Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged ballots

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
clairemann

A $15 Minimum Wage Could Be Coming Soon To Florida | HuffPost - 0 views

www.huffpost.com/...ion_n_5f9c3644c5b6f4683cee1509

shared by clairemann on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Low-wage workers in Florida’s sprawling service economy may soon find themselves on the path to a $15 minimum wage, thanks to one of the most far-reaching referendums in the country this year.
  • Amendment 2: a proposal to raise the statewide wage floor from its current $8.56 an hour to $15 an hour by 2026.
  • state’s food and hospitality industries, which say they can’t sustain the higher labor costs on top of lost revenue due to the coronavirus pandemic.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • If passed, the amendment would give Florida the highest minimum wage among Southern states and impact an estimated 2.5 million workers. 
  • There are seven other states already on track to hit $15 in the coming years, but those tend to be blue states with liberal labor policies.
  • Some proponents also say passage of Amendment 2 could help the push for a $15 wage floor at the federal level, especially if Democrats win the White House and control of the Senate.
  • “If $15 passes in Florida, it will send a clear message to the incoming [Biden] administration that raising the minimum wage is not just good policy but also good politics.”
  • But despite the general popularity of minimum wage hikes ― most have sailed through on the ballot in recent years ― the Florida proposal is by no means a sure thing.
  • “I think we feel good, but we need to turn out every single voter in the state,” said Stephanie Porta, the executive director of Organize Florida, a progressive group that supports the referendum.
  • Florida voters last approved a minimum wage increase in 2004, when they voted to raise it to $6.15 per hour. The current minimum wage is $8.56 thanks to inflation adjustments included in the 2004 referendum, but progressive advocates say that still falls far short of a living wage,
  • A single adult with no children would need to make more than $12 an hour to earn a living wage in Florida, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  • The increase to $15 would boost pay for about a quarter of the state’s workforce, according to the Florida Policy Institute, a progressive think tank.
  • A third of Florida’s female workers would see a raise; 38% of women of color in the workforce would receive a pay increase, the institute says. 
  • Florida has a $3.02-per-hour “tip credit” for business owners. It’s what allows Johnson to pay a server $5.54 before gratuities, rather than $8.56, under the current minimum wage. That $3.02 credit would stay under the new law, but it would have less impact over time.
  • “Any restaurant that’s on the bubble right now, especially with COVID ― when they have those additional costs, I don’t know if they make it through,”
  • Much of the financial backing for the amendment has come from the law firm of John Morgan, a high-profile Florida attorney who represents workers in class-action lawsuits.
  • a 2005 study that found “no empirical evidence” that Florida’s last, more modest minimum wage increase caused employers to lay off workers.
  • The COVID-19 pandemic has limited in-person organizing efforts, especially in the lower-income communities that would benefit most from the wage increase, and progressive groups and the Florida Democratic Party fell short of their voter registration targets.
  • We need to turn out every single voter in the state. Stephanie Porta, executive director of Organize Florida
  • Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has endorsed raising the federal minimum wage to $15, and Democrats and progressives in Florida hope that support for Amendment 2 could boost his chances of defeating President Donald Trump in the crucial swing state.
  • In 2018, Florida voters said yes on a referendum to restore voting rights to people with felony convictions, a major progressive priority, even as Republicans Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott won narrow victories in the state’s gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races, respectively. 
  • “I’m sure the legislature will try to screw with it,” Porta said. “They always try to go against the people ― that is their M.O. But we will be ready to fight.”
martinelligi

With Lil Wayne, Ice Cube And 50 Cent, Trump Makes Final Push For Black Voters : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...es-final-push-for-black-voters

trump voters Election

shared by martinelligi on 31 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Before President Trump left Miami on Thursday for another long day on the campaign trail, he had a private meeting with a supporter with a big following among a group of voters his campaign has been courting all year: rapper Lil Wayne.
  • The Trump campaign, delighted with the endorsement, promoted it to its outreach list for Black voters. The effort is still a very long shot. Black voters are a reliable source of strong support for Democratic presidential candidates, and no rapper is going to make a big dent in that.
  • The campaign spent $20 million on radio and TV ads — including a Super Bowl spot — as well as door-knocking operations and opening 17 field offices in Black neighborhoods in swing stat
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The website FiveThirtyEight.com did an analysis earlier this month that found that Trump was doing better with younger African Americans. His support was at 21 percent in 2020 with voters under 44, up from 10 percent in 2016. More recent surveys have since showed Trump's support among young Black voters dropping, but he remains slightly more popular with them than with older Black voters.
  • "Older individuals are willing not only to turn out, but they're willing to put up with the crap that is required for turning out."
  • But Johnson said an increase of a few points would not represent a historic level of support for a Republican president. The only Republicans in recent decades who did worse than Trump with Black voters were on the ballot against the first Black president.
martinelligi

What To Expect On Election Day And The Days After : Consider This from NPR : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...tion-day-and-in-the-days-after

politics trump biden election

shared by martinelligi on 31 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • There is no reason to expect we will know the result of the Presidential election on Tuesday night.
  • Part of the reason: a few key states will have millions of mail-in ballots to count after in-person voting has concluded. The Supreme Court ruled this week to allow that counting to proceed in two key states, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Election lawyer Ben Ginsberg has been following those cases.
clairemann

Yes, Texas Could Go Blue This Year | Time - 0 views

time.com/...texas-blue-biden-trump

US politics election trump gop Texas

shared by clairemann on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The outcome of the 2020 Presidential election is more uncertain than any in modern history—and nowhere is that uncertainty on better display than in Texas, a state that could very well go Democratic for the first time since 1976.
  • “If I were to guess, I would say 10-15% who vote in a Republican primary aren’t true Republicans,” Ryan says, adding that the percentage might be a notch higher for Democratic primaries, particularly in more partisan areas where the primary is functionally the general election.
  • (to quote Frank Drake, the founder of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, that’s “a wonderful way to organize our ignorance).
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • The polls in Texas are all over the place, ranging from a 7-point margin for U.S. President Donald Trump, who won the state by 9 percentage points in 2016, to a four-point Biden victory.
  • Turnout in Texas this year will greatly surpass any previous cycle. In 2016, just shy of 9 million Texans cast a vote for president, amounting to 51.4% of the voting-eligible population, according to the United States Election Project.
  • Many more voters are expected to turn out on Nov. 3. A recent University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll found that 75% of respondents consider it safe to vote in person on Election Day, though there’s a rift along party lines: 57% of Democrats said they felt safe compared to 91% of Republicans, suggesting Trump voters are more likely than Biden voters to vote in person.
  • “significantly different electorate than in 2016,” says Joshua Blank, research director at the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. Nationwide, the conventional wisdom that higher turnout benefits Democrats does not hold up when one considers President Trump’s core base
  • As of Wednesday, early voters with a history of voting in a Republican primary outpaced those who voted in Democratic primaries by 6 points, though the largest percentage voted in neither.
  • More to the point, those on the ballot for state races, Blank says, form an organic field operation across the state, armed with their own volunteers and knowledge of their districts that a statewide or national campaign could never generate from scratch.
  • “They’re only afraid of extremely high turnout.” Meanwhile, he says that Democrats have long held that Texas “is not a Republican state. It is a non-voting state.”
  • This is a particularly common misconception regarding eligible Hispanic voters, plenty of whom, polling by Blank’s organization and others suggests, are generally supportive of the Republican Party.
  • There is a strong possibility that Democrats will retake the Texas House of Representatives this year, which Republicans have controlled—along with the Texas Senate and governorship—since 2003.
  • the Texas Democratic Party has widened the front in terms of slating better candidates. For more than a decade, Blank says, the Party was “catch as catch can” in terms of finding viable candidates for district races, a process that restarted every cycle, with many seats going uncontested
  • “If you’re a candidate who loses narrowly but runs again, it gives you a lot more parity with the Republican incumbent,” Blank says.
  • Arguably the more relevant question is: how many Texans who otherwise would not have voted are excited about local candidates, and are thus more likely to vote and perhaps boost Biden?
  • both shifted Texas from leaning or tilting Republican to a genuine toss up, while the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato places it in “Leans Republican,” just one category to the right.
  • Whether that’s enough to make a difference is, of course, ultimately unknowable before the election. When I asked Sabato why he was keeping Texas in the “Leans Republican” category, he said that “I’ve been hearing every four years that Texas is going Democratic, and it never happens.”
  • Austin Q. Sarker-Young on 31 Oct 20
     
    Dear Claire, While I appreciate the optimism, I think the Democratic Party has cried victory too early this year, and claiming that Texas could go blue simply reinforces this. The Democratic Party seems to have gone a little too far on the offensive, much in the same way as they did in 2016, and this could have disastrous results for the cause of Joe Biden. As for your evidence, I do not trust Larry Sabato, since his prediction given right before election night in 2016 was WILDLY wrong (Clinton 322 - Trump 216). In that prediction, linked here (https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/our-final-2016-picks/), he predicted that Wisconsin was a "Likely D" and said "Lean D" for the myriad swing states that we all know went for Trump that year. When it comes to Sabato's 2020 predictions, linked here (https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/2020-president/), a great many of the states he marks as toss-up or lean Democrat went Republican in 2016. We also all remember the "Blue Wave" disappointment of 2018 that took the House but failed to take the Senate. Considering all this, I have reason to be quite skeptical of what pollsters say. And my opinion? I cannot have one yet. As of today, and probably even at the end of election day on November 3, the final winner of the election is unknowable.
cartergramiak

Opinion | Trump, the Absolute Worst Loser - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-2020-election.html

US trump gop culture

shared by cartergramiak on 16 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump lost the election. He knows it. But he won’t admit it.
  • He still hopes and believes that there is a way for the courts to erase enough votes to tip the election in his favor. This will not happen.
  • In the end, Trump hopes to push his case to the Supreme Court, where he has seated three conservative justices. That is also not likely to be a winning strategy.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • On Sunday, in reference to Biden, he tweeted: “He only won in the eyes of the FAKE NEWS MEDIA. I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go. This was a RIGGED ELECTION!”
  • But Trump has gone further, appearing to attack the voters who cast their ballots for Biden. He retweeted a post by a Richmond, Va. television station that read: “Virginia Wesleyan University business professor and dean Paul Ewell wrote that anyone who chose Biden for president is ‘ignorant, anti-American and anti-Christian.’ ” To that tweet, Trump appended, “Progress!”
  • Donald Trump will no longer be president on Jan. 20. That is a hard fact, an unmovable date. Biden will be sworn in and will become the president.
  • But the problem here is bigger than Trump. Republicans in Congress are indulging Trump’s delusion, which has the effect of granting his derangement credence in the eyes of his loyal followers.
  • After Republicans lost in 2012, they produced an autopsy report designed to grow the party. With Trump, they threw that out and doubled down on being the party of white grievance. This year’s election and Trump’s reaction to it is not likely to produce an autopsy but induce a séance.
  • The Republican Party is dead. Trump killed it. MAGA is dancing on the grave. The way to remember that party is in spirit.
yehbru

Joe Biden and the History of 'Hidden Earpiece' Conspiracy Theories - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...piece-conspiracy-theories.html

politics US trump biden

shared by yehbru on 30 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • rumors began spreading among right-wing influencers and Trump campaign surrogates that Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee, was being outfitted with a hidden earpiece in order to receive surreptitious help during the debate
  • If Joe Biden isn’t hiding anything,” wrote the conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Twitter, “why won’t he consent to a third party checking for an earpiece before tonight’s debate?”
  • “Secret earpiece” rumors are nothing new. In fact, they’ve become something of a fixture during presidential debate cycles, and part of a baseless conspiracy theory that tends to rear its head every four years.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • In 2008, rumors again circulated online that a candidate was being fed answers during a debate. Ann Althouse, a law professor and conservative blogger, wrote that close-up TV stills showed that Barack Obama “was wearing an earpiece” during a debate with John McCain.
  • Four years later, during the 2004 presidential debates, rumors circulated among left-wing bloggers that George W. Bush was getting help from a surreptitiously placed earpiece.
  • 2000, when Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio host, accused then-candidate Al Gore of getting answers fed to him through an earpiece during a “Meet the Press” appearance.
  • In 2016, the rumor appeared again, this time attached to Hillary Clinton, who was accused by right-wing websites of wearing a secret earpiece. (One such story, which appeared on the conspiracy theory website Infowars, was shared by Donald Trump Jr. and other pro-Trump influencers.)
  • Foreign politicians, including Emmanuel Macron of France, have also been baselessly accused of wearing earpieces during debates.
  • But the idea of a hidden helper giving one side an unfair debate advantage has proved seductive to campaign operatives trying to explain away a lopsided debate, or sow doubts about cheating on the other side.
saberal

Opinion | Trump Sent a Warning. Let's Take It Seriously. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-election-fraud-2020.html

politics US trump crisis

shared by saberal on 30 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Our democracy is in terrible danger — more than since the Civil War, more than after Pearl Harbor, more than during the Cuban missile crisis.
  • The president has told us in innumerable ways that either he will be re-elected or he will delegitimize the vote by claiming that all mail-in ballots
  • But when extremists go all the way, and moderates just go away, the system can break. And it will break. I saw it happen.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • And that is why the only choice in this election is Joe Biden. The Democrats are not blameless when it comes to playing politics, but there is no equivalence to the Republicans. The Democratic Party sorted through all the choices, and, led by older Black men and women in South Carolina, rejected the Democratic socialist candidate and said they wanted a moderate unifier named Joe Biden.
  • They have fallen in line lock step behind a man who is the most dishonest, dangerous, meanspirited, divisive and corrupt person to ever occupy the Oval Office. And they know it. Four more years of Trump’s divide and rule will destroy our institutions and rip the country apart.
  • To get back a semblance of unity and sanity, Biden has to win. And that is why I have only one answer to every question now: Vote for Biden
xaviermcelderry

Tuesday's Debate Made Clear the Gravest Threat to the Election: The President Himself -... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-debate-election.html

shared by xaviermcelderry on 01 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Mr. Trump’s unwillingness to say he would abide by the result, and his disinformation campaign about the integrity of the American electoral system,
  • since 1788 (a messy first experiment, which stretched just under a month), through civil wars, world wars and natural disasters now faces the gravest challenge in its history to the way it chooses a leader and peacefully transfers power.
  • “We have never heard a president deliberately cast doubt on an election’s integrity this way a month before it happened,” said Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian and the author of “Presidents of War.” “This is the kind of thing we have preached to other countries that they should not do. It reeks of autocracy, not democracy.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Mr. Trump himself has provided no evidence to back up his assertions, apart from citing a handful of Pennsylvania ballots discarded in a dumpster — and immediately tracked down, and counted, by election officials.
  • Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. have been issuing warnings, as recently as 24 hours before the debate, about the dangers of disinformation in what could be a tumultuous time after the election.
cartergramiak

Trump's Legal Blitz Isn't Contesting Enough Votes to Win - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...-targeting-enough-votes-to-win

trump gop Policy

shared by cartergramiak on 11 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump’s hopes of reversing the outcome of the 2020 election in the courts are running into the reality that the numbers just aren’t there in terms of votes he can dispute -- at least not yet.
  • At a Saturday press conference held just as the major networks were calling the election for Biden, Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani hinted that hundreds of thousands of votes might be overturned by a federal civil rights lawsuit he planned to file in Pennsylvania alleging that Republican observers were excluded from areas where mail-in ballots were tabulated or kept too far away to watch in a meaningful way.
  • “A court would not set aside the results of an election, or particular votes, based on violations of laws concerning observation of the counting process,” said Michael Morley, an assistant law professor at Florida State University who’s worked on election emergencies and post-election litigation. “Courts will not disturb election results based on unproven generalized claims about the theoretical possibility of fraud.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Monday said the country should wait to decide on the election winner for Trump to pursue his challenges, comparing them to the 2000 election dispute decided by the Supreme Court giving George W. Bush the victory over Al Gore.
  • “This assumes that the problem is evidentiary,” Levitt said. “If the problem is that there really hasn’t been widespread voter fraud, there’s no evidence to present.”
katherineharron

Biden carries Arizona, flipping a longtime Republican stronghold - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

election

shared by katherineharron on 13 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • For just the second time in more than seven decades, a Democrat will carry Arizona in a presidential election, a monumental shift for a state that was once a Republican stronghold.
  • CNN projected on Thursday that President-elect Joe Biden will carry Arizona,
  • Biden's win in the state that propelled Republican leaders like Barry Goldwater and John McCain to national prominence could foretell problems for the party going forward.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Three key shifts in the state helped Democrats this year: a growing Latino population that leans Democratic, a surge in voters moving to Arizona from more liberal states like California and Illinois, and the way suburban voters have starkly broken with a Republican Party led by someone like Trump.
  • Arizona, by going blue, is moving closer to its neighbor to the northwest -- Nevada, where Democrats have taken control of almost all aspects of government
  • Maricopa is the fastest-growing county in the country, transforming over the last two decades into a sprawling mass of metropolitan hubs, sun-scorched planned communities and bustling strip malls.
  • "Maricopa County won the state of Arizona for Mark Kelly and Joe Biden," said Steven Slugocki, chair of Maricopa County's Democrats. "Here in Maricopa, we committed our resources to contact voters of color, women and traditionally underrepresented groups throughout the state. Our strategy proved to be effective."
  • Biden is just the second Democrat to win Arizona since 1948, when Harry Truman won. Bill Clinton narrowly won the state in 1996, but Arizona moved further right in the next two decades, electing hard-line immigration proponents like Gov. Jan Brewer and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and passing laws like SB 1070, a controversial state law that required officers to make immigration checks while enforcing other laws if "reasonable suspicion" of illegal immigration exists.
  • The Democratic victory builds on the work by grassroots organizations on the ground in Arizona, many of which focused on the state's growing Latino population by uniting around the opposition to Arpaio and the immigration crackdown
  • "This year was a victory for the decade-plus of work in this state," said Laura Dent, the executive director of Chispa Arizona
  • "It has been a decade-plus of building and the sustained work of organizing between electoral cycles have been critical."
  • Dent said the organizing around SB 1070 was a "catalyst" for these groups to unify around something and "build that collective power" on display this year
  • "I thought by 2024, Arizona would be for real a swing state," said Yasser Sanchez, an immigration lawyer who volunteered for Republican Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign and worked for McCain's 2016 reelection to the Senate before rejecting a Trump-led Republican Party and helping organize Latino voters for Biden. "Every time I heard it would be before, I thought that was wishful thinking."
  • Looming over Biden's victory is the legacy of McCain, an Arizona stalwart whose "maverick" conservatism carried a coalition of Democrats, independents and Republicans for years in the state.
  • Trump to double down on his mocking attacks of the Republican senator, even after he died in 2018. This, along with comments Trump reportedly made about military members and veterans, spurred McCain's widow, Cindy McCain, to back Biden, an endorsement that was front page news in the state.
  • But Arizona was considered so reliably red in 2014 that a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California-Los Angeles dubbed Mesa -- a sprawling suburb east of Phoenix -- the "most conservative American city."
  • "Ten years ago, if you wanted to be politically relevant and if you wanted your vote to have an impact, you were foolish to be registered as a Democrat because they failed to field a candidate for some offices," said Mesa Mayor John Giles, a registered Republican in a nonpartisan job. "And even then, it was just volunteering to get killed in the general by the Republican."
  • "I am hoping to change the state blue," Schaefer said after casting her ballot. "Believe me, I have tried to turn everybody that I can possibly turn."
  • "Trump is dangerous for the country," Hudock said after voting days before the election. "In the last four years, Republicans have shown their true colors. ... I just wish there was a centrist party.
  • That quickly changed as the virus spread throughout the state, with more than 160,000 cases and 3,600 people dying in Maricopa County alone.
  • Biden's win in Arizona was not for a lack of trying on Trump's part. The President held seven events in the state in 2020. Biden held one event after the Democratic National Convention over the summer, a bus tour around Maricopa in October.
rerobinson03

Hunter Biden Discloses He Is Focus of Federal Tax Inquiry - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...r-biden-tax-investigation.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 10 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • The investigation is being led by the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware. It was opened in late 2018 and has included inquiries into potential criminal violations of tax and money laundering laws, according to people familiar with the inquiry.
  • The inquiry was focused on Hunter Biden and some of his associates, not the president-elect or other family members, two people familiar with it said.
  • The timing means it is possible that one of the last decisions of the Trump Justice Department could be about a potential case against the son of the incoming president, if investigators uncover enough evidence to go forward.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • t also means that Mr. Biden will most likely come into office as the Justice Department is actively investigating his son, a case his political opponents are certain to seize on to try to damage the early days of his presidency.
  • The investigation could also complicate Mr. Biden’s efforts to instill public confidence that the department can operate independent of the personal interests of the president after it became deeply politicized under President Trump. L
  • “It’s not my Justice Department. It’s the people’s Justice Department.”
  • Mr. Biden has long been an intense target of Mr. Trump and his allies over the range of business ventures he pursued around the world during his father’s time as vice president and beyond
  • Mr. Biden and a group of partners — including his uncle James Biden, the president-elect’s brother — were also involved in negotiations about a joint venture with a Chinese energy and finance company called CEFC China Energy in 2017, documents provided by a jilted former business partner show.
  • The Republican report, which was released weeks before Election Day in an apparent effort to damage the Biden campaign, found no evidence of improper influence or wrongdoing by the former vice president.
  • Efforts by Mr. Trump and his supporters to damage Mr. Biden’s presidential campaign took on new urgency in October after The New York Post published reports based on files from a laptop that appeared to have belonged to Hunter Biden. The Post, which obtained materials from Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, reported that the laptop had been seized by the F.B.I.
  • The Biden team has rejected some of the claims made in the Post articles, but has not disputed the authenticity of the files upon which they were based.
  • Mr. Trump and his allies openly pressed the Justice Department to disclose negative information about Mr. Biden ahead of the election, but investigators did not make overt moves that would have exposed the investigation before the ballots were cast.
saberal

17 Republican Attorneys General Back Trump in Far-Fetched Election Lawsuit - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...xas-supreme-court-lawsuit.html

politics US Trump

shared by saberal on 10 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • The move is an attempt to bolster a baseless legal effort by Texas that seeks to delay certification of the presidential electors in four battleground states that Mr. Trump lost.
  • and have largely dismissed it as a publicity stunt.Late Tuesday, the president asked Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican, if he would be willing to argue the case, according to a person familiar with their conversation. Mr. Cruz agreed, this person said. And the president has filed a motion with the court to intervene, which would make him a party to the case.
  • The willingness of so many Republican politicians to publicly involve themselves in a legal campaign to invalidate the ballots of millions of Americans shows how singular a figure Mr. Trump remains in the G.O.P. That these political allies are also elected officials whose jobs involve enforcing laws, including voting rights, underscores the extraordinary nature of the brief to the court
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Mr. Trump has repeatedly tried to pressure Republican state legislators and elections officials — who have the most influence over declaring the formal winner and allocating electoral votes — to deny victory to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. They have largely resisted him.
  • The 17 states behind the amicus brief represent a majority of the 25 Republican attorneys general across the country, and include Alabama, Florida, Kansas, Missouri, Louisiana and South Dakota. Notably, the two Republican attorneys general in the battleground states that Mr. Trump lost — Arizona and Georgia — are not part of the brief.
  • Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican and former attorney general of the state, seemed baffled by the legal maneuver, calling it “extraordinary” and “unprecedented.”“I’ve never seen something like this, so I don’t know what the Supreme Court’s going to do,” he said in Washington on Wednesday.
saberal

Hunter Biden Discloses He Is Focus of Federal Tax Inquiry - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...r-biden-tax-investigation.html

politics US Trump

shared by saberal on 10 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • The Justice Department is investigating the tax affairs of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son Hunter, he disclosed in a statement on Wednesday.
  • The investigation is being led by the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware. It was opened in late 2018 and has included inquiries into potential criminal violations of tax and money laundering laws, according to people familiar with the inquiry.
  • The inquiry was focused on Hunter Biden and some of his associates, not the president-elect or other family members, two people familiar with it said.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • It also means that Mr. Biden will most likely come into office as the Justice Department is actively investigating his son,
  • The tax issues came to the attention of F.B.I. agents after they opened the money laundering investigation into Hunter Biden’s financial affairs in late 2018, under the attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions, according to several people familiar with the inquiry.
  • “We’ve got to get the attorney general to act,” Mr. Trump said
  • The next year, the I.R.S. issued a lien against the pair, who were by then divorced, for $112,805 in unpaid taxes from 2015. Those taxes appear to have been paid off by March of this year, when the lien was released.
  • Mr. Trump’s impeachment centered on allegations that he abused his powers over American foreign policy in part to damage the Biden campaign by pressuring the government of Ukraine to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden’s dealings there.
  • Efforts by Mr. Trump and his supporters to damage Mr. Biden’s presidential campaign took on new urgency in October after The New York Post published reports based on files from a laptop that appeared to have belonged to Hunter Biden.
  • By early 2017, Mr. Biden and his first wife, Kathleen, who were then estranged, owed $313,970 in taxes, and had “maxed-out credit-card debt” and “double mortgages on both real properties they own,” according to a filing she submitted in their divorce.
  • The Biden team has rejected some of the claims made in the Post articles, but has not disputed the authenticity of the files upon which they were based.
  • Mr. Trump and his allies openly pressed the Justice Department to disclose negative information about Mr. Biden ahead of the election, but investigators did not make overt moves that would have exposed the investigation before the ballots were cast.
mattrenz16

Electoral College Voter: Long an Honor, and Now Also a Headache - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...toral-college-biden-trump.html

shared by mattrenz16 on 14 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • In Michigan, Democratic electors have been promised police escorts from their cars into the State Capitol, where on Monday they will formally vote for Joseph R. Biden Jr.
  • Even in Delaware, the tiny, deeply Democratic home state of the president-elect, officials relocated their ceremony to a college gymnasium, a site considered to have better security and public health controls.
  • Despite its procedural nature, the role has long been considered an honor, bestowed as a way to recognize political stature or civic service.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The Supreme Court on Friday rejected a desperate 11th-hour effort by Trump allies to change the outcome of the election, the latest in a string of stinging legal defeats.
  • From protests outside the voting sites to livestreamed broadcasts of the activities inside the rooms, electors, state officials and party leaders are bracing for an extraordinary onslaught of attention.
  • Even as the electors prepared to vote on Monday, Mr. Trump on Sunday railed on Twitter against the “MOST CORRUPT ELECTION IN U.S. HISTORY” and suggested that swing states could not certify “without committing a severely punishable crime” — further raising concerns about electors’ personal security.
  • A broader effort to persuade Republican-controlled state legislatures to swap out Democratic electors for a slate loyal to Mr. Trump has also failed.
  • Even some Republicans who are more willing to acknowledge electoral reality seem unable to completely give up hope.
  • For Democrats, the Electoral College vote will be the final affirmation of defeat for a president they believe has undermined the foundation of the country’s political system.
  • Enshrined in the Constitution, electors are called into action weeks after an election is over.
  • As a result, more than half of the states plan to livestream their events, to provide transparency and pre-empt some of the conspiratorial thinking that many state officials anticipate will follow their events.
  • After the electors cast their ballots, the votes are counted and the electors sign certificates showing the results.
  • Still, none of that, he said, overshadowed how “exhilarating and humbling” it is to be one of the 16 Democratic electors, the first in Georgia in nearly three decades, the last time a Democrat won the state.
  • A Wisconsin elector, State Representative Shelia Stubbs of Madison, said she cried with joy after being named an elector this year.
Javier E

Review of Robert Putnam's "The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How... - 0 views

hnn.us/178481

upswing history progressive racial justice culture

shared by Javier E on 15 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Putnam refers to Upswing as a “an exercise in macrohistory,” which “inevitably involves the simplification of complex stories.” And a “simplification” it may be, but then so too are almost all history books, for they attempt to describe or analyze in mere fallible words an immensely complex reality.
  • Putnam begins Chapter 1 by examining what Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the 1830s about the American ability to balance individual liberty with the common good. He then looks ahead to the decades of the post-Civil War Gilded Age, when the USA “was startlingly similar to today. Inequality, political polarization, social dislocation, and cultural narcissism prevailed—all accompanied, as they are now, by unprecedented technological advances, prosperity, and material well-being.”
  • Figure 1.1, the first of many charts, is labeled “Economic, Political, Social, And Cultural Trends, 1895–2015.” Each of the trend lines indicates if the country was moving toward 1) “greater or lesser economic equality?” 2) “greater or lesser comity and compromise in politics?” 3) “greater or lesser cohesion in social life?” 4) “greater or lesser altruism in cultural values?” Answers to all four: 1890s to 1960s = “greater”; 1970s to present = “lesser.”
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Putnam concludes that during the Progressive Era (1890-c. 1910) “the institutional, social, and cultural seeds” of what he labels the “Great Convergence” were sown. Out of those seeds emerged more than six decades (up until the late 1960s) of “imperfect but steady upward progress toward greater economic equality, more cooperation in the public square, a stronger social fabric, and a growing culture of solidarity,”
  • “then suddenly and unexpectedly . . . the Great Convergence was reversed in a dramatic U-turn, to be followed by a half century of Great Divergence.”
  • the USA “entered the Sixties in an increasingly ‘we’ mode—with communes, shared values, and accelerating efforts toward racial and economic equality—and we left the Sixties in an increasingly ‘I’ mode—focused on ‘rights,’ culture wars, and what would be almost instantly dubbed the ‘Me Decade’ of the 1970s.”
  • Each Upswing chapter from 2 through 5 is devoted to a separate field--economics, politics, society, or culture. And each deals with the trends from the 1890s, when the Progressive Age began, up to the present era.
  • the “we” of the Great Convergence was often meant for white males more than for all Americans.
  • Although Putnam discusses many historical explanations for the transformation beginning in the late 1960s, like the backlash against the gains of African Americans and women, he is wise enough to realize that major historical occurrences, like the transformation considered here, almost always have innumerable causes.
  • It was then, in reaction to a “Gilded Age” similar to our own, that the turn toward a more cooperative, less self-centered society began
  • describes the Progressivism of the that time as a diverse movement “to limit the socially destructive effects of morally unhindered capitalism, to extract from those [capitalist] markets the tasks they had demonstrably bungled
  • “Communitarian sentiment,” he declares, “was at the heart of the Progressive mood. Teddy Roosevelt, Jane Addams, and other progressives were explicit in rejecting ‘individualism,’
  • The 1920s, with its three consecutive Republican presidents, slowed down the growth of communitarianism.
  • with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and World War II, it renewed itself until it began in the late 1960s to reverse itself
  • some of the accomplishments of the Progressive Era: “the secret ballot; the direct primary system; the popular election of senators; . . . women’s suffrage; new forms of municipal administration; the federal income tax; the Federal Reserve System; protective labor laws; the minimum wage; antitrust statutes; protected public lands and resources; food and drug regulation; sanitation infrastructure; public utilities;
  • a vast proliferation of civic and voluntary societies; new advocacy organizations such as labor unions, the ACLU, and the NAACP; the widespread provision of free public high schools; and even the spread of public parks, libraries, and playgrounds all owe their origins to the efforts of a diverse array of Progressive reformers.”
  • “Progressivism . . . was not confined to the Progressive Party but affected in a striking way all the major and minor parties and the whole tone of political life. . . . It was a rather widespread and remarkably good-natured effort of the greater part of society to achieve some not very clearly specified self-reformation.”
  • To make his point that Progressivism was primarily a “bottom up” movement involving countless citizen reformers, he provides brief biographical sketches on some of them such as Frances Perkins (b. 1880), Paul Harris (b. 1868), Ida B. Wells (b. 1862), and Tom Johnson (b. 1854).
  • Generalizing about the Progressive movement, Putnam writes it “was, first and foremost, a moral awakening.”
  • Aided in part by the religious thinking of the Social Gospel thinkers, “Americans from all walks of life began to repudiate the self-centered, hyper-individualist creed of the Gilded Age.”
  • The movement was also pragmatic, not ideological, for “true innovation requires openness to experimentation that is not premised upon ideological beliefs.
  • Putnam believes that Progressives came to realize that “to succeed they would have to compromise—to find a way to put private property, personal liberty, and economic growth on more equal footing with communitarian ideals
  • These lessons regarding moral urgency, pragmatism, and compromise are ones that Putnam thinks modern reformers need to apply.
  • he does not yet “see a truly nonpartisan movement” bringing “issue-specific efforts together in a compelling citizen-driven call for large-scale reform.” Nor does he see “a broader vision for the future of America.”
  • we should, Putnam insists, learn from what they did wrong. Most significantly, they failed to make the “we” they stressed inclusive enough, paying insufficient attention to gender and racial discrimination.
  • “The question we face today is not whether we can or should turn back the tide of history, but whether we can resurrect the earlier communitarian virtues in a way that does not reverse the progress we’ve made in terms of individual liberties. Both values are American, and we require a balance and integration of both.”
Javier E

The Myth of the Golden Years - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...619656

myth golden age democracy populism nostalgia realism politics crisis history culture

shared by Javier E on 05 Aug 21 - No Cached
  • The tale of the lotus-eating elites destroying the honest and authentic life of the hardworking commoners is a hell of a story, and it is rooted in the reality of actual human suffering. But as a criticism of liberal democracy, it is not new and it is not true.
  • When was this fortunate time when people back in our respective hometowns felt that the system was fair, or that times were good, or that the “elites”—back in the ’60s and ’70s, old Protestant white males who were practically selected before birth to attend fine universities—were somehow invested in the success of the lower classes?
  • Not many Americans want to think very much about what it would actually mean in social or economic terms to go back and live in those Kodachrome moments in their minds.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Although we are all ruled by confirmation bias, I am hard-pressed to recall when the adults around me as a boy in Chicopee were talking about the healthy economy and the promise of opportunity. What I recall, mostly, is anxiety among our neighbors about jobs, even among the dwindling number of union households. Health care was cheaper, but health was more fragile. When my father had a mild heart attack in 1974, he was confined to the hospital for weeks instead of a few days, and his company allowed him to retire as “disabled.” Cancer was so terrifying that the word was not spoken aloud or mentioned in obituaries. Many elder-care facilities were Dickensian warehouses for the old.
  • The world of 40 or 50 years ago is not a better time in my memory; it was an era that seemed, at least to me, crowded mostly with dead ends and very few avenues out.
  • Today, my hometown is doing considerably better. The population loss that began in 1970 was halted some 30 years ago, and new businesses took over many of the abandoned lots. But the empty hull of the Uniroyal is still a reminder that the “forgotten towns” were forgotten a lot earlier than the dawn of the 21st century.
  • And yet this reality never seems to matter in political debates. Whether economic times are good or bad, this lament for the old days of factories and mills—jobs that were long gone before some voters were old enough to cast a ballot or were even born—never changes.
  • This obsession with decline is one of the myths surrounding postindustrial democracy that will not die.
  • To recognize honestly and with compassion that liberal democracies—and the people who run them—can produce awful outcomes is not an admission that democracy is hopeless; rather, it is the societal self-examination that is among the greatest duties of a citizen and a sign of virtue itself in a democratic society.
  • The reality of suffering, however, is the cudgel used by populists and illiberal elements of both the right and the left to attack the foundations of modern democracy. Liberalism thrives in the center, between the extremes, where negotiation and compromise and trust must rule the day in order to produce consensus and solutions. But the center—a place that discourages performative anger and drama, and instead is filled with the boring necessities of deliberation and trust—is difficult ground to defend when the pain of other human beings is mobilized in the battle for power.
  • What we should have learned from the experience of the last 50 years is not that democracy has failed but that voters and their elected representatives have joined forces in a game of rising expectations, immediate gratification, and very little accountability from anyone at any level. Unfortunately, to borrow from Yeats, the “worst are full of passionate intensity” as they try to convince their fellow citizens that the existence of suffering invalidates the liberal democratic ideal. This is an immense and cynical lie.
  • For anything to work at almost any level of government, citizens first have to accept that they live in a community. They have to begin with an assumption that finding common ground for solutions, however imperfect they may be, is possible. They have to believe that other human beings are sensible and amenable to goodwill. And they need to be honest about the past, and to dispense with false nostalgia.
Javier E

The threat from the illiberal left | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...threat-from-the-illiberal-left

politics liberalism illiberal progressive populism Culture crisis threat

shared by Javier E on 03 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • SOMETHING HAS gone very wrong with Western liberalism. At its heart classical liberalism believes human progress is brought about by debate and reform. The best way to navigate disruptive change in a divided world is through a universal commitment to individual dignity, open markets and limited government.
  • Over the past 250 years classical liberalism has helped bring about unparalleled progress.
  • But it is undergoing a severe test, just as it did a century ago when the cancers of Bolshevism and fascism began to eat away at liberal Europe from within. It is time for liberals to understand what they are up against and to fight back.
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • By contrast the illiberal left put their own power at the centre of things, because they are sure real progress is possible only after they have first seen to it that racial, sexual and other hierarchies are dismantled.
  • The attack from the left is harder to grasp, partly because in America “liberal” has come to include an illiberal left
  • a new style of politics has recently spread from elite university departments. As young graduates have taken jobs in the upmarket media and in politics, business and education, they have brought with them a horror of feeling “unsafe” and an agenda obsessed with a narrow vision of obtaining justice for oppressed identity groups. They have also brought along tactics to enforce ideological purity, by no-platforming their enemies and cancelling allies who have transgressed—with echoes of the confessional state that dominated Europe before classical liberalism took root at the end of the 18th century.
  • Superficially, the illiberal left and classical liberals like The Economist want many of the same things. Both believe that people should be able to flourish whatever their sexuality or race. They share a suspicion of authority and entrenched interests. They believe in the desirability of change.
  • However, classical liberals and illiberal progressives could hardly disagree more over how to bring these things about
  • For classical liberals, the precise direction of progress is unknowable. It must be spontaneous and from the bottom up—and it depends on the separation of powers, so that nobody nor any group is able to exert lasting control.
  • The most dangerous threat in liberalism’s spiritual home comes from the Trumpian right. Populists denigrate liberal edifices such as science and the rule of law as façades for a plot by the deep state against the people. They subordinate facts and reason to tribal emotion. The enduring falsehood that the presidential election in 2020 was stolen points to where such impulses lead. If people cannot settle their differences using debate and trusted institutions, they resort to force.
  • Classical liberals believe in setting fair initial conditions and letting events unfold through competition—by, say, eliminating corporate monopolies, opening up guilds, radically reforming taxation and making education accessible with vouchers.
  • Progressives see laissez-faire as a pretence which powerful vested interests use to preserve the status quo. Instead, they believe in imposing “equity”—the outcomes that they deem just. For example, Ibram X. Kendi, a scholar-activist, asserts that any colour-blind policy, including the standardised testing of children, is racist if it ends up increasing average racial differentials, however enlightened the intentions behind it.
  • Mr Kendi is right to want an anti-racist policy that works. But his blunderbuss approach risks denying some disadvantaged children the help they need and others the chance to realise their talents.
  • Besides, society has many goals. People worry about economic growth, welfare, crime, the environment and national security, and policies cannot be judged simply on whether they advance a particular group.
  • Classical liberals use debate to hash out priorities and trade-offs in a pluralist society and then use elections to settle on a course.
  • It also involves making an example of supposed reactionaries, by punishing them when they say something that is taken to make someone who is less privileged feel unsafe. The results are calling-out, cancellation and no-platforming.
  • Progressives of the old school remain champions of free speech. But illiberal progressives think that equity requires the field to be tilted against those who are privileged and reactionary
  • That means restricting their freedom of speech, using a caste system of victimhood in which those on top must defer to those with a greater claim to restorative justice
  • The illiberal left believe that the marketplace of ideas is rigged just like all the others. What masquerades as evidence and argument, they say, is really yet another assertion of raw power by the elite.
  • Milton Friedman once said that the “society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither”.
  • Illiberal progressives think they have a blueprint for freeing oppressed groups. In reality theirs is a formula for the oppression of individuals
  • it is not so very different from the plans of the populist right. In their different ways both extremes put power before process, ends before means and the interests of the group before the freedom of the individual.
  • Countries run by the strongmen whom populists admire, such as Hungary under Viktor Orban and Russia under Vladimir Putin, show that unchecked power is a bad foundation for good government. Utopias like Cuba and Venezuela show that ends do not justify means
  • And nowhere at all do individuals willingly conform to state-imposed racial and economic stereotypes.
  • When populists put partisanship before truth, they sabotage good government. When progressives divide people into competing castes, they turn the nation against itself. Both diminish institutions that resolve social conflict. Hence they often resort to coercion, however much they like to talk about justice.
  • populists and progressives feed off each other pathologically. The hatred each camp feels for the other inflames its own supporters—to the benefit of both. Criticising your own tribe’s excesses seems like treachery. Under these conditions, liberal debate is starved of oxygen
  • Aspects of liberalism go against the grain of human nature. It requires you to defend your opponents’ right to speak, even when you know they are wrong. You must be willing to question your deepest beliefs. Businesses must not be sheltered from the gales of creative destruction. Your loved ones must advance on merit alone, even if all your instincts are to bend the rules for them. You must accept the victory of your enemies at the ballot box, even if you think they will bring the country to ruin.
  • Too many left-leaning liberals focus on how they, too, want social justice. They comfort themselves with the thought that the most intolerant illiberalism belongs to a fringe. Don’t worry, they say, intolerance is part of the mechanism of change: by focusing on injustice, they shift the centre ground.
  • Yet it is precisely by countering the forces propelling people to the extremes that classical liberals prevent the extremes from strengthening. By applying liberal principles, they help solve society’s many problems without anyone resorting to coercion
  • Only liberals appreciate diversity in all its forms and understand how to make it a strength. Only they can deal fairly with everything from education to planning and foreign policy so as to release people’s creative energies.
Javier E

Democrats Can Reach More Working Class Voters - by Ruy Teixeira - The Liberal Patriot - 0 views

theliberalpatriot.substack.com/...mocrats-can-reach-more-working

Democratic party working class policy messaging culture

shared by Javier E on 21 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • The divorce between Democrats and the working class just continues to grow. Despite a slight improvement, Democrats still lost white working class (noncollege) voters in 2020 by 26 points (Catalist two party vote). Since 2012, nonwhite working class voters have shifted away from the Democrats by 18 points, with a particularly sharp shift in the last election and particularly among Hispanics.
  • In the recent Virginia gubernatorial election, Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe lost working class voters overall by 7 points, with large swings against the Democrats among the overwhelmingly working class Hispanic population (the same basic pattern can be seen in the New Jersey election results).
  • Recent generic Congressional ballot results show Democrats’ working class support as the mirror image of their college graduate support—strongly negative among working class voters, strongly positive among college graduate voters. But there are way more working class voters than college graduate voters.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • In other words, AOC can win in NY-14 but AOC-type candidates are no solution at all to the Democrats’ working class problems in most areas of the country. The grim fact is that as education polarization has played out geographically, Democratic votes are now distributed so inefficiently that the translation of these votes into political power has been severely undercut
  • As a result, Democrats’ hold on political power is ever on a knife’s edge even when their last election was a good one (as it is today).
  • Consistent with other recent research, the study finds that:
  • Working-class voters prefer progressive candidates who focus primarily on bread-and-butter economic issues, and who frame those issues in universal terms.
  • Candidates whose campaigns focused primarily on universalist policy issues such as jobs, health care, and the economy performed better than those who focused on group-specific policies, such as racial justice or immigration.
  • In addition, woke messaging decreased the appeal of other candidate characteristics. For example, candidates employing woke messaging who championed either centrist or progressive economic, health care, or civil rights policy priorities were viewed less favorably than their counterparts who championed the same priorities but opted for universalist messaging.
  • easier said than done given Democrats’ recent evolution away from universalist messaging and toward foregrounding the equity effects of unambiguously universal programs and deferring to group specific concerns around race, gender and sexuality, even where they are clearly unpopular and dubious as policy. The result has a been a shift in the Democratic party “brand” that has created barriers to Democratic party voting among broad swathes of the working class.
  • The grim prospects for the Democrats in 2022 and the gut-wrenching prospect of losing the White House to Donald Trump (again) in 2024 make clear the stakes.
  • A Democratic brand reset is clearly in order to stop the bleeding among working class voters, along the lines suggested by the Jacobin study. A good way to start would be to embrace widely-held American views and values that are particularly strong among the multiracial working class.
  • Equality of opportunity is a fundamental American principle; equality of outcome is not.America is not perfect but it is good to be patriotic and proud of the country.
  • Discrimination and racism are bad but they are not the cause of all disparities in American society.No one is completely without bias but calling all white people racists who benefit from white privilege and American society a white supremacist society is not right or fair.
  • America benefits from the presence of immigrants and no immigrant, even if illegal, should be mistreated. But border security is still important, as is an enforceable system that fairly decides who can enter the country.Police misconduct and brutality against people of any race is wrong and we need to reform police conduct and recruitment. But crime is a real problem so more and better policing is needed for public safety. That cannot be provided by “defunding the police”.
  • There are underlying differences between men and women but discrimination on the basis of gender is wrong.There are basically two genders but people who want to live as a gender different from their biological sex should have that right and not be discriminated against. However, there are issues around child consent to transitioning and participation in women’s sports that are complicated and not settled.
  • Racial achievement gaps are bad and we should seek to close them. However, they are not due just to racism and standards of high achievement should be maintained for people of all races.Language policing has gone too far; by and large, people should be able to express their views without fear of sanction by employer, school, institution or government. Good faith should be assumed, not bad faith.
  • Besides positively embracing these views it is necessary for major Democratic officeholders and candidates to actively dissociate themselves and their party from the woke stances that contradict these views and tarnish their brand among working class voters. That entails not just saying that one does not endorse now-familiar strands of cultural leftism but in some well-chosen places directly criticizing by name some who hold extreme views that are associated with the Democrats. That will be of great assistance in getting the message through to average working class voters.
  • these views are entirely consistent with a very progressive Democratic program in the areas of health care, education, social programs, jobs and the economy that would disproportionately benefit the poor and working class, and therefore blacks and Hispanics.
  • In that sense, one might respond to the inevitable accusation that a universalist, mainstream approach is tantamount to throwing loyal Democratic constituencies in need of help “under the bus”: who is throwing whom under the bus? Perhaps it is those who stand in the way of a Democratic approach that could plausibly generate the widest possible support that are throwing those who need help the most under the bus.
  • And this approach, unlike the Democrats’ current default setting, has the potential to make the Democrats and their progressive policies consistent winners
Javier E

Collapsing Levels of Trust Are Devastating America - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...616581

politics history crisis culture US trust anomie polarization progressive progress

shared by Javier E on 19 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • American history is driven by periodic moments of moral convulsion
  • Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington noticed that these convulsions seem to hit the United States every 60 years or so: the Revolutionary period of the 1760s and ’70s; the Jacksonian uprising of the 1820s and ’30s; the Progressive Era, which began in the 1890s; and the social-protest movements of the 1960s and early ’70s
  • A highly moralistic generation appears on the scene. It uses new modes of communication to seize control of the national conversation. Groups formerly outside of power rise up and take over the system. These are moments of agitation and excitement, frenzy and accusation, mobilization and passion.
  • ...168 more annotations...
  • In 1981, Huntington predicted that the next moral convulsion would hit America around the second or third decade of the 21st century—that is, right about now.
  • Trump is the final instrument of this crisis, but the conditions that brought him to power and make him so dangerous at this moment were decades in the making, and those conditions will not disappear if he is defeated.
  • Social trust is a measure of the moral quality of a society—of whether the people and institutions in it are trustworthy, whether they keep their promises and work for the common g
  • When people in a society lose faith or trust in their institutions and in each other, the nation collapses.
  • This is an account of how, over the past few decades, America became a more untrustworthy society
  • under the stresses of 2020, American institutions and the American social order crumbled and were revealed as more untrustworthy still
  • We had a chance, in crisis, to pull together as a nation and build trust. We did not. That has left us a broken, alienated society caught in a distrust doom loop.
  • The Baby Boomers grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, an era of family stability, widespread prosperity, and cultural cohesion. The mindset they embraced in the late ’60s and have embodied ever since was all about rebelling against authority, unshackling from institutions, and celebrating freedom, individualism, and liberation.
  • The emerging generations today enjoy none of that sense of security. They grew up in a world in which institutions failed, financial systems collapsed, and families were fragile. Children can now expect to have a lower quality of life than their parents, the pandemic rages, climate change looms, and social media is vicious. Their worldview is predicated on threat, not safety.
  • Thus the values of the Millennial and Gen Z generations that will dominate in the years ahead are the opposite of Boomer values: not liberation, but security; not freedom, but equality; not individualism, but the safety of the collective; not sink-or-swim meritocracy, but promotion on the basis of social justice
  • A new culture is dawning. The Age of Precarity is here.
  • I’ve spent my career rebutting the idea that America is in decline, but the events of these past six years, and especially of 2020, have made clear that we live in a broken nation. The cancer of distrust has spread to every vital organ.
  • Those were the days of triumphant globalization. Communism was falling. Apartheid was ending. The Arab-Israeli dispute was calming down. Europe was unifying. China was prospering. In the United States, a moderate Republican president, George H. W. Bush, gave way to the first Baby Boomer president, a moderate Democrat, Bill Clinton.
  • The stench of national decline is in the air. A political, social, and moral order is dissolving. America will only remain whole if we can build a new order in its place.
  • The American economy grew nicely. The racial wealth gap narrowed. All the great systems of society seemed to be working: capitalism, democracy, pluralism, diversity, globalization. It seemed, as Francis Fukuyama wrote in his famous “The End of History?” essay for The National Interest, “an unabashed victory for economic and political liberalism.”
  • Nations with low social trust—like Brazil, Morocco, and Zimbabwe—have struggling economies.
  • We think of the 1960s as the classic Boomer decade, but the false summer of the 1990s was the high-water mark of that ethos
  • The first great theme of that era was convergence. Walls were coming down. Everybody was coming together.
  • The second theme was the triumph of classical liberalism. Liberalism was not just a philosophy—it was a spirit and a zeitgeist, a faith that individual freedom would blossom in a loosely networked democratic capitalist world. Enterprise and creativity would be unleashed. America was the great embodiment and champion of this liberation.
  • The third theme was individualism. Society flourished when individuals were liberated from the shackles of society and the state, when they had the freedom to be true to themselves.
  • For his 2001 book, Moral Freedom, the political scientist Alan Wolfe interviewed a wide array of Americans. The moral culture he described was no longer based on mainline Protestantism, as it had been for generations
  • Instead, Americans, from urban bobos to suburban evangelicals, were living in a state of what he called moral freedom: the belief that life is best when each individual finds his or her own morality—inevitable in a society that insists on individual freedom.
  • moral freedom, like the other dominant values of the time, contained within it a core assumption: If everybody does their own thing, then everything will work out for everybody.
  • This was an ideology of maximum freedom and minimum sacrifice.
  • It all looks naive now. We were naive about what the globalized economy would do to the working class, naive to think the internet would bring us together, naive to think the global mixing of people would breed harmony, naive to think the privileged wouldn’t pull up the ladders of opportunity behind them
  • Over the 20 years after I sat with Kosieva, it all began to unravel. The global financial crisis had hit, the Middle East was being ripped apart by fanatics. On May 15, 2011, street revolts broke out in Spain, led by the self-declared Indignados—“the outraged.” “They don’t represent us!” they railed as an insult to the Spanish establishment. It would turn out to be the cry of a decade.
  • Millennials and members of Gen Z have grown up in the age of that disappointment, knowing nothing else. In the U.S. and elsewhere, this has produced a crisis of faith, across society but especially among the young. It has produced a crisis of trust.
  • Social trust is a generalized faith in the people of your community. It consists of smaller faiths. It begins with the assumption that we are interdependent, our destinies linked. It continues with the assumption that we share the same moral values. We share a sense of what is the right thing to do in different situations
  • gh-trust societies have what Fukuyama calls spontaneous sociability. People are able to organize more quickly, initiate action, and sacrifice for the common good.
  • When you look at research on social trust, you find all sorts of virtuous feedback loops. Trust produces good outcomes, which then produce more trust. In high-trust societies, corruption is lower and entrepreneurship is catalyzed.
  • Higher-trust nations have lower economic inequality, because people feel connected to each other and are willing to support a more generous welfare state.
  • People in high-trust societies are more civically engaged. Nations that score high in social trust—like the Netherlands, Sweden, China, and Australia—have rapidly growing or developed economies.
  • Renewal is hard to imagine. Destruction is everywhere, and construction difficult to see.
  • As the ethicist Sissela Bok once put it, “Whatever matters to human beings, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives.”
  • During most of the 20th century, through depression and wars, Americans expressed high faith in their institutions
  • In 1964, for example, 77 percent of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing most or all of the time.
  • By 1994, only one in five Americans said they trusted government to do the right thing.
  • Then came the Iraq War and the financial crisis and the election of Donald Trump. Institutional trust levels remained pathetically low. What changed was the rise of a large group of people who were actively and poi
  • sonously alienated—who were not only distrustful but explosively distrustful. Explosive distrust is not just an absence of trust or a sense of detached alienation—it is an aggressive animosity and an urge to destroy. Explosive distrust is the belief that those who disagree with you are not just wrong but illegitimate
  • In 1997, 64 percent of Americans had a great or good deal of trust in the political competence of their fellow citizens; today only a third of Americans feel that way.
  • In most societies, interpersonal trust is stable over the decades. But for some—like Denmark, where about 75 percent say the people around them are trustworthy, and the Netherlands, where two-thirds say so—the numbers have actually risen.
  • In America, interpersonal trust is in catastrophic decline. In 2014, according to the General Social Survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, only 30.3 percent of Americans agreed that “most people can be trusted,”
  • Today, a majority of Americans say they don’t trust other people when they first meet them.
  • There’s evidence to suggest that marital infidelity, academic cheating, and animal cruelty are all on the rise in America, but it’s hard to directly measure the overall moral condition of society—how honest people are, and how faithful.
  • Trust is the ratio between the number of people who betray you and the number of people who remain faithful to you. It’s not clear that there is more betrayal in America than there used to be—but there are certainly fewer faithful supports around people than there used to be.
  • Hundreds of books and studies on declining social capital and collapsing family structure demonstrate this. In the age of disappointment, people are less likely to be surrounded by faithful networks of people they can trust.
  • Black Americans have high trust in other Black Americans; it’s the wider society they don’t trust, for good and obvious reasons
  • As Vallier puts it, trust levels are a reflection of the moral condition of a nation at any given time.
  • high national trust is a collective moral achievement.
  • High national distrust is a sign that people have earned the right to be suspicious. Trust isn’t a virtue—it’s a measure of other people’s virtue.
  • Unsurprisingly, the groups with the lowest social trust in America are among the most marginalized.
  • Black Americans have been one of the most ill-treated groups in American history; their distrust is earned distrust
  • In 2018, 37.3 percent of white Americans felt that most people can be trusted, according to the General Social Survey, but only 15.3 percent of Black Americans felt the same.
  • People become trusting when the world around them is trustworthy. When they are surrounded by people who live up to their commitments. When they experience their country as a fair place.
  • In 2002, 43 percent of Black Americans were very or somewhat satisfied with the way Black people are treated in the U.S. By 2018, only 18 percent felt that way, according to Gallup.
  • The second disenfranchised low-trust group includes the lower-middle class and the working poor.
  • this group makes up about 40 percent of the country.
  • “They are driven by the insecurity of their place in society and in the economy,” he says. They are distrustful of technology and are much more likely to buy into conspiracy theories. “They’re often convinced by stories that someone is trying to trick them, that the world is against them,”
  • the third marginalized group that scores extremely high on social distrust: young adults. These are people who grew up in the age of disappointment. It’s the only world they know.
  • In 2012, 40 percent of Baby Boomers believed that most people can be trusted, as did 31 percent of members of Generation X. In contrast, only 19 percent of Millennials said most people can be trusted
  • Seventy-three percent of adults under 30 believe that “most of the time, people just look out for themselves,” according to a Pew survey from 2018. Seventy-one percent of those young adults say that most people “would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance.
  • A mere 10 percent of Gen Zers trust politicians to do the right thing.
  • Only 35 percent of young people, versus 67 percent of old people, believe that Americans respect the rights of people who are not like them.
  • Fewer than a third of Millennials say America is the greatest country in the world, compared to 64 percent of members of the Silent Generation.
  • “values and behavior are shaped by the degree to which survival is secure.” In the age of disappointment, our sense of safety went away
  • Some of this is physical insecurity: school shootings, terrorist attacks, police brutality, and overprotective parenting at home
  • the true insecurity is financial, social, and emotional.
  • By the time the Baby Boomers hit a median age of 35, their generation owned 21 percent of the nation’s wealth
  • First, financial insecurity
  • As of last year, Millennials—who will hit an average age of 35 in three years—owned just 3.2 percent of the nation’s wealth.
  • Next, emotional insecurity:
  • fewer children growing up in married two-parent households, more single-parent households, more depression, and higher suicide rates.
  • Then, identity insecurity.
  • All the traits that were once assigned to you by your community, you must now determine on your own: your identity, your morality, your gender, your vocation, your purpose, and the place of your belonging. Self-creation becomes a major anxiety-inducing act of young adulthood.
  • liquid modernity
  • Finally, social insecurity.
  • n the age of social media our “sociometers”—the antennae we use to measure how other people are seeing us—are up and on high alert all the time. Am I liked? Am I affirmed?
  • Danger is ever present. “For many people, it is impossible to think without simultaneously thinking about what other people would think about what you’re thinking,” the educator Fredrik deBoer has written. “This is exhausting and deeply unsatisfying. As long as your self-conception is tied up in your perception of other people’s conception of you, you will never be free to occupy a personality with confidence; you’re always at the mercy of the next person’s dim opinion of you and your whole deal.”
  • In this world, nothing seems safe; everything feels like chaos.
  • Distrust sows distrust. It produces the spiritual state that Emile Durkheim called anomie, a feeling of being disconnected from society, a feeling that the whole game is illegitimate, that you are invisible and not valued, a feeling that the only person you can really trust is yourself.
  • People plagued by distrust can start to see threats that aren’t there; they become risk averse
  • Americans take fewer risks and are much less entrepreneurial than they used to be. In 2014, the rate of business start-ups hit a nearly 40-year low. Since the early 1970s, the rate at which people move across state lines each year has dropped by 56 percent
  • People lose faith in experts. They lose faith in truth, in the flow of information that is the basis of modern society. “A world of truth is a world of trust, and vice versa,”
  • In periods of distrust, you get surges of populism; populism is the ideology of those who feel betrayed
  • People are drawn to leaders who use the language of menace and threat, who tell group-versus-group power narratives. You also get a lot more political extremism. People seek closed, rigid ideological systems that give them a sense of security.
  • fanaticism is a response to existential anxiety. When people feel naked and alone, they revert to tribe. Their radius of trust shrinks, and they only trust their own kind.
  • When many Americans see Trump’s distrust, they see a man who looks at the world as they do.
  • By February 2020, America was a land mired in distrust. Then the plague arrived.
  • From the start, the pandemic has hit the American mind with sledgehammer force. Anxiety and depression have spiked. In April, Gallup recorded a record drop in self-reported well-being, as the share of Americans who said they were thriving fell to the same low point as during the Great Recession
  • These kinds of drops tend to produce social upheavals. A similar drop was seen in Tunisian well-being just before the street protests that led to the Arab Spring.
  • The emotional crisis seems to have hit low-trust groups the hardest
  • “low trusters” were more nervous during the early months of the pandemic, more likely to have trouble sleeping, more likely to feel depressed, less likely to say the public authorities were responding well to the pandemic
  • Eighty-one percent of Americans under 30 reported feeling anxious, depressed, lonely, or hopeless at least one day in the previous week, compared to 48 percent of adults 60 and over.
  • Americans looked to their governing institutions to keep them safe. And nearly every one of their institutions betrayed them
  • The president downplayed the crisis, and his administration was a daily disaster area
  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention produced faulty tests, failed to provide up-to-date data on infections and deaths, and didn’t provide a trustworthy voice for a scared public.
  • The Food and Drug Administration wouldn’t allow private labs to produce their own tests without a lengthy approval process.
  • In nations that ranked high on the World Values Survey measure of interpersonal trust—like China, Australia, and most of the Nordic states—leaders were able to mobilize quickly, come up with a plan, and count on citizens to comply with the new rules.
  • In low-trust nations—like Mexico, Spain, and Brazil—there was less planning, less compliance, less collective action, and more death.
  • Countries that fell somewhere in the middle—including the U.S., Germany, and Japan—had a mixed record depending on the quality of their leadership.
  • South Korea, where more than 65 percent of people say they trust government when it comes to health care, was able to build a successful test-and-trace regime. In America, where only 31 percent of Republicans and 44 percent of Democrats say the government should be able to use cellphone data to track compliance with experts’ coronavirus social-contact guidelines, such a system was never really implemented.
  • For decades, researchers have been warning about institutional decay. Institutions get caught up in one of those negative feedback loops that are so common in a world of mistrust. They become ineffective and lose legitimacy. People who lose faith in them tend not to fund them. Talented people don’t go to work for them. They become more ineffective still.
  • On the right, this anti-institutional bias has manifested itself as hatred of government; an unwillingness to defer to expertise, authority, and basic science; and a reluctance to fund the civic infrastructure of society, such as a decent public health system
  • On the left, distrust of institutional authority has manifested as a series of checks on power that have given many small actors the power to stop common plans, producing what Fukuyama calls a vetocracy
  • In 2020, American institutions groaned and sputtered. Academics wrote up plan after plan and lobbed them onto the internet. Few of them went anywhere. America had lost the ability to build new civic structures to respond to ongoing crises like climate change, opioid addiction, and pandemics, or to reform existing ones.
  • In a lower-trust era like today, Levin told me, “there is a greater instinct to say, ‘They’re failing us.’ We see ourselves as outsiders to the systems—an outsider mentality that’s hard to get out of.”
  • Americans haven’t just lost faith in institutions; they’ve come to loathe them, even to think that they are evil
  • 55 percent of Americans believe that the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was created in a lab and 59 percent believe that the U.S. government is concealing the true number of deaths
  • Half of all Fox News viewers believe that Bill Gates is plotting a mass-vaccination campaign so he can track people.
  • This spring, nearly a third of Americans were convinced that it was probably or definitely true that a vaccine existed but was being withheld by the government.
  • institutions like the law, the government, the police, and even the family don’t merely serve social functions, Levin said; they form the individuals who work and live within them. The institutions provide rules to live by, standards of excellence to live up to, social roles to fulfill.
  • By 2020, people had stopped seeing institutions as places they entered to be morally formed,
  • Instead, they see institutions as stages on which they can perform, can display their splendid selves.
  • People run for Congress not so they can legislate, but so they can get on TV. People work in companies so they can build their personal brand.
  • The result is a world in which institutions not only fail to serve their social function and keep us safe, they also fail to form trustworthy people. The rot in our structures spreads to a rot in ourselves.
  • The Failure of Society
  • The coronavirus has confronted America with a social dilemma. A social dilemma, the University of Pennsylvania scholar Cristina Bicchieri notes, is “a situation in which each group member gets a higher outcome if she pursues her individual self-interest, but everyone in the group is better off if all group members further the common interest.”
  • Social distancing is a social dilemma. Many low-risk individuals have been asked to endure some large pain (unemployment, bankruptcy) and some small inconvenience (mask wearing) for the sake of the common good. If they could make and keep this moral commitment to each other in the short term, the curve would be crushed, and in the long run we’d all be better off. It is the ultimate test of American trustworthiness.
  • While pretending to be rigorous, people relaxed and started going out. It was like watching somebody gradually give up on a diet. There wasn’t a big moment of capitulation, just an extra chocolate bar here, a bagel there, a scoop of ice cream before bed
  • in reality this was a mass moral failure of Republicans and Democrats and independents alike. This was a failure of social solidarity, a failure to look out for each other.
  • Alexis de Tocqueville discussed a concept called the social body. Americans were clearly individualistic, he observed, but they shared common ideas and common values, and could, when needed, produce common action. They could form a social body.
  • Over time, those common values eroded, and were replaced by a value system that put personal freedom above every other value
  • When Americans were confronted with the extremely hard task of locking down for months without any of the collective resources that would have made it easier—habits of deference to group needs; a dense network of community bonds to help hold each other accountable; a history of trust that if you do the right thing, others will too; preexisting patterns of cooperation; a sense of shame if you deviate from the group—they couldn’t do it. America failed.
  • The Crack-up
  • This wasn’t just a political and social crisis, it was also an emotional trauma.
  • The week before George Floyd was killed, the National Center for Health Statistics released data showing that a third of all Americans were showing signs of clinical anxiety or depression. By early June, after Floyd’s death, the percentage of Black Americans showing clinical signs of depression and anxiety disorders had jumped from 36 to 41 percent
  • By late June, American national pride was lower than at any time since Gallup started measuring, in 2001
  • In another poll, 71 percent of Americans said they were angry about the state of the country, and just 17 percent said they were proud.
  • By late June, it was clear that America was enduring a full-bore crisis of legitimacy, an epidemic of alienation, and a loss of faith in the existing order.
  • The most alienated, anarchic actors in society—antifa, the Proud Boys, QAnon—seemed to be driving events. The distrust doom loop was now at hand.
  • The Age of Precarity
  • Cultures are collective responses to common problems. But when reality changes, culture takes a few years, and a moral convulsion, to completely shake off the old norms and values.
  • The culture that is emerging, and which will dominate American life over the next decades, is a response to a prevailing sense of threat.
  • This new culture values security over liberation, equality over freedom, the collective over the individual.
  • From risk to security.
  • we’ve entered an age of precarity in which every political or social movement has an opportunity pole and a risk pole. In the opportunity mentality, risk is embraced because of the upside possibilities. In the risk mindset, security is embraced because people need protection from downside dangers
  • In this period of convulsion, almost every party and movement has moved from its opportunity pole to its risk pole.
  • From achievement to equality
  • In the new culture we are entering, that meritocratic system looks more and more like a ruthless sorting system that excludes the vast majority of people, rendering their life precarious and second class, while pushing the “winners” into a relentless go-go lifestyle that leaves them exhausted and unhappy
  • Equality becomes the great social and political goal. Any disparity—racial, economic, meritocratic—comes to seem hateful.
  • From self to society
  • If we’ve lived through an age of the isolated self, people in the emerging culture see embedded selves. Socialists see individuals embedded in their class group. Right-wing populists see individuals as embedded pieces of a national identity group. Left-wing critical theorists see individuals embedded in their racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual-orientation identity group.
  • The cultural mantra shifts from “Don’t label me!” to “My label is who I am.”
  • From global to local
  • When there is massive distrust of central institutions, people shift power to local institutions, where trust is higher. Power flows away from Washington to cities and states.
  • From liberalism to activism
  • enlightenment liberalism, which was a long effort to reduce the role of passions in politics and increase the role of reason. Politics was seen as a competition between partial truths.
  • Liberalism is ill-suited for an age of precarity. It demands that we live with a lot of ambiguity, which is hard when the atmosphere already feels unsafe. Furthermore, it is thin. It offers an open-ended process of discovery when what people hunger for is justice and moral certainty.
  • liberalism’s niceties come to seem like a cover that oppressors use to mask and maintain their systems of oppression. Public life isn’t an exchange of ideas; it’s a conflict of groups engaged in a vicious death struggle
  • The cultural shifts we are witnessing offer more safety to the individual at the cost of clannishness within society. People are embedded more in communities and groups, but in an age of distrust, groups look at each other warily, angrily, viciously.
  • The shift toward a more communal viewpoint is potentially a wonderful thing, but it leads to cold civil war unless there is a renaissance of trust. There’s no avoiding the core problem. Unless we can find a way to rebuild trust, the nation does not function.
  • How to Rebuild Trust
  • Historians have more to offer, because they can cite examples of nations that have gone from pervasive social decay to relative social health. The two most germane to our situation are Great Britain between 1830 and 1848 and the United States between 1895 and 1914.
  • In both periods, a highly individualistic and amoral culture was replaced by a more communal and moralistic one.
  • But there was a crucial difference between those eras and our own, at least so far. In both cases, moral convulsion led to frenetic action.
  • As Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett note in their forthcoming book, The Upswing, the American civic revival that began in the 1870s produced a stunning array of new organizations: the United Way, the NAACP, the Boy Scouts, the Forest Service, the Federal Reserve System, 4-H clubs, the Sierra Club, the settlement-house movement, the compulsory-education movement, the American Bar Association, the American Legion, the ACLU, and on and on
  • After the civic revivals, both nations witnessed frenetic political reform. During the 1830s, Britain passed the Reform Act, which widened the franchise; the Factory Act, which regulated workplaces; and the Municipal Corporations Act, which reformed local government.
  • The Progressive Era in America saw an avalanche of reform: civil-service reform; food and drug regulation; the Sherman Act, which battled the trusts; the secret ballot; and so on. Civic life became profoundly moralistic, but political life became profoundly pragmatic and anti-ideological. Pragmatism and social-science expertise were valued.
  • Can America in the 2020s turn itself around the way the America of the 1890s, or the Britain of the 1830s, did? Can we create a civic renaissance and a legislative revolution?
  • I see no scenario in which we return to being the nation we were in 1965, with a cohesive national ethos, a clear national establishment, trusted central institutions, and a pop-culture landscape in which people overwhelmingly watch the same shows and talked about the same things.
  • The age of distrust has smashed the converging America and the converging globe—that great dream of the 1990s—and has left us with the reality that our only plausible future is decentralized pluralism.
  • The key to making decentralized pluralism work still comes down to one question: Do we have the energy to build new organizations that address our problems, the way the Brits did in the 1830s and Americans did in the 1890s?
  • social trust is built within organizations in which people are bound together to do joint work, in which they struggle together long enough for trust to gradually develop, in which they develop shared understandings of what is expected of each other, in which they are enmeshed in rules and standards of behavior that keep them trustworthy when their commitments might otherwise falter.
  • Over the past 60 years, we have given up on the Rotary Club and the American Legion and other civic organizations and replaced them with Twitter and Instagram. Ultimately, our ability to rebuild trust depends on our ability to join and stick to organizations.
  • Whether we emerge from this transition stronger depends on our ability, from the bottom up and the top down, to build organizations targeted at our many problems. If history is any guide, this will be the work not of months, but of one or two decades.
  • For centuries, America was the greatest success story on earth, a nation of steady progress, dazzling achievement, and growing international power. That story threatens to end on our watch, crushed by the collapse of our institutions and the implosion of social trust
  • But trust can be rebuilt through the accumulation of small heroic acts—by the outrageous gesture of extending vulnerability in a world that is mean, by proffering faith in other people when that faith may not be returned. Sometimes trust blooms when somebody holds you against all logic, when you expected to be dropped.
  • By David Brooks
Javier E

Fox News Isn't Helping the Republican Party - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...t-helping-the-republican-party

fox news gop effect governing base winning elections incentives

shared by Javier E on 05 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • Because the influence of Fox News, conservative talk radio and the rest of the ideological marketplace on the Republican Party has been important. And damaging.
  • What’s different about contemporary Republicans is that party-aligned media has become overwhelmingly important within their party.
  • whatever the reason, it’s simply the case that Republican-aligned media is disproportionately influential within the party.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Without the incentive to win elections, Republican elected officials increasingly have no reason to try to make voters happy (or more precisely: The politicians have that incentive, but the party as a whole does not and that’s what matters).
  • The results are exactly what one would expect. Republicans do fine for the most part in elections as the out-party, because when an incumbent is on the ballot an election is mainly about whether he or she is doing a good job.
  • As a result, their ability to advance public policy atrophies, and eventually they lose interest in nominating candidates who are equipped to govern — or even interested in doing so. More and more, the party is driven by what their media cares about: Finding the things that most activate their most loyal audience, and repeating them as much as possible.
« First ‹ Previous 421 - 440 of 456 Next ›
Showing 20▼ items per page