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A New Hopium

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 11, 2024

When underdogs fight back

The moment Luke Skywalker joins the fight against the empire. Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope.

“When people feel uncertain, they’d rather have someone strong and wrong than weak and right,” President Bill Clinton advised Democratic leaders in 2002.

Enter Donald John Trump, the seven deadly sins on two legs. No way would Americans vote for that walking atrocity, I thought in 2016. Hoo-boy, did I call that wrong. So did Bill’s wife Hillary. Americans chose strong and wrong.

The pivot point in the Hero’s Journey comes when, after refusing the call to adventure, she/he crosses a threshold out of the ordinary world into one of challenge and quest. Young Luke Skywalker crosses that threshold early in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope. Did President Joe Biden reach one of those pivot points last week? Some think maybe.

Reflecting on the 2008 HBO film, Recount, about the 2000 presidential election, Joe Klein writes in The New York Times:

Democrats litigate; Republicans fight. Democrats float toward an almost helium-infused state of high-mindedness; Republicans see politics as a no-holds-barred cage match.

President Biden’s pugilistic State of the Union address last week may represent a new direction. But given the party’s recent history, the Democrats will probably need some CRISPR editing to their DNA.

Both Michael Dukakis and John Kerry were distressingly saintly in their presidential campaigns, failing to respond to Republican attack ads. Hillary Clinton endured a classic “Recount” moment in her second debate against Donald Trump. Mr. Trump stalked her around the stage. “He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled,” Mrs. Clinton later wrote. “Do you stay calm, keep smiling and carry on,” she wondered. “Or do you turn, look him in the eye and say loudly and clearly, ‘Back up, you creep. Get away from me. I know you love to intimidate women, but you can’t intimidate me.” Throwing the haymaker might not have won the election, but Mrs. Clinton would have instantly changed the impression that she was a hapless, patronizing, liberal elitist.

… and the audience CHEERS.

Throwing political left hooks is not Democrats’ nature, nor in Biden’s. But it’s time they find it in themselves. Perhaps Biden has crossed a threshold, and others will follow. (Okay, maybe not these people.) Americans cheer when the underdog fights back.

Klein continues:

Street fighting can be overdone, but it is where Mr. Trump lives. He is perhaps the most impolitic politician in American history. Joe Biden can, at times, wield a wicked sense of humor, and last week he demonstrated that he can be a merry Celtic warrior. But he’ll have to sustain his energy throughout the campaign, and he will need help.

Strong women fluster Trump. If Kamala Harris were Nixon’s VP, Klein suggests, “she’d be tasked with one job: Stomp Trump.” Maybe she will in 2024. That doesn’t let the rest of us off the hook.

Biden himself has been reluctant a reluctant warrior, writes E.J. Dionne. Working across the aisle is in his blood. But so is his “Irish.” Time for Joe to ball his fists, “because you can’t reconcile with those who have no interest in civility or dialogue,” Dionne advises:

So Biden the peacemaker gave way to Biden the scrapper on behalf of a threatened democracy. He reached for the most dramatic metaphor available to him in expressing just how irreconcilable our differences have become. “Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War,” he declared, “have freedom and democracy been under assault at home as they are today.”

[…]

A strategy of warfare requires tactical decisions. Rallying Democrats was the first priority of his speech, but Biden made two of his other top objectives obvious. He intends to fight hard for the kinds of Republicans and independents who rallied to Nikki Haley’s candidacy by making clear that he will stand up for Ukraine’s survival and stand strong against Vladimir Putin’s threats. His pointed contrast of Trump with Ronald Reagan reminded many Republicans of a heritage their soon-to-be nominee would squander by “bowing down to a Russian leader.”

“The assertion that hyper-partisanship, chaos and nihilism (e.g., threatening to shut down the government, egging on a default and refusing to even vote on Ukraine aide) is equally divided amounts to an outright fabrication — or utter cluelessness,” insists Jennifer Rubin while praising Democrats who won primaries on March 5 as comparative moderates.

“Responsible reporting should not cover for Republicans. The MAGA Republican Party has become shockingly irrational and radicalized, fully embracing totalitarianism, white nationalism and radical isolationism.”

Mainstream false-equivalence reporting about political polarization is nonsense. The radicalized Republican Party, like the Confederacy, has become an authoritarian movement bent on overturning our constitutional order. There’s no way back to normal without first stomping it soundly.

But not just for stomping’s sake. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) observed famously, “I think we’ve just shown that we have an ability to not only walk and chew gum at the same time, but to run, chew gum, do cartwheels at the same time on behalf of the American people.”

Democrats must not only find their Irish but do their fighting while making sure Americans know what they are fighting for, not just against. Lincoln may not have intended to free the slaves at the beginning of the war the South started, but he made sure to finish it, and to make the sacrifices mean more than just preserving the union. He made it more perfect.

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He’s Just Ken

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 11, 2024

And still great at doing stuff

Margot Robbie and Billie Eilish (over Ryan Gosling’s left shoulder) crack up as Gosling begins singing “I’m Just Ken” at the Oscars.

Watching Ryan Gosling and the Barbie cast perform “I’m Just Ken” at the Oscars last night was the highlight of the wekend. Enjoy.

Digby has a viral moment from late in the show in the queue. Come back soon.

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No Help For Rudy?

Published by digby on March 10, 2024

Looks like Trump has his own problems and Giuliani’s on his own

Rudy’s mess just keeps getting messier:

Attorneys for Rudy Giuliani’s creditors negotiating his Chapter 11 bankruptcy filed a request on Thursday, demanding that Giuliani reveal his financial secrets, including details on his cable TV earnings, the origin of his legal defense fund (led by his son), and even the nature of his work for Trump.

The far-reaching order is only possible thanks to allegations that Giuliani participated in “discovery misconduct”—that is to say, he failed to spill all the beans the first time around when he was sued by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.

“Indeed, it was Giuliani’s discovery misconduct in the Freeman Litigation—concerning Giuliani’s defamatory statements about two Georgia 2020 election workers—that led U.S. District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell to enter a $148 million default judgment against Giuliani,” reads the motion, obtained by Law & Crime,

“Judge Howell found Giuliani’s misconduct in the Freeman Litigation so egregious that she further ordered immediate dissolution of the automatic thirty-day stay of enforcement of the judgment, allowing the plaintiffs in the Freeman Litigation to take immediate steps to enforce the judgment,” the motion continued, noting that Giuliani’s “willful shirking of his discovery obligations” effectively lost him the case by default.

The creditors think he’s hiding his assets and for good reason. He’s got a world of legal trouble: his  multimillion-dollar judgment for defaming Freeman and Moss but also the Dominion and Smartmatic defamation suits and the Fulton County Georgia election case. And there’s that truly atrocious case from Noelle Dunphy, a former assistant, who has accused him of sexual harassment and assault.

Trump held one fundraiser for him at Mar-a-lago but I don’t think it could have possibly covered all the legal costs much less the judgments. He appears to have dropped Rudy completely now. He’s got his own legal and financial problems to worry about.

The big question is whether Rudy is under so much duress that he will plead guilty — and spill the beans. There’s no evidence that he will but you never know. He might just wake up one day and wonder if it was all worth it.

Thanks Bernie. It Needs To Be Said.

Published by digby on March 10, 2024

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont on CBS urged his supporters to vote for President Biden despite the widespread opposition among them to Biden’s continued backing of Israel. “The fight continues to change Biden’s policy in Gaza, but the contrast between Biden and Trump is day and night,” he said. “The election of Trump would be a disaster for this country and, in my view, the world.”

I agree with that. It’s both. Apparently, this needs to be said too:

Of course Hamas is not a progressive organization. It’s a political organization and you may agree with some of its aims. But it’s also an authoritarian, fundamentalist Islamic group dedicated to violence. Fundamentalist religious organizations are by definition not progressive. I can’t believe that anyone would think they are.

Biden is moving on Gaza. Probably not enough but he is moving. Sanders is right. It’s fine to protest (although I think “genocide Joe” is pretty crude and not exactly accurate, “genocide Bibi maybe.) But if you care about Gaza you have to do everything you can to make sure Biden is re-elected. Otherwise, you are consigning them to total hopelessness.

The Most Perfect Example Of Projection

Published by digby on March 10, 2024

Trump said Biden’s speech was an “angry, dark, hate-filled” divisive rant. And then he mocked Biden’s stutter and spent two hours spewing vile, grotesque rhetoric to rival even American Carnage

The NY Times:

Early in his remarks at what was effectively his first campaign rally of the general election, former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday blasted President Biden’s State of the Union address as an “angry, dark, hate-filled rant” that was more divisive than unifying.

Then, in the nearly two hours that followed, Mr. Trump, speaking in Rome, Ga., used inflammatory language to stoke fears on immigration, and repeated his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

The former president, who faces four criminal cases, called the press “criminals.” And he mocked President Biden’s stutter and revived a litany of grievances against political opponents, prosecutors and television executives.

Mr. Trump told thousands of his supporters gathered at the rally that “everything Joe Biden touches” turns to filth, though he used an expletive to describe the result. “Everything. I tried finding a different word, but there are some words that cannot be duplicated.” (He used the word, or a variant, at least four times in his speech.)

He’s used the word fuck and motherfuckers in some speeches before. It’s only a matter of time before he starts doing it commonly as he’s now using the words shit and bullshit. His classy followers love it.

He went on to pitch the now usual Nazi-esque ideas that the country is threatened “from within” even going so far as to say that his political enemies are more dangerous than his buddy Vladimir Putin. And the dehumanization of migrants is becoming so hysterical and over the top that I’m afraid he’s going to start ordering his cult to start killing people.

While vowing to expand his crackdown on immigration, Mr. Trump described the continuing surge of migrants across the southern border as “the agony of our people, the plunder of our cities, the sacking of our towns, the violation of our citizens and the conquest of our country.”

Apparently the migrants are Visigoths and we are actually living in the 5th century.

The speech that Mr. Trump gave on Saturday was his first since Mr. Biden repeatedly attacked him and his policies in his State of the Union address. “Joe Biden should not be shouting angrily at America,” Mr. Trump said. “America should be shouting angrily at Joe Biden.”

But his critiques moved toward personal insults. At one point, Mr. Trump slurred his words and pretended to stutter in a mocking imitation of the president, who has dealt with a stutter since childhood.

It was one of several such attacks Mr. Trump lobbed during the event. Of the former television anchor Megyn Kelly, with whom Mr. Trump sparred during his first presidential run, he said “may she rest in peace.” While talking about the success that his time on “The Apprentice” had brought NBC, he called Jeff Zucker, the network’s former chief executive, an “idiot.”

Mr. Trump also denigrated a number of prosecutors and judges involved in the criminal cases and multiple civil lawsuits in which he is entangled. He spent a considerable amount of time attacking Fani T. Willis, the district attorney prosecuting him over his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia.

And yes, he spent plenty of time on the Big Lie too and defamed E. Jean Carroll again among other things. His entire speech was nothing more than an odious assault on decency at every level.

His cult members loved it. People like this:

Have there always been tens of millions of people like this and I just didn’t know it?

Corporations Use Their Muscle

Published by digby on March 10, 2024

This is why they like Republicans

Stephen Greenhouse in The Guardian:

Upset by the surge in union drives, several of the best-known corporations in the US are seeking to cripple the country’s top labor watchdog, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), by having it declared unconstitutional. Some labor experts warn that if those efforts succeed, US labor relations might return to “the law of the jungle”.

In recent weeks, Elon Musk’s SpaceX as well as Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s have filed legal papers that advance novel arguments aimed at hobbling and perhaps shutting down the NLRB – the federal agency that enforces labor rights and oversees unionization efforts. Those companies are eager to thwart the NLRB after it accused Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s of breaking the law in battling against unionization and accused SpaceX of illegally firing eight workers for criticizing Musk.

Roger King, a longtime management-side lawyer who is senior labor counsel for the HR Policy Association, said “it will be a lose-lose” if the federal courts overturn the 89-year-old National Labor Relations Act, which has governed labor relations since Franklin Roosevelt was president. “We’ll have the law of the jungle, the law of the streets,” King said. “It will be who has the most power. It’s potential for chaos.”

Kate Andrias, a Columbia University law professor, said workers would be hurt if the courts issue a sweeping decision that declares both the NLRB and the National Labor Relations Act unconstitutional. “Without them, workers will be even worse off,” she said. “It’s critical that they continue to exist to protect the basic right to organize and engage in collective bargaining. This is an assault on rights we have considered fundamental since the New Deal.”

Some worker advocates have voiced surprise that these companies are seeking to hobble the NLRB when, in their view, the labor board is already too weak, its penalties toothless. The NLRB can’t fine companies even one dollar for breaking the law – for instance, by illegally firing workers for supporting a union.

SpaceX, Starbucks, Amazon and Trader Joe’s have put forward three main arguments for holding the NLRB unconstitutional: it penalizes companies without a jury trial, exercises executive powers without the president being free to remove board officials, and violates the separation of powers by exercising executive, legislative and judicial functions. This corporate attack is part of a wave of lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of various federal agencies that regulate business.

Andrias said one factor spurring the challenges to the NLRB is that “the supreme court over the last decade, but especially in the last couple of years, has signaled a hostility to the administrative state and has radically remade administrative law in a way that would curb the government’s ability to protect workers and consumers. Companies are now trying to capitalize on the court’s conservative majority.”

Bingo. They know they have a better chance today than any time in a century to get protections from the high court.

It’s worth reading the whole thing. Unsurprisingly, this crusade is being led by Elon Musk who is clearly supporting Donald Trump and the MAGA plan to strip the executive branch of all authority to regulate business. (Trump also wants to lower the corporate tax and hand out more tax cut candy to himself and his rich buddies like Musk.)

As much damage as the far right Supreme Court has done to our society they’re only getting started. This is where their heart is.

Florida Retreats In The War On Woke

Published by digby on March 10, 2024

DeSantis’ spectacular flame out sours his followers on his strategy

Oh my. It looks like Ron DeSantis has lost his clout. Florida’s sick of the “war on woke.” Just this last week the GOP legislature failed to even get a rainbow flag ban out of committee! What is this world coming to?

It wasn’t the only culture war proposal from conservative lawmakers to end up in the bill graveyard during the session that ended Friday. One rejected bill would have banned the removal of Confederate monuments. Another would have required transgender people to use their sex assigned at birth on driver’s licenses — something the state Department of Motor Vehicles is already mandating. A third proposed forbiddinglocal and state government officials from using transgender people’s pronouns.

Some of those ideas have come up in the past and may surface again next year. But the fact that the bills failed, even with public support from DeSantis, marks a change from the days when the GOP supermajority in Tallahassee passed nearly everything the governor asked for.

Florida has firmly cemented itself in recent years as ground zero for the nation’s culture wars. The Sunshine State is the birthplace of conservative parental rights group Moms for Liberty, the original law restricting LGBTQ+ discussion in classrooms, one of the strictest abortion laws in the country and legislation that has led to the banning of more books than in any other state in America.

But the pushback is growing.

Parents and others have organized and protested schoolbook bans. Abortion rights advocates gathered enough signatures to put the issue on the ballot in Florida in November. A bill that would have established “fetal personhood” stalled before it could reach a full vote.

Judges are also canceling some of DeSantis’s marquee laws, including the “Stop Woke Act.”A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled Monday that the law “exceeds the bounds” of the Constitution’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech and expression.

Even the governor recently admitted the state might have gone too far in trying to remove certain books from school shelves, suggesting laws on book challenges should be “tweaked” to prevent “bad actors” from having too much influence.

Democrats and other DeSantis critics say the laws that the governor has pushed will continue to shape public life in Florida for years to come, and they don’t expect the Republican supermajority in the state House to suddenly abandon conservative causes. But they do sense a shift.

“When his presidential race ended, I think that a lot of his influence and power died at the same time,” said state Sen. Shevrin Jones, a South Florida Democrat. “And I think that people in Florida and across the country, including Republicans, are starting to see that the culture wars are getting us nowhere.”

That’s what happens when you are the Great White Bread Hope and get knocked out in the first round. Nobody is frightened of you anymore and your fans are embarrassed. DeSantis is almost certainly going to run in 2028 and it will be interesting (and, no doubt, nauseating) to see what DeSanctimonious 2.0 looks like. It probably won’t look a lot like 1.0.

I wonder if any of this will have an effect on 2024 in Florida. I won’t get my hopes off. That state is way down the rabbit hole and it’s MAGA central now. But you never know. Rick Scott is extremely unpopular (I can’t imagine why) so maybe he’s vulnerable? He’s only leading his challenger Debbie Mucarsal-Powell by 3 points in the latest polling.

The culture war will never die, unfortunately. It always seamlessly morphs into something else. I think the new themes are going to come straight out of Christian Nationalism which is the Big New Thing on the right. Get ready. This next battle is going to be something else.

Good Morning

Published by digby on March 10, 2024

From the “you can’t make this stuff up” files

She is totally shameless so this won’t embarrass her. But it should embarrass someone.

The following won’t embarrass this looney tunes either. But it should:

I don’t think I’ve ever agreed with Kevin McCarthy about anything. But his loathing for this woman is well taken. I hope he succeeds in using his network to take her out. She’s almost as nuts as George Santos.

And then there’s this piece of work:

Oh really? Imagine that …

As I said, you can’t make this stuff up.

Relativism Is In The Eye Of the Justice

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 10, 2024

Will SCOTUS now revisit Dobbs and Heller?

Image from Warren Zevon’s “Excitable Boy” album cover.

Need I repeat that conservatives principles always seem to be a mile wide and an inch deep? Democracy, the rule of law, the peaceful transfer of power, peace through strength, the sacredness of the Constitution, etc.

“If you ask me what the biggest problem in America is, I’m not going to tell you debt, deficits, statistics, economics—I’ll tell you it’s moral relativism,” Congressman Paul Ryan insisted four years before becoming House Speaker. Relativism was for years a charge conservatives levied against liberals. Until it was no longer useful.

My memorable first introduction to Rick Perlstein in 2005 included something Richard Nixon once told a staffer, “Flexibility is the first principle of politics.” Expediency conservatives hold sacrosanct.

Jill Lepore asks in The New Yorker whether, having sacrificed the 14th Amendment in pursuit of political expediency, “originalists” on the Supreme Court now feel free to rexamine other amendments:

There’s more than one way to skin a Constitution. Here are two: a court might base a decision on the original intention, meaning, and public understanding, the “history and tradition,” of a constitutional provision, or it might base a decision on a consideration of the consequences. Ordinarily, a judge might apply both these and other methods, but a strict originalist might argue that the jurisprudence of originalism is fundamentally opposed to the jurisprudence of consequentialism—that it’s best to heed the past and damn the consequences. During oral arguments at the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, for instance, Justice Samuel Alito asked about origins (“Can it be said that the right to abortion is deeply rooted in the history and traditions of the American people?”), and Justice Sonia Sotomayor inquired after consequences (“When does the life of a woman and putting her at risk enter the calculus?”). Alito wrote the majority opinion, declaring that no right to an abortion can be found in the Constitution’s history and tradition, and that therefore “the Fourteenth Amendment does not protect the right to an abortion.” Sotomayor joined a dissent that denounced “the majority’s refusal even to consider the life-altering consequences” of its decision.

This term, the tables turned. In Trump v. Anderson, the Court agreed to review a decision by the Colorado Supreme Court to strike the former President’s name from that state’s Republican primary ballot. That court had found that Donald Trump, owing to his role in the events of January 6th, had been disqualified under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits people who have sworn an oath to the Constitution and then engaged in an insurrection against it from holding office. Maine and Illinois also determined that Trump had disqualified himself.

There are strong arguments against disqualifying Trump, but none involve the historical record: the evidence of history supported affirming the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision. (I and the historians David Blight, Drew Gilpin Faust, and John Fabian Witt made this argument in an amicus brief.) During oral arguments, Justice Sotomayor asked about origins: “History proves a lot to me.” Justice Alito worried about outcomes: “The consequences of what the Colorado Supreme Court did, some people claim, would be quite severe.” So did Chief Justice John Roberts, who asked Jason Murray, the lawyer representing Colorado voters, what he’d do with what “would seem to me to be plain consequences of your position?” Alito asked Murray “to grapple with what some people have seen as the consequences of the argument that you’re advancing.” Posing one hypothetical after another, Alito asked, “Then what would we do?”

Whether to err on the side with tradition or consequences, like other political debates, depends not on principle, but on whose ox is being gored. It’s not that both liberals and conservatives aren’t flexible in their principles. It’s that conservatives are utterly shameless in Texas-two-stepping around theirs when convenient.

Until very recently, the Second Amendment, known as “the lost amendment,” hardly ever came up. In a unanimous opinion in 1939, the Court ruled that it protected the right to bear arms only as part of a well-regulated militia. Then, beginning with D.C. v. Heller, in 2008, and continuing down through New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, in 2022, the Court codified a new, individual-rights reading that it described as “original,” and devised history tests (including a “historical-analogy” test) that any effort to curtail gun violence must pass in order to be deemed constitutional. Without the fealty to originalism that these cases demanded, there could be no Dobbs—no impossible test for abortion to fail.

Historians protested that the Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment was wrong and its tests preposterous. In Bruen, a case involving the question of where New Yorkers can and cannot carry guns, which was argued four weeks before Dobbs, oral arguments included groping for an eighteenth-century equivalent of a football stadium. Pressed by Justice Elena Kagan, the lawyer for the petitioner admitted the limits of historical analogies, given that, for instance, you can’t base denying felons the right to own guns on any eighteenth-century law, since, at the time, many crimes were capital crimes. Felons weren’t banned from carrying guns; they were executed. Justice Stephen Breyer later tried to intervene: “Even following Heller and following the history, which I thought was wrong,” he said, he wondered which way the Court could possibly rule that would not result in “a kind of gun-related chaos.” But why should anyone follow Heller or Bruen, whose reasoning attempts to defy the very passage of time? By that logic, the constitutionality of I.V.F. turns on identifying the eighteenth-century equivalent of a frozen embryo.

If the Court is now interested in consequentialist arguments, here’s one: in the past quarter century, more than three hundred thousand American children have experienced armed civilians attacking their schools. Last year, there were six hundred and fifty-six mass shootings in the United States. Four out of five murders and more than half of all suicides in this country involve a gun. Gun ownership is rising, and so is political violence. For nearly a century, beginning with the earliest public-opinion surveys, Americans have consistently supported safety measures and curbs on gun ownership. Since 2008, the Court has thwarted them.

And the Court will until gun violence reaches reaches their families. Consequences. Miraculously, the scales will fall from their eyes.

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SNL Blesses Katie Britt’s Heart

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 10, 2024

Britt is as phony as Joe Biden is real

It was baked in that Saturday Night Live would use Alabama Sen. Katie Britt’s “absurdly overdramatic” SOTU performance as it’s cold open. My problem with SNL’s sketch? “Bless his heart” Britt will probably just be flattered that SNL asked Scarlett Johansson to play her.

“What was the point of that nonsense?” The American Conservative asked, descrbing Britt’s appearance as a ” hyper-emotional speech that verged from creepy to hormonal to giddy within the span of twenty minutes.” It’s a wonder SNL did not just replicate Britt’s address almost word-for-word, as Tina Fey once did in mocking Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

But The American Conservative‘s response to Biden’s SOTU was just as bizarre, judging it a declaration of war on half the country while calling Biden a liar and Britt “authentic.”

Judge for yourself which of the likely 2024 presidential candidates is the kind of authentic you want sitting in the Oval Office.

The American Conservative declares the SOTU a tradition draped in “pseudo-monarchic pomp” and out of character for “a country that defines itself against hereditary hierarchy,” yet “arch-feudal in spirit.” On that, we agree. Especially regarding conservatives who yearn for an emotionally stunted child-king.

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