Monthly Archives: August 2023

They Give Themselves Permission

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Right-wingers love to claim the left is trying to “destroy America”. Joe Biden, a long-time politician who isn’t a radical in any way whatsoever, is accused of the same. (They also sometimes call him a “communist” — at least they know enough about communism to know they’re against it.)

David Roberts, who operates a newsletter/podcast about clean energy and politics called Volts, explains what they’re doing:

In his book The School for Dictators, Ignazio Silone famously called fascism “a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place”. There is much wisdom there.

A core feature of reactionary (I’ll use that term rather than “fascist” because people love to pointlessly debate semantics) movements is an inversion of power. They cast the weak as looming threats and status-quo powers as the trembling victims.

This is a familiar move … in every reactionary movement. You see it in the US when they talk about gay or trans people imposing themselves on everyone, forcing their lifestyle down our throats. Or when they talk about how white people face more racism.

Or, on a grander scale, when they talk about how social justice warriors have taken over every institution in the the US, ruthlessly imposing their woke worldview.

It’s self-evidently ridiculous, but why do they do it so consistently?

The point is to justify their own escalating violence and lawlessness. They hate difference, they hate the status quo being challenged, they hate the existence of Others in their midst, so they need to convince one another that it’s ok to cast off norms and let the violence [or criminality or immorality] out.

This is why the only mode of moral argumentation you ever see from a reactionary is whataboutism. The point of “they did it first” (for whatever “it,” censorship or voter fraud or whatever) is not that “it” is bad and no one should do it, but that it’s ok for us to do it too.

It’s not even really a moral argument. It’s just a permission structure — they did it, so we can’t be held accountable for doing it too.

So when they create this mythology about Democratic voter fraud, the point is not “voter fraud is bad,” the point is, “it’s ok for us to do it too” [which explains why the people found to have voted twice or somewhere they don’t live are almost always Republicans].

The long-running narrative about left bias in the media is not about “bias is bad”, it’s about, “it’s ok for us to make full-on propaganda”. The point about violent rioting urban lefties is not “violence is bad”, it’s “it’s ok for us to be violent”.

The cliché goes “every conservative accusation is a confession,” and that’s kind of true, but it’s more accurate to say every accusation is permission — permission for the right to do in reality what it has worked itself up to believe the left is doing.

Oh I forgot to mention the classic example we’re living through: endlessly accusing the left of censorship to justify banning books and rewriting history.

It’s all a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place — a way of defending and reinforcing status quo hierarchies by exaggerating the power and efficacy of the marginalized and vulnerable, the outsiders trying to reform the status quo in an egalitarian direction.

I was thinking about this the other day listening to the @IfBooksPod episode on Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism”. Goldberg desperately wanted to be taken seriously as an intellectual, but literally the only thing he could think to do is the World Biggest What About. It’s “we’re rubber, you’re glue” puffed up to hundreds of pages. It’s just how their brains work. It’s never “people should be good”. It’s always, “you can’t call us shitty because you’re shitty too”.

And that is the most primal and formative feature of reactionary psychology: the belief that everyone is selfish, everyone is out for themselves, it’s a zero-sum world in which tribes compete for dominance, and all the progressive talk about universalist values is just a clever con.

They have to believe that. Their worldview has no room for people of good will trying earnestly to do good for humanity. They need for all the Others they hate to be sinister and powerful and right on the verge of taking over and destroying everything.

They need it because it gives them permission to indulge their base instincts. “We have to do this violence/censorship/lawbreaking, it’s the only way to stop the gays/immigrants/professors from destroying our way of life”. Every time it’s the same.

A friend reminded me that I forgot the most perfect example for this thread: all the “Flight 93 election” stuff! If you’re not familiar, this is the right-wing idea that US culture has been hijacked by the left and is headed for some grim end, so anything the right does to regain control is justified, even if it crashes the plane. The danger from the left is so severe, so immediate, that even blowing everything up is better than the alternative. Again, the point is always to create that permission structure.

“You prosecute us for real crimes, we’ll prosecute you for fake crimes!” Sigh.

Unquote.

Mr. Roberts then provides a few recent examples of this phenomenon:

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In case you haven’t heard, some of the worst House Republicans are pushing to impeach Biden. On what grounds? They don’t know yet, but there must be something, either real or imaginary.

The Song of the South

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What is it that makes the American South so special? A journalist named Hamilton Nolan answers that and other questions at How Things Work, where he writes about labor, politics and power.

Since the Covid pandemic struck in 2020, more than two million people have migrated to the six fastest growing states in the South, bringing with them $100 billion in new income. This population shift is held up by Southern governors as proof of the success of their policies—and as a herald of an ongoing shift in the balance of economic power that is bound to continue due to the South’s inherent advantages. What spurred this grand relocation? Traditional wisdom will tell you that it was the more relaxed and open posture of Southern states like Florida during the Covid pandemic, along with the perpetual allures of warmer weather, lower taxes, and more affordable housing prices.

In reality, though, this current sloshing of America towards its drain is not the start of anything new at all. It is spurred not by any new economic paradigm, nor by any Texan or Floridian governor’s new ideas about unleashing the power of free enterprise under the nation’s sunniest skies. It is, instead, a normal reaction to a … rise in the appeal of something that the South has been offering for more than 200 years. Politicians will tell you that the South is attractive because it offers greater freedom. Actually, it offers cannibalism: it is willing to kill and eat its own to fuel a marginal improvement in your lifestyle. Don’t let this deal pass you by!

Ron Desantis is running (unsuccessfully) for president on the premise that he can do for America what he has done for Florida in the past three years. One way to look at his record during those crucial Covid years is: he kept stuff open and got rid of pandemic restrictions, which caused the Florida economy to flourish. Another, more accurate way to look at it is: he kept stuff open and got rid of pandemic restrictions because he fundamentally does not care whether his citizens live or die, as long as his state could get a temporary economic boost that he could use for self-promotional purposes. In this, Desantis was the perfect combination of the classic Southern socioeconomic strategy with a global pandemic.

Ever since being forced to give up formal slavery at gunpoint, the South has pursued a formula of attraction only one step removed from it. The region’s offer to businesses and wealthy people in the rest of America is, and has always been, this: “Come to the South. Do whatever you want. We won’t regulate you. We won’t tax you. We’ll crush any unions that dare to come here. We’ll provide a pool of dirt-cheap labor for you. Because we don’t tax you, our public services will be awful. Our public schools will be inadequate. But don’t worry, because we will build graceful private schools for the people with money, and we will build private country clubs and gated communities to shield you from the poverty, and racist cops to police the borders of the neighborhoods, and you can live here in a private island of bliss. The inadequacy of our public services and our outright racial oppression guarantee that that cheap labor force will continue forever. You can profit from that cheap labor force without ever having to interact with the people who compose it, except as various forms of servants. The oppression, sequestered away from you and walled off from impacting your life except to enhance it, is what makes the system work.”

That’s it. That’s the South’s sales pitch. It is the poorest and most backwards region of America by traditional socioeconomic measurements, but it’s great place to be when you exclude all of the poor people from your measurements. Which they do, because “not caring about all the poor people” is the key to the South’s ability to imagine itself as a place with a political system that works. This is the slavery mentality dragged cleanly into the present day, modified just enough to fit the letter of the law.

In the plantation era, the South was great, as long as you were a plantation owner. If you add all the slaves (and poor whites) into the calculation… ugh, you mess up the numbers. Despite the fact that the South’s failure to industrialize properly due to slavery was one of the things that lost it the Civil War, the region remains stubbornly addicted to cheap labor today. It is, at heart, an inferiority complex. The South’s leaders don’t really believe that they have anything to offer to lure people in other than a work force that will show up for rock bottom wages. If the South really believed in itself, it would be busily investing in public education and health care and a strong social safety net and all the other things that build a healthy and thriving society that ultimately attracts people and businesses. Instead, they do the opposite—because empowering the existing residents of the South would undermine its cheap labor pool.

When you see Southern governors doing seemingly irrational things like rejecting federal government Medicaid funding for their state’s residents, you must understand that the people who would be helped by that funding simply do not count in the minds of those states’ leaders. Their states are modern plantations, and they calculate the success of their governance based on the living standards of the plantation owners, not the workers. Even worse, doing things that help the workers live better could harm the project of maintaining a maximally desperate labor pool. The South doesn’t want their entire population to be healthy and well-educated. They want white people and business owners to be healthy, thanks to private doctors, and well-educated, due to private schools, and to have access to a limitless low-wage work force that, thanks to the failure of the state to invest in their welfare, has no choice but to acquiesce to being exploited. The more desperate they are, the better.

When you see Texas Republicans eliminate laws that grant workers water breaks, that is not some momentary outbreak of callousness; that is the point. …

Embracing the South’s toxic sales pitch pollutes the soul. “I am moving to Florida because the total lack of public health measures is nice and easy for me, as a rich person, even though I know it will cost a calculable number of Floridians their lives.” You are a bad person. “I am moving to Texas to save on my personal income taxes, even though I know that the cost of that is poor schools and oppression for vast swaths of this state’s neediest residents.” You are a bad person. “I am relocating my company’s factory to South Carolina because labor costs there are lower, even though I know that those low wages are a result of systematic oppression and union-busting designed to keep millions of poor people powerless over their own lives.” You are a bad person.

The bliss of ignorance is a critical part of this whole process. Move only between your air conditioned home on a golf course and your air conditioned office and your kids’ private school and the nice strip malls around your nice neighborhood and don’t ask any questions of the people who build the houses and serve the food and fill the factories and it is possible to cling to the illusion that this whole system works. But as soon as you begin to think about the aggregate welfare of everyone in the South—as soon as you place an equal value on the lives of the poor—it becomes devastatingly clear that all the nice enticements that tempted you down here require you to stand, at all times, on the necks of your fellow citizens. If you know that and continue to tolerate it, the South has poisoned you.

Unquote.

“The South has poisoned you”. It’s also how the South has poisoned American politics since the 18th century.

This Is Not Normal. They Are Not Serious People.

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Wednesday night’s Republican “debate” should have convinced journalists to tell the truth about how dangerous and divorced from reality Republicans have become. They’re no longer “conservative” in any way and shouldn’t be treated like a normal political party.

Ben Rhodes, an author and former Obama official, captured the flavor of the event:

… A stage full of people acted like a bunch of kids trying to get admitted to some fascist costume party. Kill people at the border! Prohibit women from any agency over their bodies! Side with Putin! Etc. Etc.

Six of the eight prospective presidents (!!!) said they would support their party’s 2024 nominee even if he’s a convicted felon, even if one of his crimes was trying to overthrow the government.

But coverage of the 2024 presidential election is looking a lot like what we were fed in 2016 and 2020. The New York Times, for example, published this on Thursday: “Our Writers Pick the Winners, Losers and ‘the Star of the Evening’ From the First Republican Debate”. Ten of their well-paid opinion writers ranked the night’s performers on a scale of 0 to 10.

Politics as sports or entertainment.

Margaret Sullivan, the Public Editor at the Times before the management decided they didn’t like the idea of a Times employee being allowed to criticize the paper in public, wrote about Wednesday night for The Guardian. Her principal focus was on a rising star in MAGA World:

He thinks the climate crisis is a hoax, supports Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and would gladly pardon D____ T____ on day 1 of his would-be presidency. A wealthy biotech entrepreneur, the 38-year-old has never before run for public office.

Despite all of this (or maybe because of it), this week’s Republican debate became a national coming-out party for Vivek Ramaswamy.

Suddenly, this inexperienced and dangerous showoff is almost a household name.

Many in the Republican base ate up his showmanship and blatant fanboying of their hero, [the individual now charged with 91 felonies]. In CNN’s post-debate focus group of Republican voters in Iowa, for example, Ramaswamy got the most favorable response.

… Many in the mainstream media declared him victorious. The Washington Post put him up high in its “winners” column, trailing only behind [the individual facing four criminal trials], who wasn’t even there. (Choosing not to enter this particular clown car showed some uncharacteristic good sense on the former president’s part.)

The New York Times analyzed the situation under a glowing headline “How Vivek Ramaswamy Broke Through: Big Swings With a Smile”, with emphasis on his style: “unchecked confidence and insults”.

For this millennial tech bro, his performance on the Fox News stage in Milwaukee couldn’t have gone much better.

As a glimpse of America’s future, it couldn’t have gone much worse….

Certainly, Ramaswamy has the essentials covered. No, not foreign policy chops or a background in public service, but a mocking aversion to social justice and equality….

His night in the spotlight, and its aftermath, shows that neither Republican voters nor many in the mainstream media have learned much since [the leader of the cult] came down the elevator in 2015 and proceeded to wreak havoc on the country.

In case there was any doubt, now we know: they will always fall for the attention-seeking, the policy-unencumbered, the candidate quickest with a demeaning insult. That’s a “winner”, apparently.

And it’s all too familiar.

“Ramaswamy is like T____ in the larva stage, molting toward the full MAGA wingspan but not quite there yet,” wrote Frank Bruni in his New York Times newsletter. “His narcissism, though, is fully evolved.”

Not everyone in the media, of course, was buying it. Charlie Sykes, editor in chief of the right-leaning Bulwark, was blunt, calling Ramaswamy “facile, clownish, shallow, shameless, pandering”, but, then again, “exactly what Republican voters crave these days”.

Given that the Republican party – still firmly in the grip of a twice-impeached con man – has lost its mind, this craving makes a certain amount of sense.

But it makes the endless media normalization even more cringe-inducing. Shouldn’t mainstream journalists be able to step back a tiny bit, providing critical distance rather than the same old tricks?

How can there be “winners” in yet another milestone on the way to fascism?

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment Should Matter

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No person shall … hold any office, civil or military, under the United States … who, having previously taken an oath … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. 

The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868. Section 3 was designed to stop anyone who had rebelled against the United States from ever having a role in the government again. It’s not commonly applied (we don’t have that many insurrections or rebellions), but it’s still in the Constitution. The New York Times reports that legal experts are paying attention:

Two prominent conservative law professors have concluded that [the Orange Menace] is ineligible to be president under a provision of the Constitution that bars people who have engaged in an insurrection from holding government office. The professors are active members of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group, and proponents of originalism, the method of interpretation that seeks to determine the Constitution’s original meaning.

“Originalism” is bullshit, but others have reached the same conclusion, including a University of Virginia professor and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). What’s interesting about these two professors is that they would ordinarily be expected to bend over backwards to support the Orange Menace, like so many other Federalist Society members have done.

The Times article suggests the likelihood of lawsuits:

The scope and depth of the article may encourage and undergird lawsuits from other candidates and ordinary voters arguing that the Constitution makes him ineligible for office.

“There are many ways that this could become a lawsuit presenting a vital constitutional issue that potentially the Supreme Court would want to hear and decide,” [one of the authors] said.

Of course, the Supreme Court deciding that the 14th Amendment applies to the former president would require two of the Court’s right-wing, so-called “originalist” Justices to accept the Constitution’s plain language, not something they’re used to doing.

Nevertheless, here’s the authors’ summary of the article:

Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment forbids holding office by former office holders who then participate in insurrection or rebellion. Because of a range of misperceptions and mistaken assumptions, Section Three’s full legal consequences have not been appreciated or enforced. This article corrects those mistakes by setting forth the full sweep and force of Section Three.

First, Section Three remains an enforceable part of the Constitution, not limited to the Civil War, and not effectively repealed by nineteenth century amnesty legislation.

Second, Section Three is self-executing, operating as an immediate disqualification from office, without the need for additional action by Congress. It can and should be enforced by every official, state or federal, who judges qualifications.

Third, to the extent of any conflict with prior constitutional rules, Section Three repeals, supersedes, or simply satisfies them. This includes the rules against bills of attainder or ex post facto laws, the Due Process Clause, and even the free speech principles of the First Amendment.

Fourth, Section Three covers a broad range of conduct against the authority of the constitutional order, including many instances of indirect participation or support as “aid or comfort.”

[Section Three] covers a broad range of former offices, including the Presidency. And in particular, it disqualifies [the former president], and potentially many others, because of their participation in the attempted overthrow of the 2020 presidential election.

“A Mystery for the Ages”

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In under 3 minutes, Tennessee comedian Trae Crowder explains the overriding reality confronting the Republican Party and the party’s response.