A conservative-leaning centrist tries to get Trumpistas to re-evaluate their current relationship to the real world

This video from New Economic Thinking, Our Own Worst Enemy 12/13/2021 is an interview with political scientist Tom Nichols of the Naval War College talking about his latest book, Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from within on Modern Democracy (2021):



The analysis of current American politics he presents is sloppy in some ways. For instance, in the interview he seems to miss the significance of the decline of real wages since the 1960s that has coincided with the massive entry of women into the labor force, which is the main thing that kept household income from crashing much more than it did.

He talks here about the increase of partisanship as though Both Sides Do It. When the most distinguishing feature of partisan polarization in the last 30 years in the US has been the asymmetric polarization in which the Republicans have become increasingly radical to the point of being now an overtly insurrectionist party.

But I find it interesting because he's taking the position of conservative-leaning centrist who is addressing the demographic represented by the insurrections who raided the Capitol on January 6. "January 6 Republics" is probably a good shorthand for them. That means relatively affluent, middle-aged men and women who embrace far-right radicalism. And he is engaging in what he himself calls "moral hectoring" to tell those people: hey, get real! Stop trying to blow up the democratic system. Stop thinking of politics as a way to piss off people you hate. Get a grip.

It's not the analysis I would make. But it has some useful insights in how to address conservatives who are not diehard Trumpistas. And to try to tell the actual hardcore Trumpistas that they need to look at a broader picture.

Experts take a closer look at the January 6 insurrectionists

Robert Pape, author of the important study of suicide bombers, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (2005) and Keven Ruby have an analysis of Capitol attackers in the January 6 insurrection, The Capitol Rioters Aren’t Like Other Extremists The Atlantic 02/02/2021.

They present the data in this PowerPoint, The Face of American Insurrection: Right-Wing Organizations Evolving into a Violent Mass Movement 01/28/2021.

Dave Neiwert discusses their article in Profile of Capitol siege arrestees indicates pro-Trump extremists increasingly middle-class, older Daily Kos 02/04/2021. One of his main takeaways is how this shows the ongoing radicalization of the Republican Party and the mainstreaming of more ideas and attitudes from the violent radical right. As Pape and Ruby put it:

[A] closer look at the people suspected of taking part in the Capitol riot suggests a different and potentially far more dangerous problem: a new kind of violent mass movement in which more “normal” Trump supporters —middle-class and, in many cases, middle-aged people without obvious ties to the far right—joined with extremists in an attempt to overturn a presidential election.

Neiwert notes, "Compared to far-right extremists who have been arrested for their involvement in previous acts of political violence (such as the 2017 Charlottesville riots), many of the people arrested for their roles in the Capitol siege have a great deal to lose."

From the experience of the 1920s and 1930s, it has been widely assumed conventionally that fascist movement was particularly attractive to a petit bourgeois/middle class base, i.e, shopkeepers, small business owners, farmers. The data on which Pape and Ruby report seem to be consistent with that understanding, although we should be careful not to over-generalize from that. As they write in The Atlantic, "Unlike the stereotypical extremist, many of the alleged participants in the Capitol riot have a lot to lose. They work as CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants."

For instance, the PowerPoint includes these two bullet points:

Overall, the Biden counties versus the Trump counties that produced insurrectionists are more unemployed, more mixed race, and far more big city.

Telling example is Dallas County, Texas – which produced 4 insurrectionists and had a vote for Trump at 33%, unemployment is just at the national average, and 67% white.

The fact that an urban area with high unemployment may be more likely to produce violent rightwing insurrectionists does not mean that the participants are themselves unemployed or suffering from significant material "economic anxiety", to use the now-notorious lazy journalistic phrase. But it also does not mean that the economic conditions (or "anxieties") in the places where they live had no contributing effect to their political alignments and actions.

The value of this kind of factual database is that it allows people to look at the complexities of causation and prevention, or Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) to use a risk-management term, based on solid data of a significant incident of political violence.

The PowerPoint also notes, "the more Trump voters in a county – even in counties Biden won – the greater likelihood that county would send an insurrectionist to the US Capitol. This is because there are twice as many people who live in Biden counties compared to those who live in Trump counties." I would take from this that while it's an important data point, it does not necessarily mean that violent seditionist sentiment is relatively weaker in Trump majority areas. It may just reflect that is a place where there are just more people available as a pool from which to draw.

Dave Neiwert provides a review with links to more detailed reports of public events that foreshadowed the January 6 development, and warns: "All of these events set the stage for the January 6 insurrection. Its aftermath, as both the violence and the nature of the people who participated clearly demonstrate, almost certainly foretell a sustained, violent insurgency against not just the Biden administration but democracy itself for the foreseeable future."

The PowerPoint presentation also includes these cautionary observations:

Should the House of Representatives expel Marjorie Taylor Greene?

The thing with the current discussion about expelling Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene from the House is that she has boosted a call for the Speaker of the House to be assassinated, supported (at least de facto and possibly actively) the January 6 invasion of the Capitol, and publicly pimped an outrageous anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. This is one of those rare times where the idea that "the Constitution isn't a suicide pact" applies. The House does have the ability to expel a Member, and expelling one who has given them good reason to believe is a physical danger to them is an obvious move.

Nick Visser notes in this article that even Mitch McConnell is at least trying to pretend he disapproves of Greene's far-right radicalism (Nick Visser, A ‘Cancer’: Mitch McConnell Excoriates Marjorie Taylor Greene For Conspiracy Theories Huffpost 02/01/2021):

Greene has faced a firestorm of criticism after the media detailed her yearslong history of controversial social media posts. Before her election, she supported false claims that the Parkland, Florida, and Newtown, Connecticut, school shootings were staged, “liked” Facebook posts that called for the killing of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and publicly mused that a space laser may have caused 2018’s deadly wildfires in California.

In what is probably the most famous case of a Member of Congress directly engaging in physical violence in the Capitol chambers, Slave Power South Carolina Congressman Preston's Brooke's notorious assault on anti-slavery Sen. Charles Sumner in 1858, Brooks was at least censured by the House. But he became a hero among defenders of slavery, and was re-elected to his House seat after the assault.

We can't say that the Civil War would have been somehow avoided if Brooks had been expelled by the House. But the fact that he wasn't must surely have been taken by the defenders of the Slave Power as a sign of weakness on the part of the free states.

Yes, expelling a Member of Congress is a power than can be abused, which means the Republicans will abuse it if they think they can get away with it. And with the Republican Party in its current Trumpified state, that's true whether or not the Democrats expel someone or not.

But even if Greene's voters may have sent her to Congress because they wanted her to physically threaten Pelosi and other Congresspeople, that doesn't mean the House has to accept that behavior from one of their Members.

I say, have an expulsion vote and let the Republican Members show us all where they stand on her threats and crass anti-Semitism.

An expulsion would require Republican votes, "The Constitution gives Congress the ability to impeach federal officials and judges, but not its own members. They can only be removed by expulsion, which requires a 2/3 vote." (Zachary Wolf, It's hard to expel a member of Congress. Here's what to know CNN 01/28/2021)

Wolf adds:

Only 20 federal lawmakers have been expelled in the history of the US (15 in the Senate and only 5 in the House). The vast majority of expulsions had to with the Civil War. There have been only two post-Civil War expulsions -- Rep. Michael Myers, a Pennsylvania Democrat, was kicked out after taking money from undercover FBI agents. The other was James Traficant, the Ohio Democrat, who was convicted of bribery charges.

TYT has been covering the MJT story, including: Marjorie Taylor Greene's INSANE Social Media Posts Exposed 06/28/2021:

Timothy Snyder on the trajectory of Trumpism (2 of 2): The Big Lie and the strategic perspective of the Party of Trump

"Post-truth is pre-fascism," writes Timothy Snyder, "and Trump has been our post-truth president." (The American Abyss New York Times Magazine 01/09/2021)

More details are coming out about the specifics of the January 6 storming of the Capitol at the direct, immediate incitement of Donald Trump himself. PBS Frontline has a documentary called Trump's American Carnage that take that riot as a starting point.

Frontline also is posting long segments of some of the interviews they did for the program. This is one that focuses on the kinds of concerns on which Snyder focuses. It's with Olivia Troye, someone I don't recall having heard of before, who was a homeland security and counterterrorism adviser to VP Mike Pence.

She was there in a professional capacity, not as a political adviser, and left Pence's staff in August 2020. This one was done after January 6 but before Biden's Inauguration. She talks quite a bit about the Capitol riot and Trump's encouragement and direct incitement.

She seems to have an impressively nuanced and realistic view of Pence himself. Toward the end (45:00 ff), she's asked about Pence's situation when he was in the Capitol and the lynch mob was coming for him. "I can't imagine what it must be like to have stood by someone unwaveringly, and been in this environment for four years, fully knowing how dangerous this man [Trump] can be. 'Cause we've seen this, repeatedly, and it leads to his own life [Pence's] being put directly in danger by this individual [Trump]. Right? You have the President basically setting up the Vice President of our country in a situation where he puts his [Pence's] life in danger.]."

And, speaking from her professional experience in counterterrorism, "And I have no doubt that the threat level on the Vice President [Pence] will remain high. 'Cause these people are not gonna forget." And at the end, she says, "You can't have unity if you don't have accountability." Olivia Troye is currently part of the Republican Accountability Project.

Snyder talks about how the Big Lie that Trump established around the blatantly false claim that Biden won the Presidential election through election fraud. The Big Lie is something historically associated in particular with the Hitler movement. Snyder describes that infamous Big Lie as:

... Hitlerian anti-Semitism: the claims that Jews ran the world, Jews were responsible for ideas that poisoned German minds, Jews stabbed Germany in the back during the First World War. Intriguingly, [Hannah] Arendt thought big lies work only in lonely minds; their coherence substitutes for experience and companionship.

In November 2020, reaching millions of lonely minds through social media, Trump told a lie that was dangerously ambitious: that he had won an election that in fact he had lost. This lie was big in every pertinent respect: not as big as “Jews run the world,” but big enough. The significance of the matter at hand was great: the right to rule the most powerful country in the world and the efficacy and trustworthiness of its succession procedures. The level of mendacity was profound. The claim was not only wrong, but it was also made in bad faith, amid unreliable sources. It challenged not just evidence but logic: Just how could (and why would) an election have been rigged against a Republican president but not against Republican senators and representatives? Trump had to speak, absurdly, of a “Rigged (for President) Election.” [my emphasis]

But this Big Lie isn't just a professional-wrestling gimmick that Donald Trump came up with. It's one that the Republican Party in general have been working on for four decades. It's just now graduated from the concept that the Democratic Party is illegitimate to the notion that democratic elections are illegitimate. And the rule-of-law system along with it.

Snyder gives us a sobering reminder of how far along Trump got with his actual plan. And the role that Trump's own lack of knowledge of politics and government and his own laziness played in its failure. On the storming of the Capitol, he writes, "It is hard to think of a comparable insurrectionary moment, when a building of great significance was seized, that involved so much milling around." In other words, "for all his lawsuits and entreaties and threats to public officials, [Trump] could not engineer a situation that ended with the right people doing the wrong thing."

But it did provide a real-world example of how close it could come. The two groups of Republicans that Snyder calls the Gamers and the Breakers have a template for a coup that they can broadly share. And did broadly share in 2020-1.

If Trump remains present in American political life, he will surely repeat his big lie incessantly. Hawley and Cruz and the other breakers share responsibility for where this leads. Cruz and Hawley seem to be running for president. Yet what does it mean to be a candidate for office and denounce voting? If you claim that the other side has cheated, and your supporters believe you, they will expect you to cheat yourself. By defending Trump’s big lie on Jan. 6, they set a precedent: A Republican presidential candidate who loses an election should be appointed anyway by Congress. Republicans in the future, at least breaker candidates for president, will presumably have a Plan A, to win and win, and a Plan B, to lose and win. No fraud is necessary; only allegations that there are allegations of fraud. Truth is to be replaced by spectacle, facts by faith.

Trump’s coup attempt of 2020-21, like other failed coup attempts, is a warning for those who care about the rule of law and a lesson for those who do not. His pre-fascism revealed a possibility for American politics. For a coup to work in 2024, the breakers will require something that Trump never quite had: an angry minority, organized for nationwide violence, ready to add intimidation to an election. Four years of amplifying a big lie just might get them this. To claim that the other side stole an election is to promise to steal one yourself. It is also to claim that the other side deserves to be punished. [my emphasis]

Mark Sumner has an insightful Twitter thread on this process that has played out to this point in the Republican Party. He goes back to what Ronald Reagan called the 11th Commandment, that Republicans shouldn't criticize other Republicans, which as he puts it, "erected a wall on the Republican left, but placed not a single barrier to the right. It meant there was never any internal testing of ideas. There was no competition to challenge and refine claims. No effort to call out extreme views. ..." (01/30/2021)

The Twitter format forces painting in broad strokes. So of course we could point out that the Republican Party at times over those four decades have called out the more extreme views of characters like David Duke and Pat Buchanan. But Sumer describes the basic trend very well. David Duke may have been too bitter a pill for country club Republicans to swallow. But Rush Limbaugh wasn't. Nor Alex Jones.

So, he writes, "Josh Hawley opposing votes certified by PA’s GOP legislature is the future of the Republican Party." And Hawley is by no means the only one ready to keep operating on Trump's coup template: A Slap in The Face to Voters': GOP Bill Would Allow AZ Legislature to Overturn Election The Choice 01/30/2021.

Snyder also centers the white supremacy element in the current Republican drive against democracy. "In the past half century, since the Civil Rights Act, Republicans have become a predominantly white party interested — as Trump openly declared — in keeping the number of voters, and particularly the number of Black voters, as low as possible." And he says of the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, "At bottom, the fantasy of fraud is that of a crime committed by Black people against white people."

Snyder uses the f-word (fascism) without jumping into the thornbush of academic definition. He writes of using the history of fascism to understand Trumpism, "One comfortable position has been to label any such effort as a direct comparison and then to treat such comparisons as taboo. More productively, the philosopher Jason Stanley has treated fascism as a phenomenon, as a series of patterns that can be observed not only in interwar Europe but beyond it." Mussolini actually called his politics Fascism - it's where we get the word for that brand of politics - and Hitler modeled his takeover of power after Mussolini's. So we can observe similarities without having to quibble about the precise definition.

Snyder in this article uses the word "cult" only in the context of a "martyrdom cult" the authoritarian governing party in Poland currently uses. But understanding cults does shed light on how the current Trumpian Big Lie functions:

Thanks to technological capacity and personal talent, Donald Trump lied at a pace perhaps unmatched by any other leader in history. For the most part these were small lies, and their main effect was cumulative. To believe in all of them was to accept the authority of a single man, because to believe in all of them was to disbelieve everything else. Once such personal authority was established, the president could treat everyone else as the liars; he even had the power to turn someone from a trusted adviser into a dishonest scoundrel with a single tweet. Yet so long as he was unable to enforce some truly big lie, some fantasy that created an alternative reality where people could live and die, his pre-fascism fell short of the thing itself. [my emphasis]

In the more narrow sociological-clinical sense of cult, like Jim Jones' People's Temple, or the UFO cult Heaven's Gate, or the Branch Davidians, that doesn't describe the complexity of the current authoritarianism in the Republican Party. But there is a cultish aspect in Trump following.

Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, calls the Trumpified Republican Party "a one-man cult." (Rep. Jayapal: GOP Isn't A Party Of Principle. It's A Cult MSNBC/The 11th Hour 01/30/2021)

Steven Hassan, an authority on cults and author of The Cult of Trump (2019), spoke earlier this month with Kati Couric on this subject, Former Cult Follower Describes How President Trump Has Created a Cult Following (a sloppy YouTube title!) 01/13/2021:

I'll end by going back once again to what Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein wrote in their 2012 book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks:

[H]owever awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier- ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

Trump is no longer President. But the Republican Party is still a Trumpian party. And it is still on the trajectory that took it from 2012 to becoming the Party of Trump. In 2020, the Republican National Committee (RNC) didn't even bother to adopt a new party platform. They just issued a one-page resolution stating, "RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda." It really is the Party of Trump.

"Economic anxiety" as a journalistic placeholder (2 of 2)

Will Bunch takes up the "economic anxiety" trope to mock it in An insurrection of upper-middle class white people Philadelphia Inquirer 01/12/2021.

This Morning Joe segments talks about the affluent profiles of so many of the known Capitol insurrectionists, How Riots Show Trump Supporters Not Just White, Disaffected Americans MSNBC 01/12/2021:

Both the Bunch column and the Morning Joe segment featuring Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough talking with Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times, who tweets as Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones), focus on debunking the idea that the most passionate Trump supporters are salt-of-the-earth working-class white folks who are just frustrated by the economy. Hannah-Jones wrote i the first of a tweet thread on 01/11/2021: "Turns out that instead of those endless rural diner profiles, political journalists should have been doing MAGA pieces in board rooms, on military bases, in private jets."

Both reports focus on the Capitol invaders of last week and the revelations that a significant part of the armed Trump mob of Radical Republicans prowling the Capitol seeking to lynch Members of Congress - and even the rightwing theocratic Republican Vice President! - were actually notably affluent Republicans. As Will Bunch puts it:

When fascism finally came to America in the form of an attempted coup to halt our presidential election, it came from lush-green suburbs all across this land, flying business class on Delta or United and staying in four-star hotels with three-martini lobby bars — the better to keep warm after a long day of taking selfies with friendly cops or pummeling the unfriendly ones, chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” and generally standing athwart democracy yelling “Halt!”

What else can one think after seeing the photo of Jenna Ryan, real-estate broker from the upscale Dallas exurb of Frisco (also a “conservative” radio talker) posing in front of the private jet that whisked her to the Jan. 6 pro-Trump rally and subsequent storming of the Capitol, where she smiled in front of a window broken by other rioters and tweeted that “if the news doesn’t stop lying about us we’re going to come after their studios next”?

Maybe Ryan is an extreme example, but her compatriots in rushing Capitol Hill on Wednesday included a father of three from another upscale Dallas suburb named Larry Rendall Brock Jr., whose 1989 degree in international relations from the Air Force Academy apparently never taught him that it’s a bad idea to be photographed leaving House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office in a combat helmet, tactical gear, and holding zip-tie handcuffs. [bold in original]

In this post, I won't try to dig too much into the weeds of distinguishing the voting base from the most prominent activists. But it's also important to keep in mind how big Republican donors can simulate grassroots support by funding trips to demonstrations in Washington in "astroturf" operations like we saw with the Tea Party during the Obama-Biden Administration. Showing up to a riot in Washington on a Wednesday doesn't necessarily mean that the rioter is well-heeled personally. Nor does the fact that a miners or a cleaning lady might vote for Trump and the Republicans does not mean that Republican policies benefit them.

Because even the Republicans who don't want to join the Trumpistas in dropping the trappings of democracy and the rule are also committed to government of the people, by the oligarchy, and for the oligarchy.

The use of the "economic anxiety" phrase has taken on a particular ideological edge thanks to the left-vs-right fights in the Democratic Party. (Or left-vs-establishment, if you prefer, or left-vs-center). To use the 2016 and 2020 Presidential primaries as a very visible example, the Sanders campaign stressed the need to disrupt the Trump voting base and to win some of those votes for the Democrats by stressing economic issues like raising the minimum wage and social provisions like Medicare For All.

Sanders has a very solid civil-rights and women's-rights record, going back to his serious activism in the civil rights movement in the 1960. But in 2016 and 2020, establishment Democrats were committed to a neoliberal, very corporate-friendly economic program and hoped to use "identity" issues - more concretely, stress on anti-discrimination measures and celebration of diversity - to attract moderate suburban voters while implicitly assuming that white working-class voters interested in pro-labor measures would have no place to go in a two-way race but to the Democrats. And at least part of that narrative even tried to stigmatize the left's emphasis on economic populism as being in itself racist and sexist, or at minimum a bad-faith distraction from anti-discrimination policies.

Amanda Marcotte is someone who has leaned toward the latter position who has also been serious and carful in her arguments for it. As in this article from 2017: New election analysis: Yes, it really was blatant racism that gave us President Donald Trump Salon 04/19/2017.

The "economic anxiety" trope is also an echo of the "Sister Souljah" strategy of the Bill Clinton in his 1992 Presidential campaign. Which was in some ways the inverse of the establishment Democratic narrative just described from 2016-2020. The idea there was to rely on a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats approach to economic policy to win working-class votes while also pandering at least symbolically to white racism to show the Democratic Party wasn't being controlled by "Jesse Jackson," the worst bogeyman for white supremacists in 1992.

A sad but classic version of that argument was presented by Thomas Edsall with Mary Edsall in their book Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (1991). A more recent work presents a version of the "economic anxiety" version is Strangers in Their Own Land (2016) by Arlie Russell Hochschild.

My own framework on the angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin version of the "economic anxiety" narrative is that of course racism, sexism, xenophobia, and authoritarianism are all phenomena that are not purely dependent on immediate economic conditions or class identity. But they also exist within economic systems that both shape them are are shaped by them. The details of "intersectionality" will always present particular complications that will get translated into political rhetoric in a variety of ways.

But journalists using "economic anxiety" as a lazy placeholder for all that creates more fog than light.

"Economic anxiety" as a journalistic placeholder ( 1 of 2)

Katie Couric has a YouTube channel where she has been doing a serious of interesting and serious interviews. Including some very relevant recent ones about Trump with Mary Trump and the former Acting US Solicitor General Neal Katyal. In a recent one, she brings up the effect of "economic anxiety" on making Trump appealing to some voters.

This interview with Stephen Hassan, a respected authority on cults, is also about Trump. It is somewhat oddly titled, since Hassan is a serious and widely recognized expert and director of the anti-cult Director of Freedom of Mind Resource Center, Former Cult Follower Describes How President Trump Has Created a Cult Following. 01/12/2021: 

Hassan has written a book, The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control (2019). In the interview, he talks about how Trump's "very deceptive appeals" have succeeded in producing so many devoted and uncritical followers who are willing to believe imaginary claims coming from him. After 4:5 comes his portion:

Stephen Hassan: But essentially in my research of over 40 years, people are in vulnerable moments in their life where they'll be more receptive to a recruitment message or recruiter. So: death of a loved one, illness, dislocation, losing a job - I mean, seriously, the pandemic - and the economic problems are huge susceptibility factors for the public going forward.

Destabilizing a country [or] a group's economic status is a major technique for doing mind control on people. Because you want to disorient people. You wanna confuse people. You wanna make people search for meaning and hope outside of the existing institutional structures.

So, the susceptibility of people now to look to, well, who knows the solution to the problem of how to make the world a better place now, unfortunately, the human mind responds to certainty. And cult leaders are very good at talking in a way that's very convincing.

[Clip of a Trump speech shown]

This kind of communication, kind of accesses people's emotional brain, not their critical thinking part, but their emotional brain of, "Well, maybe, he seems to sound confident. Maybe he can do something 'cause things are so bad."

Katie Couric: What you're saying is, he preyed on people's economic anxiety? [my italics]

This is an example of a star journalist using "economic anxiety" as a general catch-all phrase for vague discontent.

Because Hassan had just mentioned a variety of events and conditions that could create emotional uncertainty in individuals that might make them more vulnerable to a cultish appeal promising certainty and discouraging critical thinking skills.

Hassan goes on to talk then about the variety of factors that a politician can use to tell people, I'll give your certainly on this issue you care a lot about. He mentions the standard "cultural war" issues of religion, abortion, and guns.

In the second post on this, I'll look at another treatment of the "economic anxiety" trope by columnist Will Bunch. It's had a strange career these last few years.

On Hassan's comments, I would add that this type of observations is helpful. Because as we saw on January 6 when Trump directly incited a mob to invade the Capitol and hunt down Members of Congress to kill them base on genuinely groundless claims of election theft, there is a cultish element to the Trump movement.

On the other hand, we should be careful about any Trump-apologist narrative suggesting that the cultish aspects of the movement absolve him or his violent white supremacist goon squads because it means they didn't know what they were doing. I haven't heard that offered up yet. But someone surely will.

Nullificationist Republicans show no sign of "the fever breaking"

Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein wrote one of the best analyses yet of the still-current asymmetric partisan polarization in US politics, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism (2012). Still current, but the problem has become far more intense, to the point of the Republican President inciting an armed mob to attack the Capitol building and attempt to murder members of Congress.

One of the insurrectionists favorite symbols, of course, is the Confederate battle flag. So it's interesting to note how Mann and Ornstein used the Confederate and segregationist concept of "nullification," which they applied to the Republicans' aggressive obstructionist tactics in slow-walking and blocking Obama's appointments, even in his first term:

Republicans' efforts in the tacit cause of partisan rivalry to block the confirmation of nominees - to embarrass the president and hobble his ability to run the executive branch-are troubling enough. But the new strategy has an additional, even more disturbing element: blocking nominations, even while acknowledging the competence and integrity of the nominees, to prevent the legitimate implementation of laws on the books. In many cases, if no person is running an agency charged with enforcing a law, the agency can't easily implement or enforce the law; career bureaucrats are reluctant to make critical decisions without the imprimatur of the presidential appointee who should be running the agency. We call this - together with other tactics, including repeal of just-enacted statutes, coordinated challenges to their constitutionality, and denial of funds for implementation - the new nullification, in reference to the pre-Civil War theory in Southern states that a state could ignore or nullify a federal law it unilaterally viewed as unconstitutional. [italics in original; my emphasis in Bold]

This is why continuing the 2009-style Democratic fantasies about Bipartisan harmony is so dangerous for the effectiveness of the Biden-Harris Administration.

Mann and Orstein wrote during the last year of the Obama-Biden Administration about the radicalism behind the new nullification as the Republicans applied it to the nomination of Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court (The Grim Reality of American Politics The Atlantic 03/17/2016):

On the policy front, the Republican Congress has made the unprecedented decision to portray a president with almost a year left in his term as not simply a “lame duck” but utterly bereft of any legitimacy to carry out the responsibilities of his office. Both House and Senate have declined to recognize the budget the president submitted in January, refusing even to hold the customary hearings with the head of the National Economic Council and the director of the Office of Management and Budget. And within an hour of the announcement of the sudden death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made it clear that the Senate would not recognize any nominee put forward by Obama—no vetting, no hearing, not even the customary individual meetings with Judiciary Committee Republicans. [my emphasis]

It's pointless and even counterproductive to speculate hopefully in the current moment about how they hope "the fever will break" on the Republican side without very substantive signs from Republicans themselves that they are changing course. The fact that a big majority of Republican House Representatives voted for the coup attempt even after the invasion of the Capitol is a sign the "fever" is raging right along. (John Bowden, The Republicans who voted to challenge election results The Hill 01/07/2021)

It would be appropriate for everyone to refer to everyone on that list with the description "seditionist" prefacing their names.

Biden, Confederate Republicans, and the heritage (and continuing presence) of Obama

Now that Joe Biden has been elected President, even a thoroughly Both-Sides-Do-It guy like Chuck Todd is now willing to call Trump and at least some Republicans anti-democratic, as he showed on Meet the Press yesterday. But he still brought on loyal Trumpist ally Tennessee Confederate Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander to defend Trump with, you got it, Both Sides Do It. Sen. Alexander seems to think that Georgia's Stacey Abrahms was also a Presidential candidate.

But in the Bruch Liberalism daydream that now that Trump is leaving the White House, we're back to our Exceptional American normality with a Democratic President and a Republican Party with stodgy ideas and bad manners that is nevertheless willing to be a loyal opposition and respect the results of elections. Unfortunately, anyone holding on to that idea has probably been taking the commentary from people like Chuck Todd the last way to seriously in the last 20 years or so.

Because the Both Sides Do It world that mainstream pundits report on is a convenient fantasy to protect their access to shameless partisans who will give them anonymous partisan quotes to use: the world of the End of History in which taking political contests more seriously than sports matches. But that world, to the extent it ever actually corresponded to reality, is not the one we live in now.

At the latest, that world became a zombie haunting corporate media newsrooms sometime between the New York Times' first Whitewater story in 1992 and Bush v. Gore in 2000. Trying to make sense of today's US politics against a backdrop of that fantasy land is about as helpful as trying to learn how parents should approach distance learning for 10-year-old during a COVID lockdown by watching episodes of Leave It to Beaver.

In this Facebook post of 12/13/2020, Dan Rather writes:

But there is of course another deep worry pervasive in this country. It is about America's heretofore unbroken peaceful transfer of power between presidents. It is the notion that all of us, regardless of party, play by and revere the same democratic ideal that we the people have the power to fire our leaders in free and fair elections. This election has revealed a president who doesn't believe any of that, and a party and base that is eager to go along with him. This is not fringe; it is a movement that encompassess [sic] tens of millions of Americans. And to defeat it and preserve American democracy will require resolve, patience, ingenuity, and grit. [my emphasis]

The problem of Trumpism is a particular, symptomatic moment in the Republican Party whose Presidential candidate he was and which has followed him remarkably loyally in his anti-democracy program. The Republican Party is now the Confederate Party, the John Calhoun Party, the Trump Party.

For Democrats and anyone who considers themselves "left" in current, reality-based terms (i.e., not QAnon/One America News/FOX News/Republican Party terms), part of understanding the present is understanding how that, however "classy" and intelligent and compassionate President Obama may come off as a media figure, the combination of his political program during his Presidency and his strategy for the Democratic Party not only failed to achieve the Bipartisanship which he really seemed to value as a good thing in itself. It also left the Democratic Party unable to defeat Donald Trump in 2016 and left their leaders largely dazed and confused on how to politically combat him during the last four years.

Lili Loofbourow's article Barack Obama Sat Out the Past Four Years and It Shows (Slate 12/11/2020) is a timely reminder of this. Obama is not only a popular speaker and media star in his own right. He's also still very influential in the Democratic Party, and very much on the side of Establishment (i.e., conservative) policies and political messaging. She calls attention to one of the most important and persistent characteristics of his political rhetoric:

Barack Obama is ready to come back into the spotlight. After four years spent mostly out of the public eye, right on the heels of Donald Trump’s defeat, the ex-president is suddenly everywhere. ...

But in these recent appearances, the most surprising thing might be that his political remarks about this moment feel stale. Maybe his absence from the fray over these past four years has cost him. Maybe he’s using a different timescale to measure progress (as he sometimes explicitly says he is). But even his harshest remarks about the right don’t capture the hysterical party we’re watching try to steal an election. His recent criticisms of “snappy” leftist political slogans like “defund the police” reflect an abiding faith in a theory of politics that seems passé—as several Black intellectuals and activists have pointed out. Boiled down to its essentials, Obama’s argument is that one shouldn’t “alienate” people who might be converted to your cause if you say things in just the right way. In practice, that means tucking the political self into a package that a “reasonable person”—that usefully unmeasurable political fiction—cannot help but find acceptable and persuasive. [my emphasis]

David Bromwich wrote some useful analyses of Obama's rhetoric and messaging while he was President, although it was sometimes marred by what seemed to be a distinct dislike of the man. But this comment from Bromwich that I quoted in 2012 post is an important observation:

[Obama] has often echoed Lincoln's Second Inaugural, the canonical American speech of reconciliation. It has not occurred to him that our time may be more suited to the House Divided speech, in which Lincoln in 1858 showed why the slavery question was so important it might make the two sides irreconcilable. Obama's many House United speeches, by contrast, are always about unity for its own sake – a curious idea. Unity for its own sake will capture neither votes nor lasting loyalty among people who crave an explanation of the elements of political right and wrong. [my emphasis]

That post of mine was David Bromwich looks again at Obama's words and speculates about his personality 07/12/2012, in which I also looked at how Obama rhetoric fit so well with the neoliberal policy preferences. As I noted there, Obama distrusted progressives because he's not one, though in 2004-2008 when he first emerged as a national figure, he cultivated the notion that he was. He even regarded progressives with contempt, and I noted there that it was surely in major part because of his identification with the wealthy. I quoted a contemporary speech of his on his tax policies in which he made a point to refer to "the wealthiest Americans -- folks like myself".

In her current piece, Loofbourow observes, "Obama’s commitment to not alienating people is fascinating to the precise extent that it becomes a principle in its own right." (my emphasis)

But that approach has proven to be spectacularly deficient in dealing with the Calhoun-ized, QAnon-ized Republican Party that we now have:

Obama’s personal self-packaging has long been extraordinary. He won two elections with it. But he also disproved his own theory. Despite his extraordinary efforts to perform an unoffending normalcy, he was spectacularly mischaracterized as a socialist, a Kenyan, a Muslim, a criminal, and more. He was demonized by an opposition party whose virulent determination to shove evidence aside has only grown since—they will read Biden as a communist pedophile and Trump as an athletic man of God. This is not an environment where self-editing or careful packaging matters. Nor is it one where bland political slogans gain purchase. [my emphasis]

I'll close by recalling that Obama's "principle in its own right" of non-offensiveness was applied during his Presidency with much more rigor when dealing with hostile Republicans than in dealing with progressives in his own party.

How Democrats can handle radical-baiting from Republicans

My friend Bob McElvaine just did a column on Democrats need to make Republicans own their usage of terms like "socialist" and "radical": Georgia's Senate runoffs show Democrats need a new message on socialism. Here's what to do. NBC News Think 12/06/2020.

This used to be called "red-baiting". But since 2000, in the US we've been referring to the Republicans as the "red" party - a nice historical irony that I do appreciate - we can't really call their accusations against Democrats red-baiting any more. Maybe, "Reds, baiting," maybe?

I think Bob's suggestion is the right approach for both Democrats like Sanders and AOC who want to use an explicit democratic-socialism framework and for centrists like John Ossoff who may break out in hives at the sound of the s-word: make the Republicans own what they mean by "socialism".

Which, translated from RepublicanSpeak, basically means anything the government might do which benefits anyone other than obscenely wealthy plutocrats like Kelly Loeffler or grifters like David Perdue, for whom being a Senator is mainly a way to make money as a day trader. (They are the two Georgia Republican Senators running for re-election in January.)

I quoted some of Trump's political sleaze-slinging in his Saturday superspreader rally in Valdosta, Georgia, in my previous post.

Make them eat their own definitions. So, Republicans want to defund the socialist police and fire departments? They want to do aware with Social Security - it even has "social" in its name! - and Medicare, which St. Reagan himself called socialist? No more socialist public schools? Well, yeah, that is what the Republicans want to do.

As Bob puts it in his column:

The supposed “socialism” that Democrats support includes the military, police and fire departments, public schools, roads, the Post Office, Social Security, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act, requiring the wealthy to pay their fair share in taxes, combating climate change, protecting us all against contaminated foods, overseeing essential scientific research and assuring that medications — and vaccines — are safe and effective.

The last of those are both central to combating the current pandemic and a striking illustration of the absurd lengths to which some Republicans are willing to go to fight what they deem "socialism."

Make them own their definitions!

But he adds an important caution: "it will take something at which the [Democratic] party has long been notoriously poor: messaging."

Another reminder: the Republican Party is a Trumpist party

Michael Tomasky has written an assessment of the 2020 election results that strike me as unusually pessimistic from him: What Did the Democrats Win? New York Review of Books 11/18/2020 (12/17/2020 issue).

But his assessment of the Trumpification of the Republican Party is realistic:

But even if Trump himself fades, it’s hard to see the changes he has effected being undone. No one else will be quite as brazen as Trump, but he and his 73 million votes have taught the party that created him a great deal. Openly being a white ethnonationalist carries surprisingly little penalty, and in fact brings considerable reward. Ditto flouting constitutional traditions and norms—oh, they will eviscerate you on Morning Joe and the Times editorial page, but Amy Coney Barrett sits on the Supreme Court and Merrick Garland does not. You can lie and lie and lie and invert and pervert the truth endlessly, and half of the media and country will be onto you, but the other half will pick up on your cues and rearrange their understanding of the world to suit yours, and together you will fight the other half to a rough draw, even on a matter as serious as the effective negligent homicide of tens of thousands of Americans, if not more.

The Republican Party will not stop doing, or being, all of the above. Its authoritarian impulses, which predate and have enabled Trump, will continue. There is no one in the party—no one—urging it to pull back from the pursuit of total dominance by means of the courts, racial gerrymandering (which it will continue to control), the rules of the Senate, and the imbalance of the Electoral College. [my emphasis]

I hope Democrats will recognize this. There is no Golden Age of Bipartisan Harmony on the horizon. Much less standing just the other side of Joe Biden's Inauguration.

Norm Ornstein on the 2020 Republican Party: "This is a cult"

Norman Ornstein appeared yesterday on the Mehdi Hasan Show talking about the authoritarian state of the Republican Party, Inside The Deep Roots of the GOP’s Ongoing Denial of Reality 12/05/2020:

He co-authored a 2012 book with Thomas Mann, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism (2012).

It's only gotten worse since. Much worse, as Orstein discusses in that interview. (And, yes, he does say, "This is a cult, Mehdi.") Their book made me more intensely aware of how much the fact of asymmetric partisan polarization is a defining fact of politics in America now. And not just because the ideological center of gravity of both parties both moved to the right. But also because of the Republican Party far more aggressive and combative style in fighting for their own side.

As they said in the book, "Today's Republican Party ... is an insurgent outlier." Trumpism was a kind of "desublimation" that made even more raw and obvious what the Republican Party has become. Trump is a freakish manifestation of it. But he's not pursuing a fundamentally different political project than the authoritarian course that has been taken in recent decades.

I'm going to quote here a review of the book I did in Parties and government dysfunction in the US 03/15/2013:

Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein attracted quite a bit of well-deserved attention last year for their book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism (2012).

It has been much discussed and reviewed. I saw the two of them do a presentation based on the book last year, of which they did quite a few in the process of promoting the book.

They discuss the current toxic partisan environment in the national government in the US. And they rightly identified the main culprit, not relying on the lazy pseudo-centrist both-sides-are-to-blame truism of which the Beltway Village press are so fond:

Today's Republican Party ... is an insurgent outlier. It has become ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all but declaring war on the government. The Democratic Party, while no paragon of civic virtue, is more ideologically centered and diverse, protective of the government's role as it developed over the course of the last century, open to incremental changes in policy fashioned through bargaining with the Republicans, and less disposed to or adept at take-no-prisoners conflict between the parties. This asymmetry between the parties, which journalists and scholars often brush aside or whitewash in a quest for "balance," constitutes a huge obstacle to effective governance.

Their book offers a number of ideas of reforms that might be sensible and improve the general functioning of the federal government. And they make critical examinations of a number of popular explanations of the current widely-recognized problems. They argue, for instance, that the assumption that gerrymandering is responsible for party polarization as such doesn't hold up well to scrutiny. They argue that its "impact is relatively minor and marginal" on party polarization.

They also use a phrase "the new nullification" that may prove to be a useful term, though I'm still digesting it myself:

Republicans' efforts in the tacit cause of partisan rivalry to block the confirmation of nominees - to embarrass the president and hobble his ability to run the executive branch-are troubling enough. But the new strategy has an additional, even more disturbing element: blocking nominations, even while acknowledging the competence and integrity of the nominees, to prevent the legitimate implementation of laws on the books. In many cases, if no person is running an agency charged with enforcing a law, the agency can't easily implement or enforce the law; career bureaucrats are reluctant to make critical decisions without the imprimatur of the presidential appointee who should be running the agency. We call this - together with other tactics, including repeal of just-enacted statutes, coordinated challenges to their constitutionality, and denial of funds for implementation - the new nullification, in reference to the pre-Civil War theory in Southern states that a state could ignore or nullify a federal law it unilaterally viewed as unconstitutional. [emphasis in original]

They also mention a salient fact that is typically ignored entirely when Village pundits wring their hands at the incivility of all this partisanship: "for most of the past century, the parties were less internally unified and ideologically distinctive, and more coalitions in Congress cut across parties than is the case today." So, of course in that situation, ideologically divisive issues were often settled on a "bipartisan" basis. But that's something very different than the Village's fetish for bipartisanship as a goal in itself.

Still, Mann and Ornstein don't entirely avoid the peril inherent in focusing on process and institutional issues, which is failing to give full significance to the reality that content matters.

Bipartisanship or consensus isn't a good thing in itself. Ever. It may feel good, but it's never a good thing in itself in isolation from what action or lack thereof is being decided. Some of the worst decisions the American government has ever made were done so on a broadly bipartisan basis. The ending of Reconstruction in the South in the 1870s, for instance, in which Democrats and Republicans agreed to withdraw federal forces discontinue using federal forces against armed white terrorism and leave the laws unenforced, while white Democrats overthrew the democratic governments there by force and violence, and many states sustained segregation and un-Constitutional voter suppression laws against black citizens (which also affected poor whites) well into the 1960s.

The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was passed in 1964 on a broad bipartisan basis, becoming the legal and political figleaf on which the Johnson Administration justified the full-blown escalation of the Vietnam War - an escalation he was elected in 1964 opposing.

The list could go on: the open-ended Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF)after the September 11 attacks in 2001, the rush bipartisan approval of the PATRIOT Act that same year. The debate in Congress over Old Man Bush's Gulf War against Iraq in 1991 may have been more nominally civil. But it resulted in a decision to authorize military intervention, a decision I supported at the time but in light of subsequent events and revelations about how the Bush I Administration made its case for war, I regard now as very much a bad one.

The debate over the Iraq War and the authorizing resolution in 2002 also passed on a bipartisan basis, though Democrats like Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd opposed it intensely. The fact that it was bipartisan didn't make the decision any less destructive, irresponsible and reprehensible.

Mann and Ornstein devote their first chapter, "The New Politics of Hostage Taking," to the debt-ceiling fight in 2011, using it as example of how asymmetrical political polarization torpedoed a Grand Bargain, which they characterize this way: "What that produced was a year of hostage taking and wrangling in Congress, misdirected steps to deal with the deficit, and nothing whatsoever to remedy the public's greatest concern - chronic unemployment."

But what was the content of that Grand Bargain likely to have been? "Grand Bargain" basically means cutting benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Very bad policy, a very bad idea. (See Bob Kuttner, The Grand Bargain We Don't Need Huffington Post 3/10/2013) And we know that the Democratic President was in full Heinrich Brüning mode, as he is again at this present writing. We know he offered up a large and very damaging increase of the Medicare eligibility age by two years. He was also pushing for using the "chained CPI" scam to cut benefits on current and future Social Security recipients.

And the whole debt-ceiling debate was about how much austerity to impose on the US economy that was then and still is now in a weak recovery, employment levels still a long way from the 2007 level and well-paying jobs even scarcer. All this while Britain, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain were demonstrating dramatically and in real time how damaging austerity policies in the middle of a depression are.

So, while the debt-ceiling fiasco did illustrate the partisan and institutional dysfunctions that Mann and Ornstein describe, in that context a more successful partisan and institutional process would have produced a really bad set of policy decisions. We can distinguish between process and result. But they can't be treated in isolation from one another. And that's not only true for that particular incident.

But the thrust of the book is to point out real problems that block the functioning of healthy democratic processes in a major way. And they do point out the massively corrupting role of big money, which is intimately connected with policy outcomes. If wealthy donors dominate the political process, outcomes will be skewed in a way that favors the narrow interest of that class.

Mann and Ornstein are also not promoting some pseudo-centrist "postpartisan" or end-of-ideology perspective here. For instance, they write:

... beware of nonprofit political groups bearing independent presidential candidates and balanced, centrist tickets. Americans hate political parties in general but the parties are essential vehicles to represent their values and views and to give direction and purpose to government. A democracy cannot float above politics; politics - and parties - are critical components of our democratic DNA. Political groups promoting the siren song of transcending politics instead of working to change the dysfunctional behavior of those in politics and government suffer from their own democratic deficit and are more likely to play spoiler or produce an ungovernable administration than to remedy dysfunctional politics. [my emphasis]

Krugman on the serious dangers of romantic "bipartisan" illusions and pretensions about today's Republican Party

Paul Krugman was one of the few major columnists who was not only talking sense about the Iraq War in the runup to that disastrous invasion, he was also sounding the alarm from the start of the Obama-Biden Administration on the dangers of a too-timid approach to economic stimulus and the vapidity of the "Very Serious People" (aka, VSPs) advising austerity policies in order to soothe what he called the "confidence fairy" who, similar to Tinker Bell, would wither and die if more attention were not given to balancing budgets and cutting civilian government programs. All this in addition to playing Cassandra during the last euro crisis, giving good advice that the relevant policymakers cheerfully ignored.

Krugman has also been pretty cold-eyed in recognizing the Republican Party's authoritarianism during the Cheney-Bush Administration and ever since.

So his current warning is something everyone in the Biden-Harris Administration should take very seriously (How Will Biden Deal With Republican Sabotage? New York Times 11/30/2020):

When Joe Biden is inaugurated, he will immediately be confronted with an unprecedented challenge — and I don’t mean the pandemic, although Covid-19 will almost surely be killing thousands of Americans every day. I mean, instead, that he’ll be the first modern U.S. president trying to govern in the face of an opposition that refuses to accept his legitimacy. And no, Democrats never said Donald Trump was illegitimate, just that he was incompetent and dangerous.

And he expands the observation with this critical point: "And this won’t simply be because they fear a backlash from the base if they admit that Trump lost fair and square. At a fundamental level — and completely separate from the Trump factor — today’s G.O.P. doesn’t believe that Democrats ever have the right to govern, no matter how many votes they receive." (my emphasis)

Historians still refer to the German Weimar Republic of 1918-1933 as a "Republic without republicans," by which they mean not only the Communists on the left and hardcore rightists who each for different reasons rejected the notion of a liberal democratic republic, but especially conservatives in establishment institutions from the army and government bureaucracies to corporations and universities. Many of the supposed respectable conservatives were especially interested in conserving democratic government. Which led to increasing authoritarianism is the form of a conservative President and conservative Chancellors (prime ministers) like Heinrich Brüning, Franz von Papen, and Kurt von Schleicher, ending with Adolf Hitler as Chancellor. Krugman himself during the last euro crisis referred repeatedly to Brüning's brutal austerity program during his 1930-32 Chancellorship as a dire warning that is still relevant.

If Mitch McConnell and the Republicans are successful in obstructing needed economic measures, Krugman urges the Biden-Harris team to do the thing that always seems so difficult for establishment Democrats. That is, to fight for their own side.

First, he needs to start talking about immediate policy actions to help ordinary Americans, if only to make it clear to Georgia voters how much damage will be done if they don’t elect Democrats to those two Senate seats.

If Democrats don’t get those seats, Biden will need to use executive action to accomplish as much as possible despite Republican obstruction — although I worry that the Trump-stacked Supreme Court will try to block him when he does.

Finally, although Biden is still talking in a comforting way about unity and reaching across the aisle, at some point he’ll need to stop reassuring us that he’s nothing like Trump and start making Republicans pay a political price for their attempts to prevent him from governing. ...

[W]hat Biden needs to do is what Harry Truman did in 1948, when he built political support by running against “do-nothing” Republicans. And he’ll have a better case than Truman ever did, because today’s Republicans are infinitely more corrupt and less patriotic than the Republicans Truman faced. [my emphasis]

This is absolutely critical. Today's Republican Party doesn't just pursue bad policies and oppose constructive ones. It wants to do away with the current democratic system of governance.

The Republican Party is not going to de-radicalize after a Trump defeat. Really not.

Deborah Friedell gives her summary of the current FOX narrative about a Joe Biden Presidency (Fox News President London Revie of Books 10/23/2020:

Two weeks before the election, the top story on Fox and Friends is that Joe Biden’s son Hunter – or so says Rudy Giuliani – has taken bribes from China and Ukraine, and there’s now supposedly evidence unearthed on an old laptop that he’s given kickbacks to his father. But then they say Biden is only a puppet who’s already showing signs of dementia. If he becomes president, the country will actually be run by the ‘radical socialists’ Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who intend, Laura Ingraham says, ‘to punish anyone who gets in the way of their cultural revolution’.

If the Democrats prevail, Fox News warns, Americans will be ruled by an ‘unholy alliance’ between ‘the billionaires and the Bolsheviks’: billionaires want to depress wages, so they’re in favour of opening the country’s borders to immigrants who’ll take American jobs and remake the culture. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks will use ‘every tool in the government’s power to harass Americans who defy the socialist edicts. It’s going to be a long, dark period of recriminations and retribution.’ You won’t learn these truths in the New York Times or on CNN. Only Fox News can be trusted. More than half its viewers say there is nothing Trump could do that would ever cause them not to vote for him. [my emphasis]

The Republicans have cultivated a party and media environment in which grievance and projection are constant. Along with their national program of voter suppression and fundamental opposition by their Congressional party throughout Obama's Presidency and their well-funded astroturf operations like the Tea Party events, the have been able to achieve much of what their oligarchical donors want. Far-reaching freedom from taxation for the wealthiest individuals and massive corporations. Drastic cutbacks in business regulations. Shameless corruption in government. Starving the IRS so they are unable to conduct adequate tax oversight on business and the wealthy. Pushing privatization schemes, notably including wrecking the Post Office as a prelude to privatization. Blocking virtually all policy initiatives that would enhance social insurance and the social state. Promotion and support of authoritarian policing. Packing the federal courts with rightwing hacks. To name a few.

This model is working for their donors. And for a Republican Party that depends on the less-democratic aspects of our Constitutional structure to maintain their power, it also works. The fact that Donald Trump turned out to be so astonishingly incompetent at governing it not something that is going to make them retire their authoritarian playbook.

In any case, incompetence and corruption comes with authoritarian government, even when they manage to implement policies that economically benefits some significant part of the general public. Remember George W. Bush? Dick Cheney? Hurricane Katrina? Heckuva job, Brownie?

Speaking of the unspeakable, part of the Republican Party is queueing up another Cheney to pick up the wreckage in the likely event that Trump loses the election (Alex Thompson, ‘She Kind of Reminds You of Margaret Thatcher’: Liz Cheney Prepares To Make Her Move Politico 11/01/2020):

Now [Dick Cheney's] 54-year-old daughter—whose devotion to an unapologetically muscular [i.e, militaristic and prowar] foreign policy is every bit as ardent as his own — has emerged as one of the Republican Party’s fastest-rising leaders. ...

As with many ambitious Republicans, however, Cheney’s future hinges on what happens Nov. 3 as the country renders a verdict on Trump’s Republican Party with his blend of “America First” foreign policy and populist, big-spending domestic policy. Many of Trump’s most prominent supporters sneer at the idea of a Cheney being the future of the party, confident that Trump’s 2016 victory is a sign that the Bush-Cheney-era conservative moment is over. ...

Whatever direction the party takes, Liz Cheney will have something to say about it. For just as Donald Trump Jr. is a devoted advocate for his father’s views, so, too, is Liz Cheney a latter-day avatar of her father’s legacy.

Behind her veneer of support for President Trump—she votes with him “something like 97 percent of the time,” she bragged on “Fox & Friends” in July—there’s a far harsher reality: Many of her and her father’s closest friends and ideological allies have become the most virulent Trump critics. The large group, which includes former national security adviser John Bolton, Steve Schmidt, Steve Hayes, Bill Kristol, and Jennifer Rubin, are rooting for Liz to restore their brand of conservatism after Trump.

"I've talked to a lot of people about the conversation we have to have in the Republican Party, about how to cut this albatross off from around our necks if he loses,” Bolton told POLITICO, referring to Trump. “And I think it's going to be very robust across the board." [my emphasis]

The Cheney fans do not represent any kind of fundamental change in direction for the Republican Party. It's a rejection of the Trump crime family's faction. But not of the party's direction.

And it's not new for the Republicans to go through a post-election ritual of nominally repudiating a Presidential candidate that just lost - Old Man Bush, Robert Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney. The same thing happened with Shrub Bush after he termed out with terrible approval ratings after eight years of plutocratic policies, the disastrous Iraq War, the 9/11 attacks, and Hurricane Katrina. Digby Parton explains the attitude like this: Conservatism can't fail, it can only be failed. And since Republican policies always fail the majority in some substantial way, some kind of ritual rebranding is a regularly recurring necessity for the Republicans.

After Tuesday, the Democrats need to remember which party the Never-Trump Republicans came from

Claire Conner, who wrote an autobiographical account of growing up in a family whose father was a major player in the John Birch Society, wrote this blog post late last year describing Trump's radical right politics as President, Poisoning America with Conspiracy Theories, Birther Nonsense, and Lies 03/19/2017 (bolding in original):

They [Trump and the Republicans] tell us:

• The economy has been a disaster
• The military is crumbling
• Obamacare is a disaster
• Nothing in the government works
• Terrorists are pouring in
• Immigrants are taking our jobs
• Muslims are the enemy
• Undocumented immigrants must be deported
• Our leaders are losers and morons, except, of course, the great Donald Trump and his cabinet
• We’re one supreme court justice away from gun confiscation
• It’s almost the end of the nation that was once known as the United States of America. 

Every day these talking points are repeated by Trump’s surrogates. Republicans parrot the same dribble and repeat it to their constituents.

As a child of the radical right, I heard the identical talking points from my father and his John Birch Society allies. It’s hard to say, but it’s true; my father preached the ideas that are poisoning American politics today. These radical right-wing ideas have polarized Americans and threaten our democracy.

Please don’t dismiss Trump and his GOP pals as “politics as usual.” Don’t laugh at his crazy tweets and pretend that somehow, someday he’ll start acting presidential. Don’t assume that a president like Donald Trump will be stopped by the same radical GOP that elected him.

I would add: Don't assume that the same radical GOP that elected Trump and supported him loyally for the last four years are going to revert to acting like those fabled moderate Eisenhower Republicans of "bipartisan" folklore.

I should point out that at least in the 1950s and 1960s, Muslims were not a particular target of Bircher fear-mongering.

Speaking of the Birchers, here's an interesting cultural relic from 1968 - John Denver singing a song critical of them, John Denver with The Mitchell Trio - The John Birch Society (Live 1968):

The John Birch Society still exists, though I won't include their website link here. John Savage wrote about them in 2017 in The John Birch Society Is Back Politico 07/16/2017:

This is what the 21st-century John Birch Society looks like. Gone is the organization’s past obsession with ending the supposed communist plot to achieve mind-control through water fluoridation. What remains is a hodgepodge of isolationist, religious and right-wing goals that vary from concrete to abstract, from legitimate to conspiracy minded—goals that don’t look so different from the ideology coming out of the [Trump] White House. It wants to pull the United States out of NAFTA (which it sees as the slippery slope that will lead us to a single-government North American Union), return America to what they call its Christian foundations, defund the UN, abolish the departments of education and energy, and slash the federal government drastically. The John Birch Society once fulminated on the idea of Soviet infiltration of the U.S. government; now, it wants to stop the investigation into Russia’s 2016 election meddling and possible collusion with the campaign of President Donald Trump.

The Society’s ideas, once on the fringe, are increasingly commonplace in today’s Republican Party. And where Birchers once looked upon national Republican leaders as mortal enemies, the ones I met in Texas see an ally in the president. “All of us here voted for Trump,” says Carter. “And we’re optimistic about what he will do."

Rick Perlstein discussed the Birchers and Claire Conner's book in Growing Up in the John Birch Society The Nation 08/06/2013. That was during the Obama Administration, three years before Donald Trump was elected President. Rick wrote then:

... now we have thirty states with Republican majorities, many of them veto-proof.

... in Chicago, Claire [Conner] concluded in thunder. “These people are at the point of changing our government. If you want to see how, look at Texas, look at Florida. Look at Ohio. Look at Wisconsin, for God’s sake - my state. Look at Michigan, for heaven’s sake: they think they elected a moderate, but they elected a right-wing radical. That’s how this game is played. They’re changing the policy. And the whole thing is so deep that when they vote them out of office, number one, half of them won’t be able to vote. And number two, we will have years of problems to fix…. We were so happy that we won the popular vote, but they’re buying the place….they’ve virtually stopped the government for five years.”

Claire Conner knows of what she speaks. She was there at the inception—as a sad-eyed, vulnerable adolescent—then watched as the machine was put together: a machine whose deceptively smooth surface has always only barely hid the corrosive ugliness and cunning anti-democratic cleverness underneath, convincing too many liberals, too many times, that the ugliness could not but fade away in the fulness of time—convincing them wrong. Read her, and listen well: there is nothing new under the wingnut sun. [italics in original; my emphasis in bold]

We can defend or idealize Obama all we want. But this was the state of American politics less than a year after Obama's re-election. And whatever the Democrats did, good or bad, during those eight years was not sufficient to avoid a Radical Republican takeover in 2016. This is something we all need to remember when people hold up the Obama Administration as a template for a Biden Administration. If we want a Biden Presidency to be more than a four-year reprieve from a Trumpist restoration, that Administration will have to achieve something different in both policy and in political organization and persuasion than what we had in 2009-2017 under Obama.

The new Handmaid Supreme Court Justice and "the autocracy trainee program"

Dahlia Litwick describes how the Republicans' capture of the federal judiciary with highly partisan, rightwing ideological, often techically unqualified judges is a major plank in the Republican Party's oligarchical plan for minority rule (my characterization, not hers): This Is What It Feels Like to Live Under Minority Rule Slate 10/26/2020.

She has a good take on the now-common tactic of judicial nominees to refuse to answer questions about almost anything substantive during confirmation hearings, which The Handmaid Amy Coney Barrett practiced rigidly:

The refusal to answer even the simplest yes/no questions about what black letter law means, and who it binds, has the effect - intentional or not - of unsettling what was once widely accepted and understood. It’s the judicial equivalent of “flooding the zone with shit“ and the result is the same when it’s done in law as it is when it’s done in media - it renders all that was known to be certain as indeterminate and up for grabs. It puts us all at the mercy of powerful deciders and consolidates the power to decide those newly open questions in an authority figure. It recalibrates both truth and power as emanating from someone else. [my emphasis]

Lithwick notes that for all the mealy-mouthed talk about the bogus "originalist" theory, Coney Barrett's position comes down to, "she has taken the position that what judges believe matters more than precedent anyhow."

She places the legal part of this project in the larger political goals of today's Republican Party.

Even though she didn’t answer any of her questions, we know who Barrett is and what she will do on the court. She is exactly who she has always been, who she was seated to become, and if you are worried for your children, for the planet, for the future of anti-racism and LGBTQ rights and voting rights, your worry is not misplaced. Barring court reform, the coming years will be marked by attacks on government agencies, court-endorsed rollbacks of progressive gains, and a steady series of wins for business, oligarchs, and inequality. It will come dressed as neutral “originalism,” but it will be neither neutral nor originalist. And as Adam Serwer brilliantly details, this is not simply a conservative project; it is a project to beat back changing demographics and to suppress the power of the majority. The whatever [attitude] that powerlessness engenders is a feature, not a bug, of the conservative legal movement’s efforts to tell majorities that they are of no moment. [my emphasis]

Here's another of her characterizations of this larger project: "Your very powerlessness is the point. The cruelty is the fringe benefit. ... You’re now in the autocracy trainee program."

Rightwing radicalism in the Republican Party and neoliberalism among the Democrats

Claire Conner made a useful list on her website last September of important elements in the supposedly libertarian radicalism of today's Republican Party (Why Does the GOP Cling to Trump No Matter What? 09/17/2019):

Trump and today’s radical GOP agree on the basics.

1. Cut taxes on the rich and handcuff the IRS.
2. End most federal programs and privatize the rest.
3. Reduce the safety net and end all welfare.
4. Repeal healthcare reform and let the free market handle the issue.
5. Make it harder to vote.
6. Stop immigration and block all reform that would offer a path to citizenship.
7. Oppose reproductive rights and equal rights for the LGBTQ community.
8. Stack the courts with right-wing judges who will stop any progressive legislation that comes before them. 

Even today, too many Americans have no clue that the GOP really believes these things. And I can understand why. The extremists have gone to great lengths to frame their ideas in sound bites. At the same time, they’ve become masters at telling half-truths and outright lies about the real-world consequences of their radical ideas. [emphasis in original]

One more reminder that even though Trump presents, uh, unique features, his domestic radicalism isn't some aberrant phenomenon. This is what today's Republican Party is. And it's been on this road for a long time.

Trump does it in a crass, caricatured populist fashion. But he's on board with the things in that list.

Part of his populist appeal in 2016 was to promise things like protecting Social Security and a vague promise for a great healthcare system for everybody. Of course, as we also saw in 2010, the Democrats have made themselves vulnerable to accusations that they want to cut Social Security:

Years that Biden pushed for cuts to Social Security:

1980s
1990s
2000s
2010s

That’s a lot of video to doctor. https://t.co/lQDfYpzXNu

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) January 18, 2020

Adopting "third way" neoliberal economics and a general defense crouch was a bad development in the Democratic Party.James Kwak provides one description of that process in (‘Take Back Our Party’ Chapter 3: Bad Politics The American Prospepct 12/16/2019. Although it's kind of unfortunate that the story is illustrated with two different photos of Al Gore. It's true that Gore was a leading figure in the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a party faction that actively promoted this development. But I would argue that his leadership on making people aware of the seriousness of the climate crisis is a major mitigating factor. And, in general, he has been sounding more like a regular New Deal Democrat since the 2000 Presidential election was stolen from him by the Radical Republicans and the Supreme Court.

This is part of how Kwak describes the political effect of the Democrats' corporate/neoliberal approach:

The 2018 elections proved that Democrats can still put up a fight when Republicans go after popular government programs. But the first major weakness of the Democratic economic platform in recent decades has been a failure to talk about the economic issues that most people actually care about. Presidents Obama and Clinton liked nothing more than invoking the soaring rhetoric of growth and opportunity. Schumer, Bustos, and the rest of the leadership seem to think that repeating the word “jobs” will enable them to connect with the working class. But for most people, growth and opportunity are just abstract concepts, and jobs are not what keep them up late at night. Few people setting aside their medical bills because they are afraid to open them think that a larger economy will be the solution to their problems, or that cheaper student loans will turn their lives around. Nor are jobs the answer to all problems. For one thing, the unemployment rate is historically low; it was less than 5 percent when Donald Trump was elected president, and has since fallen as low as 3.5 percent. It is true that many people have given up on looking for jobs and are not counted in those figures (although the broadest measure of unemployment, which includes discouraged and underemployed workers, is also at the lowest level since 2000). But workers without the skills to find employment in a highly favorable labor market are unlikely to think that the existence of more job openings will magically make them better off. The economy has been growing for a decade, and unemployment is low, yet tens of millions of people still face a daily struggle to make ends meet. [my emphasis]

A central feature in Democratic politics right now is a quasi-theological dispute over identity issues, i.e., racism/sexism/gender vs. economics. For the Obama/Biden/Clinton corporate-friendly neoliberal pitch to distinguish itself from the Republican version, emphasizing both symbolic and real measures to protect civil rights while pretending that growth in the GDP stimulated by deregulation and low taxes for corporations oligarchs would take care of economic problems. Trickle-down economics with a more diverse face.

The unemployment rate is a good example of the weakness of the neoliberal a-rising-tide-lifts-all-boats narrative. For decades, the unemployment rate has generally been an excellent measure for the relative strength or weaknesses of the economy. But the weakening of labor laws and the rise of the "gig economy" means more and more that the unemployment rate is now a far less meaningful indicator of economy distress or well-being.