#Damon Linker

[alanshemper]

...a huge fucking douchebag. Shut the fuck up, Damon Linker.

[dixiedrudge]

Here's Why "America Is Broken" And People Are Worried

Help Dixie Defeat Big-Tech Censorship! Spread the Word! Like, Share, Re-Post, and Subscribe! There’s a lot more to see at our main page, Dixie Drudge! (Tyler Durden, Zero Hedge) – The NY Times on Monday published an opinion piece by UPenn senior lecturer and Open Society Project senior fellow (!) Damon Linker titled “Why Is Biden Struggling? Because America Is Broken.” And while it’s more or less…

[antonio-velardo]

Antonio Velardo shares: Even if Nikki Haley Shocks Trump in New Hampshire, It Won’t Matter by Damon Linker

By Damon Linker Trump connects with the G.O.P. in a way that she can’t muster. Published: January 17, 2024 at 05:03AM from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/dmrZB2I via IFTTT

[arpov-blog-blog]

..."Thirty years ago," Damon Linker told The Guardian, "if I told you that a bunch of billionaires and intellectuals on the right are waiting in the wings to impose a dictatorship on the United States, you would have said that I was insane."

Now, however, the senior lecturer at Penn State's Department of Political Science and author of the Notes From the Middleground Substack newsletter has reconsidered.

"But it's no longer insane," Linker writes. "It's now real. There are those people out there." And, Linker notes, "The question is: will they get their chance."

The simple reality is that they already have had their chance in multiple red states, and when we watch what they're doing with it we see that step by step, day by day, Republicans are inching towards full-blown fascism. Now they're calling to end democracy and replace our president with a "Red Caesar."

They no longer believe in elections, because the American people are rejecting their vision of more tax cuts for billionaires, hating on racial and gender minorities, and more fossil-fuel pollution to destroy our planet.

So instead of trying to get elected by presenting honest differences in policy from Democrats, Republicans have resorted to massive gerrymandering, purging voting rolls of millions of Americans who live in blue cities within red states and dark-money TV carpet-bombing campaigns often filled with lies and half-truths.

But that's just the beginning.

Wisconsin voters elected a Democratic justice to the state Supreme Court, Janet Protasiewicz, and Republicans are trying to impeach her before she's heard a single case because they believe (probably correctly) that she will vote to declare their gerrymandered legislative map — which overwhelmingly favors Republicans, out of proportion to their strength in the state — unconstitutional.

North Carolina is so gerrymandered that the majority of the state's residents vote for Democrats (which is why the governor is a Democrat) but, as in Wisconsin, Republicans hold a solid majority in the state House, the state Senate and the congressional delegation. So I guess it shouldn't surprise us that a committee co-chaired by Republican state Senate President Phil Berger and Republican state House Speaker Tim Moore just gave itself Gestapo-like powers.

The Republican-controlled Joint Legislative Committee on Government Operations — or, as Judd Legum notes at Popular.info, Gov Ops for short — now has the power to break into the home or office of anybody in the state who has worked for or with state government and go through their files and even personal phones and computers.

Meanwhile, down in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has created two new armed organizations answerable to himself: a new "state guard" militia and a police agency that is supposed to provide for "election integrity" (GOP code for preventing Black people in blue cities from voting).

As former Republican Gov. Charlie Crist (now a Democrat) said of DeSantis' new armed officers: "No governor should have his own handpicked secret police."

Across the country, Republicans are threatening and intimidating teachers and librarians into stripping from their collections any books that positively portray Black or queer people.

Armed fascist militias supportive of those efforts show up at school board and other meetings with assault rifles strapped across their backs to heckle and threaten elected officials.

Dozens of white supremacist militia groups nationwide — modern versions of the old Ku Klux Klan — openly embrace Republican politicians while parading with Nazi and Confederate flags.

Donald Trump, the American fascist movement's current standard-bearer, has said that if he again gains the White House he will immediately lock up and then prosecute high-profile Democrats and the judges and prosecutors who have tried to hold him to account for his decades of criminal activity.

When last in office he tried to stop and then to overturn an election; should he get elected again it will almost certainly be the last free and fair election in the nation.

Trump uses racial slurs — calling the Black prosecutors who have gone after him "Riggers" and "racists" — to crank his white supremacist base into stochastic terror violence.

He has also said that — like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán — he will investigate for "treason" and then presumably shut down network television news outlets that don't echo his talking points and unquestioningly broadcast his lies.

Not a single Republican of national stature has stood up to condemn any of this rhetoric. The entire party is terrified of this 77-year-old who recently told an audience that he'd beaten Barack Obama in the 2016 election and he was worried that Democrats might "start World War II."

Our corporate media, of course, buried those stories while obsessing on concerns that President Biden is too old for his job. It's almost as if the network executives are already looking forward to another tax cut when Trump gets back in."

[fuojbe-beowgi]

"The More Opposition Trump Faces, the More Popular He Becomes, and He Knows It" by Damon Linker via NYT Opinion https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/08/opinion/trump-indicted.html?partner=IFTTT

[swords0827]

Watch "Damon Linker: How Not to Fight Wokeness | The Bulwark Podcast" on YouTube

[arcticdementor]

Sometimes a piece of writing so perfectly distills a cultural moment and mood that it deserves to be given outsized attention. That's very much the case with Farhad Manjoo's op-ed column in Thursday's New York Times, "The Perfect Pronoun: Singular 'They'."

…

The first thing to be said about these convictions is that, apart from a miniscule number of transgender activists and postmodern theorists and scholars, no one would have affirmed any of them as recently as four years ago. There is almost no chance at all that the Farhad Manjoo of 2009 sat around pondering and lamenting the oppressiveness of his peers referring to "him" as "he." That's because (as far as I know) Manjoo is a man, with XY chromosomes, male reproductive organs, and typically male hormone levels, and a mere decade ago referring to such a person as "he" was considered to be merely descriptive of a rather mundane aspect of reality. His freedom was not infringed, or implicated, in any way by this convention. It wouldn't have occurred to him to think or feel otherwise. Freedom was something else and about other things.

The emergence and spread of the contrary idea — that "gender is a ubiquitous prison of the mind" — can be traced to a precise point in time: the six months following the Supreme Court's Obergefell decision, which declared same-sex marriage a constitutional right. Almost immediately after that decision was handed down, progressive activists took up the cause of championing transgender rights as the next front in the culture war — and here we are, just four short years later, born free but everywhere in chains.

How should we understand this astonishingly radical and rapid shift in self-understanding among highly educated progressive members of the upper-middle class? (In addition to calling himself a "cisgender, middle-aged suburban dad" at the opening of his column, Manjoo confesses that he "covet[s] my neighbor's Porsche," so it seems exactly right to describe him in this way.) I suspect Manjoo would say that his consciousness has been raised. Once he was blind, but now he sees. Once he slumbered, but now he's awake — or "woke."

Others have noted the religious connotations of the term. This has even been reflected in the prevalence of the formulation "Great Awokening" among sympathetic journalists seeking to explain the trend. It gets at something important. A kind of spiritual-moral madness periodically wells up and sweeps across vast swaths of the United States. In the 18th and 19th centuries, these Great Awakenings were decidedly "low church" affairs and invariably emerged from America's plethora of Protestant sects. Today, for perhaps the first time in American history, it is a nominally secular, progressive elite that finds itself swept up into a moral fervor and eager to overturn (linguistic and other) conventions in a surge of self-certainty and self-righteousness.

…

What is it, exactly, that Manjoo finds oppressive about the use of gendered pronouns? In addition to raising a fusty objection to the ungrammatical use of a gender-neutral plural pronoun to refer to single, gendered individuals, grammarians might also point out that English is far less gender-infused than many other languages. Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and many other languages divide the world into masculine, feminine, and sometimes (but not always) neuter nouns. Masculine chairs, feminine houses, and so on, reflected in definite and indefinite articles and pronouns in every sentence ever read, written, spoken, or heard in languages across the world. Talk about a prison with little prospect for escape!

…

But what is this freedom that Manjoo and so many others suddenly crave for themselves and their children? That's more than a little mysterious. Slaves everywhere presumably know that they are unfree, even if they accept the legitimacy of the system and the master that keeps them enslaved. But what is this bondage we couldn't even begin to perceive in 2009 that in under a decade has become a burden so onerous that it produces a demand for the overturning of well-settled rules and assumptions, some of which ("the gender binary") go all the way back to the earliest origins of human civilization?

The beginnings of an answer can be found in the writings of a number of thinkers who have analyzed, often critically but from a range of religious and political perspectives, the potential excesses of liberalism and democracy — and especially the antinomian logic of individualism. Alexis de Tocqueville, Robert Nisbet, Christopher Lasch, Walker Percy, Michel Houellebecq, and others have reflected deeply on what might be called the phenomenology of individualism — how a society devoted at the level of principle to the liberation of the individual from constraints can easily produce citizens who continually feel themselves to be newly enslaved and in need of ever new and more radical forms of liberation.

…

This is how a progressive in 2014 can consider it an unacceptable limitation on individual freedom for gay couples to be denied the right to marry — and base that argument on the claim that a gay man's love and natural desire for another man, like a lesbian's love and natural desire for another woman, is irreducible and ineradicable — and then insist just five years later that it is an unacceptable limitation on individual freedom for anyone to be presumed a man or a woman at all.

As Andrew Sullivan has powerfully argued, the two positions are fundamentally incompatible. The first, which morally justifies same-sex marriage, presumes that biological sex and binary gender differences are real, that they matter, and that they can't just be erased at will. The second, which Manjoo and many transgender activists embrace and espouse, presumes the opposite — that those differences can and should be immediately dissolved. To affirm the truth of both positions is to embrace incoherence.

But that assumes that we're treating them as arguments. If, instead, we view them as expressions of what it can feel like at two different moments in a society devoted to the principle of individualism, they can be brought into a kind of alignment. Each is simply an expression of rebellion against a different but equally intolerable constraint on the individual. All that's changed is the object of rebellion.

Will Manjoo's call for liberation from the tyranny of the gender binary catch on in the way that the push for same-sex marriage did before it? I have no idea. What I do know is that, whatever happens, it's likely to be followed by another undoubtedly very different crusade in the name of individual freedom, and then another, and another, as our society (and others like it) continues to work through the logic of its devotion to the principle of individualism.

The only thing that could halt the process is the rejection of that principle altogether.

[politicsnc]

Pardon Trump

The raid on Mar-a-lago could not have come at a worse time for Democrats. While a lot of them are giddy about the prospect of prosecuting Trump, Republicans are now fired up to protect their leader, likely offsetting any advantage Roe v Wade may have given Democrats in enthusiasm. The incursion onto Trump property also totally shut down the discussion about Democrats’ successful legislative…

[volunteerismandanarchy]

Rumors about bigger artists … joining the exodus have been swirling for days, so far with no confirmations. What’s strange about this effort to deplatform Rogan is that his popularity preceded, and made possible, his deal with Spotify. If the protest succeeds in getting him booted, he can simply go back to making his podcast available on other platforms or launch his own. A “win” would merely allow certain politically progressive artists to end their tacit association with a personality whose brand is the puncturing of liberal pieties.

Damon Linker, Whats Really at Stake in the Joe Rogan Kerfuffle (The Week)

https://theweek.com/politics/1009635/whats-really-at-stake-in-the-joe-rogan-kerfuffle

[indizombie]

Technological innovation benefits us in innumerable ways, but its downsides receive too little attention. Twitter facilitates the communication of information, but it also provided Trump with a megaphone to help build political support for his presidential campaign, just as it powerfully amplifies the voices of extremists of all political stripes. Facebook allows us to easily share personal and political news, but it also sells information about our habits and opinions to the highest bidder, spreads populist poison around the globe. The proper response to this threat is not to dismiss the danger or deny anything can be done about it. It's to recognize the hazard and act to minimize it. Technology isn't our master. We're the ones in charge. If democracy means anything, it must mean that.

Damon Linker, 'The dark side of Tech', The Week

[antonio-velardo]

Antonio Velardo shares: Get to Know the Influential Conservative Intellectuals Who Help Explain G.O.P. Extremism by Damon Linker

By Damon Linker A coalition of catastrophists is trying to make the next generation of Republicans believe that the country is on the verge of collapse. Published: November 4, 2023 at 07:00AM from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/Ny9vpJR via IFTTT

[arpov-blog-blog]

..."In June, the rightwing academic Kevin Slack published a book-length polemic claiming that ideas that had emerged from what he called the radical left were now so dominant that the US republic its founders envisioned was effectively at an end.

Slack, a politics professor at the conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan, made conspiratorial and extreme arguments now common on the antidemocratic right, that “transgenderism, anti-white racism, censorship, cronyism … are now the policies of an entire cosmopolitan class that includes much of the entrenched bureaucracy, the military, the media, and government-sponsored corporations”.

In a discussion of possible responses to this conspiracy theory, he wrote that the “New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people”.

For the last three years, parts of the American right have advocated a theory called Caesarism as an authoritarian solution to the claimed collapse of the US republic in conference rooms, podcasts and the house organs of the extreme right, especially those associated with the Claremont Institute thinktank.

Though on the surface this discussion might seem esoteric, experts who track extremism in the US say that due to their influence on the Republican party, the rightwing intellectuals who espouse these ideas about the attractions of autocracy present a profound threat to American democracy.

Their calls for a “red Caesar” are now only growing louder as Donald Trump, whose supporters attempted to violently halt the election of Joe Biden in 2020, has assumed dominant frontrunner status in the 2024 Republican nomination race. Trump, who also faces multiple criminal indictments, has spoken openly of attacking the free press in the US and having little regard for American constitutional norms should he win the White House again.

The idea that the US might be redeemed by a Caesar – an authoritarian, rightwing leader – was first broached explicitly by Michael Anton, a Claremont senior fellow and Trump presidential adviser.

Anton has been an influential rightwing intellectual since in 2016 penning The Flight 93 Election, a rightwing essay in which he told conservatives who were squeamish about Trump “charge the cockpit or you die”, referencing one of the hijacked flights of 9/11.

He gave Caesarism a passing mention in that essay, but developed it further in his 2020 book, The Stakes, defining it as a “form of one-man rule: halfway … between monarchy and tyranny”.

The Guardian contacted Anton at his Claremont Institute email address, but received no response.

Anton and others in the Claremont milieu are not simply hypothesizing about the future: their dreams of Caesar arise from their dark view of the US.

Anton wrote the scene-setting essay in Up From Conservatism, an anthology of essays published this year and edited by the executive director of Claremont’s Center for the American Way of Life, Arthur Milikh.

In that essay Anton writes baldly that “the United States peaked around 1965”, and that Americans are ruled by “a network of unelected bureaucrats … corporate-tech-finance senior management, ‘experts’ who set the boundaries of acceptable opinion, and media figures who police those boundaries”.

His diagnosis of US social and cultural life unfolds under a series of subheadings that are almost comical in their disillusionment: “The universities have become evil”, “Our economy is fake”, “The people are corrupt”, “Our civilization has lost the will to live”.

Damon Linker, a senior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and an author of several books on the American right, was early in noticing the extreme right’s drift towards Caesarism.

Linker told the Guardian that Anton and others in the Claremont milieu “have convinced themselves thoroughly that the current order is decadent, corrupt and far removed from the proper, admirable origins of American government”.

[fuojbe-beowgi]

"My Fellow Liberals Are Exaggerating the Dangers of Ron DeSantis" by Damon Linker via NYT Opinion https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/27/opinion/desantis-trump-president-comparison.html?partner=IFTTT

[electricparson]

Writing Prompt: Finding a Narrative

Yet in recent decades, the United States has begun to experience a precipitous collapse in trust in public institutions. Trump himself has accelerated this collapse among more conservative Americans, and much of his party now contributes to it, too. That means that the foundations of the rule of law have already been seriously undermined....

...This is a dangerous problem, because it shows both that the rule of law is already in an advanced state of decay and that pressing charges against Trump, putting him on trial, and potentially throwing him in jail will accelerate this process, making the decay far worse—because each of those acts undertaken against Trump will confirm the right in its conviction that “the rule of law” has already been replaced by rank partisanship.

-Damon Linker

Trump is a symptom of a weakened democracy, but not the cause.

Why is Donald Trump so powerful? How did he come to dominate one of the two major parties and get himself elected president? Is it his hair? His waistline? No, it’s his narratives. Trump tells powerful stories that ring true to tens of millions of Americans.

The main one is that America is being ruined by corrupt coastal elites. According to this narrative, there is an interlocking network of highly educated Americans who make up what the Trumpians have come to call the Regime: Washington power players, liberal media, big foundations, elite universities, woke corporations. These people are corrupt, condescending and immoral and are looking out only for themselves. They are out to get Trump because Trump is the person who stands up to them. They are not only out to get Trump; they are out to get you.

This narrative has a core of truth to it. Highly educated metropolitan elites have become something of a self-enclosed Brahmin class. But the Trumpian propaganda turns what is an unfortunate social chasm into venomous conspiracy theory. It simply assumes, against a lot of evidence, that the leading institutions of society are inherently corrupt, malevolent and partisan and are acting in bad faith.

-David Brooks

This dynamic started to mutate in the middle of the 20th century. Though surveys from the 1950s through the 1980s saw a marked decline in sectarian hatreds in the United States, the period saw the emergence of a conflict that is familiar to us today: a fight over “ultimate moral authority,” pitting those with orthodox tendencies (people committed to “an external, definable, and transcendent authority”) and those with progressivist leanings (people who are generally committed to deriving authority from rationalism and subjectivism).

“Abortion, child care, funding for the arts, affirmative action and quotas, gay rights, values in public education, or multiculturalism” — all these debates, Hunter notes, derive from this struggle for moral authority. Jews, Catholics, Protestants, and Muslims these days spend less time in doctrinal disputes with each other and instead each split along the orthodox/progressivist divide. It’s not shocking, for example, to see some Orthodox Jews aligning with Catholics and evangelicals against abortion.

Hunter’s analysis was groundbreaking in that it highlighted the religious underpinnings that tied these fights together. But his argument wasn’t that the culture wars were simply a fight between the forces of traditionalism versus the forces of secularism. Rather, his point was that everything in America was suffused with a religious sense of mission — even spheres we might normally imagine are completely secularized.

-Damir Marusic

The situation as Buchanan sketched it out is a dangerous one for a liberal democracy like ours. If the fight is over values rather than policy positions — a “religious war” — compromise is impossible: Values are absolute and not amenable to deliberative give-and-take.

And democratic elections are not meant to adjudicate such matters anyway. They are by definition a mechanism of temporarily designating who gets to run the country. (The question is posed to voters again and again, on a regular schedule.) If the issues at stake are about the very “soul of America,” democracy quickly reveals itself to be a profoundly unsatisfying means of organizing our politics.

It’s that lack of satisfaction with democratic outcomes that undeniably played a role in Republicans pursuing a legalistic means of undermining the legitimacy of Clinton’s presidency. The dark murmurs about the legitimacy of Bush and Obama didn’t rise to the level of what happened under Clinton, but now, with Trump, we’re back to special prosecutors and talk of impeachment...

...Pat Buchanan’s call to arms in 1991 was a pivotal moment in American politics. Buchanan saw himself and his followers as the ones on the defensive in a struggle that had been going on for a while. He had probably read Hunter’s book (which was published earlier that year), and it may have crystallized some things for him. The struggle itself wasn’t necessarily new, but calling it a “religious war” in an explicitly political context almost certainly changed things.Hunter’s orthodox and progressivists had already mostly sorted themselves into the two major parties by that point. Buchanan was the bugler sounding the cavalry charge. Buchanan’s bugling didn’t cause an immediate rupture in society. But by injecting “ultimate,” zero-sum questions into democratic politics, he undoubtedly put a new process into motion.Trust is a fragile thing, the first casualty of any war. And given that this war is now in its 27th year, it shouldn’t be surprising that reservoirs of trust — especially in partisan politics — are at an all-time low. But while Trump himself seems to go out of his way to exacerbate tensions among Americans, it’s important to remember that he is ultimately the symptom of something that has been going on for quite some time. And that implies that with his departure, we will not necessarily be better as a country.

-Damir Marusic

Third, we’ve come to dominate left-wing parties around the world that were formerly vehicles for the working class. We’ve pulled these parties further left on cultural issues (prizing cosmopolitanism and questions of identity) while watering down or reversing traditional Democratic positions on trade and unions. As creative-class people enter left-leaning parties, working-class people tend to leave. Around 1990, nearly a third of Labour members of the British Parliament were from working-class backgrounds; from 2010 to 2015, the proportion wasn’t even one in 10. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the 50 most-educated counties in America by an average of 26 points — while losing the 50 least-educated counties by an average of 31 points.

These partisan differences overlay economic differences. In 2020, Joe Biden won just 500 or so counties — but together they account for 71 percent of American economic activity, according to the Brookings Institution. Donald Trump won more than 2,500 counties that together generate only 29 percent of that activity. An analysis by Brookings and The Wall Street Journal found that just 13 years ago, Democratic and Republican areas were at near parity on prosperity and income measures. Now they are divergent and getting more so. If Republicans and Democrats talk as though they are living in different realities, it’s because they are.

-David Brooks

I want to write an essay about the moment that we are in which is the result of many factors.  We are dealing with eroding trust in institutions, a growing class divide and all of this leads to a wannabe authoritarian that is turning one political party into his personality cult.  The above quotes and links are the backbone of the essay.More to follow soon.