JV Last at the Bulwark discusses the fact that lefty influencer/podcaster Cenk Uyger (with whom I once had a passing acquaintance back in the early blogger days) seems to be cozying up to right, specifically Elon Musk. I won’t attempt to question what his motives might be — it could be any number of things. But Last makes an observation with which I totally agree out of hard won experience:
You know about horseshoe theory, right? It’s the idea that the political spectrum is not a straight line but a U-shape, where the far left and far right end up nearly touching.
Usually when people talk about horseshoe theory, it’s in terms of policy preferences—how the policies of the far left and far right can start to overlap. But I think it’s driven much more by temperament.
If you are the kind of person who tends toward conspiracy theories, you will gravitate toward the far end of the horseshoe. The same is true for people who are driven by grievance.
And also for populists. If you disdain expertise and despise the opinions of “elites” who happen to know a lot more than you do about, say, military logistics or the actuarial side of force planning, then you will tend to make common cause with people like Elon Musk. Or Musk’s boss.
My advice is to keep this in mind when evaluating potential allies. Just because a person seems like they’re on one side at the moment doesn’t mean they’ll stay there. Personalities and character matter.
Once you understand that, it’s not all that hard to predict who will end up where on the horseshoe.
No, it is not. I have learned that the people who have this particular personality and temperament can be very appealing when they’re on your side. They’re often fighters who are brave enough to do and say things that others won’t. But in the end, you can almost always bet that their sense of grievance, attraction to conspiracy theories or hatred for elites will drive them to make common cause with the right. It’s happened over and over again.
Temperament matters more in politics than you think it should.
You know all those new regulations requiring that airlines pay you for cancellations and advertise the full price of fares upfront, including mandatory fees and taxes? They’re very popular and seem to have made the airlines more responsive. Well, the airlines are very happy that Trump is promising to roll all that back:
The chief executive of Delta Air Lines says the incoming Trump administration will be a “breath of fresh air” for airlines after what he called government “overreach” under President Joe Biden.
On Monday, the airline industry trade group praised Trump’s pick for transportation secretary, former Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy. Duffy, a former reality TV star who is co-host of “The Bottom Line” on Fox Business, lobbied for U.S. airlines and their unions during a dispute with Persian Gulf carriers.
I’m sure that when they roll back those consumer protections the media will somehow blame the Democrats but I hope that the Democrats fight back hard on things like this. When there’s another travel crisis, as is likely, they need to hammer the Republicans and force the media to cover it properly instead of going along with the Trump lies. These are the sort of things that people feel in their own lives and the Democrats cannot allow the Republicans to escape responsibility for them anymore.
There’s going to be a lot of this and it’s not going to be enough for AOC and Jasmine Crockett to give good speeches during hearings. The Dems need a concerted plan to hammer again and again that the Trump administration is rewarding its corporate buddies at people’s expense. These are the specific kinds of things that bring that home.
I wrote about the things I think are missing from the Dem discourse: 1) scope of the losses (you'd think this was 1984)2) how media struggles to explain a second Trump win; easier to yell at Dems 3) there might not be a grand theory. it might be uninformed voters' vibes.njour.nl/s/726851?unl…
Pretty sure all three are true. But 2 is the biggie. Because it’s application is so wide. People are confused by, upset by, outraged by Trump. And they don’t know what to make of or do with those feelings and the easiest course is vent about Dems. Full stop. 2/3 of contemporary political commetnary.
Absolutely correct. The “bad vibe” election, expertly exploited by Trump, was caused by Trump himself. He persuaded his own followers that the country was in the worst shape it’s ever been including the Great Depression and that the previous election had been stolen from them. Democrats were upset and frustrated that he was out there lying about all this. Bad vibes all around. In the end, the election was decided by the small slice of voters who just felt the vibes and had no idea where they were coming from. They just went with the general vibes they heard and felt in passing and believed it was necessary to throw the bastards out.
Here’s an excerpt of the National Journal piece:
Explaining a Harris win would have been easy: Voters rejected Trump and his ilk, just as they did in 2020. A Trump win seems more difficult to explain. Everyone knows who he is now! Surely the majority would reject him, even if he won the Electoral College. But instead, Trump not only won the Electoral College, he won the popular vote.
And now we get a zillion media think pieces on what Democrats did wrong and what the ideological fights are between the center and the Left.
[…]
The explanations are not cut-and-dried; they never are. But it’s also not difficult to see that swing voters rejected an administration they felt didn’t help them. As for what they knew about Trump—well, I hate to break it to you, but the vast majority of swing voters only pay attention to politics long enough to cast their ballots. They are not watching rallies. They are annoyed by political ads and ignore mailers. This is why searches of “did Joe Biden drop out” surged on Election Day.
Logically, voters who didn’t even know who was on the ballot were probably unlikely to cast a ballot for the candidate they didn’t know (Harris). They did know Trump, and they knew their perception that the economy was better—mostly because prices were lower—during his term.
Those swing voters who did know enough to have the right candidates in mind, but not much more, went with a gut feeling of some sort. In an environment where the current administration is unpopular and people think the country is on the wrong track, that vote wasn’t going to Harris. Plus, isn’t Trump a great businessman or something?
These are the stories you only rarely see in the media. It is uncomfortable to learn how swing voters actually make decisions. It is also uncomfortable to think about how much money was spent trying to sway their decisions, when they came down to a gut feeling or something they only saw in passing. We spend a lot of time and money trying to catch them in passing.
Eventually, more data will help us sort out what happened. In the meantime, all of the media explainers would do well to consider that there might not be some grand theory of what happened. Maybe we just have a low-information swing electorate that is busy living their lives and votes on a whim. It’s just not what we want to see from inside our political bubbles.
The consequences of all this are profound. As with so much else, Trump has exposed the flaws in our democratic system as well. Flood the zone with bullshit and the people who don’t pay attention until the day they vote will probably go your way.
I’m sure the contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents are dangerous. But right now that sounds more like the contemptuous, unpitying masters of this country…
There are lots of attempts to explain the 2024 election. Many voters said something along the lines of, they were unhappy with the government and wanted to try something new. These voters were concerned about the economy (although even The Wall Street Journal conceded it was the strongest in the world), the price of gasoline, and other similar issues that amounted to little more than a permission structure for voting for Trump. It was all summed up for me a few days after the election, in a conversation with an acquaintance who said they’d voted for Harris, but at least “my portfolio is doing great this week.”
Voters who ignored the facts about the economy and used them as an excuse to vote for Trump weren’t people who wanted a change. They were people who, actually, didn’t want any change at all. They didn’t like new policies advanced by the Biden-Harris administration, a more inclusive vision of America where traditionally marginalized people had equal opportunity. They didn’t want a new generation of leadership. They wanted the “old stability,” the patriarchy that has run the country for generations. In many ways, that’s what’s at the heart of the conservative coalition. It’s not a rejection of the established order; it’s an embrace of it.
[…]
Thinking a vote for Trump was a rejection of “elites” is part of the weak tea biography Trump sold to far too many Americans—the idea that he, the guy who started out on third base, hit and would continue hitting homes runs for them. Trump appeals to people who want to slide into home without having to run all the bases; that’s his ultimate appeal, the cheat who somehow manages to succeed, surrounded by his billionaire friends.
Two things there that ring especially true to me. The votes for Trump on the economy “amounted to little more than a permission structure for voting for Trump.” Yes. It was a rationale that people used to be respectable. It was not the real reason. And that reason was that they admire Trump because he is the cheat who manages to succeed. He slithers out from all accountability and they love him for it. It makes him supernatural, invincible.
How do you fashion a political strategy around that? I don’t know but I do know that coming up with a better set of 10 point plans on the economy isn’t gonna do it.
You may recall during the campaign Donald Trump waxing on interminably during “the weave” about the time he watched Elon Musk’s picture perfect spacecraft landings. He would say, ” Elon with his rocket ships that land within 12 inches on the moon where they want it to land…” Trump travelled to Texas yesterday with his bff Musk to observe the latest Starship SpaceX test of one of those perfect landings. He and the rest of his entourage watched as the spacecraft aborted its second attempt to catch the returning booster at its launchpad and splashed in to the Gulf of Mexico instead.
I think we’re all hoping this is a metaphor for Trump’s administration: lots of hype but they just can’t stick the landing.
It’s certainly possible. Virtually none of the people he is choosing to lead the various departments have any qualifications for the jobs he’s putting them into and little or no management experience of any kind. He’s generally named people he’s seen on TV which I suppose makes sense since that was his only qualification for the presidency and in his mind he’s the greatest leader the world has ever known. What other qualification do you really need?
On Tuesday he even chose another reality show veteran and Fox Business host former congressman Sean Duffy as Secretary of Transportation and TV talk show host Dr. Oz to head up the CMS which administers Medicare and Medicaid. Oz promised to work closely with the equally unqualified conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr who has been tapped to head the Department of Health and Human Services, so that’s double helping of kookiness.
All of the other nominees we’ve seen thus far, with a small handful of exceptions, are quacks and hucksters chosen for their loyalty to Trump and their stated eagerness to take a wrecking ball to the departments they’ve been hired to oversee. The question at this point is whether or not they are capable of doing that or will spend most of their time on Fox News sucking up to the big boss, which is how they got the nod for their jobs in the first place. They will go in knowing next to nothing and will be staffed with cranks and scammers who know even less. Perhaps the best we can hope for in some of these agencies is that they’ll flounder about for a while without any serious results.
There is some talk that many of these choices are actually designed as much to keep the Senate in line as anything else. The idea is that by forcing his own Republican caucus to vote for these extremists and buffoons against their will Trump will have demonstrated his dominance once and for all. One Trump transition member told Rolling Stone, “He wants to bend them to his will until they snap in half and then thank him for the privilege.” I doubt they’re going to give him any trouble. They’ve shown over and over again that the quaint notion of an equal branch of government with its own prerogatives is something for the history books.
But for all the nuts and kooks Trump is appointing to some of the top jobs to accomplish his revenge agenda there are some areas where he’s stocking the administration with some people who are determined to fulfill their own. Many of them are Project 2025 veterans.
It’s clear that the tag team of Stephen Miller and Tom Homan are prepared to initiate Trump’s mass deportation program immediately upon taking office. Trump has said there’s no price tag so there is already a tremendous amount of activity taking place in the private sector, with private prison and airplane businesses gearing up for some major government contracts. These people are serious about doing this. It’s unlikely that they can accomplish their goal of deporting every undocumented person in America but they’re going to destroy a lot of lives in the attempt, including those of citizens who “harbor” them, according to Homan.
incoming Trump border czar Tom Homan threatens people in blue states with prosecution if they hide migrants from ICE pic.twitter.com/VenTqWTKdv
Then there is the promotion of FCC chair Brendan Carr, another one of the authors of Project 2025, to head the commission. Carr told Fox News on Tuesday that he may obstruct the planned merger between Paramount Global and Skydance because CBS refused to release the transcript of the Kamala Harris 60 Minutes interview, a silly Trump conspiracy theory suggesting that they were covering for her. And you will not be surprised to learn that he is a big promoter of expanding internet access through low-earth satellite technology—including Elon Musk’s SpaceX’s Starlink and Jeff Bezos’s Amazon’s Project Kuiper.
Trump has also appointed his good pal and transition chief Howard Lutnick to head the Commerce department. As the longtime CEO of the investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald he is at least experienced at running a large organization so that appointment makes some sense. He had reportedly wanted to be Treasury Secretary, and was backed by Musk for that job, but according to the NY Times has annoyed Trump in recent days by hovering too closely and seemingly cozying up for his personal benefit. And anyway, Trump is still looking for that perfect man out of Central Casting who can simultaneously keep the markets calm while helping Trump implement his monumentally idiotic tariff scheme, a job for a magician rather than afinancial expert. That appointment is still to come.
And then there is Russell Vought, one of the real movers and shakers of Project 2025. I wrote about him back in June, concerned that the self-described Christian nationalist was going to wind up in an important position in a possible Trump administration. At the time people were talking about him as a good bet for Chief of Staff but Trump chose his campaign manager Susie Wiles instead. Vought was the person charged with writing the chapter on the executive office of the president for Project 2025 and was said to be in charge of the planning for the first 180 days of a new Trump administration.
Politico reported on Tuesday that he may be tapped for the Office of Management and Budget, the job he held in the previous Trump administration in the final years. Vought would be working closely with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy:
On [Tucker]Carlson’s show, Vought said he expects to work with their new agency — the Department of Government Efficiency — to use recent court decisions limiting federal agency powers to pursue a “massive deregulatory agenda.” They will also be “as radical or aggressive as you can” in reducing full-time federal employees and contractors, he added.
We knew Trump was lying when he said during he campaign that he’d never heard of Project 2025 while simultaneously insisting that he didn’t agree with it. He certainly never read it personally but he knew many of the people involved because they had been in his first administration. They were among the most loyal of the loyal and there was never any doubt that Trump would hire many of them in a second term.
These are not the instruments of vengeance like Gaetz, Gabbard et al, who Trump wants to use to pay back his enemies. These are people for whom Trump is their instrument to achieve their own long standing goals. It looks like they’re going to have free rein.
As X swirls around the Musk sewer, social media users not of the MAGA persuasion are fleeing to Bluesky. What was a sleepy outpost with little traffic (at least for me) is now surging as an alternative. My follows have over tripled since the election.
That means it’s time for a culling by billionaires with more money than sense.
Case in point: Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager and big Democratic donor. He proposes buying and shutting down Bluesky to “prevent further fracturing of the town square.”
Every day is a like a new fork to the brain by people with lunatic money and absolutely no f***ing sense
Bill Ackman, a hedge fund billionaire with 1.4 million followers on X, obsessively promoted allegations from an ABC News “whistleblower” that the network had given Harris questions in advance of her debate with Trump. On Wednesday, more than a month later, Ackman admitted it was “fake.”
Zachary Basu wrote:
The big picture: The misinformation crisis may be playing out online, but the real-world implications are vast.
The deadly hurricanes that swept across the Southeast in recent weeks exposed the staggering extent to which people have become prone to conspiracy theories, spurring threats against emergency responders.
“The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality,” The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel wrote in an article about hurricane conspiracies headlined: “I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is.”
54% of respondents in an Axios Vibes survey published last month agreed with the statement, “I’ve disengaged from politics because I can’t tell what’s true.”
The bottom line: Never before have so many people been so exposed to so much misinformation. Given the increasing ubiquity of AI-generated content, this may be only the beginning.
Thank you, Dear Readers, for sustaining this humble little island of sanity.
Update: Melissa Ryan shares her take on why “people are rediscovering that social media can only be social if there are consequences for antisocial behavior.”
As the nation braces for another game of “What Are the Chances?” with Donald J. Trump the returning contestant, the 2024 election is still in overtime in North Carolina.
While the dust settles on the outcome of the presidential race, North Carolinians are still waiting to see who’ll sit on the state’s highest court.
Justice Allison Riggs, one of two liberals on the seven-member court, is locked into a tight race with appeals court Judge Jefferson Griffin (R). Griffin was leading on Election Day but was surpassed by Riggs, who’s ahead by a few hundred votes.
The race isn’t North Carolina’s first judicial match to span several weeks. In the 2020 general election, now-Chief Justice Paul Newby (R) beat then-incumbent Justice Cheri Beasley (D) by just 401 votes. That race also involved a recount and didn’t conclude until December of 2020, when Beasley conceded.
The Riggs lead this morning stands at 625 votes. Tell us again that your vote doesn’t count.
A recount in the Riggs race starts today across most of North Carolina. (It started in my county on Tuesday and will take days; I was there Tuesday as an observer.)
Riggs is on track to defeat her Republican challenger by a couple of hundred votes more than Republican Paul Newby turned out Chief Justice Cheri Beasley in 2020.
I don’t have hard numbers on absentee ballot cures Democrat volunteers secured between Nov. 5 and Nov. 14 (the deadline), but Katherine Jeanes, Deputy Digital Director for NCDP, posted this estimate on Monday: over 800.
🚨 After two weeks of counting, Justice @AllisonJRiggs will return to the bench as a champion for justice and reproductive freedom. 🥲⚖️
We won by ✨ 6️⃣2️⃣3️⃣ ✨ votes after North Carolina Democrats helped a little over 800 voters cure their ballots! pic.twitter.com/pEKsV6cqsZ
The Republican response to losing judicial races here is, as The Dude might say, “This aggression will not stand, man.”
So like clockwork, Republicans running the North Carolina legislature are scrambling to change ballot curing rules before the next election and, with Democrat Josh Stein the incoming governor, before they lose their veto-proof majority in January.
In a bill NC's GOP-controlled legislature is expected to vote on today, lawmakers are proposing moving the State Board of Elections under the purview of the auditor. A Republican will hold the office come Jan., after a Democrat has held the office for more than a decade. #ncpolpic.twitter.com/ubvmyI1tPJ
It’s a thing they do when they lose races: change the rules for the next one. After Judge Michael Morgan (hint: he’s Black) in 2016 won a North Carolina Supreme Court in what were nonpartisan judicial races (tipping the court majority in Democrats’ favor), the Republican-controlled legislature responded by switching the contest to a partisan one over the veto of newly elected Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat.
After it was clear Cooper had turned out incumbent governor Republican Pat McCrory in 2016, Republicans set about stripping the governor of powers (as Wisconsin Republicans tried with Democrat Tony Evers). Jamelle Bouie, then at Slate, called it “a new nullification crisis.”
Republicans are at it again now. Their vehicle this time? An amendment to a disaster relief bill:
The North Carolina House passed a bill Tuesday stripping incoming Democratic Gov. Josh Stein of all appointments to the State Board of Elections and giving them to a newly elected Republican official.
Currently, the board’s members are appointed by the governor, who is allowed to appoint a 3-2 majority of their own party. That means Democrats have controlled the board since 2017, when Gov. Roy Cooper took office, and would continue to do so throughout Stein’s term.
However, a provision tucked into a 132-page disaster relief bill would transfer all appointments to the state auditor, a position that was just won by Republican Dave Boliek after 16 years of control by Democrats.
The bill passed the House 63-46 Tuesday evening, just hours after it was made available to the public.
Democrats slammed Republicans for moving the complex bill so quickly and for tying it to hurricane relief efforts.
“This is a transparent power grab pushed through by a supermajority that’s not happy with the recent election results,” Rep. Lindsey Prather, a Buncombe County Democrat, said. “And you’re calling it a disaster relief bill. This is shameful and Western North Carolina isn’t going to stand for it
But jerking around with State Board of Elections appointments is only part of it. A State Board summary provided to me bulleted a few of the vote-counting rules SB 382 would change. Many involve ballot curing and provisional ballot counting. Go figure:
Election Administration Changes 3A.4(a) — Requires corrections to VR forms from voters (cures) to come in 3 days after election instead of by the day before canvass. Eliminates 6 days to cure. 3A.4(b) – Requires the use of the State Board’s template voter assistance log at the polling place. 3A.4(c) – Eliminates 6 days to cure HAVA ID required after election day; now noon on the third day after election. 3A.4(d) — Eliminates 6 days the opportunity to return with ID to cure lack of ID at the polls; now noon on the third day after election. 3A.4(e) — Requires counting of all provisional ballots by 5 pm on the third day after Election Day. 3A.4(f) – Request deadline for absentee ballot moved up one week to two weeks before Election Day. — Absentee cures cut down 6 days, must be done by noon on Friday after election day. 3A.4(g) — Requires all election day absentees to be counted on election day night in an ongoing meeting starting at 5 pm — Supplemental absentee meeting is only permitted for UOCAVA ballots — Absentee ballot tallies must be announced at 5pm three days after Election Day (meaning all civilian absentees must be tallied included those that could have cured by noon that same day) 3A.4(h) – the above changes become effective Jan. 1, 2025.
This is in the weeds, but bear with me.
If a county party in North Carolina has a building fund for purchase, payoff or operating of a party headquarters, it may accept corporate contributions. The proposed change would turn that building fund into a corporate-funded slush fund for challenging election results:
Campaign Finance Changes 3A.5(a) — As of Jan. 1, 2025, political parties may use their party headquarters building funds to fund a legal action as defined in G.S. 163-278.300(4) or to make donations to candidate legal expense funds organized under Article 22M of Chapter 163. Building funds may accept unlimited corporate contributions. Candidate legal expense funds may already accept limited corporate contributions.
Republicans in North Carolina rushed a bill through the legislature this week to boost their power before they lose their supermajority, approving a measureto give their party more control over elections, eliminate the jobs of judges who have ruled against them and limit the authority of the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general.
[…]
Republicans’ last-minute move to hamper the power of Democrats echo their efforts in 2016 to limit the authority of Cooper in the weeks between his election as governor and his inauguration. Two years later, Republicans in Wisconsin’s legislature took the same step before Democrats were sworn in as governor and attorney general.
Oh look, Trump’s nominee to head the DOD isn’t just an enthusiastic supporter of war crimes. He’s a full-fledge Christian Nationalist fruitcake. Those tattoos mean exactly what we thought they meant.
During the discussion about Hegseth’s book “Battle For The American Mind,” Hegseth said that he is working to create a system of “classical Christian schools” to provide the recruits for an underground army that will eventually launch an “educational insurgency” to take over the nation.
“I think we need to be thinking in terms of these classical Christian schools are boot camps for winning back America,” said Sumpter.
“That’s what the crop of these classical Christian schools are gonna do in a generation,” Hegseth agreed. “Policy answers like school choice, while they’re great, that’s phase two stuff later on once the foothold has been taken, once the recruits have graduated boot camp.”
“We call it a tactical retreat,” Hegseth continued. “We draw out in the last part of the book what an educational insurgency would look like, because I was a counterinsurgency instructor in Afghanistan and kind of the phases that Mao [Zedong] wrote about. We’re in middle phase one right now, which is effectively a tactical retreat where you regroup, consolidate, and reorganize. And as you do so, you build your army underground with the opportunity later on of taking offensive operations in an overt way.”
Sounds great. And, by the way, this didn’t happen two years ago. He went on this show on Monday night, as the nominee to run the Department of Defense. This shows his excellent judgement…
