As we approach the winter solstice, things are not as dark as they seem. More sunlight is on the way. As I noted the other day:
I’m assembling mailing lists for the 5th Ed of For The Win right now. Two years ago 40% of Idaho’s counties either had no functioning Democratic committees (or no sign of them on the Net). Today all do. Two years ago an even higher percentage of Iowa’s counties were MIA. Today only 5 [of 99] are. Sure, it’s red Idaho and Iowa, but it’s dramatic progress in two short years. Nobody knows about that. Now you do.
Candidate filing closed at noon on Friday in North Carolina and I was thrilled:
Chided for absences across more than 25% the General Assembly races in 2022, Friday’s final half-day of election filing for the 2024 cycle brought a resounding end to the fortnight. All 50 Senate districts have a Democratic candidate, and 118 of 120 House of Representatives districts have one.
That’s a far cry from nobody in 15 Senate and 29 House races.
But let former Ohio Democratic Party chair David Pepper tell it:
The new North Carolina Democratic Party Chairwoman, in her mid-20s, didn’t just believe in running everywhere.
@abreezeclayton gave the candidates running in the toughest districts a name:
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“Champion Candidates.”
Because, as she says, by running in those tough districts, these heroes are championing the Democratic cause and values.
And from my standpoint, they’re championing democracy itself.
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Now THAT is how you show that you value running in these tough districts—which means you value running everywhere.
Well, Chairwoman Clayton got to work finding those champion candidates, in a state that’s seen a non-stop attack on democracy as brutal as any state.
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Chairwoman Clayton has been tirelessly circling the state recruiting ever since, and yesterday was the filing deadline.
And…WOW did she succeed!
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Only 2 years ago, North Carolina Dems didn’t field a candidate in 29 statehouse districts. That left about 40% of GOP members without opposition.
And THAT is an unacceptably high number of politicians feeling zero accountability to the people—exerting power with no democracy
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Well, here’s the headline in North Carolina after yesterday…
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That’s right, for 2024, Chairwoman Clayton and her colleagues now have a candidate in all but 2 districts!
From 29 to 2!!
And all 50 Senate districts have a Democratic candidate—in 2022, 15 seats went unopposed!
From 15 to zero!
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Incredibly, as a brand new chair, Chairwoman Clayton bested the Republicans in recruiting in a state THEY gerrymandered.
Republicans are leaving far more districts uncontested (25 statehouse, 8 senate) than she is!
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How is this success being treated in North Carolina?
“NC Dems have reversed the narrative…Chided for absences across more than 25% the General Assembly races in 2022, Friday’s final half-day of election filing for the 2024 cycle brought a resounding end to the fortnight.”
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This is how you go on offense in states, where democracy is most directly under attack!
Kudos to @abreezeclayton , all the other leaders and activists who recruited so vigorously, and especially to the many Champion Candidates for stepping up and providing this invaluable…
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and patriotic public service.
Your service has already begun!
For more on recruiting success elsewhere, and what we need to do next, go here:
The lead organizer from RuralOrganizing.org e-introduced me to Anderson Clayton in August 2021. Like David Pepper, I knew with our first phone call Clayton was going places. By October, she was electing Democrats in a red county. When she ran for state chair last February, I may have been the only one on her campaign Slack over 35. The level of organization I witnessed there was super-impressive. Same-old was not going to cut it. Clayton won handily on reversing the the underperformance in 2022. Since then, she’s won over skeptics, including one close to home. Her team is bringing back the fight.
He’s stepped up to run in a county that’s R+20, and he knows it’s an uphill battle. But he’s ready to get out there and talk to voters about the REAL issues that matter to folks in our own backyard. #RuralMatters
Yes, I’m a fan. My generation can still be footsoldiers and advisers, but it will be this young cohort that will save democracy. Help yourselves by helping them. Stay hydrated, get good sleep.
David Hogg at the far end on the left, along with other GenZ activists at Netroots Nation-Chicago. Including Leaders We Deserve board members TN state Rep. Justin Jones, FL Congressman Maxwell Frost (1st and 2nd on left), and NC Democratic state chair Anderson Clayton (4th on right).
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, left, meets in Moscow with U.S. Republican lawmakers over July 4th weekend, 2018. AP Photo.
Not that long ago the American right was militarist, love-it-or-leave-it, and rabidly anti-Communist/anti-Russia. To a comical “no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops” and “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” degree, even. Fight ’em over there so we don’t fight ’em over here. War was good business, good politics, and a resume-builder for aspiring politicans. Americans of all political stripes reflexively pulled for the underdogs facing imperialist aggression (unless we were the imperialists).
Then came the BIg Shift. Now righties are fans of authoritarians and dictators. They’ve soured on all-American democracy and have turned fascism-curious. Let Russia have Ukraine, whatevs. It’s been in the making since the 1990s.
Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos take a swag in The New Yorkerat explaining why American conservatives have turned fans of Vladimir Putin:
The New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz joins the Washington Roundtable to discuss his reporting on CPAC Hungary, where far-right political figures gathered in Budapest last year, and on why American conservatives are gravitating toward figures like Putin and Orbán. “You don’t have to be a red-string-on-a-corkboard conspiracy theorist to see the connections,” Marantz says. “In Florida, for example, Ron DeSantis’s administration has admitted when they wrote the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, they were modelling it on a previous Hungarian law, which was itself modelled on a previous Russian law. So, no one’s really entirely hiding the ball here.”
Year-end roundup time…here’s a few more recommended 2023 Blu-ray reissues for your creel:
Dance Craze(BFI; Region ‘B’ locked) – In the book Reggae International, a collection of essays compiled by Stephen Davis and Peter Simon, sub-culturalist Dick Hebdige writes about the UK’s short-lived yet highly influential “2-tone” movement of the early 1980s:
Behind the fusion of rock and reggae lay the hope that the humour, wit, and style of working-class kids from Britain’s black and white communities could find a common voice in 2-tone; that a new, hybrid cultural identity could emerge along with the new music. The larger message was usually left implicit. There was nothing solemn or evangelical about 2-tone. It offered an alternative to the well-intentioned polemics of the more highly educated punk groups, who tended to top the bill at many of the Rock Against Racism gigs. […]
Instead of imposing an alienating, moralising discourse on a popular form (alien at least to their working-class constituency), bands like the Specials worked in and on the popular, steered clear of the new avant-gardes, and stayed firmly within the “classical” definitions of 50s and early 60s rock and pop: that this was music for Saturday nights, something to dance to, to use.
In 1981, a concert film called Dance Craze was released. Shot in 1980 and directed by Joe Massot (The Song Remains the Same), it was filmed at several venues, showcasing six of the most high-profile bands in the 2 Tone Records stable: Bad Manners, The English Beat, The Bodysnatchers, Madness, The Selector, and The Specials.
I’d heard about this Holy Grail, but it was a tough film to catch; outside of its initial theatrical run in the UK (and I’m assuming very limited engagements here in the colonies) it had all but vanished in the mists of time…until now.
This film is nirvana for genre fans; all six bands are positively on fire (this is music for Saturday nights-I guarantee you’ll be dancing in your living room). Thanks to cinematographer Joe Dunton’s fluid “performer’s-eye view” camerawork and tight editing by Ben Rayner and Anthony Sloman, you not only feel like you are on stage with the band, but you get a palpable sense of the energy and enthusiasm feeding back from the audience.
Luckily for posterity, Dunton originally shot the film in super 35mm. Coupled with the meticulous restoration (using 70mm materials), it looks and sounds superb (especially for a concert film of this vintage). Extras include a 34-minute episode of the BBC program Arena examining the 2-tone movement (from 1980), outtakes, previously unseen interview footage, and more. (Please note: This is a Region ‘B’-locked Blu-ray, and requires an all-region player!).
Inland Empire(Criterion Collection) – From Richard A. Barney’s 2009 book David Lynch: Interviews:
Barney: I’ve read some comments you’ve made about the pleasures of [writing a script ‘as you film’]. Can you talk about that and whether [working that way on Inland Empire] was a horror at other times?
Lynch: There’s no horror. The horror, if there is a horror, is the lack of ideas. But that’s all the time. You’re just waiting. And I always say, it’s like fishing: Some days you don’t catch any fish. The next day, it’s another story – they just swim in.
When I read that excerpt (featured in the booklet that accompanies Criterion’s Blu-ray package), a light bulb went off in my (mostly empty) head. Lynch’s answer is analogous to my experience with Inland Empire. The first time I watched it…he didn’t hook me. I watched it once in 2007, found it baffling and disturbing (even for a Lynch joint) and then parked the DVD for 16 years.
Being a glutton for punishment, I purchased the Blu-ray earlier this year (the extras looked interesting, and life is short). When I re-watched the film recently, I kept an open mind. This time, he caught me – hook, line, sinker and latest edition of Angler’s Digest. As I once wrote in a capsule review of his equally experimental Eraserhead:
I think the secret to his enigmatic approach to telling a story is that Lynch is having the time of his life being impenetrably enigmatic-he’s sitting back and chuckling at all the futile attempts to dissect and make “sense” of his narratives. For example, have you noticed how I’ve managed to dodge and weave and avoid giving you any kind of plot summary? I suspect that David Lynch would find that fucking hysterical.
In Inland Empire, Laura Dern stars as an actress (or is she?) who lands a part (or does she?) in a) a film b) her own nightmare, or c) somebody else’s nightmare. It’s Rod Serling’s Alice In Wonderland. Know going in that this is a David Lynch film; if you buy the ticket, take the ride.
While it’s odd to tout a “4k restoration” of a film that was digitally shot to begin with, I suppose the print looks as sharp (and at times, as purposely blurry) as originally intended by the filmmaker. There’s a generous helping of extras, including two documentaries about Lynch, a 2007 short by Lynch, 75 minutes of extra footage, and more.
Tintin and the Mystery of the Golden Fleece/Tintin and the Blue Oranges(Kino Classics) – Thundering typhoons! This “twofer” set features beautifully restored prints of the first two live-action feature films based on writer-illustrator Hergé’s classic comic book series The Adventures of Tintin (published between 1929-1986).
Interestingly, unlike a previous 1947 stop-motion film and an animated late 50s TV series, Jean-Jacques Vierne’s Tintin and the Mystery of the Golden Fleece (1961) was not adapted from one of the Hergé books but was an original story (co-scripted by André Barret and Rémo Forlani). Ditto Philippe Condroyer’s Tintin and the Blue Oranges (1964), which featured an original story by Condroyer, André Barret, Rémo Forlani and René Goscinny.
Both films star athletic Belgian actor Jean-Pierre Talbot as the titular globe-trotting boy-reporter/adventurer. Talbot is a ringer for the comic book character. Tintin’s stalwart (and perpetually half-in-the-bag) co-adventurer Captain Haddock is also on hand (played with appropriate bombast by Georges Wilson in the 1961 film and Jean Bouise in the 1964 film). The other iconic series characters, like bumbling detectives Thompson and Thompson, Professor Calculus and (of course) Tintin’s faithful dog Snowy are all rendered with equal aplomb.
I’m a fan of the books but had never seen these two films. Tintin and the Mystery of the Golden Fleece is the best of the pair; a delight from start to finish. While entertaining enough to hold your interest, Tintin and the Blue Oranges has a less cohesive story and leans more on slapstick (note how many writers toiled on it-usually not a good sign). That said, rest assured it’s not as manic and overcooked as Steven Speilberg’s animated 2011 entry The Adventures of Tintin.
No extras, but the prints are pristine, and fans of the books should get a kick out of this set.
Tokyo Pop(Kino Lorber/Indie Collect) – This 1988 film is a likable entry in the vein of other 80s films like Starstruck, Breaking Glass, Desperately Seeking Susan, Smithereens and The Fabulous Stains. Star Carrie Hamilton’s winning screen presence helps to buoy the fluffy premise. Hamilton (who does her own singing) plays a struggling wannabe rock star who buys a one-way ticket to Tokyo at the invitation of a girlfriend. Unfortunately, her flaky friend has flown the coop, and our heroine is stranded in a strange land. “Fish out of water” misadventures ensue, including cross-cultural romance with all the usual complications.
For music fans, it’s a fun time capsule of the late 80s Japanese music scene, and the colorful cinematography nicely captures the neon-lit energy of Tokyo nightlife. Director Fran Rubel Kuzui (who co-wrote the screenplay with Lynn Grossman) later directed the 1992 feature film Buffy the Vampire Slayer and went on to serve as executive producer for the eponymous TV series. Sadly, Hamilton (Carol Burnett’s daughter) died of cancer at age 38 in 2002.
This one has been on my reissue wish list for a while. Indie Collect’s 4k restoration is sparkling, and the colors are vibrant. Regarding the audio…it is nice and clean, but be ready to ride your volume control, as the music has about ten times the gain over the dialog (a noticeable trend in remastered film soundtracks that makes me crazy). There are no extras, but you can’t have everything, and I am just happy that I can finally retire my VHS copy!
Trump promises the federal government will indemnify all police and law enforcement officials for "strong actions against crime," and says this is "a big thing and brand new and so important." Which it is, if you really want to put a nation on the road to authoritarianism. https://t.co/n1yz4ftiWA
(That’s the plan to allow drilling in Alaska which he thinks will fully finance all American health care.)
Bold predictions:
After criticizing Biden on the economy, Trump tries to take credit for the economy and predicts a depression “the likes of which you haven’t seen since the depression of 1929” pic.twitter.com/hPMnrTgrW9
He has a novel (final) solution for Social Security funding
Asked in New Hampshire whether he plans to raise the retirement age he had some great news. It isn’t going broke after all!
“What I don’t think people are acknowledging the way they should is that life expectancy in this country is declining. And so, you know, we used to think it was just gonna keep going up. I mean, it’s been a pretty steep decline. So I don’t see how you raise it if life expectancy is declining.”
What a relief, huh? The old people are dying early! Whew!
DeSantis said that the decrease in lifespans isn’t “just from COVID,” but is “from a lot of other things,” including “deaths of despair, overdoses” and “other things, that have happened that I think the government hasn’t been willing to really be honest about.”
Apparently, he didn’t express any particular concern about this decrease. He clearly sees it as a big plus, saving him from having to support raising the retirement age. He’s here to tell you the truth which the government refuses to do! We’re all gonna be dead soon!
It also explains why a Florida Governor, of all people, would be so cavalier about a pandemic that was especially deadly for elderly people. There are a whole lot of them down there and I’m sure it saved the state some serious money. Who says he’s not a true conservative Republican!
Stephen Miller is only 38 years old. He sounds like somebody’s crotchety old grandfather there, living in some pre-1960s world. I suppose he’s speaking to the aging Fox boomer audience but I hate to tell him, purple and pink hair and piercings and tattoos have been around for decades now.
We’ve been hearing an awful lot about appropriate dress and proper decorum from Republicans lately. But seriously, don’t you think they should take a look in the mirror?
How about whatever this is?
One of Giuliani’s lawyers
Let’s just say that the left doesn’t have a monopoly on wild hairdos and garish fashion.
And those Fox News boomers need to take an extra dose of their Prevagen. This is from 1972:
Miller’s idea seems to be that liberals and progressives are out of step with mainstream America but that requires a very creative definition of mainstream. Here’s how the dictionary defines it:
having, reflecting, or being compatible with the prevailing attitudes and values of a society or group
To put this into political terms, all you have to do is look at the popular vote counts since 2016 to see where the mainstream of America really is.
Not that this is anything new. Hippie bashing has always been one of their standard go-to insults and since they have abandoned all sense of sense of shame and no longer reside on planet earth they can say anything and their people will nod their heads in agreement.
This is what they see as upstanding behavior from the kind of people who make this country great:
When they say that the left doesn’t feel joy and wants everyone to suffer, what they mean is that they don’t enjoy lynching. That’s what they consider fun:
Back when I first started this site, over 20 years ago, I said I wanted to document the atrocities. At the time we were engaged in the “war or terror” and the prevailing attitude in America was that we need to “hit them back,” the same way that the townsmen go out and kill a bear, any bear, in the wake of an bear attack. It was horrifying but it was recognizable phenomenon.
What’s happening now, 20 years later has scholars all over the world scratching their heads trying to define exactly what’s going on. There’s plenty of historical data on the rise of fascism and the decline of democracy but this particular toxic mix of modern media, conspiracy theories and celebrity worship is a peculiarly American recipe for the right’s authoritarian movement. I wish I could say that it’s dissipating but it doesn’t seem to be, Trump or no Trump.
It’s going to be a long year, everyone. I know that many of you would rather stick chopsticks in your ears than hear another word from Trump and his henchmen and they’re going to be everywhere this year. But I hope you will come by here from time to time as we try to find the most informative of their grotesque utterings and synthesize them for you so you’ll be able to follow the conversation without having to mire yourself in the muck of the Trump campaign. (And if you want a respite from all of it, you’ve always got the Friday Night Soother with adorable animals and fell good stories and my old pal Dennis Hartley’s Saturday Night movie and music post to take your mind off the hellscape of our political culture. )
If you’d like to support this effort you can do so below. I am so grateful for your help over these years and I hope you’ll continue to read us even if you can’t contribute. Subscriptions and donations are always 100% voluntary. 🙂
I confess I didn’t see this coming. And I should have. Of course the normalization of the narcissistic imbecile Donald Trump would lead inexorably to a Nixon revival on the right. After all, how can you hold him responsible for his crimes if everything Trump has done is perfectly above board?
In late August, Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy took a break from his typical campaign events to make a pit stop at an unusual venue for mainstream Republicans: The Richard Nixon Presidential Library. Speaking before a packed house, Ramaswamy was slated to deliver a speech on foreign policy. But his opening remarks served the more provocative purpose of challenging Nixon’s much-maligned status in the annals of conservative history.
“He is by and away the most underappreciated president of our modern history in this country — probably in all of American history,” said Ramaswamy, without a hint of irony.
Ramaswamy’s homage to America’s most disgraced ex-president perplexed someliberal commentators, for whom Nixon remains the ultimate symbol of conservative criminality. But Ramaswamy is far from alone in rethinking Nixon’s divisive legacy. Among a small but influential group of young conservative activists and intellectuals, “Tricky Dick” is making a quiet — but notable — comeback. Long condemned by both Democrats and Republicans as the “crook” that he infamously swore not to be, Nixon is reemerging in some conservative circles as a paragon of populist power, a noble warrior who was unjustly consigned to the black list of American history.
Across the right-of-center media sphere, examples of Nixonmania abound. Online, popular conservative activists are studying the history of Nixon’s presidency as a “blueprint for counter-revolution” in the 21st century. In the pages of small conservative magazines, readers can meet the “New Nixonians” who are studying up on Nixon’s foreign policy prowess. On TikTok, users can scroll through meme-ified homages to Nixon. And in the weirdest (and most irony laden) corners of the internet, Nixon stans are even swooning over the former president’s swarthy good looks.
“I’ve always been pretty fascinated with him,” said Curt Mills, a conservative journalist and self-professed Nixon fan. (Mills has contributed to POLITICO Magazine.) “I think the Nixon story is really an American story. He really is this guy who is from nowhere, and he’s just absolutely reviled … [but] I do think he has this charisma that’s sort of underrated.”
The Nixon renaissance is being driven in part by young conservatives’ genuine interest in Nixon, whom Mills colorfully described as “our Shakespearean president.” But when pressed about their pro-Nixon views, even his most sincere supporters readily admit that the Nixon-mania isn’t being driven solely — or even primarily — by academic interest in Nixon. Instead, the populist right’s ongoing effort to rehabilitate Nixon, which is unfolding against the backdrop of the 2024 Republican primary, is really about another divisive former Republican president: Donald Trump.
In the topsy-turvy historical tableau of 2023, to defend Nixon is to back Trump — and to rescue the former from historical ignominy is, according to the thinking of some young conservatives, to save the latter from the same fate.
“If we can rehabilitate Richard Nixon in a balanced and fair manner — or even if we can just create questions in the public discourse about Nixon and about Nixon’s presidency — then I think, by way of analogy, it will provoke similar questions about Donald Trump,” said the conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who published a lengthy defense of Nixon earlier this year for City Journal. “It will give us the kind of template, it will give us the precedents, it will give us the skills, where we can more effectively defend a conservative president against these kinds of attacks.”
Amid the surge of interest in Nixon, different conservatives are finding different things to admire in his legacy. Some — like Ramaswamy and Mills — have taken a shine to Nixon’s foreign policy realism, which they see as an alternative to the naive idealism that has led Democrats and Republicans alike into ill-fated entanglements abroad. In his speech at the Nixon Library, Ramaswamy identified Nixon as the forebear of his own foreign policy vision, which includes withdrawing from NATO, cutting off U.S. support for Ukraine and adopting a more combative military and economic posture toward China.
“No man is perfect — Richard Nixon definitely wasn’t — but one element of his legacy that I respect is reviving realism in our foreign policy,” said Ramaswamy in an interview from the campaign trail, pointing specifically to Nixon’s successful efforts to reestablish diplomatic relations with China during the 1970s. “Pulling Mao out of the hands of the USSR was one of the great victories that allowed us to come to the end of the Cold War … and it took an independent thinker like Nixon to lead us out of that.”
Meanwhile, other conservatives are looking to Nixon’s domestic policy as a template for the GOP’s battle against the liberal establishment and its alleged allies in government, academia and the media. In August, Rufo — who is best known for leading the conservative crusade against “critical race theory” — produced a short film called “Nixon Forever,” which identified the former president’s “law and order” policies and his efforts to constrain the power of the federal bureaucracy as “a blueprint for counter-revolution” in the 21st century. Rufo has gone so far as to suggest that the next Republican president look to Nixon’s brutal (and occasionally illegal) treatment of leftist groups like the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground as a model for their own war on the “radical left.”
“I think a Nixon-style effort — within the limitations of the law — would be correct,” Rufo told me. “The basic strategy would be to identify violent left-wing networks, to infiltrate them with confidential human sources, undercover agents [and] electronic communications — if that can pass muster with a judge — and then to start just imploding them from within.”
I do love Rufo’s disclaimer “within the limits of the law” considering that Donald Trump is making it clear that he plans to deputize the Department of Justice as his personal goon squad to punish his enemies. They don’t need no stinkin’ laws or judges.
Nixon would have been impeached and convicted if he hadn’t resigned and would have faced jail time if he hadn’t been pardoned. But that was 40 years ago. What these people are really suggesting is that times have changed and Trump can get away with the things that Nixon did. And they are not wrong. Half the country is now enthusiastically supporting an openly corrupt half wit and the entire Republican Party is behind him too. Nixon would never have resigned under those circumstances.
But Rufo is one of those guys who says the quiet part out loud. He is the MAGA Goebbles:
Rufo says future generations will instead remember Tricky Dick, “as a good, honest man who rose from humble beginnings to the highest office in America, who loved his country, who tried to save the ideals of 1776.” Someone who, per Rufo, “was caught in the web of his own culpability, the tragic nature of politics, and a vicious bureaucratic coup set out to destroy him.”
Amid the overwrought comparisons to the founders, it’s worth asking how much the Nixon renaissance is, at its core, just an elaborate troll, one designed as much to provoke as to educate?
“Yes — yes, it is,” Rufo said, without hesitation, when I posed that question to him. “But,” he added, “it’s not just a troll, because there’s a substantive purpose to it. If we can rehabilitate Richard Nixon in the public mind, we will have demonstrated a capacity for reshaping how people think about political figures in the past, which gives us a lesson in actively shaping [the perception] in the present of political figures of our current day.” In other words, a blueprint for rehabilitating Trump.
What was it the Bushies used to call this? Catapaulting the propaganda? I don’t know if it could work but I wouldn’t be surprised. Rufo could also disappear like a relic of an embarrassing past and MAGA could be remembered as a severe form of mass delusion. Only time will tell.
It looks like another vaunted group of culture warriors bites the dust:
Moms for Liberty, a national right-wing advocacy group, was born in Florida as a response to Covid-19 school closures and mask mandates. But it quickly became just as well known for pushing policies branded as anti-L.G.B.T.Q. by opponents.
So when one of its founders, Bridget Ziegler, recently told the police that she and her husband, who is under criminal investigation for sexual assault, had a consensual sexual encounter with another woman, the perceived disconnect between her public stances and private life fueled intense pressure for her to resign from the Sarasota County School Board.
“Most of our community could not care less what you do in the privacy of your own home, but your hypocrisy takes center stage,” said Sally Sells, a Sarasota resident and the mother of a fifth-grader, told Ms. Ziegler during a tense school board meeting this week. Ms. Ziegler, whose husband has denied wrongdoing, said little and did not resign.
Ms. Sells was one of dozens of speakers who criticized Ms. Ziegler — and Moms for Liberty — at the meeting, an outcry that underscored the group’s prominence in the most contentious debates of the pandemic era.
Perhaps no group gained so much influence so quickly, transforming education issues from a sleepy political backwater to a rallying cry for Republican politicians. The organization quickly became a conservative powerhouse, a coveted endorsement and a mandatory stop on the G.O.P. presidential primary campaign trail.
Yet, as Moms for Liberty reels from the scandal surrounding the Zieglers, the group’s power seems to be fading. Candidates endorsed by the group lost a series of key school board races in 2023. The losses have prompted questions about the future of education issues as an animating force in Republican politics.
Donald J. Trump, the dominant front-runner for the party’s nomination, makes only passing reference in his stump speeches to preserving “parental rights” — the catchphrase of the group’s cause. Issues like school curriculums, transgender students’ rights and teaching about race were far less prominent in the three Republican primary debates than abortion rights, foreign policy and the economy. And the most prominent champion of conservative views on education — Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — has yet to unite conservatives behind his struggling presidential bid.
John Fredericks, a Trump ally in Virginia, said the causes that Moms for Liberty became most known for supporting — policies banning books it deemed pornographic, curtailing the teaching of L.G.B.T.Q. issues and policing how race is taught in schools — had fallen far from many voters’ top concerns.
“You closed schools, and people were upset about that. Schools are open now,” he said. “The Moms for Liberty really have to aim their fire on math and science and reading, versus focusing on critical race theory and drag queen story hours.”
He added: “It’s nonsense, all of it.”
It just goes to show you how quickly things change in today’s politics. It was just over a year ago that everyone was gnashing their teeth and wringing their hands over the new “parental rights” movement with many advising that Democrats needed to “moderate” on these issues or they would lost everything. As usual.
School board races and moral panics around education have been a feature of right wing politics as long as I can remember. And then it almost always turns out that they get exposed as hypocrites or move on to the next outrage and it settles down. It’s rare that one of the far right leaders is a woman involved in a three-way sex scandal (it’s common among the men…) but maybe we can call that progress?
“I can’t seem to get out of my own way,” my best friend from college used to complain. By that he meant that all his smarts and cleverness were stumbling blocks to getting what he wanted out of life. Which was another way of saying he thought too much.
Democrats and lefty allies have the same problem: stubbornly insisting this is a survival-of-the-smartest world when it isn’t.
Anand Giridharadas the other night issued a warning about that. First he notes that while lefty anger is dialed up to 11, our actions do not reflect it. Are we serious about stopping fascism or what?
Three theses from my discussion with @chrislhayes last night about 2024.
1. Tens of millions profess to be as mad as they’ve ever been about Trump, but if we’re honest, we don’t have a national pro-democracy movement commensurate with the threat or with the professed passion. pic.twitter.com/3ocXVNtmjp
Do our actions “really match the level of in-the-streetsness” we saw in the 1960s, Giridharadas asks. Just as I’ve argued before:
Winning in your head is like bringing sports visualization training to the Olympics and thinking you’ll be competitive when you show up with no conditioning and no skills.
At some point, you have to play the game for real. At some point, you have to run the election and count the votes. At some point, you have to win on the ground instead of in your head. You’d best be good at it.
And that “on the ground” fight is won in part through stories, not data. Stories are how humans process data and make sense of their actual experiences. Abstractions like “the economy” or GDP do not carry the same weight.
Giridharadas doesn’t say it this way, but Democrats must quit thinking that being the smartest person in the room wins elections. Think George W. Bush vs. Al Gore. Or Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton. Someone this week on social media noted that even when he’s alone Donald Trump is not the smartest person in the room. And he won the presidency.
Trump’s movement was built on tapping into human sentiment, Giridharadas says, “in all the dark ways, in all the morally neutral ways,” but it persuades and turns out voters. It’s a skill. Neither the White House nor the DNC rely on those skills. The Lincoln Project gets it though.
3. When you dig below the day-to-day issues, this is a country full of anxious, unmoored voters, of every background.
To me, the central problem in American politics right now is that the bad guys know how to speak to the psychologically adrift, and the good guys don’t. pic.twitter.com/eFxPdE39Xo
What’s driving political sentiment in this country is much deeper than data, Giridharadas believes. Economic data does not address people’s psychological distress and feelings of displacement.
“And right now in America, the bad guys know how to speak to psychologically adrift people, and the good guys do not.”
If we’re as smart as we think we are, we’ll learn. And fast.
Ukrainians modify racing drones to carry explosive charges, turning them into improvised missiles.
Trying to teach Yellow Dogs new tricks sometimes seems pointless. With few exceptions, Democrats always seem to be fighting the last war because that’s the one they learned on. Brian Beutler sees it too.
When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 on the strength of a media feeding frenzy over emails, it dawned on me that either my intuitions about partisan politics had been wrong, or something fundamental had changed. With the benefit of hindsight, I soon came to see the 2014 midterm campaign as a precursor. Republicans back then turned a closely fought election into a blowout in the final stretch by fanning a different media feeding frenzy—this one over a far-off outbreak of Ebola.
[…]
All of this happened because Republicans situated themselves to win an information war in 2014, then situated themselves to win another information war in 2016. I had simply been underestimating the effectiveness of their antics.
What allowed Democrats to win in 2018 and 2020 were not material conditions but “contagious ideas.” We could use some about now.
“A huge recession in 2008 drove the incumbent party from power,” Beutler writes, and the slow recovery precipitated the 2010 backlash. All fitting predictive models. Then social media took off.
The media once measured the economy by a standard set of metrics, whatever “gloom and doom” Republicans spread. But the right had fewer tools for spreading them. Today the Net is a toxic smorgasbord while collective media literacy has remained weak. (Undermining liberal arts and civics education has helped that, I’d add.)
“Within that glut, the lines between professional journalism and all other media have blurred, and liberal political elites were unprepared for it,” Beutler continues. All of the radical shifts in how people receive and process information off screens has occured in the last 15 years, he argues (emphasis mine):
While we weren’t paying attention, Republicans created a politics for the attention economy. Democrats are doing politics like it’s 1999. More generously, they’ve built politics around the insight that “the internet isn’t real life” and stuck with it for many years, even as the assumption itself has become less and less true.
Ask those beaten and injured in the “Be There. Will Be Wild!” insurrection if the internet isn’t real life.
This paragraph evokes memories:
Even before Republicans became terminally online, Democrats were no great visionaries about the power of the internet. When I began my career in online journalism almost 19 years ago, Democrats on Capitol Hill were quicker than Republicans to make small adjustments for it. But they were very small and very reluctant. It was common practice for Democrats to leave their standard communications operations intact, but create tiny, isolated digital-media outreach teams to contend with their online critics and allies. Real news and information was for the capital-J Journalists; “bloggers” (emphasis always on the “blah”) had to contend with the 22-year old staffer who had an RSS feed and no useful information to share. Over many years and under a lot of pressure, these teams typically became integrated. But the disdain lingered—many of the same people run the Democratic Party today. And under their watch, Republicans became savvier about the online world and overtook the left.
Before then, back when conservatives scheduled their Right Online conferences for the same dates and cities as Netroots Nation (2008-2011?), they held digital trainings that seemed to amount to teaching senior citizens how to “log on.” Ah, the good old days. We bloggers were DFHs then. Still are.
Most liberals see factual realities—of Biden’s unimpeachable conduct, or the economy’s resiliency—and assume they must break through to the masses at some point. I see artifacts of yet-more information wars that could cost Democrats a fateful election once again.
I have to interject yet again that this information war is an asymmetrical one. When people ask why the Democrats don’t have a messaging infrastructure as vast and as disciplined as the GOP’s, I remind them that the GOP doesn’t have one either. It just appears that way because Republicans are so well-supplied with information armaments by a network of billionaire-funded think tanks and billionaire-owned media outlets. Democrats are Ukrainians fending off Russia without support from NATO and the U.S.
Another problem is that Democrats are not as plucky and improvisational as the “outmatched” Ukrainian Army. Decades after the advent of near-universal early voting, their election organizing still echoes the days when precinct captains were tasked with turning out neighborhood voters in a single-day, fourteen-hour marathon. Like 1999, if not 1969. They’ve been slow to up their game at the county level.
It’s Happy Hollandaise Time! You help keep lit this beacon of sanity.
