#Damon Linker

[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…

[arcticdementor]

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[alanshemper]

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

[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each of those acts undertaken against Trump will confirm the right in its conviction that “the rule of law” has already been replaced by rank partisanship.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.

[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

[arcticdementor]

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[swords0827]

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

[truck-fump]

Opinion | Possible Scenarios to Deal With the '<b>Trump</b> Problem' - The New York Times

New Post has been published on https://www.google.com/url?rct=j&sa=t&url=https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/28/opinion/letters/trump-possible-prosecution.html&ct=ga&cd=CAIyGjUzM2UwMTY5ZmFhZTIwMGQ6Y29tOmVuOlVT&usg=AOvVaw2o17CyrqsbqLwF_OafeTxO

Opinion | Possible Scenarios to Deal With the 'Trump Problem' - The New York Times

I hate to say it, but I agree with Damon Linker. The Justice Department should not bring charges against Donald Trump (Plan A). As he points out, if a …

[merrikstryfe]

In his own account of esoteric writing, Strauss emphasizes two reasons why philosophers prior to the modern period adopted a rhetoric of intentional misdirection or deliberate obscurity in writing their texts. First, they wished to avoid persecution—and above all the fate of Socrates, who was put to death for impiety and corrupting the youth of ancient Athens. Second, they wished to protect certain unsound but socially salubrious beliefs from the acids of philosophical skepticism. [...]

But as Arthur Melzer points out in his excellent book on philosophical esotericism, there is an additional reason why philosophers of the past chose to refrain from forthrightly spelling out their most fully developed views: pedagogy. Just as a skilled teacher will sometimes avoid spoonfeeding promising students out of the conviction that’s they will learn far more by figuring things out independently, so a philosopher hoping to lead people to the skeptical life of philosophy will often pose problems and riddles, drop hints, and construct puzzles in his text, leaving it up to the most motivated and careful readers to think things through and fill in the gaps on their own.

Damon Linker, "Conservatism and Skepticism - Part 2", Eyes on the Right, 7/15/22

[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

[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