Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

“No one—and I mean no one—is interested in or takes seriously lectures on border security from Senate Republicans.”
 
You need to watch @SenOssoff pic.twitter.com/yte6scGtkt

— Senate Democrats (@SenateDems) April 18, 2024

You can say that about a lot of things, can’t you? This example is about that impeachment trial yesterday from Steve Benen:

More than a month after House Republicans impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, despite the GOP’s inability to find any evidence of him committing high crimes, the articles were finally delivered to the Senate on Tuesday. Republicans in the upper chamber responded by demanding a full impeachment trial.

They didn’t get one. As NBC News reported, the Senate Democratic majority dismissed both of the articles against the DHS chief just hours after the proceedings began.

The speed of the impeachment trial was an embarrassing blow to Republicans who had threatened to gum up the Senate and delay the proceedings in a bid to highlight what they argue is Mayorkas’ failure to secure the border and stop the flow of thousands of undocumented migrants at the border. However, Democrats, who control the upper chamber, easily dispensed with the pair of impeachment articles — as well as several motions to adjourn the Senate.

There were a series of procedural votes, but ultimately it came to a relatively straightforward question: Did senators consider the impeachment articles against Mayorkas to be constitutionally legitimate? In votes that the GOP minority could not filibuster, it took 51 votes to reject the articles and end the process.

Yesterday, both articles received 51 votes, with the entirety of the Senate Democratic conference united.

The case against the Homeland Security secretary, in other words, has run its course, ending in predictable fashion.

But before the political world moves on, it’s worth considering just how weak the Republicans’ talking points were. To hear GOP senators tell it, (a) the Democrats’ rejection of the case against Mayorkas reflects a lack of seriousness about border policy; and (b) Democrats have set a dangerous new precedent by refusing to hold an impeachment trial in response to the House-passed articles.

“It doesn’t make any difference whether our friends on the other side thought he should have been impeached or not. He was,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said. “And by doing what we just did, we have in effect ignored the directions of the House, which were to have a trial. No evidence, no procedure — this is a day that’s not a proud day in the history of the Senate.”

Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri added, “So this will be the precedent going forward. Impeachment as a constitutional matter is effectively dead now. They just they just killed it.”

[…]

First, at no point in recent months have GOP lawmakers in either chamber treated this process with even a hint of seriousness. The entire impeachment ordeal was a cheap stunt, and Senate Republicans all but admitted that they wanted a trial as part of an election-season public-relations gambit.

Second, if GOP officials want to talk about which party is serious about border policy, perhaps they can explain why they were so quick to kill the bipartisan border plan they requested.

Third, many of the Senate Republicans who insisted that the institution was required to conduct a full impeachment trial in response to House-backed articles are the same Senate Republicans who tried to forgo a full impeachment trial in response to House-backed articles three years ago after Donald Trump’s second impeachment.

As for the idea that Senate Democrats have set a dangerous precedent by dismissing impeachment articles without a trial, the GOP appears to have this backwards. The impeachment crusade against Mayorkas was itself a radical and unprecedented scheme. Republicans sought evidence of high crimes, failed to find any, and decided to nevertheless impeach a sitting cabinet secretary — without cause — for the first time in American history.

As regular readers know, the Republicans’ impeachment hearings against the DHS secretary were a joke; and the impeachment effort was condemned by constitutional experts from the left, right and center, senators from both parties, some prominent voices in conservative media, and former Homeland Security secretaries from both Democratic and Republican administrations.

The real risk would’ve been to legitimize the GOP’s abuse, setting a far more dangerous precedent.

Yes, the Senate’s rejection of the articles was unprecedented, but it was a first-of-its-kind response to a first-of-its-kind abuse.

Wisconsin Rep.Mike Gallagher was once considered a major rising star in the GOP. Dar I say he might even have been a Great Whitebread Hope along the lines of a similar looking former Wisconsin superstar, Paul Ryan. But he decided to quit early and tomorrow is his last day. Why?

 With just days until he leaves his seat in Congress, Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wisc., could be shedding some light on the reasoning behind his early resignation

Gallagher announced in February he would not seek re-election after he was just one of a small handful of House Republicans to oppose the impeachment of Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. Then, in March, he said he would be resigning his seat, effective April 19.

In one of his last acts in Congress, Gallagher — who represents Wisconsin’s 8th District — chaired a Tuesday hearing of the House Select Committee on China concerning the country’s possible connection to fentanyl overdose deaths in the U.S.

After the hearing, Gallagher spoke with reporters about the hearing and the end of his time in Congress.

This is more just me wanting to prioritize being with my family,” he said at the gaggle. “I signed up for the death threats and the late-night swatting, but they did not. And for a young family, I would say this job is really hard.

WLUK reached out to Gallagher’s office about his comments on death threats and late-night swatting calls. It is still unclear if any specific incident led to his early resignation.

However, WLUK did confirm through the Brown County Sheriff’s Office — which patrols Allouez, where Gallagher lives — a case number was assigned late last year to a swatting incident related to the congressman.

The sheriff’s office said it reached out to U.S. Capitol Police about the incident. In January, the investigation was handed over to federal authorities, including Capitol Police, the FBI, and the U.S. Secret Service.

A spokeswoman for the FBI in Milwaukee tells WLUK that the Capitol Police is leading the investigation.

They’re SWATTING people with small kids in the middle of the night it’s certainly understandable that he would want to get out. From years of evidence in other cases, I would imagine some of the written and phone threats were also made to the family. They often are. This man decided that life is too short for this. I can’t say I blame him.

I do admire the fact that he decided to really stick it to the GOP by leaving them with a one vote majority. He knew what he was doing. It will be interesting to see if he has any future in politics — or if he wants one.

They make mistakes

The NY Times reports:

Israel was mere moments away from an airstrike on April 1 that killed several senior Iranian commanders at Iran’s embassy complex in Syria when it told the United States what was about to happen.

Israel’s closest ally had just been caught off guard.

Aides quickly alerted Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser; Jon Finer, the deputy national security adviser; Brett McGurk, Mr. Biden’s Middle East coordinator; and others, who saw that the strike could have serious consequences, a U.S. official said. Publicly, U.S. officials voiced support for Israel, but privately, they expressed anger that it would take such aggressive action against Iran without consulting Washington.

The Israelis had badly miscalculated, thinking that Iran would not react strongly, according to multiple American officials who were involved in high-level discussions after the attack, a view shared by a senior Israeli official. On Saturday, Iran launched a retaliatory barrage of more than 300 drones and missiles at Israel, an unexpectedly large-scale response, if one that did minimal damage.

The events made clear that the unwritten rules of engagement in the long-simmering conflict between Israel and Iran have changed drastically in recent months, making it harder than ever for each side to gauge the other’s intentions and reactions.

Maybe Israel should find someone who isn’t fatally flawed and desperate to keep the war going to run the country because relying on the religious fanatic leaders of Iran to always be restrained is extremely foolish. And the US should be using all its leverage at this point to get Israel under control. The Gaza war is immoral and Netanyahu is risking global war now. It’s got to stop.

Trump’s Juror intimidation tactics are already bearing fruit

Did the Trump team signal to Watters to target that juror? Did they even need to?

The DA brought this up as yet another example of Trump defying the gag order. We’ll see if he will suffer any consequences for that.

She’s not funny

Philip Bump on Marge’s latest stunt:

After Republicans won the House majority in 2022, Greene emerged as an unlikely ally of Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). With the change in leadership, she went from pariah to establishment loyalist, someone who might at times serve as a bridge between the Republican conference’s fringe right and its leadership. She was now someone to be taken seriously.

So when a British journalist approached Greene at an event last month and brought up the subject of conspiracy theories, Greene bristled.

“Tell us about Jewish space lasers,” Emily Maitlis asked.

“Why don’t you go talk about Jewish space lasers,” Greene angrily replied. She then suggested Maitlis do something else that can be left to your imagination. [“Go fuck youself”]

Yet, less than a month later, Greene offered an amendment Wednesday to legislation centered on foreign aid.

“By the funds made available by this Act,” the proposed amendment reads, “such sums as necessary shall be used for the development of space laser technology on the southwest border.”

Ha ha! Get it? Having fun, joking about space lasers. In a bill predicated on offering military support to Israel.

(For what it’s worth, which isn’t much, the original technology cited by Greene in 2018 as the source of the “space laser” wasn’t a laser at all but, instead, directed radio frequency power.)

We’re assuming that the intent here is to be lighthearted, as well as to bring one more thing back to the border and immigration. (A request for clarification from Greene’s office did not immediately receive a response.) But poking fun at one’s past eccentricities lands a lot better when one is not being problematically eccentric in much the same way.

Greene, for example, is a fervent opponent of providing more aid to Ukraine in its efforts to defend against Russian invaders. She has been for a long time, arguing soon after the Russian invasion that Ukraine would be better served by simply rolling over. The long game, she suggested in March 2022, was for Americans to be on the ground fighting, defending the imaginary financial interests of powerful non-MAGA political actors.

How the Rothschilds might have been involved was left unstated, but the framework of thought was recognizable.

More recently, she insisted in a social media post that it was “antisemitic” to make aid to Israel “contingent on funding Ukrainian Nazis,” a criticism that is intertwined with her relentless attacks in recent weeks on Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.). But the “Ukrainian Nazis” thing is itself false, as well as a central component of Russian misinformation about its aggression.

As Bump points out her jokes aren’t landing and from what I gather her caucus is getting very sick of her grandstanding. I’m not sure what they can do about it with this tiny majority but when they’re back in the minority next year there are going to be some recriminations.

.@SpeakerJohnson (R-LA): "My philosophy is you do the right thing and you let the chips fall where they may. If I operated out of fear of a motion to vacate, I would never be able to do my job." pic.twitter.com/YfJYu0Nyln

— CSPAN (@cspan) April 17, 2024

What a turnaround in just a couple of days. I’m following this very closely and I think I’ve finally lost the thread. Josh Marshall feels the same way:

I don’t pretend to even understand the moving parts of how this is supposed to work. But almost out of the blue Speaker Mike Johnson has decided to go all-in on an aide package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. As this started to come into view over the last two or three days I had a number of TPM Readers write in to say, why is this happening? What’s the catch? Or why is walking the plank like this. What is he sacrificing his Speakership for? And I don’t have a really good answer.

Let’s start by noting the one thing that is at least a catalyst if not the trigger: the thwarted Iranian missile attacks on Israel. That clearly changed the game for many House Republicans. Passing some Israel aid became a necessity for a number of Republicans. I assume that Johnson concluded that without assistance from at least some Democrats that too wouldn’t be possible and that he had no choice but to move ahead with Ukraine aid too.

According to reports from earlier in the week, when Hakeem Jeffries was asked how Democrats should respond to Republicans asking for support on a motion to vacate, he said to tell those Republicans to sign the discharge petition. That’s the parliamentary procedure with which the signatures of a simple majority of the House can mostly force a vote on a particular bill. (It’s a touch more complicated than that. But for present purposes that’s more or less it.) But in the last two days Johnson appears to have gone all in, scheduling a pretty robust aid package for a vote, all but guaranteeing a Freedom Caucus-led attempt to topple him and forcing himself to rely on Democratic votes to save him from that fate. Yesterday he was on TV leaning into the absolute necessity of moving aid to Ukraine, pitching it with a more traditionally Republican rhetoric – American strength, freedom, etc. – but still nonetheless making the case for the necessity of Ukraine aid on the merits.

He suspects that Democrats may trust Johnson a bit more than McCarthy so they might be more willing to help him out as a way of explaining why they are willing to help him out. But I think it’s mostly about the policy:

I’m sure we’ll see criticism of this. How can Democrats find themselves sustaining the Speakership of a far-right winger who meaningfully participated in the January 6th coup by providing colleagues with a purported constitutional argument for why COVID-based changes to election year vote administration were unconstitutional? Good question. How on earth did we get here? But for what it’s worth, if I’m understanding the tacit deal in the works it’s worth it. Ukraine aid is absolutely critical and time is running out. Taiwan aid is important too. Israel aid is more complicated in my mind. But on balance I support it.

The politics for Dems are a little bit complicated too, right? It’s usually smart to let your opponents keep punching themselves in the face but there does come a time when the public thinks you should probably step in and put a stop to it if you can. We may be reaching that point.

It’s possible that he’s going to try to push a border vote but from what I can tell the original Senate negotiated version was much tougher. But he doesn’t have much choice if he wants Democratic votes. If I were him I’d just table ti altogether which will please Dear Leader and get everything else accomplished.

This is intriguing:

There’s also talk among Republicans of using this must-pass piece of legislation to increase the threshold for “motions to vacate”, i.e., the ability for one or two GOP showboating freaks to kick off a new emergency clown derby.

This is interesting because it solves what has always seemed to me to be the basic problem: Sure, maybe Dems save Johnson’s speakership. But why don’t Greene and Massie and whoever else wants to be on TV just wait a week and try again? Dems can’t permanently sustain his Speakership without some kind of very tangible power sharing. But if the deal included increasing the threshold or allowing only members of the leadership to push such a vote that problem might go away.

They really should do it. I suspect Johnson is toast anyway and will be rendered completely impotent once he agrees to proceed with Democratic votes if he does hang on. They should try and protect their next speaker from this ongoing threat.

I can’t see how Johnson hasn’t already gone too far rhetorically, saying the Ukraine aid is a moral and national security imperative, to go back. It’s also not totally clear to me he has any understanding with Democrats. I see some smart folks saying he’ll be out within the week and that he’s simply accepted that. Maybe so. Who knows?

Some reaction:

Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) on Republicans who oppose aid to Ukraine:

“I guess their reasoning is they want Russia to win so badly that they want to oust the speaker over it. It’s a strange position to take.” @GOP4Ukraine pic.twitter.com/MUz10lRejC

— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) April 18, 2024

Stay tuned.

Republicans deserve everything that’s coming to them

Democrats have plenty of experience with snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The Israeli war on Hamas in Gaza is not helping President Biden. There are panicked missives in my in-box this morning about how him signing the TikTok bill if it passes will further erode his support among younger voters. Plus, as Dan Pfeiffer acknowledges, the Donald Trump campaign is much better run than it was in 2016 and 2020.

That said, Pfeiffer believes Biden has advantages the increasingly addled Trump wishes he had. For starters, incumbent advantage and non-stop offense:

1. The Incumbent Advantage

There’s a reason why incumbents win more often than not. Incumbency is an advantage. Of course, convincing the electorate to fire a president presents a challenge, but the ability to plan, raise money, and build campaign infrastructure while your opponent is campaigning for the nomination is a huge advantage. Because Trump’s primary opponents never landed a blow on him and he was able to avoid the diminishing campaign rituals, including debates, there was a sense that he negated Biden’s incumbent advantage. But that is not the case.

The Biden Campaign viewed the State of the Union as the starting gun. From the moment the President walked off the dais, the campaign has been fully engaged — dropping new ads, opening offices, and pushing its message aggressively in the battleground states.

They spent the last year quietly building an operation, doing plenty of research, and sketching out a plan to defeat Donald Trump.

2. Biden’s Offense

The Trump Campaign exited the GOP primary largely broke despite facing no real opposition. And his campaign has struggled to pivot to the general election. Since Nikki Haley dropped out, Trump has rarely campaigned, and avoids battleground states or even using media to reach voters. The campaign has no ads of consequence on the air and Trump is spending most of his time spinning records at Mar-a-Lago or attending legal proceedings related to his various criminal trials.

The Biden operation has been on non-stop offense. Since the State of the Union, the President remains omnipresent in the battleground states. His messaging is  strategically designed to shore up the President’s coalition; and he is currently in the midst of a three-day tour of Pennsylvania to talk about the economy. Since the State of the Union, the President made major announcements on climate change, student loan debt cancellation, gun safety reform and prescription drug costs. All of these issues are critical to the struggling segments of his coalition.

The Biden Campaign continues to draw contrasts with Trump at every opportunity, launching new ads and videos on a near daily basis to define Trump and his agenda like this ad released immediately after the Arizona Supreme Court enacted a near-total ban on abortion in the state:

This week, President Biden is barnstorming Pennsylvania to drive and amplify an economic contrast message with this new ad. 

Trump, on the other hand, has been on defense in recent weeks. He is scrambling to unwind his proposals to cut Social Security and repeal the Affordable Care Act. Trump is also utterly flummoxed by how to talk about abortion. One day he says to leave it to the states, and the next day he opposes Arizona’s state law banning abortion. For the next six to eight weeks, he is trapped in a Manhattan courtroom instead of campaigning in the states that will decide the election.

Based on the first month of the general election, Biden has a clear strategy to win and Trump is still figuring it out.

While Trump-the Degenerate degenerates like nobody’s never seen, Biden is flush with cash, “boasts 300 paid staffers across nine states and 100 offices in parts of the country.” (His first staffer moves into our offices by the end of the month.) And Trump? Nothing to see here in N.C.

Yes, the country’s mood is a wild card. But if all politics is local (is that still true?), then the sideshow candidates Republicans are fielding in North Carolina may persuade voters to vote and vote D even if they are put off by national politics.

Thomas Edsall wrote last month:

On Nov. 5, North Carolina will determine whether a slate of Republican candidates who believe that the 2020 election was stolen, who dismiss Donald Trump’s 88 felony charges and who are eager to be led by the most prodigious liar in the history of the presidency can win in a battleground state.

Pope McCorkle, a Democratic consultant and professor at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy, argued in an email that the results of this year’s Republican primary elections on March 5 demonstrate that “the North Carolina G.O.P. is now a MAGA party. With the gubernatorial nomination of Mark Robinson, the N.C. G.O.P. is clearly in the running for the most MAGA party in the nation.”

For those who grew up watching the Tonight Show, “How MAGA are they?”

Robinson has pledged that “Christian patriots of this nation will own this nation and rule this nation,” and he’ll will stop only when his political enemies “run past me laying on the ground, choking on my own blood.” He’s racking up a greatest hits list that’s not to be believed.

On May 13, 2020, Michele Morrow, the Republican nominee for North Carolina superintendent of public schools, responded on X to a suggestion that Barack Obama be sent to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp on charges of treason. Morrow’s counterproposal?

I prefer a Pay Per View of him in front of the firing squad. I do not want to waste another dime on supporting his life. We could make some money back from televising his death.

In Morrow’s world, Obama would be unlikely to die alone. Her treason execution list, according to a report on CNN, includes Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, the former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, Representative Ilhan Omar, Hillary Clinton, Senator Chuck Schumer, Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates and President Biden.

I could go on about the N.C. G.O.P.’s entire council of state slate, but you get the idea. A canvasser here over the weekend encountered a woman completely put out with Joe Biden, so she pivoted to asking about those state races. The voter was shocked, shocked (and not in a Claude Rains way) to hear how bizarre the state Republican slate is. North Carolina Democrats have fielded a solidly non-insane set of diverse candidates.

McCorkle tells Edsall, “the N.C. G.O.P. is testing the outer limits of MAGAism.” I agree with Ezra Levin, Republicans deserve everything that’s coming to them.

These assholes deserve everything that's coming to them electorally. https://t.co/OaJemfQD3G

— Ezra Levin (@ezralevin) April 17, 2024

Remind family and friends: There’s more on the fall ballot than one race.

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Freakin’ Anthony Burgess horrorshow

Read that Washington Post headline again. Is there anything you’ve read lately that encapsulates the ultraviolence the MAGA cult is committing against the United States of America (land of the free, and all) than “Red states threaten librarians with prison”?

Who knew “A Clockwork Orange” (1962) was to be so prescient? Anthony Burgess published Clockwork during the Cold War, in the year the U.S. and the Soviets came closest to nuking each other. Laced with Nadsat, the Russian-based teen slang Burgess invented and put into the mouth of his thuggish protagonist, the book itself was designed as a subtle form of conditioning.

Burgess wrote in 1980, “The novel was to be an exercise in linguistic programming, with the exoticisms gradually clarified by context: I would resist to the limit any publisher’s demand that a glossary be provided. A glossary would disrupt the programme and nullify the brainwashing.”

As we’ve seen:

Two senior Republican lawmakers, the chairs of the House Intelligence and Foreign Affairs committees, say their colleagues are echoing Russian state propaganda against Ukraine.

Researchers who study disinformation say Reps. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, and Michael McCaul, R-Texas, are merely acknowledging what has been clear for some time: Russian propaganda aimed at undermining U.S. and European support for Ukraine has steadily seeped into America’s political conversation over the past decade, taking on a life of its own.

In the 1960s, it was the hippie counterculture that coined “Better Red Than Dead” in reaction to the threat of nuclear war. These days, MAGA Republicans show off T-shirts celebrating their negative partisanship: “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat.”

This about sums up the Republican party right now. pic.twitter.com/Kh1G3QocZD

— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@Noahpinion) August 5, 2018

Demonizing political rivals, banning books, threatening librarians with prison, spouting Russian propaganda aimed at destroying the United States is what the Party of Trump considers ultranationalist ultrapatriotism.

And, of course, bearing “assault weapons, Confederate flags, and swastikas,” threatening fellow Americans with “a bit of the old ultraviolence.”

Even against their own, Mike Johnson.

The Post explains that while Democrats are attempting to pass measures to “prohibit book bans or forbid the harassment of school and public librarians,” their “library-friendly measures are being outpaced by bills in mostly red states that aim to restrict which books libraries can offer and threaten librarians with prison or thousands in fines for handing out ‘obscene’ or ‘harmful’ titles.” Republicans claim their laws are about pornography:

But other lawmakers say [the bills] are ideologically driven censorship dressed up as concern for children. They note that, as book challenges spiked to historic highs over the past two years, the majority of objections targeted books by and about LGBTQ people and people of color.

The bans are a Republican reverse-Ludovico Technique aimed not at forcing children to read but Brezhnev Era censorship designed by right-thinking “patriots” hoping to prevent children’s exposure to ideas they deem wrong-thinking.

Imagine Stephen Miller back in the White House next year. Then get busy working to elect Democrats up and down the ticket.

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The real politicization began

Four years ago today, Trump tweeted calling on his supporters to “LIBERATE” states with Democratic governors.

His supporters showed up to the Michigan Capitol building with assault weapons, Confederate flags, and swastikas pic.twitter.com/teBI92cqax

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) April 17, 2024

It was a dry run for January 6th. And he incited it.

Brian Beutler argues today in his newsletter (subscribe here) that even though the media has belatedly begun to acknowledge the booming Biden economy, we live in a world where there are too many people with vested interests in denying to allow Biden to have a “Morning In America” validation:

Even as the mainstream press comes around, there are more than enough individuals and institutions with a rooting interest in denying the health of the economy to keep economic perceptions anchored way below where they’d be under a Republican president. Indeed, it would be remarkable if sentiment pokes above water before the year is out.

If you’re wondering why I think that, here’s a rough-and-ready taxonomy of the doomsayers.

THE REPUBLICAN GRASSROOTS

I’m thinking of millions of partisan voters, mostly anonymous, who are so invested in GOP politics or movement conservatism or even just Donald Trump that they interpret Democratic rule as coterminous with apocalyptic decline. They huff right-wing media for hours a day. Their identities are wrapped up in their disdain for liberals, big cities, Hollywood, and the mainstream media. They can’t fathom the country succeeding under the opposing party so they assume it must be spiraling downward along every conceivable dimension. Sadly, these kinds of Republicans comprise the great majority of GOP voters. There are Democrats who have an equal-and-opposite worldview, but their numbers are lopsidedly small. When Donald Trump became president consumer sentiment among Democrats dipped slightly but spiked among Republicans. When Biden beat him, Democratic sentiment improved quite a bit, but Republican sentiment collapsed.

REPUBLICAN CYNICS

These are conservatives and professional propagandists who know the truth, but understand the value of misleading the public in big ways and small—if all they can do is tell a pollster they think the economy is a disaster, when they know that’s not true, that’s what they’ll do. If they have enough clout to spread false gloom to low-information voters, they’ll do that, too. This category includes scores of party elites, but I’m thinking especially of Steve Bannon, Fox News anchors (particularly in primetime), the Trump family, Elon Musk, etc. Between these first two categories, we’re already edging close to half the country. 

ONLINE WRECKERS

There’s surely overlap between Republican cynics and online wreckers, but here I’m thinking less of official and unofficial party operatives, and more of a diffuse set of content makers with bad motives. Clout-seeking doomsayers who know that spreading free-floating misery is a recipe for viral traffic; influencers in realms like fitness where showing disdain for all things Biden is an entry point to selling supplements (or investment tips or whatever); leftists who want to crush liberalism, even at the cost of returning Trump to power; armies of trolls who are excited about returning Trump to power; megarich tech and finance bros, but I repeat myself.

If you ever express anything remotely positive about the economy online—particularly about macroeconomic data—you will encounter one or all subspecies of online wreckers. They spread conspiracy theories about official data being cooked. They mock the idea that data, even if gathered ethically, can tell us anything more valuable than anecdotal impressions of the national economy or “lived experiences.” There’s a secret depression. Eggs and Big Macs are more expensive now, even though eggs haven’t been expensive for over a year and you bought that Big Mac on DoorDash. Their meta-method isn’t just to say they haven’t enjoyed the spoils of the recovery, but to make observing the reality of the recovery seem deeply uncool. I don’t suspect that there are many online wreckers in absolute terms, but they dominate economic discourse on social media, where most Americans get at least some information. 

LEFTY MATERIALISTS AND LIBERAL QUANTS

I’m lumping these two groups together because their approaches are similar, though their ideologies differ. The former essentially believe—for perfectly justifiable reasons!—that the U.S. economy has never been good or just. For them, a mismatch between sentiment and macro data represents the first time in memory that the numbers have made sense. And because they believe politics is downstream from material conditions, they go looking for material explanations of unusual political phenomena, even if it means reaching much deeper into the data than could possibly be useful. The scholar Tyler Austin Harper wrote, “Many middle-class people want to buy a house and cannot afford to [] buy a house in this economy. An economy where many gainfully employed middle-class people can’t buy a house is not a good economy, no matter what the pie charts say.” It’s true: many middle-class people who want homes can’t afford them. Also true: This has been the case for a long time now, including through periods when economic sentiment was sky high.

Liberal quants have much more faith in the macro data. So much so that they believed the correlation between GDP growth and incumbent political success was something like an iron law. Biden’s poor standing amid a historic boom unsettles them, and so they’ve taken to revising their theories with epicycles. Perhaps a heretofore undiscovered lag effect keeps sentiment mired in the doldrums after a period of inflation? Perhaps people remember 2020 fondly because of all the stimulus money they had (while stuck in their homes for months on end)?

You’d think these validators of discontent would be more responsive to straightforward refutations of their insights: Last time inflation was high it did not generate this much economic despair, let alone for over a year after inflation ended; last time interest rates were at this level people thought the economy was good. It’s easier for young Americans to buy homes now than it was just a few years ago, when economic sentiment was extremely high. The economy is stronger now than it was prior to the pandemic, but sentiment is much, much worse. Etc etc.

Nevertheless, they persisted.

SALESPEOPLE

These people aren’t acting with obvious political or ideological motives. They just want people to spend their money, and think the best way to do this is with a “we feel your pain” appeal to the collective sense that things are expensive and it’s harder than usual to get by.

We are living in a whiny, outrage culture driven by social media, Donald Trump, pissed off liberals, right wing grievance fetishists. And we are still recovering from the pandemic which knocked us for a loop. So I think Beutler has a point. On the other hand, most people get tired of negativity after a while and want some relief. I think that may be in play as well. Unfortunately, that may not come until after the election. If Trump wins he will get credit for it which is just too much to bear.