Category: Political issues

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Foreign ministers meeting in Brussels, Nov. 29, 2023. Source: U.S. Department of State via Wikimedia Commons.

One of my sources of information is Apple News, which includes subscriptions to a good many newspapers that are otherwise behind paywalls. During the past few weeks, I have been seeing a lot of stories with scary headlines in the Times of London in which military leaders express their worry about the risk of war with Russia and their concern that NATO is dangerously unprepared. I’ve seen very little on this subject in American newspapers. What should we make of this?

An example of one of these scary headlines was today: “Nato should ‘prepare for Russian missile strikes in Europe.'” The article is a long interview with Lieutenant General Alexander Sollfrank, who is commander of NATO’s military logistics center in southwest Germany.

For an overview of this war worry that is not behind a paywall, I recommend this piece in the Guardian from January 26: “Why are European defence leaders talking about war?” The Guardian brings up one of my concerns: “Planning for warfare, a remote contingency, is what militaries do and there is always pressure from generals and defence ministries to spend more.”

Plus I’m always concerned that the Times of London may have agendas and a point of view that would not align well with my own. But there also are some obvious points of real concern:

“A wave of anxiety has gripped European defence ministers and armed forces as politicians and military leaders believe that Nato-sceptic Donald Trump could be elected as the next president of the US — and that Russia may not be forced out or defeated in Ukraine. This febrile mood has prompted growing warnings that Europe could find itself involved in a war in Russia, even though at present Russia is embroiled in Ukraine.”

I don’t know what to make of this. But I do think it’s something that needs to be on our radar screens. Americans are distracted, and the American media can’t be counted on to understand what’s important and what’s not.

Here are a few more links:

CBS News: U.K. army chief says citizens should be ready to fight in possible land war.

NATO: Setting the record straight.

GlobalAffairs.org: Why is Sweden telling its citizens to prepare for war?

The Hill: NATO admiral warns of potential all-out war with Russia.

The American media are reporting, however, on how happy Russia is about Western division over military aid to Ukraine and Israel-Gaza issues: Russia projects confidence as it pursues alliances to undermine West.

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Update 1:

Today (January 29), the Times of London has another one of these scary headlines: “Zelensky warns Germany it risks being sucked into World War Three.” Zelensky made this warning on a German talk show, in which he also asked Germany to give him long-range Taurus missiles. Zelensky also said, according to the Times, that “Putin could turn his attention to Germany, Poland or the Baltic states after Ukraine.”

This coordinated talk about World War III in Europe has all the marks of a coordinated media campaign. That does not necessarily mean that someone is trying to deceive us. But what worries me personally is that there are several new hot spots right now (Jordan, Yemen, and the Red Sea, in addition to Gaza), and those (such as Iran and Russia) who think they can profit from chaos see new opportunities. Right-wingers in the U.S. Congress are begging for some kind of retaliation against Iran.

Update 2:

Today (Jan. 30), the New York Times is writing about this: “For Europe and NATO, a Russian Invasion Is No Longer Unthinkable: Amid crumbling U.S. support for Ukraine and Donald Trump’s rising candidacy, European nations and NATO are making plans to take on Russia by themselves.”

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Trump in New Hampshire. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Do the American political media actually believe their own delusional spin — that Trump is so powerful that he may actually get back into the White House? Or is it, as not a few people on the left (including me) see it, that the media have a strong — and dangerously perverse — self-interest in keeping the Trump era going, because Trump has been a bonanza in delivering clicks and eyeballs to an industry desperate for clicks and eyeballs?

“Trump gains speed with win over Haley,” writes the Washington Post this morning. Trump “crushed” Haley’s momentum, the Post writes. That’s the theme that dominates the New York Times’ New Hampshire coverage as well.

I am increasingly worried about what is happening at the Washington Post. At the Post, it seems that Trump was what made the difference between profit and loss. The “Trump bump” made a lot of money for the Post. But the Post lost 20 percent of its subscribers after Trump left office and may now be losing money. Pretty much all the mainstream media including the New York Times rode the Trump bump.

The Washington Post got a new publisher on January 3. That’s Sir William Lewis, who is British and who comes to the Post from the Murdoch media empire. The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, of course doesn’t want to lose money. How can reasonable people not suspect that Bezos thinks that the Murdochification of the Washington Post is the way to make money?

Who am I do disagree with the Washington Post’s elite political team? No one; I’m just an obscure blogger and veteran of the newspaper business whose personal politics don’t accord very well with the media elite. But at least none of my salary or job security (I’m retired) ever came from the Trump bump.

I see the present political situation very differently. The media elite see New Hampshire as a huge win for Trump and a dead end for Nikki Haley. Not I. No one, it seems, expected Haley to get 44 percent vs. Trump’s 55. That means that surprisingly close to half of the Republicans who voted in the New Hampshire primary do not support Trump. That seems to have spooked Trump, and Marjorie Taylor Greene said that Haley’s numbers are “fake“.

The Republican Party is headed for a civil war that can only be vicious. It is impossible to imagine a united Republican Party in November. They will turn their guns on each other, and no matter what Republican is on the ballot in November, half of Republican voters will be motivated to stay home.

As always, the stories about Trump “crushing” his opposition conveniently forget that Trump is going to be crushed by the law — convicted by the criminal courts and financially ruined by the civil courts. And yes, that’s going to happen before the Republican National Convention, which starts on July 15. It is all too likely that the internal warfare that we’ll see at that convention will be a televised riot like nothing the world has ever seen before. The mainstream media are still afraid to touch the growing evidence that Trump’s cognitive impairments are getting worse. The Biden campaign, though, is posting videos drawing attention to Trump’s slurring of words, confusing one person with another, and not understanding what’s what or who’s who or where is where. Trump is one big gaffe away from being caught on video with a gaffe so shocking that the mainstream media won’t be able to ignore it anymore. Even Fox News is acknowledging that Trump is “increasingly confused on the campaign trail.” Trump’s handlers are in a bind. They have to put him out there, if he’s to be seen as a real candidate, but the more they put him out there the more they risk the gaffe that will put an end to him.

It seems all too likely that, when the history of the presidential campaign of 2024 is written, that history will be as much about media as about politics. The rightwing media will be all-lies and all-gaslighting all the time, as always. The mainstream media is compromised with conflicts of interest, addicted to Trump. And we are unprepared for the “tsunami of misinformation” that AI will pour into the media including social media.

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Two angles of the iron triangle: Ronald Reagan with Rupert Murdoch, 1983. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Corruption and national security

Heather Cox Richardson’s daily newsletter, “Letters From an American,” is a must-read every day. Today’s newsletter, though (the link is to Substack), is particularly important. It’s about international corruption. Richardson quotes an FBI statement to the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City from 2011:

International enterprises, the FBI statement said, “are running multi-national, multi-billion dollar schemes from start to finish…. They may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military…. These criminal enterprises are making billions of dollars from human trafficking, health care fraud, computer intrusions, and copyright infringement. They are cornering the market on natural gas, oil, and precious metals, and selling to the highest bidder…. These groups may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called ‘iron triangles’ of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat.”

Take note of this “iron triangle”: organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders.

Russia, of course

Richardson touches on how the collapse of the Soviet Union, the looting of Russia by oligarchs including Vladimir Putin, and the need to launder Russian money in the West made the United States one of the money-laundering capitals of the world. Richardson writes:

“In March 2023 the Treasury told Congress that ‘[m]oney laundering perpetrated by the Government of the Russian Federation (GOR), Russian [state-owned enterprises], Russian organized crime, and Russian elites poses a significant threat to the national security of the United States and the integrity of the international financial system,’ and it outlined the ways in which it had been trying to combat that corruption. ‘In light of Russia’s further invasion of Ukraine,’ it said, ‘we must redouble our efforts to prevent Russia from abusing the U.S. financial system to sustain its war and counter Russian sanctioned individuals and firms seeking to exploit vulnerabilities in the U.S. financial system.'”

The vast right-wing conspiracy

Richardson does not mention “the vast right-wing conspiracy.” But clearly the “iron triangle” of corruption and “the vast right-wing conspiracy” that Hillary Clinton described are pretty much one and the same.

The Wikipedia article on the vast right-wing conspiracy quotes Paul Krugman:

In some of his books, Krugman has used the phrase (“Yes, Virginia, there is a vast right-wing conspiracy”[¹]) to refer not to a conservative Republican-leaning campaign against Clinton (or Obama), but more generally to “an interlocking set of institutions ultimately answering to a small group of people that collectively reward loyalists and punish dissenters” in the service of “movement conservatism.” The network of institutions provide “obedient politicians with the resources to win elections, safe havens in the event of defeat, and lucrative career opportunities after they leave office. They guarantee favorable news coverage to politicians who follow the party line, while harassing and undermining opponents. And they support a large standing army of party intellectuals and activists.[²]”

In Krugman’s view, the network of foundations that fund conservative scholarship, the national and regional think tanks and advocacy groups, talk radio media outlets, and conservative law firms through which they pushed their agenda to move the Republican Party to the right, far surpass in funding, size, inter-connectedness or influence anything the Democratic Party or the American political left/liberal movement have at their disposal.

The iron triangle

In short, it’s all of a piece, and it’s the piece that overhangs the greatest struggle of the present times — democracy vs. authoritarianism, economic fairness vs. the super-rich, the Putin-Trump axis, the iron-triangle politics of the Republican Party, and the terrifyingly effective machinery of disinformation that sells the billionaire politics of the oligarchy to deplorable Americans who don’t have a pot to piss in, such that every national election in the U.S. is now a deadly conflict between the international ecology of corruption and those who struggle against it.

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Wikipedia notes:

1. Krugman, Paul R. (2004). The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century, pp. 217, 269–71.

2. Krugman, Paul R. (2007). The Conscience of a Liberal, p. 163.

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“One down, two to go,” said Elise Stefanik, gloating over the resignation of Liz Magill as president of the University of Pennsylvania. Magill had blindly walked right into Stefanik’s right-wing gotcha trap during a congressional hearing. An orgy of right-wing glee followed Magill’s resignation, amplified by a clueless media eager to pose as nonpartisan and principled.

Magill’s cautious answers, which were intended to respect the difference between speech and conduct, were exactly what Republicans would have wanted to hear, if right-wing speech had been the issue. But, to Republicans, left-wing speech is a different matter. To Republicans, the protection of left-wing speech on campus is so dangerous, even in the absence of conduct, that, not only does the principle of free speech not matter, liberal heads must roll.

As a Democratic member of the House (Robert C. Scott of Virginia) pointed out, Republicans wouldn’t hold a hearing in 2017 after white supremacists marched through the campus of the University of Virginia shouting, among other things, “Jews will not replace us.”

The issue I’m drawing attention to here has nothing to do with Israel and Gaza. My point, as I’ve argued before, is that all the fuss and spilled ink about free speech on campus has nothing to do with the principle of free speech. Rather, it is a right-wing propaganda strategy, funded by right-wing money and furnished with lipstick by right-wing think tanks. Its purpose is to weaken the standing of America’s universities and to advance the right-wing project of corporatization and right-wing control of education. This propaganda has been very effective, partly because so many well-meaning people who actually do care about free speech have fallen for the lie that it contains — that the right actually cares about the principle of free speech. For the right, it’s the perfect disguise for what they want to do to American education (and what they are already doing, in the states where they have the power to do it).

Now right-wingers have a university president’s head on a platter. They hope to have two more, and soon. They hope to also get the heads of the presidents of Harvard and MIT.

So far, I’ve seen only one piece in the media that saw through the lie (though only partly). That is in the Washington Post, “Republicans say they believe in free speech. Except when it comes to Israel.” I say “partly” because I don’t think it’s Israel that makes the difference. I think what makes the difference is whether speech serves, or opposes, right-wing power.

Why did Magill walk into the trap? I can only guess. But my guess would be that she was thinking in principles, and like a lawyer, but that she’s fatally naive on the matter of persuasion and propaganda.

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Update 1:

Here’s a fine example of how right-wing interests use the media and how the media fall for it. The headline in the New York Times this afternoon is “Are academics best suited to lead big schools?” The idea is that maybe academics are not qualified to run academia! Who might be qualified, then? We know their answer to that, of course: political figures and our corporate masters.

Update 2:

Paul Krugman writes about this issue in his column for Dec. 15, 2023: “The Biggest Threat to America’s Universities.”

Update 3:

Here’s an example of how eager Republicans are to put money men in charge of universities: “Lee Roberts, former McCrory budget director, to serve as interim UNC chancellor.” Pat McCrory was a Republican governor of North Carolina. Roberts was appointed to the university’s board of governors by the state senate, which is controlled by Republicans. As the story in the Raleigh newspaper points out, Roberts has no experience in university administration. It’s all about money. What’s to stop university chancellors who are academics from choosing university vice presidents who’ll deal with money issues? Money rules, and the money men will do everything they can to accelerate the corporatization of universites.

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Students chilling each other’s speech. AI image generated by Dall-E 3.

Today at the Atlantic, Greg Lukianoff has a piece with the headline “The latest victims of the free-speech crisis.” If there are free-speech issues on campus, and no doubt there are, is that really a crisis? Or is someone trying to distract us from the real crisis of free speech — the banning of books, laws threatening librarians with jail sentences, efforts to reverse New York Times v. Sullivan, and legislating — legislating! — what teachers can and cannot say. A recent article in Foreign Policy reports that these Republicans actions to limit speech are spreading abroad.

In right-wing (and centrist) propaganda, one of the most common ways of intentional deception is to create false equivalencies to slam the left. An excellent example is claiming that the property damage caused by the Black Lives Matter protests during the summer of 2020 was somehow just as bad, and just as serious a threat, as the violent right-wing attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. At the Capitol, people died in a violent attempt to stop the constitutional functions of government, subvert the will of American voters, and install a neofascist permanently in the White House.

Yes, BLM protesters lit a fire in the entryway of a federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, on July 20, 2021. That was at 1:30 a.m. No one was hurt, and federal agents quickly extinguished the fire. They hurt their cause with such behavior, but BLM is not a threat to this country, unless it’s a threat to draw attention to racism, discrimination, racial inequality, and racially motivated violence against Black people.

I mention the false equivalency of the BLM and Capitol cases because I myself encountered it during the Thanksgiving holidays. I was told that “people like me” use January 6 to distract from the BLM protests. I of course replied that it’s the other way around. The implication was that the BLM protests were worse than January 6. I’m sure that many people think that, and, if they do, can we think of any reason for it other than racism?

Some of the contributors to Greg Lukianoff’s organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, are among the most right-wing and billionaire-run organizations in the country — the Bradley Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the Charles Koch Institute. If Lukianoff’s efforts to protect free speech have ever attempted to hold conservatives accountable for their attacks on “woke” speech, I’m not aware of it.

Lukianoff, in other words, is a right-wing propagandist, and his foundation is a right-wing propaganda outfit. Lukianoff, and many others, use the red herring of free speech on campus to draw attention away from the organized and well-funded attacks on democracy from the right, attacks that use the coercive power of government whenever possible, as in Florida, Texas, and Tennessee. If Greg Lukianoff was really concerned about free speech instead of producing the propaganda for which he is paid, then he’d be writing crisis alerts about his billionaire contributors, the Republican party, and the corporatization of American universities.

A few lonely voices have tried to point out how right-wing propaganda is attempting to gaslight us on the matter of free speech. For example, “Remember This Article? It Was Conservative Propaganda, and a Lot of Us Fell for It.”

A more nuanced view from an academic, Wendy Brown, was published in the New York Times: “Why Angry Critics of Woke College Kids are Missing the Point.”

From the interview with Wendy Brown:

“We need to appreciate that young left activist outrage about a burning planet and grotesque inequality and murderous racial violence and gendered abuses of power is accompanied by disgust with the systems and the rules of engagement that have brought us here. Young left activists are pulling the emergency brake because it feels as if there’s no time for debate and compromise and incrementalism; because many see conventional norms and practices as having brought us to the brink and kept us stupid and inert….

“My point here is that if we just focus on this generation’s political style — and we have to remember youth style always aggravates the elders — we ignore their rage at the world they’ve inherited, and their desperation for a more livable and just one, and their critique of our complacency.”

I’m with the kids. The kids, after all, are the ones with no money to corrupt them, unlike Greg Lukianoff, his billionaires, and his friends in the think tanks and media.

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Update:

European universities accept €260 million in fossil fuel money

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This past Sunday (Nov. 5, 2023) the New York Times started hyping an utterly screwball poll saying that Trump was leading Biden by an average of four points in six swing states. Right-wing subscribers to the Times swooped into the comments section to gloat. Times pundits doubled down on their usual snide and superior lecturing of Democrats while repeating and amplifying the usual Republican fictions.

Three days later, reality struck in the form of an actual real-world election. In the real world of elections, as opposed to the imaginary world that the media herd have bought into, Democrats won, bigtime, in multiple states, while MAGA Republicans got their you-know-whats handed to them.

I have no idea why political polling has gone haywire. Is it the “weighting” that pollsters apply? I have a hunch, though it’s untestable. When a pollster calls, more than 85 percent of the people who get the calls refuse to answer because of what they see on caller ID. My guess is that while most people roll their eyes and ignore the call, MAGA types are much more motivated to answer, because a poll gives them a way to register their rage and demoralization as their world falls apart. The hope of revenge is pretty much all they have left.

What’s frustrating is that there is no way for rational people to discipline the media for their malpractice. The New York Times thinks it knows better than everyone else, and nothing short of a major scandal (such as a reporter nailed for making stuff up) penetrates the Times’ unlimited faith in its own infallibility.

What we can do as rational people is to always keep in mind how Republican propagandists, starting in 1996 with the birth of Fox News, figured out how to use the principles of journalism to destroy journalism. For years, newspapers as a matter of principle refused to print the word “lie,” because that word wasn’t “objective,” even when reporting on Republican lies that journalists knew perfectly well were lies. That coincided with the rise of the internet and the ability to count clicks. Lies are designed to be provocative and thus get lots of clicks. Good government is boring to most people, which is why the media mostly ignore President Biden’s accomplishments. Whereas lies about Biden are never boring and thus get repeated and amplified by the mainstream media.

The New York Times poll that they hyped on Nov. 5 got lots of clicks. But the poll got the current political mindset of American voters exactly backwards, as the election on Nov. 7 showed. What’s worse is that the New York Times will learn nothing from this very public display of their own ongoing pattern not only of being wrong, but also of the now blind and baked-in pattern of being manipulated by right-wing propagandists. And worse still is that the mainstream media will never admit to having been a megaphone and amplifier to all the lies that led, starting in 1996 with the rise of Fox News, to an attempted right-wing coup against the government of the United States.

And they’re still not telling us that Trump is doomed, becaused they need the clicks.

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Update:

The Biden campaign has sent letters to major media outlets scolding them for their distorted coverage of polls:

Biden campaign sends memo to media outlets asserting disparity in polling coverage

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A Facebook meme

Prison, here they come

For several years, even a couple of my friends smirked at me for what they perceived was a fringy and starry-eyed position of mine — that Trump is going to prison. Maybe I didn’t make myself clear enough about the time line. It seemed obvious enough to me that it would take time for justice to catch up with Trump. Many people gave up on justice for Trump back in 2019, after Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, squelched Robert Mueller’s investigation and lied about what Mueller’s report concluded. The media fell for Barr’s distortions, partly because Mueller made such a fool of himself in front of Congress. But, if you actually read Mueller’s report rather than being schnookered by Barr’s spin, it was obvious that Trump was guilty as sin. And, in 2019, Trump had not even yet committed the worst of his many crimes — attempting to nullify an election, take over the U.S. government, and turn us into Russia.

Now here we are. The courts now have total control over Trump, including Trump’s mouth. Trump is powerless. Even his threats and menacing words have no power anymore, except insofar as they lead to gag orders. The evidence is damning, the penalties are severe, and Trump has no defense. Our abominable media and degenerate punditry, in spite of the evidence, continue to push the hits-friendly notion that prosecutors are overreaching, that the charges are weak, and that there are ways in which Trump can beat the charges. Such notions died this week — or should have died — when both Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, both of them evil lawyers, pleaded guilty to the charges in Georgia. This shows that Powell and Chesebro understood that the evidence against them is damning and that they would be convicted if they went to trial. And, even worse for Trump, Powell and Chesebro will now have to testify against all the others who have been charged in Georgia, including Trump, meaning that an already airtight case will now include damning eye-witness testimony from Trump’s co-conspirators.

We hardly need to mention the federal indictments brought by Jack Smith. The federal case against Trump and his co-conspirators will be just as airtight and just as damning as the Georgia cases. The whole sorry lot of them are headed for prison, except for those who are clever enough to plead guilty while there is still time. And I haven’t even mentioned the civil case in New York that will expose Trump’s true net worth (which may well be negative if all the loans were called in) and ruin Trump financially.

The House of Representatives

The present chaos in the U.S. House of Representatives is extremely revealing. Some are calling it a Republican civil war. Maybe. But I think there is a good chance that, between now and, say, April, the Trumpists will capitulate, when they finally see that Trump is truly and completely doomed. If the Trumpists can find new leadership (Jim Jordan seems to be a favorite, though he is as dumb as a rock), then there may well be a Republican civil war in 2024 in which the MAGA forces of chaos and fascism struggle with the corporate wing of the Republican party, the wing of the party that provides most of the money and which has no interests other than still lower taxes on the rich, more deregulation, a government in the hands of hacks owned by the party, law enforcement used only against the poor, and right-wing courts that won’t stand in the way of money and corruption. We shall see. But one thing we can see clearly in the House is that many Republicans who are cowardly and silent in public are struggling behind the scenes to regain control of the Republican Party for the corporate wing. There is nothing good to be said about the Republicans who are resisting MAGA. They are still vile human beings and enemies of democrary, every last one of them.

What is conservatism?

For a long time, I’ve been making a claim here that I don’t have the credentials to make. Nevertheless, it’s a claim that I believe to be true, and a claim for which much evidence and strong arguments exist (including the evidence right before our eyes at present in the Republican Party, MAGA world, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the white churches, particularly the execrable Southern Baptist Convention). The evidence is equally visible in history, if we bother to look for it. That claim is that all conservatives — and certainly all authoritarians — are cognitively and morally defective.

I recently came across an excellent paper written in 2004 by Philip E. Agre, a humanities professor and AI researcher who then was on the faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles. The article is “What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?“. Agre gets straight to the point in the opening lines:

Q: What is conservatism?

A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.

Q: What is wrong with conservatism?

A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.

And:

Conservatism in every place and time is founded on deception. The deceptions of conservatism today are especially sophisticated, simply because culture today is sufficiently democratic that the myths of earlier times will no longer suffice.

My moral case against conservatives can be stated very simply: If a person wishes to use deception, inequality, and injustice as a tool for dominating others, depriving others of human goods that they claim for themselves, then that person is morally defective — not just morally wrong, but morally defective.

What might we say about aristocratic societies that actually were stable, for example, 19th Century Britain? Agre would say that the aristocracy was stable (at least, more stable than in France) because the lower classes in Britain had internalized their inferiority and their subordination. That is, they actually believed that the aristocracy were somehow superior and were thus entitled to rule. Agre again:

This is a central conservative argument: freedom is impossible unless the common people internalize aristocratic domination. Indeed, many conservative theorists to the present day have argued that freedom is not possible at all. Without the internalized domination of conservatism, it is argued, social order would require the external domination of state terror. In a sense this argument is correct: historically conservatives have routinely resorted to terror when internalized domination has not worked. What is unthinkable by design here is the possibility that people might organize their lives in a democratic fashion.

This is why MAGA types collect armaments and long for civil war — domination by terror, because some people refuse to internalize their inferiority and must be taught their place. Trump encourages this, formerly in dog whistles, but eventually in plain language. (See, in the New Yorker, “A President Asking for Civil War,” July 12, 2022.)

Neoliberalism as conservative derp

The theme of the Fall 2023 issue of Dissent Magazine asks the question, “Is neoliberalism dead?” (I certainly hope the answer is yes.) There is an excellent interview with Brad DeLong, an economics professor at UC-Berkeley who saw neoliberalism up close in the Clinton administration. DeLong describes the American form of neoliberalism, as it arose during the Reagan era, thus:

It was the belief that social democracy had greatly overreached and had created a society in 1979 that was too bureaucratic, too rigid, and also too equal: the rich needed to be richer so they would be incentivized to create jobs, and the poor needed to be poorer so they would be incentivized to work.

In other words, aristocracy. This begs a question: What do Republican deplorables in red states who don’t have a pot to piss in get out of aristocracy? I think the answer to that is clear. They get domination over all the people they don’t like, and, as lackeys, they get more of the crumbs that fall from the aristocratic table.

Incremental progress?

Could the U.S. yet fall backward into neofascism, in spite of Trump’s ruin and the disgusting but welcome spectacle of the Republican circus-train train wreck? On that I make no predictions, because we are still in a state of chaos and all sorts of things could go wrong. But I do think that a strong possibility for the future is some real progress, probably modest and incremental, but progress. I was wrong about Biden. In 2020, I thought that a Biden administration would be like a third term of the Obama administration — timid, staffed by neoliberals, eager for bad bargains with Republicans, and rudely dismissive of progressives like me. But Biden gets it. Dissent Magazine again:

After the Biden inauguration, many on the left settled down to await a familiar sequence of post-election equivocation and retreat. But a number of observers with no special affection for Biden have concluded that 2021 ended up marking some kind of a departure — if not quite the end of neoliberalism, at least the end of the bipartisan austerity consensus that has stifled American politics since the last days of disco. Corey Robin wrote that “No president since Ronald Reagan has achieved a more ambitious domestic legislative agenda in his first year than Joe Biden.” Cédric Durand, writing for the New Left Review, detected “a structural break in the regulation of capitalism.”

I’m not making any predications about progress, I’m only expressing hope. But one thing is clear. That’s that almost all of those who tried to pull off the Trump coup are headed for prison. Republicans have no leadership, no team of evil people capable of planning anything like Trump’s capture of the White House and his attempt to stay there after losing an election. Even the propagandists who provided weaker minds with ideas have been weakened and almost neutralized — Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson. Fox News can still wind people up, but with no one but feckless idiots such as Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, and Marjorie Taylor Greene to do the wet work, and with contributions to Republicans running way behind Democrats, how can the Republican Party, in the next year, build another machine capable of winning (or even stealing) a national election?

For now, though, let’s just enjoy the circus. They are terrible people, and they deserve everything they get, and worse.

Guilty

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Yuck.

The whole world is laughing at David Brooks, the conservative columnist for the New York Times who sees himself as a great moral oracle and moral leader. Brooks posted a picture on X (formerly known as Twitter) of the hamburger he had bought at the Newark Airport. His tweet said: “This meal just cost me $78 at Newark Airport. This is why Americans think the economy is terrible.”

He was instantly busted by people on Twitter, who pointed out that the hamburger and fries had cost $18, and that the remaining $55 was the bar tab — whisky, apparently.

Brooks, like his conservative colleague Ross Douthat, also a conservative columnist at the New York Times, is actually pretty lucid and reasonable much of the time. But it’s important to keep in mind that the New York Times has some very hard-ass copy editors, and Brooks’ and Douthat’s columns have to get through those copy editors before they get into print.

Maybe it’s a cheap shot on my part, but I’m going to take this opportunity to interpret the hamburger tweet as evidence for my argument that all conservative discourse is derp, because there’s always something not quite right, both morally and cognitively, inside a conservative mind. I’ve written on that subject here, here, and here.

Had Brooks had too many glasses of Scotch? Maybe. But that’s no excuse. A normal mind, even on the fourth whisky, would look at the $78 tab and think, “Dang. I just spent $17.78 on a hamburger and $55 on Scotch.” But not Brooks. He’s a great moral oracle and moral leader, after all, so he moralizes, spins, and lies, without any real reflection, all in one short tweet. He trusts his conservative gut. It’s a given to him that non-conservatives are always the ones who are mistaken. He can’t even be fair and rational about evaluating what is literally right under his nose. He baits us — trolls us, even — with the deception.

Show me a conservative, any conservative, and I’ll show you someone with some wires crossed inside their head.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

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A malignant narcissist’s last resort: If you won’t adore me, at least be afraid of me.

Politically, they are doomed. The very devil would have to intervene with some sort of devil-miracle to prevent a wipeout of Republicans in the 2024 elections. Not only are Trump and his operatives politically doomed, their lives are over. Some of them are old enough to die in prison.

These criminals actually occupied the White House. That’s how close we came to fascism. They were off to a good start, but four years was not enough for them to turn us into Russia. That, of course, was their intention. Elections would no longer matter. With a bit more work, the lower courts wouldn’t be able to touch them. The Supreme Court would protect them. Then they’d divvy up the economy, and it would be full steam ahead in the process of looting America, the same way Putin and his friends looted Russia. They’d all fly around in private jets (including Supreme Court justices). They’d all buy fancy properties (as the Russians have done, and including Supreme Court justices) in all the places where the global oligarchy go to live it up on the loot they’ve extracted by turning their home countries into corrupt shit-hole countries.

The leaders of this conspiracy to turn the United States into Russia are finished. But the big problem now is that we are left with the fools who not only supported them but who continue to support them. That’s no more than 30 percent of the voting population. At the national level, there are not enough of them to be dangerous — at least, not unless one of the many wannabes succeeds in becoming the new Trump and some stupid “independents” fall for it, as they did for Trump. Right-wing Republicans can continue to do damage only in the red states where they are in power. It’s going to take years, unfortunately, for them to die off. Most young people detest them, which is a major driver of right-wing panic and their attempts to lock themselves into power, legally if possible and illegally if they think they can get away with it. They are terrified of the future, because there is no place for them there.

What amazes me is that the hometown deplorables thought they had something to gain from the corruption and criminalization of the American government. The deplorables seem to actually believe that criminals like the people in these mug shots somehow care about them. Or maybe it’s that the deplorables are so motivated by such pure spite that they’d be OK with even greater marginalization, and ever-smaller pieces of the pie, as long as the people they’ve been taught to hate are kicked around even worse than they are themselves.

Though the fascist dream of a fascist America has been crushed for now, their propagandists are still active. The dreams of the propagandists seem to have been reduced to violence. With elections now beyond them, violence is their only hope. Sarah Palin said yesterday that a civil war is going to happen if the prosecution of Trump continues. Dream on, Sarah Palin. Tucker Carlson wanted to ask Trump about civil war. That’s a pretty dream if you’re a fascist, but the truth is that the troops are no longer available for the civil war they dream of. I’m reminded of the Vietnam era, when the peaceniks often said, “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” Today it’s, “What if the fascists gave a civil war and nobody came?” The cream of the fascist crop went to the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and they got neutralized by justice. The deplorables now know that they’ve lost, though they’re still in the rage and denial stage.

The courts are dealing with the criminals. But it’s up to us to deal with the hordes of hometown deplorables and their rage. They’re all around us. But there’s nothing they can do now with their rage, other than go after school boards and harass their scapegoats. Some true believers with lots of guns will, as usual, go on shooting expeditions that they won’t survive.

As recently as August 2, David Brooks wrote a piece in the New York Times with the headline “What if we’re the bad guys here?” He’s reviving yet again the terrible idea that it’s Democrats and other decent human beings who are somehow responsible for Trumpism, rather than the deplorables. Even if life for the deplorables isn’t fair (it isn’t), that’s no excuse for fascism. The deplorables might benefit from studying the history of African-Americans (rather than erasing them from the history taught in schools), whose lot was — and is — far worse than the deplorables, but who chose good leaders and a rational path to progress. I just saw a new and very true meme on Facebook — that those who deny history fully intend to repeat it.

I very much believe that there is something cognitively and morally broken — deranged — in those who still see Trump as a hero. They are just not decent human beings, and they are not fit for decent human company. Yet there they are, and we have to deal with them. That’s why civility is more important than ever. We’re surrounded by them. If they’re civil to us, then we can be civil to them. (Start preparing yourself now for the next Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings.) Most of them will never change, and it’s going to take years for them to die off. Economic justice — better lives for working people rather than more billionaires, the very thing that Republicans most oppose — is a major part of the longterm solution. Educating their children is one of the biggest challenges, because the deplorables (and their leaders and propagandists) don’t want children educated. They want children to be deplorable.

We’ve avoided disaster. Now we just need more time for the arc of the moral universe to continue its course toward justice — until, someday, as their numbers dwindle, as their children catch on, and as their churches serve the devil and go bankrupt, we leave these ugly souls behind forever.

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Update:

It’s not just me. Anyone with a moral IQ above 98.6 can see it.

“Trump has ‘moral compass of an ax murderer,’ says Georgia Republican.

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