Tag Archives: Ronald Brownstein

Democracy, Donald Trump, Republicans

A perspective that clarifies the agenda of the contemporary Republican party

Ten days after the FBI broke up a domestic terrorist plot to kidnap and murder Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Donald Trump encouraged rally goers (shoulder to shoulder, without masks, cheering and jeering in the midst of rising rates of coronavirus infection and hospitalization) to chant, “Lock her up,” while adding himself: “Lock ’em all up.”

As we approach an election that will likely deliver an emphatic defeat to the President, two prominent Republican Senators, Ben Sasse and John Cornyn, offered criticism of their party’s leader, but no condemnation of either his campaign to delegitimize the election or his musings about jailing his political opponents (including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden). Washington Republicans refuse to acknowledge these expressions of an increasingly authoritarian chief executive as causes for concern.

Meanwhile, the United States Senate, controlled by a party dominated by a shrinking base — mostly white, mostly men, shrugging off the twin crises of a raging pandemic that is hardly slowing down and a struggling economy months or years away from full recovery, is rushing toward confirmation of a justice of the Supreme Court. Why the rush? Ronald Brownstein offers an analysis that puts the issue into context:

The historic number of Americans who stood in long lines to cast their ballot in cities from Atlanta to Houston symbolizes the diverse, urbanized Democratic coalition that will make it very difficult for the GOP to win majority support in elections through the 2020s. That hill will get only steeper as Millennials and Generation Z grow through the decade to become the largest generations in the electorate.

Every young conservative judge that the GOP has stacked onto the federal courts amounts to a sandbag against that rising demographic wave. Trump’s nominations to the Supreme Court of Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Barrett—whom a slim majority of Republican senators appears determined to seat by Election Day—represent the capstone of that strategy. As the nation’s growing racial and religious diversity limits the GOP’s prospects, filling the courts with conservatives constitutes what the Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz calls “the right-wing firewall” against a country evolving electorally away from the party.

Small-d democratic governance is antithetical to the success of the contemporary Republican Party. Voter suppression and gerrymandering are central tenets of the GOP’s electoral strategy, while the party has come to rely on the courts to stifle the aspirations of a burgeoning American majority. 

(Image of Donald Trump intoning, “Lock ’em all up,” from WZZM13 on YouTube.)

2020 General Election, Democracy, Off the Rails, Republicans

An increasingly authoritarian GOP has a plan to steal the 2020 election for Donald Trump

President Donald Trump on the November 2020 election:

● “The only way we’re gonna lose this election is if the election is rigged. Remember that. The only way we’re gonna lose this election. So we have to be very careful.”

● “So this is a disaster waiting to happen. The only hope we have, really, other than going through a long unbelievable litigation at the end after it’s over, is we’re gonna win. We’re not going to lose this except if they cheat. That’s the way I look at it.

We can’t let ’em cheat. We can’t let ’em. . . .Our country is at stake . . . Our country is at stake, because these people will destroy our country. We can’t let this happen. And this is a scam. They know it, the media knows it, but the media doesn’t wanna cover it. They know exactly what’s going to happen and so do I. But the Democrats know better than all of us what’s gonna happen.”

● “We’re gonna have a victory on November 3rd the likes of which you’ve never seen. Now we’re counting on the federal court system to make it so we can actually have an evening where we know who wins, okay? Not where the votes are gonna be counted a week later, or two weeks later. . . .”

[Q: Win, lose, or draw in this election, will you commit here today for a peaceful transferal of power after the election?]

● “Well, we’ll have to see what happens. You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster. . . .

We wanna have — get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very trans — you’ll have a very peaceful — There won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation. The ballots out of control. You know it. And you know who knows it better than anybody else? The Democrats know it better than anybody else.”

The relentless campaign to deny the integrity of the upcoming election is part of a larger Republican plan, set out in plain sight, to throw the election to Donald Trump.

In How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt describe the informal rules or norms that serve as the guardrails of our democracy, forestalling a democratic breakdown  – and a Republican Party more than willing to plow through those guardrails to gain political advantage. As the authors explain, “political leaders, and especially political parties,” play the critical roles in preserving democracy. The GOP has shunned this role.

Nearly two decades after the ascendency of Newt Gingrich, after Bush v. Gore, and half a dozen years after publication of Mann and Ornstein’s It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, no political observer in 2018 (when How Democracies Die was published) could have been surprised by the indictment of the pre-Trump GOP, and not simply of the party since Trump’s takeover.

The book, which I read in early 2019, is a warning to small-d democrats. I regarded the warning as less urgent, and the threat as less imminent, on that first reading than I do now. I recognized then that the Republican Party continued to trash democratic norms and that Trump had pushed the GOP even further off the rails, but I believed that our institutions would protect us. We were safe from the worst. We would vote Trump out of office, just as we had rejected the Republican majority in the House in November 2018.

But the Republican Party has become increasingly extreme with each year of the Trump presidency. So, the passages that I regarded as perceptive observations have become alarming portents. As our country loses prestige and influence abroad, and as the chaos at home betrays our image as the world’s greatest democracy, our democratic institutions appear less robust than they did even a short time ago.

Shockingly, today the United States of America doesn’t seem a world away from Venezuela, Turkey, or Hungary (to cite a few of the countries discussed in How Democracies Die where people still cast ballots, but authoritarians rule). The threat of a free and fair election — offering a judgment on Donald Trump’s presidency — being subverted so Trump can stay in office regardless of the will of American voters is right upon us, here and now in 2020.

Recognition of this impending threat has come in stages.

On August 19, election-law expert Richard Hasen wrote about the broad Republican strategy:

The threat to the 2020 election’s legitimacy finally broke through into everyday conversation last week. People who pay little attention to politics started talking about whether President Trump was looking to mess with the United States Postal Service to slow down the receipt of mail-in ballots.

After reports from NPR and the Washington Post (on August 22 and 23, respectively) that upwards of 500,000 mail-in ballots had been disqualified in the Wisconsin primary jolted me, on August 24 I posted, “Democrats desperately need a Plan B.” If a half million votes could be lost in a single primary, maximal Republican interference in multiple states in a general election could be much more consequential. The GOP is preparing to pull out all the stops to prevent votes from being counted (the successful strategy in Florida in 2000), so Trump doesn’t face a reckoning.

By September 10, when Ronald Brownstein wrote the essay, “Democrats Won’t Cede the Streets This Time,” the previously fantastical idea (an authoritarian leader subverting a free and fair election in the U.S.A.) was widely anticipated. Not only did Democrats expect Trump to try to steal the election, they expected Republicans to employ shock troops (as they had in the well-orchestrated Brooks Brothers’ riot of 2000) to intimidate officials responsible for tabulating votes.

Hasen’s assessment now is that the Republican Party’s plan — to muck up the works and then, when bedlam breaks out, disregard the voters and declare Trump the winner — is “a five-alarm fire” that threatens democratic rule:

With less than six weeks to go before Election Day, and with over 250 COVID-related election lawsuits filed across 45 states, the litigation strategy of the Trump campaign and its allies has become clear: try to block the expansion of mail-in balloting whenever possible and, in a few key states, create enough chaos in the system and legal and political uncertainty in the results that the Supreme Court, Congress, or Republican legislatures can throw the election to Trump if the outcome is at all close or in doubt. It’s a Hail Mary, but in a close enough election, we cannot count the possibility out. I’ve never been more worried about American democracy than I am right now.

I initially shrugged off Trump’s attacks on the credibility of the election because he had done the same thing in 2016 — even after winning (when he claimed that 3 to 5 million illegal votes had been cast, unfairly depriving him of a popular vote victory). I regarded the continuing crusade as just blather and bluster. (And it would be were it not for the complicity of the Republican Party and its leadership.)

I shrugged off Trump’s tweets about postponing the November 3 election, which I took as evidence of his insecurity (after consistently trailing Joe Biden in public polling for more than a year) and his ignorance (of the structure of our governing institutions). Moving the date of the election was not a viable possibility — and so not the way to steal an election.

I never regarded as likely the suggestion that Trump would lose the election, but refuse to budge from the White House.  That’s not where the threat lies, as Barton Gellman explains:

A lot of people, including Joe Biden, the Democratic Party nominee, have mis­conceived the nature of the threat. They frame it as a concern, unthinkable for presidents past, that Trump might refuse to vacate the Oval Office if he loses. They generally conclude, as Biden has, that in that event the proper authorities “will escort him from the White House with great dispatch.”

The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that un­certainty to hold on to power.

Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states. Ambiguities in the Constitution and logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would bring the nation to a precipice. The Twentieth Amendment is crystal clear that the president’s term in office “shall end” at noon on January 20, but two men could show up to be sworn in. One of them would arrive with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand.

The linchpin: “if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them.” Trump is Trump. He sends signals. It is his Republican allies — in Congress, on Fox News Channel, in a handful of legislatures and statehouses across the country, and at the Supreme Court — that could pull off the heist.

The Republican Party has moved unwaveringly toward a fulsome embrace of Trump’s authoritarian impulses. At every fork in the road — whether to enable Trump’s authoritarian incursions or to take a principled stand to defend democratic institutions — Republicans in the House and the Senate have chosen the former.

Consider 2020; that is, just the past nine months:

Apart from Mitt Romney (who acknowledges that he has no followers in today’s GOP), Republicans in both the House and the Senate were unanimous in refusing to hold Donald Trump accountable for his shakedown of Ukraine’s President Zelensky. This was a choice. The rejection of principle, in favor of raw political power, with the recent Supreme Court vacancy was a choice. The loudest voices among Washington Republicans have reinforced Trump’s campaign to delegitimize the election; other Republicans remain silent (implicitly standing behind Trump). Everyone — the vocal and the mute — has made a choice. Finally, the namby-pamby statements after Trump’s rejection of the principle of a peaceful transition represent a choice. (Not that a more definitive rejection from today’s Republicans, while still weeks away from the election, would count for much.)

The Republican Party has rejected Congressional oversight, Constitutional checks and balances, the rule of law, the sanctity of the vote and of democratic elections, conservative principles and policy commitments, and much else where this president is concerned. The party has collectively made choice after choice to go all-in with Trump wherever he has led.

In my August 24 post, I raised this question:

But — stop and consider for just a moment all that we’ve witnessed over the past three and a half years — are there any grounds to believe that, say, Mitch McConnell would object to a transparent theft of the election if he thought that he could get away with it?

Consider all of Trump’s enablers. Isn’t the same cynical calculation in play for each of them? If Fox News Channel and the rest of the conservative media universe were on board, nearly half the country would be convinced, if Trump claimed a victory, that Trump had won (or that McConnell had held his majority).

I would not have thought to write those paragraphs at the beginning of the year, much less in early 2019, after first reading How Democracies Die. Even understanding that the GOP was an insurgent outlier, which employed voter suppression as a primary electoral strategy, I would have regarded this contingency as a bridge too far. But here we are.

I’ve written more than once about the go-to play in the Republican Party’s game plan, which Steve Bannon described as “to flood the zone with shit.” Republicans in Washington and state capitals, on FNC and talk radio, in social media and on the streets are always prepared to flood the zone with shit. Lies, conspiracy theories, denials, misdirection, and ceaseless vilification: that’s the route to creating chaos. Republicans are amply prepared to follow their authoritarian leader if, when push to comes to shove, they think they can get away with it.

Near the beginning of Donald Trump’s term, Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote:

We know that extremist demagogues emerge from time to time in all societies, even in healthy democracies. The United States has had its share . . . . An essential test for democracies is not whether such figures emerge but whether political leaders, and especially political parties, work to prevent them from gaining power in the first place—by keeping them off mainstream party tickets, refusing to endorse or align with them, and when necessary, making common cause with rivals in support of democratic candidates. Isolating popular extremists requires political courage. But when fear, opportunism, or miscalculation leads established parties to bring extremists into the mainstream, democracy is imperiled.

Once a would-be authoritarian makes it to power, democracies face a second critical test: Will the autocratic leader subvert democratic institutions or be constrained by them? Institutions alone are not enough to rein in elected autocrats. Constitutions must be defended—by political parties and organized citizens, but also by democratic norms. Without robust norms, constitutional checks and balances do not serve as the bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be. Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not. This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and renewing the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.

Thus far, choice by choice, the Republican Party has failed both critical tests.

The authoritarian threat — as the country’s November election approaches — is nearer, more imminent than I had imagined just months ago. Killing democratic rule is not just an exotic foreign affair, it’s something that could happen here. The contemporary Republican Party has a plan for stealing the 2020 American election — if only a viable opportunity presents itself. It is up to democrats (and Democrats) to make sure that tabulated ballots, not chaos and chicanery triumph.

(Image: The Hill.)

2020 General Election, Republicans

Vote by mail requirements present many enticing opportunities for voter suppression

Six key swing states — Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — permit voters to cast mail-in ballots for any reason. Nonetheless, Ronald Brownstein notes (“The Most Important 2020 States Already Have Vote by Mail”), there is still much room for partisan disagreement in the coming months, as Democrats push to make voting simpler and easier, while Republicans oppose such efforts (even though in states that permit voting by mail — such as Arizona — Republicans may cast most of the mail-in ballots). Among the stickiest issues:

Partisan conflicts could erupt over how exactly citizens can request absentee ballots (many don’t allow them to do so online); whether the state will pay the postage to return the ballot (Michigan, Florida, and Pennsylvania are among those that don’t); and whether, amid the outbreak, states should still require voters to obtain witness signatures before submitting their ballot (as North Carolina and Wisconsin, among others, do). “Probably … tens of thousands of people will have difficulty getting those witnesses,” Morris said.

The most contentious subject will be the standards used to judge which ballots are rejected, particularly on the grounds that a voter’s signature doesn’t match records on file.

Daniel A. Smith, a University of Florida political scientist, has found that mail ballots in that state from young people and minorities are rejected at higher rates than those from older people and white voters—a dynamic that has obvious benefits for Republicans. In some states, Weiser noted, the election officials determining whether to accept a ballot can see on their screen the age and partisan affiliation of the voter they are assessing. Stewart told me he anticipates “a lot of litigation about the rejection of absentee ballots.” [My emphasis.]

This could be decisive in one or more battleground states. Imagine, hypothetically, a case going before the U.S. Supreme Court. A voter’s mail-in ballot has been disqualified because her signature doesn’t match — according to the county election officer, who happens to be a Republican — the signature on the envelope containing the ballot. The voter, who happens to be African American, has filed an affidavit attesting that the signature is hers, and the ballot that she cast is inside the sealed envelope. Suppose hundreds or thousands of additional voters from Democratic areas have had their ballots disqualified based on their signatures.

Recall that the Republican majority in the Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore decision stopped local officials from counting ballots in Florida in 2000, giving the election to the Republican candidate for president. Suppose in our hypothetical that a ruling in favor of the voters who wish their votes to be counted, would likely tip the state to Joe Biden, while a ruling in favor of the local official would likely tip the state to Donald Trump: how likely is it that the Republican majority on the current Court would decide in favor of voters?

This past week in Wisconsin, mostly Democratic voters did not receive the mail-in ballots soon enough to vote by mail. The Court’s majority found that the right to vote was of lesser importance than a “narrow, technical question” of the law. Suppose such a scenario plays out in November. Suppose, even, that Republican election officials are suspected of either slow-walking the process or simply find themselves unprepared to meet the demand for mail-in ballots? How likely is it that the Republican majority on the Supreme Court would side with voters and against local officials?

Signature requirements – and the possibility of failures by state and local government, including deliberate failures – are huge red flags for anyone who supposes that Republicans are ready and willing to cheat, if necessary, to win an election.

(Image from New York Times‘ Retro Report on Florida in 2000 on YouTube.)

Democrats, Republicans, Tribalism

Americans view Trump and COVID-19 through starkly different lenses: one Red, one Blue

The dire lack of test kits (in spite of repeated denials and broken promises by the Trump administration) continues to hamper public health efforts to contain the coronavirus. When asked (on March 13) whether he accepted responsibility for the shortage, Trump replied:

“No, I don’t take responsibility at all.”

Instead he blamed the Obama administration for an unspecificed “decision” that tied his hands (more than three years after he took office). Policy experts were baffled by the claim. (“To our knowledge, there were some discussions about laboratory developed test rules but nothing was ever put into place. So we are not aware of anything that changed how LDTs are regulated.”)

There is also a dire shortage of personal protective equipment, PPE — such as face shields, masks, head covers, and respirators — for doctors, nurses, and other medical staff. In light of this shortfall, medical personnel are even being instructed to reuse (generally single-use) N-95 masks.

When asked about the lack of safety equipment, Trump shrugged off responsibility and pointed to the nation’s governors:

“Governors are supposed to be doing a lot of this work. . . . The federal government is not supposed to be out there buying vast amounts of items, and then shipping. We’re not a shipping clerk.”

This is not leadership. But for nearly half the country, it’s close enough to satisfy.

Ronald Brownstein (“Red and Blue America Aren’t Experiencing the Same Pandemic”) notes that the spread of the coronavirus is playing out much differently in Red and Blue areas of the country: “That disconnect is already shaping, even distorting, the nation’s response to this unprecedented challenge—and it could determine the pandemic’s ultimate political consequences as well.”

National surveys reveal that Democrats express greater concern about the virus than Republicans, and attest to making more changes in their personal behavior in response. Democratic governors for the most part are acting aggressively to slow the spread of the virus; fewer Republicans (Ohio Governor Mike DeWine is an exception) are doing so.

Furthermore, the ideological disparity is matched by a geographical division. New York, Washington, and California — in virtue of the disease’s impact in their metro areas — have by far the most cases, though other states (especially those with large cities) are catching up. In Red states with large metro areas — Texas, Arizona, Georgia, and Tennessee, for instance — Democratic mayors and city councils are imposing social distancing restrictions.

Brownstein quotes Geoffrey Kabaservice, author of Rule and Ruin (a history of the modern Republican Party), regarding the urban-rural divide:

“There’s a long history of conservatives demonizing the cities as sources of disease to threaten the ‘pure heartland.’ That’s an old theme. . . . So that could be how it goes down.”

Kabaservice also alludes to the Republican suspicion of elites who comprise the scientific establishment and academia, professionals within government agencies, and of course the media (apart from Fox News Channel and other outfits within the conservative media universe).

We are seeing that on each side of the divide, folks are falling in line with the preconceptions of their tribe. Democrats look to scientific and medical authorities, acknowledge the reality of the pandemic, and accept journalists’ reports on Trump’s dissembling and his administration’s evident failures. Republicans are more likely to accept Trump’s messaging that diminishes the threat, to trust his efforts to protect public health, to endorse his rejection of expert opinion inside and outside of government, and to share his finger pointing at China, other countries, Democrats, and journalists whose reporting casts doubt on the President’s rosy view.

This exchange is all too typical, and will be viewed from starkly different lenses by Democrats and Republicans:

Peter Alexander (asking what he regarded as a softball question): “What do you say to Americans who are watching you right now who are scared?”

Trump responds: “I say that you’re a terrible reporter. That’s what I say.”

I think it’s a very nasty question. And I think it’s a very bad signal that you’re putting out to the American people.

The American people are looking for answers and they are looking for hope. And you’re doing sensationalism — and the same with NBC and Concast. I don’t call it Comcast, I call it Concast … for whom you work.

Let me just say something: That’s really bad reporting. And you ought to get back to reporting, instead of sensationalism.

Let’s see if it works. It might. And it might not. I happen to feel good about it. But, who knows? I’ve been right a lot! Let’s see what happens.

Donald Trump has never sought to appeal to all Americans. He consistently appeals to his base, while disparaging the other half of the country. (My first post in this blog referenced this dichotomy.)

And I believe Trump is in sync with his base. The grassroots Republicans who embrace the President come what may, don’t want to hear any message that detracts from the party line. They want to hear Trump’s rosy scenario.

And Trump could be right. Within a few months, we may look back at COVID-19 as something that didn’t have the dire, long-term consequences media reports have led us to expect. It may, like a miracle, just disappear one day, perhaps mere weeks from now.

Trump’s supporters are sticking with him, hoping for — even expecting — the best. He can weave, and dodge, and change his story as often as he likes. He can point his fingers at everyone but himself. He can make fanciful claims, deny observable facts, and contradict scientists and medical authorities. But his base embraces his authority and outlook. (“He doesn’t lie. I know y’all say he does. He doesn’t. He doesn’t.“)

And what if things don’t turn out for the best? Will their support waver? Will they stray from the party when it comes time to vote in November?

Don’t count on it (even though some may jump off the Trump train). More likely: the hardcore base, the true believers in Trump’s camp — the overwhelming majority of Republicans who voted for Trump in 2016 — will readily blame the Chinese, the Europeans, the Mexicans. They will point the finger at Democrats, liberals, elites — the folks who, in their judgment, look down on them. They will fault urban dwellers, minorities, and non-white immigrants who, in their view, don’t qualify as real Americans.

If things turn out badly, if COVID-19 hits their communities as hard as it is beginning to hit the Blue regions of the country, they are likely to add yet another grievance to their indictment of the liberal establishment, not to hold Trump responsible.

Whether Trump is right or wrong, whether his bet — playing exclusively to the Republican base — will pay off in November, this is the wager that Trump is staking his Presidency on.

It’s a wager he has placed before. He won the prize in 2016.

We have Blue America on one side, Red America on the other. The outcome in November will hinge on turnout. And perhaps, if things are close enough, on that mushy middle, that sliver of folks who mostly don’t pay enough attention to have a side.

An ABC/Ipsos poll reveals that a healthy majority of Americans approve of the way Trump is handling the response to the Coronavirus (COVID-19). Right now the mushy middle seems to be leaning toward Trump.

November 3 is a long way off. We don’t know how bad things will get or how long recovery will take. At this stage, though, the 2020 election appears to represent a daunting challenge for Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.

2020 Democratic Primary, Democrats

Thoughts on the Democratic primary in the aftermath of Super Tuesday

After Super Tuesday, Joe Biden has pushed Bernie Sanders from his position as frontrunner. With everyone else out of the way, Bloomberg especially, it’s a two-man race for the Democratic nomination.

In 2016, I initially gave Sanders a pass when he continued campaigning even after it was obvious he had no chance of beating Hillary Clinton. After all, one of his goals was to amass enough delegates that he could influence the party platform and push it to the left. To do that, he had to keep competing.

But he’s done that. – Kevin Drum

Agreed. I was indulgent of Sanders’ protracted 2016 primary campaign because of my confidence that Hillary Clinton would win in November. If Sanders falters this time, let’s hope the senator promptly concedes and gets behind the Democratic nominee.

Perhaps the starkest symbol of Sanders’s limitations last night was the resurgence of a problem that severely damaged him in 2016: widespread resistance from primary voters who self-identify as Democrats (as opposed to independents). . . .

The Super Tuesday exit polls showed Biden beating Sanders among self-identified Democrats by about 30 percentage points in both Virginia and North Carolina, about 25 points in Oklahoma, 20 points in Tennessee, and nearly 50 in Alabama. Sanders was more competitive among Democratic partisans in the New England states of Massachusetts and Maine. But the overall pattern was unmistakable.

His collapse among Democratic partisans came after recent full-throated attacks on “the Democratic establishment” in his rallies and media appearances. Sanders has often sounded more as if he believes he’s leading his movement in a hostile takeover of the party than a merger with it. – Ronald Brownstein

Yeah. Democrats can’t resist complaining about the Democratic Party – but the millions of Democratic voters are a diverse bunch. Our communities are as diverse as we are. We don’t always agree. That’s the nature of a broad coalition under a big tent. Most Democrats, in the election of our lives, are seeking someone to unify us, not scold us – or our leaders. Attacking the Democratic establishment is a discordant rallying cry, especially from someone who regards himself as standing outside the tent.

When the campaign began, I had a fervent wish not to have to vote for an old white guy. It wasn’t always clear to me, if I didn’t get my wish, whether a Biden or a Sanders nomination would be the most disappointing.

From my vantage point today, Biden looks like the best bet to help Democrats boot out Trump and take back the Senate. Joe Biden has significant vulnerabilities, including looking and acting like a not especially vibrant 77-year-old; a continuing career of gaffes, verbal tangents, and visibly losing his train of thought; and an inability, thus far, to explain simply and coherently why the Hunter, Burisma, and Ukraine tales hammered by Republicans aren’t on a par with Trump’s corruption. But he is one of us, the last one standing (since Sanders chooses to stand apart from us), and it’s us against them.

That said, yesterday I cast a ballot – with no expectations that she would hit 15% in California – for Elizabeth Warren. Here’s hoping this terrific senator returns to Washington next year to a chamber with a Democratic majority. And, give her credit, Warren had the starring role in taking down Mike Bloomberg and his obscene $600,000,000+ campaign (which, not incidentally, provided a critical assist in the resurrection of the Biden campaign).

L.A. County’s new “ballot marking device” worked like a charm (though the process of checking in voters was very, very slow).
Casting a ballot for Elizabeth Warren in March 2020 primary election.

(Image of Joe Biden from his twitter page.)

Democracy, Off the Rails, Tribalism

Worlds collide, truth fractures — the Lesson on Day One of the public impeachment hearings

The nation is divided. The opposing sides cannot even agree on plain as day, garden variety, eyes wide open facts. Yesterday, from my vantage point, the evidence presented by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent and Ambassador William Taylor was devastating for President Donald Trump.

Rank and file Republicans, who buy into the world according to Fox News Channel, didn’t see the same thing. Meanwhile even Republican Congressmen who don’t push unhinged conspiracy theories, fail to push back against them. And this (as Ronald Brownstein points out) suggests that the rule of law across party lines is endangered.

Screenshots by Danielle Misiak via Mother Jones.

“The larger question the hearings may raise, then, is whether the partisan divide has widened to the point where Republican voters and elected officials alike will not consider valid any process controlled by Democrats, no matter how powerful the evidence it produces. If that’s the case, it points toward a future in which partisan loyalties eclipse, to a growing extent, any shared national commitment to applying the rule of law across party lines. Even given the decades-long rise in political polarization, such a rejection of common standards would constitute an ominous threshold for the nation to cross. . . .

The willingness of rank-and-file Republican voters to dismiss the concerns of such nonpartisan voices underscores the extent to which the party has grown resistant to outside information that challenges its ideological preferences…. [argument attributed to Alan Abramowitz, political scientist at Emory University] . . .

A recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that the roughly 45 percent of Republicans who identified Fox as their primary news source expressed nearly unbroken opposition to impeachment. Just 2 percent of Fox-dependent Republicans said they back Trump’s removal, compared with 10 percent of those who don’t rely on the network, the poll found. The indifferent response to the evidence against Trump on Ukraine “is maybe the best example so far of how the Fox News bubble just totally consumes a different reality—which, of course, is not actually reality….” [quotation from Andrew Baumann, Democratic pollster] . . .

In that environment, it’s easy for Trump to convince much of his base that any charge against him—even allegations from nonpartisan diplomats and national-security professionals—is inherently a liberal plot to silence him and his supporters. Very few Republican elected officials have challenged that conspiratorial argument.” — Ronald Brownstein, “Just How Far Will Republicans Go for Trump?“

Conservatives with convictions that don’t budge because the political winds change direction, who have been loyal Republicans but can’t deny Donald Trump’s unfitness as a leader, are horrified by their party’s opportunistic embrace of the man. Peter Wehner served in the Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush administrations. He couldn’t bear the thought of voting for Hillary Clinton; he laments the “increasingly radicalized” Democratic Party. But he sees with clear eyes the GOP circa 2019:

“What makes the Trump era so unusual isn’t partisanship and political tribalism, which have been around for much of human existence. It is the degree to which the transgressive nature of Trump—his willingness to go places no other president has gone, to say and do things that no president before him has done—has exposed the Republican Party. There is hardly a pretense any more regarding what the party, and the right-wing media complex, are doing. They are driven by a single, all-consuming commitment: Defend Donald Trump at all costs. That is the end they seek, and they will pursue virtually any means necessary to achieve it. This from the party that once said it stood for objective truth, for honor and integrity, and against moral relativism.

We are facing a profound political crisis. What the Republican Party is saying and signaling isn’t simply that rationality and truth are subordinate to partisanship; it is that they have to be obliterated for the sake of partisanship and the survival of the Trump presidency. As best I can tell, based on some fairly intense interactions with Trump supporters, there is no limiting principle—almost nothing he can do—that will forfeit their support. Members of Congress clearly believe Trump is all that stands between them and the loss of power, while many Trump voters believe the president is all that stands between them and national ruin. In either case, it has led them into the shadowlands.” . . .

“The Republican Party under Donald Trump is a party built largely on lies, and it is now maintained by politicians and supporters who are willing to “live within the lie,” to quote the great Czech dissident (and later president) Vaclav Havel. Many congressional Republicans privately admit this but, with very rare exceptions—Utah Senator Mitt Romney is the most conspicuous example—refuse to publicly acknowledge it.

“For what purpose?” they respond point-blank when asked why they don’t speak out with moral urgency against the president’s moral transgressions, his cruelty, his daily assault on reality, and his ongoing destruction of our civic and political culture. Trump is more powerful and more popular than they are, they will say, and they will be targeted by him and his supporters and perhaps even voted out of office.” — Peter Wehner, “The Exposure of the Republican Party“

(Image above headline: CNN on YouTube.)

Democrats, Donald Trump, Income Inequality

The Howard Schultz campaign is already helping Donald Trump

“After this week’s CNN town hall, it’s more and more clear that any money Howard Schultz might spend on an independent presidential bid would function as an in-kind campaign contribution to Donald Trump.” – Ronald Brownstein

“To win a majority of electoral college votes, which Schultz says would be his goal, he would have to ultimately replace the Democratic nominee as the favored choice of voters who do not want Trump to win a second term.” – Michael Scherer

Schultz has praised the “thoughtful analysis” of a conservative commentator who fears the Democrats will nominate a “hard-left” candidate and – in the course of the column – demeans Kamala Harris (“shrill … quasi-socialist promising pie in the sky”), Elizabeth Warren (“Fauxcahontas … playing a game of socialist one-upmanship”), and “supposedly centrist” Joe Biden. The critic also name-checks Bernie Sanders and, of course, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. 

Schultz, who claims to be a “lifelong Democrat” – but not a very attentive one (“Schultz voted in just 11 of 38 elections dating back to 2005”), took back the praise he had offered after folks actually read the “thoughtful analysis” he was promoting;  he deleted the tweet when he was asked about it by the Washington Post, and blamed someone else for posting the link on his personal Twitter account.

Nonetheless, he embraces the conservative views expressed in the deleted column. It’s the “hard-left,” “quasi-socialist” Democrats that Schultz fears and, most scary and objectionable of all, the proposal (broached by conservatives’ favorite new Democratic Member of Congress, Ocasio-Cortez) to raise the marginal tax rate for incomes over $10 million to 70% (the level in the United States in 1980).

When asked at his CNN Town Hall what he thinks his personal income tax rate – as a billionaire – should be, Schutz concedes that he “should pay more taxes,” but tap dances for more than a minute (with platitudes about corporate taxes, the Republican tax bill, comprehensive tax reform, as well as personal income tax rates for millionaires) without giving an answer, at which point the moderator Poppy Harlow reminds him of the question and asks, “Give me a sense. Are you talking about you should pay 2% higher? Ten percent higher, twenty percent higher federal income tax?”

He stammers and says, “I don’t – Poppy, I don’t know what the number is….”

“Ballpark it for people,” she asks.

He won’t. He finally gets to the heart of his concern, “I think that what’s being proposed at 70% is a punitive number. And I think there are better ways to do this.”

Better ways. In other words, instead of significant increases in the personal tax rates of billionaires, we should seek revenue increases somewhere else.

Brownstein notes that on issue after issue, Schultz’s positions align with Democrats, while alienating Trump’s Republican base.

“To obscure his tilt toward the Democrats on almost all issues, Schultz has quickly settled on a strategy of loudly criticizing ideas popular on the party’s far-left flank.”

Brownstein perceives in Schultz’s strategy echoes of the (now defunct) centrist group, the Democratic Leadership Council, which Bill Clinton embraced in his trek to the White House.  But there’s a huge difference in the two strategies. The DLC and Clinton worked for years “inside the Democratic Party.” Regardless of what you think of Clinton or his policies, he sought to “rebuild a political majority that would allow Democrats to regain control of the national agenda from the increasingly militant conservatism within the GOP.”

Schultz seeks to do the opposite: to split the Democrats and peel off Democratic voters to his independent campaign.

‘Exaggerating the power of the left in the Democratic coalition, he’s portraying the party as beyond redemption for anyone holding centrist views. To make that case, Schultz is echoing claims from Trump and other Republicans that Democrats have become radical. At times, Schultz has even called some of the Democratic ideas he opposes “un-American” or “not American,” not to mention “punitive” and “ridiculous.”

By validating the Republican efforts to portray Democrats as outside the mainstream, Schultz is helping Trump already.’

Democrats, Donald Trump, Republicans, Tribalism

Gender and religion – the People’s House takes a couple of strides toward better representing Americans


After the overwhelming Democratic victory for the control of the House of Representatives – Democrats won by nearly 10 million votes nationally, which was the greatest popular vote margin in U.S. history – a highly diverse Congress convened yesterday. It doesn’t look quite like America – but it’s closer than ever before.

A woman became Speaker of the House for only the second time; Nancy Pelosi, who made history the first time, made history again. More women – 102 – will serve in the 116th Congress than in any previous House. (And consider this contrast: in 1989 there were 16 Democratic women and 13 Republican women in Congress. In 2019, there are 89 Democratic women and 13 Republican women in Congress.)

Two Native American women will serve in this Congress. And, heralding greater religious diversity, two Muslim women (a Somali-American and a Palestinian) will serve.

A PEW survey notes that even with the new members, Congress still doesn’t accurately represent Americans’ religious preferences and ‘by far the largest difference between the U.S. public and Congress is in the share who are unaffiliated with a religious group. In the general public, 23% say they are atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.” In Congress, just one person – Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., who was recently elected to the Senate after three terms in the House – says she is religiously unaffiliated, making the share of “nones” in Congress 0.2%.’

Ed Kilgore notes that the two parties present a stark contrast regarding religious diversity: “With the exception of the two Jewish Republicans in the House, all of Congress’s non-Christians and religiously unspecified members are Democrats. Professed Christians are over-represented in both parties’ congressional ranks…”

Meanwhile, evangelical Christians continue to be the most devoted, unwavering supporters of one Donald J. Trump, a man (in Michael Gerson’s words) “prone to cruelty, bigotry, vanity, adultery and serial deception.” Gerson, who embraces a never-Trump conservatism, notes in an op-ed in this morning’s newspaper – borrowing a phrase from Ronald Brownstein – the “hardening loyalty” of evangelicals to Trump.

Gerson suggests that something other than fidelity to the Gospel lies behind this support:

Trump has understood something about evangelical Christians that many are unable to articulate themselves. White, theologically conservative Protestants were once — not that long ago — a culturally predominant force. Many of their convictions — on matters such as sexuality and public religiosity — were also the default settings of the broader society. But that changed in a series of cultural tidal waves — the Darwinist account of human origins, the application of higher criticism to the text of the Bible, the sexual revolution — which swept away old certainties.

Americans, in an increasingly diverse country, have reason to celebrate more diverse representation at the national level. Democrats are at the forefront of the changes taking place. Make no mistake: Trump and Republicans, 89% of whom approve of the job he is doing in the latest Gallup Poll (December 17-22), view diversity as a threat. Identity politics, tribalism, and cultural anxiety have swamped faith, hope, and charity in this group.

(Photograph is MSNBC screengrab of Kyrsten Sinema, a departing member of the House just elected to the U.S. Senate from Arizona, taking the oath of office with her hand on a law book, which contained the Constitution of the United States, rather than a religious text.)