Author: Tom Sullivan

Oh, the stories behind these stories

It’s getting noticed, that story I mentioned Tuesday about Judge Jefferson Griffin, the losing Republican N.C. Supreme Court candidate’, and his desperate attempt to cancel 60,000 votes in an effort to narrow the 734 vote gap between himself and sitting Justice Allison Riggs.

Judd Legum’s Popular Information:

The contest between Griffin and Riggs was very close. The initial count showed Riggs with a lead of 734 votes out of 5.5 million cast. Griffin then exercised his legal right to request a machine recount of all ballots. After that recount, Riggs was still ahead by the same margin. Griffin has now requested a second recount of the ballots, this time by hand. Under North Carolina’s procedures, there will first be a hand recount of 3% of the ballots cast. If the North Carolina Election Board determines that the partial hand recount revealed a sufficient number of discrepancies to suggest the outcome could change, a full hand recount will take place.

There is nothing particularly unusual about requesting recounts in close elections. But Griffin is also taking a page out of President-elect Donald Trump’s playbook and claiming that tens of thousands of votes were cast illegally. Griffin’s campaign sent postcards to the voters whose ballots it is seeking to invalidate, alerting them of the protest. Popular Information obtained a photo of one of the postcards. [See above]

Riggs’ campaign says the “postcards have sowed confusion, anger, and frustration among voters who cast their ballots in good faith to make their voices heard.” Among those receiving a postcard notifying them that their vote was under protest were Riggs’ parents.

The now four friends on my county’s list have had a rude awakening. I don’t think they got the postcards. They were contacted by me. Griffin has challeged nearly 1,600 voters in my county alone.

The Asheville Watchdog’s Peter Lewis (formerly senior writer, editor, and columnist with The New York Times and more) quotes campaign spokespersons:

“Our priority remains ensuring that every legal vote is counted and that the public can trust the integrity of this election,” state Republican Party spokesperson Matt Mercer said in a news release. Embry Owen, Riggs’s campaign manager, said Griffin’s protests were a “last-ditch effort to deny the will of voters across the state.”

Those unfamiliar with election proccesses may not grasp the weediness of the challenge.

The bulk of the challenges involve the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which in North Carolina requires voters to provide the last four digits of their Social Security number or their NC driver’s license number. Anyone attempting to vote in 2024 whose voter registration records did not already include the ID numbers should have been required at the polls to provide those numbers. 

Under state law, all voters in 2024 were required to show proper identification before being allowed to vote. But there is no uniform method among the counties for capturing that information on voter forms. Even if a poll worker requested and verified a voter’s ID, precinct computers are not linked to any database for security reasons, so no corrections or additions to the registration could be made.

That’s correct. It’s not as if these people never presented that information. The state has no process outside the local board offices for logging it. Not the voters’ problem. But that’s the loophole Republicans now want to drive a bus through to narrow the vote gap and overturn the election results.

Republicans insist we need more accurate voter rolls but won’t pay for making it happen. As in so many other cases, they’d rather have the issue to run on than fix the problem. But they will exploit the problem to cancel people’s votes, including their own. There are 300 Republican voters on the challenge list in my county alone.

Oh, the stories behind these stories. But that’s for another time.

Resistance could be fruitful

Step back from the ledge. Take a break from news about the punishments the Jan. 20 Revolution plans to roll out against its enemies, and against friends who won’t publicly abase themselves before the king. “That wasn’t humiliating enough. Grovel lower!”

Need a redoubt against Trumpism that doesn’t require a passport? Fifteen blue states, especially those in which Democrats control both executive and legislative branches, are preparing to hold the line against the incoming Trump administration’s predations. Their weapon of choice? Federalism. What a concept.

Democrats and their lawyers have laid plans to defend reproductive rights and hold the line against mass deportations. But more than that, they’ve outlined “a new progressive vision of federalism—pugilistic and creative, audacious and idealistic.” They mean to “filch tactics” deployed to punishing effect by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott who has perfected a form of “hegemonic federalism” to work his will and annoy Democratic state governments.

Franklin Foer explains at The Atlantic:

I have heard a few hastily sketched ideas for how Democrats could mimic Abbott’s coercive ploys. Blue states might aggressively recruit ob-gyns from states with severe restrictions on abortion, leaving behind a red-state shortage of medical care. Women in those states, even ones who aren’t especially passionate about abortion, might begin clamoring to ease abortion bans—or punishing the Republican politicians who installed them in the first place. The goal is to apply pressure on Republican governors by provoking a political backlash from within.

Another set of proposals involves deploying massive public-employee pension funds that Democratic states control to make strategic investments in red states. By sinking money into Texas’s wind industry, for instance, blue states would do more than just expand alternative-energy options in the state. They would unleash a powerful interest group, which might help reshape the political dynamic in the state.

Muahahaha!

The goal, Foer writes, is to get blue state governors “to think sensationalistically in order to call attention to the failures of Republican policies.” But there’s a more virtuous side too. Think Progressive Era Wisconsin Gov. Robert La Follette and his “Wisconsin Idea.”

Consider: California’s economic clout and population size mean that policies like auto emission standards born there eventually migrate east, not by force of ideology, but by force of the Almighty American Dollar.

The innovation that the new federalists propose is that the blue states begin to leverage their big budgets—and their outsize influence—by acting in concert. Banding together into a cartel, they can wield their scale to bargain to buy goods at discount. There are drafts of plans to form a collective of states that would purchase insulin and other prescription drugs, which might help mitigate the higher costs of living in their states. (After the Dobbs decision, California Governor Gavin Newsom spearheaded an alliance that began to stockpile the abortion pill misoprostol.) Or they could cooperate to buy solar panels en masse, with the hopes of transforming clean-energy markets.

It’s not just about teaming up for the sake of bulk purchases. They can collaborate on creating a joint set of standards, which becomes the basis for legislating and regulating. By creating uniform rules for, say, corporate governance or animal welfare or the disclosure of dark-money contributions to nonprofits, they stand a chance of shaping the standard for the entirety of the country, because it’s cumbersome for a national corporation to adhere to two sets of guidelines for raising chickens.

Whether Democrats can get their acts together enough to act in concert is the trick.

Compared to whom?

Gen Zers have grown up amidst endless economic and political crises — fallout from September 11, the financial collapse of 2008, the Great Recession, the Covid-9 pandemic, January 6, etc. — that led to a grimmer view of their futures. Axios reports that their struggles have pushed them right while setting impossibly high expectations for financial security:

Catch up quick: Financial services company Empower surveyed more than 2,200 Americans in September and the Gen Z respondents — born between 1997 and 2012 — said they would need to make more than $587,000 a year to be “financially successful.”

That’s three to six times the amount reported by other age groups surveyed, and almost nine times the average U.S. salary tracked by the Social Security Administration.

So what’s going on here?

• Angst: “Many people feel they’re coming up short — with half believing they’re less financially successful compared to others around them,” Rebecca Rickert, head of communications at Empower, tells Axios. “The majority think prosperity is harder to achieve for their generation, which factors into the magic number people attach to success.”
• Persistently high costs: “Sure, groceries, student loan payments, the cost of going out to restaurants and bars all matter — but ‘feeling successful’ when you have to have a roommate to afford rent undermines all capacity for consumption,” David Bahnsen, whose California-based Bahnsen Group manages $6.5 billion in assets, tells Axios.
• The influence of influencers: “These macro trends are exacerbated by social trends. Influencers portray false versions of reality that suggest wealth building being easy and hard work being outdated,” says David Laut, CIO of Abound Financial in California. “It is widely known that comparison is the thief of joy, and this leads the next generation to feel discouraged, setting higher and higher bars as a prerequisite for happiness.”
• Mismatched expectations: “They’re concerned about increased costs of living, hyper-aware that their money isn’t going as far as it used to even few years ago. Our hypothesis is this is having a major impact on what they think it takes to be ‘financially successful’ in our current climate,” Julia Peterson, director of consumer marketing at youth marketing agency Archrival, tells Axios.

Costs are certainly up, especially housing costs. People living with their parents into their late 20s or needing rommates just to get by certainly influences one’s sense of economic stability.

But the statement above about “influencers” stands out. Is their presence on social media leaving the impression that fame and fortune are just one TikTok away? Or is that just generational prejudice by us oldsters? Or is it another edition of that familiar, old American fantasy that everyone is just one lottery tickey or NBA contract from being fabulously wealthy and a life of leisure? I don’t know. Nor do I know how representative is the Gen Z cohort in Empower’s survey of 2,200 Americans.

Cara Michelle Smith writes at Salon citing Eric Arzubi, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Yale Child Study Center:

More than 90% of Gen Zers regularly use social media. And as anybody with even one social media account knows, apps like TikTok and Instagram offer glimpses into the (often meticulously curated) lives of individuals who, frankly, seem like they’re living our fantasy. A perfectly innocent, five-minute scroll sesh can bombard you with irrefutable evidence that there are people living in nicer apartments than you rent, buying pricier skincare products than you can afford and wearing clothes you couldn’t dream of splurging on — making you, by comparison, feel a little less satisfied with your weekend road trip now that you’re comparing it to another couple’s two-week retreat in the Maldives. This can redefine what success looks like. 

“That’s what people naturally do, right? You index yourself against other people. That’s just kind of human nature,” Arzubi said. “We all know that the level of happiness doesn’t necessarily correlate with what people are seeing online, but that doesn’t matter.”

There’s a name for this phenomenon: upward comparison. It’s the flipside of downward comparison, in which individuals compare themselves to those with fewer resources. Downward comparisons can translate to feelings of gratitude, while upward comparisons can leave individuals feeling dissatisfied with their lives, though research also suggests upward comparison can motivate individuals to create positive changes.

My Gen Z friends are doing better, I suspect. But their cohort’s right lean won’t help any of us in the end.

(h/t DJ)

A Trumpist feature, not a bug

It is no secret by now that patriarchy will not go quietly, as Digby noted on Tuesday, calling it “the oldest organizing principle in human history.”

There are some very deep forces at work in our changing world, many of which refuse to change. Vigorously. People I’ve called rump royalists never bought into the Declaration’s flowery prose about people being “created equal.” It’s surprising that more don’t do spit-takes at its very mention. They would just as soon see the return of feudalism if they could craft a more consumer-friendly version consistent with global consumer capitalism. (They’re working on it.) Misogyny, promimently on display in Trump 2.0 cabinet picks, is one facet of that patriarchal organizing principle.

Consistent with both is the elevation to the cabinet of what Greg Sargent dubs “a Murderer’s Row of Billionaires.” By one count, there are eight among Trump’s picks so far. Sargent discusses the takeover of the White House by the ultra-wealthy with Noah Bookbinder, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

It’s not as if some wealthy leaders have not been good stewards worthy of the public’s trust, Bookbinder begins, “But the idea that you would have a government where such a high proportion of the top ranks are filled by the wealthiest people in American society is not something we’ve seen in modern times.”

Not since the Gilded Age have we seen the level of corruption and kleptocracy in government that Trumpism brings to Washington. Ethical standards that Trump pushed aside in his first administration Trump is torching heading into his second:

Bookbinder: One thing that we saw again and again in the first Trump administration were people coming into cabinet positions or deputy positions, and immediately making decisions that benefited former clients, former companies, companies to which they had ties. Now, you see a little bit of that in every administration—as you said, the revolving door is a really unfortunate D.C. tradition. But it was taken up a notch in Donald Trump’s administration to what seems to be happening here, which is you increase the number of billionaires and investors and people who potentially stand to profit.

Trump in his first term found areas of govenance controlled more by tradition than by law and exploited them for profit, Bookbinder notes. He at least attempted the pretense of adhering to ethical rules. (At least financial ones, I’d interject.)

Bookbinder: It now looks like he’s got no particular interest in doing that. I’m hopeful that he’ll see the light in the next month or two and divest from his companies and commit to ethics, but we certainly haven’t seen anything to date that gives us a lot of confidence. When you have a president who has chipped away at ethical safeguards coming in without any stated regard for those safeguards and surrounding himself by very, very wealthy people who stand to benefit from their government posts unless they adhere to the strictest ethical standards, there’s a lot of cause for concern here.

Coming after the Jeffrey Epstein conviction for child prostitution and a civil judgment against Trump for sexual assault, many Trump 2.0 picks come with their own history of misogyny and sexual misconduct. Just a coincidence, no doubt.

“Donald Trump is most likely not trying to intentionally assemble a Cabinet chock-full of people accused either of sexual assault or of enabling it, but if he were, he’d be killing it,” writes Adam Serwer in The Atlantic. Sewer provides a rundown of Trump picks you can read there or just catch on the evening news.

What’s notable is how prominently sex crimes feature in the imaginations of Republican politicians. Sex crimes committed by “whichever group they want to demonize,” that is. When it’s a Republican, well, “I don’t care,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham in dismissing sexual misconduct allegations against Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nomineee for secretary of defense, and Matt Gaetz, Trump’s first nominee for attorney general.

Sophie Gilbert adds (also in The Atlantic) that she harbored little hope about seeing attitudes change among emotionally stunted men:

I simply wished for voters to reject the idea, pushed so fervently by those on Trump’s side, that women should be subservient incubators, passively raising the next generation of men who disdain them. This wish did not pan out. “Your body, my choice. Forever,” the white-supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes, who has dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, posted on X on Election Night. “Women threatening sex strikes like LMAO as if you have a say,” the right-wing troll Jon Miller wrote on the same site.

The misogynist backlash is here:

The old analytical terms we use to describe sexism in politics aren’t sufficient to deal with this onslaught of repugnant hatred. Michelle Obama was right, in her closing argument of the 2024 campaign, to note that Harris had faced an astonishing double standard: Both the media and Americans more broadly had picked apart her arguments, bearing, and policy details while skating over Trump’s “erratic behavior; his obvious mental decline; his history as a convicted felon, a known slumlord, a predator found liable for sexual abuse.” She also captured the stakes of the election when she said that voters were fundamentally making a choice in 2024 about “our value as women in this world.” On that front, the people have spoken. But women don’t have to play along.

All his life, Trump has ruined people who get close to him. He won’t ruin women, but he will absolutely destroy a generation of men who take his vile messaging to heart. And, to some extent, the damage has already been done.

This old union will not be perfected anytime soon. Don’t let the bastards walk away with an easy win.

Would you buy a used covert operation from this man?

Frank Figliuzzi, former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence and national security contributor for NBC News and MSNBC, flagged this on the hellsite. (Yes, I still monitor.):

A self-described “deep state” wrecking ball, Kash Patel is a favorite of Trump’s MAGA base. However, during the first Trump administration, Patel’s actions revealed him as a bombastic fool who put SEAL Team Six in harm’s way through his ineptitude. open.substack.com/pub/theicema…

— Seth Hettena (@hettena.bsky.social) 2024-12-01T16:08:46.292Z

Kash Patel’s knees are scabbed from making obeisance to Donald Trump. And he’s got a fanatic’s zeal (check the eyes) for punishing Trump’s enemies. Which is why Trump wants to make him director of the FBI next year.

Hettena points out at SpyTalk just how cavalierly Kash Patel operates in the security sphere:

On October 30, 2020, President Trump signed off on a mission to have SEAL Team Six rescue Philip Walton, a 27-year-old American who gunmen had abducted from his farm in the West African nation of Niger, near the border with Nigeria. The kidnappers had hustled Walton across the border to Nigeria and were demanding a $1 million ransom.

In their book Only I Can Fix It, journalists Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker reported that the plan called for the SEALs to parachute into northern Nigeria and move three miles on foot to reach the compound where Walton was being held.

Overflying Nigeria required permission from thge Nigerian government. I know you are surprised that the Trump administration bothered. But the Pentagon thought it best not to violate another country’s sovereignty without asking.

Patel told Secretary of Defense Mark Esper that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “got the airspace cleared.”

Um, no. Pompeo later told Esper that he’d never spoken with Patel.

A few hours later, the Pentagon learned that Patel’s information was — what? — inaccurate. By this point, the SEALS were minutes away from crossing into Nigerian airspace. The aircraft circled for an hour while State obtained the necessary clearances.

The mission proceded successfully with no SEAL injuries.

But the Pentagon was still furious at Patel. Tony Tata, the Pentagon official to whom Patel had given the green light, confronted Patel in a rage.

“You could’ve gotten these guys killed!” Tata shouted at Patel, according to a report in The Atlantic. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

Patel’s response was: “If nobody got hurt, who the fuck cares?”

Yes, put that man in charge of a federal law enforcement agency and his agent’s lives.

Like Trump’s loyalty is a one-way street. So is hypocrisy where the press is concerned.

Kevin Kruse, the Princeton historian, caught my attention Monday night when he posted the cancellation of his Washington Post subscription. Kruse posted a screenshot of the Post’s landing page making the Hunter Biden pardon out to be the biggest national story since Nov. 5. In disgust, Kruse threw up his hands and hit “cancel. “

The Post’s front page caught me by surprise because I was otherwise tied up with North Carolina Republicans trying to cancel 60,000 votes, including those of several friends. More on that in a minute.

— Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) 2024-12-03T00:09:30.084Z

Marcy Wheeler has an explanation for the blanket coverage of a non-story:
How Jeff Bezos Smothered Pete Hegseth News because Hunter Biden Was Pardoned of Already Declined Charges

Author/journalist Mikel Jollet replied that the focus perfectly encapsulated what’s wrong with American journalism:

Is it a story? Sure.

But every newspaper in America devoting front page headlines to Hunter fucking Biden while Trump appoints a cabal of rapists, racists and con-men to positions of enormous power is MADNESS.

Donald Trump’s plans to spend his second term seeking vengeance against opponents, tanking the economy, ethnically cleansing nonwhite people, lining his pockets, selling out U.S. allies, and cozying up to brutish dictators is now background noise unworthy of the kind of attention the Post just gave the Bidens.

Know why? Because Democrats have a hypocrisy problem.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes responded: “A thing everyone has forgotten is that Donald Trump basically sprang Roger Stone from prison so he could help with the coup and it was maybe a one day story.”

Josh Marshall of TPM responded: “This is why I seriously don’t want to ever hear from anyone about this pardon. Politico says it’s the most consequential pardon since Richard Nixon.”

Here’s a list of Trumps truly corrupt pardons

— Rachel Bitecofer (@rachelbitecofer.bsky.social) 2024-12-02T02:31:26.664Z

You get the point. Had Kamala Harris actually won the presidency last month, the press narrative would be “bad news for Democrats.” As is, losing by a whisker is “bad news for Democrats.”

But back to Republicans backstabbing voters in North Carolina. This deserves headlines it will never get.

While you were inundated with stories about the Biden pardon, Judge Jefferson Griffin (remember him?), the Republican challenger for a North Carolina state Supreme Court seat, is trailing incumbent Democrat Justice Allison Riggs in the ballot counting. Something must be done, amirite?

Griffin trails Riggs by over 600 votes as recounts continue. Desperate, Griffin and GOP attorneys assembled a list of 60,000 voters statewide whose ballots they allege were improperly counted. On the Buncombe list (my county) are several friends who have voted for years: a former president of the local NAACP, a manager at a downtown hotel, a former Asheville talk show host.

Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University, tells the Raleigh News and Observer that Griffin’s challenge is “a choose-your-own-adventure” gambit with no penalty for trying. “So the incentive is to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.”

Griffin is not only attempting to stick it to Democrats. His attorneys can read election results. Throwing out 1,600 Buncombe votes in bulk will hurt Riggs more than Griffin. (Riggs won the county 64-36 percent.) Republican and unaffiliated votes Griffin cancels in pursuit of a win by any means necessary are simply collateral damage. They’ll always throw their own under the bus to win.

If you live in North Carolina, is your name on the GOP hit list? Here are the links by county.

UPDATE: Added the link to Marcy Wheeler’s post.

A rule of law turned inside out

The whole world will watch Donald Trump and his gang of thieves defenestrate the “rule of law” in Putinesque style.

Michael Tomasky considers the implications of Trump nominating Kash Patel to run the FBI inside what Trump likes to call the Department of Injustice. Trump 2.0 aims to make the name a reality. Patel’s only real qualification is that he is a “one-thousand-percent Trump loyalist,” Tomasky writes:

We’re about to enter a world where the rule of law is going to be turned inside out—where everything is converted into its bizarro-world version. It’s a world the conservative movement has been building for 50 years. It took Trump to dare to say the things that no other Republican president would quite say—about how the entire legal apparatus of the United States government is illegitimate and corrupt. But Trump said those things, and he opened the floodgates. For the next four years, we will be living, assuming Patel’s confirmation and that of Pam Bondi as attorney general, under a justice system where the following black-is-white presumptions will hold true:

• Donald Trump, far from being the one-step-ahead-of-the-law hoodlum he’s been his entire adult life, is America’s last honest man, and every legal effort that attempts to say otherwise is, by definition, corrupt and a lie.
• Joe Biden’s near 50-year record of never having been attached to scandal (except a case of plagiarism) is not evidence that Biden has lived an unusually clean public life; it’s evidence of a broad conspiracy by the deep state to protect Democrats. Just wait and see.
• It’s axiomatic that the 2020 election was stolen, as the federal government, now that it is in honest hands, will prove.
• January 6, 2021, was not an insurrection; it was a patriotic outcry by citizens who know the truth, and the attempt to “get to the bottom of” it was the real insurrection—a conspiracy against truth of unfathomable proportions that will now be justly avenged.

Etc., etc.

For all the raising of alarms, the punditry is short on countermeasures. I’m reminded of the anti-nuclear movement’s Helen Caldicott and her rapid-fire, scare-them-straight speech about the horrifying effects of nuclear weapons. Even her allies grew weary of the scare tactics:

“We knew it was past when someone interrupted the speech one evening, actually interrupted it, and said, ‘We know all that, but what can we do?’”

From his remove in England, Brian Beutler recommends Democrats find some actual leaders, stat, while they still have time to define the incoming Trump regime.

“Instead, the spectrum of congressional opposition to Trump ranges from total silence to voluntary obeisance,” he writes. If not naive offers by Democrats to work together on progressive-ish policies toward which Trump made feints but will in no way deliver.

Beutler offers a model from the Obama-era, that used by Republicans against him:

When Barack Obama won a genuinely overwhelming victory in 2008, Republicans began plotting lockstep opposition before he’d governed a full day.

Voting was a component of their strategy, but far from the totality. Their rhetoric was defiant. Their procedural maneuvers were designed not to expose Democrats’ promises as hollow, but to mire them in legislative quicksand. When they proclaimed interest in bipartisan dealmaking, the bad faith was palpable. They might as well have crossed their fingers behind their backs and chortled.

They refused to help Obama revive the economy, then blamed him for the economic destruction they had caused. When the right-wing grassroots proved restive, Republicans and their allied groups egged them on and helped them organize.

The strategy was a wild success.

Maybe. It wasn’t enough of a success to prevent Obama’s reelection in 2012, but it launched the T-party movement that morphed into MAGA once Trump rode his golden escalator into history. That T-party opposition model could work for Democrats, Beutler argues, giving them something to offer voters in 2026 and 2028:

• If Republicans destroy the agencies that protect consumers, workers, and the environment from rapacious oligarchs, a new generation of Democrats will be prepared to reconstitute it, leaner and meaner, the moment they retake power.
• If Republicans rescind the federal health-coverage guarantee Democrats enacted under Obama, Democrats will restore it—this time by extending Medicare to all Americans, without hesitation.
• If Republicans dissolve the rule of law, Democrats will be prepared to re-establish a legitimate anti-corruption apparatus, and it will seek justice for any crimes committed between now and whenever that day comes.

But this is still more policy-speak, the sort that 77 million voters “in no mood for quiet professionalism” tuned out in 2024 while Democrats pursued their pet kitchen-table issues. The T-party protests were more visceral, and only nominally about being “taxed enough already.”

Benjamin Wallace-Wells argues in The New Yorker that perhaps the opioid crisis had as much of an impact in red areas of the country as economic conditions. A study by Carolina Arteaga, of the University of Toronto, and Victoria Barone, of Notre Dame, noticed the overlap in red areas among depopulation, job loss, cancer rates, and the opioid epidemic. Right-wing outlets wrapped the opioid crisis with border issues and made hay of it:

Many post-election op-eds have instructed the Democratic Party to move to the center, or to become more pragmatic, or to break with the neoliberal system more sharply. But the Democrats’ failure in the fentanyl case had little to do with political theory or economic systems. It was, much more simply, a failure of political attention. The history that Arteaga and Barone describe is not one that primarily apportions blame for the fentanyl crisis to more liberal immigration controls at the southern border. Bernie Sanders might look at this material and, not unfairly, call the ongoing suffering of the opioid epidemic a Purdue Pharma plot. But as with the other temporary crises that eventually came to doom the Biden Administration—the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the migrant surge at the southern border, and, perhaps most important, post-pandemic inflation—the Democrats were a little too ready to dismiss the hubbub over opioids as partisan hysteria, and a little too slow to notice that people were actually troubled.

The anxieties the right exploited were less about economic policy and more about people’s uneasiness about their own life circumstances.

Again, the GOP works people’s guts, not their heads. Democrats can’t seem to get out of theirs. Nor do they make enough fuss that earns enough press to improve their brand-image. Doing that will take some relearning. What I find is that teaching yellow dogs new tricks is a helluva challenge. It will be even more challenging in a world where the rule of law is a matter of caprice.

Now you see it, now you don’t

Before the 2024 election itself disappears down the memory hole, take a moment to consider the disappearance of voter fraud as a campaign issue. Democrats would cheat. There would be massive corruption in the election. Migrants Democrats were importing through Joe Biden’s open southern borders would tip the scales for Kamala Harris. Nearly 9 in 10 Trump voters believed voter fraud would play a major role in 2024. Etc.

Then Donald Trump won. Voter fraud vanished like ground fog at sunrise. It was morning in MAGAstan.

Politico and Morning Consult ran a poll:

In polling just days before the election, Trump supporters expressed little confidence in the election outcome, with a whopping 87 percent substantially or somewhat agreeing with the statement that voter fraud was a “serious issue” that could determine the outcome of the election. Among Harris supporters, roughly half expressed similar worries.

That partisan divide disappeared after Election Day.

Shocked?

Views on the economy flipped as well, considered a “very important” issue ahead of Nov. 5:

A week before the election, just 8 percent of self-identified Trump voters described the economy as on the “right track,” the polling found. But after Trump’s victory, that number swung to 28 percent — still a minority, but a substantial swing in a span of just a few weeks when economic conditions did not change dramatically.

Poynter examined election fraud claims and found that after Trump won “Republicans’ claims of chicanery mostly dissipated.” A few left-leaners picked them up, but not leaders among Democrats.

Politifact fact-checked multiple fraud claims (above). They mostly focused on swing states.

One pundit observed that for four years Donald Trump complained he’d been cheated and would be cheated again in 2024. It only took about four hours of election returns for voter fraud to disappear as an issue both for him and his base.

But he’ll always have 2020.

Fighting for freedom itself

Sometimes lost in our strategizing on how to defeat authoritarianism is the need to strengthen liberal democracy itself.

Heather Cox Richardson references a Bluesky thread that makes that important point: “Cas Mudde, a political scientist who specializes in extremism and democracy, observed yesterday on Bluesky that ‘the fight against the far right is secondary to the fight to strengthen liberal democracy.’ That’s a smart observation.”

It is another way of saying that you don’t win games with defense alone.

The Dutch political scientist declined a recent offer “to speak about the upcoming Trump era and share some lessons and optimism.” It’s not that Mudde is pessimistic about the future so much as the lessons he’s offered over the last 25 years “were either wrong or not inspiring.” He needs some time to reflect before offering more.

“At the moment, I don’t so much think I underestimate the strength of the far right but rather significantly overestimated the strength of liberal democracy,” Mudde reflects. “I feel 100% certain that liberal democracy will prevail… just not sure when,” Mudde writes, echoing Ghandi:

When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it–always.

Like Hari Selden’s plan for shortening a galactic dark age, we must not only work through crises but also build anew.

Richardson reminds us what’s fallen into disrepair:

During World War II, when the United States led the defense of democracy against fascism, and after it, when the U.S. stood against communism, members of both major political parties celebrated American liberal democracy. Democratic presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower made it a point to emphasize the importance of the rule of law and people’s right to choose their government, as well as how much more effectively democracies managed their economies and how much fairer those economies were than those in which authoritarians and their cronies pocketed most of a country’s wealth.

Those mid-twentieth-century presidents helped to construct a “liberal consensus” in which Americans rallied behind a democratic government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights.

The problem Richardson diagnoses (as does Mudde) is that we became overconfident that that consensus would endure on its own, could defend itself. That truth would be self-evident. Movement Conservatives I’ve described as (essentially) rump royalists had other ideas.

In their conception, government did not exist to protect from predation and exploitation our hard-won freedoms — four, in FDR’s telling — but inhibited the individual, as Richardson tells it:

But that image of the American government is not the one on which the nation was founded.

Liberal democracy was the product of a moment in the 1600s in which European thinkers rethought old ideas about human society to emphasize the importance of the individual and his (it was almost always a “him” in those days) rights. Men like John Locke rejected the idea that God had appointed kings and noblemen to rule over subjects by virtue of their family lineage, and began to explore the idea that since government was a social compact to enable men to live together in peace, it should rest not on birth or wealth or religion, all of which were arbitrary, but on natural laws that men could figure out through their own experiences.

The Founders of what would become the United States rested their philosophy on an idea that came from Locke’s observations: that individuals had the right to freedom, or “liberty,” including the right to consent to the government under which they lived. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Lincoln reimagined liberal government for the 19th century as one that guaranteed “that all men—not just rich white men—were equal before the law and had equal access to resources, including education” and a level playing field. Roosevelt imagined “an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.” That requires a government strong enough to stand up to the rich.

Rump royalists were having none of it. Reactionary conservatives since the New Deal era successfully undermined that conception of liberal democracy as a community project for expanding freedom and supplanted it with an atomized one that provided them the freedom to rule over the rest of society.

I recommend Timothy Snyder’s conversation with Michael Steele on how the right twisted our Founders’ conception of freedom into a radically different vision. It is our broader “freedom,” and liberal democracy’s mission as its guarantor, that we lose sight of when we spend most of our efforts on defense against authoritarianism and not on offense rebuilding the liberal consensus that’s been under attack for decades.

The new team of vipers

It remains mind-boggling that grown men and women worship the hapless Wile E. Coyote of American politicians. They attend the would-be strongman’s rallies, buy his shitty merch, and mimic his dance to the gay national anthem. Even Elaine Benes finds his dance stupid. His entire adult life, Donald Trump complained that the world was laughing at the U.S. (him). Then he got elected president and United Nations ambassadors from around the world laughed at him. Wile E. didn’t understand that another ACME product blew up in his face.

Half of American voters rehired the man last month. The world doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry as Trump announces a series of defective appointments to his new administration. Trump’s recruiting leans heavily on Fox News regulars or “central casting” stereotypes. But in fact, most feature in the ACME catalog.

On Saturday, Trump proposed son-in-law Jared Kushner’s father as ambassador to France. The man pleaded guilty in 2005 to “18 counts of illegal campaign contributions and tax evasion, as well as witness tampering after he retaliated against his brother-in-law, William Schulder, who was cooperating with federal investigators.”

Social media’s JoJo from Jerz (Joanne Carducci) reminds Threads users just how Kushner wound up in jail.

View on Threads

Trump also nominated Kash Patel as FBI Director on Saturday. Patel has been a faithful promoter of Trump propaganda. He played a role in the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election Trump lost to Joe Biden. Special counsel Jack Smith’s may have dropped his prosecution of Trump for that act, for inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection, and for stealing national security documents. But when (not if) his report sees the light of day, Patel’s role may be implicated in it, Marcy Wheeler reminds us:

Then there’s another aspect to the timing. Trump announced this pick — as he did the decision implanting all his defense attorneys at DOJ — while Jack Smith’s prosecutors are working on their report. And Kash should show up in that report, at least to lay out his false public claims that Trump had declassified all the documents he took with him (and possibly even his demand that he got immunity before giving that testimony). I’m not sure how central that will be to a report. But Trump had a choice about how confrontational to be with how he installed Kash in a place to dismantle the so-called Deep State, and his choice to be maximally confrontational may have a tie to this report.

People are currently thinking of all the other ways Kash has helped serve Trump’s false claims in the past — the false claim that the Russian investigation was predicated on the Steele dossier, efforts to override Ukraine experts during that impeachment, attempts to misrepresent the Russian investigation. But the Smith report may well explain that Trump’s FBI Director nominee played a more central role in Trump’s effort to spin Trump’s efforts to take hundreds of classified documents home. So when Kash gets a confirmation hearing, it will put the veracity of the Smith report centrally at issue. If Senators find the report convincing, they should have renewed cause to reject Patel’s nomination, but Trump has almost without exception forced GOP Senators to believe his false claims to avoid scary confrontations with him, so I wouldn’t bet against Trump and Kash.

Trump has spent eight years sowing propaganda about his own corruption and crimes. Not just Patel’s nomination to a position in which he could thoroughly politicize rule of law, but also the means by which Trump made that nomination, is part of that same project.

As George W. Bush might ask: Is our reporters learning? So far, no, Wheeler concludes. They continue to soft-peddle Trump’s propaganda and the “weird” aspect of his nominees. The way in which he’s rolled out his new team of vipers is all part of his efforts to deconstruct reality, and to make it “far more difficult to sort out truth from crime anymore.”

Or a real tunnel from a false one. It’s increasingly difficult to bet our nation’s future as a democratic republic on Trump’s haplessness.