Month: April 2023

There is plenty of wokeness out there if you know where to look for it. It’s on Twitter, in a variety of periodicals, and even occasionally in the NYT. Some of it is as objectionable as the far right says it is.

But the average farmer in Nebraska doesn’t go out looking for it. Nobody in his path during the day embodies it. No one he meets reminds him that the haughty coastal elites look down on him and his values, or says that gender is a fluid concept, or calls him a bigot. He doesn’t even know any trans people or illegal immigrants. So why does he feel so passionately on these subjects?

Because reactionary activists, mostly from urban areas, post about them and they are broadcast 24/7 on Fox News. The outrage machine makes him angry and profits from it. The rest of us, and our liberal democratic system, are the losers.

The one person in America who hasn’t expressed an opinion on the settlement is Donald Trump, who would have been on trial almost as much as Fox. Why?

Almost certainly because Trump sees his interests, in the long run, being aligned with those of Fox, and he feared the consequences of a trial as much as Fox did. With good reason, I might add.

For Fox, paying large defamation claims is just a part of their business model. Trump doesn’t have that luxury. If it is ever found by an impartial jury that his claims about the “rigged” election were not just false, but reckless and absurd, it will do him a lot of damage.

When you know, you know.

When you know, you know.

It’s time

It’s time to go.

——Lana Del Rey, “Paris, Texas”

Life in Florida these days is deceptively normal, even in areas that were battered by Hurricane Ian. The sun is out, the sky is blue, and the tourists have mostly gone home. Everything is as it should be.

Except it isn’t. DeSantis and the GOP-dominated Florida Legislature are engaging in an assault on liberal democracy on a wide range of fronts. No one who criticizes the governor is safe from retaliation–except Trump, of course, who is opportunistically taking the side of the angels on some of these issues.

Barring some last minute, unforeseen issues with our house, we are leaving for the mountains tomorrow. We will be happy to be out of DeSantistan for six months. Of course, the GOP obtained a supermajority in the NC legislature by flipping a Democrat from a Biden district, so we may be going from the frying pan to the fire. We’ll see.

Donald Trump is effectively telling the reactionary base that he will destroy the liberal establishment from the outside–by throwing rhetorical bombs and ignoring constitutional norms. The DeSantis message, on the other hand, is that liberal democracy can be eviscerated through hard, plodding work using the normal constitutional processes. He’s doing his best to prove his point in Florida even as we speak.

That’s what the GOP has come to: a tactical dispute over how best to destroy liberal democracy in America.

The entire ecosystem of the GOP is designed to reward bomb throwing. The way you get ahead in the party is not by working hard and following orders, but by saying outrageous things about Democrats and the establishment–including some Republicans–on Fox News and the internet. It is a system that works well when the GOP is in opposition, and powerless.

But what happens when the GOP is actually in power? How can you plausibly run against the establishment when you’re it? How does throwing bombs help you create an effective working majority that actually runs the federal government?

Hence, the many failures of the Trump years.

It is conceivable–though hardly assured–that McCarthy can get unanimous GOP House approval of a plan by including everything in everyone’s wish list and telling moderates that it is just an opening bid that shouldn’t be taken seriously. That effectively puts off the hard choices to a later date. But what happens next?

The problem for McCarthy is that he can’t possibly get unanimous approval in his caucus for any deal that would be acceptable to the Democrats, who hold most of the cards in this process, as they are relatively united against fiscal blackmail and control the Senate. That means two things: first, if there is a deal, it will probably be made between the Democrats and moderate GOP members, with most GOP House members in opposition; and second, that deal would put his job in jeopardy, given the concessions he made to the extremists in January and his razor thin majority.

The GOP won a crushing victory in the 2010 midterm elections. While this was undoubtedly due more to the slow pace of the recovery than any overriding public concern about spending, the deficit did figure prominently in the campaign, so there was a plausible argument that America was demanding large spending cuts. The debt ceiling crisis of 2011 should be seen in that context.

But what about today? The GOP lost the presidential election in 2020. It lost a Senate seat in 2022. It underperformed, relative to history, and won only a tiny majority in the House. Culture war issues were the focus of the campaign, not spending cuts. Finally, the GOP has shown throughout recent history that it only cares about spending and the deficit when a Democrat is in the White House. The electorate is perfectly aware of that.

It is consequently absurd to suggest that McCarthy has some sort of mandate to impose spending cuts by holding the economy hostage. Given the divisions even within his own caucus, the only mandate he has is to keep the lights on and wait for 2024.

I said weeks ago that the lawyers for Fox should be desperate to settle this case. They finally took my advice.

There were two points to the litigation: to punish Fox for knowingly telling lies in an effort to pander to the base and maintain ratings; and to defend the existing standard for defamation of public officials and public figures. The settlement accomplishes both. It is an unequivocal victory for the good guys.

Unfortunately, we will not be treated to the spectacle of a hardened litigation attorney cross-examining Tucker Carlson. Oh, well. It’s good enough.

Disney employs about 77,000 workers at its Florida theme parks. The spinoff economic impacts from the parks are enormous. Approximately 58 million people visit the parks each year. The parks are, in effect, a very large part of Florida’s international tourism brand.

Given that as background, you would think that DeSantis would be eager to put an end to his battle with Disney, but you would be wrong. He’s once again doubling down–even talking about putting a state prison next to the parks. It appears that he would rather drive Disney out of Florida than submit to a tiny bit of wokeness and humility. It’s utterly ridiculous.

If DeSantis is trying to sell himself as a reasonable, predictable alternative to Trump to the business donor class, this kind of arbitrary, despotic behavior towards a large and mostly beloved corporation is not exactly going to help the sales pitch.

On the still looming fight over debt.

We don’t have the ransom note yet.

If the stock market tanks

Send McCarthy your thanks.

But for now, we’ll just sit back and fret.

David French’s reactionary Tennessee neighbors tell him that they are powerless, that their backs are against the wall, and that they are entitled to do just about anything to save themselves and their culture. He finds it difficult to square these ideas with the GOP’s electoral successes over the past 20 years. Can we help him out?

Since the Reagan years, the foundation of the GOP has been a bargain between the PBPs and the Reactionaries in which the former get tax cuts for the wealthy and the latter get rhetoric about traditional values, along with some conservative judges. Due to a variety of circumstances and events I have outline many times previously, including the creation of Fox News, the failures of the George W. Bush administration, and the election of a black Democrat as president, the Reactionaries lost their deference for the tax-cutting establishment wing of the party after 2008. As far as they are concerned, victories in elections gave the PBPs their tax cuts, but they only got gay marriage and trans athletes in return. Since they represent a large portion of the GOP electorate, is it any wonder they want to renegotiate the deal and put culture war issues ahead of tax cuts? Given that Fox News tells them every day that their culture is on the edge of extinction, is it surprising that they believe it?

This is why, in case you weren’t watching carefully, the Reactionaries despise the GOP establishment almost as much as the left.

Ron DeSantis is trapped. If he criticizes Trump, he risks losing support from the base; if he doesn’t, there is no rationale for his candidacy. Is there any way out of this dilemma?

Yes. The Hungarian Candidate needs a surrogate who has little or no chance of winning the nomination on his own to destroy Trump at the debates. DeSantis could then say little or nothing and pick up the pieces at the end of the process.

The logical person for the job is Liz Cheney, but she probably isn’t interested in helping DeSantis. Chris Christie would be my second choice; he has shown some interest, and he has some form, having ripped Rubio a new one at a debate in 2016.

Better get on the phone with him ASAP.

It’s almost May, and Biden hasn’t announced he’s running for re-election yet. Why? I suspect it’s largely because he wants to know the state of the GOP race before he makes a final decision.

My guess is that he feels completely comfortable running against Trump, but not against DeSantis. Trump is consistently polling well ahead of DeSantis at this point. If the Hungarian Candidate continues to spin his wheels, Biden will run. And he should.

David Brooks notes the migration of talented young people from blue states to less expensive, more business-friendly blue cities in red states, but worries that the GOP is killing the golden goose by imposing reactionary rules on these engines of growth. Is he right?

Yes. Most of these states–even Texas–were once run by pragmatic PBPs who put money into infrastructure and education, but the reactionaries are now completely in charge, so anyone who wants to move to a red state will be knowingly trading freedom for lower taxes and cheaper real estate. These days, it isn’t even that much cheaper; Austin, for example, has become very expensive.

It doesn’t sound like a great bargain to me.

Citing a famous Latin proverb most recently used to ill effect by Matt Damon, Ross Douthat argues that Ron DeSantis has to run now, or let his best opportunity slip through his fingers. There is an element of ideological self-interest to the argument; Douthat probably views DeSantis as the closest thing to his 21st century William Jennings Bryan that is on offer. That doesn’t necessarily make him wrong, however. Would DeSantis be making a mistake by declining to run?

Let’s analyze it. If he doesn’t run, Trump is far more likely than not to be the GOP nominee. If he wins the general election, he is likely to discredit right-wing populism during his administration even more than he has already, which would operate to the detriment of DeSantis. If, as is more likely, he loses to Biden, the way would be open for DeSantis in 2028, but would the GOP be looking for a warmed-over Trump after yet another loss by the real thing? Would the war on wokeness still have the resonance it has with the base today? Would DeSantis, now out of office, still be the man of the hour for the base, or will the party have passed him by?

I don’t know the answer to those questions, but my best guess is that Douthat is right. DeSantis has plenty of money and lots of potential support, if he plays his cards shrewdly, which he has not, to date. If he doesn’t run after building himself up for such a long time, he won’t just look like a fool: he will be one.