Everything old is back again

I was watching a film on PBS, a report on the '64 campaign, LBJ v. Goldwater.  I remember only that LBJ won that campaign (direct memory, I mean), and that I backed LBJ because he was from Texas.

Well, I was 9, so what do you want?

I don't remember the "Daisy ad," even though I saw it later and thought, for years, that I'd seen it on TV.   That ad is now given credit for most of the TV ads we see today, and all the money raised to buy TV ads that we abhor today.  Probably true; I'll accept the argument, anyway.

What was interesting was that Goldwater was a very controversial candidate, and was also credited, by Pat Buchanan in the film, with creating the split between the conservative and liberal (i.e., Rockefeller) Republicans (even saying "Rockefeller Republican" doesn't mean anything anymore.  Although, of course, Nixon was considered an arch-conservative Republican, and he'd be a liberal, not to say "progressive," politician today.  He established the EPA, after all.).  Buchanan argues that Goldwater fomented the split in party and the eventual dominance of that party by people like Buchanan (and worse).  So there wasn't the solid support for Goldwater that we've come to expect from political parties today, which is not the only parallel with Trump.

In fact, the film ended with a Democratic TV ad portraying a Republican agonizing over his choice for President and, after losing all the cons against Goldwater that fit into 60 seconds, deciding to vote for LBJ.  Yeah, you could run that one today with only minor changes (though, at 60 seconds, it would probably be on-line only.  Tl;dr, don't ya know; at least on the TeeVee.)

But it seems Goldwater didn't think he could win, and didn't much care that he wouldn't.  He ran as Goldwater, not as a winning candidate.  Buchanan said his father watched Goldwater's speech to the GOP, the speech where he said:  "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.  And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."  Buchanan said his father said something like, "Yeah, he's gonna lose."  Someone present at the GOP convention in the Cow Palace that year (sorry, lost the name) said he looked at a friend and said, "My God!  He's gonna run as Goldwater!"

Yup; history has an eerie way of repeating itself.

Goldwater really resented that "Daisy Ad."  On the other hand, he considered nuclear weapons "just another weapon" (not quite the "Why can't we use 'em?" of Trump, but close).  And he was shown on a TV news show, explaining that low-yield nukes could be used to defoliate the forests of Vietnam (probably more efficient than Agent Orange, but certainly with the same long-term health effects).  Considering this was in the day of Curtis LeMay, who argued FOR pre-emptive nuclear strikes, this was a slightly more active issue than it is today.  The use of nukes was, in other words, slightly more imaginable.  Goldwater hated that LBJ made Goldwater look like a trigger-happy fool.  Then again, as I think when I hear so many Trump defenders complain about how Trump is being portrayed in news reports:  truth hurts.

The other aspect of modern politics that was invented in '64 was the well-scripted convention.  It wasn't quite the yawnfest then that it is now, but there was no doubt LBJ was the candidate, so the Democratic convention was less a surprise in the end than the GOP convention (where Goldwater outmaneuvered Rockefeller for the nomination).  If conventions are now a 4 day advertisement for the party's nominee (and the party), it started when we were urged to go all the way with LBJ.

So we've been here before, with a major party so split over it's candidate it's doom seems sure.  The GOP wasn't destroyed by Goldwater, it probably won't be destroyed by Trump.  The campaign was ugly, but not as ugly as what we're used to now; and again, the truth hurts.  Trump lies so thoroughly he reinvigorates the old insult about every word he utters being a lie.  Goldwater actually turned out to be a decent politician, supporting what today would be considered wildly liberal ideas (like gay rights).  If he was a caricature in '64, it's because he left himself open to it.  "In your heart you know he's right" was too easily turned into "In your guts, you know he's' nuts."  The "Daisy" ad worked because it played into perceptions of Goldwater he himself created, knowingly or not.   That famous statement about extremism and moderation is not as nuts as some of the things Trump has said, but it is just as indefensible.

And besides, anytime you can change political history and win a political campaign by quoting (almost accurately) a gay ex-patriate English poet, it's a win-win; in my book, anyway.




A bonus, because they liked kids in ads in those days. And here's that ad I was talking about (ain't the internet grand?)

And yeah, just change the names to Clinton and Trump, and run this again.

The East Coast Media's Great GOP Hope

After my challenging of @GovChristie on @ThisWeekABC for his steadfast support of Donald Trump, @amandacarpenter dropped this fastball on @BulwarkOnline: "Chris Christie’s Bogus Blunt Talk" https://t.co/sTHJqyCpyy She threw that one right down the middle for a strike!

— rolandsmartin (@rolandsmartin) September 13, 2021

So Christie went to the Reagan library to denounce....He Who Must Not Be Named.

Seriously.  He wouldn't mention Trump's name.

HINT, HINT. What you, dear reader, are supposed to infer is that Christie is criticizing Trump. But without saying the word “Trump.” Because not saying Trump’s name makes it an even bolder and blunter foray into the marketplace of ideas. Or something.

Yeah, this article is not a transcript of the speech, but still:  you get the idea.  Funnier is how Christie tried to frame himself as the Heir To Reagan:

But whatever. Historical accuracy isn’t the point. The point is that Chris Christie wants you to think that Trump is Goldwater, the MAGA people are the Birchers, and that he, Chris Christie, is Reagan.

I know that's out of order, but you have to start there to work backwards and then read between the lines at what even this Bulwark writer won't say.  Let me go back to the paragraph just before the "HINT, HINT."

But let’s take Christie at his word for a moment. Just for giggles. The former governor took the audience back to 1962 when “the American political landscape was not unlike today’s” and talked about how terrible it was that Barry Goldwater pandered to the Birchers and how the party paid dearly for this mistake in 1964. Christie described the Birchers as “downright paranoid, at least as radical as the truth deniers and conspiracy propagandists of today.” 

“Not unlike today” has to include something else the times have in common: the persistence of racism. But let’s turn first to the situation of Goldwater.

Ah, yes; Goldwater was captured by the Birchers back in’62. Except the entire GOP nominated Goldwater.  This was back in the day when conventions were real events, and men were men and women were women, and other argle-bargle.  The GOP selected Goldwater, thrust him up against the "liberal" from Texas, and the race between the Westerners was off!  Goldwater didn't trudge his way across 50 states, garnering votes as he went.  He was selected by the party apparatus; which is to say things haven't really changed that much in the GOP in almost 60 years, isn't it? No mention here that LBJ "schlonged" Goldwater for LBJ's re-election (well, he'd been elected VP already).  I mention that because now we can go to the paragraph just after "HINT, HINT" (Everything revolves around that, doesn't it?  HINT, HINT, that's a clue!)

Anyway, in Christie’s telling, it wasn’t until Ronald Reagan’s “rejection of Birch extremism,” as this rather obvious ripped from the old-headlines political allegory goes, that the party started winning again. This flies in the face of history, obviously: The Republicans won with Nixon—bigly. And Richard Nixon, for all his faults, absolutely schlonged the Democrats in his re-election win.

Well, both analyses fly in the face of history because we’re also asked to overlook Nixon's racist "Southern Strategy," as well as Reagan's outrageously racist "welfare queen" stories, and his racebaiting by announcing his candidacy in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where he spoke ringingly and approvingly of states' rights.  You don't need a decoder ring for either of those messages. And they link Reagan to Goldwater and Nixon, as well as Trump. The more things change, as the French say.

I bring this up because the author doesn't; and because Trump and Trumpism are all about racism and white supremacy.  Something the Birchers were quite comfortable with, too, and another reason they backed Goldwater and feared LBJ.  So Trump can be Goldwater (electorally he certainly is, though Goldwater was a much more honorable public figure than Trump; crazy as a bedbug in 1962, but still far and away above Trump even then), the MAGA people (i.e., the GOP primary voters) can be the Birchers (in fact I welcome the comparison), and Christie can be Reagan, if he thinks that works.  Certainly the East Coast press did at one time.  Still, the question raised in the article and never returned to, is the only question that matters:

But the overriding question is: Why should anyone listen to Chris Christie?

Why, indeed?

" 'Run, run,' said the bird....

Rick Perlstein, whose books chart the rise of modern conservatism, discusses the wide-ranging effects of Richard Nixon’s pardon. https://t.co/QBO95bjd1K

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) January 15, 2021

One of the things that’s blowing my mind is that what we have heard from Republicans is, “This is divisive, and we need to look forward and not backward.” And what we heard from Democrats is very powerful moral witness about what this breach meant to the American constitutional order and arguments about why Donald Trump is responsible. What we’re not hearing is that the President of the United States has sole and unreviewable power to use nuclear weapons. Now, in that sense, we don’t have a Constitution. The President is sovereign. He has the power of life and death over the planet. So, I mean, he has to be removed from office, right? But we don’t see that argument. I wonder if there’s a sense that the public can’t handle the truth, that this is almost too much. This idea that there’s only so much reckoning that the American people can handle is the structural thing back behind all of this. 

This may be true.  It also may be the ultimate elitism (ironically).  It's certainly a question of democracy, and what democracy actually is.  After all, the people are the sovereign.  But can they handle the reckoning of their decisions, or their failure to decide? None of us do, but what do you do when the truth will drive the sovereign mad?  And don't we face that situation right now, and until noon on January 20th?  Isn't that why there are so many reports of what staffers are left in the White House avoiding the POTUS?

Before we go too far down that path, let's put this in the context of Mr. Perlstein's view of American history, at least as it relates to national politics:

Your historical project has tried to tell a story of American conservatism after the Second World War, and Barry Goldwater, as somewhat of a coherent story. Is what we saw on January 6th somewhat of a culmination of that story? Or do you think that there have been some important breaks that got us to this point?

I have two answers for that. The one is actually something that takes the semi-coherent narrative back almost to the founding of the nation, which is to the reactionary minoritarianism behind the Constitutional Convention and the South saying, “We’re not going to be part of this deal unless we put rules into place to guarantee that we have a veto power over the rest of the country deciding slavery is wrong.” Throughout the nineteenth century the South in various ways was trying to extend that logic, devolving into the force of arms when the parliamentary part of that project failed. We see that kind of reactionary minoritarianism in, for example, a rule within the Democratic Party that, until 1936, you had to have two-thirds of the delegates to be a Presidential nominee. That was the South’s veto, the white-supremacy veto.

And then, with the civil-rights movement, when you began to see this challenge to white supremacy, one of the things that happened is that reactionary minoritarianism devolved again into force of arms, which basically happens every time. And then you get the fact that the Republican Party makes a conscious decision to nominate an anti-civil-rights Presidential candidate [Barry Goldwater] in 1964. You see, basically, this project of making sure that the reactionary part of America has operational control, whether they’re in the majority or not, and whenever that seems to be under threat, we see more and more hysteria, more and more conspiracy theories, more and more violence. So, in that sense, it’s the apotheosis of something we’ve seen since the founding.

In another sense, Trump does really represent a break from the way the Republican Party has negotiated its bargain with demagoguery. There’s always been an element of that. You saw some of that with [Senator Joe] McCarthy, but there’s also been a disciplining function by the more establishment part of the Republican Party. So George W. Bush is willing to start a war on false pretenses, exploiting the anger that the country feels over 9/11 at the Arab world, but he also says, “Islam is peace.” Donald Trump, of course, feels no such compunctions. That’s both a continuation and a discontinuity. And now, basically, they’re learning the same thing that every kind of creature in Greek mythology learns when they tempt the gods.

I remember when the Tea Party started, a lot of liberals said, “Well, if these Tea Party lunatics get nominated for Senate seats, they’re going to lose those seats.” And in fact, Republicans did lose a lot of Senate seats because these people were too crazy. At the same time, it seems pretty clear after the past four years that, even if the insanity of one party leads to a few election losses, in a two-party system, you fundamentally need both parties to be sane, or you’re in a very bad place. And, with that in mind, what is the recipe to get a saner G.O.P.?

I don’t think Democrats have agency to change the Republican Party. But I do think that they have agency to weaken the Republican Party so that they have operational control of the government and can legislate in the interests of the majority of Americans. I mean, don’t forget that, alongside Donald Trump, we have Mitch McConnell literally turning the filibuster into a routinized process to make it impossible for legislation to pass. So, it all fits together.

The Democratic Party should endeavor to defeat the Republican Party. I see a lot of confusion among younger, more progressive Democrats, when Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi says, “We need a strong Republican Party.” I know what they mean. They’re following that neo-Madisonian insight that if there’s only one party, that party will be tempted to tyranny. The fascinating thing is, I don’t think that theory really holds because the Democratic Party itself is such a coalition with such strong, contending, moderate and leftist factions.

And I think he's right about what the Democrats can hope to do, although it has (as most analysis of such large issues does) that "And then a miracle occurs" quality in the ill-defined step two:

I wasn’t saying the Democratic Party will be tempted to tyranny but that, in a two-party system, each party is going to win sometimes. And if one is really bad, that’s going to be really bad for the country. Is the best people can do just to hope for Democratic wins?

That’s the best they can do. Look, I mean, when Richard Nixon was defeated and a new class of Democrats came into Congress, some good stuff happened. Gerald Ford had to sign some legislation that made our air and water a lot cleaner. One of the reasons I’m very hesitant to speculate about what happens next in history is, no one really saw Reagan coming. The idea that someone who never criticized Richard Nixon over Watergate would soon be seen as the redeemer of the country, or that a figure like Jimmy Carter, who seemed to have met the moment, turned out to be such a disappointment—that’s why I’m trying to kind of keep it simple, stupid. What the Democratic Party needs to do is to govern compassionately and well for the broad majority of the country and not negotiate with itself.

Although he's more pragmatic than my statement about his statement may leave you thinking he is:

A lot of people are comparing the report that McConnell is open to removal to Goldwater’s behavior during Watergate. [In 1974, Goldwater and the Republican Senate and House leaders told Nixon that they did not have the votes to prevent his removal, triggering Nixon’s resignation.] What did you think of that?

I think the American people and especially the American media love for people to comfort them with the belief that reconciliation is possible, and thus I think that the role of Goldwater in Watergate is profoundly overestimated. It was just to give Nixon the news that if he takes us to the outermost, he’s going to lose, and that’ll be a humiliation. It wasn’t looking Richard Nixon in the eye calling him to his senses. So, I think whatever Mitch McConnell’s up to, and I don’t intend to grasp the folds and recesses of his mind, it’s not that.

I read recently that Nixon had already considered resignation when the GOP Senators came to see him, and they almost convinced him not to just out of defiance to the demand.  And then he decided his first idea, resignation, was the better course; for him, of course.  If McConnell wants Trump out, it's because he's pissed over being chased from the Senate by thugs while Trump cackled with glee in the White House.  Good enough, but don't make more of it than it is.

"These are the stakes...."

100% fabricated and made-up charges, pushed strongly by the media and the Clinton Campaign, may poison the minds of the American Voter. FIX!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 15, 2016

He's really beginning to resemble the guy on the street corner talking loudly to himself as he takes his shirt off and puts it back on, and glares at the passing traffic.

Animals representing Hillary Clinton and Dems in North Carolina just firebombed our office in Orange County because we are winning @NCGOP

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 16, 2016

Can't believe these totally phoney stories, 100% made up by women (many already proven false) and pushed big time by press, have impact!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 17, 2016

Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 17, 2016

Just a random selection, but which is it?  Is Trump winning, and so Clinton is engaged in Watergate-like crimes to stop him in Durham, NC (a stronghold of Democratic NC voters)?  Are the stories of his improprieties having an impact, or is the problem voter fraud?  Of course, don't ask if there's evidence for any of this.

I saw my first Trump TV ad the other night.  Usually I don't watch the major networks (I'm too old for their target audience, I guess); but an ad came on that may have been running for months, and I wouldn't know.  An earnest young woman describes how she was assaulted and only fended off the attacker, who meant to kill her, because she had a gun.  I'm watching because I'm wondering what's going on, and at this point I smell a rat.  I noticed later she never gave her name nor any specifics that could prove this story true, and she's clearly a professional:  she's very comfortable on camera.  No Kenneth Bone, she.  She goes on to claim Hillary Clinton wants to take away our guns and our right to self-defense, which would of course leave this young woman dead on a street somewhere in the hellscape of modern America.  To prevent this, we must all vote for Trump.

As I watched I thought:  no, Heller was based on the individual right of self-defense, so Clinton can't take away that right, or your guns, even if she wanted to.  It was such a profound misunderstanding of the way Constitutional government works that it took me a minute to realize it was also a profound lie.  The incident itself was undoubtedly fictional, the whole ad a major leap beyond the implied instability of Goldwater in LBJ's famous "Daisy" ad.  That ad never mentioned Goldwater, and only slyly implied his Presidency would lead to nuclear war (although I'm not sure Goldwater wouldn't have used nukes in Vietnam.  He publicly stated he saw no reason not to, in order to win the war.).  Trump's ad, on the other hand, is an outright lie, with no basis in fact at all.  Every word in it is a lie, in the famous summation, including "and" and "the."

Or do we go into the dark?

The Pursuit Of Happiness And Me

Point is, these right wingers really BELIEVE Trump's claims of grievance, because he has spent 8 years getting Republicans to believe his propaganda. He has ALREADY thoroughly dismantled rule of law for Republicans. It's just normies don't get that yet.

— emptywheel (blue dacnis) (@emptywheel) October 13, 2024

Trump didn’t start it. Trump is the apotheosis. This started in the Cold War, quite literally , with a “young” JFK taking the White House away from Nixon the Commie Hunter (who was tight with Roy Cohen). And also the demise of Joe McCarthy (Eisenhower was a weak sister, probably because of all the Commies in his State Department). But the real catalyst was the failure of Goldwater.  

Trump is just Goldwater who believes the bullshit the mossbacks with money have sold him. The fall of Goldwater spurred the grassroots, closed doors movement of Viguerrie and Norquist (somebody had to fund them), which finally made Newt the Speaker of the House, and Clinton a vilified President (and if you think the NYT is bad now, find a copy of Gene Lyons’ Fools For Scandal. Everything new is old again.)

From Gingrich comes the Tea Party (a completely Astro-turfed group the political press accepted as “grassroots” like the gullible rubes they are) which led directly to Trump.

The only mistake that’s been consistently made is that America would wake up and shake off these “fleas” and return to the liberal vision that started with Kennedy (LBJ passed the Civil Rights Act as Kennedy’s (Johnson beefed it up), and as a tribute to the murdered President).  The situation now is the rule; Kennedy-LBJ was the aberration.

This is where I remind you the Warren Court dismantled the “rule of law” with more decisions than I have time to catalogue. It was pretty much received that way by the people who started working to overturn Roe a decade before that decision was handed down. Because they’ve been working to reverse the Warren Court since Brown v Board, a landmark decision today more honored in the breach than in the keeping.

And gutting campaign finance regulations? The VRA? Warren Court church-state separation jurisprudence? All done in accordance with the “rule of law.”

In fact, Trump talked a lot about ruling like a dictator in his one term. He did it in D.C. so he could hold a Bible upside down in front of a church. But he never managed it nationwide. Not that he won’t keep trying. But the rule of law set by legislation, thwarted him. (There are two rules: the law written into statutes, easily altered when the courts grossly misread legislative intent; and constitutional interpretation, which under the Roberts Court is almost wholly unrestrained. Trump v US is as wholly invented ruling with no basis in anything except the votes of 6 people. One rule has more constitutional validity than the other.)

The problem is not Trump. The problem is the electorate. American grievance is not about “economic anxiety.” It’s about having everything “my way,” because that’s what “the pursuit of happiness” means. Maybe not to Jefferson; but certainly to us.

The View From 30,000 Feet

It seems to me plainly wrong. Mansfield seems to be contrasting a “selfish“ voting ethos with a “public-spirited” one, but either can be pursued under RCV or FPTP alike. I’d even say it’s #RCV that’s better at getting you to think about other groups’ wishes.

— Walter Olson (@walterolson) July 14, 2021

I don't have a dog in this fight of which system of voting is better, but the argument against it being made here seems to be predicated on this point:

An interesting point indeed. https://t.co/2rGZxzvO6n pic.twitter.com/03KMsPfgwK

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) July 14, 2021

There is no system that is going to protect society's "common good" from the selfishness of individuals. That's how the American model was sold to us, and after four years of Trump we're all asking: "How did that work out?"

I'm open to the argument that the Gingrich/Goldwater effect is in play, that after Goldwater and since Gingrich selfishness has become the raison d'etre of political participation.  But part of that backlash is not just because Goldwater lost l, it is because LBJ took the shackles off of non-whites in this country (and rightly so).  That backlash spawned Gingrich and the bait shop in Arkansas (ask yer Grandpa!) and Trump and Proud Boys and 1/6/21.  The line is pretty damned direct.

Not that it wasn't coming anyway.  LBJ did the right thing; but the rest of us, by and large, didn't.  We were content to let him do it for us (sound familiar?).  A system of "checks and balances" is supposed to ameliorate rank selfishness, but is that system preserved or skewed by the Senate filibuster rules?  Is it preserved or skewed by voter ID laws, ignoring the 15th Amendment, criminalizing voting behaviors that are perfectly benign (like voting when you have been banned from voting because of your criminal record.  Why the hell does the "common good" need laws like that to protect itself?)  Even the system itself is only preserved if people choose to preserve it.  That's what's upset so many people about Trump:  he exposed the reality that this is not so much a system that protects us, as it is a system we must protect.  

This is not to say we are in danger of losing America.  80 million Americans turned out last No to oppose just that possibility.  Sure, 71 million voted for the former guy, but roughly 13% more voted for the victor.  And besides, incumbency is a helluva drug.  "Don't switch dicks in mid-screw" was the profane slogan in '72, when it referred to "Dick" Nixon and wasn't meant as an argument for re-election.  But democracies prefer stability:  it's seen as central to the "common good," and so incumbents have a built-in advantage.  Not that, in my lifetime, it helped Jimmy Carter or GHWBush; but it more often does than doesn't.  That's not an unalloyed good either (4 more years of Reagan and W weren't all that good for us).  But the shellacking Trump got was an honest-to-God repudiation.

Besides, selfishness is pretty much the way all things human play.  My concern for your well-being can be well-intended; it can also be misguided, even paternalistic. Then again, my concern for you is my concern for me, too; absolute selfishness is absolute disaster.  Ask any child who learned to mature into an adult (Trump is the exception that proves the rule).  If I'm sensible enough to realize your well-being is connected to mine (what else is government for but the preservation of well-being?), then the system works merrily.  Of course we're finding out how my well-being is connected to yours, with stories like this:

Republicans claiming workers are mooching off of unemployment are wrong — they just found better: WSJhttps://t.co/8Laq8kO04z

— Raw Story (@RawStory) July 14, 2021

Turns out people who can find better work than being your poorly paid servant will take that work! Who knew? Maybe it's time we paid more for meals out, rather than purchase them with the labor of the poorest among us? That's one lesson we might learn now; the other you'd have thought we'd have learned already, though:

Blistering CNN supercut takes aim at Fox and NewsMax for spreading 'deadly' propaganda 'as Americans die' https://t.co/IdBr5kkVrL

— Raw Story (@RawStory) July 14, 2021

‘What is wrong with them?’ MSNBC’s Mika hammers Republicans for undermining vaccines as COVID-19 surges https://t.co/zSltclNdeH

— Raw Story (@RawStory) July 14, 2021

That's the question, isn't it? And the only answer I have is:  selfishness.

“It just strikes me as enormously selfish.”
Unvaccinated Americans—many with a chance that people in other countries only can wish for to avoid a pandemic—spur a doubling in US #COVID19 cases in the past three weeks.https://t.co/GtM9IFDZJS

— David Beard (@dabeard) July 14, 2021

Now, do we have a system that will purge that from the body politic, or at least suppress it sufficiently to render it harmless?  You'd have thought self-preservation would do it, but that only works individually, and too often after the fact:

Florida man regrets waiting to get vaccine after COVID-19 destroys both his lungs https://t.co/JIS0jMK1CW

— Raw Story (@RawStory) July 14, 2021

'It's devastating': Unvaccinated woman thought she could ‘escape’ COVID-19 – now she says she’ll ‘never be the same’ https://t.co/aLnr7ZpP7Q

— Raw Story (@RawStory) July 14, 2021

To be fair, these people weren't necessarily selfish; they just made unfortunate decisions. They don't deserve the consequences of their errors, but those consequences came anyway, because basically the universe doesn't care and deals harshly but fairly in terms of consequences. I sympathize with these people; but covid doesn't. If you want to see selfishness about this subject, look no further:

'Killing kids to own the libs': Americans horrified after Tennessee shuts down all child vaccination programs https://t.co/l9cfqhKOIP

— Raw Story (@RawStory) July 14, 2021

The GOP in Tennessee I can blame; and I can wonder at the voters of Tennessee who will probably keep those people in power (I don't see a groundswell of political resentment in Texas after February, despite the fact 150 of us died and almost all of us lost power in the worst cold in recent memory).  But ideology and "owning the libs" and "true conservative" are still powerful motivators for too many voters.

Selfishness is a helluva drug.

Everything New Is Old Again (and again, and again...)

The GOP is surrendering to QAnon #MarjorieTaylorGreene and other extremists today even more than it did to the John Birch Society in the 1960s, the closest earlier equivalent. My take. https://t.co/1QXkferkyn

— Ronald Brownstein (@RonBrownstein) February 4, 2021

I'm old enough to remember this; and to remember when Barry Goldwater went from extreme right-wing crank to elder statesman and almost not crazy (turned out he wasn't quite as crazy as Curtis LeMay). The extremism of Goldwater paved the way for the liberal social policies of LBJ (but not a desire to stand down from Vietnam. LBJ was doomed to one term no matter what he did in Vietnam: had he de-escalated, he'd have been emasculated as too weak to be the C-in-C. He escalated, and got us so stuck in the tar baby even the briar patch couldn't get us loose.).

History may not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes.  Biden is not going to be LBJ (I don't think; who really knows?), but he's using the extremism of Trump to take the country to the other extreme.  He's not going to fulfill Sanders' wish list, but he's likely to come as close as LBJ did to fulfilling the "dream" of MLK (and a few other dreams as well, on a number of fronts).  After Korea and McCarthyism and with a rising Boomer generation demanding government do what only government could do, LBJ had something of a mandate for his sweeping actions.  After the pandemic and Trump's complete inability to even figure out where the light switches were, Biden was a sweeping and implicit mandate to do whatever Trump would not.  Much as LBJ had authority to be whatever Goldwater wouldn't have been.

May you live in interesting times.

You Mean….

The people at Nazi rallies in the 1930s were told their country was going to hell, their leaders were weak, there were forces secretly controlling the govt behind the scenes, and only one man could save them leading a nationalist movement to fight the socialists and communists.

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) September 18, 2022

...practically every political campaign I’ve heard (including for dog catcher) since I’ve been aware?

Even LBJ ran an ad promising nuclear annihilation if Goldwater won. W. told us Dukakis would release black rapists to come for our women. Nixon promised a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam, which would otherwise end in ignominy and national disgrace if a Democrat (Humphrey or McGovern) was elected. Pat Buchanan gave the speech at the GOP convention in ‘92 that “sounded better in the original German” and nobody in the GOP distanced themselves from it. Gingrich’s Contract on America was all about one folk, one party, one rule. That’s where the real emphasis on governance as exercising a power base rather than serving the country through consensus and compromise took root.

Does no one else remember: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!”?* Or that it was okay for a white man to say that, but no black man in America could be allowed to say the same thing? (The ones who came close were treated as enemies of the people. White people, of course.)

I even remember a lot of prominent Southern politicians who loudly proclaimed the country was going to hell because of the civil rights movement and new civil rights laws. They represented whole states, too, not just a gaggle of dead-enders following the freak show around.

Reports are Trump has about 5 million true believers behind him. That’s roughly the population of the Houston area. If all 5 million of those people voted in lockstep for Beto, it still wouldn’t be enough, alone, to get him elected governor.

Take a deep breath and calm down.

*Goldwater, in ‘64 (or so), if you don’t remember. And yeah, he lost by a landslide. And hardcore conservatives went to their graves insisting LBJ cheated to win that vote. Said the same about JFK (because Lyndon helped him win Texas. Which he did, but not through fraud.) Everything old is not new again, because it’s not even old.

There is indeed nothing new under the sun. 🌞 

If the only way to prevent the ascent to power of a party led by a mentally unstable autocrat, filled with seditious loons, and staffed by cowards and opportunists is to vote for a party that may be flawed but is not a danger to the Constitution, well, okay, Dan, you got me. https://t.co/MZ2P6TuFoV

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 18, 2022

I’m honestly hard-pressed to understand how that hasn’t been true since Goldwater, either.  🤷🏻‍♂️ Oh, well.

And promises to keep

Fascinating interview with Gary Hart this morning on Democracy Now! Did you know that, until the Church Committee started looking into COINTELPRO, Congress had never exercised any oversight of the CIA or the FBI?

Never!

Which explains why:

Basically, what the country is going through now is a rerun of what happened during periods of the Vietnam War, in which largely the Nixon administration undertook illegal activities to place American citizens under surveillance and accuse them of unpatriotic conduct, and justifying support for the war -- using support for the war as a justification for violation of constitutional rights and liberties. So, what's happening now is a rerun of history, in effect.

There is no cultural basis, no tradition, for this kind of oversight. But let's put that committee in context:

There had never been genuine congressional oversight of the intelligence community in the United States since the C.I.A. was formed in 1947. By and large, members of Congress did not want to know what was going on. When press leaks of unconstitutional behavior on the part of the administration occurred, there was public demand for some kind of investigation. That's what led to our committee.

We had eleven members -- six Democrats, five Republicans -- including the late Barry Goldwater and others, and we began a unique undertaking which was to try to find out what the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. and N.S.A. and others were up to. And it was during that that the most startling revelations had to do with our efforts to assassinate foreign leaders, particularly Fidel Castro, over two or three administrations, and this massive scheme to surveil American citizens.

The members were Goldwater, John Tower, Frank Church, Gary Hart, Philip Hart, Walter Mondale. Try to imagine a similiar committee today. Tower and Goldwater were certainly not "liberals" in their day. But try to imagine who would do what they did, today. Try to imagine members of both parties concerned enough about governmental activity and restrictions on governmental power. And this was in 1975. Gerald Ford was President.

As I say, there is no long history of Congressional oversight of intelligence activity. It goes back no further than 30 years, and began almost 30 years after the CIA was started. FISA came from the work of the Church Committee. The FISA court system is no older than that. It is no wonder the attempts at oversight now are so pathetic and wan. Even in an era dominated by partisan politics in a way we haven't seen in decades, it isn't in the culture of the Congress to look into what "intelligence agencies" are up to. Mostly, as Hart says, because Congress doesn't want to know. Like the public at large, they buy into the idea that there are dark things needed to "protect us," and the less we know about such things, the better (and safer) we will sleep. They, and the public, buy into the idea that government functions best when it has a "reasonable monopoly on violence." But that's the problem, isn't it? Government governs best which has the greatest monopoily on power over individuals, and that power need not be limited to violence in order to legitimate the government. After all, if it is only violence that is the standard, then only brutal rulers are truly legitimate. Surely government should have a right to a monopoly on certain kinds of power, the better to make life as comfortable as possible for those of us who do not run afoul of the government.

Surely? And if we grant government that right, isn't it better to remain chastely ignorant of what government must do in our name, in order to protect us from the projections of our own id? Welcome to reality as a Tom Clancy novel. Frankly, it was bound to come to this.

And so now we have COINTELPRO all over again. It's in the culture, in other words. Americans will always despise "big government," fed as we are on lies about "self-reliance" and "independent frontiersman" (who wouldn't have gone West if the gov't wasn't giving away land, offering military protection, and extending civilization, like railroads, out to them). And we will always look to government whenever we decide there might be monsters under the bed. Because one of the powers we seem determined to cede to government, is a reasonable monopoly on keeping the monsters, and the elephants, away.

So, as ever, we have miles to go before we sleep.

"In His Heart, He Know He's Right"

Barry Goldwater's campaign slogan from 1964, for those of you who don't remember (snot nosed punks!).  Goldwater was reaching out to supporters, claiming he was one of them.  Trump represents the reverse of that.  We are all Trump, he declares.  And if you aren't, get lost.

In more concrete terms, think of it this way:

“The way to create more power is by giving it away and empowering staff to achieve your goals,” [Scaramucci] maintained. “But Trump is incapable of this. He has hobbled the executive branch and made it extremely difficult for the Cabinet departments and agencies to coordinate. He has left most of these agencies understaffed, and the heads of the agencies are afraid to do things because of the president’s fickleness. Nobody feels empowered and they worry if they make a mistake, the president will come hunting for their heads.”

This is, at this extreme, entirely Trump's doing.  But Trump did not spring sui generis from the American electorate.  The ground for him was prepared carefully, and for a long time; and arguably, the preparation began in 1964, when the very conservative Goldwater was bested by the most liberal U.S. President in American history.

The result of that loss was a relentless effort to recapture and control the U.S. government by forces and ideologies embodied by Mitch McConnell, who cares only about power and wielding it, and doesn't give a wet snap for the republic or the people who live in it.  McConnell is really the more cunning, more accomplished, political face of Trumpism.  But Trumpism is just the clearest, purest, and most extreme expression of American conservatism since Nixon was forced to retire and never got to put forward his idea for a basic income (something still chatted about almost 50 years later, but still considered too extreme to ever implement.  Nixon was considered wise for considering it; even Bernie Sanders wouldn't go so far today).

After Nixon, conservatives recovered their authority through Ronald Reagan, who told us government should run like a business, if in fact it should exist at all.  During Reagan's tenure a plane ran off the runway in D.C. and wound up in the Potomac.  Reagan, following the press's lead, praised a lone individual who jumped into the river and pulled a few passengers to safety.  As others pointed out, it was government:  police, firefighters, ambulance drivers, paramedics, who saved the rest of the passengers.  But Reagan pointed to the brave individual who volunteered by jumping in the river on his own.  That was an example of America.  That what what Americans do, and they don't need government to tell them to do it.  No; we just need government to rescue everyone else.

But the image became the ideal, and once again we were off on the American mythos of how John Wayne won World War II singlehandedly (well, he did in the movies) and how the west was "won" by strong silent men who imposed their will on it, and went west to escape the stifling hand of government (never mind the reality, that without government urging people to go west, and giving them land when they got there, and clearing the way for the railroad to connect the two coasts, many of those western states would still be unpopulated wilderness).  And government, we were told, should be run like a business.

So now, finally, we have a businessman in office.  It's telling that Reagan was never a business man.  He was an employee of movie studios, and then a shill for detergent makers, and finally a politician as governor of California.  Jimmy Carter had actually run a business, but it was myth that mattered, not reality.  George W. Bush ran several businesses into the ground, and his father spent more time working for the federal government than actually working to create jobs, but the idea clung to Republican presidential candidates that they knew how things go done, and bidness was what got things done.  Small wonder Poppy cratered when he marveled at the scanner in a grocery store.  He didn't really know how business got done at all, was the message.

Newt Gingrich never did anything but work for government entities either, but like Rick Perry in Texas (who was in the same employment boat) it didn't matter.  What was good for American business was good for Republican office holders, and the culmination of this determination that the business of American government is business, we got Donald Trump.  A man with no business experience who hadn't quite managed to squander all the money his father left him (it's harder to do than you think to go through $400 million; Donald Trump is a testament to that, because Lord knows, he tried), Trump was elected because he sounded like a blue-collar worker (he's never done a days manual labor in his life) and he was accepted as a successful maker of businesses which in turn made jobs (even though almost every business he's ever put his name to has gone bankrupt, and his near-every business transaction has been a money-losing one).  Mostly, it turned out, what Trump was good at was marketing his name, and not investing the money Daddy left him so he never lost it all in his bad ventures; the investors did.

To this day, in his heart he knows he's right.  He's not right about anything, but it doesn't matter.  Purity of heart is not, in Kierkegaard's formulation, to will one thing.  Now, in Donald Trump World, purity of heart is to believe you are right despite all evidence and reality to the contrary.  Trump even managed to hire a lawyer who would go to the well of the Senate and declare that, so long as Trump thought he was right to do what he wants, he can't even be accused of doing wrong.  And thus Trump makes it all about himself; and thus do we go along with him.

Let's take another stab at explaining how Trump functions as the head of government:

“The U.S. government has the tools, talent, and team to help fight the coronavirus abroad and minimize its impact at home,” Klain writes. “But the combination of Trump’s paranoia toward experienced government officials (who lack ‘loyalty’ to him), inattention to detail, opinionated rejection of science and evidence, and isolationist instincts may prove toxic when it comes to managing a global-health security challenge.”

If Trump wants to protect Americans from what looks to be an impending global outbreak, he’ll have to turn to the government experts he’s disparaged in the past and set aside “his own terrible instincts, lead from the White House, and work closely with foreign leaders and global institutions—all things he has failed to do in his first 1,200 days in office.”

Failed to do them, we can comfortably say, because he is incapable of doing them.  And the problem is not just that he's a lousy businessman.  The problem is that government is not a business.  Rex Tillerson was a very successful businessman, the former head of one of the richest corporations in the world.  And yet he was a failure as Secretary of State not just because he answered to Donald Trump, but because he oversaw a hollowing out of expertise at the State Department that can't be blamed solely on Donald Trump, but has to be laid at the feet of Tillerson himself.  The problem is not just understanding how large organizations work (Trump has no clue.  He can't "work closely with foreign leaders and global institutions."  It's like expecting a dog to recite Shakespeare); the problem is understanding how government works.  American conservatives have disparaged government for so many decades now that it seems the only function of government is to employ dupes (i.e., Democrats) or to aggrandize power to Mitch McConnell and the most extreme of right-wing judges (what else is government for, after all, except to boss around other people?).  No wonder so many "evangelical leaders" (I handle even the terms with gloves on) love Trump.

The roots of this problem don't even lie there, though, but in the Enlightenment, and in the Romantic revolution that rejected the most radical change in human culture in history:  the Industrial Revolution.  This is not an argument for a neo-Ludditie movement, which after all was not a rejection of "progress" but an assertion of humanity over the machine (the machine won).  The ideal of the Romantic revolution was, perversely, the Byronic hero.  Perversely because Byron was hardly a commoner, and his accomplishments were those of a highly privileged person who was also, as it turned out, highly gifted.  In an odd way Trump is that antithesis of the Byronic hero:  born equally wealthy (albeit in a purportedly classless society), he is as ungifted in every way was George Gordon, Lord Byron, was.  And yet Trump and the Byronic hero, exemplified by its namesake, both stand for the individual over the system, the idealized person over the common mass.  Both are, ultimately, completely undemocratic models, as opposite to Whitman's individual who is "vast" and "contains multitudes" as can be imagined.  But Whitman's democratic person embodied in the poet who embraced all levels of life (especially the marginalized ones of homosexuals and women and common laborers; try to imagine Byron, or Trump, as an advocate for the common person) is not as appealing as the Byronic hero who is raised above all other persons, who is almost god-like in his individuality and particularity.  It is no accident some "evangelical leaders" have tried to equate Trump with God ("the Chosen One").  They do so not because Trump is as inspiring as Byron, but because Trump is the apotheosis of American power in the individual.  He appears beholden to no one, speaks for the causes they embrace (the aggrandizement of their power over women for abortion, over "non-believers" for control of the public sphere, over regaining "their own" from the "secular humanists" who deny the full authority of their god), and defies all convention and social mores.  Trump speaks for no one but himself, but in our post-Romantic vainglory his supporters imagine he speaks for them.  Just as the Byronic hero for a time presented a model one could live through vicariously, so too does Trump present a model every person can identify with:  a fat, loud, old white man who does and says whatever he wants and "owns the libs" because that is what is best in life.

That it's a sad, pathetic spectacle which is not only dangerous to but absolutely destructive of the course and purpose of governance is besides the point.  Self-governance is a concept Trump's supporters cannot grasp and resent having to yield to.  They consider themselves the "victims" and want only to victimize others, the better to think better of themselves.  They are both superior and suppressed, in equal measure, and pointing out the illogic of that only proves how afflicted they are, and how belittled.  Trump doesn't speak for them, as Goldwater professed to do; Trump speaks of them, and cares only for himself.  Which is precisely what they do; they care only for themselves.  If self-fulfillment and self-actualization are the goals of the Romantic movement, they care only for self-satisfaction and self-aggrandizement.  The former, in some ways more legitimate (and in other ways more troublesome) goals require too much introspection and too much regard for the other, for all who are not you or just like you.  This they reject, as Trump does; this they disdain, because it puts some measure of responsibility on them.  Trump rejects all responsibility and accepts only authority.  Fault always lies with someone else; it is people he discards who are the failures, never him.  He is a monster of selfishness and self-concern, but that is a monstrousness that always appeals to a certain portion of the populace.  In his heart, he knows he's right.  In the hearts of each one of his followers, they know they are right, too.  And like Trump, they resent anyone who stands as obstacle to their full enjoyment of that truth.  Describe it as narcissism, as psychopathy, as the will to power and the power of willful ignorance; it doesn't matter.  The end result is that a culture steeped in the importance of the individual, of you as an important individual, has produced this pathology, this illness, this very social disease.

And the system is not going to save us from it:  not the law, not the Constitution, not the houses of the Legislative branch who have authority over the Executive in these matters.  In his heart Trump knows he's right, and he doesn't care what anyone says about him.  His critics are enemies; his supporters are of value only so long as they sing his praises, and they must sing them loud and long and louder and louder.  In his heart he knows he's right, and not even punishment would stop him, nor change him.  He will not be removed from power except by rejection at the ballot; he will not be reined in because he recognizes no constraint except the criminal laws and so long as he is POTUS he is free from them.  This is not the product of the sleep of reason because reason put the system in place that led to him being in office.  This is the result of a change in culture the "Founding Fathers" could not have foreseen (by the time the Romantic revolution had reached these shores they were all moldering in the grave, despite the fact it originated almost as the Constitution itself was being ratified), but it is also just as much a result of their confidence in the power of reason to rule the affairs of humans.  It doesn't matter, really, what they knew or thought or expected.  What matters now is what we do.  In our hearts, we know he's wrong; that Mitch McConnell is wrong, and Ted Cruz, and John Barasso, and all the Senators who will, for one reason or another, shirk their responsibilities to the nation and let this man run amok and tell the voters "You broke it, you bought it!"  We have a man in the highest office in the land who thinks that whatever he does is right, because he does it.  And when he does nothing, he's still right, because he convinces himself he's done so many things he hasn't done.  When he does wrong, now he knows he can hide it, he can say what he wants about it, and what he says is true, because the Senate of the United States of America has said they won't contradict him, not even one word he speaks.

In his heart he knows he's right. Trump wants you to believe that he's right, and that you should think so, too.  He doesn't want you on his side; he wants you cheering only for him.  Because if you are not with him, you are against him.  And he is, in the end, the only one who matters.  Which is not undemocratic; it is anti-democratic.  He is not a challenge to the government; he is the rejection of governance. In truth, he is a monster we have created.  If we are like biblical Israel at all, it is in this:  that we were told to do better, and we were told how to do better, and we refused to listen.  In our hearts, we knew we were right, too.  Except for us it won't be the Exile; but it won't be the Peaceable Kingdom, either.

Riding the Tiger

An interesting review of a sociological study, Never Trump, in an interesting place.

 “To buy into Trump,” he says, “you have to believe that the essence of what the Republican Party stood for—personal responsibility, embracing of legal immigration, character counts, strong on Russia—you have to believe that all of that was just a marketing slogan and it didn’t mean anything—any more than ‘We say, “Chevrolet’s the heartbeat of America.”’”

Is it too cynical of me to say those were just marketing slogans, and the "essence" of the Republican Party since Goldwater fell to LBJ has been "Blow you, Jack!  I got mine!"

Saldin and Teles highlight how shocking 2016 was for conservative elites. As traditional candidates like Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush competed for high-information voters, Trump swept up low-information voters, securing the nomination over “Against Trump” finger-wagging. This isn’t just a problem for moderate Republicans and aging neocons, Saldin and Teles warn. A body of literature suggests that by restraining and marginalizing extremists on their own side, right-wing elites are essential to sustaining democracies.

The only shocking part to the "party elites" should have been that the proletariat had taken their propaganda seriously.  I mean, I like some of what Rick Wilson has to say, but the guy worked for Dick Cheney!  Did he really think what Cheney championed wouldn't be read as racist, xenophobic, and so anti-government Trump has proceeded to disassemble government from the inside?  That was as plain as sunrise.  Of course, even Cheney's daughter seems somewhat surprised at what has been wrought, but what's the old adage?  Oh, yeah:  "Be careful what you wish for.  You might get it."

In that, the GOP has been remarkably successful.  And now the Lincoln Project wants to take on Mitch McConnell?

Which of these Trump enablers should we focus on next?

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) May 20, 2020

Where have they been for the last 30 years?  What have they been paying attention to?  That Obama was a Democrat?  That he was black?  That Clinton didn't want to talk about having an affair with an office staff member?

Many of the organizational efforts described in Never Trump are symbolic: letters, meetings, hashtags. Throughout, the Republican elites seem shellshocked, waiting for the world to return to its regular axis. Attempts to stymie Trump politically came largely, though fruitlessly, from party operatives.

Gee, it's like they never really had any power.  Maybe they just thought they were in control, huh?  Did they even realize they were riding a tiger?  Do they realize now the tiger has eaten them?  And the problem with the day of reckoning is always, that you find yourself before the seat of judgment.  It indeed a day of darkness, not light:

As evident from Michael Anton’s infamous “Flight 93” article, apocalyptic thinking came to define Trump’s active supporters among conservatives. But apocalypticism, and its driving forces polarization and negative partisanship, have been central to the movement conservative project since its inception. The foundational conservative thinker James Burnham pathologized liberalism as a syndrome of Western suicide; National Review’s longtime publisher William Rusher actively worked to redefine the GOP on ideologically polarized lines; Barry Goldwater rallied conservatives against John F. Kennedy by warning “we are facing Democrat candidates and a Democrat platform that signify a new type of New Deal, far more menacing than anything we have seen in the past.”

Animosity towards the "other," in other words, is basic to the conservative project.  And you don't get to decide who that "other" is.  Animosity is a shotgun, not a rifle.  It sprays everywhere.

The conservative movement’s vaunted history of policing its ideological borders is much more complicated than the way many conservative writers and thinkers remember it. Take perhaps the most famous example, William F. Buckley’s kicking of the John Birch Society out of the movement. In fact, while Buckley was distressed by the Birchers, he vacillated and only took decisive action after the 1964 LBJ landslide—five years after first registering his discomfort with the organization while at the same time carrying water for the Southern Strategy. Before the John Birch Society, Buckley took up anti-anti-Joseph McCarthy positions and dallied in responding to the anti-Semitic American Mercury.

Buckley was a racist; he just wasn't as racist as the KKK.  Back in the day, we would say he was "prejudiced," but not "racist."  It's a difference without a distinction.

Contemporary Never Trumpers are only just beginning to reflect on the extent to which they participated in the demonization of liberals, worked within a party that invited proto-Trump Pat Buchanan to address its convention in 1992, and justified, ignored, or spit-shined the arguments of many who flocked to Trump—or, like Michelle Malkin, even worse extremes. As Saldin and Teles put it, “the enthusiastic response that Trump’s cruelty, racism, and misogyny generated in a large part of the party base lent support to charges that those inclinations were in fact baked into the party’s DNA.” They note that “many Never Trumpers had minimized” these characteristics of the conservative movement, “or insisted [they] were outdated or flat-out wrong.”

Maybe I should have said Trump is their "road to Damascus" moment; but I don't think it is.  So long as they blame Trump, they needn't take responsibility themselves.  Interesting how Trump's extreme example should, could be making us all examine our own responsibility and denial of same.  Interesting how it never quite works that way.  Self-examination is hard!  Too hard, in fact.

For example, David Brooks complains about conservative media personalities Dinesh D’Souza and Laura Ingraham and their breakthrough at the Dartmouth Review, a student newspaper. “Even in those days,” Brooks tells the authors, “they were much more confrontational, much more anti-left, much more shock the bourgeoisie, and that turns out to have been a significant difference.” Yet both were mentored by National Review senior editor Jeffrey Hart, in whose living room the paper was founded and whose sensibility they inherited. And both were once taken seriously as intellectuals. D’Souza’s movement pedigree is outstanding. After Dartmouth, he worked in the Reagan administration, held a fellowship at the Hoover Institution, and was contributing editor to Policy Review when it was published by the Heritage Foundation. Even now, he is still on National Review’s masthead. In other words, conservative intellectuals and institutions have been too willing to work with and defend questionable actors until they become a public relations liability—and in some cases after. (For its part, the Weekly Standard criticized D’Souza as early as 1995, in its second issue, but went on to publish him six times between 1997 and 2002; in later years, though, it was frequently critical of D’Souza, through to its final issues.)

Tl:dr:  William Buckley didn't really mind the Birchers until the extremism of Goldwater was snuffed out like a candle in a hurricane.  History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.

But as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in 1950, “a responsible liberal . . . would rather have a healthy and intelligent conservative party, which might even win an election now and then, than a dull and hopeless conservative party, threatening at any moment to break into pieces and leave its members prey for fascist-minded demagogues.” “There is no guarantee,” he also remarked, “that any new party which rises in its place will have a basic respect for constitutional processes and public order.” In this case, the demagogues eviscerated the elites.

I agree with Schlesinger's sentiment, but I don't think the demagogues eviscerated the elites.  I think the demagogues proved democracy is what the Greeks feared it would be, and that the elites never really had any power in the first place.  Especially since this analysis resolutely refuses to call Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, and Mark Levin (which it name-checks) "elites."  I don't honestly see why they aren't, in this scenario.

But it’s unclear what exactly Never Trump is. Like the Whigs of old, it has formed first in opposition to a larger-than-life figure and fading older allegiances. Is it a commitment to small-L American liberalism and constitutional arrangements? Or an ideological critique of Trumpism? An antipathy to the man? A commitment to small government and free market nostrums? The personal nature of Never Trump means all of the above apply to individuals.

Without a serious reckoning with conservatism’s sins and blind spots, the great temptation of Never Trump will be to reconcile with Trump’s enablers when the Democrats inevitably retake the White House. It is by no means guaranteed, but it is quite plausible there will be a rapprochement on the right united in opposition to Joe Biden or whoever is the next Democrat to sit in the Oval Office, especially once Trump leaves the political scene. A sincere reflection on the dark sides of conservatism—including those that some Never Trumpers failed to counter, or even facilitated—is necessary to salvage the American right from Trump so it can perform the vital democratic task of keeping the monsters at bay.

If the GOP is only about Trump, what does it do when he leaves the stage, probably tossed out unceremoniously in January, 2021?  Is there a GOP to salvage?  And "serious reckoning"?  Without a public Truth and Reconciliation Committee, how does that happen?  And what real good did that do South Africa?  Did they become the city on the hill to which all nations are drawn to learn from their example?  "A sincere reflection on the dark side" of conservatism, liberalism, capitalism, American social order is distinctly and definitely needed; but the closest we got to it was listening to a Baptist preacher named King.  And we shot him, before we turned our back on him because of the War.

What should happen is dramatic change, a revolution in thought, even.  But be careful what you wish for....

It’s Not A Mystery 🧟‍♂️

My latest for @LincolnSquareHQ

“Something happened in the Republican Party. We evolved a system that rewarded lack of character and elevated weak men and women.”

An Inside Look: How the Law-and-Order Party became the Party of Jeffery Epstein https://t.co/h20TuQxhsg

— Stuart Stevens (@stuartpstevens) August 9, 2025

What happened to the GOP is that Goldwater lost to LBJ; and the arch-conservatives who saw Goldwater as their avatar started working on Project 2025. Not literally, but their own version of how things ought to be. Their next avatar was Newt Gingrich, and the wholly Astro-turfed “grassroots” Tea Party, which they treated as useful idiots and discarded as soon as the Tea Party became useless.

Not at all unlike MAGA.

Trump didn’t do a damned thing to the GOP. He’s not that smart, ambitious, cunning (feral or otherwise), or strategic. The GOP was hollowed out after the Tea Party and W and Cheney/Rumsfeld got through with it. That and decades of Chicago school of economics bullshit about the cause of inflation (Reagan didn’t lower government spending, as Friedman preached; Volcker raised interest rates to over 20% and strangled inflation out of the economy) and how government should be “run like a business.” Like Trump’s businesses? Or Elmo’s?

That argument, of course, is why NWS is rehiring 450 employees laid off by DOGE, and why Pantex had to rehire everyone to keep watch on nuclear fuel and processed nuclear waste in America. Because businesses don’t do that shit; governments do.

Trump and Project 2025 are nothing more than where the GOP has been driving the country since at least 1964. Some in the GOP don’t like that reality, because the party finally caught the car they were chasing. And it’s a bus full of zombies hungry to destroy brains.

Some of us can’t but say we told you so. And welcome to the resistance.

I was enjoying the plagiarism side show....

Too much?  I would have thought so at one point; more and more, I'm not so sure.

I'm not anymore.  I'm not because Josh Marshall is right:  Trump is dangerous.  Trump is not "outlandish" and "disruptive":  he is transgressive.  He is beyond the pale, across the boundaries, off the rails.  All the more reason he be repudiated as thoroughly as Barry Goldwater or George McGovern.  His defeat needs to be one for the ages.

Not least because of crap like this:

"These are values, Republican values by the way, of hard work, determination, family values, dedication and respect, and that's Melania Trump," Pierson told The Hill. "This concept that Michelle Obama invented the English language is absurd."

Girl, please.  And they just happened to express themselves in the very same words?

Events last night were the garbage fire we were warned about, and I don't mean one stupid and otherwise forgettable speech.  The sad part is that blatant act of theft that's getting all the attention.  The exploitation of pain and grief, the demands to incarcerate the opponent, the racism that creates an entire class of immigrants to fear because they are coming to kill us and nobody in government cares; that's going unmentioned now, or being accepted as what the GOP is doing and since the GOP is a major political party, this too must be normal.  When important enough people do it or back it or support it, it has to be treated as reasonable, or at least normative.

It isn't; it shouldn't be.  Honestly, it's becoming an object lesson on why you never argue with fools.  The problem here isn't the plagiarism; it's the transgressions of all norms, all boundaries, all decency and common sense.   The problem is the discussion is about how Trump's carelessness caught up with him, as if lifting two paragraphs was the worst thing about the night, was finally going to be Trump's Achilles Heel.  The discussion isn't about the racism, the exploitation, the fear-mongering, the sheer horror show that was on display last night.  These things aren't Nixonian; this isn't Goldwater; this isn't even Pat Buchanan.  We're way past that.  This is the garbage fire they warned us about.  Whether or not we realize that may be important, soon.

This one you can blame on Charlie Pierce.

Except he doesn't have the (memory) charms....

Am I the only one who sees the resemblance?

Once again Charlie Pierce wants to man the battlements of Bad Historical Analogy, only where Ted Cruz prefers World War II, Mr. Pierce favors the struggle for Irish independence:

Maybe it's because I was over there last week, but Cruz's effort reminds me of nothing more than the political aftermath of the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916 which, as a military action, looked as doomed and useless as Cruz's extended speech will look as soon as the Senate votes through whatever Harry Reid comes up with in the next couple of days. In Ireland, after all the drumhead courts-martial and the summary executions, which succeeded only in turning Irish political opinion almost 180 degrees and permanently in favor of the Rising, in the elections of 1918, Sinn Fein, the political entity that arose from the Rising, won 73 of Ireland's 105 seats in the British Parliament. Those elected then refused to go to London, and they formed themselves into Dail Eireann, the Irish parliament, and declared themselves the elected representatives of the Irish Republic declared from the steps of the General Post Office two years earlier. In doing so, they declared themselves loyal to no institutions but their own, no government but their own. In Neil Jordan's movie Michael Collins, Jordan has the imprisoned Eamon de Valera explain this in a letter to Collins as a strategy of "defeating the British Empire by ignoring it."

Yeah, and all the people who don't want to defund Obamacare are Nazi Appeasers, while Cruz is Winston Churchill.  Maybe Churchill is the more apt analogy, because events finally proved Churchill right about Germany, but as soon as that war was over, so was Churchill's career. And Ted Cruz is not warning us about another Nazi Germany, much as he'd like to think he is.

There is a reason the Vietnamese won the Vietnam War, and it's the same reason the Irish formed the Dail Eireann; it's even the same reason the colonists won the War for Independence:  people who live in the country can always repel people who don't live in the country, sooner or later.  The Irish didn't win independence in 1918 (the Irish Free State was not declared until 1921), but they were, like the Vietnamese, like the colonists, fighting for their homeland, and for home rule.

 I suppose we can make bad analogies to various homegrown secession movements, but since none of those are going to succeed, it's not helpful to Mr. Pierce's argument. Which is kinda the point, really. Yes, Goldwater was a looney who got swept aside in the heady days of 1964 when we'd won the war and the peace and prosperity was on every corner and we felt we could afford to be generous to the poor and even afford some measure of justice to the African Americans; and by 1972 that had all fallen apart.  Inflation was destroying incomes, jobs were beginning to falter, women were entering the workforce less because Ms. Magazine convinced them to, and more because the family needed the money.  And while the nation prospered still, in one sense; in another, that's when we started to feel poorer; and pretty soon two incomes became the norm and necessary, and while some things got cheaper, we became more aware of the cost of everything, and by the time Jimmy Carter told us the "energy crisis" was the "moral equivalent of war" (or "M.E.O.W."), the stage was set for morning in America and Ronald Reagan, if only because the newest generation of voters was sick of the "liberalism" of the '60's generation (we became "Boomers" a decade later), and they liked the avuncular old guy who did terrible things but since when were JFK and LBJ Boy Scouts?

Are we heading back to that?  Did we ever leave it?  But Reagan was not the blustering and terrifying Goldwater, while Cruz has embraced his inner racist and seems to long for the good ol' days of the 1950's, when real Americans learned to hate Castro and Communism and still loved John Wayne.  The guy is stuck in a time warp:  his first references  just in time for the evening news yesterday were World War II.  Yeah, it works for the Tea Baggers, but they're a majority of Texas voters only because the Hispanics don't vote and the youth won't vote unless they can do it on Facebook.  They aren't, by a long shot, the majority of the voters in America.

Nor, to carry on with the bad analogies, do the majority of Americans see the government as an invading force bent on destroying our liberties.  That's been the selling point of conservatism since the beginning of the Republic.  Maybe when all these guys who say government is the problem finally decide to leave D.C. and form a new government that isn't the problem (makes as much sense as Cruz's reasons for his "filibuster"), I'll start to worry.  But I don't see Ted Cruz leading that revolution, or any change in government, because so far he's shown the political acumen of a dead rat.

And don't tell me his rise to the Senate is "amazing."  This is Texas.  We elected Louie Gohmert.  We elected Rick Perry to statewide office three times, and before that it was George W. Bush, twice.  Have you looked at the people we usually send to the Senate?  Hell, before Cruz we kept sending Phil Gramm there.  Face it, since LBJ our Senate selections have all been downhill.

Cruz's "political acumen" consists of believing the power of his personality will cause Americans to rise up and drown the Congress in indignant phone calls that will cleanse the Aegean stables of the Capitol. Yeah:  that didn't happen either.

Pierce loves this Manichean vision of politics:  if the bad guys are still standing, if they still have a base, no matter how small, then the good guys have no hope and it's all over but the cryin'.  Look, the Cruz "filibuster" is so inside baseball it's under the stitches.  Even in Texas almost no news outlet noticed.  Claire McCaskill's remarks were on one of the least watched shows on cable TeeVee.  Lawrence O'Donnell, ditto (his audience is probably smaller than Morning Joe's).

Ted Cruz will not lose an election based on this long talk. But he's got no broader a base of support nationally than Rick Perry does.  Cruz might make it through the primaries because he won't speak kindly of immigrants, as Perry did (irony alert!)  But run that stuff about how great Jesse Helms was in a national election, and he's over.  He might survive in Texas, but I'm not sure he would.  Even down here such blatant embrace of racists is toxic.

As for his continued presence in the Senate:  well, you can't get anything done if even your GOP colleagues won't stand with you.  Cruz has the support of Rubio, Paul, and Lee.  Not exactly a majority, by any calculus.  And it's likely he just hasn't yet had a chance to piss them off.
Cruz has had his 15 minutes.  He's not eloquent; he's not smart; he's not Voldemort.

He's not even Snape.  He's Gilderoy Lockhart.

Historical Footnote:  Phil Gramm, who, if memory serves, was the first Republican Senator from Texas since John Tower, was also a popular conservative figure back in the day.  Then he ran for POTUS, and hit the townships of New Hampshire, where campaigning requires the personal visit.  Turns out Mr. Gramm was so personally obnoxious his handlers practically had to drag him away from fervent supporters who were already deciding this was not the man for them.

Any similarities to Ted Cruz are purely historical.

The One Thing Arkansas (Or Texas, or almost any Southern State) Takes More Pride in...

Trump’s authoritarian contempt for truth sets the tone, forcing military hawks such as Cotton to remain mum when Trump dismisses traumatic brain injuries as “headaches” and former Cold Warriors such as Sen. Ted Cruz to parrot Russian propaganda on Ukraine. https://t.co/X89MKL5y4s

— Jennifer Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) February 17, 2020

...than military posturing, is know-nothingism.  Ted Cruz is too young to be a "Cold Warrior."  He won office the first time around promoting the conspiracy theory of Agenda 21, that the UN, as Charlie Pierce so memorably put it, wanted to "take all our golfs."  Well, that and fear of sharia law.  But he's not a true believer; he scrubbed all that from his campaign website the moment he won in 2012.  Sure, he hates Castro because Daddy does but, "Cold Warrior"?  Nah.

And Cotton is a preening military jackass who is proud of his "know-nothingism," as are the people of Arkansas.  Cruz is not quite as proud to be publicly ignorant, but he doesn't play up his Harvard Law education (or was it Yale?  Is there a difference to voters in Texas?  No.)  But Trump isn't forcing them to play the ass in D.C.  To Cotton and Cruz that comes naturally.

It's a dangerous thing to blame all out current problems on one person.  Trump is not Patient Zero of the infection in the GOP; he is the apotheosis of it.  There is a long history of this stuff rising in the GOP, beginning at least with the emergence of Newt Gingrich, but his antecedents go back as far as the failure of Goldwater against LBJ, as stark a distinction between Presidential contenders as we've had, with perhaps the except of McGovern v. Nixon.  But liberals were enervated by the disaster of McGovern, while conservatives responded to Nixon with Reagan a mere 6 years later; and then Poppy, and after 8 years W., and after another 8 years, Trump.*

Does anybody else see a pattern here?

Republicans ran against the "Commies" when it meant being strong on defense and "owning the libs."    Sure, some of them remembered WWII, but that faded from memory far faster than it did from movie houses (Hollywood built its empire on war movies distributed in my childhood, and I was born 10 years after that war ended).  The lessons of the war Trump clearly didn't learn (the importance of alliances and NATO, or even what "Pearl Harbor" means) are the lessons a whole new generation hasn't learned, and yelling at them about their historical ignorance is no way to win hearts and minds. Communism is as defunct as the Whigs, and as meaningless to many too many Americans (not all of them Millenials).  And by the time Reagan "ended" the Cold War (more credit goes to Gorbachev, actually; and John LeCarre warned us what we needed to do to prevent Putin's Russia, but who listened?), it was over anyway, and quickly forgotten.  If you're still thinking in terms of the "Cold War," you're still know what an IBM Selectric was, and probably remember rotary dial phones, too.  Ted Cruz was born in 1970; it could be he remembers neither.

Too ambitious to endanger a future in a party they imagine will be permanently deformed by Trump, and too cowardly to defy the willful ignorance they now pride themselves on their willingness to adopt non-factual conspiracy theories https://t.co/X89MKL5y4s

— Jennifer Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) February 17, 2020

If Cotton and Cruz are going to be left a party "deformed by Trump," it will be the party they joined in the first place; they won't notice the change.  They don't remember "Rockefeller Republicans" or when the "Grand Old Party" brought up images of country club stalwarts.  They grew up in Gingrich's party, in the party taken over, slowly but surely, by those who didn't accept the descent of Goldwater, the ascent of LBJ (too few of us did, as it turned out).  Nixon actually floated a minimum income for all Americans, a la Andrew Yang  50+ years later.  It was Nixon's attempt to keep up with expectations set by LBJ.  Reagan brought all that crashing to a halt.  Hard to imagine Richard Nixon as a liberal, but compared to post-Reagan, and especially post-Gingrich, Republicans, RMN is AOC.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend, but honestly, some of the most virulent critics of Trump are not yet facing reality head-on.

*And LBJ had the "Daisy Ad," Reagan had "Morning in America," Poppy had Willie Horton, W. had "Turdblossom" as his political adviser/campaign manager, and Trump ran against Hillary Clinton, probably the only public figure likely to lose to him.  See another pattern?  The best Democratic politicians in that period were LBJ, Clinton, and Obama.  The worst were ground up by Reagan, Poppy, W., and Trump (although, yes, Trump won by the skin of his teeth, and W. won the first time by the Supreme Court, but why was it ever that close?). Politics matters.

It’s Even Plain To NBC News …

 …why “bi-partisanship” in D.C. isn’t alive and well:

House Republicans have undermined the bipartisan path for years by slamming the resulting deals as “swamp” creations by a “uniparty” that is addicted to spending. Now, GOP lawmakers in both chambers are going it alone, suggesting they’ll bring more rescissions packages to undo past bipartisan spending agreements because the existing process is failing.

The arsonists are trying to claim the benefits of burning it all down.

The appropriations process has to be less bipartisan,” Vought told reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast Thursday. “It’s not going to keep me up at night, and I think will lead to better results, by having the appropriations process be a little bit partisan.”

He added that more rescission packages would be coming.

The backlash was fierce. Senate Republicans responsible for crafting the government funding bills were taken aback by his candor.

Taken aback at Vought saying the quiet part out loud, that is. I mean, when the fundamental work of Congress needs to be “less bipartisan,” that’s damning the very concept of a democratic republic. And when even Mitch McConnell thinks there’s a problem:

“The one thing we all agree on is the appropriations process is broken,” former Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., lamented, describing how during his 18 years leading the GOP conference he helped oversee a shift away from government funding levels being decided by committees and instead being negotiated by only the highest levels of leadership and the White House.

“I concluded our failure to pass our bills empower every president, regardless of party, because I’ve been in those discussions at the end, the big four and the guy with the pen, and that makes all of our requests irrelevant,” McConnell said.

One has to wonder why the Democrats are so intransigent. 🤨

Rising partisanship has weakened committees broadly and placed more power in the hands of leadership. In the context of government funding, that led to “omnibus” spending bills and continuing resolutions — or CRs — negotiated by party leaders and jammed through Congress, often with an impending deadline to pressure holdouts to fall in line quickly.

But House Republicans raised hell, torching the massive bills negotiated behind closed doors as a betrayal to their constituents. In recent years, they have successfully steered their leadership away from that approach. And it leaves few options going forward.

This goes back to the Gingrich era, when he decided government shutdowns were a valid GOP tool. They’ve never proven to be, but the GOP keeps swinging that hammer and hitting themselves in the head. The logical conclusion of that analogy explains why they keep doing it without learning from the experience.

It also illustrates that the problem of “partisanship” (which is not a problem in a democratic society. Intransigence is.) in D.C. all flows from one side. And I continue to insist this latest iteration predates Gingrich’s speakership by 3 decades. It springs from the failure of Goldwater against LBJ in ‘64, and the refusal of Goldwater supporters (the ideological ancestors of Vought and Miller and Kirk) to accept that electoral landslide result. The serious partisanship has come from one side, opposing the Civil Rights Act and the Great Society legislation and everything that sprang from that. The GOP wants to rollback everything government has done since at least FDR, if not back to the 19th century.

But, you know, Democrats really should be less intractable… 🤦‍♂️