Why is our culture so horrible now?

I don't understand the anger and the violence, particularly from those on the right.  Their guy won.  But they seem consumed by grievance and rudeness, seasoned with glee at the pain of others.  Indeed, much of our discourse is cruel, and suffused with an undercurrent of potential violence.  Anti-semitism, racism, hate crimes against gays and Muslims are all increased.  It's as though the GOP victory has allowed a festering sore of hatred to be exposed.

 Obviously some of these are the professional provocateurs of the Alt-Right.  But it's not them I want to discuss. It's the casual cruelty of the average Trump supporter, who is so mad.... mad at the elites, mad at the folks in cities, mad at washington, just plain mad.

How do we recovery decency?  John Pavlovitz promotes a solution:  the Church of Not Being Horrible. He writes,

our sacred calling is to be decent, to be kind, to be compassionate, to be whatever it is that we believe the world is lacking: to be the kind of person the world needs—and it definitely needs people being less horrible these days. 

And this call to humanity isn't limited to any belief or denomination.

If you’re interested in joining the church, you don’t need to pray a magic prayer. You don’t have to attend a membership class or recite any creeds or take a test or promise to give financially. There are no theological or bureaucratic hoops to jump through. 

There is no conversion, there is only commencement. You simply begin, right where you are, in this very moment—seeking to be less horrible to the people you live with, work with, come across in the street, interact with online, see from a distance. That’s it.

It may seem like a low bar to set, but it’s actually a beautiful aspiration: making the world less cruel, less violent, less insulting—less horrible.

But not as long as violent would-be brown-shirts are in training to beat up "libtards".

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.

Deplorable

Yes, I'd say this is deplorable.

The Times found that nearly 20% of Trump supporters did not approve of freeing the slaves, according to a January YouGov/Economist poll that asked respondents if they supported or disapproved of “the executive order that freed all slaves in the states that were in rebellion against the federal government”—Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

The Republicans need to own it that they are the party of white supremacy.  Democrats need to stand firm:  these views have no place in mainstream politics.

And I'd say this is a sad indictment of what had been a noble history.

For a very brief period after the end of the Civil War, Republicans truly fought for the rights of black Americans. Frustrated by reports of abuses of and violence against former slaves in the postwar South, and by the inaction of Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, a faction known as the Radicals gained increasing sway in Congress. 

The Radicals drove Republicans to pass the country’s first civil rights bill in 1866, and to fight for voting rights for black men (though not yet women) at a time when such an idea was still controversial even in the North. 

Furthermore, Republicans twice managed to amend the Constitution, so that it now stated that everyone born in the United States is a citizen, that all citizens should have equal protection of the law, and that the right to vote couldn’t be denied because of race. 

This article concludes:

Now the GOP is at a crossroads. It’s possible that the turn toward Trump and his ideas this year will be remembered as an aberration, and that a new generation of Republican politicians will find a way to be more than just the party of white resentment — rediscovering their roots as the party of Lincoln. 

But it’s also quite possible that Trump is just the beginning, and that the party will increasingly play to white voters by appealing to racial tensions. It’s up to Republican voters and leaders to decide just what they want their party to be.

UPDATE:  Ta-nehisi  Coates argues that the polls back Hillary up.

Was Hillary Clinton being truthful or not? 

Much like Trump’s alleged opposition to the Iraq War, this not an impossible claim to investigate. We know, for instance, some nearly 60 percent of Trump’s supportershold “unfavorable views” of Islam, and 76 percent support a ban on Muslims entering the United States. We know that some 40 percent of Trump’s supporters believe blacks are more violent, more criminal, lazier, and ruder than whites. Two-thirds of Trump’s supporters believe the first black president in this country’s history is not American. These claim are not ancillary to Donald Trump’s candidacy, they are a driving force behind it. 

When Hillary Clinton claims that half of Trump’s supporters qualify as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic,” data is on her side. One could certainly argue that determining the truth of a candidate’s claims is not a political reporter’s role. But this is not a standard that political reporters actually adhere to.

Trumpism and the end of the GOP

Andrew Sullivan on the first night of the Republican Convention:

The degeneracy of conservatism – its descent into literally mindless appeals to tribalism and fear and hatred – was on full display. You might also say the same about the religious right, the members of whom have eagerly embraced a racist, a nativist, a believer in war crimes, and a lover of the tyrants that conservatism once defined itself against. Their movement long lost any claim to a serious Christian conscience. But that they would so readily embrace such an unreconstructed pagan is indeed a revelation. 

If you think of the conservative movement as beginning in 1964 and climaxing in the 1990s, then the era we are now in is suffering from a cancer of the mind and the soul. That the GOP has finally found a creature that can personify these urges to purge, a man for whom the word “shameless” could have been invented, a bully and a creep, a liar and cheat, a con man and wannabe tyrant, a dedicated loather of individual liberty, and an opponent of the pricelessly important conventions of liberal democracy is perhaps a fitting end. 

This is the gutter, ladies and gentlemen, and it runs into a sewer. May what’s left of conservatism be carried out to sea.

The politics of cynicism

In the breathtaking aftermath of the UK Brexit decision, we learn that the proponents of the departure of the UK from the EU, principally Nigel Farage of the odious UKIP party, and the gadfly Tory Boris Johnson, really didn't expect to win.

They have no plans.

They are backtracking on what they promised (more money for the National Health!  No immigrants!)

The whole campaign was a cynical exercise in lies and mis-statements, intended to inflame the right wing of the party and gain them power.  They didn't expect to actually have to DO anything, like drag the UK out of the EU (and potentially shatter the UK).  Indeed, Johnson as a journalist has a long record of telling lies.  (Does that remind you of anyone?)

The media treated pronouncements on both side as equally sober, because the UK media like the US  is not about journalism, but about false equivalence that makes a horse race.  (Rupert Murdoch has much to answer for).

And now that the referendum has passed, the truth is revealed (though it was known all the time).  And Boris Johnson's plans to be PM are over.

Similarly, the far right in this country has cynically manipulated the electorate to believe that Obama is a crazed commie liberal Muslim and we are going to hell in a handbasket because of environmentalists and homosexuals.  They have merrily blown up any concept of sober governance and compromise purely for power and leverage.

So much for the best of the country and the governed.  It's all a game, scoring points.

The Conservative Establishment in the UK tried to call the right wing's bluff by calling for a Brexit referendum, and now they are careening into economic unknown.   The Prime Minister has resigned and who knows what is next.

The Republican Establishment in the US thought the could control their right wing, but lo and behold, DJ Trump is now their candidate, on an explicitly racist platform.  Now, as they move into the general election, the Elites are trying to figure out how they can manage this disaster.  And the mediatainment industry loves it.

In neither case is anyone actually interested in the well-being of the country.

The peasants are revolting and the big cats are still trying to make it to their advantage. It is sobering and not a little frightening.

The Party of Delusion

Two writers from different sides of the spectrum come up with the same answer to the question, how did the GOP become raving insane?

In an open letter to Republican friends, Richard North Patterson examines current Republicanism and finds a distressing absence of evidence-based policy, but rather delusional orthodoxy.  Purging the moderates in favor of true believers.  How did this happen?

Start with the relationship between the party establishment and its base. Your family, and mine, occupy a privileged slice of American society. Not so for most members of the GOP electorate. They are folks that few of us know very well: evangelicals; modestly educated whites threatened by economic dislocation; and people whose distrust of government partakes of paranoia.

...The real causes of their woes are globalization, the Great Recession, the housing crisis, and an information society which marginalizes blue-collar jobs. But the GOP never addressed these complex forces with any kind of candor — let alone proposed solutions like job retraining and educational access for their kids. 

Barren of ideas for helping its base voters, it resorted to blame-shifting and scapegoating — of government, Obama, illegal immigrants, Muslims and other minorities. Instead of looking forward, the party indulged a primal nostalgia for simpler times, an imaginary white folks’ paradise which can never be resurrected.

BINGO. "an imaginary white folks’ paradise which can never be resurrected."

GOP lifer sees the same thing, but goes one to place  the roots of the problem in the "Southern Strategy" that appealed to race in the era of desegregation.  That's when the Democrats lost the south. That's when the prudent GOP businessman united with culturally conservative whites who were largely evangelical Christians.  (my emphasis below)

When millions of Southern whites frightened by desegregation pivoted into the Party of Lincoln, something had to give. This marriage between Southern racial conservatives and America’s party of commerce and trade could only be sustained through a collective commitment to delusion....

Leveraging religious fundamentalism as a political force created consequences beyond mere rhetoric. Central to this worldview was a denial of Enlightenment ideas about the foundational value of science and data. Coupled with the wider decline of social capital institutions that once filtered the crazy from our political system, this uncoupling of ideology from empirical results unleashed a monster. A smokescreen of religious fundamentalism allowed Republicans to recruit racial conservatives in the South, but expansion came at a cost. With facts discredited, no force could contain the wave of crazy that broke across the party of prudent, intellectual conservatism.

And, as he points out, the results are inevitable.

Nevertheless, in time tax cuts produced massive deficits. Ever looser gun regulations produced thousands of needless deaths. Pointless wars produced global instability on a massive scale and a terrible tide of death and debt. Bigoted rhetoric drove non-whites and urban voters out of the party. Refusal to acknowledge climate change fed accelerating climate change. Blind financial deregulation produced unprecedented economic collapse. Cuts to the social safety net led to ballooning poverty. Tax cuts for the rich made the rich richer. Meanwhile public institutions shriveled and public faith in government collapsed.

Exactly. And so, here we are.

Your court, Republicans.

The resurgence of the know-nothings

Ben Carson's popularity is a symptom of a broader, deeply concerning anti-intellectualism.

Mike Lofgren:

Thanks to these overlapping and mutually reinforcing segments of the right-wing media-entertainment-“educational” complex, it is now possible for the true believer to sail on an ocean of political, historical, and scientific disinformation without ever sighting the dry land of empirical fact. This effect is fortified by the substantial overlap between conservative Republicans and fundamentalist Christians...... 

For these culture warriors, belief in demonstrably false propositions is no longer a stigma of ignorance, but a defiantly worn badge of political resistance.

And while we may laugh at them, they are more dangerous than that.

Numerous states like Louisiana now mandate that public schools teach the wholly imaginary “controversy” about evolution. A school textbook in Texas, whose state school board has long been infested with reactionary kooks, referred to chattel slaves as “workers” (the implication was obvious: neo-Confederate elements in the South have been trying to minimize slavery for a century and a half, to the point of insinuating it had nothing to do with the Civil War). 

This brings us back to Ben Carson. He now suggests that, rather than abolishing the Department of Education, a perennial Republican goal, the department should be used to investigate professors who say something he doesn’t agree with. The mechanism to bring these heretics to the government’s attention should be denunciations from students, a technique once in vogue in the old Soviet Union. 

Those seeking the Evangelical vote play to these views.  And they are scary. As is misattributed to Sinclair Lewis:

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

Lancing the boil

An interview with Political scientists Thomas Mann (Brookings Institute and UC Berkeley) and Norman Ornstein (American Enterprise Institute) who came to notice by their analysis that the "broken" politics in the US is a result of the GOP collapse.

They say,

There is no clear path out of our current distemper. The solution, like the diagnosis, must focus on the obvious but seldom acknowledged asymmetry between the parties. The Republican Party must become a conservative governing party once again and accept the assumptions and norms of our Madisonian system. That will likely require more election defeats, more honest reporting by the mainstream press and more recognition by the public that the problem is not "Washington" or "Congress" or "insiders" or politicians in general.

The burden is on the GOP because they are currently the major source of our political dysfunction. No happy talk about bipartisanship can obscure that reality. Unless other voices and movements arise within the Republican Party to change its character and course, our dysfunctional politics will continue.

Unless and until the infotainment industry otherwise known as the Mainstream Media stops this false equivalence between GOP and Dems, we will continue to see this.

And really, after the contrast of the free-for-all reality TV of the insult-flinging Republican "debate" and the sober Democratic version, isn't this apparent?

Republicans at war with the Pope?

Fetch the popcorn.

Damon Linker:

The problem is simply that Francis has broken from too many elements in the Republican Party platform. First there were affirming statements about homosexuality. Then harsh words for capitalism and trickle-down economics. And now climate change. That, it seems, is a bridge too far. Francis has put conservative American Catholics in the position of having to choose between the pope and the GOP. It should surprise no one that they’re siding with the Republicans. 

Under Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, a number of neoconservative Catholics (or theocons) went out of their way to make the case for the deep compatibility between Catholicism and the GOP. But not just compatibility: more like symbiosis. ...the GOP would serve as a vehicle for injecting Catholic moral and social ideas into American political culture — while those Catholics ideas, in turn, would galvanize the Republican Party, lending theological gravity and purpose to its agenda and priorities.....

Andrew Sullivan:

The theocons created an abstract fusion of GOP policy and an unrecognizable form of Christianity that saw money as a virtue, the earth as disposable, and the poor as invisible. It couldn’t last, given the weight of Christian theology and tradition marshaled against it. And it hasn’t. Francis is, moreover, indistinguishable on this issue from Benedict XVI and even John Paul II. As in so many areas, it’s the American far right whose bluff is finally being called.

We need more republicans like this

I have recently started reading a blog called "GOPlifer".  The  writer is a sensible old-style republican, the sort that we used to have back in the day.  While I am more leftist than he is, and not as enamored of markets, I have been enjoying his writing.  A Republican party that came back to its rational roots (or should we say, sensible cloth coats) would be a welcome change and a force for good.  

Indeed, I'm often not comfortable with the extreme left, particularly its political correctness and identity politics, and very much opposed to the current fashion of shutting down unpopular speech or speakers.  There's a real streak of old-style Republican in me, though I still identify as more liberal than GOPlifer.  And I bet a lot of people who are uncomfortable in the middle would vote for some of his policies.Which would not necessarily be bad ones.

On immigration, GOPlifer writes,

We will achieve real border security when we start making intelligent policy choices. Republicans should be well positioned to lead the way on border security since many of the best solutions are based on market mechanisms rather than big government. Unfortunately, the GOP is not only the party of markets and commerce; it has become the central political expression of aging whites terrified of losing their cultural dominance.

That’s where Republican border security rhetoric confronts border security politics. The policies that will make America more powerful, wealthier, and more secure will also make America increasingly more diverse. Too many core Republican voters are willing to live in a weaker, poorer country so long as people who speak English and look like me remain securely dominant. As long as Republicans are more interested in cultural security than border security, Republicans will not regain leadership on immigration reform.

He has an excellent diagnosis of what the GOP is, and what it could be, from the view of a market-oriented capitalist.

Markets do not survive under weak or inept government. The Republican Party was originally organized to thwart powerful interests who, unhindered by a government too weak and ineffectual to provide justice, violently stole the labor and resources of an enslaved people. It took the force of a muscular, determined central government to end slavery. A century later it took a muscular, determined central government to enforce the rights of the formerly enslaved to participate freely in markets.

That battle for justice has not ended and may never end. Republicans will not regain our balance until we recognize one essential reality – government is not our enemy and it not the enemy of markets.

The South?  He recognizes the same neo-Confederate problem that we talked about earlier,  but sees the potential:

Southern men in their fifties launched their lives in an atmosphere of near-total protection from competition. God had made them racially supreme, the benevolent protectors of the weaker sex and even weaker neighboring races. Law and culture made that supremacy feel like a reality until the Federal government and global economic competition began to strip it away.....

For that formerly insulated generation, accelerating technological dynamism has undermined much of their economic value just at the moment when global capitalism has broadened the range of competition. They have lost privileges and protections they barely realized they had and the terror is palpable. Southern Republican politics in this moment is pure, distilled fear; rhetorical moonshine that rushes straight to the heart before dimming the eyes.

But, he sees much promise:

Reconstruction 2.0 is a relentless juggernaut bringing a brighter, freer, more prosperous future to the South. The aging Neo-Confederates that have seized control of the GOP are tilting at windmills. Cooler heads might regain political control before the party goes the way of the Whigs, but the country at large is already moving on. When the dust settles and the dead-enders have given up, the Southern states may be positioned to breathe vibrant new life into the American Dream.

And, today, he diagnoses the Republican party:

The miserable state of the Republican Party can perhaps be understood through its response to four simple truths. Each item on this list is measurable, provable and broadly regarded as obvious. Failure to acknowledge these four truths means being as clearly, empirically wrong as it’s possible to be in the otherwise mushy, gray realm of politics:

1) Climate change is real and it is caused primarily by human activity.

2) Human beings evolved from simpler life forms, and the same evolutionary process shapes all living systems.

3) Abortion is a complex issue because it involves two legitimate liberty interests in conflict with one another.

4) Race still skews economic outcomes in the United States.

...

Unfortunately, there is almost no corner of America in which a Republican can survive a primary election while openly acknowledging all four of these truths....

Mediation begins by reaching some agreement on a defined, provable set of facts. The truth is slow, but relentless. Over time it becomes irresistible. Anyone who is looking for a first step, a template for building a newly relevant Republican establishment should look first to those four truths. If we can ever generate a core of Republican strategists, activists and officeholders willing to acknowledge these simple, demonstrable truths without evasion or flinching, we’ll be on our way to a far brighter future for the party, the country, and our world.

So, Republicans, how do you take your party back?

Conservatives secede, liberals endure

I recently came across a very interesting piece that argues that although they lost the war, the Confederates actually won the peace:  not a Tea party, but a Confederate Party.   First, a little history:

After the U.S. forces won on the battlefield in 1865 and shattered the organized Confederate military, the veterans of that shattered army formed a terrorist insurgency that carried on a campaign of fire and assassination throughout the South until President Hayes agreed to withdraw the occupying U. S. troops in 1877.

By the time it was all over, the planter aristocrats were back in control, and the three constitutional amendments that supposedly had codified the U.S.A’s victory over the C.S.A.– the 13th, 14th, and 15th — had been effectively nullified in every Confederate state. The Civil Rights Acts had been gutted by the Supreme Court, and were all but forgotten by the time similar proposals resurfaced in the 1960s. Blacks were once again forced into hard labor for subsistence wages, denied the right to vote, and denied the equal protection of the laws.

In other words, the South did rise again!  And its culture endures, entrenched in the Old South but also  other parts of the country, particularly Appalachia and parts of the rural west.  Not in great shape in many respects, and a net taker, but in control of our political process.  The author draws specific comparisons to the Tea Party-inspired threats of secession and nullification.

The essence of the Confederate worldview is that the democratic process cannot legitimately change the established social order, and so all forms of legal and illegal resistance are justified when it tries.

That worldview is alive and well. During last fall’s government shutdown and threatened debt-ceiling crisis, historian Garry Wills wrote about our present-day Tea Partiers: “The presiding spirit of this neo-secessionism is a resistance to majority rule.”

Here's the thing:

When in the majority, Confederates protect the established order through democracy. If they are not in the majority, but have power, they protect it through the authority of law. If the law is against them, but they have social standing, they create shams of law, which are kept in place through the power of social disapproval. If disapproval is not enough, they keep the wrong people from claiming their legal rights by the threat of ostracism and economic retribution. If that is not intimidating enough, there are physical threats, then beatings and fires, and, if that fails, murder.

Violence.  Guns.  Bombing abortion clinics.  And the attempt to render the president illegitimate (birther conspiracies, etc) because he challenges the social order.  A black man dares to be president.

This is not a universal, both-sides-do-it phenomenon. Compare, for example, the responses to the elections of our last two presidents. Like many liberals, I will go to my grave believing that if every person who went to the polls in 2000 had succeeded in casting the vote s/he intended, George W. Bush would never have been president. I supported Gore in taking his case to the Supreme Court. And, like Gore, once the Court ruled in Bush’s favor — incorrectly, in my opinion — I dropped the issue. 

For liberals, the Supreme Court was the end of the line. Any further effort to replace Bush would have been even less legitimate than his victory. ....I don’t recall anyone suggesting that military officers refuse his orders on the grounds that he was not a legitimate president. 

Barack Obama, by contrast, won a huge landslide in 2008, getting more votes than any president in history. And yet, his legitimacy has been questioned ever since. The Birther movement was created out of whole cloth, there never having been any reason to doubt the circumstances of Obama’s birth. Outrageous conspiracy theories of voter fraud — millions and millions of votes worth — have been entertained on no basis whatsoever. Immediately after Obama took office, the Oath Keeper movement prepared itself to refuse his orders. 

A black president calling for change, who owes most of his margin to black voters — he himself is a violation of the established order. His legitimacy cannot be conceded.

Fascinating concept.

This isn't limited to the Old Confederacy, of course.  It seems to be a particular type of conservatism that trends towards nullification and threats.   Consider the recent ire of conservatives in the Roman Catholic church, outraged that Pope Francis is calling for a more merciful face on doctrine.  We can't have that.  Note the hysteria, manifest in columnist Ross Douthat's recent piece threatening a schism 
 over the possibility that divorcés could be readmitted to Commuion, or gays accepted.

No change can be allowed, and if it comes, then there will be schism.  No dynamic tension is possible.  We will walk, back to the former Pope.  

Here's an interesting article in the National Catholic Reporter on the small numbers of  vocal, angry conservatives and their leader Cardinal Burke.

Well, the Episcopal Church saw this too.  The conservatives were very clearly "my way or the highway", especially over the issues of sexuality.   Democratic polity be damned.  You can't do this, or we will walk, and deny your validity.  And so there was ACNA, and attempts to replace TEC in the Anglican Communion with a band of angry conservatives defined by what they are against.

So I would put it to you that there is a disturbing trend amongst a certain type of conservative that sees a defense of a particular social order as a high calling, even if it requires the destruction of an institution.

Shut down the government.  Repeal Obamacare.  Drown the government in the bathtub.  Unpave the streets, dismiss the police.  Every man for himself, with a gun at the window.

No good news in politics

The Republicans took over the Senate far more easily than polls suggested they would. I do blame the Democrats for running away from the record and from the President, and I blame the President, for being too cool and distant.

The idea that this was a wave of some sort is clearly not true;  this was a typical realignment of the Congress in a mid-term election.  It is also clearly not true that the Republicans have repudiated the tea-partiers and put the adults back in charge;  as Charles Pierce writes,

Let us dispense with some conventional wisdom before it petrifies. First of all, the president's basic unpopularity was unquestionably a factor, but not anywhere near as much of a factor as was the reluctance of the Democratic party -- from the president on down -- to embrace the actual successes that the administration has achieved. The economy is, in fact, improving. It is the responsibility of the president and his party that we have the paradoxical polling that indicates that the elements of the Affordable Care Act are popular, while "Obamacare" is not.....The senatorial candidates who lost were senators who ran away from the administration.... 

Second, it was a great night for voter-suppression, which has been central to the Republican response to the fact that the president has been elected twice....It's going to take days to sort out the overall effect of these laws on the general electorate, even if anyone cares to do so, which I've come to doubt, because the Supreme Court created a new normal when John Roberts gutted the Voting Rights Act and declared the day of jubilee, and the people in the country who are not those inconvenienced by these laws, and who are not those against whose franchise these laws were directly aimed, seem perfectly content with this situation. 

Last, and I hate to break this to Tom Brokaw, and to Kasie Hunt, who talked about how the Republicans know they have to "govern," but this election couldn't have been less of a repudiation of the Tea Party. As the cable shows signed off last night, it was dawning even on the most conventional pundits that the Republicans had not elected an escadrille of Republican archangels to descend upon Capitol Hill. It was more like a murder of angry crows. .....Several of these people -- most notably, Sasse and Ernst -- won Republican primaries specifically as Tea Partiers, defeating establishment candidates. The Republicans did not defeat the Tea Party. The Tea Party's ideas animated what happened on Tuesday night. What the Republicans managed to do was to teach the Tea Party to wear shoes, mind its language, and use the proper knife while amputating the social safety net. They did nothing except send the Tea Party to finishing school.

The really depressing thing is that it's not clear how any of this will change in 2016.  And it is also clear that the Dems seem out of ideas, unable to compelling speak a compelling vision.  And Hilary sure as heck doesn't have one--because a vision requires a debate and discussion, not a coronation of someone representing the Corporate Wing of the Democratic party.

It's going to be a long few years.

Hot Air

I've had little to say for the last few days, because it all seems same-old same old.  I've been feeling burdened and burned out by work and by politics.

Marriage equality has had a booming month so far, with 32 states now having equal marriage rights.  Appeals are flying but the Supreme Court seems content to stay out of it unless and until there is a conflict between circuits.  Fundamentalists are throwing hissy fits and demanding the right to discriminate against LGBT people on the grounds of religious freedom. To which the answer is, if an adherent of a white-supremicist church (and there are such) demanding the "right" to discriminate against a black person in the civil realm, would we allow it?  How about a refusal to serve a Muslim woman in a head scarf?  But I've gone on about this at length elsewhere and I haven't the energy to do it again.

The Republicans (or the right-wing fanatics who have taken over the Republican party) scarcely even pretend any more to support democracy, but admit that they want to prevent Democratic constituencies from voting.  They  continue providing money and power to the Koch brothers, the fossil fuel industry, the military-industrial complex, and the big banks.  And the climate is continuing its dangerous change. It's hard to conclude anything than that we are screwed.

The Roman Catholic Synod on the family backtracked on making overtures to respect LGBT people, let alone welcome them. The conservatives are smirking at their slap-back of Pope Francis.  And yet, the transparency in the final document and the votes on each paragraph are such that it appears there is a more closely divided church, between conservatives by-the-book happy to lay crosses on other people's shoulders, and progressives of more pastoral instincts.  Polls show a surging majority of young American Catholics support gay rights and marriage equality.  At least arch-conservative Raymond Cardinal Burke, known for his love of garments liturgical, has suffered another demotion.

In the Episcopal Church, there's been the agonizing slow-motion crash at General Theological Seminary in New York.  I don't know much about seminaries, but I know a lot about secular academe, where the faculty have been demoted to a minor managerial role as the institutions become increasingly corporatized.   At GTS, it  bears all the hallmarks of heavy-handed institutional leadership, a hot-house atmosphere with a weakened faculty making dramatic ultimatums, and a board digging in its heels.  One would somehow have hoped that a seminary would do better,  both the faculty and the board.

And the Northern White Rhino species is down to 6 individuals, guaranteeing they will go extinct.

Stupid humans.

A gay free zone? Religious liberty, the Republicans, and the Christian Right

The Republicans are in agood position.  They can point fingers at the Supreme Court, but thanks to SCOTUS, they can complain about marriage equality without actually dirtying their hands doing anything to stop it.

 Ed Kilgore has a perceptive piece in TPM Cafe on how they are playing this into a "dogwhistle" that nevertheless keeps the footsoldiers of the Evangelical Christians in the tent doing the work (and the voting).   And it's all about "religious liberty" and the gay-free zone that they want:

["Religious liberty"] even more effective than opposing “judicial activism,” because it borrows the aura of an almost universally valued American principle. And it’s less aggressively theocratic, as well, insofar as its proponents do not (at least in this context) propose to ban same-sex marriage (or to ban abortions or contraceptives), but simply to create a zone in which gay marriages don’t have to be recognized (and abortions and contraceptives provided or subsidized). 

So far, claims that same-sex marriages will threaten “religious liberty” have mostly emerged from conservative Christian quadrants of the wedding industry, and proponents of giving them broad exemptions from laws they don’t like haven’t made a lot of progress (though less formally, opposing gay rights on religious grounds has been a boon for businesses like Chick-Fil-A and for careers like Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson). But as the “religious liberty” movement continues to develop, you could see it morph into the theoretical foundation for a parallel society in which the painful diversity of contemporary life, and its disturbing clatter of demands for “equality” and “non-discrimination” and “rights” (other than religious rights and the Right To Life, of course) is simply excluded, along with “government schools” and secular news and entertainment. 

And this is the goal of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and others -- to have the legal right to live in a "gay free zone" where LGBT Americans are legitimately denied services, employment, or recognition as fellow Americans.

Republican Christianity: a counterfeit?

With the defeat of Eric Cantor (who is Jewish), all the Republicans in Congress identify as Christian of one sort or another.  All of them.

Now think about that.  Think about the >16% of Americans who are not affiliated. And another 5-6% who are of other faiths e.g., Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu...  (Data here)  Just another way that the ruling Republicans do not reflect America, ethnically, economically, or religiously.

From Religion Dispatches

The Republican Christians who now inhabit Congress have in most cases assertively presented their Christian faith as the glue that binds together their public service, their connection to their constituencies, and their policy thinking. It also frames the way they understand both collegiality and political compromise or the lack thereof. Like it or not, the Republicans in Congress are now a kind of congregation, a reality of church, a particular church, but still a church. Inescapably, now they present a Christianity in total power.

This is a perfect storm for Christianity. We now have a political party that deeply dislikes the first African American president (who is also a Christian), clearly opposes significant cooperation with him or his party, is reactionary on most issues from taxes to the environment to women’s health to full equality for LGBTQ folks, is wedded to a neo-conservative economic fideism, and is unapologetically Christian. It will be difficult to convince anyone that this Republican Christianity is not authentic Christianity because a religion reveals itself when it has political and economic power. 

Moral Mondays

"Moral Mondays" are the efforts by faith leaders in North Carolina to call attention to the extremist right wing agenda of their state legislature that injures the poor and least amongst us.  This sums up the hypocrisy of the "Christian" right:

As the senators bowed their heads for an opening prayer, introduced a new crop of pages, and began the evening’s business, the protestors filed by, hundreds upon hundreds, totally quiet, pressing their signs up to the glass—signs about fracking, and women’s rights, and health care reform. “Jesus wept … and so do we.” “In-state tuition for dreamers.” “God wants justice and compassion for the poor.” The senators didn’t look up. 

Changing views of racial issues, by party

I live in California, which has ample problems to be sure.  But one feature of living here is that it's far from homogeneous.  Of course there's racial segregation, but it's  still a melting pot, where I mangle Mandarin to wish a student Happy (Chinese) New Year, or greet my office neighbor with "Hola!" On my morning train, there's a rainbow of skin color along with multiple languages.  Of course race is noticed;  we aren't post-racial much as we pretend to be. And we have fierce arguments about immigration reform and affirmative action.  But for most of us, racial difference per se is not a threat.  I wept with joy when Obama was elected.

Sobering reading in the Washington Post suggests that Democrats and Republicans increasingly view issues around race very differently.

Then:  we weren't so far apart.  (Goetz shot four black youths, claiming he thought they would mug him.  OJ, well, you know.  And Don Imus made insensitive racial comments. )

Now, it's far more dramatic a difference, and it suggests something very troubling.  Over and over again we see ugly attitudes rear their heads, suggesting that the core of the Republican party is angry white people who are threatened by this spectrum.

How do we lance this boil?

NC wins for most cynical republican since the 47%

Thom Tillis won his NC primary last night and will face incumbent Senator Kay Hagen in the fall.  He's really quite despicable. 

here’s what Tillis told a group of voters in 2011: 

“What we have to do is find a way to divide and conquer the people who are on assistance. We have to show respect for that woman who has cerebral palsy and had no choice in her condition, that needs help and we should help. And we need to get those folks to look down at these people who choose to get into a condition that makes them dependent on the government and say, ‘At some point you’re on your own. We may end up taking care of those babies, but we’re not taking care of you.’ 

Chris Matthews points out “The goal here politically is to get the sick people to attack the poor people.”

As Greg Sargent writes,

Tillis not only opposed the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, which would have expanded coverage to 500,000 people he would represent; he also boasted in an ad that he was personallyresponsible for stopping that outcome “cold.” Tillis and North Carolina Republicans alsodramatically slashed unemployment benefits, which, in the words of one national observer, turned help for the jobless into a ”thinner safety net than it has been in decades.” 

Tillis has heaped contempt on those protesting such policies, arguing: “What I see from the folks who are opposing our agenda is whining coming from losers.”

This is an obvious example of the Republican meme of "deserving" vs "undeserving".  Deserving, in Republican code, means angry white people with medicare and social security:  "us".  Undeserving means people of color in cities, immigrants, and others who may be on welfare, need foodstamps, or unemployment:  "them".

It is deeply offensive, not to mention, anti-Christian.

What on earth is wrong with North Carolina?