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Javier E

Opinion | A Big TV Hit Is a Conservative Fantasy Liberals Should Watch - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ative-prestige-television.html

TV series conservative fantasy liberals culture POWeR diversity vision education

shared by Javier E on 10 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • Pop culture says a lot about the hopes we have for politics. And in a politically polarized and unequal society, we express our political identities as tastes
  • We aren’t just divided into red and blue America. We divide ourselves into Fox people versus CNN people, country music versus hip-hop people and reality TV versus prestige drama people. The lines are not fixed — there is always crossover — but they are rooted in something fundamental: identity. Our imagined Americas are as divided as our news cycles.
  • a working paper by two sociologists, Clayton Childress at the University of Toronto and Craig Rawlings at Duke University. The paper is titled “When Tastes Are Ideological: The Asymmetric Foundations of Cultural Polarization.” It is part of the subfield of sociology that studies how culture reflects and reproduces inequality. Childress and Rawlings draw out several asymmetries in how liberals and conservatives consume cultural objects like music and television.
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  • Liberals aren’t watching “Yellowstone” for cultural reasons, and conservatives love it for ideological ones, he said.
  • I watched all four seasons of “Yellowstone” through the lens of these asymmetries. The show is compelling but not groundbreaking. It is too easy to call it a conservative show. Like its audience counterpart, “Yellowstone” thinks it is at war with progress when it is really at war with itself.
  • when it comes to identity and tastes, Childress said it is a “mark of social status for liberals to be culturally omnivorous.”
  • In contrast, conservative audiences do not consider reading, watching or listening around a mark of status or identity. And they are more likely to dislike what liberals like than liberals are to dislike what conservatives like.
  • “People on the left like more pop culture than people on the right,’’ Childress said. “And people on the left don’t dislike what people on the right dislike.
  • The rejection of cosmopolitanism as a desirable attribute is more subtle, but present
  • The West of “Yellowstone” is multiethnic, multiracial and multi-class. There are Black cowboys and complex Native American characters. A pair of lesbians even makes an appearance in Season 2 (although there are no gay cowboys,
  • Regardless of whether you agree with the classification, you have an idea of what other people mean by “elite”: urban, sophisticated and educated. In short, the things that “Yellowstone” skewers at every opportunity. The characters despise California and San Francisco in particular
  • It accommodates feminism by making women the most vicious capitalist actors.
  • The slow dialogue of “Yellowstone” also rejects sophistication. The narrative plods even as the show’s many horses run. And the mood is dour; there aren’t many jokes
  • Those aesthetic choices implicitly argue for simplicity as a moral virtue, something John Dutton telegraphs when he tells a field hand that sometimes the world really is simple.
  • “Yellowstone” sidesteps Westerns’ romanticization of the white imaginary. At dinner last week with my family, my 30-something Black lesbian cousins gushed about the show, although they prefer its Native American characters to the Duttons.
  • There are few strivers in the world of “Yellowstone.” The show’s royalty grudgingly accept higher education as a strategic tool to beat the liberal do-gooders. The poor and disenfranchised don’t dream of going to college at all.
  • the show’s revenge is how well it exposes the material conditions of elitism. Its worldview resembles fantasy but it is brutally realistic about how power operates.
  • Whatever brings its audience to the show, once they arrive, they are playacting within the vision of America that “Yellowstone” holds. The show suggests that elitism and power can be reconciled with our need to be both moral and self-interested. It is a seductive fantasy because it does not ask the audience to give up anything.
  • The nominal diversity of the show’s cast implies that conservatives don’t hate anyone, as long as everyone is willing to conform to their way of life
  • It acknowledges white land theft and Native American grievance, but it does not make a case for reparations.
  • It accepts that Christopher Columbus was a colonizer but implies that the Duttons’ good-enough ends justify the means.
  • If the show rejects sophistication, it takes a hammer to education
  • And it depicts the police as feckless, but it does not want to abolish cops. It wants to choose the cops. That means a lot of guns.
  • “Yellowstone” does not just have gunfights. It has all-out wars. There are military-grade weapons, aerial assaults, night-vision goggles and automatic rifles. When John Dutton cannot win, he starts shooting.
  • “Yellowstone” isn’t ideologically driven, even if ideology is what makes it so comforting for conservative audiences.
  • in the end, the show shares a problem with Republican Party electoral politics: Neither offers a compelling vision of the future.
  • Republicans don’t solve problems like climate change or economic inequality or water rights or housing costs or stagnant wages. With Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell’s leadership, the G.O.P. does not even bother to sell a conservative story for America. Audiences looking for that vision in “Yellowstone” might find that cosmetic diversity needn’t be scary, but they won’t find much else.
  • Like Republicans, the Dutton dynasty has one defense against demography and time: Buy guns and hoard stolen power.
Javier E

Britain's Guilty Men and Women - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...671812

history uk pm crisis decline politics

shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • Today, Britain is very much not on the edge of national annihilation, whatever the hyperbolic coverage of the past few weeks might suggest. But it is in the grip of chaotic mismanagement that has left the country poorer and weaker, having lost its fourth prime minister in six turbulent years since the Brexit referendum and with an economy pushed close to its breaking point.
  • when did this era of the small people begin? What was its genesis?
  • He had also signed up to a new European treaty that left a fatal tension at the heart of Britain’s membership in the European Union. Major’s European compromise left Britain inside the European Union but outside its single currency. In time, the inherent tension in this position would reveal itself in disastrous fashion—the historian Niall Ferguson has called it “Brexit 1.0.”
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  • 1990 offers a deeper origin story. That was the year Margaret Thatcher was pulled from office and replaced by John Major, a man no one thinks of as a giant. Major inherited a country in a stronger position than at any time since the 1960s, yet handed over power to Tony Blair having frittered away the Conservative Party’s reputation for economic management.
  • The stars of the show were the three prime ministers before her—Boris Johnson, Theresa May, and David Cameron—with supporting roles for the former chancellor George Osborne and former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.
  • When Blair left office in 2007, the country was still relatively unified and prosperous. It fell to Gordon Brown, Blair’s replacement, to watch everything explode in the great financial crisis. All of these milestones—1990, 1997, and 2007—have legitimate claims to be the genesis of the current crisis. Yet none quite fits. The regime of little men had not begun. That came in 2010
  • For the past 12 years, Britain has been led by a succession of Conservative prime ministers—each, like Russian dolls, somehow smaller than the last—who have contrived to leave the country in a worse state than it was when they took over
  • Without Truss realizing it, Britain had become too weak to cope with a leader so small.
  • In this absurd hospital drama, there were also walk-on parts for two former Labour leaders, Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn. And Boris Johnson is now attempting a comeback!
  • May was a serious, qualified, thoughtful Conservative who had opposed Brexit but now assumed responsibility for it. But she was simply not up to the job. Being prime minister requires not just diligence and seriousness but political acumen and an ability to lead. She had too little of either.
  • Both Cameron and Clegg had been elected leader of their respective parties through American-style primaries. Back then, such votes were lauded as “democratization,” much-needed medicine to treat an ailing old constitution. They were no such thing. Rather than injecting more democracy into the process, they did the opposite—empowering tiny caucuses to send their minority tribunes to challenge parliamentary rule.
  • Miliband would further “modernize” the process with rule changes that would send the party careering toward populist extremism and electoral annihilation under Jeremy Corbyn. In time, such institutional vandalism would have dire consequences for both the Conservative and Labour Parties, and therefore the country.
  • Cameron and Clegg went to work hacking back public spending with extraordinary severity. The result was that Britain experienced the slowest economic recovery in its history, which meant that the coalition government failed to balance the books as it had hoped—exactly, in fact, as Labour had warned would happen
  • Britain had bailed out the bankers and then watched them get rich while the rest of the country got poorer. No wonder people were angry.
  • Cameron began to panic about the threat to British interests from a more cohesive euro-zone bloc—which was an inevitable consequence of Major’s compromise. After Cameron’s demands for new safeguards to those interests were ignored, he vetoed the euro zone’s reforms. The euro zone went ahead with them anyway. One year into Cameron’s premiership, in 2011, the nightmare of British isolation within the EU had come true.
  • For the next five years, the British prime minister took a series of gambles that ended in disaster. Alarmed by his veto failure, Cameron concluded that Britain needed to renegotiate its membership entirely—and put it to voters in a referendum, which he promised in 2013. By then he had also agreed to a referendum on Scottish independence. Britain’s future was on the line not once but twice.
  • A year after his election victory, Cameron had to keep his promise of a referendum on Europe, lost, and resigned. As with the Scottish case, he had refused to countenance any preparations for the possibility of a winning Leave vote. Cameron left behind a country divided and a Parliament that did not want Brexit but was tasked with delivering it without any idea how. By any estimation, it was a catastrophic miscarriage of statecraft.
  • A second origin date, then, might be 1997, when Tony Blair came to power. Blair proved unable to change Major’s compromise and pursued instead a series of radical constitutional changes that slowly undermined the unity of the country he thought he was building.
  • May was hampered throughout her troubled final years as prime minister with a leader of the opposition in Jeremy Corbyn, who was ideologically hostile to any conciliation or compromise with the Tories, empowered by both his own sense of righteous purity and the mandate he had twice received from Labour Party members. He, after all, had a mandate outside Parliament.
  • Despite his brief tenure, Johnson remains one of the most influential—and notorious—figures in postwar British history. Without him, the country likely would not have voted for Brexit in the first place, let alone seen it pushed through Parliament.
  • In their first act in power, Truss and Kwarteng blew up the British government’s reputation for economic competence—and with it went the household budgets of Middle England.
  • Guilty Men was indeed something of a character assassination of Neville Chamberlain, Baldwin, and MacDonald, among others. Many historians now say these appeasers of the 1930s bought their country much-needed time.
  • each, unquestionably, left their country poorer, weaker, angrier, and more divided. Over the past 12 years, Britain has degraded. A sense of decay fills the air, and so, too, a feeling of genuine public fury.
Javier E

How the U.K. Became One of the Poorest Countries in Western Europe - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...671847

UK economy culture history crisis politics society decline

shared by Javier E on 26 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, it hit hard, smashing the engine of Britain’s economic ascent. Wary of rising deficits, the British government pursued a policy of austerity, fretting about debt rather than productivity or aggregate demand. The results were disastrous. Real wages fell for six straight years. Facing what the writer Fintan O’Toole called “the dull anxiety of declining living standards,” conservative pols sniffed out a bogeyman to blame for this slow-motion catastrophe. They served up to anxious voters a menu of scary outsiders: bureaucrats in Brussels, immigrants, asylum seekers—anybody but the actual decision makers who had kneecapped British competitiveness.
  • A cohort of older, middle-class, grievously nostalgic voters demanded Brexit, and they got it.
  • In the past 30 years, the British economy chose finance over industry, Britain’s government chose austerity over investment, and British voters chose a closed and poorer economy over an open and richer one.
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  • the U.K. manufacturing industry has less technological automation than just about any other similarly rich country. With barely 100 installed robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers in 2020, its average robot density was below that of Slovenia and Slovaki
  • One analysis of the U.K.’s infamous “productivity puzzle” concluded that outside of London and finance, almost every British sector has lower productivity than its Western European peers.
  • What was once the world’s most powerful globalized empire has now voted to explicitly reduce global access to trade and talent. Since Brexit, immigration, exports, and foreign investment have all declined, likely reducing the size of the U.K.’s economy by several percentage points in the long run.
  • “Take out Greater London—the prosperity of which depends to an uncomfortable degree on a willingness to provide services to oligarchs from the Middle East and the former Soviet Union—and the UK is one of the poorest countries in Western Europe.”
  • Today, Britain seems trapped between a left-wing aversion to growth and a right-wing aversion to openness. On the academic left, the U.K. has lately been home to a surging movement called degrowtherism, which asserts that saving the planet requires rich countries to stop seeking growth.
  • On the right, the electorate is dominated by older voters who care more about culture wars than about competitiveness
  • The U.K. is now an object lesson for other countries dealing with a dark triad of deindustrialization, degrowth, and denigration of foreigners.
  • Enemies of progress can criticize the legacy of industrialization, productivity, and globalization. But the U.K. shows us what can happen when a rich country seems to reject all three. Rather than transforming into some post-economic Eden of good vibes, it becomes bitter, flailing, and nonsensical.
Javier E

America Is Growing Apart, Possibly for Good - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...661377

crisis culture politics history gop divergence red blue differences antagonistic

shared by Javier E on 26 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Michael Podhorzer, a longtime political strategist for labor unions and the chair of the Analyst Institute
  • Podhorzer recently laid out a detailed case for thinking of the two blocs as fundamentally different nations uneasily sharing the same geographic space.
  • in truth, we have never been one nation. We are more like a federated republic of two nations: Blue Nation and Red Nation. This is not a metaphor; it is a geographic and historical reality.”
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  • the growing divisions between red and blue states represent a reversion to the lines of separation through much of the nation’s history.
  • “very similar, both geographically and culturally, to the divides between the Union and the Confederacy. And those dividing lines were largely set at the nation’s founding, when slave states and free states forged an uneasy alliance to become ‘one nation.’”
  • he’s warning that the pressure on the country’s fundamental cohesion is likely to continue ratcheting up in the 2020s
  • the “MAGA movement”—as the U.S. equivalent to the authoritarian parties in places such as Hungary and Venezuela. It is a multipronged, fundamentally antidemocratic movement that has built a solidifying base of institutional support through conservative media networks, evangelical churches, wealthy Republican donors, GOP elected officials, paramilitary white-nationalist groups, and a mass public following
  • Virginia has voted like a blue state at the presidential level, and Arizona and Georgia have moved from red to purple. With these three states shifted into those categories, the two “nations” are almost equal in eligible voting-age population, and the blue advantage in GDP roughly doubles, with the blue section contributing 48 percent and the red just 35 percent.)
  • This divergence itself creates enormous strain on the country’s cohesion, but more and more even that looks like only a way station
  • the underlying political question of the 2020s remains whether majority rule—and democracy as we’ve known it—can survive this offensive.
  • Podhorzer defines modern red and blue America as the states in which each party has usually held unified control of the governorship and state legislature in recent years.
  • By that yardstick, there are 25 red states, 17 blue states, and eight purple states
  • the red nation houses slightly more of the country’s eligible voting population (45 percent versus 39 percent), but the blue nation contributes more of the total U.S. gross national product: 46 percent versus 40 percent
  • it is determined to impose its policy and social vision on the entire country—with or without majority support
  • The hardening difference between red and blue, Podhorzer maintains, “empowers” the 10 purple states (if you include Arizona and Georgia) to “decide which of the two superpower nations’ values, Blue or Red, will prevail” in presidential and congressional elections
  • that leaves the country perpetually teetering on a knife’s edge: The combined vote margin for either party across those purple states has been no greater than two percentage points in any of the past three presidential elections
  • That’s a reversal from the middle decades of the 20th century, when the basic trend was toward greater convergence.
  • One element of that convergence came through what legal scholars call the “rights revolution.” That was the succession of actions from Congress and the Supreme Court, mostly beginning in the 1960s, that strengthened the floor of nationwide rights and reduced the ability of states to curtail those rights.
  • Key moments in that revolution included the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and the Supreme Court decisions striking down state bans on contraception, interracial marriage, abortion, and, much later, prohibitions against same-sex intimate relations and marriage.)
  • Simultaneously, the regional differences were moderated by waves of national investment, including the New Deal spending on rural electrification, the Tennessee Valley Authority, agricultural price supports, and Social Security during the 1930s, and the Great Society programs that provided federal aid for K–12 schools and higher education, as well as Medicare and Medicaid.
  • The impact of these investments (as well as massive defense spending across both periods) on states that had historically spent little on public services and economic development helped steadily narrow the gap in per capita income between the states of the old Confederacy and the rest of the country from the 1930s until about 1980.
  • Since about 2008, Podhorzer calculates, the southern states at the heart of the red nation have again fallen further behind the blue nation in per capita income.
  • red states, as a group, are falling behind blue states on a broad range of economic and social outcomes—including economic productivity, family income, life expectancy, and “deaths of despair” from the opioid crisis and alcoholism.
  • other measures that show those places in a more favorable light
  • Housing is often more affordable in red states; partly for that reason, homelessness has become endemic in many big blue cities. Red-state taxes are generally lower than their blue counterparts. Many red states have experienced robust job growth
  • And red states across the Sun Belt rank among the nation’s fastest growing in population.
  • blue states are benefiting more as the nation transitions into a high-productivity, 21st-century information economy
  • red states (apart from their major metropolitan centers participating in that economy) are suffering as the powerhouse industries of the 20th century—agriculture, manufacturing, and fossil-fuel extraction—decline.
  • The gross domestic product per person and the median household income are now both more than 25 percent greater in the blue section than in the red,
  • The share of kids in poverty is more than 20 percent lower in the blue section than red, and the share of working households with incomes below the poverty line is nearly 40 percent lower.
  • Gun deaths are almost twice as high per capita in the red places as in the blue, as is the maternal mortality rate.
  • Per capita spending on elementary and secondary education is almost 50 percent higher in the blue states compared with red
  • All of the blue states have expanded access to Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, while about 60 percent of the total red-nation population lives in states that have refused to do so.
  • All of the blue states have set a minimum wage higher than the federal level of $7.25, while only about one-third of the red-state residents live in places that have done so.
  • Right-to-work laws are common in the red states and nonexistent in the blue, with the result that the latter have a much higher share of unionized workers than the former
  • No state in the blue section has a law on the books banning abortion before fetal viability, while almost all of the red states are poised to restrict abortion rights
  • Almost all of the red states have also passed “stand your ground” laws backed by the National Rifle Association, which provide a legal defense for those who use weapons against a perceived threat, while none of the blue states have done so.
  • During the seven decades of legal Jim Crow segregation from the 1890s through the 1960s, the principal goal of the southern states at the core of red America was defensive: They worked tirelessly to prevent federal interference with state-sponsored segregation but did not seek to impose it on states outside the region.
  • Jim Crow segregation offers an important reference point for understanding how far red states might take this movement to roll back civil rights and liberties—not that they literally would seek to restore segregation, but that they are comfortable with “a time when states” had laws so “entirely different” that they created a form of domestic apartheid.
  • The flurry of socially conservative laws that red states have passed since 2021, on issues such as abortion; classroom discussions of race, gender, and sexual orientation; and LGBTQ rights, is widening this split. No Democratic-controlled state has passed any of those measures.
  • he documents a return to historical patterns from the Jim Crow era in which the dominant party (segregationist Democrats then, conservative Republicans now) has skewed the playing field to achieve a level of political dominance in the red nation far beyond its level of popular support
  • Undergirding that advantage, he argues, are laws that make registering or voting in many of the red states more difficult, and severe gerrymanders that have allowed Republicans to virtually lock in indefinite control of many state legislatures
  • how the United States will function with two sections that are moving so far apart.
  • History, in my view, offers two models
  • bedrock differences dating back to the country’s founding are resurfacing. And one crucial element of that, he argues, is the return of what he calls “one-party rule in the red nation.”
  • in the last years before the Civil War, the South’s political orientation was offensive: Through the courts (the 1857 Dred Scott decision) and in Congress (the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854), its principal aim was to authorize the expansion of slavery into more territories and states
  • Podhorzer, like Mason and Grumbach, believes that the MAGA movement’s long-term goal is to tilt the electoral rules in enough states to make winning Congress or the White House almost impossible for Democrats
  • Then, with support from the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court, Republicans could impose red-state values and programs nationwide, even if most Americans oppose them. The “MAGA movement is not stopping at the borders of the states it already controls,” Podhorzer writes. “It seeks to conquer as much territory as possible by any means possible.”
  • The Trump model, in other words, is more the South in 1850 than the South in 1950, more John Calhoun than Richard Russell
  • it does mean that the 2020s may bring the greatest threats to the country’s basic stability since those dark and tumultuous years.
Javier E

Climate activists mixed hardball with a long game - 0 views

messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/...oakv2

climate politics policy gnd activism green

shared by Javier E on 29 Jul 22 - No Cached
  • Although the story will be much more heroic if this bill or something like it passes into law, the achievement is already heroic, by bringing such legislation, in this country, even this close.
  • In less than five years, a new generation of activists and aligned technocrats has taken climate action from the don’t-go-there zone of American politics and helped place it at the very center of the Democratic agenda, persuading an old-guard centrist septuagenarian, Biden, to make a New Deal-scale green investment the focus of his presidential campaign platform and his top policy priority once in office
  • This, despite a generation of conventional wisdom that the issue was electorally fraught and legislatively doomed. Now they find themselves pushing a recognizable iteration of that agenda — retooled and whittled down, yes, but still unthinkably large by the standards of previous administrations — plausibly forward into law.
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  • If you believe that climate change is a boutique issue prioritized only by out-of-touch liberal elites, as one poll found, then this bill, should it pass, represents a political achievement of astonishing magnitude: the triumph of a moral crusade against long odds.
  • if you believe there is quite a lot of public support for climate action, as other polls suggest — then this bill marks the success of outsider activists in holding establishment forces to account, both to their own rhetoric and to the demands of their voters.
  • whatever your read of public sentiment, what is most striking about the news this week is not just that there is now some climate action on the table but also how fast the landscape for climate policy has changed, shifting all of our standards for success and failure along with it
  • The bill may well prove inadequate, even if it passes. It also represents a generational achievement — achieved, from the point of view of activists, in a lot less time than a full generation.
  • Technological progress has driven the cost of renewable energy down so quickly, it should now seem irresistible to anyone making long-term policy plans or public investments. There has been rapid policy innovation among centrists and policy wonks, too, dramatically expanding the climate tool kit beyond carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems to what has been called a whole-of-government approach to decarbonizing.
  • To trust the math of its architects, this deal between Manchin and the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, splits the difference — the United States won’t be leading the pack on decarbonization, but it probably won’t be seen by the rest of the world as a laughingstock or climate criminal, either.
  • None of this is exclusively the work of the climate left
  • The present-day climate left was effectively born, in the United States, with the November 2018 Sunrise Movement sit-in. At the time, hardly anyone on the planet had heard of Greta Thunberg, who had just begun striking outside Swedish Parliament — a lonely, socially awkward 15-year-old holding up a single sign. Not four years later, her existential rhetoric is routinely echoed by presidents and prime ministers and C.E.O.s and secretaries general, and more than 80 percent of the world’s economic activity and emissions are now, theoretically, governed by net-zero pledges pointing the way to a carbon-neutral future in just decades.
  • as the political scientist Matto Mildenberger has pointed out, the legislation hadn’t failed at the ballot box; it had stalled on Manchin’s desk
  • He also pointed to research showing climate is driving the voting behavior of Democrats much more than it is driving Republicans into opposition and that most polling shows high levels of baseline concern about warming and climate policy all across the country. (It is perhaps notable that as the Democrats were hashing out a series of possible compromises, there wasn’t much noise about any of them from Republicans, who appeared to prefer to make hay about inflation, pandemic policy and critical race theory.)
  • It is hard not to talk about warming without evoking any fear, but the president was famous, on the campaign trail and in office, for saying, “When I think ‘climate change,’ I think ‘jobs.’”
  • He focused on green growth and the opportunities and benefits of a rapid transition.
  • In the primaries, Sunrise gave Biden an F for his climate plan, but after he sewed up the nomination, its co-founder Varshini Prakash joined his policy task force to help write his climate plan. As the plan evolved and shrank over time, there were squeaks and complaints here and there but nothing like a concerted, oppositional movement to punish the White House for its accommodating approach to political realities.
  • over the past 18 months, since the inauguration, whenever activists chose to protest, they were almost always protesting not the inadequacy of proposed legislation but the worrying possibility of no legislation at all
  • When they showed up at Manchin’s yacht, they were there to tell him not that they didn’t want his support but that they needed him to act. They didn’t urge Biden to throw the baby out with the bathwater; they were urging him not to.
  • When, last week, they thought they’d lost, Democratic congressional staff members staged an unprecedented sit-in at Schumer’s office, hoping to pressure the Senate majority leader back into negotiations with Manchin. And what did they say? They didn’t say, “We have eight years to save the earth.” They didn’t say, “The blood of the future is on your hands.” What their protest sign said was “Keep negotiating, Chuck.” As far as I can tell, this was code for “Give Joe more.”
  • They got their wish. And as a result, we got a bill. That’s not naïveté but the opposite.
  • The deal, if it holds, is very big, several times as large as anything on climate the United States passed into law before. The architects and supporters of the $369 billion in climate and clean-energy provisions in Joe Manchin’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, announced Wednesday, are already calculating that it could reduce American carbon emissions by 40 percent, compared with 2005 levels, by 2030. That’s close enough to President Biden’s pledge of 50 percent that exhausted advocates seem prepared to count it as a victory
Javier E

Opinion | A Trump-Biden Rematch Is the Election We Need - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ump-election-2024-rematch.html

2024 election decision-making

shared by Javier E on 12 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Joe Biden versus Donald Trump is not the choice America wants. But it is the choice we need to face.
  • The one thing on which Americans seem to agree is that we find a Biden-Trump 2024 rematch entirely disagreeable.
  • it also may signal an underlying reluctance to acknowledge the meaning of their standoff and the inescapability of our decision. A contest between Biden and Trump would compel Americans to either reaffirm or discard basic democratic and governing principles.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Biden versus Trump forces us to decide, or at least to clarify, who we think we are and what we strive to be.
  • Trump is running as an overtly authoritarian candidate — the illusion of pivots, of adults in the room, of a man molded by the office, is long gone. He is dismissive of the law, except when he can harness it for his benefit; of open expression, except when it fawns all over him; and of free elections, except when they produce victories he likes
  • in a new term he would use the Justice Department as an instrument of vengeance against political opponents. We know who Trump is and what he offers.
  • Biden’s case to the electorate — for 2020, 2022 and 2024 — has been premised on the preservation of American democratic traditions. In the video announcing his 2020 campaign, he asserted that “our very democracy” was at stake in the race against Trump.
  • And the video kicking off his 2024 re-election bid featured multiple scenes of the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. “The question we are facing,” Biden said, “is whether in the years ahead we have more freedom or less freedom.” That is our choice in 2024.
  • When half the country believes democracy isn’t working well, when calls for political violence have become commonplace, when the speaker of the House is an election denier, it is time to face what we risk becoming and to accept or reject it. We have no choice but to choose.
  • The protection of American democracy offers a potentially resonant message for Biden, precisely among parts of the Democratic coalition that he can ill afford to lose.
  • Of course, we already faced this choice — and made it — in 2020. Why insist on a do-over? Because a country approaching its 250th birthday does not have the luxury of calling itself an experiment forever; this is the moment to assess the results of that experiment.
  • Because a lone Trump victory in 2016 could conceivably be remembered as an aberration if it were followed by two consecutive defeats, but a Trump restoration in 2024 would confirm America’s slide toward authoritarian rule and would render Biden’s lone term an interregnum, a blip in history’s turn.
  • And we must choose again because the fever did not break; instead, it threatens to break us.
Javier E

Opinion | The New Republican Party Isn't Ready for the Post-Roe World - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ohio-abortion-republicans.html

libertinism libertarian GOP pro-life analysis prospects

shared by Javier E on 13 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • The pro-life movement is in a state of electoral collapse, and I think I know one reason.
  • In the eight years since the so-called New Right emerged on the scene and Trump began to dominate the Republican landscape, the Republican Party has become less libertarian but more libertine, and libertinism is ultimately incompatible with a holistic pro-life worldview.
  • t I’ve seen Republican libertinism with my own eyes. I know that it distorts the culture of the Republican Party and red America.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • a pro-life libertarian will recognize the humanity and dignity of both mother and child.
  • The entire philosophy of libertarianism depends on a healthy recognition of human dignity. A healthy libertarianism can still be individualistic, but it’s also deeply concerned with both personal virtue and the rights of others.
  • The difference between libertarianism and libertinism can be summed up as the difference between rights and desires. A libertarian is concerned with her own liberty but also knows that this liberty ends where yours begins
  • A libertine, by contrast, is dominated by his desires. The object of his life is to do what he wants, and the object of politics is to give him what he wants.
  • A libertarian is concerned with all forms of state coercion. A libertine rejects any attempt to coerce him personally, but he’s happy to coerce others if it gives him what he wants.
  • Donald Trump is the consummate libertine. He rejects restraints on his appetites and accountability for his actions. The guiding principle of his worldview is summed up with a simple declaration: I do what I want. Any movement built in his image will be libertine as well.
  • Trump’s movement dismisses the value of personal character. It mocks personal restraint. And it’s happy to inflict its will on others if it achieves what it wants
  • Libertinism says my desires are more important than your rights, and this means that libertines are terrible ambassadors for any cause that requires self-sacrifice.
  • I don’t think the pro-life movement has fully reckoned with the political and cultural fallout from the libertine right-wing response to the Covid pandemic
  • Here was a movement that was loudly telling women that they had to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, with all the physical transformations, risks and financial uncertainties that come with pregnancy and childbirth, at the same time that millions of its members were also loudly refusing the minor inconveniences of masking and the low risks of vaccination — even if the best science available at the time told us that both masking and vaccination could help protect others from getting the disease.
  • Even worse, many of the same people demanded that the state limit the liberty of others so that they could live how they wanted
  • This do-what-you-want ethos cost a staggering number of American lives. A 2022 study found that there were an estimated 318,981 vaccine-preventable deaths from January 2021 to April 2022.
  • Now there’s evidence from Ohio and Florida that excess mortality rates were significantly higher for Republicans than Democrats after vaccines were widely available.
  • It’s not just that libertinism robs Republicans of moral authority; it’s that libertinism robs Republicans of moral principle.
  • In each state, all the pro-life movement needed was consistent Republican support, and it would have sailed to victory. All the Democrats in the state could have voted to protect abortion rights, and they would have lost if Republicans held firm. But they did not.
  • “Do as I say and not as I do” is among the worst moral arguments imaginable.
  • A holistic pro-life society requires true self-sacrifice. It asks women to value the life growing inside of them even in the face of fear and poverty. It asks the community to rally beside these women to keep them and their children safe and to provide them with opportunities to flourish. It requires both individuals and communities to sublimate their own desires to protect the lives and opportunities of others.
  • An ethos that centers individuals’ desires will bleed over into matters of life and death. It did during Covid, and it’s doing so now, as even Republicans reject the pro-life cause.
  • The challenge is much more profound. Pro-life America has to reconnect with personal virtue. It has to model self-sacrifice. It has to show, not just tell, America what it would look like to value life from conception to natural death.
  • At present, however, the Republican Party is dominated by its id. It indulges its desires. And so long as its id is in control, the pro-life movement will fail. There is no selfish path to a culture of life.
Javier E

When Milton Friedman Ran the Show - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...675983

friedman economics culture politics US history policy gop conservatism

shared by Javier E on 14 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Today, Friedman might seem to belong to a bygone world. The Trumpian wing of the Republican Party focuses on guns, gender, and God—­a stark contrast with Friedman’s free-market individualism. Its hostility to intellectuals and scientific authority is a far cry from his grounding within academic economics.
  • The analysts associated with the Claremont Institute, the Edmund Burke Foundation, and the National Conservatism Conference (such as Michael Anton, Yoram Hazony, and Patrick Deneen) espouse a vision of society focused on preserving communal order that seems very different from anything Friedman, a self-defined liberal in the style of John Stuart Mill, described in his work.
  • Jennifer Burns, a Stanford historian, sets out to make the case in her intriguing biography Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative that Friedman’s legacy cannot be shaken so easily. As she points out, some of his ideas—­the volunteer army, school choice—­have been adopted as policy; others, such as a universal basic income, have supporters across the political spectrum.
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  • Friedman’s thought, she argues, is more complex and subtle than has been understood: He raised pressing questions about the market, individualism, and the role of the state that will be with us for as long as capitalism endures.
  • Just as important, his time at Chicago taught Friedman about the intertwining of political, intellectual, and personal loyalties. He became a regular in an informal group of graduate students and junior faculty trying to consolidate the department as a center of free-market thought
  • by the 1930s, the leading figures at the University of Chicago were deeply committed to what had become known as price theory, which analyzed economic behavior in terms of the incentives and information reflected in prices. The economists who left their mark on Friedman sought to create predictive models of economic decision making, and they were politically invested in the ideal of an unencumbered marketplace.
  • Friedman was also shaped by older traditions of economic thought, in particular the vision of political economy advanced by thinkers such as Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall. For them, as for him, economics was not a narrow social science, concerned with increasing productivity and efficiency. It was closely linked to a broader set of political ideas and values, and it necessarily dealt with basic questions of justice, freedom, and the best way to organize society.
  • His libertarian ethos helped seed the far more openly hierarchical social and political conservatism that fuels much of our present-day political dysfunction.
  • But his fundamental commitments were consistent. In his early work on consumption habits, Friedman sought to puncture the arrogance of the postwar Keynesian economists, who claimed to be able to manipulate the economy from above, using taxes and spending to turn investment, consumption, and demand on and off like so many spigots
  • Instead, he believed that consumption patterns were dependent on local conditions and on lifetime expectations of income. The federal government, he argued, could do much less to affect economic demand—­and hence to fight recessions—­than the Keynesian consensus suggested.
  • In 1946, Friedman was hired by the University of Chicago, where he shut down efforts to recruit economists who didn’t subscribe to free-market views.
  • He was also legendary for his brutal classroom culture. One departmental memo, trying to rectify the situation, went so far as to remind faculty to please not treat a university student “like a dog.” What had started as a freewheeling, rebellious culture among the economists in Room Seven wound up as doctrinal rigidity.
  • Evidence leads her to argue more pointedly that Rose (credited only with providing “assistance”) essentially co-wrote Capitalism and Freedom (1962).
  • Burns implicitly exposes some of the limitations of Friedman’s focus on the economic benefits of innate individual talent. He had more than nature to thank for producing associates of such high caliber, ready to benefit him in his career. Culture and institutions clearly played a large role, and sexual discrimination during the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s ensured that professional paths were anything but fair.
  • The state, he acknowledged, would have to take some responsibility for managing economic life—­and thus economists would be thrust into a public role. The question was what they would do with this new prominence.
  • Almost as soon as the Second World War ended, Friedman began to stake out a distinctive rhetorical position, arguing that the policy goals of the welfare state could be better accomplished by the free market
  • in Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman made the case that the real problem lay in the methods liberals employed, which involved interfering with the competitive price mechanism of the free market. Liberals weren’t morally wrong, just foolish, despite the vaunted expertise of their economic advisers.
  • In a rhetorical move that seemed designed to portray liberal political leaders as incompetent, he emphasized efficiency and the importance of the price system as a tool for social policy
  • For Friedman, the competitive market was the realm of innovation, creativity, and freedom. In constructing his arguments, he envisioned workers and consumers as individuals in a position to exert decisive economic power, always able to seek a higher wage, a better price, an improved product
  • The limits of this notion emerged starkly in his contorted attempts to apply economic reasoning to the problem of racism, which he described as merely a matter of taste that should be free from the “coercive power” of the law:
  • Although he personally rejected racial prejudice, he considered the question of whether Black children could attend good schools—and whether, given the “taste” for prejudice in the South, Black adults could find remunerative jobs—less important than the “right” of white southerners to make economic decisions that reflected their individual preferences. In fact, Friedman compared fair-employment laws to the Nuremberg Race Laws of Nazi Germany. Not only was this tone-deaf in the context of the surging 1960s civil-rights movement; it was a sign of how restricted his idea of freedom really was.
  • s the conservative movement started to make electoral gains in the ’70s, Friedman emerged as a full-throated challenger of liberal goals, not just methods
  • He campaigned for “tax limitation” amendments that would have restricted the ability of state governments to tax or spend
  • n a famous New York Times Magazine essay, he suggested that corporations had no “social responsibility” at all; they were accountable only for increasing their own profit
  • Friedman’s free-market certainties went on to win over neoliberals. By the time he and Rose published their 1998 memoir, Two Lucky People, their ideas, once on the margin of society, had become the reigning consensus.
  • That consensus is now in surprising disarray in the Republican Party that was once its stronghold. The startling rise in economic inequality and the continued erosion of middle-class living standards have called into question the idea that downsizing the welfare state, ending regulations, and expanding the reach of the market really do lead to greater economic well-being—let alone freedom.
  • Friedman—despite being caricatured as a key intellectual architect of anti-government politics—had actually internalized an underlying assumption of the New Deal era: that government policy should be the key focus of political action. Using market theory to reshape state and federal policy was a constant theme of his career.
  • Still, Friedman—­and the libertarian economic tradition he advanced—­bears more responsibility for the rise of a far right in the United States than Burns’s biography would suggest. His strategy of goading the left, fully on display in the various provocations of Free to Choose and even Capitalism and Freedom, has been a staple for conservatives ever since
  • He zealously promoted the kind of relentless individualism that undergirds parts of today’s right, most notably the gun lobby. The hostile spirit that he brought to civil-rights laws surfaces now in the idea that reliance on court decisions and legislation to address racial hierarchy itself hems in freedom
  • The opposition to centralized government that he championed informs a political culture that venerates local authority and private power, even when they are oppressive
  • his insistence (to quote Capitalism and Freedom) that “any … use of government is fraught with danger” has nurtured a deep pessimism that democratic politics can offer any route to redressing social and economic inequalities.
Javier E

Jenrick's resignation is a turning point for the Tory party | The Spectator - 0 views

www.spectator.co.uk/...icks-resignation-is-a-big-deal

UK immigration tory party spectator politics crisis culture history

shared by Javier E on 09 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • Jenrick quitting over the Rwanda Bill not being strong enough is an equally telling moment. The 41-year-old Jenrick comes from the same well-mannered, centre-right Tory tradition as Sunak. He is in politics for the long haul and undoubtedly sees a return to full Cabinet rank as part of his personal career plan.
  • He was sent by Sunak to the Home Office to man mark that wild card Suella Braverman. But he came to see that she was right on the fundamentals of migration policy of both the legal and illegal varieties.
  • And now he has quit Sunak’s administration, resigning both on a point of principle and as a result of a calculated analysis about the future direction and likely reservoirs of support of the Conservative party.
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  • his political antennae have told him, correctly in my view, that the Conservative Party is going to lose the next election and then undergo a major reorientation that will see its patrician liberal wing of upper-class internationalists getting marginalised and then dropping out.
  • In their place will emerge an earthier, more provincial pro-nation state party that is genuinely socially conservative, particularly around the totemic issue of border control.
  • As immigration minister he looked into the future of migration trends and realised that the international arrangements currently in place are completely unsustainable and that the British public will turn towards a Nigel Farage political vehicle to remedy things if the Tories do not. 
  • Blue Wall, Home Counties Tory liberalism of a kind that prioritises foreign aid over domestic levelling up or international law over basic border control is destined to become so much political roadkill. The actual Liberal Democrats or Keir Starmer’s new Blairism will hoover up voters who believe in that stuff.
  • Jenrick has detected both the electoral and intellectual power of scepticism about mass, uncontrolled migration.
  • The National or ‘New’ Conservative movement, which prioritises the ideas of citizen preference in public services and social housing, strong law and order, pro-family policy, resisting Woke onslaughts from the identitarian left, and the enhancement of social solidarity is the coming force.
  • It will either take a controlling interest in the Tory party or create a party of its own – perhaps in conjunction with senior voices in Reform or even the SDP – after a calamitous Conservative defeat next year. Either way, a big shake-out is coming and the smart people are turning right
Javier E

Javier Milei, Trump and Bolsonaro admirer, leads Argentina presidential race - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ilei-argentina-trump-bolsonaro

masculinity argentina president candidate macho sexism maga trumpism

shared by Javier E on 20 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Most of the thousands who packed the Movistar Arena for Milei’s campaign-closing rally on Wednesday were men, many of them young and all of them seemingly angry.
  • Angry with a leftist establishment that has failed to control spiraling inflation and economic stagnation. Angry with a government that has allowed their currency to plummet and their earnings to vanish.
  • Young people are a political force in Argentina. Young women here were on the front lines of massive protests for the “green wave” abortion rights movement that spread across Latin America. They’ve led a campaign for gender-inclusive Spanish and helped bring the populist movement of former Argentine leaders Juan and Eva “Evita” Perón back to power.
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  • Now, after the Peronista government of Alberto Fernández and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has failed to halt the country’s economic decline, a new force among Argentina’s Generation Z is rising.
  • This time, it’s young men who are at the forefront. Milei is speaking for them.
  • An admirer of Donald Trump and former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, Milei is campaigning on an Argentine version of “Drain the Swamp.” His aggressive style, outlandish comments and unusual presentation — he claims he hasn’t brushed that hair in years — have drawn millions of viewers to his videos and disrupted traditional politics
  • He has branded Pope Francis — the Argentine former Archbishop of Buenos Aires Jorge Bergoglio, the first South American pontiff — an “evil” leftist. Climate change, he says, is a “socialist lie.” He would hold a referendum to undo the three-year-old law that legalized abortion. He has called for creating a market for the sale of organs.
  • But he has also offered frustrated Argentines a break from the status quo: He has proposed shutting down the central bank, dollarizing the economy and taking a “chain saw” to government spending.
  • His attacks on the peso are already shocking the Argentine economy; the currency has taken a nose dive in the widely traded black market in recent weeks. The inflation rate has skyrocketed.
  • If Milei wins, it will likely be on the strength of the country’s young. Voters aged 18 to 29 account for a quarter of the electorate, and polls show they’re overwhelmingly inclined to vote for the iconoclast. That’s especially true for young men.
  • Coronel grew up watching the North American right-wing provocateurs Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos on a YouTube channel that translated their words into Spanish. “They were a fundamental part of my ideological awakening,” he said. But his greatest inspiration was Trump.
  • “We stopped listening to the intellectuals to listen to the politicians,” Coronel said.
  • “While everyone was focused on feminist demands and gay rights, there was a generation slowly starting to pay attention to Javier Milei.”
  • He decided to become an economist in 1989 during the early days of hyperinflation in Argentina. He worked as a risk analyst for Corporacion America, owned by one of Argentina’s billionaires, before leaping into television as a regular guest on shows.
  • Milei’s unconventional ideas and brash style — rants peppered with personal insults — was a TV hit. As the peso plunged and inflation skyrocketed, his economic theories began to find an audience.
  • He was elected to Congress in 2021 on pledges to tear the political elite down. He gained national prominence by raffling off his congressional salary each month.
  • Milei describes himself as a liberal-libertarian or a miniarchist. He supports limiting government to just a few functions — ideally, only security and justice — a night-watchman state.
  • He promises to slash the number of federal ministries from 18 to eight. He applies his free-market ideas to just about everything — he proposes loosening gun restrictions to “maximize the cost of robbery” — and letting the invisible hand of the market do the rest.
  • “Sometimes I have to pinch myself to ask whether I am living a dream or it’s a reality,” he told The Washington Post. “Because what Javier Milei proposes in politics hasn’t been heard in Argentina for 80 years.”
  • Milei’s originality is perhaps exactly why Gen Z is so transfixed by him. It’s a generation craving authenticity, Argentine political analyst Ana Iparraguirre said. “They see this guy telling it like it is,” she said. “I might not like that he’ll be selling guns in the streets, but at least this guy is not faking it.”
  • Most of his 1.4 million TikTok followers are younger than 24, according to his social media team. Iñaki Gutierrez, a 22-year old unpaid volunteer who manages his TikTok, said Milei managed to win the primaries in remote provinces “we didn’t even set foot in.” “TikTok was the answer,” Gutierrez said.
  • The fastest-growing social media site in Latin America has helped elect a wave of millennial presidents in the region, including Nayib Bukele in El Salvador and, last week, Daniel Noboa in Ecuador.
  • Milei’s TikTok posts offer Gen Z voters an outlet for rebellion against a system that they say is doing very little for them.
  • According to one recent survey, more than 65 percent of young voters say they would leave Argentina if they could.
  • “They feel they have no future,” Iparraguirre said. “If you’ve got nothing to lose you may as well try something different.”
  • Fragoso’s girlfriend, Victoria Alegre, 23, walking with him in a mall in Buenos Aires this week, said she thinks Milei is a machista who could roll back rights for women. Fragoso said he also dislikes the way Milei speaks about feminism. But he’s willing to overlook it, he said, to take a chance on something — anything — different.
  • “They said we were dangerous and that we needed to be quiet,” Milei shouted. “But we’re here, we fought the battle and we’re going to win!
Javier E

(1) The Resilience Of Republican Christianism - 0 views

andrewsullivan.substack.com/...of-republican-christianism-1a5

Christianist worldview GOP trump culture politics US history crisis fundamentalism

shared by Javier E on 04 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • I tried to sketch out the essence of an actual conservative sensibility and politics: one of skepticism, limited government and an acceptance of human imperfection.
  • My point was that this conservative tradition had been lost in America, in so far as it had ever been found, because it had been hijacked by religious and political fundamentalism
  • I saw the fundamentalist psyche — rigid, abstract, authoritarian — as integral to the GOP in the Bush years and beyond, a phenomenon that, if sustained, would render liberal democracy practically moribund. It was less about the policy details, which change over time, than an entire worldview.
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  • the intellectual right effectively dismissed the book
  • Here is David Brooks, echoing the conservative consensus in 2006:
  • As any number of historians, sociologists and pollsters can tell you, the evangelical Protestants who now exercise a major influence on the Republican Party are an infinitely diverse and contradictory group, and their relationship to these hyperpartisans is extremely ambivalent.
  • The idea that members of the religious right form an “infinitely diverse and contradictory group” and were in no way “hyperpartisan” is now clearly absurd. Christianism, in fact, turned out to be the central pillar of Trump’s success, with white evangelicals giving unprecedented and near-universal support — 84 percent — to a shameless, disgusting pagan, because and only because he swore to smite their enemies.
  • The fusion of Trump and Christianism is an unveiling of a sort — proof of principle that, in its core, Christianism is not religious but political, a reactionary cult susceptible to authoritarian preacher
  • Christianism is to the American right what critical theory is to the American left: a reductionist, totalizing creed that “others” half the country, and deeply misreads the genius of the American project.
  • Christianism starts, as critical theory does, by attacking the core of the Founding: in particular, its Enlightenment defense of universal reason, and its revolutionary removal of religion from the state.
  • Mike Johnson’s guru, pseudo-historian David Barton, claims that the Founders were just like evangelicals today, and intended the government at all levels to enforce “Christian values” — primarily, it seems, with respect to the private lives of others. As Pete Wehner notes, “If you listen to Johnson speak on the ‘so-called separation of Church and state’ and claim that ‘the Founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around,’ you will hear echoes of Barton.”
  • Christianism is a way to think about politics without actually thinking. Johnson expressed this beautifully last week: “I am a Bible-believing Christian. Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘It’s curious, people are curious: What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.
  • this tells us nothing, of course. The Bible demands interpretation in almost every sentence and almost every word; it contains universes of moral thought and thesauri of ambiguous words in a different ancient language; it has no clear blueprint for contemporary American politics, period
  • Yet Johnson uses it as an absolute authority to back up any policy he might support
  • The submission to (male) authority is often integral to fundamentalism
  • Trump was an authority figure, period. He was a patriarch. He was the patriarch of their tribe. And he was in power, which meant that God put him there. After which nothing needs to be said. So of course if the patriarch says the election is rigged, you believe him.
  • And of course you do what you can to make sure that God’s will be done — by attempting to overturn the election results if necessary.
  • Christianism is a just-so story, with no deep moral conflicts. Material wealth does not pose a moral challenge, for example, as it has done for Christians for millennia. For Christianists, it’s merely proof that God has blessed you and you deserve it.
  • “I believe that scripture, the Bible is very clear: that God is the one that raises up those in authority. And I believe that God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this specific moment.” That means that Trump was blessed by God, and not just by the Electoral College in 2016. And because he was blessed by God, it was impossible that Biden beat him fairly in 2020.
  • More than three-quarters of those representing the most evangelical districts are election deniers, compared to just half of those in the remaining districts. Fully three-quarters of the deniers in the caucus hail from evangelical districts.
  • since the Tea Party, the turnover in primary challenges in these evangelical districts has been historic — a RINO-shredding machine. No wonder there were crosses being carried on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021. The insurrectionists were merely following God’s will. And Trump’s legal team was filled with the faithful.
  • Tom Edsall shows the skew that has turned American politics into something of a religious war: “When House districts are ranked by the percentage of voters who are white evangelicals, the top quintile is represented by 81 Republicans and 6 Democrats and the second quintile by 68 Republicans and 19 Democrats.”
  • the overwhelming majority of the Republican House Caucus (70%) represents the Most Evangelical districts (top two quintiles). Thus, we can see that a group that represents less than 15% of the US population commands 70% of the districts comprising the majority party in the House of Representatives.
  • And almost all those districts are safe as houses. When you add Christianism to gerrymandering, you get a caucus that has no incentive to do anything but perform for the cable shows.
  • This is not a caucus interested in actually doing anything.
  • I don’t know how we best break the grip of the fundamentalist psyche on the right. It’s a deep human tendency — to give over control to a patriarch or a holy book rather than engage in the difficult process of democratic interaction with others, compromise, and common ground.
  • he phenomenon has been given new life by a charismatic con-man in Donald Trump, preternaturally able to corral the cultural fears and anxieties of those with brittle, politicized faith.
  • What I do know is that, unchecked, this kind of fundamentalism is a recipe not for civil peace but for civil conflict
  • It’s a mindset, a worldview, as deep in the human psyche as the racial tribalism now endemic on the left. It controls one of our two major parties. And in so far as it has assigned all decisions to one man, Donald Trump, it is capable of supporting the overturning of an election — or anything else, for that matter, that the patriarch wants. Johnson is a reminder of that.
lilyrashkind

Georgia district attorney investigating Trump has subpoenaed officials from secretary of state's office - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...illis-trump-subpoena-officials

trump attorney officials US politics

shared by lilyrashkind on 31 May 22 - No Cached
  • An Atlanta-area district attorney investigating Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election results has subpoenaed half a dozen officials from the Georgia secretary of state's office, according to copies of the documents obtained by CNN. The flurry of activity comes as a special grand jury is set to begin its work of investigating the former President and his allies on June 1. A person familiar with the investigation said secretary of state officials are not alone in receiving subpoenas in recent weeks, as the Fulton County district attorney's office has ramped up its investigative activity.
  • The subpoenas call for the witnesses to testify on dates from early to mid-June. Raffensperger, who has previously said he would comply with a subpoena, appears slated to be one of the first witnesses to testify on June 2. His call with Trump -- in which the former President pressured Raffensperger to "find" the votes needed for Trump to win Georgia -- lies at the heart of the Georgia probe.
  • Willis, meantime, has said she's not limiting her investigation to Trump's infamous call with Raffensperger. She has cast a wide net -- looking at Georgia's fake electors, former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani's conspiracy-ridden presentation to state lawmakers and other issues -- as she tries to determine whether Trump and his allies engaged in a broad criminal conspiracy to try to swing the Peach State to Trump's column.
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  • The Atlanta Journal-Constitution also reported that one of its political reporters who covered the 2020 election, Greg Bluestein, has been told he should expect to receive a subpoena. The newspaper's managing editor, Shawn McIntosh, has said they would try to have any subpoena for Bluestein dismissed. She did not immediately respond to CNN's request for comment.CNN's Ryan Nobles contributed to this report.
Javier E

Opinion | Steve Bannon Is Onto Something - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...bannon-trumpism-democracy.html

politics culture democracy Democratic party activism

shared by Javier E on 10 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • In his 2020 book “Politics Is for Power,” Eitan Hersh, a political scientist at Tufts, sketched a day in the life of many political obsessives in sharp, if cruel, terms.I refresh my Twitter feed to keep up on the latest political crisis, then toggle over to Facebook to read clickbait news stories, then over to YouTube to see a montage of juicy clips from the latest congressional hearing. I then complain to my family about all the things I don’t like that I have seen.
  • To Hersh, that’s not politics. It’s what he calls “political hobbyism.” And it’s close to a national pastime.
  • Real political work, for Hersh, is the intentional, strategic accumulation of power in service of a defined end
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  • It is action in service of change, not information in service of outrage.
  • “The people thinking strategically about how to win the 2022 election are the ones doing the most for democracy,” said Daniel Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard and one of the authors of “How Democracies Die.”
  • “I’ve heard people saying bridges don’t save democracy — voting rights do. But for Democrats to be in a position to protect democracy, they need bigger majorities.”
  • There are people working on a Plan B
  • He spends his days obsessing over mayoral races in 20,000-person towns, because those mayors appoint the city clerks who decide whether to pull the drop boxes for mail-in ballots and small changes to electoral administration could be the difference between winning Senator Ron Johnson’s seat in 2022 (and having a chance at democracy reform) and losing the race and the Senate. Wikler is organizing volunteers to staff phone banks to recruit people who believe in democracy to serve as municipal poll workers, because Steve Bannon has made it his mission to recruit people who don’t believe in democracy t
  • The difference between those organizing at the local level to shape democracy and those raging ineffectually about democratic backsliding — myself included — reminds me of the old line about war: Amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics. Right now, Trumpists are talking logistics.
  • “We do not have one federal election,” said Amanda Litman, a co-founder of Run for Something, which helps first-time candidates learn about the offices they can contest and helps them mount their campaigns. “We have 50 state elections and then thousands of county elections. And each of those ladder up to give us results.
  • While Congress can write, in some ways, rules or boundaries for how elections are administered, state legislatures are making decisions about who can and can’t vote. Counties and towns are making decisions about how much money they’re spending, what technology they’re using, the rules around which candidates can participate.”
  • Protecting democracy by supporting county supervisors or small-town mayors — particularly ones who fit the politics of more conservative communities — can feel like being diagnosed with heart failure and being told the best thing to do is to double-check your tax returns and those of all your neighbors.
  • These races get zero national attention. They hardly get local attention. Turnout is often lower than 20 percent. That means people who actually engage have a superpower. You, as a single dedicated volunteer, might be able to call and knock on the doors of enough voters to win a local election.”
  • “One thing I was really struck by when I first started getting involved in politics is how much power there is in just showing up to things,” she said. “If you love libraries, libraries have board meetings. Go to the public meeting. See where they’re spending their money. We’re supposed to be participating. If you want to get involved, there’s always a way.”
kennyn-77

What next for world powers in war-torn Libya? | News | Al Jazeera - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...world-powers-in-war-torn-libya

libya troops turkey Russia

shared by kennyn-77 on 04 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • The presence of both Turkish and Russian forces in the North African country is deeply unsettling to European powers, unlike the United States, analysts say.
  • Libya’s electoral commission decided that no such vote could take place for numerous reasons. The presence of foreign forces on Libyan soil was unquestionably one of the delicate factors, adding complexity and controversy to the now-postponed election scheduled for December 24.
  • Turkey’s military or Russia’s Wagner Group will leave the country in the foreseeable future.
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  • First, the Turks and Russians have too much to gain from staying in Libya. Second, they have little incentive to leave under current circumstances because the only power in the world that could potentially use its leverage to pressure Turkish and Russian forces to depart is the United States. It is unlikely for the US to play its cards in such a manner.
  • Washington is not interested in Libya, especially at this time when there are far more pressing problems – from Donbas to North Korea, to China and, above all, to the enormous internal problems that the Biden administration is facing,”
  • From Washington’s perspective, this is not necessarily problematic so long as the Wagner Group’s presence does not expand. Because of such concerns about the Russian force enlarging its footprint in Libya, the US sees the Turkish military’s presence in the polarised North African country as the best outcome that Washington could realistically expect.
  • “The only mechanism that the United States has is the Turkish presence. When the United States looks at Turkey it sees a NATO member.
  • The presence of both Turkish and Russian forces in the North African country is deeply unsettling to European powers, unlike Washington that has taken a far more favourable stance towards Ankara’s role in Libya.
  • “The presence of Turkish forces there is of course considered detrimental to France’s interests, given the strategic alignment of Paris to Abu Dhabi and its support of the Eastern forces of General Khalifa Haftar in the 2019-2020 Tripoli offensive,”
  • “Economic competition must be also factored into these considerations, which help explain why after many years of a worrisome intra-European spat, Paris [which backed Haftar] and Rome [which backed the Government of National Accord] decided to come together, set aside their differences, and face outsiders expanding their influence in the Libyan arena.”
  • Beyond issues stemming from economic competition, there are security issues that give EU members reason to perceive the Turkish and Russian hard power in Libya as threatening national interests of European powers. “Finally, whoever controls the Libyan coast controls migration flows and this is a strategic issue that Brussels should not underestimate,” said Fasanotti.
  • If the US remains unwilling to throw its weight around in Libya and maintains its own perspectives on Turkish-Russian rivalry for influence that leads Washington to be more accommodating of Ankara’s Libya foreign policy than several of the US’s close European allies, these divisions could deepen.
lilyrashkind

Secret Service says Pence was taken to loading dock under US Capitol during January 6 riot - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...-january-6-riot-secret-service

secret service capitol us

shared by lilyrashkind on 26 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • (CNN)A US Secret Service inspector who helped coordinate then-Vice President Mike Pence's trip to the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, testified on Monday that Pence spent several hours in a loading dock underneath the building during the riot.The revelation -- during the second trial for a defendant charged in the Capitol attack -- is the first time that federal law enforcement has confirmed where Pence went after he was evacuated from the Senate chamber on January 6.
  • "We took him to a secure location ... underground," Secret Service inspector Lanelle Hawa testified. "It was in the loading dock," which is located underneath the plaza on the Senate side of the building, she said.Read MoreHawa said the loading dock counted as a restricted area, established for the Electoral College certification, as did the Capitol grounds. When asked by prosecutors whether Pence ever left that restricted area, Hawa said, "No."
  • Griffin's legal defense team made it clear before the trial that they wanted to ask about Pence's location during the riot and about the restricted area established for his visit -- appearing to set up the argument that the area was no longer restricted because Pence left. Days before the trial, McFadden allowed Griffin's attorneys to cross examine the Secret Service inspector on Pence's location during the riot, writing that "Griffin must be allowed to test the veracity of the Government's contention that Vice President Pence was on the Capitol grounds during the relevant period."After a half an hour of Griffin's attorney, Nicholas Smith, questioning the inspector, McFadden told Smith that he had not established that Pence had left the restricted area.
lilyrashkind

Ketanji Brown Jackson is the most popular Supreme Court nominee in years - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...wn-jackson-supreme-court-biden

politics us supreme court

shared by lilyrashkind on 26 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • (CNN)Two news stories dominated the headlines this week. The ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine reached its one month mark. And the Senate hosted confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to join the Supreme Court. It's with the Jackson confirmation hearings that we begin our statistical journey into the news of the week.
  • If Jackson's ratings hold up through her likely confirmation, she would be the most popular nominee to be confirmed since John Roberts in 2005. Jackson's popularity should only help her in the confirmation process. Read MoreA few years ago, I built a statistical model to help understand why senators vote the way they do on Supreme Court nominees. The model took into account variables such as a nominee's qualifications, the ideology of the nominee and the senator, etc.
  • A lot of that may have had to do with the fact that he was popular. Thomas had a +33-point net popularity rating among Americans, according to an average of polling taken before he was confirmed.
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  • Indeed, one of the big stories of Supreme Court nominations this century is how divisive they've generally been with the American public. Since 2005, nominees who either got a Senate vote or withdrew their nominations averaged only a +10-point net popularity rating in their final polls. Compare that with nominees from 1986 to 1994, who averaged a +26-point net popularity rating in their final polls before their Senate vote or withdrawal of their nomination. This strong popularity for earlier nominees helps, at least in small part, to explain why most of them flew through their confirmation hearings and why many this century have generally had a harder time.
  • Still, it would be surprising if Jackson didn't get at least a few Republican votes. Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Rob Portman of Ohio seem the most likely given how often they've voted with Biden this Congress. The good news for Democrats is that even if Jackson doesn't get any Republican votes, the polarization would still help her. It is unlikely that any Democrat will vote against her. With the Senate Democratic Caucus controlling 50 seats and Vice President Kamala Harris breaking any tie votes, all Jackson needs for confirmation is Democratic support.
  • There were just 220 mentions of inflation by comparison. Yet, that's what voters care the most about. In a CBS News/YouGov poll from earlier this month, 46% said the "economy and jobs" or "inflation" were the most important issues facing the country. No other issue came close. This could explain why there's been a minimal "rally around the flag" effect for Biden following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. While the President's approval rating seemed to rise by a point or two initially, any rise has since flattened out. Biden's average approval rating stands in the low 40s with a disapproval rating in the mid 50s.
  • The fact that the economy has remained important to determining the temperature of the electorate shouldn't be surprising. Even with a global pandemic, the 2020 election result tracked well with what would have been expected with a lackluster, though not awful, economy. It's a reminder that what
  • Helping others: A Gallup study found strong growth across the world in people helping strangers, volunteering time to organizations and donating money to charities over the course of the pandemic, with participation in such activities increasing by nearly 25%.
Javier E

Opinion | Mixing Barstool Conservatives and Social Conservatives Is Warping the G.O.P. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...al-conservatives-abortion.html

conservatism sex license libertinism gop culture politics history

shared by Javier E on 16 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • Some conservatives seem to have decided that winning over a new constituency — one that hates rules and ordinances and loves hot people and cool ideas and sex, sex and ideally more sex — is worth changing what it means to be a conservative in the first place.
  • A hornier conservative movement might be more electorally successful, but it will run headfirst into a wall of longstanding conservative policy commitments — to end abortion, eliminate pornography and reinforce the “nuclear family.” Goals that are, at the very least, not very horny.
  • Being a horny bro is not terribly unusual, or even bad. In fact, I’d argue that many men fall in this category — heterosexual men who think that liking sex and sexiness are generally good, uncomplicated things, and think that people who tell them that sex or sexiness is bad or sinful or problematic should be mocked or ignored.
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  • Under the philosophical construct of horny bro-dom, the idea is that abortion isn’t good or bad, but it is an act that a woman wishes to commit, and nobody should tell anybody else what to do, or what not to do. In fact, in 1992, then-Gov. Bill Clinton (a noted horny bro) said
  • Barstool conservatives are “people who, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, accept pornography, homosexuality, drug use, legalized gambling, and whatever Gamergate was about.” But what they do not accept, ever, is being told what to do, whether by “hectoring, schoolmarmish” politicians and media or by the federal government
  • “This attitude is ‘liberal’ in that it regards sexual license as an unalloyed good, and treats any kind of social or religious conservatism as a dead letter. But at the same time it wants to rebel and lash out against the strictures it feels that feminism and political correctness have placed on male liberty, male rights.”
  • The debate that Mr. Hefner and Mr. Buckley had about politics in the 1960s has become a defining question for the conservative movement: whether conservatism is a project intended to get people to do something (even things they do not wish to do) or to protect people from being told what to do.
  • This has created peril for traditional Republicans. Attempting to come across as the “cool mom” of political persuasions — do whatever you want, just do it at home, and ideally, do it in a way that owns the teetotaling libs — is not the natural affect of movement conservatives.
Javier E

All the Trump Indictments Everywhere All at Once - 0 views

thetriad.thebulwark.com/...ump-indictments-everywhere-all

corruption gop maga electorate trump culture politics

shared by Javier E on 24 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • Here’s Furman:There’s what economists think people should think about inflation—and what people actually think about inflation are different. . . .Inflation has big winners and losers. So surprise inflation helps debtors and hurts creditors. And there are probably tens of millions of people in our economy who have benefited from inflation. Maybe it’s a business that was able to raise prices more. Maybe a worker who was able to get a bigger raise. Maybe it’s someone whose mortgage is now worth 10 percent less.But there are not tens of millions of people who think they’ve benefited from inflation. In fact, I’m not sure there are tens of people who think they’ve benefited from inflation.And so it has these winners and losers. The losers are very aware of their losses. The winners are completely oblivious to their gains.So then as a policymaker, do you want to sort of make people happy? Or do you want to sort of do what you think is in their economic and financial interests? And that to me is not obvious.
  • Oh it’s obvious to me. The People are the problem.But they’re a persistent problem and until the AIs replace us, The People aren’t going away. So given this constraint, I’m not sure that an optimal solution is ever going to be politically possible in American democracy. The country is too fractured. Our political institutions too compromised.
  • so if you work from the assumption that we’re going to shoot wide of the mark in one direction or the other, I’d still rather be on the Trump-Biden side of having done too much, and dealing with our attendant problems than the Bush-Obama side of having done too little.
Javier E

Opinion | The Left's Fever Is Breaking - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...left-activism.html

progressive woke excess backlash culture history crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 16 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • In June the Intercept’s Ryan Grim wrote about the toll that staff revolts and ideologically inflected psychodramas were taking on the work: “It’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult.”
  • That’s why the decision by Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the progressive Working Families Party, to speak out about the left’s self-sabotaging impulse is so significant. Mitchell, who has roots in the Black Lives Matter movement, has a great deal of credibility; he can’t be dismissed as a dinosaur threatened by identity politics
  • But as the head of an organization with a very practical devotion to building electoral power, he has a sharp critique of the way some on the left deploy identity as a trump card. “Identity and position are misused to create a doom loop that can lead to unnecessary ruptures of our political vehicles and the shuttering of vital movement spaces,
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Among many progressive leaders, though, it’s been received eagerly and gratefully. It “helped to put language to tensions and trends facing our movement organizations,” Christopher Torres, an executive director of the Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice institute, said at a Tuesday webinar devoted to the article.
  • Mitchell’s piece systematically lays out some of the assertions and assumptions that have paralyzed progressive outfits.
  • Among them are maximalism, or “considering anything less than the most idealistic position” a betrayal; a refusal to distinguish between discomfort and oppression; and reflexive hostility to hierarchy.
  • He criticizes the insistence “that change on an interpersonal or organizational level must occur before it is sought or practiced on a larger scale,” an approach that keeps activists turned inward, along with the idea that progressive organizations should be places of therapeutic healing.
  • All the problems Mitchell elucidates have been endemic to the left for a long time. Destructive left-wing purity spirals are at least as old as the French Revolution.
  • It’s not surprising that such counterproductive tendencies became particularly acute during the pandemic, when people were terrified, isolated and, crucially, very online
  • “On balance, I think social media has been bad for democracy,” Mitchell told me.
  • as Mitchell wrote in his essay, social media platforms reward shallow polemics, “self-aggrandizement, competition and conflict.” These platforms can give power to the powerless, but they also bestow it on the most disruptive and self-interested people in any group, those likely to take their complaints to Twitter rather than to their supervisors or colleagues.
  • The gamification of discourse through likes and retweets, he said, “flies in the face of building solidarity, of being serious about difference, of engaging in meaningful debate and struggle around complex ideas.”
  • The publication of “Building Resilient Organizations” and the conversation around it are signs that the fever Mitchell describes is beginning to break.
  • that doesn’t mean the dysfunctions Mitchell identified will go away on their own once people start spending more time together. He puts much of the onus on leaders to be clear with employees about the missions of their organizations and their decision-making processes and to take emotional maturity into account in hiring decisions.
  • the ultimate aim of social justice work should not be the refinement of one’s own environment. “Building resilient and strong organizations is not the end goal,” said Mitchell. “It’s a means to building power so we can defeat an authoritarian movement that wants to take away democracy.” Here’s to remembering that in 2023.
Javier E

Opinion | The Red Wave Didn't Just Vanish - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rms-republicans-democrats.html

shared by Javier E on 17 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • On Election Day, a small but crucial percentage of Republican voters deserted their party, casting ballots for Democratic nominees in several elections that featured Trump-backed candidates at the top of the ticket. These Trump-driven defections wrought havoc on Republican ranks.
  • at key battleground states that were critical to continued Democratic control of the Senate. In Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, party-line voting among Republicans consistently fell below the party’s national average, according to exit poll data.
  • In New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, the Republican vote for the Republican Senate candidate was seven percentage points below the national average, and the Republican vote for the Democratic Senate candidate increased by the same amount; in Arizona, support for the Republican Senate nominee fell among Republicans by six points, and support for the Democratic candidate rose by the same amount again; in Nevada, the drop in support for the Republican candidate was two percentage points, and the increase for the Democratic nominee was once again the same.
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  • the major finding of the survey “is that democratic norm violations of the sort many Republicans ran on are an electoral loser.”
  • Republican candidates, Westwood added, “running on platforms that supported democratic norm violations were standing behind a policy that seems to only resonate with Trump and a small minority of Republican voters.
  • A publicly released post-election analysis by Neil Newhouse and Jim Hobart, partners at the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, found, for example, that a far higher percentage of Democrats, 81 percent, believe “Republicans represent a threat to democracy that, if not stopped, will destroy America as we know it,” than Republicans (69 percent) believe the same thing about Democrats
  • the election outcomes are consistent with the interpretation that the candidates most closely associated with Trump suffered a penalty. Voters rejected all the Trump-endorsed secretary of state nominees in important swing states. Republicans unexpectedly lost seats in districts where Republican incumbents who supported Trump’s impeachment had been denied renomination. Republicans closely linked to Trump lost elections in winnable swing states
  • Both Democrats and Republicans, Westwood said,overestimate the extent to which the other side supports democratic norm violations by up to five times. There is a real risk that damage to our country could occur not because of support for norm violations but as a pre-emptive strike based on the faulty assumption that the other side has abandoned democracy.
  • abortion, which worked to the advantage of Democrats, “was more of a factor than the pre-election polls indicated,” with almost as many voters, 31 percent, saying it was a high-priority issue as the 32 percent who identified rising prices and inflation, an issue that benefited Republicans
  • Almost identical percentages identified concern over democratic backsliding, at 25 percent, a pro-Democratic issue, as the 26 percent who identified jobs and the economy, a pro-Republican concern.
  • through 2020, a larger percentage of Republicans considered themselves “to be more a supporter of Donald Trump” than “a supporter of the Republican Party.” That came to an end in January 2021, and by this month, 67 percent said they were “more a supporter of the Republican Party,” more than double the 30 percent who said they were “more a supporter of Donald Trump.”
  • Crime, Greenberg wrote,was a top issue for many Democratic base voters. A quarter of Blacks and half of Hispanics and Asians voters trusted Republicans more than Democrats to address the issue. With Democrats trailing Republicans by 10 points on crime, Democrats have a lot of work to do.There is another word of caution for Democrats. The party’s single most important achievement in 2022 was to maintain control of the Senate, preventing Republicans from blocking Biden’s judicial and executive branch appointments.
  • n 2024, however, 23 seats in the Democratic caucus will be up for grabs — including two independent seats (Angus King in Maine and Bernie Sanders in Vermont) — making it that much harder for Democrats to keep their thin majority. Eight of these Democratic seats are in purple or red states (Montana and West Virginia, for example), offering multiple opportunities to the Republican Party
  • In contrast, all 10 of the Republican-held seats up for election in 2024 are in solidly red states.
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