Remy, Was This You?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-63739836

Later,

HappyThanksgiving. Love and Peace.

The Attack on Voting is Part of a Broader Attack on Democracy

“I don’t want everybody to vote . . . . As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Paul Weyrich, far-right activist, co-founder of the Moral Majority, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, 1980.

In three weeks, on December 7^th, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in Moore v. Harper, a North Carolina case growing from repeated attempts of the Republican-controlled legislature there to draw gerrymandered congressional maps to disenfranchise minority voters.  They have been stymied by their state’s Supreme Court, which described their scheme as an “egregious and intentional partisan gerrymander” that violated the state’s constitution.  So they turned to the federal courts and will get their day very soon.

The case rests on the “independent legislature theory,” a once-fringe argument that, like other, similar, nonsense has nonetheless made its way into the conservative mainstream, one in which several, if not all, of the six Supreme Court Republicans swim happily.  In a nutshell, this theory holds that state legislatures can make whatever decisions they want regarding the conduct of elections, and neither state nor federal courts can intervene.  Its tortured reasoning is grounded in a superficial reading of our Constitution’s Elections Clause:

“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”

Traditionally, courts have considered the term “legislature” to mean a state’s overall lawmaking process, which includes checks and balances.  Independent legislature advocates say, no, “legislatures” means only a state’s house and senate, and they can operate unchecked by a governor or the courts.

This makes no sense unless one’s goal is to further undermine the authority of the federal government and diffuse governmental power across the states.  That has been part of a larger goal for the Right for decades.  See, for example, Dan Kaufman’s book, “The Fall of Wisconsin.”

The idea that the framers would create a system without any checks on state legislatures’ power is absurd on its face.  The Constitution itself was written to replace the cumbersome and unfair Articles of Confederation, which vested greater powers in the states.

When The Angry Inch tried to enlist the courts in his effort to overturn the 2020 election, he and his allies raised this theory, and they were shot down three times, twice in cases from Wisconsin and once in a case originating in Pennsylvania.  The North Carolina Republicans actually came to the court earlier this year, requesting an emergency review, but they were rebuffed.  However, Justice Alito, joined by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch, dissented, and Justice Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion saying the independent state legislature theory presented important questions.  Subsequently, the court agreed to hear the case through the normal appeals process.  Justice Barrett had not been sworn in when those cases were briefed and argued.  She could well be the fifth vote necessary to overturn America’s centuries-old system of federal elections.

While, on the surface, this case is about drawing electoral maps, it opens the door to the Supreme Court holding that state legislatures could pass voter suppression legislation and even decide which candidate’s election they certify, the will of the voters be damned.

Former U.S. Court of Appeals Judge J. Michael Luttig, a conservative appointed to the bench by the first President Bush, calls this an essential part of the “Republican blueprint to steal the 2024 election.”

The Brennan Center has an analysis. And the folks at Democracy Docket have a rundown about other cases where this is rearing its ugly head: https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/eight-recent-cases-where-the-isl-theory-appears/

This moment has been a long time coming; it could be the death of our democracy.  The Weyrich quote up at the top is from a speech he gave in 1980, just before the 42-year-long ascendency of the Right after the mess of the Carter presidency.  Voter suppression has been woven into the Republican fabric ever since they welcomed whites who bolted the Democratic party in anger and revulsion over the civil rights movement.  Yes, this is grounded in racism.

In 1981, the Republican National Committee created the National Ballot Security Task Force.  This group’s first assignment was to send out gangs of armed, off-duty police officers into Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in New Jersey to harass and discourage voters in that state’s gubernatorial election.  This led to a lawsuit from the Democratic National Committee, alleging violations of the Voting Rights Act.  The suit culminated in a 1982 consent decree preventing the RNC from engaging voter suppression.  That decree expired in 2017.

That consent decree, however, did not stop Republicans from organizing the “Brooks Brothers Riot” in 2000, where a small mob of their staffers created chaos to disrupt the ballot counting in Florida.

During the Bush administration—ultimately made possible by the then-five-Republican Supreme Court justices—there was an energetic—one might even say, fanatical—effort to convince Americans there was rampant fraud throughout our elections.  In 2007, the New York Times began its story on the results of that effort thusly:

“Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.”

With the arrival of the Trump Interregnum, the Justice Department was again dispatched to supposedly uncover rampant fraud, with the same results.

However, after the ascent of John Roberts—one of the Bush campaign’s lawyers in Florida in 2000, along with Justices Barrett and Kavanaugh—to Chief Justice, voting rights protections began to fall, principally the decision in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, which effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act and unleashed a new wave of voter suppression legislation across the country.

Given that history and the current line-up of the court that is about the hear Moore v. Harper, the odds of our right to vote and the integrity of our elections surviving do not look particularly good.

“And so it goes . . . ” Born a Century Ago Today

How we miss him . . .

Later,

First Take on an Historic Mid-Term Election

At the least, Dems have staved off the long-predicted Red Wave. They appear, at this point, to have a very good shot at holding a 50-50 Senate and perhaps even go 51-49 if they pull out Georgia. Right now, AZ (Kelly) looks good, and knowledgeable sources I follow are reassuring me NV (Cortez Masto) can squeak by. That leaves Warnock in GA.

On the House side, it’s neck-and-neck. Whoever prevails will have a VERY slim working margin, though, in the House, that’s enough.

Recall, as late as a week ago, all the Wise People were predicting a big night for the Rs. It was common to read them saying 240 House seats and 53 Senate seats.

Dems did not pull this off appealing to the white male working class (who likely wouldn’t listen, anyhow). They did not get here pushing economics (though I think they should have done more on that), although they did emphasize abortion as a “pocketbook issue,” something some people dismissed. They did it by responding to the anger of millions of women and by pointing out the dangers to our democracy. They roused young people, primarily Gen Z. They worked at the ground level and won.

They may well hold governorships in the crucial states (WI, MI, PA, AZ) that could determine the electoral college in 2024. They completely flipped Michigan state offices and the legislature for the first time since 1984. They notched victories in the PA and MN legislatures.

No matter what the final outcome, this was an historic election, and the mechanics that made the outcome possible should be studied carefully. Things are different, now.

Later,

Will Our Media Help Bring Down Our Democracy?

(I actually wrote this some time ago, but I’m updating it as I’m reading Margaret Sullivan’s new book, “Newsroom Confidential.”)

Since the beginning of the Trump Interregnum, a lot of people have shaken their heads in disbelief, asking, “how did this happen?”

Asked that way, I think the question misses the point.  Saying we “how did this happen” assumes the last four-plus years were an aberration.  They weren’t.  They were a louder, cruder, more shameless incarnation of an America that has existed pretty much from its founding.  Ask any Black citizen.

A lot of events coincided to cause this particular crisis.  The rise of social media that enabled the rapid spread of false information and hate-group organizing.  Decades of planning, funding, organizing, and divisive messaging from the right.  A large part of the public deeply steeped in national myths, angry about change, uninterested in complexities, receptive to manipulation—particularly when it comes dressed in racist clothes—and, as a body, strongly prone to what’s known as confirmation bias, taking what one sees and hears in a way that reinforces one’s existing beliefs.

As for Trump himself, the system was primed for someone like him.  Little about him was original, just, again, louder, cruder, and more shameless.  Putting aside the oddity of the Electoral College and whatever machinations the Russians pulled on his behalf, he created a cult and nearly wrecked our democracy by working cultural forces that embrace the flashy and the fake, and, after years of practice, he knew as well or better than anyone how to play journalists.

A good touchstone for understanding “how this happened” is Daniel Boorstin’s 1962 book, “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.”  Boorstin laid out how a large cohort of Americans had not only lost the ability to separate the real from the fake, but actually preferred the fake.  In his view, American journalism, particularly the political press, played a role in creating and maintaining this situation:

“Nowadays the test of a Washington reporter is seldom his skill at precise dramatic reporting, but more often his adept­ness at dark intimation. If he wishes to keep his news channels open he must accumulate a vocabulary and develop a style to conceal his sources and obscure the relation of a supposed event or statement to the underlying facts of life, at the same time seeming to offer hard facts. Much of his stock in trade is his own and other people’s speculation about the reality of what he reports. He lives in a penumbra be­tween fact and fantasy. He helps create that very obscurity without which the supposed illumination of his reports would be unnecessary.”

Boorstin was describing what we now call “access journalism.”

Just as Trump was nothing new, neither was the media’s general acquiescence to an outrageous figure.

I have read many comparisons between what we’ve gone through to the Watergate scandal, but journalists weren’t consumed by Richard Nixon in the same way they were by Donald Trump.  The ugly phenomenon of Sen. Joseph McCarthy is probably closer to the mark.

McCarthy, a freshman U.S. Senator, burst onto the scene with a fiery speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in February 1950 (a speech, by the way, included material provided by a Chicago Tribune reporter).  McCarthy bellowed at his audience, “While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205.” 

The list was phony, but it didn’t matter.  Enough media outlets ran with the story to catapult McCarthy to fame and power.  

Why?  In part because McCarthy was good copy.  He was brash (The Saturday Evening Post, then a major publication, called him “The Senate’s Remarkable Upstart”), contemptuous of rules and protocols, and, as the Broadway song lyric goes, “careless with the truth.”  Once he got rolling after that speech, reporters swarmed around him.

Some did see and report on the danger he represented, but, for several years, they were simply overwhelmed by their colleagues’ eagerness to jump on the bandwagon.  Just five months after that speech, the Nieman Foundation’s publication, Nieman Reports, published a piece by Douglass Carter dissecting how the “captive press” was amplifying McCarthy’s lies.  Even though some journalists were taking apart McCarthy, his backers, and his lies, Carter wrote, the Senator had a big enough head of steam that he rolled right over them.

Carter ended his piece with a warning:

“The press of America has long constituted itself a merry Fourth Estate, largely immune from criticism.  Today, the advent of McCarthyism has thrown real fear into the hearts of some fear of what a demagogue can do to America while the press helplessly gives its sometimes unwilling cooperation.  Perhaps Joseph McCarthy, Senator from Wisconsin, is not a demagogue.  But who knows?  One greater than McCarthy may come.”

Eventually—some say belatedly—CBS’ Edward R. Murrow’s 1954 See It Now broadcast used McCarthy’s own words to lay bare the threat he presented to the nation.  Murrow also delivered a commentary at the end of the broadcast, and McCarthy was given the opportunity to deliver a rebuttal, which made matters worse for him.  Things went downhill from there, and nine months later, his fellow senators voted 67 to 22 to censure him.

Fast-forward 65 years, and Douglass Carter’s warning had come true, but by that point, the journalism establishment had become too mesmerized by the show to stop it.  The truth broke cover early, in February 2016, with CBS CEO and Executive Chairman Leslie Moonves’ remarks to The Hollywood Reporter: “The money’s rolling in and this is fun . . . I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us.  Sorry, it’s a terrible thing to say.  But, bring it on, Donald.  Keep going.”

Wonder what Ed Murrow would have made of that.  He recognized a dramatic news story as well as anyone, and he certainly understood the economics of his profession.  However, he used drama to illustrate and explain, not just to cash in.

Moonves was salivating over potential advertising revenue, but a similar impulse existed on the other side of the newsroom wall.  NPR reporter Jim Zarroli summed it up in a 2019 tweet: “I know a lot of people may have trouble understanding this, but no reporter was crying when Trump won. Whatever journalists think of him as citizens, he is a great story. It’s actually been, well, fun covering him.”

Granted, Zarroli wrote that before we’d heard about COVID-19, but it came after refugee children had been torn from their families and put into cages, some of them dying there; after corruption was obvious; after racist violence had become practically commonplace.  I, for one, haven’t seen anything more recent from him to say, in effect, “let me re-phrase that.”

It’s pretty hard to escape the conclusion that, for some journalists, at least, outrages, even crimes, were secondary to the “fun” of covering the man responsible.  Yes, stories about the outrages appeared, but, just as Douglass Carter described, Trump’s next out-there tweet could turn the Fourth Estate’s attention on a dime.

The day after Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 election, the Washington Post’s media critic, Margaret Sullivan, looked back at how her compatriots had performed, and while she had some praise, her take included:

“When he said ‘jump,’ journalists all too often said ‘how high?’  Some of this was about ratings and clicks; some of it was just because the latest outrage was irresistibly newsworthy.  He was a deeply abnormal president, but we constantly sought to normalize him, treating his deranged tweets like legitimate news and piously forecasting, every time he sounded the least bit calm, that he was becoming ‘presidential.’”

Politico’s Ben White shortly thereafter essentially confirmed Ms. Sullivan in a tweet:

“Deep down in places you don’t talk about at cocktail parties you want him tweeting those tweets. You miss him tweeting those tweets. … And the sweet rush of outrage that followed. If you say you don’t you are lying.”

Not everyone saw it that way.  Sullivan, in another column, recalled how she sat at her keyboard on November 8, 2016, her hands shaking.  Nearby, in the Post newsroom:

“One young Black editor had tears in her eyes, not saying much but clearly aware — rightly so — that Trump’s ascendancy was an existential threat, not just to her but to something much larger. She understood, at a visceral and an intellectual level, that a misogynist con artist who sympathized with white supremacists was about to do a whole lot of damage.

“An older staffer (White, male and a former foreign correspondent) tried to counter her reaction by offering a bit of perspective — predicting, also rightly, that we were all about to have what every journalist yearns for: a ‘great story’ to cover.”

One journalist saw the likely consequences for millions of people; the other saw a professional opportunity.

To their defense, journalists face a culture light-years distant from the one than Murrow worked in.  Many in Murrow’s “See It Now” audience were stunned and repelled by what they heard and saw.  By contrast, over the last four years, tens of millions of Americans cheered what they saw and heard.  One woman entering a Trump rally early in his tenure was asked by a journalist whether she believed what she heard from him.  “Anything he says,” was her response.  Nothing short of a cult grew up around him, and their fervor was such that thousands of armed members stormed the U.S. Capitol building a few weeks ago, intending to stop Congress from certifying the election results.

Several years ago, VOX writer David Roberts described America as plagued with “tribal epistemology,” meaning, “Information is evaluated based not on conformity to common standards of evidence or corresponding to a common understanding of the world, but on whether it supports the tribe’s values and goals . . . ‘Good for our side’ and ‘true’ begin to blur into one.” 

Roberts zeroed in on the right-wing media that has taught audiences to reject the traditional sources of knowledge in favor of an entirely separate reality as the culprit.  Trump’s man Steve Bannon, formerly head of Breitbart, exploited a version of that as a strategy: “flood the zone with shit.”  As another VOX writer, Sean Illing, explained in his piece last year, the idea is not to engage in a traditional competition of ideas but instead to convince people the truth cannot be known, so they should look for a strong leader to trust and follow.

While I grant those points, traditional journalism, as an institution, nonetheless abetted this in several ways.  First, it allowed entertainment values to overtake news gathering and reporting.  The worst professional sin was no longer being wrong, but being boring, and while it’s possible to write or broadcast solid stories in engaging ways, it’s much easier—and cheaper—to focus on the superficial than the substantive.  That makes you an easy mark for the hustlers and hucksters, and, at some point, you cross the line and not merely the target of their grift, but a participant, passing along what you’re told with only the barest critique, if any at all.  

Second, being a participant means having access, influential people talking to you, shaping how you view events.  In turn, granting access creates a bond between the journalist and the source.  They’re members of the same club, and membership nurtures a certain arrogance., which in turn colors reporting.  As Sullivan also wrote, “We know because we hang out with people who know.”

Larry Tye, a celebrated journalist and biographer, last year published “Demagogue,” his book on McCarthy, and makes comparisons to Trump.  Despite the damage both men wreaked, however, Tye insisted in an interview we should not despair.  

“I see it as a good news story,” he said. “Every demagogue in American history, from Huey Long to Governor Wallace of Alabama to most importantly Joe McCarthy, given the rope, every demagogue has hung themselves. More importantly, given the time America has discovered its better nature and rejected the bully. It takes too long at times for us to do that, but I’m confident going forward that we’ll continue to do that.”

Considering how close we just came to losing our democracy -and how close we are, still – I am not sure I share his level of confidence.

Later,

The Violence That Has Come and the Violence Yet to Come Have Been Building for a Long Time

“I said, ‘Fuck the voting; let’s get right to the violence.’”

Roger Stone, advisor to Richard Nixon and Donald Trump, 11/2/20

I’m writing this a few days ahead of Election Day and a week after the vicious attack on Paul Pelosi.

Like millions of other Americans, I was disgusted at the Republicans’ response to the attack: mockery and, if you get right down to it, cheerleading.  As with Kyle Rittenhouse, the right applauded the violence and even started up a defense fund.

But, thinking about it—and I grew up in a hard-right, Midwestern Republican household—I realized I should not be surprised.  Violence, threatened or committed, has been part of the Republican DNA for a long time; it has only become more public in the last several years.  And its purpose is not random; we are in the middle of an ongoing attempted coup.

It exploded on January 6^th, 2021.  The attack on the Capitol had been planned, funded, supplied, and coordinated—they even had t-shirts made—even as the Secret Service dragged its feet and the recently appointed Secretary of Defense sent out a memo forbidding the District of Columbia National Guard from doing anything to aid local law enforcement in meeting the attack without his personal approval.  The clear intention was to disrupt the electoral vote count and overturn the 2020 presidential election.

But the seditionists had another goal: assault and quite possibly assassination.  A primary target was the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.  They prowled the building, calling her name.  A few days later, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes (now on trial for seditious conspiracy) said, “We should have brought rifles.  We should have fixed it then and there.  I’d hang _____ Pelosi from the lamppost.”

The thug who attacked Paul Pelosi had the same intent.

This follows years of growing right-wing political violence, both threatened and committed.  I worked in the U.S. Senate when Timothy McVeigh murdered 168 people—the youngest victim was three months old—in Oklahoma City in 1995 and staffed he hearings that followed.  More recently, we witnessed the murder of Srinivas Kuchibhotla in Kansas in 2017, the killing of Heather Hyer in Charlottesville later that same year, and the plot to kidnap (and undoubtedly harm) Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020.  Since then, in the hysteria whipped up by right-wing activists about CRT and COVID, school board members were the targets of threats.  Election workers have been similarly threatened (e.g., this, from Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/kill-them-arizona-election-workers-face-midterm-threats-2022-11-06/), and armed thugs showed up around outdoor voting drop boxes in Arizona.  Social media is rife with threats; I saw a photo the other day of a pickup with “Shoot Your Local Liberal” in the rear window.

It’s clear tens of thousands of armed people are chomping at the bit to shooting.  They are being goaded—as if they needed much—and cheered on by Republicans and by outlets like FOX.

All this has deep cultural roots.

Back before his batteries went dead and he became more focused on his celebrity than his job, Hunter Thompson was a solid journalist with a particularly good eye for harbingers. I think these bits, culled from his very good book on the Hell’s Angels, forewarned us about what’s happening now:

“The Angels are prototypes . . . A toad who believes he got a raw deal before he even knew who was dealing will usually be sympathetic to the mean, vindictive ignorance that colors the Hell’s Angels’ view of humanity. There is not much mental distance between a feeling of having been screwed and the ethic of total retaliation, or at least the kind of random revenge that comes with outraging the public decency . . . Their image of themselves derives mainly from Celluloid, from the Western movies and two-fisted TV shows that have taught them most of what they know about the society they live in. Very few read books . . . What little they know of history has come from the mass media, beginning with comics . . . so if they see themselves in terms of the past, it’s because they can’t grasp the terms of the present, much less the future.”

This is the mindset we’re dealing with.

Bits of Thompson’s book were devoted to explaining the mix of tribalism, resentment, and sense of exclusion that bound the Angels together:

” . . . the total retaliation ethic: when you’re asked to stay out of a bar, you don’t just punch the owner—you come back with your army and tear the place down, destroy the whole edifice and everything it stands for. No compromise. If a man gets wise, smash his face. If a woman snubs you, rape her . . . . . The streets of every city are thronged with men who would give all the money they could get their hands on to be transformed—even for a day—into hairy, hard-fisted brutes who walk over cops, extort free drinks from terrified bartenders, and thunder out of town on big motorcycles.”

That simmering resentment has been a major political tool for the right for more than 50 years.  I imagine no matter what happens November 8^th, there will be a violent reaction, either in celebration or out of revenge.

There is a familiar, if not entirely sourced, story that, following the Constitutional Convention’s vote to approve the draft document, Benjamin Franklin encountered Elizabeth Wiling Powell, a prominent Philadelphia figure, wife of the mayor, who asked, “Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”  To which Franklin is supposed to have replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

235 years later, we are dangerously close to losing it.

Later,