All that's left is white nationalism

As Trump's proposals turn out to be grift for the 1%,  Nancy LeTourneau points out how Trump's economic policy is bound to hurt his rural, poorly educated white supporters.  The ACA repeal will throw tens of millions out of health coverage.  The EPA retreat will leave them drinking dirty water and exposed to chemicals.  The coal jobs aren't coming back, regardless.  And don't even get us started on the effect of climate change.

The truth is that Trump’s economic populism consists of promises based on lies. But there is one arena of his populism that is actually moving forward – albeit in fits and starts. That is his appeal to xenophobia. .... 

In this country, the Trump administration’s deportation force is sending undocumented immigrants farther underground. As was predicted, victims of crime now fear reporting it to law enforcement and children are being pulled out of free lunch programs at school for fear of being deported. AG Sessions is planning to pull federal funding from so-called “sanctuary cities,” and has broadcast that he will no longer pursue police brutality investigations. 

To the extent that these kinds of activities address the concerns of Trump’s base of support among white working class Americans, his populism is solely based on what many of us assumed it would be all along…white nationalism. The only question is when and if any of his supporters who thought his presidency would be about anything else will catch on.

Will they catch on?  Will they care?  I firmly believe that as long as it is THOSE PEOPLE being targeted--the poor, the brown, the Muslims, the gays, the ones NOT LIKE US, that Trump's supporters will still make excuses. As long as THOSE PEOPLE have it worse, they will suck it up.

 The New York Times went to Iowa to see what the reaction there was to the blatantly racist comments of their representative Steve King.

His latest anti-immigrant tirade — “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” he said — once again drew wide condemnation and critical attention to Iowa’s Fourth Congressional District, whose voters overwhelmingly re-elected him to an eighth term in November.

And yes, the Times easily found people who were uncomfortable with King's comments....but he has't changed his spots, and they keep voting for him.  So frankly they seem more uncomfortable that the unspoken is out in the open:

Mr. King has survived past denunciations: Last year, he drew a rare primary challenger, who accused him of being so toxic that his name on a bill rendered it “dead on arrival.” But Mr. King won easily and went on to crush his Democratic opponent, Kim Weaver, an advocate for the elderly.

So, sure, they can look embarrassed about him. But they keep voting for him.  And then there's this :

[T]here are plenty who don’t seem to quibble much with Mr. King’s way of thinking.

Sitting at the Hardees in Orange City last week, Don Engeltjes, 76, said he agreed with Mr. King on the need to clamp down on immigration. He said he believed new arrivals were a drain on taxpayers’ money, lumping immigrants from Mexico in with those from the Muslim world. 

“It’s just handout, handout, handout,” he said. 

“But Don, your dad is an immigrant too,” another man piped up, noting that Mr. Engeltjes’s father, like many forebears of the district’s voters, had come over from Holland at age 9. 

“You bet he was,” Mr. Engeltjes replied. “But the way it’s going nowadays, man, they’re outproducing us. We’re going to be the minority in a few years.” 

Asked by a reporter who he meant by “we,” Mr. Engeltjes said: “The white people. The American people.”

I'm sure he thinks he's a God-fearing Christian. But let's remember that the Christian Right that so fervently embraces Trump has its roots deep in racism.  And they  have ripped off any pretense that they are driven otherwise.  Sarah Posner describes how Trumpism united with the Christian Right--and how the CR roots are deeply racist.

The movement was actually galvanized in the 1970s and early ’80s, when the IRS revoked the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University and other conservative Christian schools that refused to admit nonwhites. It was the government’s actions against segregated schools, not the legalization of abortion, that “enraged the Christian community,” Moral Majority co-founder Paul Weyrich has acknowledged.

... evangelicals were much more likely to support banning Muslims from the United States, creating a database of Muslim citizens, and flying the Confederate flag at the state capitol. Thirty-eight percent of evangelicals told pollsters that they wished the South had won the Civil War—more than twice the number of nonevangelicals who held that view.

Racism is alive and well in this country. The bubble we've been living in, is to think that we had made progress.  All that they offer is nihilism and destruction, and by God they are going to destroy all that they can, while waving a cross above them.

A lack of care

Yesterday I asked why the Republicans are so cruel.  Today, I want to continue that discussion.

Along with cruelty comes a lack of care.  Writing in the Guardian, Lindy West comments

I don’t know that America has ever seen a political party so divested of care. Since Trump took office, Republicans have proposed legislation to destroy unions, the healthcare system, the education system and the Environmental Protection Agency; to defund the reproductive health charity Planned Parenthood and restrict abortion; to stifle public protest and decimate arts funding; to increase the risk of violence against trans people and roll back anti-discrimination laws; and to funnel more and more wealth from the poorest to the richest. Every executive order and piece of GOP legislation is destructive, aimed at dismantling something else, never creating anything new, never in the service of improving the care of the nation.

She cites an accidental truth-telling by Paul Ryan, who said in 2013 “We’re not going to give up,” Ryan assures his audience, “on destroying the healthcare system for the American people.”

Even if we acknowledge that such a slip of the tongue is technically possible (if not likely), we don’t actually need to wonder about what Ryan secretly believes. Gaffe or no, we already know he wants to destroy the healthcare system for the American people, because he tried to pass legislation that would destroy the healthcare system for the American people. And because destruction, not life, is the foundation of Ryan’s party.

Destruction grounded in a lack of care for their fellow citizens, who are votes to be used, not people worthy of care.

The urbane, smooth judicial nominee Neil Gorsuch likewise shows a lack of care and compassion. Take, for example, his dissent in the case of the trucker who was fired for leaving his trailer.  The trucker was essentially told to freeze to death.  Lucia Graves writes

He may have empathized with Maddin but that did not lead him to change his legal opinion. What’s unusual here is not Gorsuch’s conservative philosophy or textualist tendencies. It’s not even that he sided with a company over the “little guy”, as Democrats repeatedly said. 

It’s that the fact that Maddin might have died sitting there waiting for help at 14-below, if he’d been unwise enough to follow the only option made available by Gorsuch, did not appear to enter into his calculus. He did not seem to care.... 

... the trouble with Gorsuch, we learned this week, is not ideology but humanity.

Indeed, the Supreme Court just overturned a Gorsuch decision regarding the education of a disabled child--unanimously. 

In Thompson R2-J School District v. Luke P., a case brought by an autistic student whose parents sought reimbursement for tuition at a specialized school for children with autism, Gorsuch read IDEA extraordinarily narrowly. 

Under Gorsuch’s opinion in Luke P., a school district complies with the law so long as they provide educational benefits that “must merely be ‘more than de minimis.’” 

“De minimis” is a Latin phrase meaning “so minor as to merit disregard.” So Gorsuch essentially concluded that school districts comply with their obligation to disabled students so long as they provide those students with a little more than nothing. 

All eight justices rejected Gorsuch’s approach. IDEA, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “is markedly more demanding than the ‘merely more than de minimis’ test applied by the Tenth Circuit.” Indeed, Roberts added, Gorsuch’s approach would effectively strip many disabled students of their right to an education. Roberts went on: 

When all is said and done, a student offered an educational program providing “merely more than de minimis” progress from year to year can hardly be said to have been offered an education at all. For children with disabilities, receiving instruction that aims so low would be tantamount to “sitting idly . . . awaiting the time when they were old enough to ‘drop out.’”

What appears common in both the Gorsuch examples,  and in the overall approach of the GOP, is a lack of care for people, and our common humanity.  It is a focus on the game, whether it is law or legislative, rather than realizing that law and legislation should be in service of people, not to destroy them.  It is so far from any expression of decency, let alone any religion, that I feel at times we have slipped into another dimension where all humane values are annulled.

What in hell has happened to them?

Why are they so cruel?

After the debacle of the AHCA collapse, one thing seems crystal clear:  the Republican party is a party of heartless cruelty.  The AHCA would have essentially destroyed the insurance market.  In their attempts to court the far-right, they even got rid of a requirement that minimal plans cover "outpatient care, emergency room visits, hospitalization, maternity and newborn care, mental health and addiction treatment, prescription drugs, rehabilitative services, lab services, preventive care and pediatric services."  So, what's the point of having insurance if it doesn't cover everything?

Exactly.  The point is that "those people" don't deserve any help.

This comes on top of efforts to de-fund social programs including those that support Meals on Wheels.

Paul Waldman:

Beneath proposals like that is a particular view of poor people, one that drips with contempt. It sees them not as those who have had hard lives or encountered some bad luck or who could use help, but people who are fundamentally lazy and trying to scam the system. What they need is a lecture on bootstrap-pulling and maybe some humiliation, and then through that suffering they might improve their moral character enough to be worthy of the government benefits those with higher incomes enjoy. 

And the White House is eager to help; its proposed budget would slash nearly every program in sight that actually helps people, from Meals on Wheels to afterschool programs to the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) food assistance program to affordable housing to libraries. 

All this is accompanied, of course, by the Republicans' eternal desire to cut taxes on the wealthy. So pay attention, because this is what Republicans do when they get the chance: They work like dogs to make the lives of those at the bottom and middle more difficult, while trying equally hard to ease the burdens so unjustly suffered by those at the top.  

Chauncey DeVega:

It is normal to feel aghast at and disgusted by the Republican Party’s war on the poor. The more challenging and perhaps even more disturbing task is to ask why today’s conservatives feel such antipathy, disregard and hostility toward poor and other vulnerable Americans. Certainly greed and a slavish devotion to a revanchist right-wing ideology are part of the answer. But they may not be sufficient 

....American political elites often use language that robs poor and other marginalized people of their individuality, humanity and dignity. This language also creates a type of social distance between “middle class” or “normal” Americans and those with economic disadvantages. ...conservatives are more likely than liberals or progressives to believe in what’s known as the “just world fallacy,” whereby people who suffer a misfortune are viewed as somehow deserving their fate....

and like so much else, it is deeply tied to racial dynamics.

As such, poor people are incorrectly stereotyped as being overwhelmingly black and brown. In the United States, the intersections of race and class also affect the media narratives and cultural scripts that have dictated who has historically been considered “deserving” (widows of war veterans, people with disabilities, single white mothers, children, elderly folks) and “undeserving” (adult men and people of color) poor. 

Of course, you'll know they are "Christians" by their love:

Among evangelical Christians, what is called the “prosperity gospel” has become increasingly influential. This grotesque interpretation of Christian doctrine assures its adherents that poor people deserve their circumstances because God has chosen not to bless them with money. Conversely, rich people have more money because God has deemed them worthy. Christian evangelicals — especially those who believe in the prosperity gospel — were a key constituency in Donald Trump’s winning coalition.

As Gandhi said, your Christians are so unlike your Christ.

The death of media and the rise of Trump

Most media in the US is no longer occupied by journalists, who make an effort to find facts and inform the public.  Rather, it is personalities who are driven to entertain to get ratings and advertising dollars.  This info-tainment industry has narratives that it wants to tell us, rather than simply reporting on the facts.  Hence, we hear little about Bernie Sanders, a relentless drum beat of negativity about non-existent Hilary Clinton scandals, and an effort to create a Presidential race between Clinton and Jeb! even though Jeb! has generated no enthusiasm and puts his silver foot in his mouth  regularly. 

But now there's the Donald. The media loves a circus, so Trump is sucking up all the energy in the Republican race, and has torn off the polite pretense that the  tea partiers are something other than fearful white racists. 

Writing in the Washington Monthly, Nancy Tourneau points out that this is the triumph of "epistemic closure", which is the cross-linked echo chamber of conservative media that tells them what they want to hear.

The entire basis for the existence of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News is the belief that the “mainstream media” cannot be trusted to tell the truth because they are all “liberals.” This fed something that we as human beings already tend to do anyway - reject information that doesn’t conform to our already-established beliefs. ...

The disastrous results of epistemic closure for conservatives have been on display for some time now. It explains how they continue to deny the science of climate change, assume that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is “cooking the books” on unemployment data and led to a whole movement during the 2012 election to unskew the polls. But for everyone from Murdoch to GOP leaders, it worked to keep the base angry and engaged.

The problem is, now, that "they" can't control it.  A focus group with Trump supporters shows that all they can express is an anger at the system and Trump's ramblings perfectly express it. He says what they are thinking, and isn't that a horrible thought.

For these participants, the Republican establishment (and perhaps even Fox News itself) have now joined the liberal New York Times in peddling a politically motivated conspiracy when they challenge Donald Trump. That should come as no surprise when these same people have been told for years that they can pick and chose their facts based on how they make you feel. Stephen Colbert was positively prophetic when he coined the term “truthiness.” And now it’s all coming back to haunt the GOP.

And the rest of us too.  A few days ago:

Police in Boston say that one of two brothers who allegedly beat a homeless Hispanic man cited Trump’s message on immigration as a motivation for their attack. “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported,” Scott Leader, 38, told officers, according to a police report cited by The Boston Globe.

 God help us.