Month: March 2024

It was sooo bad

The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols has a book called The Death Of Expertise which he’s updated with a new chapter on the pandemic. He’s interviewed in the magazine:

Isabel: You argue that one mistake scientists made was to take on the role of elected officials. Can you talk me through that shift?

Tom: If you look back at those White House press briefings, where you had people such as Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci standing there uncomfortably while Donald Trump ranted about bleach and lights, you can see where they and other experts felt the need to clarify useful policies in a way that ordinary people could follow, especially because elected leaders—and not just Trump—were making a mess of things. Early in the pandemic, for example, I was impressed by then–New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who seemed like a steady and capable hand on the tiller. But Cuomo—as we now know and as I discuss in the book—was desperately trying to cover up his own lethal mistakes.

The scientists, people we’d mostly never heard of at the state and federal levels, stepped forward to issue guidance. But that’s not their job, and, frankly, talking to the public isn’t their main skill set. People, understandably, don’t want to take orders from appointed officials. When it came time to close public places—and, even more important, to reopen them, including schools—scientists got dragged into a huge fight that was more about politics than science. They got tagged as political figures rather than dispassionate experts.

You can blame a lot of that on Trump and the GOP making pandemic measures into political issues. But the way medical professionals supported the George Floyd protests was a big mistake and a completely self-inflicted wound on the cause of expertise.

Isabel: How so?

Tom: As I say in the Atlantic excerpt, a vocal part of the medical community said: These protests are so important that they should be allowed to happen despite all of our advice warning against such gatherings.

To say this while people couldn’t go to church, get married, or bury their dead inflamed a lot of people, including me. (My brother died in a VA long-term-care facility at the start of the pandemic that was later at the center of a scandal about the mishandling of COVID measures, and we couldn’t lay him to rest for weeks.) Many doctors, who had argued that their advice was apolitical, made a nakedly political decision. Fauci, wisely, tried to stay neutral, but by late summer, the damage was done.

I don’t think we can say definitively whether the protests increased COVID cases, but the bigger problem is that the argument is a no-win trap for experts: If the doctors were concerned that the protests could spread the disease, then they shouldn’t have signed on to the protests. But if the protests were acceptable with the appropriate precautions, then the doctors and the public-health officials should have allowed gatherings for everyone willing to use the same measures.

Isabel: I was really struck by the quote you include from a member of the COVID Crisis Group: “Trump was a comorbidity.” Is there a world in which COVID didn’t get quite so politicized?

Tom: I think, given decades of narcissism, political polarization, and general distrust in government, a pandemic was always going to be politicized. But in my view, Trump’s personal influence and his mobilization of an entire political party around the demonization of expertise cost lives. It’s still a remarkable thing, and it astounds me that anyone would think of putting him back in any position of responsibility anywhere.

Isabel: Why is listening to experts the task of a responsible American citizen?

Tom: It’s not our task to obey experts without question, but, yes, listening is a requirement of being a citizen in a democracy. In the end, political leaders should, and do, have the last word and make the call on most things, including war and peace. But we are not a rabble. We don’t just all shout in the public square and then demand that the loudest voices carry the day. Experts give all of us, including our elected leaders, information we need to make decisions.

We can choose to ignore that advice. Experts can tell us about risks, and we can choose to take those risks. But if we simply block our ears and insist that we know better than everyone else because our gut, or some TV personality, or some politician, told us that we’re smarter than the experts, that’s on us.

I too winced at at the doctors and scientists on TV making that clearly political commentary about the protests at the time, not because I was especially terrified of the spread of the virus through that means but because it was obvious it was a political not a scientific decision and would, therefore, further politicize all the scientific advice going forward. It was dissonant and weird but then everything was during that period.

But nobody politicized the scientific community that Trump and his henchmen. I don’t know if the professions will ever fully recover from it.

Too good not to share

Elaine Benes’ dancing (Seinfeld: “The Little Kicks“) was “like a full body dry heave set to music.” Her “little kicks” and the rest lost Elaine the respect of her office staff. For reasons that remain a mystery, Donald Trump’s “dancing” and cringey flag-fondling never seem to induce similar shock and revulsion among MAGA cult members.

Somebody a year or so ago saw the similarities and mapped in Trump as Elaine’s dance partner. I just saw it. DON’T LOOK if you have a sensitive stomach. As the man says below, nicely done!

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Don’t go counting chickens

Yes, yes, nobody wants to front Donald “91 Counts” Trump half a billion to cover his bond in the New York fraud trial judgment while he appeals (as he always does). Trump attorneys “have asked appellate judges to reduce, delay or waive the bond requirement.” But what will New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) do to collect when he can’t cough up the cash by tommorrow (Monday)? Well?

“Nothing happens immediately,” The Washington Post advises:

The appeals court generally issues rulings on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so there is very little chance it will act by Monday on Trump’s request to waive the bond requirement. If it doesn’t, and if Trump doesn’t post a bond by then, legal experts say there is nothing preventing James from calling on the New York City sheriffs or on city marshals to begin seizing his assets.

But there are reasons for her to wait. Legal experts say Trump has a chance of getting some type of relief from the appeals court. If James begins moving on his assets before the court rules, she may have to backtrack afterward. She also may consider the optics of moving quickly. As Nikos Passas, a Northeastern University criminology professor, put it: “She doesn’t want to be accused of being overly aggressive and unfair.”

Whatever she does, Trump will nasally whine about the unfairness “like nobody’s ever seen” of it all.

James has said she intends to take Trump’s assets if he fails to pay. “If he does not have funds to pay off the judgment, then we will seek judgment enforcement mechanisms in court, and we will ask the judge to seize his assets,” she told ABC News last month. In the interview, James mentioned Trump’s 40 Wall Street office building by name.

Experts say James would probably start with New York properties, partly because the LLCs that own two of them — 40 Wall Street and his Seven Springs estate in Westchester County — are defendants in the fraud case. James’s office already filed Engoron’s judgment with a court in Westchester County, a first step toward seizing the Seven Springs property, as CNN first reported.

The Post offers more details, of course, including how his Friday Truth Social boast that he has “almost five hundred million dollars in cash” undercuts his complaints that the court owes him some relief as he scrounges to arrange payment by Monday.

Each time the former reality show star presented himself to the court for arrest and processing, security concerns and undeserved deference meant the public was denied a proper perp walk. That would be one reality show many of us would like to watch. Cameras following as James formally seize Trump’s assets would be less cinematic and not pay-per-view worthy.

Trump may receive a trial date for his criminal hush-money case on Monday as well. The trial could begin “as soon as next month,” The New York Times reports:

The twin threats — on the same day, in the same town — crystallize two of Mr. Trump’s greatest and longest-held fears: a criminal conviction and a public perception that he does not have as much cash as he claims.

For decades, Mr. Trump employed a broad array of tactics to keep those fears at bay, learning from his well-connected father and his own ruthless lawyer and fixer, Roy M. Cohn. After fending off local and federal investigations, not to mention financial ruin, Mr. Trump came to believe that any problems could be solved by personal connections — and a whole lot of money.

“If Trump uses one thing to score the game, it has always been money,” said Jack O’Donnell, a former casino executive who worked for Mr. Trump in the early 1990s and wrote a tell-all book about him. “If he has more money than someone, he is winning and the other person is losing. And if someone has more money than Trump, he has the fear that someone will say he is losing to that person.”

Mr. Trump himself has also described the shame of becoming a criminal defendant four times over. Even as his advisers used the indictments to great effect in fund-raising and galvanizing his Republican base, the former president has conceded that the charges pained him.

Tell it to the minority groups he’s smeared, and to the subcontractors he’s cheated, and to the adversaries whose lives were upended by threats from his MAGA followers.

Maggie Haberman and Ben Protess fill out column inches summarizing Trump’s already familiar history of using wealth and personal connections to avoid accountability. Through a “public relations strategy” and “a mix of bare-knuckle tactics — attacking prosecutors as ‘corrupt’ and guilty of the same conduct of which he was suspected — and arm-twisting charm,” plus endless legal delaying tactics, Trump has to this point in life remained out of jail.

Don’t go counting chickens. What’s worked for him in the past may yet work for Trump now. “Equal justice” is a pipe dream. Trump’s life is proof that anyone accused in this country gets just as much due process as they can afford.

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No, Truth Social isn’t going to save him

If you were shaking your fist at the sky damning the fates that Trump is going to get a big cash injection from his lame social media platform, not to worry:

Donald Trump is on the verge of gaining what could be a massive windfall from his social media company. But it will likely come too late to save him from the financial peril he’s facing now.

Investors on Friday signed off on a deal to allow Trump’s new venture, which operates Truth Social, to be publicly traded on Wall Street, clearing the way for a possible multibillion-dollar payday for the former president.

But Trump’s stake will be tied up for much of the year under a so-called lock-up agreement, a normal arrangement for such deals to ensure that insiders don’t bail as soon as a company goes public and push down the stock price.

Trump could try to obtain a waiver from that rule, but even then he wouldn’t be able to sell more than a small fraction of his stake at any given time — up to 1 percent of the outstanding shares every quarter. And if he eventually does unload a large quantity of stock, the ramifications could be significant, according to investors and others watching the deal. That’s because Trump himself is the heart of the venture, they say, and any sign that his interest is waning could chill investors.

“It’s simply trading on Trump’s name,” said Kristi Marvin, founder of SPACInsider, a research firm. “People aren’t buying this because they like the fundamentals — they’re buying this because they like Trump.”

Now, the corrupt bargains between Trump and his biggest sugar daddy are another thing altogether. The fact that he is the biggest invester in Truth Social should trip some alarms but I guess nobody cares about his corruption.

This piece from Josh Kovensky about Manafort is epic. Switch over to read the whole thing. I didn’t know even half of this:

Entertain this scenario for a minute: there’s a country sitting on a geopolitical fault line between the U.S. and one of its main adversaries, Russia.

Its population is becoming increasingly pro-western; its governing and business elite largely remains beholden to Russia.  

After years of fraudulent elections, a politician with a mafia past, widely seen as a stooge for Russia, comes to power in this contested country. The rise of The Stooge is seen as a breakthrough moment for Russia, a roadblock in the path of the country toward closer ties with the West.

And yet, an American political consultant and insider in the traditionally hawkish Republican Party, who has worked with anti-communist guerillas around the world, has been quietly working his way into the inner circle of The Stooge and his backers. Once The Stooge is in power, The Consultant sets to work. Once in place, he works to whitewash The Stooge’s worst abuses and corruption, but all for a greater goal: persuading both The Stooge and a neighboring multi-state western polity that now is, in fact, the perfect time for the country in question to sign treaties cementing its move not toward Russia, but westward. 

By this point in the story, you may have a guess about which country we’re describing, and even, perhaps, who that consultant was. This is an unfamiliar way of telling one version of the story of Ukraine in the run-up to its 2014 revolution, and of Paul Manafort’s role in it as adviser to President Viktor Yanukovych, who fled after being deposed amid the tumult. It’s the version Manafort, convicted in a case stemming from the Mueller investigation and later pardoned by Trump, would like you to believe. And, it’s one that we may be hearing more of — and which has increased relevance given Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a last-ditch, violent effort to gather Ukraine’s lands into Russia’s immense embrace before it could slip away into the west. As Ukraine’s spirited defense begins to falter amid a GOP hold on U.S.-supplied ammunition, Manafort is making his return to the limelight. Per multiple stories this week, Manafort is expected to officially reenter Trump’s orbit this year as a campaign adviser, potentially taking on a fundraising role just as multiple court cases have left Trump strapped for cash. 

I’ve covered Manafort extensively for TPM and, before that, for the Kyiv Post in Ukraine. He’s a fascinating and unique figure who’s work has done more to shape the past decade and a half of American history than is commonly understood, largely via his up-close involvement in Ukrainian politics before its 2014 revolution. It’s that revolution which set Ukraine on a course westward, prompted Russian military aggression, and fatally poisoned ties between Washington and Moscow for the past decade. And while its clear Manafort was a key character in the story, the exact nature of what, exactly, he was up to, remains shrouded in questions.

From Russia’s perspective, Manafort may not seem quite so deserving of the pro-Putin branding that he’s received in the West. The covert lobbying scheme he was eventually prosecuted for was overtly aimed not at keeping Ukraine within Russia’s orbit, but at instead pressuring western officials and Ukraine’s leadership into signing an association deal with the European Union.

At the same time, and as subsequent years showed, he brought tons of baggage along with him: he lacked liquidity, and was seeking millions of dollars he said he was owed from Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska (Deripaska says that Manafort owed him money). There was also a lot from Ukraine which could damage his reputation. In the mid-2010s, as Manafort reemerged in American politics, his name was found on a supposed bribe ledger which appeared in Kyiv; his daughter’s phone was hacked, revealing embarrassing personal details. Several of his close associates in Ukraine would later be accused by western governments of being on the payroll of Russian intelligence; Manafort himself was later found to have given a close associate, allegedly a Russian spy, internal Trump campaign polling data in August 2016 which eventually made its way to Russian intelligence services. That associate, Konstantin Kilimnik, would in 2021 be labeled a “Russian agent” and sanctioned by the Treasury Department. 

During the Trump administration, as the Mueller investigation ramped up, Manafort was uniquely creative in finding ways to block law enforcement from determining what had happened. He successfully used encrypted messaging apps to delete messages, placing them beyond recovery; after being convicted on multiple fraud charges, he admitted to the unregistered lobbying campaign, before pulling a brazen move: he lied to prosecutors during the period of his supposed cooperation, preventing them from getting to the bottom of his involvement. That may have also allowed Manafort to become not a cooperator, but a kind of spy; his lawyers reportedly fed Trump’s legal team information about the Mueller investigation. 

But throughout all the murkiness and knottiness in his biography, one quality stands out: Manafort is a savvy dealmaker. Everyone has a price, everything can be traded; all that matters is a link to people in influence. It’s a rough-and-tumble mixture of business and politics which flourished in the countries left behind after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Closely examining Manafort’s career unveils a byzantine story, a hall of mirrors which bears the hallmark of any good spy tale: its characters all master the interstitial space between one side and the other, where they can maintain the kind of fundamental ambiguity that allows them to project plausible allegiance to any actor. That’s the ambiguity which Manafort exploits for his central defense to the charge that he was working for a pro-Russian politician in Ukraine, or for a Russian oligarch. Rather, Manafort claims that he remained committed to American interests through that work, in spite of how unsavory his clients may have been. At one point, his zeal for allowing market forces to guide his political consulting landed him in Angola, working for anti-communist guerilla Jonas Savimbi. 

“There was no way I was going to, all of a sudden, change a lifetime of work against communism, the Soviet Union, and now Putin,” Manafort wrote in a 2022 memoir. 

Uh huh. Click over to read the rest of this and ask yourself how it can possibly be that this traitorous monster will be working in the US presidential election again. Oh my God.

It’s the pandemic, stupid

I’ve been writing here for a while that the reason everyone is so negative about everything because of mass PTSD from the pandemic. Here are a couple of eminent psychiatrists making the official diagnosis in The Atlantic:

America is in a funk, and no one seems to know why. Unemployment rates are lower than they’ve been in half a century and the stock market is sky-high, but poll after poll shows that voters are disgruntled. President Joe Biden’s approval rating has been hovering in the high 30s. Americans’ satisfaction with their personal lives—a measure that usually dips in times of economic uncertainty—is at a near-record low, according to Gallup polling. And nearly half of Americans surveyed in January said they were worse off than three years prior.

Experts have struggled to find a convincing explanation for this era of bad feelings. Maybe it’s the spate of inflation over the past couple of years, the immigration crisis at the border, or the brutal wars in Ukraine and Gaza. But even the people who claim to make sense of the political world acknowledge that these rational factors can’t fully account for America’s national malaise. We believe that’s because they’re overlooking a crucial factor.

Four years ago, the country was brought to its knees by a world-historic disaster. COVID-19 hospitalized nearly 7 million Americans and killed more than a million; it’s still killing hundreds each week. It shut down schools and forced people into social isolation. Almost overnight, most of the country was thrown into a state of high anxiety—then, soon enough, grief and mourning. But the country has not come together to sufficiently acknowledge the tragedy it endured. As clinical psychiatrists, we see the effects of such emotional turmoil every day, and we know that when it’s not properly processed, it can result in a general sense of unhappiness and anger—exactly the negative emotional state that might lead a nation to misperceive its fortunes.

The pressure to simply move on from the horrors of 2020 is strong. Who wouldn’t love to awaken from that nightmare and pretend it never happened? Besides, humans have a knack for sanitizing our most painful memories. In a 2009 study, participants did a remarkably poor job of remembering how they felt in the days after the 9/11 attacks, likely because those memories were filtered through their current emotional state. Likewise, a study published in Nature last year found that people’s recall of the severity of the 2020 COVID threat was biased by their attitudes toward vaccines months or years later.

When faced with an overwhelming and painful reality like COVID, forgetting can be useful—even, to a degree, healthy. It allows people to temporarily put aside their fear and distress, and focus on the pleasures and demands of everyday life, which restores a sense of control. That way, their losses do not define them, but instead become manageable.

But consigning painful memories to the River Lethe also has clear drawbacks, especially as the months and years go by. Ignoring such experiences robs one of the opportunity to learn from them. In addition, negating painful memories and trying to proceed as if everything is normal contorts one’s emotional life and results in untoward effects. Researchers and clinicians working with combat veterans have shown how avoiding thinking or talking about an overwhelming and painful event can lead to free-floating sadness and anger, all of which can become attached to present circumstances. For example, if you met your old friend, a war veteran, at a café and accidentally knocked his coffee over, then he turned red and screamed at you, you’d understand that the mishap alone couldn’t be the reason for his outburst. No one could be that upset about spilled coffee—the real root of such rage must lie elsewhere. In this case, it might be untreated PTSD, which is characterized by a strong startle response and heightened emotional reactivity.

We are not suggesting that the entire country has PTSD from COVID. In fact, the majority of people who are exposed to trauma do not go on to exhibit the symptoms of PTSD. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t deeply affected. In our lifetime, COVID posed an unprecedented threat in both its overwhelming scope and severity; it left most Americans unable to protect themselves and, at times, at a loss to comprehend what was happening. That meets the clinical definition of trauma: an overwhelming experience in which you are threatened with serious physical or psychological harm.

Traumatic memories are notable for how they alter the ways people recall the past and consider the future. A recent brain-imaging study showed that when people with a history of trauma were prompted to return to those horrific events, a part of the brain was activated that is normally employed when one thinks about oneself in the present. In other words, the study suggests that the traumatic memory, when retrieved, came forth as if it were being relived during the study. Traumatic memory doesn’t feel like a historical event, but returns in an eternal present, disconnected from its origin, leaving its bearer searching for an explanation. And right on cue, everyday life offers plenty of unpleasant things to blame for those feelings—errant friends, the price of groceries, or the leadership of the country.

To come to terms with a traumatic experience, as clinicians know, you need to do more than ignore or simply recall it. Rather, you must rework the disconnected memory into a context, and thereby move it firmly into the past. It helps to have a narrative that makes sense of when, how, and why something transpired. For example, if you were mugged on a dark street and became fearful of the night, your therapist might suggest that you connect your general dread with the specifics of your assault. Then your terror would make sense and be restricted to that limited situation. Afterward, the more you ventured out in the dark, perhaps avoiding the dangerous block where you were jumped, the more you would form new, safe memories that would then serve to mitigate your anxiety.

Many people don’t regularly recall the details of the early pandemic—how walking down a crowded street inspired terror, how sirens wailed like clockwork in cities, or how one had to worry about inadvertently killing grandparents when visiting them. But the feelings that that experience ignited are still very much alive. This can make it difficult to rationally assess the state of our lives and our country.

One remedy is for leaders to encourage remembrance while providing accurate and trustworthy information about both the past and the present. In the early days of the pandemic, President Donald Trump mishandled the crisis and peddled misinformation about COVID. But with 2020 a traumatic blur, Trump seems to have become the beneficiary of our collective amnesia, and Biden the repository for lingering emotional discontent. Some of that misattribution could be addressed by returning to the shattering events of the past four years and remembering what Americans went through. This process of recall is emotionally cathartic, and if it’s done right, it can even help to replace distorted memories with more accurate ones.

They suggest that Biden should start talking about this more :

By prompting Americans to remember what we endured together, paradoxically, Biden could help free all of us to more fully experience the present.

I think this is starting to happen, at least on social media, with the “are you better off than you were four years ago” stuff that’s coming up every day. I think Biden should talk about it in his speeches too. I know people don’t want to be reminded but they really should be, for political reasons alone. Donald Trump presided over the most catastrophic mass death experience of our lives and he did a terrible job.

But this article points out that we need to process this thing on its own terms and in order to do that we have to stop hiding from it. I don’t know if Joe Biden can lead us through that process but of all the political leaders out there he may be the best we have for such a task.

Has it ever been this bad before? Nope:

House Republicans have skipped town for Easter recess with their base enraged, their majority in tatters — and their speaker facing the prospect of a humiliating ouster at the hands of his own MAGA allies.

 Dysfunction doesn’t even begin to cover it. The Senate’s passage of a $1.2 trillion spending bill at 2 am ET — narrowly averting a government shutdown — was perhaps the least dramatic development in a historic day on Capitol Hill.

In a matter of hours:

The Republican-led House passed the spending bill just before noon Friday and sent it to the Senate — with more than half the House GOP conference, including many furious hardliners, voting against it.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — one of those hardliners angry at Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) for helping push the bill — introduced a motion to vacate the chair, calling for Johnson’s removal. Her move threatens to trigger the same type of vote that ended the career of his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy.

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), retiring chair of the House China Select Committee, announced suddenly he’ll leave Congress next month — leaving Republicans with an astonishing majority of just one seat.

Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), who also is retiring early, departed for the final time — but not before signing a Democratic petition to force a vote on Ukraine aid, dealing one last blow to the GOP leadership he detested.

House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-Ky.) — who helped make impeaching President Biden one of the GOP majority’s top priorities — indicated his fizzling inquiry will end without a vote.

 Republicans were left fuming over the early resignations of Gallagher and Buck, with some suggesting it’s now within the realm of possibility for the House majority to flip to Democrats mid-Congress.

-Just last week, Johnson had said in response to Buck’s departure: “I think, I hope and believe that that’s the end of the exits for now.”
-One conservative told Axios: “Coming on the heels of the speaker’s cave on the [spending bills], Gallagher’s abandonment of his colleagues mid-fight is a real gut punch.”
-Another Republican said: “I think it’s extremely unfortunate. But this is also why you don’t vote to remove the speaker of the House and create chaos.”

: Frustrated lawmakers told Axios that burnout from the historically chaotic 118th Congress — which has featured multiple speaker’s races, derailed spending bills and constant infighting — is very real.

“Normally they’re trying to talk people out of retirement,” one member said. “Now we’re at a point where we’re trying to talk them out of leaving early.”

The other side: House Democrats relished the discord on the other side of the aisle. “I’m glad to be a Democrat in Congress,” one told Axios.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) noted that Gallagher timed his resignation to ensure his seat would go unfilled until November: “Another sharp rebuke to the chaos-and-cannibalism caucus of Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene.”

Amid Friday’s chaos, disgraced former Rep. George Santos announced he’s leaving the Republican Party to run for Congress in New York as an independent — saying the GOP was too “embarrassing.”

I know many of you will remember that not so long ago the media would perennially describe the Democrats as being in “disarray.” On their worst day they were never even 1/100th as messed up as these clowns. It just gets worse and worse.

Are people paying attention? God, I hope so…

Truthiness doesn’t care about your prescription drug plan

People feel what they feel. They cannot be reasoned out of them. But feelings can be manipulated, preyed upon. Con men know this. Too often, the American left kids itself that the truth will set people free, and that our own feelings do not influence our book-learnin’. They do.

In a post titled, “Fascism will not be defeated by logic,” Anand Giridharadas considers “the role of emotion in the fraught political life of America in 2024.” Change by the boatload has left Americans anxious. The Ink talked to Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) for his seeming ability “to be both in the arena and up in the stands, observing the whole scene.”

Giridharadas writes:

We talked to him just after he’d finished work on the 2024 edition of the World Happiness Report, a process that got him to recognize how the country’s democratic crisis is rooted in deep emotional distress.

We believe Democratic leaders have failed to help Americans cope with the crisis of anxiety and unhappiness they face in a transformed world — and this failure of change management has had dire political consequences.

When we see people unsettled by it, discombobulated, a lot of them are just trying to get their heads around all that a new era is asking of them. And the authoritarians are getting to them earlier and more effectively than pro-democratic movements. And so people who start out as merely disoriented by change are radicalized into fanatics.

Murphy says that Democrats simply cannot leave emotion to the Republicans — it just plays directly into a classic authoritarian strategy. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat has told us:

Autocrats are very, very good at tapping into people’s innermost fears. On the one hand, they make themselves the carriers of those fears, but they also make themselves the solution. So when Trump said, The American dream is dead, he made himself the vessel of the forgotten, the people who felt downtrodden. Of course, his regard for them is fake. He just wants to use them. But he simulated care and inhabited those emotions, and then provided a solution: “I alone can fix it.” And people felt safe with him. .

They weren’t. Neither was the country (or the world).

“You don’t solve a crisis of meaning and purpose by just giving people a little bit bigger tax credit,” Murphy told The Ink (subscription required):

I want to start with what you’ve said about happiness. Can you expand on your notion that the government you are part of is culpable for inhibiting people’s happiness, or at least for not making happiness probable?

It’s important to remember that the government’s responsibility to protect your right to happiness is in our founding document. So this is a legitimate conversation — our founders thought this was an essential conversation. Government stays out of what you’re passionate about, who you connect with, where your purpose and meaning come from. But we are responsible for setting the rules of society and culture and economy that give you a chance at happiness.

The studies on what brings happiness don’t surprise anybody. What people want is connection and positive relationships and agency and power over their lives. They feel like they have less chance of connection today, and they certainly feel like they have much less agency over their economic lives. And there are public policy choices we’ve made that have robbed people of connection and power.

I’ve admitted before that I do what I do not as much from a deep love of country as much as a for a restored sense of power and agency. Being on the field and in the game (rather than a heckling spectator) means that, even if you get politically run over sometimes, you don’t feel like road kill. I dislike feeling like political road kill. People overwhelemed by rapid change dislike it too. Many others just find more hurtful outlets for their feelings.

There is also community in being together in the fight, even in an online community.

Murphy: “You can’t be happy if you don’t have friends and connections. You can’t be happy if you don’t feel like you have control over your life. And to the extent people feel more isolated and less in control of their lives today, there are direct lines from government policies to the ways that people feel like happiness is further away.”

[…]

I think we’ve reached a tipping point of exhaustion with an American society that has become hyper-focused on individual success and treats human beings as consumers instead of citizens. We are not a common-good society any longer. We are a kill-and-eat-what-you-can society. It’s been a gradual process, but I think we have reached a point where folks want something different.

Don’t you? Take control. Show initiative. Be more than keyboard warriors.

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What’s a little scaremongering among Republicans?

Donald “91 Counts” Trump is feeling especially vulnerable these days. For good reason. He sees his “empire” under threat on Monday of being seized to cover his half-billion-dollar bond in the New York financial fraud case. If he does not win the presidency, conviction in his other four pending cases could mean he spends the rest of his days in prison. The harshest cut of all is the damage to an ego so fragile it requires constant media and fan attention to keep from melting down.

So he and his campaign are in damage-control mode after his big mouth spit out words to the effect of his threatening Social Security and Medicare if reelected. In Trumpian “I know what you are, but what am I?” fashion, Trump issued a panicked “Truth” accusing Democrats of being the party threatening the safety net.

Big “tell,” Greg Sargent observes:

Plainly, what triggered this rage-rant was the news that a group of House Republicans has proposed a budget that would raise the retirement age for Social Security and restructure Medicare along lines that Paul Ryan–esque Republicans have long sought. Democrats have seized on this to bludgeon the GOP for threatening to cut the program.

Trump and his advisers know how big a problem this is for them. After Trump recently opened the door to Social Security and Medicare cuts, his campaign rushed to clean up his remarks. His eruption Thursday was clearly an effort to stanch the bleeding, now that House Republicans have opened that wound once again.

But here’s the thing: There is no particular reason to listen to what Trump says he’ll do on Social Security and Medicare. What really matters is that a large bloc of his party remains committed to the underlying principles of Paul Ryan–style economics and that when Trump is sitting in the Oval Office, he tends to hand control over to them.

True, Trump is no policy wonk. But as much as what was the GOP is Himself now, its zombified version still has vestigial reflexes and responds to basic stimuli. Despite Trump’s gee-hawing, Republicans will keep doing what Republicans do should he get reelected.

The fundamental difference here between the parties is that Biden and Democrats think we should raise taxes on the rich and corporations, fortify Social Security and Medicare without serious cuts to benefits, and expand the safety net and invest in other programs for reducing inequality. By contrast, Trump and Republicans oppose higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and want to cut entitlements and the safety net pretty much wherever they can.

Trump’s INVASION OF THE SOCIAL SECURITY SNATCHERS warning reflects a Republican reflex as deep as catering to the rich and keeping peasants in their places: hyping “stranger danger.” Conservatives know their marks, and they reflect their own anxieties onto them.

After the strangulation homicide of Jordan Neely, a Michael Jackson impersonator, on a New York City subway, I wrote:

Since the 1980s and earlier, unreasoning fear of the “other” has been cultivated and marketed. There was the moral panic over rumors of ritual Satanic abuse at day care centers. There was the repressed memory syndrome fad. There was “stranger danger.” The response of parents fearful of their children being abducted was to have them photographed and fingerprinted at mall clinics designed more for identifying bodies than for preventing rare abductions. There were ubiquitous “Baby on Board” signs in car windows. Danger lurked around every corner.

Stranger danger sells zombie movies and QAnon merch and MAGA candidates and the Big Lie. It feeds Trump’s anxieties that burble out in social media posts. Still, Trump thinks he’s the shmaht one. Everyone else is a sucker, and there’s one born every minute. What sells? Stranger danger. So with his ego fracturing and his empire under threat and his dreams tortured by images of jail cells, he’s selling it and selling hard. His zombie army shambles along behind.

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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.