Election 2024

In my 50-plus years of political observation, I've had many opportunities to think that our government was not doing a good job. I have at various times been very critical of and/or opposed to our economic policy, foreign policy, regulatory issues and pretty much every other aspect of our government's operation. Plus, of course, there have been a lot of destructive and counter-productive individuals in government. It seems like we get a lot wrong to go along with the good things.

But never have I thought that the 248-year evolving process of American constitutional government should be discarded and replaced with authoritarian, strong-man rule...

... as a majority of American voters have just declared.

The only explanation I can find for the recent presidential vote is that voters in the majority:

a.  do in fact want to replace our constitutional democracy with strong-man rule

 

or

b.  are too f'ing stupid/naive/ill-informed/ignorant to realize what they were voting for

The consensus of the people who have replied to this posting is that (b) is definitely the case. 

Good Headline

I haven't written the article and probably won't, but I'm happy with the headline:

Ignorance, Fear, Hatred and Religion: The Republican Game Plan for a USA of White Christian Nationalism and Tax Cuts for the Rich

Oblivious

As human-caused climate change continues unabated, and climate-related disasters of all sorts loom on the not-very-distant horizon, this December 2022 Gallup poll shows the things that Americans are most worried about.

8 November 2022

It may be one of the most significant days in American history.

I feel like the resident of a planet, let's just say Earth for example, who has been worrying every day about a life-destroying asteroid that astronomers discovered a year ago. The threat is far out in space and its trajectory couldn't be determined until it got closer. The astronomers said, "November 8, that's the day. It will be close enough to finally make an absolute determination whether Earth will be destroyed or the asteroid will pass us by."

That's today, folks, and the Earth I'm talking about is the country of the United States. If the Republicans take control of Congress with wins in both House and Senate, it will likely mark the end of the USA as we have known it for the past 233 years. 

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist wrote yesterday:

If you aren’t feeling a sense of dread on the eve of the midterm elections, you haven’t been paying attention.

...

Ten or 20 years ago, those of us who warned that the Republican Party was becoming increasingly extremist and anti-democracy were often dismissed as alarmists. But the alarmists have been vindicated every step of the way, from the selling of the Iraq war on false pretenses to the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Indeed, these days it’s almost conventional wisdom that the G.O.P. will, if it can, turn America into something like Viktor Orban’s Hungary: a democracy on paper, but an ethnonationalist, authoritarian one-party state in practice. 

....

America as we know it is not yet lost, but it’s on the edge.

I have been paying attention, and I do feel a huge sense of dread, as I have for many years. 

The Quest

Written in email to a friend July 2022, posted here October 2022.

I'm still on my quest to discover what it is that is at the root of this world-wide trend towards authoritarianism. The failed nation of the USA may be leading the way in some regards, but not in all—Turkey, Hungary and Brazil, for example, seem to be out in front of even us, and Modi's India is keeping up. 

What I'm looking for is a simple, layman's explanation of the psychological force or condition that is/are driving this insanity. My best theory so far, though it's incomplete, is that it is the combination of great fear and uncertainty about the future combined with great insecurity by majority-class men. Republican (or whatever) power is in the hands of insecure, frightened little boys who want Daddy to come and save them, to tell them what to do, to vanquish the enemies they imagine all around them.

 

Women to the Rescue

How great it would be if America were saved (i.e., its rapid descent into Republican-orchestrated fascism and the end of democracy were somehow arrested) by, of all people, the women of America. You go, girls!

New York Times guest editorial

Culture Wars

(I've known this for a long time, but for some reason have never had it coalesce into a nice coherent form or written it down.)

Have you noticed (of course you have) how the Republicans are promoting, fighting, and in many cases winning the "culture wars?"

And do you know why that is?

It's because the Republicans have no platform, no programs, no social/economic/political plans or ideas for good governing. Since they have nothing to offer the American people and can't gain power because of programs or ideas, inflaming hatred/fear/anger and fighting the culture wars is their only hope of winning the political power they need to enact tax cuts for the rich, which is their only objective.

Winning

Republicans are being very effective in amassing power and getting elected because they understand and ruthlessly implement the three primary rules of power politics.

1. Winning is everything, and how you win doesn't matter. Lie, cheat, steal, smear your opponent(s)—everything is okay in the service of winning.

2. A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

3. The most powerful political weapons are not programs or principles or social/economic/political objectives, but rather anger, fear and hatred. Organize your candidacy to exploit people's darkest emotions and worst tendencies, and your chances for winning are great.

Another Republican Win

1:30 p.m. Pacific Time, January 6, 2021

It's a glorious day for Republicans throughout the country, as forty years of Republican efforts and policies finally come together in one afternoon. Patriotic Republicans waving American flags, many undoubtedly carrying concealed (or not concealed) weapons, have stormed the central buildings of the American government for the purpose of destroying American democracy.  The great heroes of the American right, from Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms to Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, have unerringly and unswervingly led their party to this great and extremely predictable day.

Republican Campaigning

News from the just-concluded Georgia senate races, pitting Republicans Loeffler and Perdue against Democrats Warnock (a black man) and Ossoff (a Jew):

Loeffler ran ads darkening Warnock’s skin and Perdue ran ads enlarging Ossoff’s nose.

These stories were posted by reputable news organizations.

Republicans Win

For the past decade or so, I've been formulating, and trying to put into coherent form, a theory/explanation for how the rise of <I don't know what to call it> was (a) adopted by the Republican Party, and (b) has resulted in the decline of America as a country in pretty much every way you can measure—except of course the important metric of how good life is for rich people. That's the one thing, and I would argue the only thing, in which America leads the world.

In a series of tweets on 11 December 2020, Paul Krugman made the following comments which touch on various of the points my "uber theory" includes. I repeat it here verbatim.

——————————

The GOP spent most of 2020 rejecting science in the face of a deadly pandemic; now it's rejecting democracy in the face of a clear election loss. How did we get to this point? One step at a time, of course. But I'd argue that the wrong turn began under Reagan. 1/

Republicans have, of course, done their best to beatify Reagan — mainly on the basis of an economic recovery that he didn't cause and the collapse of Communism, which he also didn't cause. What actually happened on his watch? 2/

Well, for one thing it was the beginning of the great mortality divergence. America used to have about the same life expectancy as other rich countries; since 1980, however, we've fallen far behind. 3/

One contributing factor was a huge rise in income inequality, partly attributable to Reagan's policies, including union-bashing.  4/

Poverty, properly measured, was higher in 1989 than a decade earlier, especially for children and working-age adults 5/

People also forget how anti-science Reagan was; he denounced evolution as "just a theory" and wanted creationism taught in schools 6/

And while the practice of equating patriotism with political support for the current president (as long as he's a Republican) didn't start with Reagan — Nixon did it too — it got much more intense, paving the way for the Trump cult of personality 7/

As Adam Smith said, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation. America had and still has many strengths as a society. But given time and persistence, a malign political movement can undo those strengths. I'm very frightened about the future 8/

Dr. Biden

I see that it didn't take long for the scummy dregs of the Republican Party—and they do give a bad reputation to that other five percent—to start attacking Jill Biden. Some Republican stooge lowlife named Joseph Epstein proclaimed that Dr. Biden should drop the "doctor" because she only had a PhD and wasn't a medical doctor. 

(  Like all PhDs everywhere, "Dr" is a proper honorific for Ms. Biden.

And of course the article was published in a Rupert Murdoch publication, in this case the Wall Street Journal.  )

But in her case it is presumptuous and inappropriate—because, you know, she's a woman and a Democrat and a national figure and therefore a target for the terrified little men who constitute the base of the Republican Party.

 

Euphemisms

On the subject of euphemisms, I thought I would clarify something. 

When you hear a Republican say, "I think we need to be concerned about the federal deficit before spending all this money," 

what they really mean is 

"I'm a lying scumbag hypocrite who trots out the tired old deficit argument whenever we talk about spending money on social issues and low-income Americans. I don't actually give a shit about deficits, as you can easily observe if you listen to my positions on tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, or military spending, or any budgetary issue that benefits the causes that I support. The deficit only matters when it's Democrats spending money."

America is Okay?

You think America is okay, that American values prevailed in the recent election? Please stop kidding yourself. America is not okay. The total combined margin of Biden's victory in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona, the states that tipped the election, was 104,787 votes—out of 154,120,502 cast. That is seven hundredths of one percent of the votes cast.

That's like a major-league pitcher throwing a baseball at you. It's traveling a hundred miles an hour and misses your ear by a quarter of an inch. You would not likely be thinking about how well your plan, your system, your assumptions, your defense, all held up. You would, if you had any sense, instead realize that you came within a hair's breadth of a life-changing concussion—and the only reason you're not now a paraplegic vegetable or rotting corpse is good luck and a fortunate twist of fate.

Had Trump not been such a moron, a stooge, a bumbler, American democracy would have been over. It seems reasonable to assume that the next Republican candidate will have all of Trump's powers of persuasion, but will be competent and capable as well.

Krugman Again

More excellent commentary from New York Times opinion writer and economist Paul Krugman, writing in a newsletter:

(previous text talked about possibly anticipating America's financial crises)

...

What I didn’t see coming was the political side. It’s not just that America has been suffering from Third World-type economic crises. We’ve also been sliding into banana-republic politics, becoming the kind of country in which a president can refuse to acknowledge a clear election defeat — and be backed by most of his party.

The political scientist Brendan Nyhan likes to point to outrages against U.S. democracy and ask, “What would you say if you saw it in another country?” It’s a rhetorical question, of course: Our democracy is very close to failing.

There are three mistakes you shouldn’t make about what’s going on. First, don’t dismiss it because the antics of the Trump team — Four Seasons Total Landscaping, melting Rudy Giuliani — are so ridiculous. Authoritarian rulers are often ludicrous, because their hangers-on won’t tell them how silly they look. When the president of Turkmenistan erected a giant golden statue of himself on horseback, he didn’t become a national laughingstock — because nobody in his nation would have dared to laugh.

Second, don’t make the mistake of thinking that this happened all of a sudden. Republicans have been systematically undermining democracy for years through voter suppression, gerrymandering that gives them control of state legislatures even when they lose the popular vote by large margins, stripping power from governors who happen to be Democrats, and trying to bring criminal charges against their opponents.

Finally, don’t bothsides this. The decay of U.S. democracy isn’t about “politics”; it’s about one party’s turn away from democracy. Today’s G.O.P. is nothing like center-right parties in other advanced nations; it’s more like Fidesz, which has turned Hungary into a one-party state, than it is like, say, Britain’s Tories.

Why is all this happening? The truth is that I don’t fully understand it; neither do the political scientists, although they’re working on it (and I’m trying to follow their work.) But it is happening, and Joe Biden’s inauguration won’t be the end of the story.

Trump Voters

As part of my on-going—and mostly unsuccessful—efforts to try to understand why people would vote for Trump, I made a chart for "state voters by education level." One thing led to another and pretty soon I had a quite a few "state voters by 'quality of life' charts." The overall results are certainly among the most interesting, most jarring, clearest and saddest blog entries I've ever posted. Judge for yourself.

The data is largely self-explanatory, but here are some notes anyway.

The colors represent how the states voted (via electoral college) in the 2020 presidential election: red for Republican, blue for Democrat, non-colored for unknown at this time. The source of the data is provided at the bottom of each chart. I used only data sources where I could get a definite top-to-bottom listing of the states for the category indicated. All figures are "rates" and/or "per capita."

If I have referred you to this post and your political orientation is not leftish, I did it because I think it's important that all politically-interested people from all parties see and digest this data. The charts and data are not, of course, partisan in themselves, and I'm not trying to convince you of anything. I believe that the data are hugely revealing, and there are important socio-economic-political conclusions to be drawn therefrom.

Spreadsheet notes: This spreadsheet is live; it lives on my computer and is automatically updated as needed. Scroll down using slider on right margin. If you're interested in using the data for your own purposes, there's an option to download the spreadsheet at the bottom.

Notes on Titles and Data

"Education Attainment" refers to the number of years of formal schooling.

"Opportunity" refers to the Opportunity Index, which is "an annual composite measure of economic, educational and civic factors that foster opportunity. The Opportunity Index was jointly developed by Opportunity Nation and Measure of America and measures 16 indicators, including Unemployment Rate, Low Income Inequality, Access to Banking, Access to Broadband Internet, Overall Education and more." Quoted description taken from the website.  See https://opportunityindex.org/ for details.

"Poverty" refers to the percentage of the state population living in poverty. Since the poverty rate is determined by, among other things, cost of living, there is no specific dollar amount that defines the poverty level. For more details, search Wikipedia for "us states poverty rate."

Go Republicans!

A friend posted on Facebook the very nice letter she wrote to a good friend about that friend's plan to vote for Trump. My reply:

Nice letter, Carol. Of course, it's a complete waste of time and effort if you were hoping to affect her priorities, positions or votes. Republicans have given up rationality and realism in favor of power at any price, leaders that will tell them the lies they want to hear, hypocrisy at levels that would kill anybody with a conscience, and over-arching "Otherism" (fear/hatred of people/groups that are different from "us" in any way). Trump is not the problem, he is merely a symptom and logical expression of modern Republicanism.

We Am Smart To

Data from 2012 survey.

Source: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/02/which-countries-have-the-best-literacy-and-numeracy-rates/

Incarceration Rates

Social justice.

 Source: https://www.hamiltonproject.org/

Family Benefit Spending

Another revealing bit of data showing how and why and in what ways America is the greatest country in the world. After all, what kind of fools would we be if we invested in families, education and the future? No thanks!  We know that what is really important is spending lots of money on the military war machine* and reducing taxes on wealthy people.

Source of data: https://data.oecd.org/socialexp/family-benefits-public-spending.htm

 

* Please don't insult the intelligence of people you talk to by calling it "defense" spending.