Category: Political issues

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Source: Wikimedia Commons

A couple of friends have told me recently that they wish they had my optimism about which way this election is going. I make no predictions. But I see many reasons for optimism.

Ever since Kamala Harris became the nominee, it is hard to imagine things going better for the Democratic Party. Harris hit the ground running, reversed the sense of doom that we all felt after President Biden’s debate performance, and inspired a huge wave of enthusiasm and political momentum. The polls started moving our way.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has been doing pretty much everything wrong. It has been one stupid move after another. For whatever reason, Trump has chosen to throw out red meat to inflame the people who are going to vote for him anyway, instead of reaching out for votes that he might otherwise not have gotten. He keeps infuriating women voters, and in two days’ work he probably has permanently reversed the defection of Latinos from the Democratic to the Republican party. Best of all, the once-forbidden word “fascist” has been rehabilitated and forcefully injected into the national conversation. Even the New York Times was forced to run pieces (quoting experts, of course) acknowledging that, yes, Trump is a fascist. (That the New York times was the last, rather than the first, to tell us that Trump is a fascist says a lot about how completely useless our political media have become.)

I don’t pay much attention to the polls this close to the election. Again this year, as they did in 2022, Republicans have cranked out a bunch of trash polls to convince MAGA voters that Trump is sure to win, even if he loses, and that therefore that the election was stolen.

A few days ago, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Kamala Harris’ campaign chair, put out a YouTube video about the numbers (see below). Yes, of course, someone in her position has to express optimism at this point and stress the importance of voting. But O’Malley also refers to some numbers from the campaign’s internal polling. You can be sure that the campaign’s internal polling is laser-focused and of higher quality that the public polls. The internal polls are essential to campaign decisions about where to concentrate their efforts. If you’ve been stressing out about the election, then maybe you’ll feel better after watching the video.

But I’ve also been thinking some about the worst-case scenario. It’s an ugly scenario, but in the end we win.

If the American people really are so stupid as to vote for a fascist who intends to destroy the American democracy, turn us into Russia (see Fiona Hill in Politico, October 28), make elections obsolete, loot the country, and put billionaires and whack-jobs in charge of everything (thinking that this will save America!) then obviously the American people are going to have to learn things the hard way. If Trump and company get back into power, then no election will ever get them out. He even told people at his rallies that they won’t have to vote anymore, because he’ll “fix” things.

I told a friend at lunch yesterday that, if Trump gets back into power, that I think it would take Americans four to eight years to get our democracy back. After four years of Trump and a non-election in 2028, it should be clear even to MAGA cultists that they’ve been conned, that the economy has been trashed, and that the rights of everyone except for billionaires have been suspended. Non-MAGA Americans, upon seeing that elections no longer work, would clearly see what must be done. The only recourse would be a revolt, with general strikes and millions of people in the streets.

The history of how tyrants are deposed has been well studied. Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Erica Frantz have written in How Autocracies Fall that autocrats have become increasingly vulnerable to mass revolts. When Putin and his oligarchs took over Russia, the job was made much easier by the fact that the Russian people have no history of democracy. A tyrant in the Kremlin was just the same-old same-old for Russians. But that is not true of Americans. Democracy is in our bones (most of us, anyway). Anybody who takes democracy from us would have hell to pay. Nor would we Americans be in it alone. We have Canada to the north, and we have our NATO allies, who hate Trump just as much as we do. If the MAGA people ever got the civil war that they seem to want, they would lose. And maybe they’d learn a lesson that they’d remember up to a hundred years or so.

So that’s why I’m not panicking. Even if we wake up to a nightmare on November 6 (or however long it takes to count the votes), we’ll get our democracy back, whatever it takes. For decades, farsighted people have warned us about what fascism would look like if it came to America. And now we can see the whites of fascist eyes. Maybe it’s just denial, but I still find it almost impossible to believe that Americans actually would choose such a thing, especially now that we can call it what it is.

Yes, they have a plan for stealing the election. They will try, through legal maneuvers, to get it before the fascist-majority Supreme Court. Or, through dirty tricks in the states, they will try to throw the election to the House of Representatives. We do need to brace ourselves for that. Unless the election is a landslide for Harris, an attempt to steal the election is inevitable. Trump was even foolish enough to refer to a “secret plan” with the Republican speaker of the House. If they lose the election but succeed with a steal, the revolt will start on Day 1.

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North Carolina, where I live, is normally a backwater. But two things have put North Carolina in the news recently. The first is the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene in the North Carolina mountains near Asheville. The second is the possibility that Kamala Harris will win in North Carolina on November 5. Trump won North Carolina in 2016 and 2020.

It seems that everyone including the media expected the worst damage from Hurricane Helene to be in Florida and areas farther south. But the storm dumped more than 20 inches of rain in some areas of western North Carolina. In those mountains, the streams and rivers often run through narrow valleys, and that’s where the flooding occurred. I live about a hundred miles east of the heavy rain, and it wasn’t very bad here. But a neighbor, who also is the chief of the local volunteer fire department, is among the crews who were sent into western North Carolina to help with rescue and cleanup. He is spending that time helping to recover the bodies of people who drowned, and he says that the final toll will be much higher than what is being reported at present. The state has told people to consider all roads in western North Carolina closed. Even Interstate 40 was partially washed out. The video of the flooding is horrifying, with such things as an entire hospital partially submerged and people standing on the roof.

Trump, and all the Republicans on the North Carolina ballot, are going to be dragged down by the Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina, Mark Robinson. Robinson is such an idiot and such a psychopath that even some Republicans can see what he is in spite of the usual Republican adoration of idiots and psychopaths. Some polls have Robinson running 14 points behind the Democratic candidate for governor, Mark Stein.

Voters in North Carolina sometimes split on statewide races. For example, though Trump carried North Carolina in 2020, North Carolina elected a Democratic governor in the same election, Roy Cooper. Republicans were so terrified of Robinson dragging down the Republican ticket that they tried to get him to withdraw before they decided to double down and back him. North Carolina’s 16 electoral votes are likely to be critical in the 2024 election for president, maybe even decisive.

My unscientific and unquantifiable reading is that North Carolina is very likely to go for Harris. I think there is more Trump fatigue and more Trump remorse than the polls can capture. Republicans who are tired of Trump, or even sick of Trump, have to keep quiet about it or they will catch MAGA hell. I suspect that quite a few women will lie to their menfolk about how they vote. The right-wing North Carolina legislature usually cooks up some sort of bonkers culture war issue to inflame Republicans during election years, such as the “bathroom bill” of 2016. This year there is nothing like that. This year Republicans, poor things, are not quite sure what they’re supposed to be raging about.

As in 2020, this year I’ll be a poll observer for the North Carolina Democratic Party. Early voting in North Carolina starts October 17. In those states where Republicans are motivated to steal elections, lots of lawyers from out of state come in to help keep an eye on things and to stand in the way of Republican attempts to mess with the election. The state party operates a “boiler room” of lawyers in Raleigh who monitor the voting in each county through a system of volunteers. Online training for the volunteers is required. There’s a hotline, and an app, that the volunteers use for reporting to Raleigh. North Carolina statutes allow for poll observers who are permitted inside the voting area. They can listen to (though not interfere with) the interactions between poll workers and voters. They can watch the machines that tabulate the ballots and take photos of the tabulator screens before the polls open and after the polls close so that the number of ballots cast can be monitored. If poll workers turn a voter away, poll observers can follow the voter out of the voting area and inquire about what happened. If a poll observer thinks that poll workers are not following the law, they can politely intercede with the poll’s chief judge — and call the boiler room. I’ll also be attending the meetings of the county board of elections during the canvassing of the vote required by North Carolina law.

In my county, which Trump won by 78 percent in 2020 and 77 percent in 2016, Republicans have very little motive to try anything sneaky. But all of North Carolina’s 100 counties will be monitored by Democratic volunteers and the boiler room in Raleigh. If the vote is close, there is no limit to the dirty tricks that Republicans will use to try to steal the election. Democrats, at both the state and national levels, are very aware this year that Democrats need to win by such large margins that Republicans would be unable to steal the election, even with help from the Supreme Court, which will be slobbering to step in and hand it to Trump if Republicans can find a reason.

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Source: Wikimedia Commons

Some of the most smug and la-la-foolish people doing great harm in the world these days are the so-called centrists. They think that they are ever so superior to and smarter than the lowly “partisans” to their left and right. But once the right has descended into fascism, depravity, and false reality, a defensible center can no longer exist.

And yet that is where the mainstream media are today. Particularly guilty are the New York Times and the Washington Post, because, as the only newspapers of record left standing, they have a particular responsibility to the truth. The New York Times, having led the crusade to get President Biden to end his campaign for a second term, is now flagrantly applying its double standard to its coverage of Donald Trump. The Washington Post has shown some signs of rethinking its double standard, but the New York Times has not. The Times continues to translate Trump’s babblings into English, covering up what is increasingly obvious — that Trump’s mind is not all there.

Responsible people on the left are now calling out the centrist media for this, for what good it will do. The centrist media haughtily ignore criticism from the left, even as they are terrified by criticism from the right. Heather Cox Richardson directly quotes Trump’s incomprehensible ramblings about child care, as does Sara Libby in the San Francisco Chronicle and Rebecca Solnit in the Guardian.

There is something sentimental about the New York Times’ delusions. It is as though the Times has convinced itself that America today is still a place like Walter Cronkite’s America, a place where a single trusted voice could reach pretty much the entire country. Cronkite was host of the CBS Evening news for 19 years, from 1962 to 1981. He was often called the most trusted man in America. The New York Times craves that kind of trust but supposes that lying to cover for a depraved right is the way to get it.

I have only one comforting thought about this. It’s that historians understand quite well what is happening in the United States today. History will get it right. The malignant failings of the media will be a part of that history.

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Here, verbatim, are Trump’s babblings about child care:

“Well I would do that. And we’re sitting down. You know I was somebody. We had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that because—look, child care is child care. It’s—couldn’t, you know, it’s something you have to have it—in this country you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to—but they’ll get used to it very quickly—and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care. We’re going to have—I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with child care. I want to stay with child care, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just told you about. We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people, but we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about Make America Great Again, we have to do it because right now we’re a failing nation, so we’ll take care of it.”

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All the memes in this post came from Facebook.

No matter where a propagandist is on the conservative spectrum, from merely conservative to full-on fascist, it is always necessary to lie. One of the wonderful things about being a liberal is that you don’t have to lie about your values and intentions. To argue for fairness, caring, and equality is easy and can be honest. But arguments for dominance, hierarchy, systemic unfairness, exploitation, and, yes, even cruelty, have to be disguised.

Right-wing propagandists also have to lie about the natures and intentions of the people who oppose them. That’s a part of the right-wing need for scapegoats and demonization.

Here is what J.D. Vance said. He was speaking to Tucker Carlson in 2021:

“We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too. And it’s just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”

Can you count the lies? What is Vance even trying to say, in between the lies? I’d put it like this: To be liberal is to be miserable. Liberals are so perverse and fascist in their misery that they align with corporations (!) to make everyone else miserable. The liberal agenda = misery for all. Liberals are illegitimate as citizens. They don’t have a stake in the country and thus should be marginalized. Only authoritarians can be trusted with power, because in a democracy the inferior people that right-wingers demonize can’t be kept down.

Vance singles out Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez not because they are miserable (obviously they’re not) but because they are the kind of people who are scapegoated and demonized in right-wing propaganda.

Only someone without the slightest talent for politics would allow himself to be caught on video saying something like “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives.” Half a second’s reflection would see what kind of hilarious and effective blowback it would cause outside the right-wing propaganda network.

I have been greatly entertained by the tsunami of cat memes. Cat memes were already a top genre of memes. Vance provided a way for the cat meme genre to be turned against MAGA Republicans. My guess is that these cat memes will even change more than a few votes. Consider the messages behind the cat memes. None of them lie, because they don’t have to. They don’t have to be mean. Instead they convey a much-deserved ridicule in a funny and even heartwarming way. Such a thing would be impossible in right-wing propaganda.

⬇︎ For comparison, consider this right-wing meme that I found this morning in a Republican Facebook group. It tries to be funny but isn’t. The lie is rather obvious — that real men vote for fascists. It demonizes liberals as infantile and feminized. It tries to stoke and draw power from the gender wars. It unintentionally — and embarrassingly, though it goes over their heads — reveals the insecure masculinity of rural, working-class males and offers no remedy for that insecurity other than meanness and fascism.

⬆︎ A Republican meme from Facebook.

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Update:

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Source: Wikimedia Commons

Well then, here we are. The politics of the American election changed completely in one afternoon. There are two things on my agenda for the day after Biden’s announcement. The first is to heap scorn on the political media for its savage treatment of Biden while merrily changing Trump’s diapers. And the second is to laugh my ankles off at Republican rage over suddenly finding themselves in a Boeing 737 Max over Новосибирск with both engines on fire.

As usual, a historian, not the media, gives the best account. As Heather Cox Richardson wrote this morning:

“In a time of dictators, Trump tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election and install himself in power against the wishes of the people. President Joe Biden voluntarily turned away from reelection in order to give the people a better shot at preserving our democracy. He demonstrated what it means to put the country first.”

I did not watch the Biden-Trump debate. Biden had done just fine at the State of the Union address on March 7. The uproar in the next day’s papers took me by surprise. In the coming days, though, it was clear that Biden was in fact fading pretty fast. It was possible that the White House had been covering up for him. It inevitably took some time for Democrats in Washington to work out a plan, but the timing was good, with Biden’s withdrawal coming a few days after Republicans had finished making fools of themselves in Milwaukee and right in the middle of their vulgar con-man-plus-hillbilly triumphalism.

Even with a propaganda network that would have made Goebbels proud, it takes time for Republicans to demonize the opposition. They spent years demonizing the Clintons, so effectively that even some Democrats fell for it. Republicans didn’t have much on Biden other than his age, so they went after his son. Then in one afternoon, Republicans’ entire investment in demonization became worthless. No wonder Stephen Miller had a screaming fit on Fox News and Trump complained that now they have to start over.

All of a sudden, after making Biden’s age (81) their biggest issue, Republicans are left with a 78-year-old who falls asleep in front of cameras.

Heather Cox Richardson again:

“The Republicans’ anger reflects that fact that if Biden is off the ticket, they are in yet another pickle. Just last week, the Republicans nominated Donald Trump, who is 78, for president. Having made age their central complaint about Biden, they are now faced with having nominated the oldest candidate in U.S. history, who repeatedly fell asleep at his own nominating convention as well as his criminal trial, who often fumbles words, and who cannot seem to keep a coherent train of thought. Democrats immediately pounced on Trump with all the comments Republicans had been making about Biden. Republicans have already suggested that Trump will not debate Harris, a former prosecutor. ”

As for the media, they were right about Biden. But that doesn’t get them off the hook if they keep normalizing the fascism of Donald Trump. Is the New York Times capable of a little shame in the form of straightforward truthtelling about Trump? We’ll soon find out.

As for Kamala Harris, I think we should wait and see what happens between now and the Democratic convention, which starts August 19. It’s not over until the convention makes the nomination official. It seems that some of the Democrats whose position matters most want to hold off on endorsing anyone and waiting for the convention — Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffreis, and Barack Obama. That seems wise.

The media, always eager to attack Democrats, will now go on and on about “disarray” and “chaos.” That’s nonsense. The party process is working exactly as it should. In fact it’s working better than it was before, because the Biden campaign and the DNC never really allowed any other options during primary season.

It’s Nancy Pelosi whom I will be watching most closely. She knows every congressional district in the country. She has her own polling information and respects the media about as much as I do. She has no agenda other than winning. If Democrats can win both the House and Senate in November, it’s a sure bet that they’ll win the White House as well.

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Update: Jonathan Rauch, in the Atlantic, reminds us that one of the responsibilities of political parties is to select strong, qualified candidates and to stand in the way of weak, corrupt ones. The Democratic Party did this, whereas the Republican Party has been hijacked by Trump. Just think: When Trump is gone, what will the Republican Party have left? Pretty much nothing but shame, irrelevance, and a rage that will accomplish nothing. The Atlantic piece is “The Party Is Not Over: Nominations belong to parties, not to candidates.”

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Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Guardian reports today that Fiona Hill is returning to the U.K. to work for the new Labour government. She will be one of three advisers who will oversee a strategic defense review. In the U.S., Hill first came to our attention when she testified during Trump’s impeachment trial, having worked in the Trump White House, where she was called “the Russia bitch.”

The Guardian writes:

“Notably Hill and the other members of the review team will report not just to John Healey, the defence secretary, but also to the prime minister, Keir Starmer, and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves.”

A few years ago, I reviewed Hill’s book, There Is Nothing for You Here.

Oh, how I envy the U.K. right now. Not only is their election now behind them, they have a Labour government after fourteen years of Tory abuse. And they have Fiona Hill to help figure out how to deal with the Russians.

I have a particular respect for Fiona Hill partly because we have a mutual friend at the Brookings Institution, where Hill worked after the Trump White House. My friend sent her a link to my review of her book, which she read. She sent a reply to my friend: “This is wonderful. Please thank him. I am so glad that the book resonated this way with him. I was unaware of the Paul Krugman quote, but I guess it makes sense. My Dad and his friends would sit around on weekends talking for hours about practical things like this as I listened in as a kid. At the end of every discussion someone would say—well that’s everything settled then, we just need a bit of progress ….”

The Paul Krugman quote that she is referring to is Krugman’s frequent statement that reality has a distinctly liberal bias.

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Need some cinematic therapy? This film should do it for you. A fascist president refuses to leave the White House and claims a third term. You already know the story, but to improve your mental health you need to see the ending. The last fifteen minutes of this film are priceless. The problem is that, as the credits start to roll, you realize that in the real world it’s not over.

This film was released in April and had been streaming for several weeks at a cost of $20 to $30. When the rental price came down to $5.99 from Apple, I finally watched it. There may be other streaming sources as well.

Some reviewers accused this film of holding back on the politics. I don’t think that’s the case at all. It’s clear enough who’s who. The rating on Rotten Tomatoes is 81/70, which no doubt means that right-wingers took offense and voted down the audience rating.

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John F. Kennedy’s funeral, November 24, 1963. Less than five years later, Kennedy’s brother also will be dead. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

It’s all so predictable. As Democrats, liberals, and all responsible people hasten to condemn political violence, the worst type of Republicans rush in with yet more violent rhetoric to blame Democrats and liberals and thereby — knowingly and intentionally — to encourage more political violence, as they have been doing for years, because they understand very well who it is who benefits from chaos.

Though some Republicans did respond with the usual “thoughts and prayers” after gun violence, from others it was hell fire and damnation.

“Biden sent the orders,” said a Republican member of the U.S. House from Georgia. I cringe to imagine what other conspiracy theories are flooding right-wing social media right now.

J.D. Vance, who hopes to be Trump’s candidate for vice president and who obviously hopes to profit from what happened, said, “Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Frank Pavone, a right-wing activist and former Catholic priest, said, “We recall the words that President Trump always says to us: It’s not that they are coming after him,” Pavone said. “They are coming after us — all of us — he’s just standing in the way.”

We already were in a state of chaos because of the media’s feeding frenzy over Biden’s age and mental state. The powerful images from the Trump rally in Pennsylvania will amplify the MAGA lust for scapegoats and for retribution for their loss in 2020.

I have no idea where things stand now. In such a state of chaos, few things are predictable other than the likelihood that nothing good will come of it.