The third theme running through 2015’s Sifts has been Black Lives Matter. All year in the weekly summaries, I called attention to whatever the latest case was of unwarranted police violence caught on tape, from Walter Scott to Laquan McDonald.
In March, the Justice Department ripped the veil off the predatory police-and-municipal-court system in Ferguson, and the racist policing that enforced it.
[T]he City of Ferguson relies on fines for a major portion of its revenue. It regularly budgets for fines to increase, and it pressures the police department to meet its budget goals by finding more offenses it can cite citizens for. Its municipal court is an opaque, inflexible system that is hard to navigate, particularly if you are poor and/or lack transportation.
As a result, a minor initial offense can snowball into an endless and expensive series of interactions if a citizen fails to appear in court when expected (whether notification of a court date has been received or not) or fails to pay the full fine assessed (regardless of the citizen’s ability to pay).
In short, the Ferguson justice system is predatory and the citizens are the prey.
The counter-attack from the Right was that BLM is anti-police, or even promotes violence against police. I tried to answer that in “Rich Lowry’s False Choice“. (The choice was between the bad racist policing so many black communities see now, and no policing at all.) I drew the implicit conclusion from Lowry’s BLM-slandering article:
So that’s your choice, black America: Live in completely lawless communities, or STFU whenever police kill young blacks they already havesubdued, or shoot down young blacks who are doing nothingwrong. You can have police who continue misbehaving the way they have been, or no police at all. There is no third alternative.
A second objection came from people who claimed to sympathize with BLM’s issues, but found BLM tactics unnecessarily rude, as when two young black women shut down a Bernie Sanders speech in Seattle in August. In “Why BLM Protesters Can’t Behave“, I raised the question “What if you must be heard, but no one listens to your polite voice?” and quoted an activist:
I’ll tell you why. It’s because nobody listens to black people until we fuck their shit up. That’s what works. And we are trying to survive, so that’s what we do.
In “Protesting in Your Dreams” I called out Ben Carson, and all the other people who somehow blame BLM for the non-existence of the protest movement they’d prefer to see, but who don’t lift a finger to start that “better” movement.
But what if your purpose is to support the status quo, and maybe to gain the gratitude of the Powers That Be by helping derail and delegitimize the only effective action that’s currently happening? Then you should do what Ben Carson is doing: Fantasize about protest movements that could be happening, but aren’t.
Because that’s one thing the Powers That Be can always count on: Fantasy protests never change anything.
And finally, in “Samaritan Lives Matter“, I answered the “all lives matter” point, using a frame that Christian social conservatives should be able to understand.
The point, I believe, of making the third man [in the Good Samaritan parable] a Samaritan rather than a generic human, is precisely that saying “A Samaritan is my neighbor” would stick in a Judean’s throat, while “Anybody can be my neighbor” probably wouldn’t. “Anybody can be my neighbor” is an abstract feel-good idea a Judean could hold in his head without raising any of his specific prejudices.
The same thing is going on with “Black Lives Matter”. It isn’t meant to say “Black lives matter more than white lives” any more than Jesus was trying to say that Samaritans are better than Judeans. The point of saying “Black lives matter” is that it sticks in the throat of a lot of white Americans. By contrast, “Lives matter” and “All lives matter” are nice, feel-good abstractions. When we say them, we can think about generic people — who we probably picture as white.
All year, gay rights has had to compete with claims of “religious freedom”. I should have predicted that: If you look back in American history, bigotry has always hidden behind religion.
As 2015 began, same-sex marriage was clearly headed to the Supreme Court. The ruling in Obergefell v Hodges wouldn’t come until June, but both sides were making their final push to bend public opinion in their favor. So in February, I wrote “When Hate Stays in the Closet” to answer what seemed to me to be the two most reasonable-sounding arguments against same-sex marriage. (A consistent gripe I have about the national debate is that all sides tend to focus on the most hateful and unreasonable arguments made against them, and leave the more reasonable ones untouched.)
On April 6, “Religious Freedom: Colorado’s sensible middle way” explained the principles involved in the various cases involving bakers, photographers, and other folks who felt their religious convictions should allow them to not serve gay couples who were planning their weddings. The key principle, which was already embedded in First Amendment cases and didn’t need any new religious-freedom laws to enforce it, was:
a business open to the public should be (and I believe is, without any new religious-freedom laws) free to refuse to endorse an idea, but it should not be free to refuse service to people merely because they practice or promote that idea.
So if a baker refuses to put “Gay Marriage Rocks” on a cake, that’s his First Amendment right. But if the shop sells wedding cakes to the public, it isn’t free to refuse a wedding cake to a same-sex couple.
I continued on the religious-freedom theme in May with “Turning the Theocracy Against Itself“, making the point that the new religious-freedom laws were clearly intended only for conservative Christians, and predicting that
If “religious freedom” laws end up giving atheists and Muslims the same consideration Christians are claiming, Christians will repeal those laws themselves.
For example: Inscribing “In God We Trust” on the money forces atheists either to do without the convenience of a national currency, or to hand out pieces of paper that denounce their own religious views. How can any non-sectarian religious-freedom law not ban that?
In May, I gave my best explanation of why I think bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional, even though the people who ratified the 14th Amendment probably never envisioned protecting same-sex couples.
In current law, the [legal] roles of husband and wife are virtually interchangeable. … So the claim that gays and lesbians want to “redefine marriage” has it exactly backwards. During the last century-and-a-half, marriage has already been redefined. And in marriage as it exists today — rather than during the Revolution or the Civil War — what’s our justification for refusing its advantages to same-sex couples?
In short, the Constitution and the 14th Amendment haven’t changed, but the world has changed around them. Nor is the Supreme Court being asked to “redefine marriage” or to pass a “judicial law” legalizing it. That’s not what a court is for. But we do need the Court to tell us what “equal protection” is going to mean in the context of today’s marriage laws.
Also in May/June, the Josh Duggar molestation scandal broke. For reasons I can’t recall, I resisted devoting an article to it, but a segment of a weekly summary was of article length and scope, concluding:
Morality, as I conceive it, is about how we’re all going to live together on the Earth without making each other miserable. If you picture it instead as a private interaction between yourself and the Divine Lawmaker, I think you’ve still got some growing up to do.
In early June, the Bruce/Caitlin Jenner story suddenly put transgender issues in the headlines. I had never thought about the topic seriously before (and it showed; ever since, commenters have been educating me about how not to inadvertently give offense). But rather than mask my own squeamishness, I decided to explore it to see what insight it could give me into the people who saw the celebration of Jenner as a “snapshot of just how corrupt, how morally corrupt, how morally bent, how morally twisted, how morally confused, how morally bankrupt we have become”. In “What’s So Scary About Caitlyn Jenner?” I announced an abstract principle that I should probably break out into its own article sometime: Everything you thought was a category is actually a continuum.
I think the unifying principle of social conservatism is the desire to believe that the categories in our heads — male/female, black/white, good/evil, friend/enemy, and so on — correspond to real and solid divisions in the external world. Social conservatives increasingly retreat into an information bubble as it becomes more and more obvious that what they want to believe simply is not true. Binary categories are just kludges evolution has provided to help us simplify a world too complex for our brains to fully grasp.
When the Obergefell decision arrived in June and same-sex marriage became legal nationwide, I was pleased by the result but (once again) disappointed in Justice Kennedy’s reasoning.
Justice Kennedy got the right result for the wrong reasons, and that will eventually cost us. Not in other marriage cases – that’s over, just like everybody says. But Kennedy’s soaring rhetoric about the dignity of gay relationships wasn’t supported by a sound legal framework that we can use in, say, employment equality cases.
By founding his decision on a vague “right to marry” that he scries out of the word liberty in the 14th Amendment, Kennedy fed conservative rhetoric about “redefining marriage” and “judicial activism”. In the long run, I believe the reasoning that will stand is the equal-protection argument above, which I learned by reading the lower-court decisions.
After Obergefell, opponents of same-sex marriage largely went into denial, claiming that the other branches of government (or some popular uprising) could still stop this abomination (which has been happening in Massachusetts for more than a decade with no visible ill effects).
The opponents hate to be called bigots, and argue that their opposition is based on religion, not hatred. So it’s completely different than say, the opposition to interracial marriage in the 1960s. In order to make that argument, you have to be completely ignorant of history, so I tried to fix that with a history lesson in “You Don’t Have to Hate Anybody to be a Bigot” (the year’s most popular new post). After reviewing the religious arguments that have justified segregation and slavery, I concluded:
There’s nothing new about nice, salt-of-the-Earth people who sincerely believe that certain other people are undeserving of empathy or respect or fair treatment. There’s nothing new about those beliefs being expressed and justified in religious terms, or put forward by ministers and theologians.
Quite the opposite, that’s the normal situation.
In other words, it is totally typical for Americans to hide their disregard for their neighbor behind their love of God. Today’s Mike Huckabees and Kim Davises are heirs to a long tradition of religiously justified bigotry, even if they would rather not claim that legacy.
In his Obergefell dissent, Chief Justice Roberts raised the specter of polygamy as the next step down the slippery slope. In July, I examined that possibility, finding that (A) it’s not nearly so simple a step as Roberts implied, and (B) it’s also not the horror that he imagined.
By September, we had the Kim Davis saga, which I covered in “Is Kim Davis a Martyr?” I describe the standard of purity Davis and others want to apply here — that Christians shouldn’t involve themselves in other people’s sins in any way — as “a ‘sincerely held belief’ that was invented solely for this purpose.” I see no reason to take it seriously.
As the year ends, the push to define religious freedom broadly — for conservative Christians, if no one else — continues, accompanied by the self-justifying fantasy that American Christians are persecuted. We’ll undoubtedly see more states pass laws that legalize discrimination against gays, and since the male-Catholic-conservative majority on the Supreme Court (Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Kennedy) shows no signs of grasping the problem yet, it wouldn’t surprise me if they extend the religious-freedom principles in the Hobby Lobby decision even further in 2016.
I don’t see this trend stopping until unpopular religious groups start claiming their equal rights under these laws and interpretations, and forcing conservative judges to explain why they don’t deserve the same consideration Christians get. When those laws start protecting the broadly defined religious freedom of Muslims and pagans and atheists, conservative Christians will lead the repeal effort themselves.
I started 2015 with clear expectations about how I’d cover the campaign. But by Fall, I had to back up and try to answer a more fundamental question than the ones I ‘d been addressing: WTF?
Back in January, I had it all laid out.
I figured that for the first half of the year I’d resist the temptation to speculate about who was and wasn’t running, whether Clinton and Bush were inevitable nominees or not, and what the earliest Iowa polls meant (because they probably didn’t mean anything). Presidential politics has a way of crowding out all other political thought, and I wasn’t going to play that game.
By summer, I’d be looking at the candidates one-by-one, and cutting through the media’s endless horse-race coverage to focus on where each one wanted to take the country. I figured I’d have to sort through all sorts of tax-and-budget schemes, education plans, environmental positions, programs for giving more or fewer undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship, and so forth. I’d have to argue that both global warming and racism are real, tax cuts don’t pay for themselves, privatization doesn’t work, the market isn’t going to fix inequality by itself, and so on. Different faces, different specifics, but basically the same philosophical battle the country has been having for decades.
Instead, we’re talking about throwing 12 million people out of the country, and banning Muslims from coming here at all. We’re discussing what fascist means, and whether one of our front-runners qualifies. A sizable chunk of the country believes that Planned Parenthood has a lucrative business in harvesting fetal organs, and wants to shut down the government (or maybe start shooting people) to put a stop to it.
In short, things didn’t go the way I expected.
The divergence started simply enough: Large numbers of candidates got into the race so early that I had felt I had to start covering them at the end of March, when I wrote my introduction to the Republican primary process. Shortly afterwards, I started my 2016 Stump Speeches series, which was intended to focus on each candidate’s implicit or explicit answer to the question: “Where does America need to go and why am I the person to lead us there?”
In retrospect, that looks ridiculously naive.
Democrats. On the Democratic side, I sort of did what I intended. I confess to ignoring Martin O’Malley, even though I’ve seen him twice and he seems like a competent guy. But he never convinced me that he brought anything special to the race, in policy, in message, or in electability.
Chafee and Webb were gone before they caught my attention. Biden didn’t run. Lawrence Lessig tried to run, and his exclusion from the process is an interesting and disturbing story I’ll get around to telling eventually. That left Clinton and Sanders.
I covered Sanders’ announcement speech and a later speech he gave at the conservative Christian Liberty University. It was easy for me to like Bernie and his message, but less easy to imagine him leading the party to victory. I know the polls don’t detect that problem yet, but I find myself wondering what completely bogus issues the Republicans will be able to throw at him if they start seeing him as something more than just a tool to use against Hillary. (I lived through 1988, when Bush the First was able to completely dumbfound Mike Dukakis by making a serious issue out of the Pledge of Allegiance. You never forget an experience like that.) Coming from the relatively pristine political environment of Vermont, is Bernie ready for that? Can he keep his composure when he’s waist-deep in bullshit? I have serious doubts.
Hillary strongest argument, from my point of view, is that she has endured everything the GOP could throw at her for more than 20 years. (The all-day Benghazi hearing in October was a microcosm of their inability to beat her down.) But what did I think of her as a person and what could I believe about her as a president? Is better-than-a-Republican all I can say about her?
So I did my homework. I pulled three Clinton speeches into one article, and added the insight I got from reading three books by her and two about her. After spending that much time listening to her author’s voice, I kind of get Hillary now, in a way that I don’t think most of her critics on the left do. If God tasked me with picking our next president, I’m sure I could find somebody I liked better. But I’ve gotten to be OK with Hillary. I will probably vote for Bernie in the primary to send a message, but when Clinton is nominated — as I expect her to be — I’ll have no problem with that. Given that we live in a you-can’t-always-get-what-you-want world, Hillary will do fine.
And then, suddenly, we were in the Year of Trump, and any hope of a sensible, substantive discussion on the Republican side went away. It wasn’t just Trump; it was also what everyone else thought they had to do to compete with him. There was a chunk of the electorate energized by Trump, and suddenly everyone had to try to reach it.
I characterized one Republican debate as “Three Hours in Bizarro World“, but basically all of them have been that way. Fact-checking them has been pointless, because the distortions, lies, and mis-statements of fact have not been isolated incidents that can be picked out and corrected. The Republican campaign is happening in a completely different reality from the one I live in.
One of the most striking takeaways from the first two Republican debates and Tuesday’s first Democratic debate is that the two parties do not just disagree on solutions to domestic and foreign policy issues — they do not even agree on what the issues are.
That’s the root cause of the country’s polarization: People who want to solve a problem can usually find a way to compromise their solutions. But you can’t compromise about whether something’s a problem or not. If one side is discussing climate change while the other is trying to decide how big a wall to build on the Mexican border, what’s the compromise?
Eventually, I stopped trying to explain that Ben Carson’s “tithe” tax plan wouldn’t work, or why Jeb Bush’s claims about his economic record in Florida don’t stand up to scrutiny. I didn’t quite realize it at the time, but by the Fall I was trying to answer a more fundamental question: What the fuck?
I end this political year with more humility. I thought I knew what it meant to cover a presidential campaign, and it turns out that this year I didn’t. It’s not about taxes or infrastructure or education or drone strikes any more. Maybe someday it will be again, but for now I’ve still haven’t gotten past “What the fuck?”
I think I’ll be working on that question for a considerable chunk of the year to come.
It’s the final Monday of 2015; time for the Yearly Sift. Today I’ll assess what the Sift’s themes of the year have been, link to the most popular and most significant articles, provide a handy list of links to all the books I reviewed this year, claim my most and confess my least prescient comments, link to a list of all the year’s opening quotes, and tell you how the blog has been doing in terms of readership.
The themes of the year should start coming out soon, and I’ll try to get everything done by noon.
Porter is one of six officers charged in Gray’s death, and Porter was tried first because prosecutors hoped to use his testimony in the subsequent cases. It’s not clear where the prosecution goes from here.
and Chicago police corruption
The Laquan McDonald story just keeps getting worse. It isn’t just that we have video that shows a police officer blasting away at McDonald for no apparent reason, contradicting all the official reports. It’s that lots of other police officers lied to cover for the killer.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel has already fired Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, and many are calling for Emanuel’s own resignation or for a recall election. But just changing faces won’t solve this. The Mayor — whoever that turns out to be when the dust settles — needs to make it a priority to change the culture of the Chicago Police Department. What Emanuel has said so far, that he takes responsibility “because it happened on my watch” makes him sound like an innocent bystander, and just doesn’t cut it.
Neil Sternberg of the Chicago Sun Times raises the key issue:
The motto on Chicago squad cars, “We Serve and Protect,” is a phrase without an object. “We serve and protect whom?” The implication is the people of the city of Chicago, and to be fair, much serving and protecting goes on, all the time, all day, every day. … But the ooze from the bad apples spatters [the good police officers], big time. The routine competence and occasional excellence of the department is undercut by a general atmosphere that could be emblazoned on their cars as “We serve and protect ourselves.” The attitude is that their job is so dangerous that their first duty is to each other, and it fosters an insular world of corruption and cronyism.
and that the government will stay open
A budget deal got done. Ezra Klein has a good summary. The bill includes money for the medical bills of the 9-11 first responders. There’s no defunding of Planned Parenthood or blocking of Syrian refugees.
Students were not asked to translate the statement or to recite it. The lesson was found to be in line with Virginia Standards of Learning for the study of monotheistic world religions.
It was similar to a previous assignment that involved drawing Chinese characters, and came out of a standard text.
Well, maybe it was predictable that some Christian parents would object, but who could have predicted how far out of control the situation would spiral? Due to “a deluge of ‘profane’ and ‘hateful’ messages from around the country” the school operated under lockdown on Wednesday and Thursday. Thursday evening, extra-curricular activities were cancelled. Friday, following the advice of local law enforcement, all the district’s schools and offices were closed.
Remind me: Which side are the terrorists supposed to be on?
At Wheaton College in Illinois, tenured political-science professor Larycia Hawkins posted on Facebook that part of her Advent worship this year would be to “stand in human solidarity with my Muslim neighbor” by wearing the Muslim headscarf, the hijab. She said that, as a Christian, she saw Muslims as fellow “people of the book”, and quoted Pope Francis saying that “we worship the same God”.
That was too much for the Wheaton administration, who suspended her indefinitely, commenting:
Some recent faculty statements have generated confusion about complex theological matters, and could be interpreted as failing to reflect the distinctively Christian theological identity of Wheaton College.
Yale theologian Miroslav Wolf, whose book Hawkins had referenced, isn’t buying that the motives behind her suspension are “theological”.
Hawkins asserted that Muslims and Christians worship the same God. She did not insist that Christians and Muslims believe the same things about that one God. … There isn’t any theological justification for Hawkins’s forced administrative leave. Her suspension is not about theology and orthodoxy. It is about enmity toward Muslims.
… When Hawkins justified her solidarity with Muslims by noting that as a Christian she worships the same God as Muslims, she committed the unpardonable sin of removing the enemy from the category of “alien” and “purely evil” other.
It seems to me that once you declare that there’s only one God, you lose the option of claiming that other people worship a different God. You can claim that they have crazy beliefs about God and worship God all wrong, but you can’t claim their omnipotent Creator of the Universe is a different being from your omnipotent Creator of the Universe.
BTW: I wonder if the administration’s unwillingness to interpret away their differences with Hawkins has anything to do with the fact she is the only tenured black woman on the Wheaton faculty. One of the ways unconscious racism and sexism plays out is in the presumption that “he must have had a good reason to do or say that”, while women and blacks are likely to be seen as radical or irrational.
No idea whether there’s any connection or not, but a dozen or so girls at Vernon Hills High School in Illinois have also started wearing a hijab in solidarity with Muslims suffering discrimination.
While we’re talking religion: Fontbonne Academy, a Catholic prep school for girls in Milton, Massachusetts, hired a guy to be director of food services. When he filled out his employment form, though, he listed his husband as his emergency contact. The school rescinded the job offer “because his marriage was inconsistent with the teachings of the Catholic Church.”
Since being Catholic or having a lifestyle consistent with Catholic teachings had never previously been a requirement for directing food services, the guy sued. The school tried to argue that this wasn’t discrimination against gays. (You can be gay, you just can’t get married.) But courts aren’t that stupid, so they lost.
This pattern shows up a lot among people who think they aren’t prejudiced against anybody: I don’t have anything against you or your people, I just object to your attempt to live a normal life. (Go ahead a be transgendered. Just don’t use public bathrooms.)
Franklin Graham, heir to his father Billy’s evangelistic empire, is calling for an end to Muslim immigration “until the war with Islam is over”.
Graham also said Islam is not compatible with American values and therefore the U.S. might have to shut down mosques.
This is precisely why the Founders wanted to separate church and state: Graham’s version of Christianity may see itself at war with Islam, and think that Islam is incompatible with its values, but that crusade has nothing to do with the United States of America.
And before we leave religion entirely, Vox has a great article about the dilemma of Western imams when they see young people getting radicalized. You don’t want them learning Islam with only radical internet chatter for guidance. But
if they do and try [to help] these young people, and for whatever reason it doesn’t work, then they get in trouble. [Police] come knocking at the door saying, “You were in touch with this person and they went overseas. What did you tell them?”
One of the article’s most important observations comes early:
Mosques are where radicalization is stopped: They provide vulnerable Muslims with a sense of community, thus overcoming the isolation that can allow online extremist propaganda to seep in, and they give imams an opportunity to intervene in troubled lives and counteract extremist ideas.
Unfortunately, that kind of social work isn’t what imams are trained for.
There’s also the story of the New Jersey teacher who claims she was fired mostly for being a Muslim; not in so many words, of course, but because she did things (like show a Malala video) that would have been no problem for a non-Muslim teacher. I’m not making a bigger deal out of this because so far all we have is the teacher’s version of events.
but more people should be talking about Flint
Other than Rachel Maddow, national news media hasn’t shown much interest in the Michigan Emergency Manager Law, which allows the governor to appoint a manager for cities and towns that get into financial trouble. The manager essentially replaces the local government, and has the power to do just about anything but raise taxes. (Because taxation without representation would be tyranny, but having your union contract voided without representation is OK.)
As Rachel points out, though, this is a very radical notion: that democracy gets in the way when you’re trying to pay your debts, so it just makes good sense to install what is essentially a dictator. (In practice, the Michigan cities that get in trouble tend to be overwhelmingly black, so to the extent that this law is in the American tradition at all, it’s the American tradition of disenfranchising black people.)
In Flint, one way the emergency manager tried to save money was to start using water from the Flint River rather than continuing to buy lake water from Detroit. Lots of other cities use river water without any problems, but there is an issue: River water is more corrosive than lake water, so (unless treated) it has a tendency to dissolve lead out of pipes, raising the amount of lead in the water.
Well, Flint didn’t take proper precautions, so the lead level in Flint water has spiked, a fact that is likely to lead to permanent neurological damage in Flint’s children, ranging from lower IQs to mood disorders. Friday night, Rachel devoted most of her show to this story, starting with a very enraged reporting of the facts, and followed by an interview with the doctor who found elevated lead in Flint children’s blood.
and you might also be interested in
ProPublica’s “An Unbelievable Story of Rape” is both important and heart-breaking. An 18-year-old woman said she was raped. But when police and her former foster mothers started to doubt her story, she admitted that she made it all up. Then they caught a serial rapist who had her in his notebook, and found the pictures he took.
The reporters do a good job of not demonizing the police involved in the case, most of whom are women. Figuring out what to make of the testimony of someone who has been traumatized is genuinely difficult, and the detectives’ training didn’t adequately prepare them for a case like this.
In the middle of an otherwise serious poll, PPP asked 532 Republican primary voters whether they would favor or oppose bombing Agrabah. 30% said yes and only 13% no. 41% of Trump voters favored bombing Agrabah.
Agrabah is fictional; it appears in the Disney movie Aladdin. You have to wonder what results they’d have gotten if they’d asked about bombing a real city in a Middle Eastern country our government is on good terms with, like say Riyadh or Abu Dhabi. A similar question in a poll of 532 Democratic primary voters found only 19% willing to bomb Agrabah, with 36% opposed.
The Republican responses to reality-based questions were pretty remarkable as well. 34% support Trump. Combined with Ted Cruz’ 18%, that’s a majority. 54% support Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims entering the country. 46% support a national database of Muslims. 36% believe the totally baseless claim that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheered when the Twin Towers fell on 9-11.
Interestingly, 55% of the Republicans support raising the minimum wage to $10 or higher.
Fareed Zakaria debunks the “mystical powers” Republicans assign to the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism”. (Read his WaPo column or watch him present it on CNN.) Zakaria has been using the phrase himself since 9-11, so he can testify that “it gives absolutely nothing in the way of an answer or strategy to deal with terrorist attacks.”
The best proof that calling radical Islam by its name provides no solutions is that the Republican candidates had none at Tuesday’s debate. After all the huffing and puffing, the most aggressive among them proposed more bombing, no-fly zones and arming the Kurds.
These are modest additions to Obama’s current strategy, each with its own problems. … judgment calls, not no-brainers.
… Strangely, after the GOP candidates boldly and correctly described the enemy as an ideology — which is much broader than one group — they spoke almost entirely about fighting that one group. Even if the Islamic State were defeated tomorrow, would that stop the next lone-wolf jihadist in New York or Paris or London?
Zakaria calls attention to a great line by Seth Meyers:
So [Obama] used the words ‘radical,’ ‘Islam,’ and ‘terrorism,’ he just didn’t use them in the right order. Which would be a problem if it was a spell and he was Harry Potter, but he’s not, so it isn’t.
I’m way behind in my debate watching. Let me say, though, that I’m pleased to see Clinton and Sanders continue to take the high road. Sanders famously refused to make an issue of Clinton’s emails in the first debate. In Saturday’s, Sanders apologized for the data-theft incident that made such a flap this week; Clinton accepted and said they should move on.
The issues of Reconstruction continue to animate today’s political rhetoric.
One of the central words in conservative rhetoric is freedom. The far-right members of the House are the Freedom Caucus. Nate Silver did the math, and found that the 2012 Republican platform mentioned freedomfour times more often than the Democratic platform. At times they even push it to absurd lengths: To chide France for not supporting the invasion of Iraq, House Republicans renamed their cafeteria’s french fries “freedom fries“.
Freedom is so universally cited by conservatives that liberals often satirically suggest the explanation “because freedom” for any conservative proposal that doesn’t add up. (Wonkette: “Ben Carson will defund commie liberal colleges, because freedom.” Josh Marshall has used “Because Freedom” as a satirical headline at least twice.) Freedom, they’re suggesting, is just a buzzword conservatives throw out whenever they have no substantive justification for what they want to do.
Its not that Democrats don’t like freedom, but they tend to talk about particular freedoms (freedom of choice) rather than capital-F Freedom as an abstract entity. They’re more likely to talk about rights: voting rights, abortion rights, civil rights, and so on.
There are, of course, a large number of counter-examples in both directions. (Gun rights, for example, or FDR’s “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear”. [1]) But in general, the parties are talking about two subtly different concepts: Freedom, particularly the way conservatives use it, is inextricably linked to small government: Freedom means the government doesn’t get in your way.
Rights on the other hand, only exist if society provides some method of enforcement. Without a court you can appeal to when your rights are violated, and ultimately, without a police force or army that will enforce that court’s judgments, you don’t have any rights. Black children, for example, didn’t begin to acquire a right to an equal education until President Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock. Rights require some kind of government to enforce them, and if the forces that want to violate your rights are strong, you need a really big government. [2]
A simple example: If you want to be able to buy a little marijuana and smoke it without fear of narcs busting down your door, you want freedom. But if you want to be sure that what you buy really is marijuana, that no toxic or addictive chemicals have been added to it, or that the seller won’t just bash you over the head and take your money without giving you anything, then you’re looking for your rights as a consumer. Your freedom just needs the government to get out of your way, but your rights require government involvement. [3]
The relative value of freedom vs rights depends in large part on how much power you have. If you are wealthy, well-connected, or otherwise privileged, then there are all kinds of things you could do, if government would just stay out of your way. But if you are poor, then the barriers you face have more to do with your lack of resources than with government regulations.
Powerful groups can defend their own prerogatives whether they have government-enforced rights or not. Nobody has to force lunch counters to serve whites; no parent has to go to court to make the local public school offer courses in English; Christian children aren’t pressured to say “under no God” in the Pledge of Allegiance; and men in the workplace don’t have to wonder whether a glass ceiling is holding them down. But the rights of less powerful groups depend on government.
In the course of a typical workday, a woman who makes fries at McDonalds isn’t all that constrained by the government. Sure, taxes are taken out of her paycheck; she has to keep her hair covered while preparing food and wash her hands after using the bathroom; and she faces the threat of jail if she skims from the till, but the whims of her shift manager are a far bigger source of oppression than all the pencil-pushers in Washington.
On the other hand, the guy who owns her McDonalds franchise faces constant assaults on his freedom. He can’t pay his workers the $5 an hour he thinks they deserve, even if they’re so desperate they would have to take it. He can’t demand that they work in unsafe conditions. He can’t extract sexual favors from them. His kitchen has to face health inspectors. He has to make sure the trash is properly disposed of. Zoning keeps him from expanding to the new location he wants. And on and on and on. Everywhere he looks, there’s a regulation or a bureaucrat or a potential lawsuit. Tyranny, that’s what it is.
Several of those restrictions on his freedom are what the government has to do to establish the woman’s rights. She has a right to a basic level of respect and fair treatment from her employer, and (without government) she lacks the power to make him respect those rights.
That’s why American political rhetoric about freedom has such a bizarre history: a lot of it comes from slave owners. “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?” Patrick Henry demanded in the speech that ends with his memorable: “Give me liberty or give me death!” But he died owning 65 slaves. James Madison enshrined freedom of speech and freedom of religion in the Bill or Rights, but owned over 100 slaves. Thomas Jefferson is said to have owned 600 slaves in the course of his life, and a sizable chunk of his surviving descendants were fathered on a slave.
Confederate rhetoric was full of freedom, and the corresponding threat of “tyranny” or “slavery” (for white Southerners) if their cause did not prevail. In the first line of his famous speech “Slavery a Positive Good“, Senator John Calhoun warned that if the South didn’t respond to even the slightest encroachments on the institution of slavery, Southern whites were “prepared to become slaves”. In his inaugural address, Confederate President Jefferson Davis invoked “the consent of the governed” to justify a government that disenfranchised not only all its black subjects, but many poor whites as well. “All we ask is to be left alone,” said Davis. Left alone, that is, to enslave others.
The things powerful people want to be left alone to do have changed over the years: Now they want to be able to pollute rivers, get miners killed, refuse to serve gays and lesbians, use the public schools to promote their religion, put obstacles in front of minorities voting, and so on. But the basic rhetoric has stayed the same: If you just keep the government out of everybody’s way, then we’ll have freedom.
And it’s true: We will have freedom, but we won’t have any rights that more powerful people want to take away.
To see these concepts worked out in the most extreme way, pick up Gregory Downs’ recent book After Appomattox: Military occupation and the ends of war. It tells the story of the post-surrender occupation of the South by the U.S. Army, and the official state of war that continued until the last Confederate state had its representatives seated in Congress in 1871.
As I’ve described several times before, the Reconstruction Era is the unspoken reference behind a lot of the current conservative usage of tyranny, particularly as it relates to tyranny being overthrown by armed civilians. The tyranny in question was the military occupation of the South, which was absolutely necessary to guarantee any rights at all to the newly freed slaves. A terrorist insurgency by Confederate veterans eventually made the occupation more costly than the North could stomach, and black rights all but vanished after the troops were withdrawn, leading to the Jim Crow era.
Downs describes the philosophical shock that many Northerners suffered when they realized that slavery couldn’t be eliminated just by issuing proclamations or passing Constitutional amendments.
Wartime emancipation and the postsurrender struggle against slavery forced Northerners to examine the question of whether people could be free without the intervention of the government.
The law might say one thing, but the facts on the ground said something else.
[S]lavery endured on the ground well after the end of fighting. Of the nearly 4 million slaves in the United States in 1860, the vast majority were still held in bondage as the Confederate armies surrendered.
Slaves only became free when troops were around to prevent the masters re-asserting their ownership.
Ambrose Douglass, held a slave in North Carolina, captured the relationship between emancipation and the soldiers’ presence. In his area, “I guess we musta celebrated ‘mancipation about twelve time … Every time a bunch of No’thern sojers would come through they would tell us we was free and we’d begin celebratin’. Before we would get through somebody else would tell us to go back to work, and we would go.”
Many whites saw the same reality:
Arkansas’ U.S attorney similarly wrote that “he who stands between the late master and the freedmen for their protection, must be backed by the power of the bayonet.”
To the former Confederate, though, “bayonet rule” looked more like this:
Northerners knew they wanted to end slavery, but had no clear notion of what freedom would mean for the ex-slaves.
As freedpeople taught officers about the enduring power of slavery, soldiers and ex-slaves together developed the notion that freedom meant accessible rights. … [E]x-slaves found it easy to invoke rights as the measure of what it meant not to be enslaved. As slaves, they had virtually no rights they could defend in court. Looking to the experience of free people around them, they defined freedom in part as the opportunity to have these basic rights — marriage, control of children, property ownership, travel, and contract — protected by the government. … Instead of a march to freedom, with its connotations of separation from the state, freedpeople and soldiers described a walk toward government.
In particular, black men’s right to vote was established on paper by the 15th Amendment. But in reality, it only existed only where federal troops guarded the polling places. When the troops were withdrawn, Confederate veterans terrorized blacks who tried to vote. Ultimately, new state governments elected almost entirely with white votes disenfranchised blacks almost entirely until the federal government re-inserted itself into the situation in the 1960s through the Voting Rights Act.
Downs draws the conclusion:
[L]ooking at the story after Appomattox forces us to confront the dismaying, necessary fact that our own contemporary freedom and civil rights are in some ways the products of war powers. Even the rights we cherish are often fashioned by coercion.
So bear that in mind the next time you hear a conservative politician wax eloquent for freedom and against big government. How many of your rights will have to go away in order to allow the powerful people he represents the freedom he wants them to have?
[1] The confusion is amplified by two rhetorical back doors. In general “freedom from X” is a roundabout synonym for “the right to not-X”. So “freedom from want” includes a right to a minimum level of food and shelter. Conversely, the “right to be let alone” is a fairly broad description of what I am calling “freedom”.
[2] One popular conservative trope is that our rights come from God, not from the government. Ted Cruz said:
What is the promise of America? The idea that, the revolutionary idea, that this country was founded upon, which was our rights, they don’t come from man. They come from God Almighty. And it’s the purpose of the Constitution … to serve as chains, to bind the mischief of government.
While an appeal to the Declaration of Independence’s soaring rhetoric “All men … are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights” is inspiring, it is also ineffective, because God is notoriously poor at policing rights-violations in a timely manner. His mills, after all, grind slowly.
[3] In this case, as in many others, the two notions are in opposition. What about the seller’s freedom to lie to you, to cheat you, or to bash you over the head? Your rights depend on restricting his freedom.
I’m at a Holiday Inn Express with the slowest wifi in the known world, so any time predictions on this week’s Sift are iffy.
This week’s featured post will be “Small-government Freedom vs. Big-government Rights”. It explores a key difference in liberal and conservative rhetoric: When conservatives talk about “freedom”, they usually mean the absence of government, while when liberals talk about “rights”, they typically are referring to prerogatives that wouldn’t exist if government weren’t there to defend them. The clearest illustration of this difference in American history comes from a new book After Appomattox by Gregory Downs, which shows how the rights of the newly freed slaves depended on the presence of Union soldiers, who suppressed the freedom of the Southern whites to re-assert their dominance.
The weekly summary will cover developments in the Freddie Gray and Laquan McDonald police-violence cases, the deal to keep the government open, a variety of bizarre religion stories, the Flint water scandal, and a very sad and instructive story about a rape investigation, before closing with some Bad Lip Reading of Star Wars.
Times? Geez, who knows? I’ll stay with it until I get stuff out.
This week everybody was trying to figure out what to do about Donald Trump
In “How Republicans Trumped Themselves” I pull together a chorus of voices that diagnose the Trump phenomenon as a symptom of a larger ill: The GOP has been pandering to bigotry for decades, and conservative media has created a safe zone for every kind of conspiracy theory, no matter how poorly grounded in reality it might be. Now that bigotry and that disregard of facts is being used against them.
In “The Leadership We Need” I take a more abstract look at leadership, and describe how to tell a Leader from a Demagogue.
Meanwhile, this guy knows how he wants to respond.
The COP21 conference brought every country to the table, they all accepted the science of climate change, and they agreed to work together to do something about it. But some proved more ambitious than others, and the rich countries didn’t come up with enough money to get the best deal possible.
The bottom line is that the agreement gets us far closer to containing climate change than we were two weeks ago, but still far short of where we need to go. In fact, we won’t even know for years what it will accomplish. How much the agreement reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and through that reduces warming, will depend on whether countries meet their targets for curbing emissions and deploying renewable energy and whether they ramp up their ambition in the years ahead.
and the aftermath of mass shootings
Here’s what we now know about the San Bernardino shooting. 14 people were killed and 22 injured by a married couple, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, who were killed in a subsequent shootout with police. In the attack they used two semi-automatic rifles, two semi-automatic pistols, and an “explosive device”.
The weapons were acquired legally by Farook and his friend and next-door neighbor, Enrique Marquez. They were illegally modified to accept larger magazines. Farook took out a $28K loan two weeks before the attack, which may have been used to buy guns, ammunition, and other supplies for the attack.
Farook was born in the United States. He was a Sunni Muslim who traveled to Saudi Arabia more than once. In 2014 he met Malik there, and she came to the U.S. under a fiancé visa. While they appear to have had online contact with terrorist groups, so far there’s no indication that they actively belonged to a larger cell, or that anyone (with the possible exception of Marquez) helped them plan or finance their attack.
Apparently, they were both already “radicalized” when they met. Farook attended a mosque, but stopped going there a few weeks before the attack, so it seems unlikely that somebody there whipped him up to do this. There is no evidence that anybody else at the mosque was involved.
In short, San Bernardino does not seem to be an example of the kind of thing we’re being told to fear, and wouldn’t have been prevented by the anti-Muslim proposals we’re hearing: The attackers weren’t infiltrated into the U.S. by ISIS, they weren’t recruited at a mosque, and it’s not even clear that keeping Malik from entering the country would have prevented Farook from launching an attack.
To me, Farook and Malik look a lot like Robert Lewis Dear, the Planned Parenthood shooter, or Dylann Roof, the Charleston church shooter. None of them seem to have been agents of a larger conspiracy, but they are all examples of what can happen when unstable people believe the kind of hateful, irresponsible rhetoric that is so easy to find these days, and then easily acquire deadly weapons.
To me it barely matters which crazy set of beliefs your violence arises from, whether it’s that ISIS is the proper political heir to Muhammad, that the white race is facing a battle for its survival, or that Planned Parenthood is dismembering babies for profit. As responsible people, we should be trying to prevent all crazy ideologies from inspiring violence.
Liberals understand that there are theological and political differences between the different kinds of radical fundamentalism that lead to terrorism, but we are keenly aware that people who pick up a gun in the name of God have more in common with each other than they do with the rest of us.
Meanwhile, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau welcomed the first planeload of the 25,000 Syrian refugees he has promised to take in by the end of February. So Canada, a country with a fraction of our population, is taking in 2 1/2 times as many refugees.
But I’m sure that when the Canadian experiment goes smoothly, and none of their refugees gets involved in terrorist attacks, American conservatives will see the err of their ways and happily increase the number of Syrians we’re giving refuge to. Won’t they?
and Islam
For some reason, this year I haven’t gotten around to writing all the book reviews I planned. So as a down payment on a longer post, I’ll leave you with two quotes from recent books about Islam. Both books portray Islam as more diverse and more flexible than is commonly imagined by the American media.
A text’s repeatability in part depends on the potential for its old words to produce new results. A verse remains powerful not because it imposes its meaning on the future, but because it accommodates the future’s needs: The verse is not bound to its author or its first audience.
Some years ago, I attended a dinner at Princeton University where I witnessed a revealing exchange between an eminent European philosopher who was visiting from Cambridge, and a Muslim scholar who was seated next to him. The Muslim colleague was indulging in a glass of wine. Evidently troubled by this, the distinguished don eventually asked his dining companion if he might be so bold as to venture a personal question: “Do you consider yourself a Muslim?” “Yes,” came the reply. “How come, then, you are drinking wine?” The Muslim colleague smiled gently. “My family have been Muslims for a thousand years,” he said, “during which time we have always been drinking wine.” An expression of distress appeared on the learned logician’s pale countenance, prompting the further clarification: “You see, we are Muslim wine drinkers.” The questioner looked bewildered. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Yes, I know,” replied his native informant, “but I do.”
and Peanuts
Marking the 50th anniversary of A Charlie Brown Christmas, how the whole thing came to be, including a certain amount of the spiritual journey of Charles Schulz.
An attempt to enlist the Peanuts characters in the War on Christmas yielded some pushback.
On a blog he shares with his son, Sift reader Bill Camarda recently posted a piece he called “My America“, in which he presented a personal, positive vision of what America has been and could become. My point in mentioning it is not so much that this particular post should go viral, as that the idea behind should: What if people all over the country started writing their own “My America” and posting it to whatever blog, Facebook page, or other outlet they had access to? That might be a constructive response to the bigotry and hatefulness that seems to be running so wild these days — more constructive than wringing our hands and saying “Isn’t what Trump just said awful?”
I’m not sure what mine would say, but I’m thinking about it.
We’re not quite at the point of a government shutdown yet, but the agreement to prevent one is proving hard to work out.
Jon Stewart came back to The Daily Show briefly to try to shame Congress into taking care of the 9-11 first responders.
Russian production of T-shirts with anti-Turkish slogans has been delayed by disruptions in fabric imports from Turkey, Russian media reports said Wednesday.
President Obama’s reluctance to plunge deeper into the Syrian mess looks a lot better when you compare him to less cautious leaders, like Putin. Knowing when not to act is as big a part of leadership as knowing what to do.
and let’s close with some fascinating possibilities
Up until now, attempts to replace meat with vegetable products have ranged from unsatisfying to downright awful. But here are two attempts to attack the problem on a deeper level. First meat
In either case, the point isn’t to do away with animal products. But what if the number of situations where doing without them feels like a hardship got much smaller? That could make a huge difference in both public health and the environment.
When Donald Trump’s supporters are asked what they like about him, one phrase that always comes up is “strong leader”, and a contrast is drawn between Trump and President Obama, who is a “weak leader”.
People who think that way must have a very different view of leadership than I do. But this is the kind of thing we don’t talk about much. In our public discussion, leadership is like art: We all think we know it when we see it, so we don’t need to define it.
But I’m thinking we do need to define it, so I’m going to take a few paragraphs to say what I think leadership is, and how our current would-be leaders are succeeding or failing at it.
Here’s what leadership means to me: the ability to see a practical path to a better world, and to convince enough people to join you on the journey that you can actually get there together.
Given that definition, there are several ways that would-be leaders can fall short:
Idealists envision a better world, but have no practical plan for getting there.
Visionaries get so far ahead of the People that few can follow them.
Academics lack the ability to communicate their vision or persuade the People to believe in it.
Panderers do not present a vision at all, but simply tell the People what they want to hear.
Demagogues take advantage of the People’s ignorance, greed, and fear to gain power for themselves. If they lead anywhere, it is to a harsher, more hate-filled, and more violent world.
This doesn’t correspond directly to a Left/Right spectrum, but there is a broad correlation: Liberals have a weakness for Idealists (of course a book about a “better world” with a view from space on its cover is liberal) and Visionaries, while Conservatives love their Demagogues. All political movements have their Academics and Panderers.
A good way to sum up the Clinton/Sanders argument among Democrats is that Clintonistas see Sanders as a Visionary, while Sanders supporters see Clinton as a Panderer. Sanders’ program sounds great to most Democrats, but the question is whether the larger public is ready for it. And Clinton is saying a lot of progressive things right now, but will she still be saying them in the general election when she has a different audience?
One test of leadership that all the Republican presidential candidates are failing is to tell the American people the truth about climate change: It’s happening, it’s caused by burning fossil fuels, and there will be serious economic, humanitarian, and even military consequences if we don’t take dramatic action. No one on the Right wants to hear that (and people on the Left aren’t wild about it either), so the conservative candidates (most of whom are smart people who probably know better) avoid the problem when they can and openly deny it when it comes up. That’s pandering.
Democrats pander in a more subtle way. Candidates (especially Clinton) are reluctant to face the gap between the size of the country’s problems and the size of their proposed solutions. Raising the minimum wage or re-jiggering student loan programs isn’t going to reverse the country’s polarization into rich and poor. Effective gun control will require more than just background checks and assault-weapon bans. And so on.
There’s a tricky road to walk here: A Leader would be pushing for the small steps s/he can hope to take in the short term, while continuing to build support for actions big enough to make a difference. (One possible role model is how before Pearl Harbor FDR walked the narrow path between Visionary and a Panderer as he coaxed the public towards entering World War II. He didn’t seek a premature declaration of war that Congress would have voted down, but he prepared for war with the nation’s first peacetime draft and an increased defense budget. And by swapping destroyers to Britain and then getting the Lend-Lease program through Congress, he clearly identified the country with the Allies.)
The difference between a Leader and a Demagogue can be hard to see when you get caught up in the passions of the moment, but if you introspect a little you can feel it in your heart. A Leader calls out the best in his or her followers. Under the influence of a Leader, you feel more courageous, more hopeful, more generous, and generally more heroic.
These famous words of JFK’s inaugural address could come from either a Leader or a Demagogue:
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
What marks that address as leadership is what so many of the people he inspired went on to do: join the Peace Corps, or go to Mississippi for the Freedom Summer. They took risks and inconvenienced themselves for the benefit of others. Listening to Kennedy made them better people.
But those who listen to Donald Trump (and to a lesser extent several other Republican candidates) become angrier, more fearful, and more self-centered. They want to make their enemies suffer. They want to send other people to fight in the deserts of the Middle East, but they don’t volunteer to go themselves. Trump tells his followers not that they need to sacrifice, but that they’ve sacrificed too much already. It’s time for other people to sacrifice: the Hispanics, the Muslims, the Syrian refugees, the inner-city blacks.
Both Leaders and Demagogues will call on you to be strong, but the Leader will have you focus your strength on the real enemy, and take the risks associated with opposing strength to strength. The Demagogue will offer you scapegoats, weaker people you can beat up on.
Both a Leader and a Demagogue will leave you feeling energized, but if you introspect honestly, you can tell the difference: The Leader calls on you to find virtues you didn’t know you had, to be better than you have ever been. The Demagogue gives you permission to be worse.
You can’t complain just because somebody demagogues better than you do.
This week the airwaves were full of Republicans wringing their hands: What can the Party do about the wave of bigotry and hatred that Donald Trump has unleashed on their presidential primary race? How can they avoid a backlash that could wash away their 2016 chances?
Keeping Muslims out. His initial announcement wasn’t very specific — Trump’s proposals seldom are — and the first campaign spokesperson who elaborated said that American Muslims who leave the country wouldn’t be able to come back. (“Mr. Trump says ‘everyone’.”) But Trump backed off of that. So fine, Shaq can attend the Rio Olympics if he wants, and Dave Chappelle can do a show in London. They don’t have to quit America for good because of their religion.
But if a businessman from Indonesia wants to come over to negotiate a deal, or his wife wants to shop on Rodeo Drive, or his children want to see Disney World or study engineering at Purdue — no. They can’t come, because they’re Muslims. Now, their passports don’t have MUSLIM stamped on them, so it’s not clear how we’d know to keep them out. (Asking would only keep out the honest Muslims, which kind of misses the point. Maybe the Trump administration could require everybody who goes through customs to spit on a Qu’ran or something.) But let’s not get lost in the details of enforcement. Trump hasn’t thought about them, so why should we?
Trump supporters wave off criticism by pointing out that the ban is supposed to be temporary. But Trump defined the end point as “until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on”. When CNN’s Don Lemon asked what that meant, Trump replied:
Why is there such hatred and such viciousness? Why is somebody willing to fly airplanes into the World Trade Center? … Where does this hatred come from? Why does it come? We need to figure it out.
So basically, Trump’s ban would stay in place until he’s willing to learn things he doesn’t want to know. That doesn’t sound very temporary to me.
This time he’s done it. The immediate talking-head response to Trump’s proposal was that this time he had finally gone too far: The American people would recoil in horror at the thought of turning away refugees and immigrants and students and tourists because we don’t approve of their religion, a religion shared by millions of loyal American citizens, decorated American soldiers, and two members of Congress.
Well, most of the American people, maybe. Whether or not they are horrified, 57% told an NBC/WSJ poll that they disagree with keeping Muslims out of the country, while only 25% agree. (Count CNBC pundit Larry Kudlow among those who disagree, but only because he wants something more sweeping: “I say seal the borders. … We need a wartime footing if we are going to protect the American homeland.” And Laura Ingraham: “I’d do a pause on all immigration.”)
However, this is a primary campaign, not a general election. And Republican respondents were split: 38% for Trump’s proposal and 39% against. So in a multi-candidate field, the Muslim ban seems to be helping him. His lead in the RCP polling average is as big as it has ever been.
Locking up the racist/fascist vote. The anti-Muslim proposal increased the number of people willing to describe Trump as either a racist or a fascist — a term I discussed two weeks ago. But whatever you think of that usage, the undeniable racists and fascists have started welcoming Trump to their ranks. Former KKK leader David Duke has endorsed Trump, saying that he “understands the real sentiment of America”.
Visitors to the website for the Council of Conservative Citizens — a white nationalist group cited by Charleston church shooter Dylan Roof — will find a steady stream of pro-Trump articles.
BF quotes the white supremacist website American Renaissance:
If Mr. Trump loses, this could be the last chance whites have to vote for a president who could actually do something useful for them and for their country.
and neo-Nazi Stormfront radio personality Don Advo:
whether or not Trump wins, his campaign is “gonna give people the ability to come openly out of the shadows and really work very hard for something that will have a lasting effect.”
“This anger, this fire, is not going to go away,” he said. “It’s not going to go away at all. And that has not been noticed by the neocons — or perhaps we should them neo-Cohens — in the Republican Party.”
The Establishment still doesn’t understand. Republican establishment types may not grasp the implications of being “neo-Cohens” yet, but they finally do seem to be getting the message that Trump could be nominated, with catastrophic short-and-long-term effects on the Party. A year ago, it seemed possible that Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio might finesse a campaign that appealed to the Republicans’ Southern white base without being so blatantly bigoted as to drive Hispanics and all other non-whites and non-Christians into a coalition against them. But that option has pretty well vanished. (Second place in national polls and first place in Iowa have been taken by Ted Cruz, who is not that different from Trump.)
What Republicans still don’t seem to grasp, though, is that they did this to themselves. William Greider traces the problem back to the deal between Richard Nixon and Strom Thurmond that created the modern GOP, the “Southern strategy”. All that time, country-club Republicans and racist working-class whites have had little in common, but
Nixon and his successors hid behind ideology and obscured the contradictions by pursuing a strategy I would call “no-fault bigotry.” Every now and then, especially in election seasons, the Republicans played the race card in dog-whistle fashion to smear Democrats, with savage effect. The GOP never attempted to repeal civil-rights legislation but sought cheap ways to undermine enforcement and remind whites, South and North, that the party was on “their” side.
… So what caused the current rebellion in the GOP ranks? It finally dawned on loyal foot soldiers in the odd-couple coalition that they were being taken for suckers. Their causes always seemed to get the short end of the stick. The GOP made multiple promises and fervent speeches on the social issues, but, for one reason or another, the party establishment always failed to deliver. … the Republican establishment brought this crisis on itself by cynically manipulating its own rank and file.
But there is a strong element of bait-and-switch to this strategy. Whatever dog whistles get sent during the campaign, once in power the G.O.P. has made serving the interests of a small, wealthy economic elite, especially through big tax cuts, its main priority — a priority that remains intact, as you can see if you look at the tax plans of the establishment presidential candidates this cycle.
Sooner or later the angry whites who make up a large fraction, maybe even a majority, of the G.O.P. base were bound to rebel … So along comes Donald Trump, saying bluntly the things establishment candidates try to convey in coded, deniable hints, and sounding as if he really means them.
What [Trump has] done is to give marginalized Americans permission to hate. He doesn’t use dog whistles or code. His bigotry is overt. But the table was set by years of dog whistles and code. The very “un-American” sentiment that Republican elders now claim to despise has been a mainstay of conservative media for at least a decade.
“I used to spend ninety per cent of my constituent response time on people who call, e-mail, or send a letter, such as, ‘I really like this bill, H.R. 123,’ and they really believe in it because they heard about it through one of the groups that they belong to, but their view was based on actual legislation,” Nunes said. “Ten per cent were about ‘Chemtrails from airplanes are poisoning me’ to every other conspiracy theory that’s out there. And that has essentially flipped on its head.” The overwhelming majority of his constituent mail is now about the far-out ideas, and only a small portion is “based on something that is mostly true.” He added, “It’s dramatically changed politics and politicians, and what they’re doing.”
This trend may have gotten worse recently, but it isn’t new. David Frum wrote about it in 2011:
Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action phony doomed to inevitable defeat. Outside the system, social scientists worry that the U.S. is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western world, in which the children of the poor have less chance of escape than in France, Germany, or even England. Inside the system, the U.S. remains (to borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) “the only place in the world where it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from.”
Over the last ten years, everyone I know has lost a friend or family member or mentor to Fox News. Like me, they have watched helplessly as people they love have become part of the conservative punditry herd and, over time, traded their compassion for paranoia; their thoughtful opinions for manufactured outrage; and their empathy for hateful rhetoric.
It seems quaint now that, back in 2008, John McCain corrected a questioner who said that she couldn’t trust Barack Obama because he was “an Arab”. He defended Obama as “a decent family man and citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues”. (Trump, facing an even more outrageous questioner this September, did nothing of the kind. He later criticized McCain’s response, saying McCain was “harsh” when he “ripped the microphone out of the woman’s hands”. Actually, McCain reached for the microphone while saying, “No, ma’am.”)
But the McCain of 2008 was already a dinosaur in Republican circles. His younger running mate, Sarah Palin, catered to misperceptions of her audience, understanding that anything goes if it whips up your supporters.
Eight years later we have Donald Trump, who doesn’t know or care much about reality, but is really good at whipping up his supporters. Unreality, along with the irrational fears and passions it commands, is a powerful weapon in politics. The problem is that no one can own it. If you use it, you have no safe refuge when someone turns it against you.
The Weekly Sift 
