Month: January 2021

Sunday’s NYT Magazine had an interesting article written by a Yale history professor named Timothy Snyder called “The American Abyss.” Read it if you get the chance.

The centerpiece of the article is a distinction between GOP “gamers” and “breakers.” Is it accurate, and is it complete?

Anything that describes Mitch McConnell as a “gamer” (i.e., a Republican who recognizes the systemic advantages the GOP has, and uses them for all he’s worth) clearly has some merit. However, I think the distinction falls short in some respects:

1. There are serious ideological differences within the GOP, reflected in my four factions, that the article doesn’t consider;
2. Some Republicans are neither “gamers” nor “breakers”: Susan Collins and Mitt Romney, for example.
3. Cruz, Hawley, and probably most of the House members who tried to overturn the election aren’t really “breakers;” they’re just gaming the GOP base for their own personal advantage. They didn’t anticipate or welcome the riots; they just thought they could suck up to the base and fan the flames without creating any negative consequences. They were wrong.
4. There are, as the article says, plenty of “breakers” within the party, but the vast majority of them are voters, not members of Congress.
5. Donald Trump, the Flight 93 president, can certainly be described as the ultimate “breaker.” He damaged our institutions without creating anything to replace them except a malignant personal cult; the vacuum is being filled by furry Vikings and Mr. Zip-Tie. Will we recover? Much depends on Biden’s political skills; if life improves in the next four years, and the extreme right feels less threatened, the answer will be yes.

It appears that sea shanties are all the rage on the internet. I can’t help noting that my wife discovered and embraced them a decade ago when searching for appropriate music for the DVD of our Cape Cod trip. We were obviously ten years before our time.

If you can find it, I recommend the version of “Soon May the Wellerman Come” by a guy named David Coffin, who is quoted in today’s NYT article on sea shanties. It has a deep melancholy feel to it that never goes out of style, but is particularly appropriate for where the country is today.

During the first round of impeachment, the predominant GOP defense of Trump (although not the only one) was that the offense did not meet the standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” We aren’t hearing that this time, and with good reason. If inciting an insurrection doesn’t meet the constitutional standard, nothing does.

Instead, these are the arguments made by his defenders, with my responses:

1. AT ONE POINT IN HIS SPEECH, HE TALKED ABOUT PEACEFUL PROTEST, SO HE DIDN’T INCITE VIOLENCE. RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE RIOT IS PURELY ON THE RIOTERS, NOT HIM: This argument ignores the totality of Trump’s speech, which clearly called for more than a simple peaceful protest. In addition, several of the rioters who have been charged with criminal offenses are maintaining they were called to do it by their president. Their understanding of his meaning should be given a lot of weight.
2. THE RECORD SHOWS THAT AT LEAST SOME OF THE RIOTERS FORMED THEIR INTENT TO STORM THE CAPITOL BEFORE TRUMP SPOKE. HE CAN’T BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR ACTIONS: Yes, he can, based largely on his public statements prior to January 6, including, but not limited to, the representation that the day would be “wild.” The legal issue presented to the Senate is not limited to the specifics of his January 6 speech.
3. THE VICTORS OF THE ELECTION HAVE AN OBLIGATION TO TRY TO UNIFY THE COUNTRY: Rich words, coming from a party whose principal reason for being seems to be to own the libs by telling us how much they hate us.
4. THE IMPEACHMENT SERVES NO PRACTICAL PURPOSE, AS TRUMP CAN NO LONGER BE REMOVED FROM OFFICE: I’m sympathetic to that one, but only because I don’t think the public will learn anything new about Trump’s conduct during the trial. That sets this round of impeachment apart from the last one.
5. THIS IS VICTORS’ JUSTICE. THE DEMOCRATS WANTED TO IMPEACH TRUMP FROM THE BEGINNING: Actually, the last thing the leadership wanted to do was to impeach Trump. The magnitude of his crimes, and the danger they created to members of Congress and the country as a whole, drove them to do it on both occasions.
6. THE PROCESS HAS BEEN RUSHED AND SLAPDASH: The idea was to send a message as quickly as possible in order to avoid any further outrages in Trump’s waning days in office. In any event, the facts are known to everyone, and are not remote in time. This is more analogous to direct contempt than the average criminal offense.
7. WHO CAN BLAME THE RIOTERS? THE ELECTION WAS STOLEN FROM THEM!: Give me a break! The real message here is that Trump won in a landslide among “real Americans.” The rioters would say they are the only people who are entitled to vote. Alas for them–our country doesn’t work that way.

Many of the Capitol rioters were middle-class business owners wearing outlandish costumes which made them look more ridiculous than threatening. What does it tell us about our society that these people apparently view themselves as characters in a superhero drama, not ordinary citizens taking sides in a political dispute?

That we watch too many cartoonish movies, that our grasp on reality is slipping, and that Trump has always encouraged this kind of thinking. No one is going to see Joe Biden as a superhero. That’s a good thing.

John Roberts is the Mitch McConnell of the Supreme Court. Both men are intensely partisan; both care deeply about the public perception of their respective institutions; both are pragmatic dealmakers; and both take the long view.

McConnell has made it clear that he thinks the GOP would be better off without the albatross of the extremist wing of its base. You have to believe Roberts feels the same way, and was shaken by the images of the riot, which was directed at his part of the establishment as well as Congress. How will he respond? Will he move slightly to the left, and become the judicial equivalent of a Never Trumper, with Thomas and Alito in the opposing role of Flight 93 justices? Or will he embrace Christian carve-outs and abortion restrictions in the hope that appeasement of the far right will put the evil genie of fascism back in its bottle?

If you have to bet, put your money on the latter.

Newt Gingrich is often viewed as a kind of Trump precursor. Is that accurate?

Yes and no. If you look at the Contract for America, it isn’t a reactionary wish list; it is primarily a CL/PBP agenda for smaller government. Even the items that echo Trump’s statements about “the swamp” sound like they are coming from a CL perspective. In that sense, the two are quite different. Trump never had any real interest in reducing the size of government; he just wanted to keep the reactionary base happy and own the libs.

On the other hand, Gingrich was the first real bomb thrower in Washington in my lifetime. His play to the conservative media and take no prisoners style was very much like Trump’s; it isn’t a coincidence that he still supports Trump after the January 6 incident.

You could call him the Flight 93 Speaker. He broke the existing patterns of civility in the House and replaced them with . . . incivility and grandstanding. We’re still feeling the effects of that today.

There are three facially independent strains of reactionary thought in America. The religious reactionaries think Christianity is in danger from the PC thought police; the racists are afraid that the prevailing white American culture (as they incorrectly define it) will be swamped by the growing number of people of color; and the economic reactionaries are angry that their skills have lost value, and they have lost status, in an increasingly knowledge-based economy.

These are ideal types. In reality, many individual reactionaries would meet at least two, and sometimes all three, of the tests. For example, people identifying themselves as religious reactionaries frequently aren’t religious at all, in the orthodox Christian sense; their God is actually The Big White Guy in the Sky, who assures them every day that white Christian men have the divine right to rule America, that women are their subjects, and that people of color are whiny interlopers in their Jerusalem.

That is why you have Capitol rioters comfortably waving Jesus flags next to compatriots in pagan outfits, and why black Christian liberals are among their enemies, not their friends.

History tells us there are two paths to fascism. The first involves the creation of a mass party, backed by thousands of paramilitary thugs, with a populist economic agenda, a charismatic leader, and a nostalgic, nationalistic program; the second is dependent on the strength, ruthlessness, and prestige of the armed forces, typically juxtaposed against a powerful leftist movement that endangers the interests of the wealthy and privileged.

We’re some distance from either of these; illiberal democracy is a much better bet. As I’ve noted before, however, the raw materials already exist, so, with the proper leadership, a truly threatening fascist movement in this country is far from an impossibility.

Once upon a time, the founders of what became giant social media companies had a vision: to bring the world together with cute cat videos. They seemed harmless at the time. Heck, a lot of people even gave Facebook credit for the Arab Spring. Social media seemed like an unvarnished good.

That was then, and this is now. Social media, as it turns out, can as easily be a pipeline for religious, ethnic, and ideological hatred as for your travel photos. Algorithms used by the social media corporations generate higher profits when they drive consumers to extreme opinions. Rumors and conspiracy theories thrive and spread in this friendly environment. The companies can’t respond quickly enough to solve the problems, and have every financial incentive not to. What can be done?

Antitrust actions can limit the size of these corporations, but do very little to resolve the free speech/censorship problem. The repeal of Section 230 would address the issue pertaining to false and inflammatory posts by forcing the corporations to take legal responsibility for objectionable material posted on their platforms by third parties, but it would discourage speech, to the ultimate detriment of the GOP members who claim to support it. The answer has to lie elsewhere.

The antitrust actions that have been filed in the last month were an appropriate response to Facebook’s attempts to eliminate competition. The free speech/censorship issues are best addressed by the adoption and enforcement of clear and transparent government regulations which establish standards that have nothing to do with the current algorithms.

In the meantime, if you’re a Republican complaining about Twitter and Facebook using the First Amendment rights your party fought so hard to give them against Trump and his henchmen, put a sock in it.

One of the greatest “accomplishments” of the right over the past several decades has been to establish the existence of a variety of First Amendment rights for corporations through legal action. The Hobby Lobby case (won by Josh Hawley) went so far as to say that corporations with no legal connections to any church can have rights pertaining to religion, even though I have yet to see a corporation take communion.

It is, therefore, ironic to see GOP leaders screaming about giant tech corporations exercising their First Amendment rights to cut off right-wing extremists peddling lies and sedition. The moral here is to be careful what you ask for, because you might well get it.

The GOP civil war has, if anything, intensified. Business groups are now threatening to withhold their financial support. Can the split become permanent? If so, how?

PBPs are transactional; they demand tax cuts, deregulation, freedom from arbitrary governmental interference, and stability. If the Reactionary-driven GOP only offers them electoral losses and chaos, they will flip.

I don’t think we’re there yet, but we’re a lot closer than we were a week ago. I suspect it will take either another round of losses or some outrageous event perpetrated by a right-wing extremist–possibly a murder of a prominent politician or media figure–to seal the deal for the foreseeable future.

In case you’re worried that Biden, at 78, is just too old to be up for the job, consider that he is: a year younger than Bob Dylan; the same age as Paul McCartney; a year older than Mick Jagger; and just three years older than Pete Townshend. They’re doing ok for themselves, aren’t they?

Hope I die before I get old, indeed.

When I was watching the attack on the Capitol in real time, my initial thought was that the rioters had inside help. Based on the information available to us now, that appears to be a bit of an overstatement, but it is clear that at least a few of the security people were sympathetic to the rioters, and provided them with some level of assistance.

As I’ve noted many times over the past year or so, the scary thing about the far right is that: (a) its members number in the tens of millions; (b) a disproportionate number of them own guns and are willing to use them; and (c) they have infiltrated government (particularly law enforcement) at all levels. I predicted that (c) would create serious issues for the vote counting process after the election, but for the most part, that did not happen; the local elections officials, of both parties, gritted their teeth and did their job in the face of great adversity.

The realization of my fears was merely deferred–we’re facing it now. Buckle up.

It’s not difficult to imagine a scenario in which Wednesday’s riot turned into a serious threat to our political system. The rioters, with extensive inside help, take complete control of the Capitol, seize the evidence of the vote, and hold all of the members of Congress prisoner; Trump immediately declares himself re-elected and calls out carefully selected members of the military to restore order; other units shut down unfriendly media outlets in New York and D.C.; right-wing militia members rise at Trump’s direction and take control of state governments and local TV stations throughout the country; the bulk of the military refuses to take sides, thereby effectively helping the insurgents; and the left has to choose between fighting a guerrilla war against the new regime or sullen acquiescence.

All of that would have required careful and extensive preparation and communication which was far beyond the ability of the man on golf cart, let alone the furry Viking and Mr. Zip-Tie. Trump didn’t have any notion of what would happen next; he was just blowing off steam in his usual thoughtless way. The rioters didn’t think through the consequences of their actions, either. Just storming the Capitol and threatening Mitch and Nancy wasn’t going to make Trump president without a whole lot more coordinated action.

If there is a next time, you had better assume it will be different, and far more dangerous.

GOP House members reacted very differently to the riot than GOP senators. Why?

Several reasons:

1. The Republicans gained seats in the House during the last election, but lost control of the Senate. GOP House members consequently are more likely to see Trumpism as a winning hand than senators.
2. There are plenty of House districts that are uniformly bright red. The greatest danger to an incumbent in such districts is a primary challenger, not a Democrat in the general election. That is also true for some senators, but less so; there are pockets of urban blue in every state.
3. Similarly, the cost of running an election in a rural district is relatively low. House members from those districts don’t need to worry about sucking up to RINO business interests for campaign contributions.
4. The minority has some influence in the Senate as a result of the filibuster. The minority party in the House has no power (or responsibility) at all. Individual members of the House minority thus have every incentive to throw bombs in order to get attention; what do they have to lose?
5. And, of course, McConnell and McCarthy are very different people. Only one of them plays the long game. Spoiler alert: it isn’t McCarthy.