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maddieireland334

Paul Ryan is in another fight he doesn't want - this time over LGBT rights - The Washin... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ant-this-time-over-lgbt-rights

Ryan Policy Fight LGBT US

shared by maddieireland334 on 26 May 16 - No Cached
  • House Speaker Paul D. Ryan finds himself in the middle of yet another Republican civil war as the battle over LGBT rights has come to Congress, threatening to divide an already fractured GOP.
  • Democrats won an opening salvo late Wednesday night, when the House approved on a vote of 223 to 195, a measure by Rep. Sean Maloney (D-N.Y.) to deny payment to federal contractors who discriminate against LGBT employees.
  • Maloney’s victory does not mean that House conservatives — angry over what they view as overreaching by President Obama — will not continue to wage the fight.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Conservatives are mainly taking aim at a pair of Obama directives to ensure protections for LGBT employees of federal contractors and to direct public schools to provide access to locker rooms and bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity. 
  • Also on Wednesday, a measure by Alabama GOP Rep. Bradley Byrne passed to exempt religious groups from complying with the directives.
  • Republican leaders have tried to steer lawmakers away from wading into the hot-button debate on the House floor.
  • The speaker this week cautioned GOP members at a closed-door session that Democrats were likely to keep trying to force them into uncomfortable votes on LGBT discrimination, according to aides and members who were present.
  • He floated the idea of modifying House rules in a move that would likely restrict the number of amendments that could be offered on the floor, which would allow leaders to get out ahead of controversial votes and avoid any potentially embarrassing floor fights.
  • The GOP leadership is trying to “thread the needle,” according to aides, between conservatives itching for another chance to challenge Obama and those who don’t want to tackle on an issue they think is best left for the states to resolve. 
  • For their part, Democrats are exploiting the rift, looking to draw attention to the GOP infighting after a measure that would have banned federal contractors from discriminating against LGBT employees failed in the House last week.
  • Democrats see LGBT rights as a prime opportunity to prove that House Republicans are intolerant of minorities. 
  • The vote on Maloney’s original measure turned heated last week when it appeared that seven Republicans switched their votes after the bill seemed to have passed.
  • Ryan told reporters on Wednesday that the breakdown — which involved Democrats shouting “shame, shame” across the aisle at their GOP colleagues —  was just a misunderstanding.
  • Then, Democrats successfully rallied support from moderate Republicans to ban the flag on federal property. Southern Republicans were enraged and threatened to vote against the overall bill, forcing former House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) to give up on the entire appropriations process to avoid an embarrassing failure.
  • The stakes are much higher this year for Ryan who has vowed to return the House to working order, starting with passing spending bills and allowing any member to offer amendments.
Javier E

How Did the Democrats Become Favorites of the Rich? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ome-favorites-of-the-rich.html

policy politics economic culture GOP Democratic party donations voters

shared by Javier E on 07 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • On economic issues, however, the Democratic Party has inched closer to the policy positions of conservatives, stepping back from championing the needs of working men and women, of the unemployed and of the so-called underclass.
  • The current popularity of Bernie Sanders and his presidential candidacy notwithstanding, the mainstream of the Democratic Party supports centrist positions ranging from expanded free trade to stricter control of the government budget to time limits on welfare for the poor.
  • The authors, from Stanford, Princeton, the University of Georgia and N.Y.U., respectively, go on to note thatthe Democratic agenda has shifted away from general social welfare to policies that target ascriptive identities of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • “Both Republicans and many Democrats have experienced an ideological shift toward acceptance of a form of free market capitalism which, among other characteristics, offers less support for government provision of transfers, lower marginal tax rates for those with high incomes, and deregulation of a number of industries,
  • Between 1982 and 2012, the Republican share of contributions from the Forbes 400 has been steadily falling, to 59 percent from 68 percent. As membership in the Forbes 400 changes, this trend will accelerate
  • the share of contributions to Democrats from the top 0.01 percent of adults — a much larger share of the population than the Forbes 400 list — has grown from about 7 percent of total campaign contributions in 1980 to more than 25 percent of contributions in 2012. The same pattern is visible among Republicans, where the growth of fundraising dependence on the superrich has been moving along the same trajectory.
  • upscale voters were just as important to the Obama coalition as downscale voters. One consequence of the increased importance of the affluent to Democrats, according to Bonica and the three co-authors on the inequality paper, is that the Democratic Party has in many respects become the party of deregulated markets.
  • “The Democratic Party pushed through the financial regulation of the 1930s, while the Democratic party of the 1990s undid much of this regulation in its embrace of unregulated financial capitalism,” the four authors write.
  • Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, political scientists at Princeton and Northwestern. In a 2014 essay, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” they analyze congressional voting patterns and conclude thatThe majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose.
  • “These findings may be disappointing to those who look to the Democratic Party as the ally of the disadvantaged,” Gilens wrote in a 2012 essay published by the Boston Review:In some respects Democrats have in fact served this function in the social welfare domain. But in other domains, policies adopted under Democratic control are no more consistent with the preferences of the less well off than are those adopted during periods dominated by the Republican Party.
  • Gilens, in a forthcoming paper in Perspectives on Politics, is critical of both Democrats and Republicans:On important aspects of tax policy, trade policy, and government regulation, both political parties have embraced an agenda over the past few decades that coincides far more with the economically regressive, free trade, and deregulatory orientations of the affluent than with the preferences of the middle class.
  • Most important, in recent years, the Democratic Party has become the political home for those whose most passionate cause is cultural, as opposed to economic, liberalism: decriminalization of drug possession; women’s rights; the rights of criminal defendants; and rights associated with the sexual revolution, including transgender rights, the right to contraception, abortion and same-sex marriage.
  • the party, if its aim is to mobilize those on the bottom rungs of the ladder, whites as well as blacks and Hispanics, will face some bitter conflicts, because these target voters are often the most hostile to the left-leaning social rights agenda.
  • College graduates were 22.9 percentage points more liberal on homosexuality than those without high school degrees, and 24.8 percentage points more liberal in their views on gay marriage.The same class differences have been found in views on abortion, school prayer and the survey question: should women should be the equal of men.
  • For many black and Hispanic voters who hold conservative views on social issues, the Democratic Party’s commitment on civil rights, immigration reform and the safety net trumps any hesitation about voting for Democratic candidates who hold alien cultural and moral views.
  • The same is not true for noncollege whites. Many of these voters hold liberal economic views, as evidenced by the passage by large margins of minimum wage referendums in four solidly red states last year. In the case of these white voters, however, animosity to Democratic cultural and moral liberalism trumps Democratic economic liberalism, as demonstrated by the near unanimous Republican-majority midterm and presidential voting in the poorest white counties of Appalachia.
  • The practical reality is that the Democratic Party is now structurally disengaged from class-based populism, especially a form of economically redistributive populism that low-to-moderate-income whites would find inviting.
johnsonma23

Is Donald Trump another Barry Goldwater? (opinion) - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

donald trump cnn opinion US politics

shared by johnsonma23 on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Is Donald Trump another Barry Goldwater?
  • Some Democrats are giddy about the possibility of Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination.
  • But other Democrats, including former President Bill Clinton, fear Trump could prove a formidable general election opponent.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • biggest difference between then and now is the polarization of the electorate. Over the past few election cycles, there has been remarkably little movement of voters between parties in most states
  • They roared with approval when Goldwater responded: "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."
  • The GOP's choice turned out to be a total disaster: Johnson ran a devastating campaign that effectively portrayed Goldwater as far off center.
  • viewers saw Ku Klux Klan members marching in their regalia and burning crosses, a reference to an endorsement Goldwater received from a leader of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan.
  • Johnson won re-election by a massive landslide with 486 electoral votes to Goldwater's 52. Johnson's popular vote, 61%, was the biggest in American history, bigger than FDR in 1936.
  • But will a Trump candidacy be a repeat of 1964? That outcome is far from clear.
  • Republican Party has moved far to the right over the past few decades. Some controversial statements that got Goldwater in trouble in 1964 would now find support in red parts of the country.
  • It's also important to remember that when Goldwater ran, Democrats were in good shape: The death of a popular Democratic president, John F. Kennedy, had been devastating to many Americans
  • Trump is not as much of an outlier as Goldwater was perceived to be in 1964.
  • a Trump candidacy would allow Democrats to make huge gains in the House, the base of conservative power.
  • The only opponents who have a chance are those who are even more conservative than current officeholders.
  • The best opportunity would be for Democrats to win control of the Senate, given that there are a number of competitive seats where a Trump candidacy could make a difference
  • Trump is also a very different kind of candidate than Goldwater. Goldwater's candidacy grew out of a growing conservative movement that had a clear set of principles: limited government, strong anti-communism, and opposition to federal civil rights legislation.
  • Trump's campaign, on the other hand, is far more about style than actual policy.
  • Though Goldwater was an effective senator, he was a terrible campaigner, constantly stumbling over his words and making statements that didn't play well with the media. According to one Johnson adviser, Goldwater "scattered his shots too widely, hit too many issues, and thus diffused his impact.
  • Trump, by contrast, is extremely effective with the media. He seems to have a genuine feel for articulating the anger that exists in the electorate
  • With Trump, the optimists believe, Republicans might have another Barry Goldwater on their hands. This is a reference to the right-wing Arizona senator who ran in 1964 against President Lyndon Johnson, urging his party to embrace conservatism
  • In this general election, the connection will be more problematic for Hillary Clinton, given Obama's middling approval rating
  • Democrats should thus be careful in thinking through what a Trump candidacy might
Javier E

James Madison's Mob-Rule Fears Have Been Realized - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...568351

democracy government Founding history

shared by Javier E on 17 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • To prevent factions from distorting public policy and threatening liberty, Madison resolved to exclude the people from a direct role in government. “A pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction,” Madison wrote in “Federalist No. 10.”
  • The Framers designed the American constitutional system not as a direct democracy but as a representative republic, where enlightened delegates of the people would serve the public good. They also built into the Constitution a series of cooling mechanisms intended to inhibit the formulation of passionate factions, to ensure that reasonable majorities would prevail.
  • Madison, however, thought Plato’s small-republic thesis was wrong. He believed that the ease of communication in small republics was precisely what had allowed hastily formed majorities to oppress minorities. “Extend the sphere” of a territory, Madison wrote, “and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.” Madison predicted that America’s vast geography and large population would prevent passionate mobs from mobilizing. Their dangerous energy would burn out before it could inflame others.
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  • Madison’s worst fears of mob rule have been realized—and the cooling mechanisms he designed to slow down the formation of impetuous majorities have broken.
  • We are living, in short, in a Madisonian nightmare. How did we get here, and how can we escape?
  • During the election of 1912, the progressive populists Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson insisted that the president derived his authority directly from the people. Since then, the office has moved in precisely the direction the Founders had hoped to avoid: Presidents now make emotional appeals, communicate directly with voters, and pander to the mob.
  • Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms have accelerated public discourse to warp speed, creating virtual versions of the mob. Inflammatory posts based on passion travel farther and faster than arguments based on reason. Rather than encouraging deliberation, mass media undermine it by creating bubbles and echo chambers in which citizens see only those opinions they already embrace.
  • The polarization of Congress, reflecting an electorate that has not been this divided since about the time of the Civil War, has led to ideological warfare between parties that directly channels the passions of their most extreme constituents and donors—precisely the type of factionalism the Founders abhorred.
  • Whatever benefits the parties offered in the 19th and early 20th centuries, however, have long since disappeared. The moderating effects of parties were undermined by a series of populist reforms, including the direct election of senators, the popular-ballot initiative, and direct primaries in presidential elections, which became widespread in the 1970s.
  • As the historian Sean Wilentz has noted, the great movements for constitutional and social change in the 19th century—from the abolition of slavery to the Progressive movement—were the product of strong and diverse political parties.
  • The Founders’ greatest failure of imagination was in not anticipating the rise of mass political parties. The first parties played an unexpected cooling function, uniting diverse economic and regional interests through shared constitutional visions
  • More recently, geographical and political self-sorting has produced voters and representatives who are willing to support the party line at all costs. After the Republicans took both chambers of Congress in 1994, the House of Representatives, under Speaker Newt Gingrich, adjusted its rules to enforce party discipline, taking power away from committee chairs and making it easier for leadership to push bills into law with little debate or support from across the aisle.
  • The rise of what the presidential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called the “imperial presidency” has unbalanced the equilibrium among the three branches. Modern presidents rule by executive order rather than consulting with Congress. They direct a massive administrative state, with jurisdiction over everything from environmental policy to the regulation of the airwaves.
  • The passions, hyper-partisanship, and split-second decision making that Madison feared from large, concentrated groups meeting face-to-face have proved to be even more dangerous from exponentially larger, dispersed groups that meet online.
  • some promising, if modest, fixes are on the horizon. Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School who leads an independent commission that will examine the impact of Facebook on democracy, notes one step the company has taken to address the problem of “clickbait,” which lures users with sensational headlines. Articles that persuade many users to click previously appeared high on Facebook’s News Feed. The company now prioritizes those articles users have actually taken the time to read.
  • “The democratic character of the internet is itself posing a threat to democracy, and there’s no clear solution to the problem,” Persily told me. “Censorship, delay, demotion of information online, deterrence, and dilution of bad content—all pose classic free-speech problems, and everyone should be concerned at every step of the government regulatory parade.”
  • At the moment, the combination of low voter turnout and ideological extremism has tended to favor very liberal or very conservative candidates in primaries. Thanks to safe districts created by geographic self-sorting and partisan gerrymandering, many of these extremists go on to win the general election. Today, all congressional Republicans fall to the right of the most conservative Democrat, and all congressional Democrats fall to the left of the most liberal Republican. In the 1960s, at times, 50 percent of the lawmakers overlapped ideologically.
  • The best way of promoting a return to Madisonian principles, however, may be one Madison himself identified: constitutional education. In recent years, calls for more civic education have become something of a national refrain. But the Framers themselves believed that the fate of the republic depended on an educated citizenry. Drawing again on his studies of ancient republics, which taught that broad education of citizens was the best security against “crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty,” Madison insisted that the rich should subsidize the education of the poor.
  • The civics half of the educational equation is crucial. Recent studies have suggested that higher education can polarize citizens rather than ensuring the rule of reason: Highly educated liberals become more liberal, and highly educated conservatives more conservative
  • Today, passion has gotten the better of us. The preservation of the republic urgently requires imparting constitutional principles to a new generation and reviving Madisonian reason in an impetuous world.
Javier E

The Suffocation of Democracy | by Christopher R. Browning | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...suffocation-of-democracy

democracy authoritarian fascism illiberal history

shared by Javier E on 05 Oct 18 - No Cached
  • In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations. America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans. At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult. The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok. The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. (Various measures barring Asian immigration had already been implemented between 1882 and 1917.) These policies left the country unable to respond constructively to either the Great Depression or the rise of fascism, the growing threat to peace, and the refugee crisis of the 1930s.
  • Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945.
  • Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.
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  • Thinking that they could ultimately control Hitler while enjoying the benefits of his popular support, the conservatives were initially gratified by the fulfillment of their agenda: intensified rearmament, the outlawing of the Communist Party, the suspension first of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly and then of parliamentary government itself, a purge of the civil service, and the abolition of independent labor unions. Needless to say, the Nazis then proceeded far beyond the goals they shared with their conservative allies, who were powerless to hinder them in any significant way.
  • If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings.
  • Like Hitler’s conservative allies, McConnell and the Republicans have prided themselves on the early returns on their investment in Trump. The combination of Trump’s abasement before Putin in Helsinki, the shameful separation of families at the border in complete disregard of US asylum law (to say nothing of basic humanitarian principles and the GOP’s relentless claim to be the defender of “family values”), and most recently Michael Cohen’s implication of Trump in criminal violations of campaign finance laws has not shaken the fealty of the Republican old guard, so there is little indication that even an explosive and incriminating report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller will rupture the alliance.
  • Republicans begin with a systemic advantage in electing senators and representatives, because the Democratic Party’s constituency has become heavily concentrated in big states and big cities. By my calculation every currently serving Democratic senator represents roughly 3.65 million people; every Republican roughly 2.51 million. Put another way, the fifty senators from the twenty-five least populous states—twenty-nine of them Republicans—represent just over 16 percent of the American population, and thirty-four Republican senators—enough to block conviction on impeachment charges—represent states with a total of 21 percent of the American population. With gerrymandering and voter suppression enhancing even more the systemic Republican advantage, it is estimated that the Democrats will have to win by 7 to 11 points (a margin only obtainable in rare “wave” elections) in the 2018 elections to achieve even the narrowest of majorities in the House of Representatives
  • In France the prospect of a Popular Front victory and a new government headed by—horror of horrors—a Socialist and Jew, Léon Blum, led many on the right to proclaim, “Better Hitler than Blum.” Better the victory of Frenchmen emulating the Nazi dictator and traditional national enemy across the Rhine than preserving French democracy at home and French independence abroad under a Jewish Socialist.
  • The fascist movements of that time prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power
  • the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.
  • Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary, since a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion. Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging and the appointment of politically reliable loyalists. Crony capitalism opens the way to a symbiosis of corruption and self-enrichment between political and business leaders. Xenophobic nationalism (and in many cases explicitly anti-immigrant white nationalism) as well as the prioritization of “law and order” over individual rights are also crucial to these regimes in mobilizing the popular support of their bases and stigmatizing their enemies.
  • Both Mussolini and Hitler came to power in no small part because the fascist-conservative alliances on the right faced division and disarray on the left. The Catholic parties (Popolari in Italy, Zentrum in Germany), liberal moderates, Social Democrats, and Communists did not cooperate effectively in defense of democracy.
  • In the five presidential elections of the twenty-first century, Democrats have won the popular vote four times. Two of these four (2000 and 2016) nonetheless produced Republican presidents, since the Electoral College reflects the same weighting toward small, more often Republican states as the Senate. Given the Supreme Court’s undermining of central provisions of the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder), its refusal to take up current flagrant gerrymandering cases (Gill v. Whitford for Wisconsin; Benisek v. Lamone for Maryland), and its recent approval of the Ohio law purging its voting rolls (Husted v. Randolph Institute), it must be feared that the Court will in the future open the floodgates for even more egregious gerrymandering and voter suppression.
  • The unprecedented flow of dark money into closely contested campaigns has distorted the electoral process even further. The Supreme Court decision declaring corporations to be people and money to be free speech (Citizens United v. FEC) in particular has greatly enhanced the ability of corporations and wealthy individuals to influence American politics
  • To consolidate his dictatorship, Hitler had to abolish the independent unions in Germany in a single blow. Trump faces no such problem. In the first three postwar decades, workers and management effectively shared the increased wealth produced by the growth in productivity. Since the 1970s that social contract has collapsed, union membership and influence have declined, wage growth has stagnated, and inequality in wealth has grown sharply. Governor Scott Walker’s triumph over public sector unions in Wisconsin and the recent Supreme Court decision striking down mandatory public sector union dues (Janus v. AFSCME) simply accelerate a process long underway.
  • Alongside the erosion of an independent judiciary as a check on executive power, other hallmarks of illiberal democracy are the neutralization of a free press and the steady diminution of basic human rights
  • In Trump’s presidency, those functions have effectively been privatized in the form of Fox News and Sean Hannity. Fox faithfully trumpets the “alternative facts” of the Trump version of events, and in turn Trump frequently finds inspiration for his tweets and fantasy-filled statements from his daily monitoring of Fox commentators and his late-night phone calls with Hannity. The result is the creation of a “Trump bubble” for his base to inhabit that is unrecognizable to viewers of PBS, CNN, and MSNBC and readers of The Washington Post and The New York Times. The highly critical free media not only provide no effective check on Trump’s ability to be a serial liar without political penalty; on the contrary, they provide yet another enemy around which to mobilize the grievances and resentments of his base. A free press does not have to be repressed when it can be rendered irrelevant and even exploited for political gain.
  • the curtailment of many rights and protections Americans now enjoy is likely. Presumably marriage equality will survive, given the sea change in American public opinion on that issue. But the right of businesses and individuals to discriminate against gays is likely to be broadly protected as a “sincerely held religious belief.” Chief Justice John Roberts’s favorite target, affirmative action, is likely to disappear under his slogan that to end racial discrimination, one must end all forms of racial discrimination. And a woman’s right to abortion will probably disappear in red states, either through an outright overturning of Roe v. Wade or more likely through narrower rulings that fail to find any “undue burden” in draconian restrictions that in practice make abortion unavailable. And equal protection of voting rights is likely to be eroded in red states through ever more insidiously designed voter suppression laws and gerrymandering once the Supreme Court makes clear that it will not intervene to curb such measures
  • No matter how and when the Trump presidency ends, the specter of illiberalism will continue to haunt American politics. A highly politicized judiciary will remain, in which close Supreme Court decisions will be viewed by many as of dubious legitimacy, and future judicial appointments will be fiercely contested. The racial division, cultural conflict, and political polarization Trump has encouraged and intensified will be difficult to heal. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and uncontrolled campaign spending will continue to result in elections skewed in an unrepresentative and undemocratic direction. Growing income disparity will be extremely difficult to halt, much less reverse.
  • Finally, within several decades after Trump’s presidency has ended, the looming effects of ecological disaster due to human-caused climate change—which Trump not only denies but is doing so much to accelerate—will be inescapable. Desertification of continental interiors, flooding of populous coastal areas, and increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, with concomitant shortages of fresh water and food, will set in motion both population flight and conflicts over scarce resources that dwarf the current fate of Central Africa and Syria. No wall will be high enough to shelter the US from these events. Trump is not Hitler and Trumpism is not Nazism, but regardless of how the Trump presidency concludes, this is a story unlikely to have a happy ending.
malonema1

Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley - TODAY.com - 0 views

www.today.com/...-chuck-todd-says-1221829187930

trump politics US

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • Trump does deserve credit for North Korean talks, Chuck Todd says
  • Meet the Press Moderator joins Sunday TODAY’s Chuck Todd and says President Donald Trump deserves credit for helping create conditions to start talks of denuclearization with North Korea, but says some questions still loom. {"1222279235816":{"mpxId":"1222279235816","canonical_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","canonicalUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","legacy_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","playerUrl":"https://www.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","ampPlayerUrl":"https://player.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","relatedLink":"","sentiment":"Neutral","shortUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","description":"Jacob Cartwright, a truck driver in Oregon, accidentally plugged the wrong address into his GPS and wound up lost more than 100 miles out of his way. 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manhefnawi

France - The Second Republic and Second Empire | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...ond-Republic-and-Second-Empire

Louis-Philippe 1848 Overthrowing the Constitutional Monarchy

shared by manhefnawi on 03 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • The overthrow of the constitutional monarchy in February 1848 still seems, in retrospect, a puzzling event. The revolution has been called a result without a cause; more properly, it might be called a result out of proportion to its cause.
  • Since 1840 the regime had settled into a kind of torpid stability; but it had provided the nation with peace abroad and relative prosperity at home. Louis-Philippe and his ministers had prided themselves on their moderation, their respect for the ideal of cautious balance embodied in the concept of juste-milieu. France seemed to be arriving at last at a working compromise that blended traditional ways with the reforms of the Revolutionary era
  • There were, nevertheless, persistent signs of discontent. The republicans had never forgiven Louis-Philippe for “confiscating” their revolution in 1830. The urban workers, moved by their misery and by the powerful social myths engendered by the Revolution of 1789,
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Bills to extend the suffrage (and the right to hold office) to the middle bourgeoisie were repeatedly introduced in parliament but were stubbornly opposed by Guizot. Even the National Guard, that honour society of the lesser bourgeoisie, became infected with this mood of dissatisfaction.Other factors, too, contributed to this mood. In 1846 a crop failure quickly developed into a full-scale economic crisis: food became scarce and expensive; many businesses went bankrupt; unemployment rose.
  • Toward the end of two days of rioting, Louis-Philippe faced a painful choice: unleash the army (which would mean a bloodbath) or appease the demonstrators. Reluctantly, he chose the second course and announced that he would replace the hated Guizot as his chief minister. But the concession came too late. That evening, an army unit guarding Guizot’s official residence clashed with a mob of demonstrators, some 40 of whom died in the fusillade. By the morning of February 24, the angry crowd was threatening the royal palace. Louis-Philippe, confronted by the prospect of civil war, hesitated and then retreated once more; he announced his abdication in favour of his nine-year-old grandson and fled to England.
Javier E

Opinion | The Rise and Fall of the Palo Alto Consensus - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...internet-democracy.html

social media consensus tech crisis

shared by Javier E on 10 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • The past 10 years have seen the global application of the institutional reforms that Mrs. Clinton and the tech companies pushed for — with a few notable exceptions, like China. Universal connectivity has been achieved faster than anyone thought possible. About one in three people on earth is a monthly active Facebook user.
  • We can now evaluate how this technology affects politics and the public sphere. More information has been flowing, circumventing traditional media, political and cultural establishments. But the result hasn’t been more democracy, stronger communities or a world that’s closer together.
  • Countries with weaker social institutions felt the effects of social media most violently and immediately
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • At minimum, country-specific social networks would ensure that companies actually employ moderators who speak the same language as their users.
  • What’s becoming clear is that there is no single optimal digital communication hardware and software for the entire world, just as there is no single optimal set of economic reforms. But there may be an optimal arrangement for each country, fit to its specific political, cultural and economic context.
  • In the midst of a democratic transition and still reeling from a decades-long civil war, the Sri Lankan government’s main priorities were parliamentary reform and reconciliation with the Tamil minority. But Western social media enabled an alternative narrative to capture citizens’ attention. With their monopoly on truth gone, the state and the media have been unable to address the issue of whether or not there is a Muslim plot to sterilize and destroy Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority. (There isn’t.)
  • At this point, intellectuals on both the right and the left see the Palo Alto Consensus as abhorrent. Conservatives bemoan the conceit of technologists who expect to design universal systems; progressives bridle over the concentration of power in corporate hands.
  • Both groups fret that this new power transcends mere economics to encompass social relationships that had previously been shielded from market logic.
  • The assumption was that states would be prevented from shutting down information flows about, say, corruption or police brutality. That has been a success. But everyone seems to have underestimated the demand for information about how white nationalism is good and vaccines are bad.
Javier E

What Is White Supremacy? - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...what-is-white-supremacy

white supremacy culture politics

shared by Javier E on 28 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • Chait argues that for the last half century the label “white supremacist” has been reserved for political racists who explicitly demand exclusive or dominant power for white people
  • Today, though, in reaction to Trumpism, the definition has been expanded to include people who play on racial divisions or pander to white supremacists or simply accept the support of white supremacists even if they are not white supremacists themselves.
  • Chait agrees that these different groups are related but warns of the dangers of conflating them all under the single totalizing label.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • In essence, Chait is saying that this change in the definition of ‘white supremacy’ makes having Donald Trump as President no different from having David Duke as President.
  • Serwer responds by pressing Chait on just what his definition of ‘white supremacy’ actually is and I think suggests that Chait’s is a largely meaningless distinction between people who support white supremacy and say so openly and people who support white supremacy while denying that they do.
  • The real definition has to be something like Serwer’s who suggests a “general definition of white supremacist is someone who believes white people are entitled to political and cultural hegemony.”
  • The changing demography post-1970 has brought the issue of white supremacy far more acutely and unavoidably to the fore than it was in the pas
  • Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions are definitely different from David Duke. But – and I say this slightly jokingly but mainly in earnest – maybe we should call Sessions and Trump moderate white supremacists and Duke a white supremacist extremist.
  • Many people have not fully thought through how today’s dramatically different demography changes the very meaning of ‘white supremacy’. In 1970 a white person could fully support civil rights for African-Americans, oppose every sort of formal and informal bigotry and prejudice. But whites still made up almost 90% of the population. The political, social and cultural dominance of white people was a given regardless of whether you fully dismantled every aspect of white supremacy or not. The simple fact of overwhelming numerical superiority made that so
  • Accepting or even supporting equal political rights for a small minority of the population – which is frequently referred to precisely by their numerical minority status – is quite different from imagining a world where whites are not a majority at all.
  • at least as we define it today, whites will no longer be a majority at all in the relatively near future. Certainly, they won’t be the overwhelming majority able to define and dictate cultural, economic and political power more or less as they choose.
  • By the definitions that Americans use to define race, the 1970 census found that 89.5% of Americans were white and 10% were black. Hispanics, which under the Census definition can be either white or black, made up 4.5% of the population. In other words, the country was overwhelmingly white and the only numerically significant racial minority was African-Americans. Asians and Hispanics made up a minuscule part of the population and were heavily concentrated in the Pacific West and Southwest.
  • If being white is a major part of your political and cultural identity, how you think about who you are, there really is a lot to worry about. That’s because being white isn’t really a biological reality, it’s a category in America that means being the dominant and powerful group.
  • So this is not just a rhetorical or taxonomic question, whether you say you’re a white supremacist or not while you’re supporting white supremacy. Trump exists and the question of white supremacy is right at the surface today because of the demographic tipping point that country stands at.
  • Whether Trump hates people of color or would take away their rights if he could is a mind-reading exercise we could talk about forever. But the fact that he believes in and wants to preserve a country where white people call the shots goes without saying. So maybe it’s not simply that we’re pulling David Duke and Donald Trump into the same definition. Maybe it is that the changes in the country have made the functional difference between the two much less relevant.
Javier E

Obamacare: The Republican Waterloo - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...520833

health-care obamacare debate policy

shared by Javier E on 26 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • to the increasing irritation of my colleagues and employers, I fruitlessly argued through 2009 and 2010 that Republicans should do business with President Obama on health-care reform.
  • It seemed to me that Obama’s adoption of ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s—and then enacted into state law in Massachusetts by Governor Mitt Romney—offered the best near-term hope to control the federal health-care spending that would otherwise devour the defense budget and force taxes upward.
  • I suggested that universal coverage was a worthy goal, and one that would hugely relieve the anxieties of working-class and middle-class Americans who had suffered so much in the Great Recession.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • And I predicted that the Democrats remembered the catastrophe that befell them in 1994 when they promised health-care reform and failed to deliver. They had the votes this time to pass something. They surely would do so—and so the practical question facing Republicans was whether it would not be better to negotiate to shape that “something” in ways that would be less expensive, less regulatory, and less redistributive.
  • In retrospect, I have to confess to considerable sympathy for my employers’ point of view. A think tank is not a university, a haven for disinterested thought. It exists to advocate, and I had contradicted my institution’s advocacy on the most sensitive point at the most sensitive time. Being right was no excuse. If anything, being right aggravated my offense.
  • Whatever else the 2016 election has done, it has emancipated Republicans from one of their own worst self-inflicted blind spots. Health care may not be a human right, but the lack of universal health coverage in a wealthy democracy is a severe, unjustifiable, and unnecessary human wrong. As Americans lift this worry from their fellow citizens, they’ll discover that they have addressed some other important problems too. They’ll find that they have removed one of the most important barriers to entrepreneurship, because people with bright ideas will fear less to quit the jobs through which they get their health care. They’ll find they have improved the troubled lives of the white working class succumbing at earlier ages from preventable deaths of despair. They’ll find that they have equalized the life chances of Americans of different races. They’ll find that they have discouraged workplace discrimination against women, older Americans, the disabled, and other employees with higher expected health-care costs. They’ll find that their people become less alienated from a country that has overcome at last one of the least attractive manifestations of American exceptionalism—and joined the rest of the civilized world in ameliorating and alleviating our common human vulnerability to illness and pain.
  • What I would urge is that those conservatives and Republicans who were wrong about the evolution of this debate please consider why they were wrong: Consider the destructive effect of ideological conformity, of ignorance of the experience of comparable countries, and of a conservative political culture that incentivizes intransigence, radicalism, and anger over prudence, moderation, and compassion.
clairemann

Arizona Sen. Sinema targeted by conservatives in effort to stall contentious Dem-backed... - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...arizona-senator-sinema-s1-bill

policy Politics gop

shared by clairemann on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • A conservative group is running a campaign in Arizona aimed at pressuring moderate Democrat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema into voting against the massive Democrat-backed voting bill called S.1 that's before the Senate. 
  • "Remember when every TV ad was from a politician? Now Democrats want taxpayer-funded political ads," says The Heritage Action ad, which will hit the airwaves Thursday and was first obtained by Fox News. "Democrats also want to register illegal aliens and let people vote without an ID. That means fraud. It's a partisan power grab, and it's wrong." 
  • "[W]e may hear about taxpayer funding of campaigns – despite the fact that this bill includes a provision stating explicitly that no taxpayer money should be used to fund campaigns," Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said. 
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • "They are using the justification of the 2020 experience -- pandemic and challenges that some states had -- as an excuse to push through on a completely party-line vote, a list of agenda items that they've wanted to do for a long time," LaRose said. He added that as Americans learn more about the bill in the hearing Wednesday they will "start to realize that it is a left-wing activist dream list." 
  • But Democrats say S.1 is a critical civil rights bill needed to protect Americans' right to vote in the face of GOP-controlled state legislatures that have introduced bills to tighten voting restrictions. 
carolinehayter

Top House Democrat Jim Clyburn: 'No way we'd let filibuster deny voting rights' | US vo... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...rview-filibuster-voting-rights

voting politics US culture policy gop filibuster

shared by carolinehayter on 08 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • One of the most powerful Democrats in Washington has issued a frank warning to members of his own party, saying they need to find a way to pass major voting rights legislation or they will lose control of Congress.
  • In an interview with the Guardian this week, Clyburn called out two moderate Democratic senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who have opposed getting rid of the filibuster.
  • “There’s no way under the sun that in 2021 that we are going to allow the filibuster to be used to deny voting rights. That just ain’t gonna happen. That would be catastrophic,
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Voting Rights Act, gutted by the supreme court in 2013, that required places with a history of voting discrimination to get election changes cleared by the federal government before they took effect.
  • But the likelihood of that bill becoming law is doubtful under current procedures. Democrats expect Republicans to find a reason to filibuster it after its expected passage through the House of Representatives and consideration in the Senate. Thus Clyburn is calling for some kind of workaround of the filibuster in the current legislative climate, in which the Senate is split 50-50 and use of the legislative obstructing mechanism is all too common.
  • Clyburn said he has not discussed changing the filibuster with Biden, who has expressed support for keeping the filibuster in place.
  • The reality of their slim majority and the regularity of legislation dying through filibuster has caused Democrats to opt to pass the Biden administration’s Covid relief package through a budgetary process called reconciliation, which is not subject to the filibuster-proof 60-vote threshold. Clyburn wants to see the same thing with civil rights.
  • He noted: “If the headlines were to read that the John R Lewis Voting Rights Act was filibustered to death it would be catastrophic.”
  • Broadly popular proposals like a minimum wage increase or a voting rights bill seem dead on arrival. And that has left veteran Senate Democrats skeptical that even a bill protecting Americans’ rights to vote has a chance. First, the filibuster would have to go, and that seems unlikely at the moment.
ethanshilling

House Approves D.C. Statehood, but Senate Obstacles Remain - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...dc-statehood-vote.html

US washington politics

shared by ethanshilling on 22 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • The House voted along party lines on Thursday to grant statehood to Washington, D.C., as Democrats moved to use their congressional majority to accomplish a long-held goal that has become a central plank in the party’s push to expand voting rights and address racial inequity.
  • The legislation would establish a 51st state called Washington, Douglass Commonwealth — in honor of Frederick Douglass, the Black emancipation and civil rights leader — while leaving the National Mall, Capitol Hill, the White House and some other federal property under congressional control.
  • The new state would have a single voting representative in the House and two senators representing its more than 700,000 residents, most of whom are people of color.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • “Congress has both the moral obligation and the constitutional authority to pass H.R. 51,” said Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia’s nonvoting House delegate, using the legislation’s symbolic designation to reflect the new state.
  • The vote in the House was 216 to 208. The White House confirmed President Biden’s support for the measure this week, with the Office of Management of Budget issuing a statement of administration policy declaring that making the District of Columbia a state would “make our union stronger and more just.”
  • But even with Democrats now in control of a 50-to-50 Senate, prospects for the measure remain dim. A few Senate Democrats have not publicly endorsed the proposal, and advancing it would most likely require at least 10 Republicans to vote in support, while none have said they would.
  • A group of House Democrats gathered for a news conference on Thursday to call on their Senate counterparts to abolish the filibuster, as many of their legislative ambitions are doomed to fall short of the 60-vote supermajority threshold needed to advance bills.
  • “Statehood for the District of Columbia is about showing respect for our democracy, for the American people and for our Constitution,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said on the House floor on Thursday.
  • Republicans have mounted a fierce campaign against the legislation, insisting it was not about equal representation, but ensuring that Democrats would secure three reliable votes — two in the Senate and one in the House — and pad their slim margins in both chambers.
  • Other Republicans have pushed for retroceding the nation’s capital into Maryland as a solution to ensure representation, a suggestion that has been repeatedly rejected by both Washingtonians and Marylanders.
  • Some proponents of statehood have begun pushing for the bill to be incorporated in sweeping legislation to expand voting rights and overhaul national elections, which Democrats have staked out as a top priority.
  • Backlash over the violent removal of protesters outside the White House during demonstrations against police brutality galvanized the movement. A decision to treat the District of Columbia as a territory when initially distributing state pandemic relief in 2020 also shortchanged the local government more than $700 million, local officials have said.
  • They are continuing to send legislative priorities to the Senate’s doorstep, in a bid to ramp up pressure on moderate Democrats who remain reluctant to do away with the blocking tactic.
mimiterranova

The NFL Will Stop Assuming Racial Differences When Assessing Brain Injuries : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...and-review-brain-injury-claims

nfl differences brain science race

shared by mimiterranova on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • The NFL on Wednesday pledged to halt the use of "race-norming" — which assumed Black players started out with lower cognitive function — in the $1 billion settlement of brain injury claims and review past scores for any potential race bias.
  • Wednesday's announcement comes after a pair of Black players filed a civil rights lawsuit over the practice, medical experts raised concerns and a group of NFL families last month dropped 50,000 petitions at the federal courthouse in Philadelphia — where the lawsuit had been thrown out by the judge overseeing the settlement.
  • Neuropsychologists will propose a new way of testing
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The binary race norms, when they are used in the testing, assume that Black patients start with worse cognitive function than whites and other non-Blacks. That makes it harder for them to show a deficit and qualify for an award
  • The awards so far have averaged $516,000 for the 379 players with early-stage dementia and $715,000 for the 207 players with moderate dementia. Retirees can also seek payouts for Alzheimer's disease and a few other diagnoses. The settlement ended thousands of lawsuits that accused the NFL of long hiding what it knew about the link between concussions and traumatic brain injury.
carolinehayter

'Stop Lying': Muslim Rights Group Sues Facebook Over Claims It Removes Hate Groups : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-claims-it-removes-hate-groups

politics US Culture policy

shared by carolinehayter on 08 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Frustrated with what it sees as a lack of progress, Muslim Advocates on Thursday filed a consumer protection lawsuit against Facebook, Zuckerberg and Sandberg, among other executives, demanding the social network start taking anti-Muslim activity more seriously.
  • The suit alleges that statements made by the executives about the removal of hateful and violent content have misled people into believing that Facebook is doing more than it actually is to combat anti-Muslim bigotry on the world's largest social network.
  • The suit cites research from Elon University professor Megan Squire, who found that anti-Muslim bias serves "as a common denominator among hate groups around the world" on Facebook. Squire, in 2018, alerted the company to more than 200 anti-Muslim groups on its platform. According to the suit, half of them remain active.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • "We do not allow hate groups on Facebook overall. So if there is a group that their primary purpose or a large part of what they do is spreading hate, we will ban them from the platform overall," Zuckerberg told Congress in 2018. Facebook's Community Standards ban hate speech, violent and graphic content and "dangerous individuals and organizations," like an organized hate group.
  • Lawyers for Muslim Advocates say Facebook's passivity flies in the face of statements Zuckerberg has made to Congress that if something runs afoul of Facebook's rules, the company will remove it.
  • A year earlier, Muslim Advocates provided Facebook a list of 26 anti-Muslim hate groups. Nineteen of them remain active today, according to the suit.
  • The lawsuit is asking a judge to declare the statements made by Facebook executives about its content moderation policies fraudulent misrepresentations.
  • "This is not, 'Oh a couple of things are falling through the cracks,'" Bauer said. "This is pervasive content that persists despite academics pointing it out, nonprofits pointing it out. Facebook has made a decision to not take this material down."
  • It seeks an order preventing Facebook officials from making such remarks.
  • "A corporation is not entitled to exaggerate or misrepresent the safety of a product to drive up sales,
  • Since 2013, officials from Muslim Advocates have met with Facebook leadership, including Zuckerberg, "to educate them about the dangers of allowing anti-Muslim content to flourish on the platform," the suit says. But in the group's view, Facebook never lived up to its promises. Had the company done so, the group alleges in the lawsuit, "it would have significantly reduced the extent to which its platform encouraged and enabled anti-Muslim violence."
  • In the lawsuit, the group says it told Facebook that a militia group, the Texas Patriot Network, was using the platform to organize an armed protest at a Muslim convention in Houston in 2019. It took Facebook 24 hours to take the event down. The Texas Patriot Network is still active on the social network.
  • The suit also referenced an August 2020 event in Milwaukee, Wis. People gathered in front of a mosque and yelled hateful, threatening slurs against Muslims. It was broadcast live on Facebook. The video was removed days later after Muslims Advocates alerted Facebook to the content.
  • It pointed to the Christchurch mass shooting in New Zealand, which left 51 people dead. The shooter live-streamed the massacre on Facebook.
  • "Civil rights advocates have expressed alarm," the outside auditors wrote. "That Muslims feel under siege on Facebook."
aidenborst

Capitol riots unleashed long-term danger, experts warn - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Politics US trump crisis Culture policy GOP extremist Biden inauguration security riot

shared by aidenborst on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The US Capitol is surrounded by fences and troops amid fear the January 6 riots could spark violence this weekend and leading up to Wednesday's inauguration. But experts worry the real threat may be what the attack unleashed for the long term.
  • In many messaging apps and boards, some are calling for a boycott of events this weekend and the inauguration. Michael Edison Hayden, the Southern Poverty Law Center senior investigative reporter and spokesperson, says high-profile names and podcasters Mike Peinovich and Nick Fuentes have told their followers not to go to rallies. The ADL says that White supremacist Peinovich, known as Mike Enoch, and the far-right Fuentes have been rallying voices of discontent for years.
  • They're also worried that the numbers of potentially violent extremists are growing. Social media giants banned President Donald Trump and others over fears their posts would continue to spark violence, which the experts said has led to a sympathetic and growing audience at risk of radicalization.
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  • "Our moderators are reviewing an increased number of reports related to public posts with calls to violence, which are expressly forbidden by our Terms of Service," Telegram spokesperson Remi Vaughn told CNN in a statement on Wednesday. Vaughn added: "We welcome peaceful discussion and peaceful protests, but routinely remove publicly available content that contains direct calls to violence."
  • In public and private chats there are common messages about plotting to "take back America" or rallying together against supposed censorship, according to Angelo Carusone, president and CEO of Media Matters for America. Carusone and his team have been tracking extremist language and posting in a variety of media landscapes.
  • "The FBI cannot open an investigation without a threat of violence or alleged criminal activity. However, when that language does turn to a call for violence or criminal activity, the FBI is able to undertake investigative activity," the agency said.
  • "It is more and more important to know where they're going, especially if they're moving even further and further behind the veil," Carusone said. "If you lose track of them entirely, you lose that that information pipeline, you lose the ability to identify those indicators, which means it's harder to prevent harm."
  • "The plots of tomorrow are literally being hatched right now," Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism, told CNN.
  • Segal said extremists might move cautiously in coming days, from both paranoia and knowing they're being watched.
  • "It's not before inauguration that we need to be concerned about them trying to spark another civil war -- it's after," Segal told CNN.
  • Trump was very much a part of that, too. He repeatedly criticized Gov. Gretchen Whitmer about her Covid-19 restrictions before and after the news of the plot against her.
  • Experts note that at the protests against her moves, there too was a cross-pollination of people who showed up -- self-declared militia members, anarchists, those with anti-government beliefs and anti-vaxxers.
  • Carusone says this is just the beginning of the country heading "into a buzzsaw" due to divisiveness, extremist actions and political rhetoric. "Trump has gift-wrapped the narrative for the next four years," Segal explains.
  • "All of those new people being brought into these communities creates new opportunity for expanding the ranks," Carusone said. "There's going to be a lot of new people ... organized and exposed to a set of prescriptions that ultimately bring us back to the same place ... leading up to the attack on the Capitol. "Except in this case, it'll be more of them."
cartergramiak

Opinion | The Biden Opportunity - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...en-president-inauguration.html

Politics US biden pandemic

shared by cartergramiak on 21 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Amid all the exhausted relief and Twitter euphoria, it’s worth being honest: The inauguration of Joe Biden to the presidency was a dark scene overall, with strong decline-of-the-republic vibes. A windswept, wintry, barricaded Capitol; a denuded Mall; a military occupation. The establishment in masks, with a few celebrities mixed in; almost everybody looking aged, gray, laid waste by time. The ex-president absent, unmentioned, but a shadow over the proceedings all the same.
  • The test posed by QAnon and militia-style extremism, meanwhile, might be less a generational battle and more a matter of watching the enthusiasm for Jan. 6-style confrontations evaporate as the F.B.I. ramps up arrests.
  • Politically, if Biden gets an economic recovery and a retreating pandemic by fall 2021, then he has advantages no matter what happens to the right. If the story of the next two years is a Trump-fomented Republican civil war, that could solidify Biden’s center-left majority and push moderate Republican senators closer to their Democratic colleagues.
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  • But if those systemic problems made Trump president, the more visceral shock of the pandemic and the visceral incompetence (and worse) of his administration have created a space where a meaningful majority of Americans may be satisfied with recovery, normalcy, a phase of decadence that feels depressing but not dire.
Javier E

Barack Obama, conservative - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...barack-obama-conservative

obama conservative culture politics history

shared by Javier E on 24 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • to the dismay of many on the left, and to the continuing disbelief of many on the right, Obama never dramatically departed from the approach of presidents who came before him. There’s a simple reason: Barack Obama is a conservative.
  • his constant search for consensus, for ways to bring Blue America and Red America together, sometimes led him to policies that used Republican means to achieve more liberal ends.
  • Though cast as a “dithering” peacenik who led “from behind,” he stuck with his thesis that the imperative “to end the war in Iraq is to be able to get more troops into Afghanistan,” and he prosecuted a drone war in Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen.
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  • Obama’s approach to politics was marked by a circumspection that went even deeper than policies
  • To be conservative, as philosopher Michael Oakeshott, a movement hero, once put it, “is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.” The former president channeled the sentiment faithfully when he said recently that “the average American doesn’t think that we have to completely tear down the system and remake it.
  • His second inaugural address was a thoroughly conservative document, underscoring equality of opportunity as opposed to equality of outcome. Republican former House speaker Newt Gingrich praised it at the time, saying, “Ninety-five percent of the speech I thought was classically American, emphasizing hard work, emphasizing self-reliance, emphasizing doing things together.”
  • “At the end of the day, the circumstances of your life — what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home — none of that is an excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude in school.”
  • Notwithstanding the “Change we can believe in” slogan that propelled his rise, his aim was never to turn things upside down.
  • Obama went out of his way to lecture that, after the civil rights era, “what had once been a call for equality of opportunity, the chance for all Americans to work hard and get ahead, was too often framed as a mere desire for government support, as if we had no agency in our own liberation, as if poverty was an excuse for not raising your child, and the bigotry of others was reason to give up on yourself.”
  • Obama cast himself as a role model for young black men and repeatedly stressed that not all inequities in American society are attributable to discrimination, racial or otherwise. This posture helped earn him currency with the black electorate (in particular, older black voters), which votes overwhelmingly for Democrats but skews moderate to conservative on several issues.
  • He embraced respectability politics as a way to signal how conventional it was to have a first family of colo
  • The difficulty Democratic candidates have in grappling with Obama reflects the dissonance he’s generated for a decade: The center-left adores him, but to the far left, he’s a sellout.
  • He once argued that in certain circumstances, government programs created welfare dependency, saying that “as somebody who worked in low-income neighborhoods, I’ve seen it, where people weren’t encouraged to work, weren’t encouraged to upgrade their skills, were just getting a check, and over time, their motivation started to diminish.”
  • Favoring “the familiar to the unknown,” as Oakeshott wrote, was Obama’s disposition and also his political project: expanding traditional priorities — the familiar American Dream, not a reconceived one — to Americans for whom they had been denied. That meant building, gradually and at times almost reverently, on his predecessors’ foundation.
Javier E

Gertrude Himmelfarb, the Historian of Moral Change - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...604276

historian moral Victorian culture crisis

shared by Javier E on 31 Dec 19 - No Cached
  • Intellectuals played a different role then. They were more of a secular priesthood than today. The intellectual vocation, Irving Howe wrote, meant standing up for values that have no currency in commercial culture. It meant wrestling with the big questions, upholding the high ideals, and using the power of ideas to shape the mental life of the nation.
  • her passing marks the dusk of what was arguably the high-water mark of American intellectual life.
  • Himmelfarb was a great historian, and reported fairly on all sides, but it was always clear which side her heart was on. She grew up working-class and preferred the prosaic bourgeois values that fueled her family’s rise: work, thrift, temperance, self-discipline, cleanliness, moderation, respect for tradition.
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  • To understand a nation, you have to understand its literary and moral imagination—the way artists and writers reflect the times, the way the greatest minds of the day express their ideals and spread beliefs.
  • Britain in the 19th century, like America in the 20th century, was losing its religious faith and searching for a moral code to replace it.
  • Trilling believed that the manners, mores, and morals of a nation touch people everywhere, while politics touches people only in some places, and so morals are more important than day-to-day politics.
  • In its original definition, a neoconservative was a leftist who broke with the left when, in the 1960s, its leaders rejected bourgeois values for the counterculture. By this definition, she was a neoconservative.
  • Himmelfarb shared the Victorian awareness of sin. She detested the snobbery of cultural elites and narcissism in all its forms.
  • she came to admire the optimistic British Enlightenment, especially Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. We are endowed with a moral sense. We want not only to be loved, but to be lovely. We may have differences along race, class, and gender lines, but deep down we are much alike, longing to lead a life that transcends the individual sel
  • Himmelfarb didn’t fear immorality so much as demoralization, the sense that our age has lost a moral vocabulary and with it the ability to think subtly about moral matters. A great deal, she wrote, is lost when a society stops aiming for civic virtue and is content to aim merely for civility.
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