On issue after issue, what you see are multiple levels of denial combined with a refusal ever to give up an argument no matter how completely it has been discredited.
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Opinion | The Zombie Style in American Politics - The New York Times - 0 views
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false equivalency propaganda bad faith denial partisan inequality climate change debate Russia
shared by Javier E on 30 Apr 19
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I first encountered this style of argument a long time ago, over the issue of rising inequality. By the early 1990s it was already obvious that growth in the United States economy was becoming ever more skewed
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The answer was multilayered denial. Inequality wasn’t rising. O.K., it was rising, but that wasn’t a problem. O.K., rising inequality was unfortunate, but there was nothing that could be done about it without crippling economic growth.
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Global warming is a myth — a hoax concocted by a vast conspiracy of scientists around the world. O.K., the climate is changing, but it’s a natural phenomenon that has nothing to do with human activity. O.K., man-made climate change is real, but we can’t do anything about it without destroying the economy.
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You see the same thing on climate change
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in each case those making denialist arguments, while they may invoke evidence, don’t actually care what the evidence says; at a fundamental level, they aren’t interested in the truth. Their goal, instead, is to serve a predetermined agenda.
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What the right’s positioning on inequality, climate and now Russian election interference have in common is that in each case the people pretending to be making a serious argument are actually apparatchiks operating in bad faith.
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Thus, inequality denial is about using whatever argument comes to hand to defend policies that benefit the rich at the expense of working Americans. Climate denial is about using whatever argument comes to hand to defend fossil fuel interests. Russia denial is about using whatever argument comes to hand to defend Donald Trump
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reporting about these debates typically frames them as disputes about the facts and what they mean, when the reality is that one side isn’t interested in the facts.
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Calling out dishonesty and bad faith can seem like partisan bias when, to put it bluntly, one side of the political spectrum lies all the time, while the other side doesn’t.
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But pretending that good faith exists when it doesn’t is unfair to readers
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The public deserves to know that the big debates in modern U.S. politics aren’t a conventional clash of rival ideas. They’re a war in which one side’s forces consist mainly of intellectual zombies.
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Opinion | Ryan, Republicans and the Republic - The New York Times - 0 views
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it was the Faustian bargain he struck with the president, normalizing the abnormal and forgiving the unforgivable for the sake of a single mediocre policy win.
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It will remember the alacrity and ease with which the supposedly likable face of pro-growth, family-friendly conservatism opportunistically played the sycophant to the congenitally mendacious and previously priapic nativist bigot who, through a bad fluke, captured the White House.
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A conservative rejoinder to this critique is that the speaker had no choice; that Trump was the lemon with which he had to make lemonade. Nonsense. Congress and the White House are coequals, and Ryan and other Republicans who saw Trump for what he is never owed him obeisance
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They owed the country an alternative political vision, untainted by Trumpism, which could emerge from the debacle of this presidency with clean hands.
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Is there an alternative?
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There are also grass-root efforts, not all of them partisan or even particularly right-leaning, but committed to defending foundational liberal values globally in an era of creeping authoritarianism and debased populism.
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“The center-right and center-left are still joined by a broad set of common values, including respect for free speech and dissent, a belief in the benefits of international trade and immigration, respect for law and procedural legitimacy, a suspicion of cults of personality, and an understanding that free societies require protection from authoritarians promising easy fixes to complex problems.”
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“There is still a center in Western politics, and it needs to be revitalized intellectually, culturally, and politically,” reads a plank in its manifesto
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the nonpartisan Renew Democracy Initiative, led by Garry Kasparov, which had its launch this month.
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This may not be a strictly Republican position, certainly not in this administration. It is a republican one
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it offers conservatives disgusted with what their former partisan home has become a different sort of base from which they can begin to build a better form of politics, free of both the corruptions of Trumpism and the capitulations of Ryanism.
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Liberals who understand that our common political health requires a morally and intellectually sound conservative movement might consider getting aboard.
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the economist - 0 views
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AMERICA'S judges are supposed to be above party politics and yet are often appointed by politicians and then asked to rule on disputes that can sway elections. On January 9th federal judges in North Carolina gave the state two weeks to redraw its congressional map. In a caustic ruling written by James Wynn, an appellate judge nominated by Barack Obama, the court found that the state's current map-which let Republicans win ten of the state's 13 districts with just 53% of the total overall vote-was "motivated by invidious partisan intent", and violated the first and 14th Amendments. North Carolina vowed to appeal, which could see the case added to two other gerrymandering suits at the Supreme Court. The head of North Carolina's Republican Party accused Mr Wynn of "waging a personal, partisan war on North Carolina Republicans."
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Congress tries to cool partisan fever on Russia - POLITICO - 0 views
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Top Russia investigators in Congress are straining to salvage some bipartisan cooperation amid acrimony that has come to threaten the credibility of their probes. partisan anger has unsettled Russia inquiries by the Senate Judiciary Committee and House Intelligence Committee, but senior members of those panels say they hope to restore a sense of trust within their ranks. And Senate intelligence committee leaders are stressing their relative political unity in an increasingly hostile environment.
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n a small but important example, the judiciary panel’s top Democrat, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, offered an olive branch to an infuriated Republican colleague last week. Feinstein expressed “regret” for failing to notify her GOP counterpart, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, in person before she released a committee interview transcript with a key witness that Republicans had wanted kept private. The move had upset Grassley, who called it a breach of trust.
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Meanwhile, Rep. Adam Schiff, the top House intelligence Committee Democrat and a frequently harsh critic of his Republican colleagues, struck a notably conciliatory tone in a briefing with reporters last week. Noting that Republicans hadn't yet shut down his committee’s 10-month-old probe — despite some reports that they might do so by now — the Californian praised his GOP counterpart, Texas Rep. Mike Conaway, for striving to keep a spirit of collaboration alive. "Obviously there have been hurdles to overcome — and we've had more than our share on the House intel committee — but we continue to make progress," Schiff said in a Thursday interview.
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onaway said he hopes to conclude the House Intelligence Committee probe quickly, talk that angers Democrats who believe Republicans are trying to rush the panel’s investigation to a premature conclusion. "The sooner I can get this thing done, the better," he said. "The American people deserve an answer to these questions."
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Democrats were also furious earlier this month when Grassley, joined by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), suggested the FBI consider criminal charges against the author of the Fusion GPS dossier, Christopher Steele, whom they said may have lied to federal officials. Feinstein had been especially angry about the move, and many observers believed her decision to release Simpson’s transcript was an act of payback that suggested a downward spiral for the committee’s leading members. Another Democrat on the intelligence panel, Ron Wyden, offered a more direct warning Thursday as he pushed back against "this idea that gets bandied about" that the committee's Russia investigation should wind down by any certain date.
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The Oregon Democrat insisted that Trump’s son-in-law and eldest son should make return appearances before the Senate Intelligence Committee to answer what he called unresolved questions about the Trump organization's finances. “For me, I’m going to push back with everything I have if somebody tries to say this is over without Jared Kushner or Donald Trump Jr. coming to the committee to answer questions,” Wyden said.
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Judges Say Throw Out the Map. Lawmakers Say Throw Out the Judges. - The New York Times - 0 views
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political attempts to reshape or constrain state courts have risen sharply in the last 10 years, Mr. Raftery said, propelled by polarization and a fading of the civics-book notion of governmental checks and balances.
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“It ultimately boils down to this,” he said. “The courts are not looked on by some legislators as being an independent branch of government. For some, they’re looked on as an agency that needs to be brought to heel.”
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This combative approach, some analysts say, mirrors the heated rhetoric about judicial bias and overreach that has become a staple of national politics.
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“This is Trumpism at the lower level,” said Bernard Grofman, an elections expert at the University of California, Irvine who redrew Virginia’s congressional map in 2015 following a federal court finding that districts had been racially gerrymandered.
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“This is the view that if independent branches of government say things that don’t match what you say or do, you fire them; you impeach them; you malign them; you destroy them as best you can.”
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The impeachment threat has drawn sharp criticism from some quarters. “Calling for impeachment — especially five of seven justices, especially when all five are Democrats — can’t help but look partisan,”
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“We use impeachment to remove judges for serious criminal or ethical wrongdoing. This is a direct affront to the judicial branch’s power, not reasoned disagreement.”
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That said, impeachment — or at least, impeachment threats and attempts — have become a common tool to pressure courts in recent years, said Mr. Raftery of the National Center for State Courts.
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Andrew Sullivan: Kanye West and the Question of Freedom - 0 views
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race politics crisis culture freedom tribalism white liberal democracy education polarization
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in our current culture, it’s precisely the elites who seem to be driving tribal identity and thought, and doubling down on ideological and affectional polarization
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“The more highly educated also tend to be more strongly identified along political lines.” He quoted from her book: Political knowledge tends to increase the effects of identity as more knowledgeable people have more informational ammunition to counter argue any stories they don’t like
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Much of the growth in ideological consistency has come among better educated adults — including a striking rise in the share who have across-the-board liberal views, which is consistent with the growing share of postgraduates who identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party.”
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our elite debate has become far less focused on individual issues as such, and the complicated variety of positions, left, right and center, any thinking individual can take. It has become rather an elaborate and sophisticated version of “Which side are you on?”
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An analysis of American National Election Studies data from 1964 to 2012 shows that education is related to decreases in interethnic/interracial prejudice, but also to increases in ideological (liberal vs. conservative) prejudice
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But even this doesn’t capture the emotional intensity of it all, or the way it compounds over time
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In their 2015 paper, “Losing Hurts: The Happiness Impact of Partisan Electoral Loss,” the authors found that the grief of Republican Partisans after their party lost the presidential election in 2012 was twice that of “respondents with children” immediately after “the Newtown shootings” and “respondents living in Boston” after “the Boston Marathon bombings.”
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That’s an intense emotion, and it’s that intensity, it seems to me, that is corroding the norms of liberal democracy
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I find myself instinctually siding with the independent artist in these cases, perhaps because I’ve had to fight for my own individuality apart from my own various identities, most of my life. It wasn’t easy being the first openly gay editor of anything in Washington when I was in my 20s. But it was harder still to be someone not defined entirely by my group, to be a dissident within it, a pariah to many, even an oxymoron, because of my politics or my faith.
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Friendly dissidents are no longer interesting or quirky; as the stakes appear to rise, they come to seem dangerous, even contagious
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And before we even know it, we live in an atmosphere closer and closer to that of The Crucible, where politics merges into a new kind of religious warfare, dissent becomes heresy, and the response to a blasphemer among us is a righteous, metaphorical burning at the stake
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I think that’s the real context for understanding why magazines and newspapers and websites of opinion are increasingly resistant to ideological diversity within their own universes
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The dynamic here is deeply tribal. It’s an atmosphere in which the individual is always subordinate to the group, in which the “I” is allowed only when licensed by the “we.
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Hence the somewhat hysterical reaction, for example, to Kanye West’s recent rhetorical antics. I’m not here to defend West. He may be a musical genius (I’m in no way qualified to judge) but he is certainly a jackass, and saying something like “slavery was a choice” is so foul and absurd it’s self-negating
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And yet. There was something about the reaction that just didn’t sit right with me, something too easy, too dismissive of an individual artist’s right to say whatever he wants, to be accountable to no one but himself. It had a smack of raw tribalism to it, of collective disciplining, of the group owning the individual, and exacting its revenge for difference.
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It has been made far, far worse by this president, a figure whose election was both a symptom and a cause of this collective emotional unraveling, where the frontal cortex is so flooded by tribal signals that compromise feels like treason, opponents feel like enemies, and demagogues feel like saviors
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I believed in an identity politics that would aim to leave identity behind, to achieve a citizenship without qualification.
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I’m not whining about this experience, just explaining why I tend to side reflexively with the individual when he is told he isn’t legit by the group. In that intimidating atmosphere, I’m with the dissenter, the loner, and the outlier.
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It makes a liberal politics that rests on a common good close to impossible. It makes a liberal discourse not only unachievable but increasingly, in the hearts and minds of our very elites, immoral.
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I bristle because, of course, Coates is not merely subjecting West to “expectation and scrutiny” which should apply to anyone and to which no one should object; he is subjecting West to anathematization, to expulsion from the ranks.
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Just as a Puritan would suddenly exclaim that a heretic has been taken over by the Devil and must be expelled, so Coates denounces West for seeking something called “white freedom”: … freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.
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Leave aside the fact that the passage above essentializes and generalizes “whiteness” as close to evil, a sentiment that applied to any other ethnicity would be immediately recognizable as raw bigotry.
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Leave aside its emotional authenticity and rhetorical dazzle.
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Notice rather that the surrender of the individual to the we is absolute.
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That “we” he writes of doesn’t merely influence or inform or shape the individual artist; it “dictates” to him.
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it’s at that point that I’d want to draw the line. Because it’s an important line, and without it, a liberal society is close to impossible.
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I understand that the freedom enjoyed by a member of an unreflective majority is easier than the freedom of someone in a small minority, and nowhere in America is that truer than in the world of black and white.
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But that my own freedom was harder to achieve doesn’t make it any less precious, or sacrosanct. I’d argue it actually makes it more vivid, more real, than it might be for someone who never questioned it.
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And I am never going to concede it to “straightness,” the way Coates does to “whiteness.”
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As an individual, I seek my own freedom, period. Being gay is integral to who I am, but it doesn’t define who I am. There is no gay freedom or straight freedom, no black freedom or white freedom; merely freedom, a common dream, a universalizing, individual experience.
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“Liberation from the dictates of the we” is everyone’s birthright in America, and it is particularly so for anyone in the creative fields of music or writing.
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A free artist owes nothing to anyone, especially his own tribe. And if you take the space away from him to be exactly what he wants to be, in all his contradictions and complexity, you are eradicating something critical to a free and healthy society.
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Freedom, in this worldview, does not and cannot unite Americans of all races; neither can music. Because there is no category of simply human freedom possible in America, now or ever. There is only tribe. And the struggle against the other tribe. And this will never end.
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And that, of course, is one of the most dangerous aspects of our elite political polarization: It maps onto the even-deeper tribalism of race, in an age when racial diversity is radically increasing, and when the racial balance of power is shifting under our feet.
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That makes political tribalism even less resolvable and even more combustible.
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I never believed that the gay rights movement was about liberating people to be gay; I believed it was about liberating people to be themselves, in all their complexity and uniqueness.
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The promise of Obama — the integrating, reasoned, moderate promise of incremental progress — has become the depraved and toxic zero-sum culture of Trump.
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Inside the talks on the largest U.S. bailout: frantic negotiations, partisan tensions a... - 0 views
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Senior Republicans portrayed the legislation as a largely bipartisan, yet right-of-center package, and Democrats argued that they wrested the measure away from one that shortchanged workers and lacked accountability over corporations.
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Both sides claimed credit for the bill.
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“The major advantage that we had is, this is a crisis. And the Republican philosophy of little government, let the private sector do everything, diminish government, just doesn’t work,” Schumer said in an interview with The Washington Post. “So we sort of naturally had the upper hand.”
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Forgoing any concerns about the deficit, McConnell and administration officials were encouraged by a president who urged negotiators behind the scenes to “be bold, be brave and go big.”
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“It was hot on the floor and cool in the room,” said one senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk freely.
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All throughout, the fear among senators, particularly those from hard-hit states, was palpable.
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“What happened was that we kept our eye on what needed to be done, which really fit the national need — much more money for hospitals than they proposed, far more accountability on corporate bailouts than they proposed,” Schumer said in The Post interview. “Money for state and localities, which they had none of. And more stuff for working and unemployed people, and they really, our Republican friends, didn't have much to say.”
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Republicans and evangelicals think they're victims and remain unmoved by real discrimin... - 0 views
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In general, Americans of all races, ages, education levels and income groups are becoming more tolerant; the same is not true of Republicans, and evangelical Christians in particular.
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“A majority (53%) of Americans oppose allowing businesses that provide wedding services, such as catering, flowers, and wedding cakes, to refuse services to same-sex couples, compared to about four in ten (41%) who say they would support allowing these wedding-based businesses to refuse services to same-sex couples for religious reasons.”
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A majority (56%) of Americans oppose allowing small business owners in their state to refuse services or goods to gay and lesbian people if doing so violates their religious beliefs, while nearly four in ten (39%) favor
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However, two-thirds of Republicans and nearly two-thirds of evangelicals think wedding vendors should be allowed to deny service. While 60 percent of women oppose denying service, only a 48 percent plurality of men do.
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A majority (54%) of white evangelical Protestants oppose same-sex marriage, although a significant minority (43%) now expresses support
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“There is continued strong support for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people and non-discrimination laws. More than seven in ten (72%) Americans favor laws that would protect lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people from discrimination in jobs, public accommodation, and housing.
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As for transgender people serving in the military, the partisan divide reappears, with Democrats “more than twice as likely as Republicans (83% vs. 37%, respectively) to say that transgender people ought to be allowed to serve in the armed forces.
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On same-sex marriage, we see a familiar pattern: “Nearly two-thirds (66%) of Americans favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry legally, while fewer than one-third (28%) oppose.
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Support for such service refusals has increased since earlier this year. In February 2017, two-thirds (64%) opposed allowing small businesses to refuse goods or services to gay and lesbian people, compared to fewer than one-third (32%) who supported such actions. …
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“A majority (53%) of Republicans, two-thirds (67%) of independents, and more than eight in ten (81%) Democrats oppose allowing religiously affiliated adoption agencies that receive federal funding to refuse to place children with gay and lesbian couples.
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The percentage of evangelicals who would prevent gay couples from adopting is 63 percent.
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In sum, evangelicals and Republicans more generally are increasingly out of step with other Americans on issues affecting the LGBT community. Once commanding an overwhelming majority of opinion, these Americans may well feel as though the culture has “declined” or they have “lost something.”
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Among partisans, 21% of Democrats agreed with the statement to some extent compared to 63% of Republicans. Conversely, 59% of Democrats disagreed (47% strongly) while just 17% of Republicans disagreed.
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Sixty-three percent of Republicans strongly or somewhat agree that whites are under attack.
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a very large number of evangelicals, and even more Republicans in general, are convinced it is true. That may also account for high levels of opposition to immigrants among these groups.
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Other polling by PRRI also shows that these two groups are much less likely to believe minorities suffer from discrimination.
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I'm O.K. - You're Pure Evil - The New York Times - 0 views
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shared by Javier E on 18 Jun 17
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lasvegas-flights liked it
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Over the past decade in particular, the internet and social media have changed the game. They speed people to like-minded warriors and give them the impression of broader company or sturdier validation than really exist.
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What people find on the web “creates a whole new permission structure, a sense of social affirmation for what was once unthinkable,” Simas told Remnick. Obama, in his own comments to Remnick, picked up that thread, saying, “An explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers’ payroll.”
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“The capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal — that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate,” Obama added. Suspicion blossoms into certainty. Pique flowers into fury.
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As Michael Gerson noted in The Washington Post after the shooting, today’s partisans “have made anger into an industry — using it to run up the number of listeners, viewers and hits.” Mocking and savaging political opponents have been “not only normalized but monetized,” Gerson added, and he stated the obvious, which needed stating nonetheless: “If words can inspire, then they can also incite or debase.”
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Our language is growing coarser. Our images, too. And even if they’re only rarely a conduit to violence, they’re always a path away from high-minded engagement.
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Madonna fantasizes about blowing up the White House. Kathy Griffin displays a likeness of Trump’s severed head. Stephen Colbert uses a crude term to describe Trump as Putin’s sexual boy toy. Maher suggests that Trump and his daughter Ivanka have engaged in incest. I don’t question the earnestness of these entertainers’ objections to Trump, which are wholly warranted. I ask whether they’re converting even one person with a contrary point of view.
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We’re surrendering restraint and a musty but worthy thing called tact, in ways guaranteed to widen the divisions between us. The Fusion website published a story noting that one of the cops who heroically took on Hodgkinson and possibly saved Scalise’s life was a gay black woman and that Scalise, in his political career, has indulged white supremacists and fought against L.G.B.T. rights. That was worth telling.
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But the headline began by branding him a “bigoted homophobe,” and the story described this situation as an “especially delicious irony.” “Delicious”? When the congressman is lying in a hospital bed in critical condition?
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For more and more Americans, the other side isn’t merely misguided in the extreme. It’s evil in the absolute, and virtue is measured by the starkness with which that evil is labeled and reviled. There are emotional satisfactions to this. There is also a terrible price.
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The Press's Ineffective Defense Against Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Rather than explaining why the president attacking the media is bad for the media, the media need to appeal to the public’s self-interest and explain why it’s bad for them.
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Most Americans disapprove of the president—but most of them disapprove of the press as well. Just a third of Americans trust the media. Two-thirds believe the media are politically biased. Forty-five percent say the media “abuse” their First Amendment rights, versus just 35 who say they use those rights responsibly.
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simply appealing to the public to take the side of the press on grounds of reasonability is unlikely to find much traction.
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reactions to Gianforte’s assault, instead of reflecting moral principles, quickly split along partisan lines, with Democrats outraged and many Republicans rationalizing the assault.
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In a Newseum poll, 74 percent of respondents did not think that “fake news” should be protected by freedom of the press—a grave misunderstanding of how a free press operates. Four in 10 Millennials support censorship of offensive speech.
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The problem is that his attacks on the press threaten to undermine public confidence in its work, and its ability to gather and convey information on an independent basis. In a democracy, the press is the means by which ordinary citizens gain the information necessary to make informed decisions and to judge their elected representatives
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There’s no way to temper free speech for the media without tempering free speech for the rest of the population.
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What matters is convincing the public that the press is worth tolerating, because it’s an essential guarantor of the public’s own freedoms.
Right and Left: Partisan Writing You Shouldn't Miss - 0 views
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Jennifer Rubin, Charles Cooke, and the Future of Conservatism - The Atlantic - 0 views
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In the spring of 2016, National Review published its “Against Trump” issue. Twenty-one prominent conservatives signed individual statements of opposition to Trump’s candidacy. Of those 21, only six continue to speak publicly against his actions. Almost as many have become passionate defenders of the Trump presidency
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As a survival strategy, this is viable enough in the short term. But let’s understand what is driving it.
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The conservative intellectual world is whipsawed between distaste for President Trump and fear of its own audience. The conservative base has become ever more committed to Trump—and ever less tolerant of any deviation. Those conservative talkers most susceptible to market pressure—radio and TV hosts—have made the most-spectacular conversions and submissions: Mark Levin, Tucker Carlson.
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The same day that Cooke launched himself into Jennifer Rubin, another contributor to the National Review special issue, Erick W. Erickson, announced that he had lost his Fox News contract. Erickson had precisely followed Cooke’s advice, conscientiously seeking opportunities to praise Trump where he could. That halfway support did not suffice for his producers.
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Researchers at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center have quantified how dramatically far-right media sources such as Breitbart News have overtaken and displaced traditional conservative outlets such as National Review. By tallying links, citations, and other indicators of influence, they found:
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The center-left and the far right are the principal poles of the media landscape. The center of gravity of the overall landscape is the center-left. Partisan media sources on the left are integrated into this landscape and are of lesser importance than the major media outlets of the center-left. The center of attention and influence for conservative media is on the far right. The center-right is of minor importance and is the least represented portion of the media spectrum.
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Rubin stands on that embattled center-right. She is not quite alone. Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations stands there, as does the true-hearted remainder of the National Review 21: Mona Charen, Bill Kristol, John Podhoretz.
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You’ll find others at the Niskanen Center (Jerry Taylor, Brink Lindsey), and holding the faith from the Evan McMullin–Mindy Finn independent presidential ticket. A few brave the adverse comments on social media: Tom Nichols from the academic world; Seth Mandel at the New York Post’s editorial page. Joe Scarborough keeps the faith on morning TV.
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The urgency to defend Trump will accelerate should Republicans lose one or both chambers of Congress in November 2018. At that point, Trump’s veto and executive orders will become the chief political resource that conservatives have. They would not dare risk losing it.
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Charles Cooke arraigned Jennifer Rubin for being dragged to new political positions by her resistance to Trump. She is not alone. Bill Kristol quipped on Twitter: “The GOP tax bill's bringing out my inner socialist. The sex scandals are bringing out my inner feminist. Donald Trump and Roy Moore are bringing out my inner liberal. WHAT IS HAPPENING?”
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The most revealing thought in Cooke’s essay is his explanation for why he feels it is safe to go with the Trumpian flow: “Conservatism in this country long predated Trump; for now, it is tied up with Trump; soon, it will have survived Trump.”
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Good question, and here’s the answer: What is happening is the revelation that politics is dynamic, that new facts call forth new responses.
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This is something many conservatives tell themselves, but it’s not even slightly true. Trump is changing conservatism into something different. We can all observe that. Will it snap back afterward?
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Just as many anti-Trump conservatives find themselves pulled in new directions by their revulsion against Trump’s corruption and abuse of power, so too is the conservative mainstream being altered by its determination to remain on terms with Trump and his supporters.
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You can believe this only if you imagine that ideologies exist independently of the human beings who espouse them—and that they can continue unchanged and unchanging despite fluctuations in their adherents.
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This is simply not true. Ideas are not artifacts, especially the kind of collective ideas we know as ideologies. Conservatives in 1964 opposed civil-rights laws. Conservatives in 1974 opposed tax cuts unless paid for by spending cuts. Conservatives in 1984 opposed same-sex marriage. Conservatives in 1994 opposed trade protectionism. Conservatives in 2004 opposed people who equated the FBI and Soviet Union’s KGB. All those statements of conservative ideology have gone by the boards, and one could easily write a similar list of amended views for liberals.
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Conservatism is what conservatives think, say, and do. As conservatives change—as much through the harsh fact of death and birth as by the fluctuations of opinion—so does what it means to be a conservative.
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The Trump presidency is a huge political fact. He may not be the leader of American conservatism, but he is its most spectacular and vulnerable asset. The project of defending him against his coming political travails—or at least of assailing those who doubt and oppose him—is already changing what it means to be a conservative.
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The word conservative will of course continue in use. But its meaning is being rewritten each day by the actions of those who lay claim to the word. It is their commitment to Trump that etches Trumpism into them. And while Trump may indeed pass, that self-etching will not soon be effaced.
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Opinion | A Partisan Vote on the Stimulus Bill - The New York Times - 0 views
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Readers discuss the lack of any Republican support for the Senate bill, despite wide public support.
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Stimulus Win Shows Quest to Cooperate Is All but Lost,” by Carl Hulse (news analysis, March 7), proposed that bipartisanship is dead because party leaders could not work past partisan politics on the stimulus plan. While I agree that bipartisanship is dead, I believe that this is merely a symptom of a far bigger problem.Polls show that the American people overwhelmingly support President Biden’s stimulus plan. If the people of the country agree in a bipartisan way, but not the leaders, this shows a huge disconnect. Whom are the leaders representing?If the Republican leadership and centrist Democrats like Joe Manchin will not abide by the will of the people, we have a problem with representatives acting for party and self, not for the people.Christopher MartinezCoram, N.Y.To the Editor:Re “Democrats Trim Jobless Benefits in Stimulus Bill” (front page, March 6):Senate Democrats agreed to cut proposed unemployment benefits in President Biden’s stimulus bill from $400 to $300 a week in order to placate Senator Joe Manchin and other “moderates,” who feel that the larger amount is too generous for out-of-work Americans.
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Ahhh, Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, doing the people’s work, forcing Senate clerks to read the 628-page stimulus bill aloud for no apparent reason other than to delay aid to millions of Americans, many of whom desperately need it to survive.
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Biden's Bipartisan Hopes Need Not Die Now - WSJ - 0 views
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When President Barack Obama took office in 2009, the country was in the throes of a financial crisis requiring immediate action. The result was a quick, $831 billion economic stimulus plan, pushed through Congress in less than a month.
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Politically, the problem with that outcome was that it set a partisan tone that lingered, making it hard for the Obama administration and Republicans to come together on subsequent initiatives. The residue of mutual bitterness and mistrust had lasting effects.
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Perhaps more important, officials say that they will continue to pursue bipartisan outcomes—and that other items on the early to-do list should attract support in both parties.
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The Biden administration has taken office in crisis mode, facing a coronavirus pandemic that it believes requires immediate action—specifically, a new economic stimulus plan that can be in place before supplemental federal unemployment benefits expire on March 14. Once again, there is the prospect that action will be taken entirely, or almost entirely, with Democratic votes, because the gap between what the White House wants and what Republicans think is necessary is yawning.
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The grounds for a bipartisan effort in both areas were there in the Trump years, but bitterness over Democratic investigations of the president got in the way.
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Two obvious obstacles stand in the way of post-stimulus bipartisanship. The first is that there simply won’t be enough money left. The new coronavirus package is just the latest of a handful of such pandemic plans financed, in effect, with borrowed dollars.
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Republicans, having essentially looked the other way at a sea of red ink unleashed in the past four years, now are paying more attention to the rising federal debt load. But so are some Democrats.
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Maybe partisanship is inevitable in today’s divisive political climate; maybe it is simply naive to think otherwise. The partisan divides of 2021 aren’t created simply by attitudes but by the changing nature of the Democratic and Republican parties from the ground up
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The Democratic party is increasingly racially diverse, female and focused in urban areas along the coast. The Republican party is increasingly male, populated by voters without college degrees and focused in the heartland outside of coastal urban areas.
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Far-Right Misinformation Drives Facebook Engagement : NPR - 0 views
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After the events of Jan. 6, researcher Laura Edelson expected to see a spike in Facebook users engaging with the day's news, similar to Election Day.
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"The thing was, most of that spike was concentrated among the partisan extremes and misinformation providers," Edelson told NPR's All Things Considered. "And when I really sit back and think about that, I think the idea that on a day like that, which was so scary and so uncertain, that the most extreme and least reputable sources were the ones Facebook users were engaging with, is pretty troubling."
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A new study from Cybersecurity For Democracy found that far-right accounts known for spreading misinformation are not only thriving on Facebook, they're actually more successful than other kinds of accounts at getting likes, shares and other forms of user engagement.
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"It's almost twice as much engagement per follower among the sources that have a reputation for spreading misinformation," Edelson said. "So, clearly, that portion of the news ecosystem is behaving very differently."
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In response, Edelson called on Facebook to be transparent with how it tracks impressions and promotes content: "They can't say their data leads to a different conclusion but then not make that data public."
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The researchers called this phenomenon the "misinformation penalty."
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In all other partisan categories, though, "the sources that have a reputation for spreading misinformation just don't engage as well," Edelson said. "There could be a variety of reasons for that, but certainly the simplest explanation would be that users don't find them as credible and don't want to engage with them."
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"I think any system that attempts to promote the most engaging content, from what we call tell, will wind up promoting misinformation."
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Opinion | Don't Let QAnon Bully Congress - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...qanon-capitol-security.html
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Allowing the U.S. government to be held hostage by political extremists is unacceptable.
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While this won’t surprise most people, it likely came as a shock to many QAnon followers. According to that movement’s expediently evolving lore, March 4 — the date on which U.S. presidents were inaugurated until the mid-1930s — was when Mr. Trump was to reclaim the presidency and resume his epic battle against Satan-worshiping, baby-eating Democrats and deep-state monsters.This drivel is absurd. It is also alarming. Violent extremists, obsessed with the symbolism of March 4, were for weeks nattering about a possible attack on Congress, according to law enforcement officials.On March 2, the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security issued a joint intelligence bulletin to law enforcement agencies, warning that militia extremists might be plotting to overrun the Capitol complex and “remove Democratic lawmakers.” The details of the possible plot were hazy, but the threat unnerved enough people that House leaders canceled Thursday’s session. The voting schedule was condensed, and lawmakers left town early for the weekend.Although March 4 came and went without a bloody coup attempt — that is, without another bloody coup attempt — damage was still done. Lawmakers abandoned their workplace out of fear of politically motivated violence. This not only disrupted the people’s business. It also sent a dangerous signal that Congress can be intimidated — that the state of American government is fragile.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOf course the safety of lawmakers and other Capitol Hill workers must be a priority. But allowing the government to be held hostage by political extremists is unacceptable.The current security threat is not expected to dissipate any time soon. If anything, the intelligence community has cautioned that the Jan. 6 siege of the Capitol may have emboldened extremists. Having sacked the Capitol, the lunatic fringe is now dreaming of a bigger, bloodier encore.
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Representative Matt Gaetz, the Florida delegation’s mini-Trump, is in full froth. “Pelosi hired a bigot to hunt MAGA,” he charged last month. Last Tuesday, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the speaker, arguing that General Honoré’s criticism of the police and lawmakers was “disqualifying.” On Thursday, Tucker Carlson told viewers: “Honoré is an unhinged partisan extremist. He’s nuttier than anyone affiliated with QAnon.”
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Of course the safety of lawmakers and other Capitol Hill workers must be a priority. But allowing the government to be held hostage by political extremists is unacceptable.
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Trump toadies should not be allowed to turn this issue into a partisan game. Steps must be taken to safeguard the seat of government. Going forward, lawmakers cannot be seen as bowing to political thugs, their work upended whenever there is a semi-credible threat. That is not the American way.
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March 4 was just one target. The acting chief of the Capitol Police, Yogananda Pittman, recently warned that extremists have been talking about possibly blowing up the Capitol during President Biden’s first address to a joint meeting of Congress, which has not yet been scheduled, with an eye toward killing “as many members as possible.”
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This drivel is absurd. It is also alarming. Violent extremists, obsessed with the symbolism of March 4, were for weeks nattering about a possible attack on Congress, according to law enforcement officials.
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On Monday, lawmakers were briefed on the findings of the security assessment that the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, requested in the wake of Jan. 6. Russel Honoré, a retired Army lieutenant general who led the task force, recommended a variety of permanent enhancements. These include beefing up the Capitol Police force, in terms of increased staffing, improved training, enhanced authority for its leadership and a new emphasis on intelligence work; creating a quick-reaction force to be on call 24-7 to handle imminent threats; installing a retractable fencing system; and adding protections for rank-and-file members of Congress at home and while they are traveling and back in their districts.
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Last Thursday was not Donald Trump’s triumphant return to power after all.While this won’t surprise most people, it likely came as a shock to many QAnon followers. According to that movement’s expediently evolving lore, March 4 — the date on which U.S. presidents were inaugurated until the mid-1930s — was when Mr. Trump was to reclaim the presidency and resume his epic battle against Satan-worshiping, baby-eating Democrats and deep-state monsters.
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This not only disrupted the people’s business. It also sent a dangerous signal that Congress can be intimidated — that the state of American government is fragile.
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In the wake of Jan. 6, enhanced protections were put in place around Capitol Hill. There is an increased police presence along with thousands of National Guard troops. Last week, Chief Pittman requested that the Guard presence, originally set to expire Friday, be extended 60 days. (The Pentagon has yet to issue a final decision.) Inside the Capitol building, additional metal detectors have been installed. The grounds are ringed by security fencing. Lawmakers from both parties have complained that “the people’s house” now has the grim vibe of an armed camp — or a low-security prison.
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Republicans, many of them desperate to downplay the Jan. 6 tragedy, are already attacking General Honoré as biased.
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The general has not been shy about criticizing lawmakers and others he regards as having fed the postelection chaos, and he has suggested that some Capitol Police officers may have been complicit in allowing rioters into the building.
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Senate confirms Fudge as Housing secretary | TheHill - 0 views
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The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Rep. Marcia FudgeMarcia FudgeOn The Money: House passes COVID-19 relief bill in partisan vote | Biden to sign Friday | Senate confirms Fudge to lead HUD Fudge resigns to go to HUD after voting for COVID-19 relief House committee to consider Democrat challenge to results in Iowa congressional race MORE (D-Ohio) to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) by a solid bipartisan margin.
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Senators approved Fudge’s nomination to be HUD secretary on a 66-34 vote. She will be the first woman to hold the position since 1979 and the second Black woman and the third woman ever to lead the department.
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When she came before the [committee], Congresswoman Fudge’s knowledge and passion for service, her commitment to the people who make this country work were obvious to all of us, Republicans and Democrats alike,” Brown added.
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Fudge, who has represented parts of Cleveland and Akron in the House since 2008, was praised by Democrats for her years of work in Congress toward bolstering federal safety net programs and fighting racial inequities in the economy.
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She is the former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and served as mayor of Warrensville Heights, Ohio, from 2000 until she was elected to Congress.
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Fudge announced her resignation from the House on Wednesday afternoon after voting for Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief plan.
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several Republicans fiercely opposed Fudge’s nomination over past heated criticisms of GOP lawmakers and her lack of expertise on housing policy issues.
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Fudge will take over HUD at a challenging time for both the U.S. housing system and the federal department that oversees it.
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More than 11 million U.S. households are facing homelessness after nearly a year of economic peril caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
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The coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the housing affordability crisis that began long before COVID-19 hit the U.S.
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President BidenJoe BidenManchin cements key-vote status in 50-50 Senate The Memo: How the COVID year upended politics Post-pandemic plans for lawmakers: Chuck E. Cheese, visiting friends, hugging grandkids MORE is also seeking to dramatically expand public housing and make sorely needed maintenance upgrades to the country’s existing supply of federally supported homes, a longtime goal of Democrats and housing advocates.
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Fudge will face those issues with a HUD staff depleted by years of attrition and insufficient hiring.
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Fudge vowed during her confirmation process to turn HUD around at a critical moment for the U.S. with a special focus on narrowing the racial inequities in the housing market that have been deepened by COVID-19.
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While 7 percent of white households reported being behind on rent or mortgage payments in December, 22 percent of Black households, 18 percent of Hispanic households and 13 percent of Asian households had missed payments,
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And while roughly 75 percent of white Americans owned their homes in the fourth quarter of 2020, according to the Census Bureau, only 44 percent of Black Americans did.
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Opinion | Joe Manchin and Stacey Abrams Can Meet on Common Ground - The New York Times - 0 views
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There were two columns I wanted to write this week. One was about Senator Joe Manchin’s comments cracking the door open on filibuster reform. The filibuster “should be painful and we’ve made it more comfortable over the years,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Maybe it has to be more painful.” With those words — and, to be fair, a few more Delphic utterances, which I’ll get to shortly — Manchin reignited the possibility of filibuster reform and perhaps the restoration of the Senate.
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The other was about the wave of new bills, proposals and laws across Republican-controlled states, restricting ballot access, making it harder to vote and undermining the fair administration of elections. In Georgia, SB241 would end no-excuse absentee voting, and HB531 would limit weekend voting. In Arizona, SB 1593 would shorten the early voting period and trash envelopes that weren’t postmarked at least five days before the election, and SB 1068 would give the highly partisan State Legislature more power over elections.
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The core power imbalance in America is that Democrats win more people, Republicans win more places. In 2020, Joe Biden won 551 counties and 81 million votes. Donald Trump won 2,588 counties and 74 million votes. The Democrats’ advantage among people was enough to win power nationally, but the Republicans’ advantage in counties gave them control of more states. When the dust settled, Republicans held 61 state legislative chambers, compared with 37 for Democrats. There are 23 states where Republicans hold the lower house, the Senate and the governorship — a governing trifecta that eases the passage of highly partisan bills — but only 15 states where Democrats do the same.
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The John Lewis Voting Rights Act is more specific: It’s aimed at restoring the Voting Rights Act, after the Supreme Court gutted it in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013. To that end, it rewrites the V.R.A. to target states with current records of racial discrimination, not just past records; tightens the focus on electoral changes that have traditionally been used to disenfranchise minority voters, like voter ID laws; and empowers the attorney general to send federal observers wherever there’s a threat of racial discrimination in voting.
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Let’s start with the For The People Act. The bill would implement nationwide automatic voter registration, same-day voter registration and online registration (did you know there are still states where you can’t register to vote online?). It would limit the use of voter purges — a common tactic in which states throw people off the rolls under the guise of reducing duplication and errors — and restore voting rights to Americans with a past criminal conviction. As far as federal elections go, it would secure at least two weeks of early voting in all states, expand vote-by-mail options and restrict secretaries of state from overseeing elections in which they are on the ballot (they’re looking at you, Brian Kemp).
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But while Democrats are debating the best way to make sure Republicans can be heard in the Senate, Republicans in the states are passing legislation meant to silence Democratic voters across the country. The attack on the Capitol failed on Jan. 6, but that doesn’t mean the quiet war the G.O.P. is waging on democracy won’t succeed. There are ways the filibuster can be reformed to ensure that the Senate minority has a voice. But it would be obscene to let the Republican Party use the language of minority rights to deprive actual minorities of the right to vote.
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Opinion | Joe Biden Is a Transformational President - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...biden-covid-relief-bill.html
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We’re seeing a policy realignment without a partisan realignment.
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In a polarized era, the legislation is widely popular. Three-quarters of Americans support the law, including 60 percent of Republicans, according to a Morning Consult survey. The Republican members of Congress voted against it, but the G.O.P. shows no interest in turning this into a great partisan battle. As I began to write this on Thursday morning, the Fox News home page had only two stories on the Covid relief bill and dozens on things like the royal family and cancel culture.
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This is not socialism. This is not the federal government taking control of the commanding heights of the economy. This is not a bunch of programs to restrain corporate power. Americans’ trust in government is still low. This is the Transfer State: government redistributing massive amounts of money by cutting checks to people, and having faith that they spend it in the right ways.
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But income inequality, widespread child poverty and economic precarity are the problems of our time. It’s worth taking a risk to tackle all this. At first Biden seemed like the third chapter of the Clinton/Obama center-left era. But this is something new.
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The law stretches far beyond Covid-19 relief. There’s a billion for national service programs. Black farmers will receive over $4 billion in what looks like a step toward reparations. There’s a huge expansion of health insurance subsidies. Many of these changes, like the child tax credit, may well become permanent.
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I’m worried about a world in which we spend borrowed money with abandon.
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As Michael Hendrix of the Manhattan Institute notes, America spent $4.8 trillion in today’s dollars fighting World War II. Over the past year, America has spent over $5.5 trillion fighting the pandemic.
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The Covid-19 relief law that was just enacted is one of the most important pieces of legislation of our lifetimes. As Eric Levitz writes in New York magazine, the poorest fifth of households will see their income rise by 20 percent; a family of four with one working and one unemployed parent will receive $12,460 in benefits. Child poverty will be cut in half.
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The role of government is being redefined. There is now an assumption that government should step in to reduce economic insecurity and inequality.
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There was a premise through American history that if you worked hard you would earn economic security. That’s not as true for millennials and Gen-Z, or many other people across America.
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This has been one of the most quietly consequential weeks in recent American politics.
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There’s a billion for national service programs. Black farmers will receive over $4 billion in what looks like a step toward reparations.
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There’s a huge expansion of health insurance subsidies. Many of these changes, like the child tax credit, may well become permanent.
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As Michael Hendrix of the Manhattan Institute notes, America spent $4.8 trillion in today’s dollars fighting World War II. Over the past year, America has spent over $5.5 trillion fighting the pandemic.
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the legislation is widely popular. Three-quarters of Americans support the law, including 60 percent of Republicans,
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Somehow low-key Joe Biden gets yawns when he promotes progressive policies that would generate howls if promoted by a President Sanders or a President Warren.
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This moment is like 1981, the dawn of the Reagan Revolution, except in reverse. It’s not just that government is heading in a new direction, it’s that the whole paradigm of the role of government in American life is shifting
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Biden is not causing these tectonic plates to shift, but he is riding them
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Reaganism was the right response to the stagflation of the 1970s, but Bidenism is a sensible response to a very different set of economic problems.
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These realities have created a different emotional climate that the pandemic has magnified — a climate of insecurity and precarity. These realities have also produced an intellectual revolution.
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It was assumed, even only a decade ago, that the Fed could not just print money with abandon. It was assumed that the government could not wrack up huge debt without spurring inflation and crippling debt payment costs. Both of these concerns have been thrown out the window by large numbers of thinkers
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We are now experiencing monetary and fiscal policies that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. This is like the moment when the G.O.P. abandoned fiscal conservatism for the go-go excitement of supply-side economics
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The role of government is being redefined. There is now an assumption that government should step in to reduce economic insecurity and inequality.
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This is the Transfer State: government redistributing massive amounts of money by cutting checks to people, and having faith that they spend it in the right ways.
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With the wind at their backs, Democrats are concluding that Biden’s decision to eschew bipartisanship to pass a relief package is better than Barack Obama’s attempts to attract it
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Republicans have learned that in this new era it’s foolish to fight Democrats on redistribution policy, but they can win elections by fighting culture wars.
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But income inequality, widespread child poverty and economic precarity are the problems of our time
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It’s worth taking a risk to tackle all this.
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At first Biden seemed like the third chapter of the Clinton/Obama center-left era. But this is something new.