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tinyshe · 3 years ago

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Thinking about ditching all social media? I am. This includes things like youtube and other items that you “log in”... “feeding the machine” -- food for thought...

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The whole justification for the War on Terror was to target “precrime”, or terror acts before they happen; the legislation was meant to target foreign governments and individuals, but bills are pending that would make the legislation applicable to Americans in the U.S.

Investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald stated that the end goal of the newly emerging war on domestic terrorism is to "essentially criminalize any oppositional ideology to the ruling class," adding, "There is literally nothing that could be more dangerous”

Journalist Whitney Webb is concerned about fusion centers, at which the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, NGOs and others in the private sector collaborate to decide who’s a terrorist and who’s not

Fusion centers have been around for a while, but as the war on domestic terror progresses, Webb believes that fusion centers will take on the same role as the CIA-run Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War, which were designed to collate names of dissidents and people with extremist sympathies to databases so they could be pursued by the relevant authorities

Silicon Valley and the national security state are now fused; deleting your social media accounts is one of the best ways to stop feeding the domestic terror machine

In June 2021, the U.S. National Security Council released a new “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.”1 While it’s being largely framed as a tool to fight White supremacy and political extremism, the definition of what constitutes a “domestic terrorist” is incredibly vague and based on ideologies.

In a podcast with one of my favorite independent journalists, Whitney Webb,2 Media Roots Radio host Robbie Martin notes how this creates a dangerous slippery slope, one that’s connected to the attempts to have increased surveillance and tracking of Americans’ data after 9/11.3

The “War on Terror,” launched in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Martin says, “was merely a prelude to a larger domestic crackdown on political dissidents.”4 Webb agreed, stating that we’re “near the bottom part of the slippery slope” already, and it’s not a stretch that one day anyone who disagrees with the government could be labeled a domestic terrorist and charged with a crime.

Criminalizing Oppositional Ideology to the Ruling Class

The whole justification for the War on Terror was to target “precrime”, or terror acts before they happen. Initially, the legislation was meant to target foreign governments and individuals, but bills are pending that would make the legislation applicable to Americans in the U.S.5

This isn’t a partisan issue, but something that’s been in the works for decades. Greenwald stated that viewing Washington as Democrat versus Republican, with one side being “your team” and the other being “your enemy” is a flawed belief, as an elite ruling class is truly in power:7

"There is a ruling class elite that is extremely comfortable with the establishment wings of both parties ... who they fund equally because those are the people who serve their agenda. Then there's a whole other group of people at whose expense they rule in. Some consider them on the left, some on the right," but "it's time to break down those barriers."

It’s important to understand that the U.S. already has aggressive criminal laws in place, such that more people are imprisoned in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world.8 Do we need further laws to criminalize people put in place? A concerning pivot has occurred as well, shifting in focus to the FBI targeting this new model of terrorism while the terms like “incitement to violence” have been radically expanded in meaning.

“It is accompanied by viral-on-social-media pleas that one work with the FBI to turn in one’s fellow citizens (“See Something, Say Something!”) and demands for a new system of domestic surveillance,” Greenwald wrote.9

People Who Spread ‘Disinformation’ Classified as Extremists

You don’t have to be violent to be declared a terrorist. You may simply have what the government deems to be “extremist views” or could be accused of spreading disinformation — although there’s no clear definition of what “disinformation” is. According to Webb:10

“There is talk in the domestic terror strategy that people who spread disinformation can also be classified as extremists and a threat to national security and, of course, we’ve seen over the past several years, how this disinformation label can be applied to independent media as a way to promote censorship of voices that are critical of U.S. empire, among other things, or that just don’t fit a particular government narrative.”

As taken directly from the National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism:11

“Domestic terrorists have — particularly in recent years — often been lone actors or small groups of informally aligned individuals who mobilize to violence with little or no clear organizational structure or direction. These individuals often consume material deliberately disseminated to recruit individuals to causes that attempt to provide a sense of belonging and fulfillment, however false that sense might be.

Their ideologies can be fluid, evolving, and overlapping. And they can, in some instances, connect and intersect with conspiracy theories and other forms of disinformation and misinformation …

These elements combine to form a complex and shifting domestic terrorism threat landscape and create significant challenges for law enforcement. Especially on Internet-based communications platforms such as social media, file-upload sites, and end-to-end encrypted platforms, all of these elements can combine and amplify threats to public safety.

… These efforts speak to a broader priority: enhancing faith in government and addressing the extreme polarization, fueled by a crisis of disinformation and misinformation often channeled through social media platforms, which can tear Americans apart and lead some to violence.”

Fusion Centers Are Ready and Waiting

Webb is concerned about fusion centers, at which the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, NGOs and others in the private sector collaborate to decide who’s a terrorist and who’s not.

Fusion centers have been around for a while, but as the war on domestic terror progresses, Webb believes that fusion centers will take on the same role as the CIA-run Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War, which was designed to collate names of dissidents and people with extremist sympathies to databases so they could be pursued by the relevant authorities — many ended up being kidnapped, tortured and killed.

Fusion centers are waiting to take on a more active role in the newly declared war on domestic terrorism, but in order for them to gain widespread acceptance, Webb believes that an outrageous event needs to take place — one that goes further than the January 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol, such as something that targets civilians and sparks outrage among the U.S. public that something must be done.

“This is why I worry that some other event may take place in order to push this strategy further. They’re setting up an infrastructure here that they plan to use, right? And I think given the current climate in the U.S. it would be hard for them to justify taking that where the strategy clearly shows they want to go,” Webb says.12

She also draws parallels between the present day and the U.S.-backed Operation Condor, which targeted leftists, suspected leftists and their sympathizers, resulting in the murders of an estimated 60,000 people, about half of which occurred in Argentina. Another 500,000 were politically imprisoned.13

“There was no investigation into whether the claims against these people were even true,” Webb explained. “There were no trials … it was a dragnet to create reorganized society using a climate of fear to encourage acquiescence to authority and complete obedience to the state.”14 It’s history that often gives the greatest clues about where society is headed, and Webb also details a bill President Biden introduced in 1995 in response to the Oklahoma City bombing.

It was initiated by the FBI as a charter to investigate political groups and included the following disturbing points. Fortunately, the bill wasn’t passed in this version — a lot was taken out and watered down — but if allowed to pass unrevised, it would have:15

Allowed the FBI, military and other groups to investigate political groups at their will, without any higher-up approval

Allowed a 10-year prison sentence for the crime of supporting the lawful activities of an organization if the president deemed the organization a terrorist entity

Made it so that the president alone decides who is a terrorist, and the decision could not be appealed

Loosened rules for wire taps

Reversed the presumption of innocent until proven guilty

Allowed the military to be used in domestic law enforcement activities and potentially made it legal for soldiers to invade people’s homes and take possessions without probable cause

Allowed secret trials for immigrants not charged with a crime, and allowed the use of illegally obtained evidence in those trials

Silicon Valley Is Fused With the National Security State

Silicon Valley and the national security state are now fused, Webb says. The decadeslong wars against domestic dissidence have always involved technology like databases, and now the link is inseparable.

Webb wrote about “tech tyranny” at the start of the pandemic, revealing that a document from the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) — acquired through a FOIA request — said changes were needed to keep a technological advantage over China:16

“This document suggests that the U.S. follow China’s lead and even surpass them in many aspects related to AI-driven technologies, particularly their use of mass surveillance.

This perspective clearly clashes with the public rhetoric of prominent U.S. government officials and politicians on China, who have labeled the Chinese government’s technology investments and export of its surveillance systems and other technologies as a major ‘threat’ to Americans’ ‘way of life.’”

Many of the steps to implement the program are being promoted as part of the COVID-19 pandemic response. NSCAI is not only a key part of the Great Reset’s fourth industrial revolution, but also promotes mass surveillance, online-only shopping and the end of cash while noting that “having streets carpeted with cameras is good infrastructure.”

NSCAI’s chairman is Eric Schmidt, the former head of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Other notable Silicon Valley NSCAI members include:17

Eric Horvitz, director of Microsoft Research Labs

Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services (CIA contractor)

Andrew Moore, head of Google Cloud AI

Meanwhile, Greenwald highlighted a statement by Alex Stamos, a former Facebook security official, who recommends social media companies collaborate with law enforcement to crack down on extremist influencers online, especially those with large audiences in order to “get us all back in the same consensual reality.”18

Social Media Plays a Huge Role in the War

If you’re reading this and are concerned, I urge you to listen to the Media Roots Radio podcast with Whitney Webb in full.19 It’s just under 2.5 hours, but time well spent to understand the historical events that have led us to where we are today. For those who want to take action, a mass exodus from social media platforms is a good start.

Many suspect Facebook is the public-friendly version of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Lifelog, a database project aimed at tracking the minutiae of people’s entire existence for national security surveillance purposes.20

The Pentagon pulled the plug on Lifelog February 4, 2004, in response to backlash over privacy concerns.21 Yet that same day, Facebook was launched.22

Lifelog — and likely its successor Facebook — was meant to complement Total Information Awareness (TIA), a program that sprang up after the 9/11 attacks that was seeking to collect Americans’ medical records, fingerprints and other biometric data, along with DNA and records relating to personal finances, travel and media consumption.23

Now Facebook is asking users to report “extremist” content and misinformation. Fortunately, there’s a way to passively disentangle yourself from the data mining and legacy social media that is intertwined with the war on domestic terror. Webb says: “Delete your Facebook and your Instagram and your Twitter, because you are feeding the domestic terror machine.”24

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 4 years ago

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If there’s one enduring theme about tyrants in myth, literature, and history it is that, for a long time, no one takes them seriously. And there are few better examples of this than Shakespeare’s fictional Richard III. He’s a preposterous figure in many ways, an unsightly hunchback, far down the line of royal accession, socially outcast, riven with resentment, utterly dismissible — until he serially dismisses and/or murders everyone between him and the throne. What makes the play so riveting and often darkly funny is the sheer unlikelihood of the plot, the previously inconceivable ascent to the Crown of this indelibly absurd figure, as Stephen Greenblatt recently explored in his brilliant monograph, Tyrant.

I’ll never forget watching a performance by Antony Sher of Richard decades ago — playing him as a spider, instinctually scuttling on two legs and two black canes, to trap, murder, and ingest his foes. The role is, of course, a fictional portrait, designed to buttress the legitimacy of the Tudor dynasty that followed Richard III and that Shakespeare lived under. But as an analysis of the psychology of tyranny, it’s genius. Like Plato and Aristotle, Shakespeare saw this question not merely as political, but as wrapped up in the darker folds of the human soul, individual and collective.

The background of the drama is England’s “War of the Roses”, the civil war between two regional dynasties from which Richard emerged. And that’s often key in tyrant narratives: it’s when societies are already fractured into tribes, and divisions have become insurmountable, that tyrants tend to emerge, exploiting and fomenting chaos, to reign, however briefly, over the aftermath.

The war seems resolved when the victorious Edward, Richard’s older brother, succeeds to the throne: “For here I hope begins our lasting joy!” And no one thinks the deformed, bitter sibling, of all people, would be a threat. It seems preposterous. But it’s true. And at each unimaginable power grab by Richard — murdering one brother, killing the late king Edward’s young heirs, killing his own wife, and then trying to marry his niece to secure the dynasty — Richard’s peers keep telling themselves that it isn’t really happening. Greenblatt notes: “The principal weapon Richard has is the very absurdity of his ambition. No one in his right mind would suspect that he seriously aspires to the throne.”

But he has one key skill, Greenblatt notes, the ability to lie shamelessly: “‘Why, I can smile and murder whiles I smile, And cry ‘Content!’ to that which grieves my heart, And wet my cheeks with artificial tears, And frame my face to all occasions.’” It’s a skill that serves him well — and there seems no limit to the number of those eager to believe him. His older brother George, Duke of Clarence, told by thugs that Richard wants him dead, exclaims: “Oh no, he loves me, and he holds me dear. Go you to him from me.” At which point the hired goons reply — “Ay, so we will” — and merrily murder him, taking him to Richard as a corpse. (In a good production, that can get a laugh.) One of Clarence’s young sons, told that his own uncle hates him, declares, “I cannot think it.” Others witness obvious depravity but can’t quite call it out. One official receives clearly illegal orders from Richard, and follows them, asking no questions: “I will not reason what is meant hereby, Because I will be guiltless from the meaning.”

Denial. Avoidance. Distraction. Willful ignorance. These are all essential to enabling a tyrant’s rise. And keeping this pattern going is Richard’s profound grasp of the power of shock. He does and says the unexpected and unthinkable in order to stun his opponents into a kind of dazed passivity. It’s this capacity to keep you on your heels, to keep disorienting you with the unacceptable (which is then somehow accepted), that marks a tyrant’s relentless drive. He does this by instinct. He craves chaos, lies, suspense, surprises — not because he’s a genius, but because stability threatens his psyche. He cannot rest. He is not in control of himself. And whenever the dust settles, as it were, he has to disturb it again.

This is what we’ve been dealing with in the figure of Donald Trump now for five years, and it is absurd to believe that a duly conducted election is going to end it. I know, I know. I’m hysterical and over-the-top and a victim of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Trump is simply too incompetent and too lazy to be an actual tyrant, I’m constantly scolded. He’s just baiting me again. And so on. But what I think this otherwise salient critique misses is that tyranny is not, in its essence, about the authoritarian and administrative skills required to run a country effectively for a long time. Tyrants, after all, are often terrible at this. It is rather about a mindset, as the ancient philosophers understood, with obvious political consequences. It’s a pathology. It requires no expertise in anything other than itself.

You need competence if you want to run an effective government, or plan a regular campaign, or master policy with a view to persuading people, or hold power for the sake of something else. You need competence to create and sustain something. But you do not need much competence to destroy things. You just need the will. And this is what tyrants do: they destroy things. Richard III ruled for two short years, ending in his own death in battle, and a ruined country.

This is Trump’s threat. Not the construction of a viable one-party state, but the destruction of practices, norms, civility, laws, customs and procedures that constitute liberal democracy’s non-zero-sum genius. He doesn’t need to be competent to destroy our system of government. He merely needs to be himself: an out-of-control, trust-free, malignant narcissist, with inexhaustible resources of psychic compulsion, in a pluralist system designed for the opposite. All you need is an insatiable pathological drive to avoid any constraint on your own behavior, and the demagogic genius to carry a critical mass of people with you, and our system, designed as the antidote to tyranny, is soon unspooling into incoherence, deadlock, and collapse.

I’m told he’s been ineffective even as a tyrant, so no worries. To which I can only say: really? Once you realize he doesn’t give a shit about any actual policies, apart from doing all he can to wipe the legacy of Barack Obama from planet earth, he’s been pretty competent. Note how he turned Congressional subpoenas into toilet paper; how he crippled and muzzled the Mueller inquiry; how he installed a crony at the Department of Justice to pursue his political enemies and shield him from the law; how effectively he stymied impeachment; how he cucked every previous Republican opponent; how he helped destroy the credibility of news sources that oppose him; how he filled his cabinet with acting secretaries and flunkies; how he declared fake emergencies to claim the power of the purse assigned to the Congress; and how he has reshaped the Supreme Court with potentially three new Justices, whom he sees solely as his loyal stooges if he comes up against the rule of law.

And gotten away with all of it!

In protecting his own power over others, he has been as competent as hell. Imagine where we’d be in four more years. Despite a mountain of criticism, he has not conceded a single error, withdrawn a single statement, or acknowledged a single lie. His party lost the mid-terms, but seriously, what difference did that make? His control of the Republican party, and his cult-like grip on the base, has never been greater than now. Yes, he has said and done racially polarizing things — but the joke is he may yet have more support from blacks and Latinos in 2020 than he did in 2016. Think of his greatest policy failures: the appalling loss of life in the Covid epidemic and the collapse of law and order in the cities. Now recall that on February 1 of this year, Trump was at 43.4 percent approval; 200,000 deaths later, and the wreckage from Seattle to Portland to Minneapolis, and his approval today is at 43.1 percent.

This is, of course, not enough to win re-election. And Trump has no interest in broadening his appeal, because it would dilute the tribalism he feeds off. So he has made it abundantly clear that if the results of the election show him the loser, he will not accept them. Simple, really. He said this in 2016, of course, refusing to honor the result in advance. But this year, he has stumbled upon something quite marvelous for his purposes. Because of Covid19, it is likely that mail-in ballots will be far higher in number than before, and, as Barton Gellman has shown in this essential new piece, this gives Trump an opportunity he has instinctively seized. He has been saying for months now that: “MAIL-IN VOTING WILL LEAD TO MASSIVE FRAUD AND ABUSE … WE CAN NEVER LET THIS TRAGEDY BEFALL OUR GREAT NATION.” In late summer, Gellman noted, Trump was making this argument four times a day: “Very dangerous for our country.” “A catastrophe.” “The greatest rigged election in history.” He is telling us loud and clear that, if he has anything to do with it, this election will not be decided at the ballot box, but at the Supreme Court, which he expects to control.

If you haven’t, read Gellman’s piece closely. It seems inevitable to me that, unless it’s a Biden landslide, Trump will declare himself the winner on election night, regardless of the actual results. Because most mail-in ballots will take more time to count, and several swing states have not changed their laws to allow for counting before election day, and mail-ins are easily challenged, it is quite likely that much of Biden’s vote will remain uncounted or contested — and could remain so for a long time. And after declaring victory within hours of polls closing, Trump will follow the script he used for Florida in 2018: “The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged,” he tweeted, making shit up as usual. “An honest vote count is no longer possible — ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!”

I’ve no doubt this bullshit will be challenged by the networks, the press, and many of the states, and other sane people, who will urge patience. I’ve also no doubt that many states will do their best not to pervert the process. But I fear the result will be close (I’m underwhelmed by Biden’s near-invisible campaign), which will give Trump a chance. The fanaticism and alternate reality of a base already addicted to conspiracy theories means a hefty chunk of the country will back him. And it’s perfectly possible that Trump’s pre-emptive strike on the election result could prompt a massive revolt across the country from those who want to defend our democracy. (I will be marching in such a scenario myself). Most presidents would balk at anything close to this kind of scenario. Trump can’t wait. Violence? You can almost feel Trump’s hankering for it.

All he wants is chaos, because in chaos, the strong leader wins. Would he incite violence on his behalf if the votes seem to be drifting away from him? You bet he would. Would he urge his supporters to physically prevent ballot-counting? He already has. Would he try to corral Republican state legislators to back him in electing electors? Gellman has sources. Would he take this country to the brink of civil conflict? Way past it. Will anyone in the GOP do anything to stop him? We know the answer to that already. If they cannot condemn him this week, when would they? And he will do all this not out of some strategic calculation or tactical skill but because he cannot do anything else. He is psychologically incapable of conceding anything. And he has no understanding of collateral damage because his narcissism precludes it.

In every Shakespeare play about tyranny — from Richard III to Coriolanus to Macbeth — the tyrant loses in the end, and often quite quickly. They’re not that competent at governing, or even interested in it. The forces they unleash come back to wipe them from the stage, sooner or later. They flame out. Richard III lasted a mere couple of years on the throne.

But in every case, they leave a wrecked and reeling society in their wake. Look around you now and see the damage already done. Now imagine what we face in the next few months. We are tethered to Trump at this point because he is the legitimate president: the man who cannot control himself is in control of all the rest of us. And that’s why I desperately want to appeal to right-of-center readers at this point in the campaign to do everything they can to vote and to vote for Biden. This is not about left or right. This is about the integrity of a system that can give us such a choice. It really is an existential moment for liberal democracy, and its future, not just here but across the world. The next few months are critical.

It fills me with inexpressible rage that we have been brought to this. But there is no way out now other than through. This was always going to be the moment of maximal danger. And we cannot lose our focus now.

#The Weekly Dish #Andrew Sullivan #Shakespeare #election 2020 #tyranny #corrupt #chaos #2020 #political

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philosophyofpolitics · 6 years ago

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THREE VARIATIONS ON TRUMP: CHAOS, EUROPE, AND FAKE NEWS

There is disorder under heavens; the situation is excellent

Now that yet another week of Donald Trump’s frantic activity is safely behind us and slowly receding into memory, the time has come to think about the chaotic wasteland his visits left behind. Trump visited three places: Brussels, where he met key European leaders; London where he met Theresa May (plus the queen); and Helsinki where he met Putin. Everybody noted the strange fact that Trump was much friendlier to those perceived as American enemies than to its friends. But such facts should not surprise us too much. Our attention should turn in another direction. As is often the case with Trump, reactions to his acts are more important than what he did or said.

Let us begin by comparing what Trump said with what his partners said. When Trump and May were asked by a journalist what they thought about the flow of immigrants to Europe, Trump brutally and honestly rendered his populist anti-immigrant position: immigrants are a threat to the European way of life; they are destabilizing the safety of our countries, bringing violence and intolerance, so we should keep them out. A careful listener could easily notice that Theresa May said exactly the same thing, just in a more diplomatic and “civilized” way: immigrants bring diversity; they contribute to our welfare, but we should carefully check who we let in… We’ve got here a clear taste of the choice which is more and more the only one presented to us: either direct populist barbarism or a more civilized version of the same politics, barbarism with a human face.

Generally, reactions to Trump from all across the spectrum in the US, Republicans and Democrats, were those of global shock and awe bordering on panic pure and simple: Trump is unreliable. He brings chaos: first, he reproached Germany for relying on Russian gas and thus becoming vulnerable to our enemy; days later he praised his good relation with Putin… He doesn’t even have good manners (the horror: when meeting the queen, he violated the protocol of how you behave in the presence of a monarch!). He doesn’t really listen to his democratic partners in a dialogue, while he is much more open to the charm of Putin, America’s big enemy. The way he acted at the press conference with Putin in Helsinki was not only an unheard-of humiliation (just think of it: he didn’t behave as Putin’s master!), and some of his statements could even be considered outright acts of treason. Rumours swirled of how Trump was Putin’s puppet because Putin had some hold over him (the famous photos of prostitutes urinating on Trump in Moscow?), and parts of the US establishment, Democrats and some Republicans, began to contemplate a quick impeachment, even if Pence would be his replacement. The conclusion was simply that the President of the US is no longer the leader of the free world… But has the President of the US really ever been such a leader? Here our counter-attack should begin.

Note that the overall confusion of Trump’s statements contains some truths here and there. Wasn’t he in some sense right when he said that it was in our interest to have good relations with Russia and China to prevent war? Wasn’t he partially right to present his tariff war also as a protection of the interests of the US workers? The fact is that the existing order of international trade and finance is far from just, and that the European establishment hurt by Trump’s measures should also look at its own sins. Did we already forget how the existing financial and trade rules that privilege the strong European states, especially Germany, brought devastation to Greece?

Concerning Putin, I believe most of the accusations against him to be true. Say, with regard to his meddling in the US elections, probably yes, Putin was caught doing… what? What the US are doing regularly and massively, just that in their case, they call it the defence of democracy. So, Trump is a monster, and when he designated himself as a “stable genius,” we should read this as a direct reversal of the truth: he is an unstable idiot who disturbs the establishment. But as such, he is a symptom, an effect of what is wrong with the establishment itself. The true Monster is the very establishment shocked by Trump’s actions.

The panicky reaction to Trump’s latest acts demonstrates that he is undermining and destabilizing the US political establishment and its ideology. Our conclusion should thus be: the situation is dangerous; there are uncertainty and elements of chaos in international relations. But it is here that we should remember Mao’s old motto: “There is great disorder under the sky, so the situation is excellent!” Let’s not lose our resolve, let’s exploit the confusion by systematically organizing another anti-establishment front from the Left. The signs are clear here: the surprising electoral victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a self-proclaimed democratic Socialist, against 10-terms House incumbent Joe Crowley in a New York congressional primary was, hopefully, the first in a series of shocks that will transform the Democratic Party. People like her, who are not the well-known faces from the liberal establishment, should be our answer to Trump.

Trump and the Idea of Europe

In an interview on July 15, 2018, just after attending a stormy meeting with the EU leaders, Trump mentioned the European Union as the first in the line of “foes” of the US, ahead of Russia and China. Instead of condemning this claim as irrational (“Trump is treating the allies of the US worse than its enemies,” etc.), we should ask a simple question: what bothers Trump so much about the EU? And which EU is he talking about? This question should be raised because, when Trump was asked by journalists about immigrants flowing into Europe, he answered as it befits the anti-immigrant populist that he is: immigrants are tearing apart the fabric of European mores and ways of life, posing a danger to European spiritual identity… In short, it was people like Orban or Salvini who were talking through him.

So which Europe bothers Trump? It is the Europe of transnational unity, the Europe vaguely aware that, in order to cope with the challenges of our moment, we should move beyond the constraints of nation-states. It is the Europe which also desperately strives to somehow remain faithful to the old Enlightenment motto of solidarity with victims, the Europe aware of the fact that humanity is today One, that we are all on the same boat (or, as we say, on the same Spaceship Earth), so that the other’s misery is also our problem. We should mention here Peter Sloterdijk who noted that the struggle today is about how to secure the survival of modern Europe’s greatest economico-political achievement, the Social Democratic Welfare State. According to Sloterdijk, our reality is – in Europe, at least – “objective Social Democracy” as opposed to “subjective” Social Democracy. One should distinguish between Social Democracy as the panoply of political parties and Social Democracy as the “formula of a system” which “precisely describes the political-economic order of things, which is defined by the modern state as the state of taxes, as infrastructure-state, as the state of the rule of law and, not last, as the social state and the therapy state”: “We encounter everywhere a phenomenal and a structural Social Democracy, a manifest and a latent one, one which appears as a party and another one which is more or less irreversibly built into in the very definitions, functions, and procedures of modern statehood as such.” (Peter Sloterdijk, “Aufbruch der Leistungstraeger,” Cicero, November 2009, p. 99)

In the normal run of things, this Idea that underlies a united Europe got corrupted, half-forgotten, and it is only in a moment of danger that we are compelled to return to this essential dimension of Europe, to its hidden potential. More precisely, the point is not just to return to this Idea but to (re)invent it, to “discover” what was actually never there. As Alenka Zupančič put it apropos of the threat of nuclear (self-)destruction of humanity: “the true choice is between losing it all and creating what we are about to lose: only this could eventually save us, in a profound sense. […] The possible awakening call of the bomb is not simply ‘let’s do all in our power to prevent it before it is too late’, but rather ‘let’s first built this totality (unity, community, freedom) that we are about to lose through the bomb’.”

Therein resides the unique chance opened up by the very real threat of nuclear (or ecological, for that matter) destruction. When we become aware of the danger that we could lose it all, we automatically get caught in a retroactive illusion, a short-circuit between reality and its hidden potentials. What we want to save is not the reality of our world but reality as it might have been if it were not hindered by antagonisms which gave birth to the nuclear threat. And the same goes for the united Europe which lies in the great pincers between America on the one side and Russia on the other. Although America and Russia may appear opposites – unbridled liberalism and individualism versus new authoritarianism–, seen metaphysically, they are the same: the same hopeless frenzy of unchained technology grounded in fake patriotism (“America first,” “Russia first”). When the farthest corners of the globe have been conquered technically and can be exploited economically; when any incident you like, in any place you like, at any time you like, becomes accessible as fast as you like; when, through televised “live coverage,” you can simultaneously “experience” a battle in the Iraqi desert and an opera performance in Beijing; when, in a global digital network, time is nothing but speed, instantaneity, and simultaneity; when a winner in a reality TV-show counts as the great man of the people; then, yes, there still loom like spectres over all this uproar the questions: what for? – where to? – and what then?…

Anyone minimally acquainted with Heidegger will easily recognize in this paragraph an ironic paraphrase of his diagnosis of the situation of Europe from mid-1930s (Introduction to Metaphysics). There effectively is a need, among us, Europeans, for what Heidegger called Auseinandersetzung (an interpretive confrontation) with others as well as with Europe’s own past in all its scope, from its Ancient and Judeo-Christian roots to the recently deceased Welfare-State idea. Every crisis is in itself an instigation for a new beginning. Every collapse of short-term strategic and pragmatic measures can be a blessing in disguise, an opportunity to rethink the very foundations. What we need is a retrieval-through-repetition (Wieder-Holung): through a critical confrontation with the entire European tradition, one should repeat the question “What is Europe?”, or, rather, “What does it mean for us to be Europeans?”, and thus formulate a new inception.

Both the US and Russia openly want to dismember Europe. Both Trump and Putin support Brexit, and they support euro-sceptics in every corner, from Poland to Italy. What is bothering them about Europe when we all know the misery of the EU which fails again and again at every test, from its inability to enact a consistent immigration policy to its wretched reaction to Trump’s tariff war? It is obviously not this actually-existing Europe, but the idea of Europe that rekindles against all odds and becomes palpable in the moments of danger.

From Fake News to the Big Lie

An obsession with fake news is something that Trump and his critics share: Trump is accused of lying all the time, while Trump himself accuses his opponents of spreading fake news. In debates about the explosion of fake news in (not only) our media, liberal critics like to point out three events which, combined, continuously bring about what some call the “death of truth.”

First, it is the rise of religious and ethnic fundamentalisms (and its obverse, stiff Political Correctness) that disavow rational argumentation and ruthlessly manipulate data to get their message through. Christian fundamentalists lie for Jesus, Politically Correct Leftists obfuscate the news showing their favourite victims in a bad light (or denounce the bearers of such news as “Islamophobic racists”), etc.

Then, there are the new digital media that enable people to form communities defined by specific ideological interests, communities where they can exchange news and opinions outside a unified public space and where conspiracies and similar theories can flourish without constraints (just look at the thriving neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic websites).

Finally, there is the legacy of postmodern “deconstructionism” and historicist relativism, which claim that there is no objective truth valid for all, that every truth relies on a specific horizon and is rooted in a subjective standpoint dependent on power relations, and that the greatest ideology is precisely the claim that we can step out of our historical limitation and look at things objectively. Opposed to this is, of course, the view that facts are out there, accessible to an objective disinterested approach, and that we should distinguish between the freedom of opinions and the freedom of facts. Liberals can thus comfortably occupy the privileged ground of truthfulness and dismiss both sides, alt-right and radical Left.

Problems begin with the last distinction. In some sense, there ARE “alternate facts,” though, of course, not in the sense of the debate whether the Holocaust did or did not happen. (Incidentally, all the Holocaust-revisionists whom I know, from David Irving on, argue in a strictly empirical way of verifying data; none of them evokes postmodern relativism!) “Data” are a vast and impenetrable domain, and we always approach them from what hermeneutics calls a certain horizon of understanding, privileging some data and omitting others. All our histories are precisely that – stories, a combination of (selected) data into consistent narratives, not photographic reproductions of reality. For example, an anti-Semitic historian could easily write an overview of the role of the Jews in the social life of Germany in the 1920s, pointing out how entire professions (lawyers, journalists, art) were numerically dominated by Jews – an account that is (probably more or less) true, but clearly in the service of a lie.

The most efficient lies are lies performed with truth, lies which reproduce only factual data. Take the history of a country: one can tell it from the political standpoint (focusing on the vagaries of political power), on economic development, on ideological struggles, on popular misery and protest… Each of the approaches could be factually accurate, but they are not “true” in the same emphatic sense. There is nothing “relativist” in the fact that human history is always told from a certain standpoint, sustained by certain ideological interests. The difficult thing is to show how some of these interested standpoints are not ultimately all equally true: some are more “truthful” than others. For example, if one tells the story of Nazi Germany from the standpoint of the suffering of those oppressed by it, i.e., if we are led in our telling by an interest in universal human emancipation, this is not just a matter of a different subjective standpoint. Such a retelling of history is also immanently “more true” since it describes more adequately the dynamics of the social totality which gave birth to Nazism. Not all “subjective interests” are the same, not only because some are ethically preferable to others but because “subjective interests” do not stand outside a social totality; they are themselves moments of that social totality, formed by active (or passive) participants in social processes. The title of Habermas’s early masterpiece “Knowledge and Human Interest” is perhaps more actual today than ever before.

There is an even greater problem with the underlying premise of those who proclaim the “death of truth”: they talk as if before (say, until the 1980s), in spite of all the manipulations and distortions, truth did somehow prevail, and that the “death of truth” is a relatively recent phenomenon. Already a quick overview tells us that this was not the case. How many violations of human rights and humanitarian catastrophes remained invisible, from the Vietnam War to the invasion of Iraq? Just remember the times of Reagan, Nixon, Bush… The difference was not that the past was more “truthful” but that ideological hegemony was much stronger, so that, instead of today’s greater melee of local “truths,” one “truth” (or, rather, one big Lie) basically prevailed. In the West, this was the liberal-democratic Truth (with a Leftist or Rightist twist). What is happening today is that, with the populist wave which unsettled the political establishment, the Truth/Lie that has served as an ideological foundation for this establishment is also falling apart. And the ultimate reason for this disintegration is not the rise of postmodern relativism but the failure of the ruling establishment, which is no longer able to maintain its ideological hegemony.

We can now see what those who bemoan the “death of truth” really deplore: the disintegration of one big Story more or less accepted by the majority, a story, which used to bring ideological stability to a society. The secret of those who curse “historicist relativism” is that they miss the safe situation where one big Truth (even if it was a big Lie) provided basic “cognitive mapping” to all. In short, it is those who deplore the “death of truth” that are the true and most radical agents of this death: their motto is the one attributed to Goethe, “besser Unrecht als Unordnung,” better injustice than disorder, better one big Lie than the reality of a mixture of lies and truths. One thing is clear: there is no return to the old ideological hegemony. The only way to return to Truth is to reconstruct it from a new cognitive interest in universal emancipation.

Slavoj Žižek

The Philosophical Salon

#philosophy #Žižek #Trump

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keywestlou · 4 years ago

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PENCE LAYING LOW IN INDIANA.....FEARS FOR HIS LIFE

Yesterday on Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough said Mike Pence was “in fear for his life…..he was laying low in Indiana.” All because of Trump’s actions leading up to and on January 6.

Scarborough blamed Trump for putting the former Vice President “on the hit list.”

A shame from my perspective also. Pence could not have been a more loyal Vice President. From Trump’s perspective, Pence wavered at the end. From mine, he did his job in interpreting the Constitution properly.

Some came to kill Pence and Pelosi on January 6. Others decided to during Trump’s rally under the white tent before.

Trump put Pence behind the eight ball. Before and at the rally in suggesting Pence had the power to invalidate the election. Trump told everyone at the rally: Pence “did not have the courage to do it.”

Trump’s rabble rousers were ready. They had heard the words of their Master. As they proceeded to the Capitol, they chanted “hang Mike Pence.”

It has been reported 2 police officers died by suicide following what occurred at the Capitol. One a Capitol police officer. The other a member of the MDP.

The Department of Homeland Security issued a “national terrorist bulletin” yesterday. The bulletin indicated there was a “lingering potential” for “violence.” From persons motivated by anti-government sentiment following Biden’s election.

The Department suggested the January 6 riot emboldened extremists and set the stage for additional attacks.

Amazing how many Republicans have jumped ship since the election. It was reported yesterday 30,000 Republicans changed their registration to another party.

The number is probably higher. Sufficient data is not available. Only a handful of states report voter registration and information about voters switching parties on a weekly basis.

Some things in life are carried a step too far. One is the removal of statues of persons who had ties to slavery in the past and public buildings named after those considered to have had black animosity.

San Francisco joined the group supporting name removal yesterday. The San Francisco School Board had a resolution under consideration for 3 months. Forty four schools involved.

The Board approved a resolution calling for removing names that honored historical figures with direct or broad ties to slavery, oppression, racism or the “subjugation” of human beings.

Some of the names on the list included George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Father Junipero Serra, Paul Revere, Francis Scott Key, and Dianne Feinstein.

A step too far.

Yes, Washington owned slaves. Everyone did back then. It was a form of wealth. People forget how Washington made it possible for our country to be born, the cold winter he spent at Valley Forge, and his crossing the Delaware in the middle of a freezing Christmas Eve to defeat the Hussein troops.

Without Lincoln, the black race might still be where they were 150 some odd years ago. He is honored. Referred to by Americans as the Great Emancipator. On a personal level, he was shot in the back of the head and died for the good he achieved as a result of the Civil War.

Would the colonists have won the Revolutionary War had Paul Revere not galloped through the night shouting: “To arms, to arms, the British are coming.” The Revolution might never have gotten beyond Concord and Lexington.

Francis Scott Key wrote the Star Spangled Banner.

Dianne Feinstein is a today woman. What did she do to blacks?

San Francisco is a gay community. Overwhelmingly. Why not require San Francisco to tear down the statues of any persons who were anti-gay at any time in any fashion? Also, those public buildings that were named after anti-gay persons.

Another great inquiry in the Citizens’ Voice: “If the City gets 100 vaccine doses, what portion of that goes to second doses?”

Key West continues to receive acclimation as being a popular place to vacation.

The 2021 Travelers Choice Award for Destinations listed Key West fifth. Behind New York, Maui, Las Vegas and New Orleans.

Miami appears to have fallen behind after many years at or near the top. It is now listed #18.

DAY 3…..Greece The First Time

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Key West Lou

I cannot believe I have been in Novara only three days. It seems like a lifetime. Especially in view of my experiences.

Earthquakes still in the news big time here. Much destruction to Northern Italy.

I reported being in two earthquakes yesterday. Turns out it was three. Maybe five. Three hours after publication, I felt another one. I was sitting at the computer at that time also. I did not consider it of any consequence. After all, I had been involved in two already that day. Last night while watching television, it was reported that Novara had suffered two more quakes around eight in the evening. I never felt them.

Many dead. Significant damage. Sad. The people of Novara spoke of the earthquakes much yesterday. It was like being in Key West following a hurricane.

Speaking of hurricanes, I was thinking yesterday whether a earthquake or hurricane was worse. One is short and the other prolonged. Both cause significant loss of life and damage. They ended up equal in my mind. Better that both not occur, however.

Earthquakes are not common to this region. So I have been told. The word on the news is that whatever problem there is in the San Francisco area exists now in northern Italy. A shelf or whatever and it is moving. Italian news describes it as a mountain rising to the surface. The scientists have predicted at least 70 more earthquakes over time as a result. We shall see.

Lisa got Skype yesterday. We skyped for the first time in the morning Lisa time. The grandkids had already left for school. Corey joined in. It was exciting to see them both. I hope I get to speak with Robert and Ally soon.

Around 5, I decided to take a walk. I rambled up and down the streets of the historic centre of Novara. It was a high knowing that most buildings were a thousand years old. The first floor the best quality shops. Top floors great apartments. By the way, people live in apartments here. Homes are considered too expensive. I do not understand. Most of the apartments go for $1 million dollars plus.

My walk led me to discover the Piazzetta Delle Erbe. Piazzetta means little piazza. I am learning.

In English the Piazzetta is the Little Square of Herbs. Back when, probably a thousand years ago, growers and merchants came from all over Europe and Asia to buy and sell herbs at this market.

Close by, I made another discovery. The Broletto. I do not know what the term means. It was the place where the first market in all of Italy was established in medieval times. Everything and anything sold. It helped the Novara area at the time to gain financial independence

The best was yet to come. The Partigiani. It is at the Piazza Dei Martiri. Partigiani means partisans. The Piazza translates to the Plaza of Martyrs.

I learned the story of this special place while sitting at an outside cafe having a drink and watching the world go by. Two gentleman at the next table engaged me in conversation. They spoke English. Americans are revered here. I am being treated with kindness and respect because I am an American. It was not unusual for them to engage me in conversation. They started the conversation with…..American?

Novara was occupied by the Nazis during World War II. Some of the locals were not pleased.They became partisans. Guerrilla types working as the underground. Five were captured. They were placed against a brick wall and shot by the Nazis. In full view of the citizens of Novara.

After the war a small monument was placed near where they were killed. A tree was also planted. It still stands today. The tree. By itself against a large red brick wall. Bullet holes could be seen in the wall.

It dawned on me that the medieval thousand year old buildings I have been speaking about were in good shape. I asked were they not destroyed during World War II? Bombs, artillery and tank fire. No, I was told.There was never any fighting or bombing or what have you in and to Novara. The Nazis walked out and the Americans walked in. The people of Novara were very lucky. Other communities in the area, such as Milan, sustained significant damage.

My walk took me past many fine stores. I was particularly impressed with the shops featuring apparel for women. The most beautiful clothes I have ever seen! Absolutely magnificent! Bright, shiny and smart for summer wearing. The thought struck me it would have been nice to have a woman to take into the stores and buy a new wardrobe for.

Remember the 124 steps I spoke of yesterday. There are not 124. I counted them again yesterday. At a time when I was not suffering from jet lag and a bad stomach. There are 68. Still a lot of steps for this old man!

The effects of jet lag are still with me. I went to bed at nine last night. Did not sleep one minute. Finally got up at 5:30 in the morning to start this blog. I will pay for the no sleep later in the day.

Never got to Milan yesterday to view the Last Supper. The trains were out of commission because of the earthquake.

I cannot let this experience pass. At the dinner party three nights ago, one of the meats was a dark one. Deep purple. Sliced thin. Every one was going crazy over it. They loved it! A bit of lemon and they ate away!

I had a few pieces. Did not particularly like it. Other guests were surprised I did not.

Yesterday similar meat was served to me for lunch. I again was not crazy about it. I asked what is this? It was horse meat! Horse meat is legal in Italy. There are specialty butcher shops that sell horse meat. And lest I forget, donkey also. That was it. No more for me! I explained that horse meat was not legal in the United States for human consumption. My fellow diners were shocked.

The big deal today is for me to go to the bank. I have no euros. Only American money. The exchange process should be interesting. Is cash or a credit card required? Can both be used?

Stephanie Kaple is one of the loves of my life. She lives in Key West. She is known as the Island Shoe Girl. She only wears expensive shoes with high high heels. Looks good in them!

Stephanie now plays bocce. She joined the same bocce league I play in. She wears heels while playing. Not wise from my perspective. But that is Stephanie!

She writes a blog as I do. A recent one was interesting and funny. Take a look at it if you have the time. A short read. www.islandshoegirl.com.

That is all for today folks! Sorry for the length but there is much to share regarding my trip. Tomorrow I leave for Athens to start the Greece phase of this trip. Athens, Santorini, Mykinos and some deserted island. Five weeks will be spent in Greece. Then back to Italy for a while. Portofino and Morocco under consideration for the scheduled end of my trip. If I return. I am enjoying everything so much I might stay.

Enjoy your day!

PENCE LAYING LOW IN INDIANA…..FEARS FOR HIS LIFE was originally published on Key West Lou

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dipulb3 · 4 years ago

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Capitol riot tears GOP apart as it seeks a return to power in 2022

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/capitol-riot-tears-gop-apart-as-it-seeks-a-return-to-power-in-2022/

Capitol riot tears GOP apart as it seeks a return to power in 2022

“He’s not the one who made the decision to breach this Capitol,” Scott said.

After losing the House, Senate and White House in four years, Trump remains broadly popular within the GOP. But the riot has led a small group of House Republicans — including Rep. Liz Cheney, the No. 3 in GOP leadership in the chamber — to support his impeachment. Republican senators are now seriously considering whether to convict him of the charge, “incitement of insurrection,” after five people died in the attack.

The Florida Republican told Appradab that he wished Trump “responded faster” to quell the violence, calling the riot “unacceptable” and “un-American” and for some of the insurrectionists to be prosecuted.

But he did not hold Trump accountable for the attack, even though the President urged his supporters in a speech before the riot on January 6 to march to the Capitol, to “fight like hell” to save the country, and to “stop the steal.” Trump said then that he would “never give up” and “never concede.”

“I think it’s irresponsible and false to say the President told people to break into the Capitol,” Scott said. “He didn’t do that.”

‘Republicans are at a fork in the road’

The party’s divide extends to the money machine that keeps it in office.

The US Chamber of Commerce, corporate political action committees and major conservative donors are reevaluating whether they will donate to the 147 Republican members of Congress who objected to certifying the presidential election on the day of the attack in a deluded bid to overturn the results. Those members include Scott and House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, who cited voter integrity concerns.

The business community has recoiled in horror at the violence, potentially impairing Republicans’ fundraising effort to flip both the House and Senate in 2022.

The donor revolt is “going to make every Republican’s job that much harder,” said Ken Spain, a GOP strategist. Spain said the corporate pushback now under way illustrates a fissure between corporate America and rank-and-file Republicans on issues such as free trade that has only grown wider in recent years.

“The party was already becoming a more populist working-class party and Trump accelerated that,” he said. “Republicans are at a fork in the road, and the direction that they choose to take in the coming days and weeks (is) going to have a profound impact on the future of the party.”

Scott, a former governor who voted last week against certifying Biden’s win, downplayed the donors’ outcry, saying that he conducted fundraising meetings between Thursday and Monday and “everybody’s excited to help.”

“Corporations, individuals, they have a choice,” the senator said. “If you believe in a big government, less freedoms, socialism, you ought to actually put all your money into supporting the Democrats. If you want opportunity, and lower taxes and less government, you’re going to support Republicans.”

Some major American companies, including Amazon and Appradab’s owner AT&T, have announced they will withhold PAC donations to those who objected to certifying the election results. Many other firms, ranging from Coca-Cola to UPS, have suspended political donations across the board.

Business PACs are significant players in politics, accounting for more than $360 million in federal contributions during the 2020 cycle — with about 57% of the money flowing to GOP candidates, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Americans for Prosperity, the political arm of the influential network affiliated with Kansas industrialist Charles Koch, has warned it could withdraw financial support for lawmakers over their actions in the runup to the January 6 siege, although even before last week’s insurrection, Koch officials had signaled they wanted to move away from strictly partisan politics.

“Lawmakers’ actions leading up to and during last week’s insurrection will weigh heavy in our evaluation of future support,” said AFP CEO Emily Seidel in a statement.

The US Chamber of Commerce also warned that some lawmakers could lose financial support over their efforts to thwart the transfer of power but declined to single them out.

“We will take into account the totality of what candidates and elected officials do, including the actions of last week, and importantly, the actions in the days ahead in determining whether or not we support them,” said Neil Bradley, the chamber executive vice president, on Tuesday. “I actually want to be very clear: There are some members, who by their actions, will have forfeited the support of the US Chamber of Commerce.”

But when pressed on what Missouri GOP Sen. Josh Hawley, who led the objection to the certification of the election in the Senate, would have to do to earn additional donations from the Chamber, Bradley said they would evaluate how members conducted themselves last week and in the days to come.

“I’m not prepared to say, nor would our members say today, that you have to do X, Y and Z and not do A, B and C,” he said.

Some major conservative donors have also focused their ire on the individual Republicans they view as having helped to instigate last week’s events, particularly Hawley. Missouri businessman Sam Fox, who donated $300,000 to a super PAC that aided Hawley’s election in 2018, said in a statement that the senator “can certainly forget about any support from me again” after last week’s events.

“Sen. Hawley engaged in act of reckless pandering,” said Fox, who served as US ambassador to Belgium under President George W. Bush. “He helped put the country on a path that has ended in five deaths and in disgrace for himself and for the nation.”

Hawley aides did immediately respond to a request for comment. The senator wrote an op-ed for the Southeast Missourian newspaper explaining why he continued to object after the violence in the Capitol. “The reason is simple: I will not bow to a lawless mob, or allow criminals to drown out the legitimate concerns of my constituents,” Hawley wrote.

Looking to 2022

Some top donors have remained silent in the aftermath of the riot.

A spokeswoman for Ken Griffin, a billionaire hedge-fund manager and one of the GOP’s biggest donors, declined to comment on whether he would review his donation policy.

But others said they would stand by the Republicans in Congress. Dan Eberhart, an Arizona-based energy executive considering a bid against Democrat Sen. Mark Kelly in 2022, said, “I have been a big donor to Rick Scott in the past and plan to continue to be.”

Eberhart said disaffected donors will “make up with Republicans pretty quickly” if the Democrats, who will soon control the White House and both chambers in Congress, “overreach” in their agenda. “Donors will want the counterweight that Republican provide. More money may go to the leadership PACs, but it will still go to Republicans if those are the policies donors support,” he added.

After House Republicans picked up seats in 2020 and with the Senate split 50-50 — and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris set to be the tiebreaker — eyes will turn to next year’s midterms. The party out of power typically does well in midterms, and in 2022, Senate Republicans will have more seats to defend than the Democrats, including in battleground states like Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Wisconsin. Democratic senators could have tough races in Arizona, New Hampshire, Nevada and elsewhere.

Scott told Appradab that he has three goals: presenting a “clear choice” to the country on how a Republican and Democratic Senate differ, raising more money and recruiting quality candidates. He said he hoped Republican Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson would run for reelection, and that the GOP has “a lot of opportunities to pick up additional seats.”

But Trump and his legacy will continue to shape the perceptions of the party in the next election. Already, Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, announced on Wednesday that the party is going up with a six-figure ad buy that blames Johnson for inciting the riot at the Capitol.

The Florida senator said it’s up to Trump and the Senate GOP candidates whether the then-former president hits the campaign trail on their behalf in 2022.

When asked if he blamed Trump for losing the Senate, Scott said, “My focus is on ‘how do we go forward?’ “

Appradab’s Dan Merica contributed to this story.

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sariaghjik · 7 years ago

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Let’s not pretend Zuckerberg isn’t up to something, and whatever it is, he shouldn’t be allowed to do it. He’s claimed repeatedly that he’s not interested in making a presidential run, but if he isn’t, his behavior simply makes no sense. Normal, everyday megalomaniacal billionaires might decide to go on a year-long, 50-state tour of America, dropping in on hard-working folks and small business owners, publicly rhapsodizing about the food in every roadside diner they happen to come across. But they probably wouldn’t do it while accompanied by President Obama’s former campaign photographer. Tech giants might be keen to hire some political intelligence. But if it was just smarts Zuckerberg was after, he wouldn’t have snapped up the strategist and in-house pollster who disastrously mismanaged the last election for Hillary Clinton. Our new breed of dorky oligarch micro-messiahs might constantly promote Big Ideas That Could Save World. But they don’t proclaim that the good people of Wilton, Iowa, “share these values around mobility.”

So much for innovation. Mark Zuckerberg can send solar-powered drones to beam Facebook-only internet across the global south, but he can’t deviate from the tired folksy script of every other self-important grifter who decided he wanted the power of life and death over every human being on the planet.

There are some very good reasons why Mark Zuckerberg should not be allowed anywhere near the presidency. For a start, he will lose — to Trump or to whatever other monstrosity the Republicans run against him. He can only embody the politics of bland aspiration and imperious technocratic mumblings, alienating the left and inflaming the right. Second, with the entire media basically functioning as a command economy run by Facebook, Zuckerberg in office would constitute a conflict of interests and a potential for corruption so vast it would make any of Trump’s misdeeds look like minor accounting problems. Third, it would entrench the long slow rot of electoral politics, permanently establishing the nuclear codes as the private property of TV clowns and gussied-up motivational speakers. Fourth, he keeps on describing Facebook as a “community” based on “friendship,” rather than what it is — a social utility that occasionally reveals itself as a seething plasm of technologically mediated dislocation. Finally, the tech industry is a hive of inflated egos and reckless self-regard, widening the wealth gap, steadily consigning most of the human population of Earth to the status of surplus flesh, and it must not be let anywhere near political power.

All of these are very good reasons. But they’re not the most pressing or the most urgent. The real reason all Zuckerberg’s dreams of power have to be crushed now before they bear terrible fruit is this: in the 13 years since he first launched Facebook, he never gave us the dislike button.

If you want to know what Zuckerberg would be like as the warlord-in-chief of human history’s most terrifying empire, go to Facebook and look at the seamless nothing where the dislike button ought to be. It’s not just that it’s thoroughly undemocratic. For as long as Facebook has been an inescapable fact of life, its users have been clamoring for the ability to dislike each other’s posts, and Zuckerberg will not give it to them. Instead, we’ve gotten a series of incoherent cosmetic overhauls—groups are now pages, pages now have groups for pages—that nobody asked for and which are met with an immediate hatred that gives way to impotent acceptance.

It says a lot about his style of leadership. He knows what’s best for us, and he’ll do it, and what we think doesn’t really matter. But it’s more fundamental than that. Commenting on his refusal to add the dislike button, Zuckerberg said, “Some people have asked for a dislike button because they want to be able to say, ‘That thing isn’t good.’ That’s not something that we think is good. . . I don’t think there needs to be a voting mechanism on Facebook about whether posts are good or bad. I don’t think that’s socially very valuable or good for the community to help people share the important moments in their lives.”

He wants to deprive people of their ability to say no.

What’s at stake is nothing less than the possibility of negation or distinction. After all, at the core of managerial centrism is an instinctive reluctance to say that anything is good or bad. Zuckerberg’s idea is that Facebook can be a discursive space without conflict, in which people can simply share what they want, and meet a quantifiable reward. Everything starts with zero likes and grows from there: you accrue social currency mollusc-like onto yourself, until you’re encased in a hard shell of likes and shares. Everything finds its inherent value, and a community is formed. It’s a shadowless world of pure positivity. But the ability to oppose is essential for anything approaching a critical activity; it’s only by some kind of negation that thought can wrench itself free from what simply is. Negativity, as Hegel puts it, “is the energy of unconditional thinking.” A world of countable positivity is a world that is, essentially, mute.

More simply, this is not how society or politics really work. They do not form a kind of harmonious totality, where we all start from the same place and reach upward. Politics is a sphere of competing interests, agonisms and class struggle, in which the success of one set of aims always means the defeat of others. The expansion of labor rights means muzzling a powerful class of industrial capitalists; civil rights for ethnic minorities means tearing apart an entrenched system of white supremacy. Politics is struggle. But in the Facebook utopia, struggle is supposed to be impossible. There’s no contestation; instead, what is deemed to be bad is simply canceled out, removed silently and overnight by a team of invisible moderators.

In this context, a lot of Zuckerberg’s weirder pronouncements start to make sense. Earlier this year, he published a long, jargon-choked manifesto titled Building Global Community. He wants the world to be coded like Facebook — and by Facebook — as a community based on connections and commonality. The struggles going on in the world don’t need to be won, they just need to be subsumed through a greater inclusion in this community. It’s padded out by a lot of friendly sounding pap like:

“The purpose of any community is to bring people together to do things we couldn’t do on our own. To do this, we need ways to share new ideas and share enough common understanding to actually work together.”

In the end, it can all be summarized in five words. No dislike button, for anybody.

Of course, Zuckerberg isn’t the first to promote these kind of ideas. The notion that a national or supernational entity forms a cohesive community without internal conflict is as old as politics itself, and everywhere it’s put forward it’s as a mask for horrific acts of exploitation within that community. Zuckerberg is different in that he seems to genuinely believe it. This is why he might be the most dangerous presidential candidate yet. In the same way that the Republican party spent decades churning out paranoia and nonsense for a base of frothing reactionaries until they finally found themselves saddled with a president who actually believes everything he reads on Breitbart, the Democrats might be about to create a monster of their own: someone who mouths all their nonsense about never disliking anything and never saying that anything is bad with absolute conviction, a cherub-cheeked gargoyle of pious equanimity, entranced by his own capacity to bring everyone together, as those who suffer are smashed brutally underfoot. And then he’ll turn his terrifying grin toward us, and say: you might like this.

#news

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moonwalkertrance · 7 years ago

Link

‘Dangerous,’ ‘utterly untruthful’: Two retiring GOP senators sound alarm on Trump

A pair of Republican senators sounded an alarm Tuesday about President Trump’s fitness for office and warned that his actions were degrading and dangerous to the country — an extraordinary breach that threatens his legislative agenda and further escalates the civil war tearing apart the Republican Party.

Delivering an emotional speech on the Senate floor announcing that he will not seek reelection next year, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said Trump’s behavior is “dangerous to our democracy” and summoned fellow Republicans to denounce the president’s conduct.

“It is time for our complicity and our accommodation of the unacceptable to end,” Flake said. He added, “Politics can make us silent when we should speak, and silence can equal complicity.”

The charged remarks from Flake — a totem of traditional conservatism who has repeatedly spoken out about his isolation in Trump’s GOP — came hours after Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) questioned the president’s stability and competence, reigniting a deeply personal feud with the president.

Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who also will not run for reelection in 2018, told reporters in assessing Trump’s nine-month tenure: “I’ve seen no evolution in an upward way. As a matter of fact, it seems to me it’s almost devolving.”

With their distress calls, Flake and Corker joined a chorus of mainstream political leaders newly emboldened to excoriate Trump. Last week, former presidents George W. Bush, a Republican, and Barack Obama, a Democrat, both indirectly rebuked Trump’s deportment and warned of peril for the nation under his watch, as did Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who thundered about the rise of what he called “half-baked, spurious nationalism.”

The raw candor from two retiring senators came on a day when Trump made a rare trip to the Capitol for an intended show of party unity, lunching privately with Republican senators to rally support for his plan to cut taxes.

For a Republican Party that has been riven by internal turmoil for nearly a decade, the Flake-Corker rupture with Trump exacerbated the ferocious war between the party’s seasoned leaders and its anti-establishment forces, now rallying under the banner of Trumpism. Polls show that the overwhelming majority of Republican voters back Trump, and the fact that two of the president’s most vocal critics in the Senate are retiring underscores how dangerous it is for politicians seeking reelection to break with the president and risk the wrath of his loyal supporters.

Flake’s 18-minute speech was perhaps the most sweeping indictment of Trump delivered by a Republican to date. Flake, 54, spoke with bewilderment and sadness, his voice cracking at times, about what he viewed as the withering of morality and civility in the national dialogue.

“We must never regard as normal the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals,” Flake said. “We must never meekly accept the daily sundering of our country — the personal attacks; the threats against principles, freedoms and institutions; the flagrant disregard for truth and decency.”

Flake added: “We must stop pretending that the degradation of our politics and the conduct of some in our executive branch are normal. They are not normal. Reckless, outrageous and undignified behavior has become excused and countenanced as ‘telling it like it is’ when it is actually just reckless, outrageous and undignified.”

Some Republican elder statesmen who have been highly critical of Trump celebrated Flake’s remarks and called on other elected Republicans to further distance the party from the president.

“Am I concerned about what we are supposed to do for the next three-plus years with this man in the White House? Yes, I’m very concerned,” said John C. Danforth, a former Republican senator from Missouri and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. “But the best I can think of right now is simply making it clear to the American people that the Republican Party is what it has been in the past, and that is not Donald Trump.”

Still, Danforth said he is concerned that by giving up their seats, Flake and Corker are “leaving the field open” to insurgent candidates inspired by former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who is leading a rebellion against establishment Republicans.

Already, a crop of Bannon-inspired conservative outsiders is emerging nationally. From Alabama to Mississippi to Nevada, these contenders are hoping to disrupt the 2018 midterm elections. They could determine whether the GOP maintains its narrow majorities in the Senate and the House — and whether Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) hold their leadership positions.

Bannon claimed victory with Flake’s departure. “Many more to come,” he predicted in a text message to The Washington Post.

Andy Surabian, a Bannon associate who advises Great America Alliance, a pro-Trump political group, said: “This is a victory for President Trump and all of his supporters across the nation. Jeff Flake was America’s top ‘Never Trumper,’ so getting his scalp is a signal to Never Trumpers everywhere that their time is up.”

At the White House, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Flake’s and Corker’s comments were “petty” and suggested that they were retiring because they could not win reelection. She boasted from the briefing room lectern that Trump was more popular in Arizona and Tennessee, both states he carried in 2016, than the two departing senators.

“The voters of these individual senators’ states are speaking in pretty loud volumes,” Sanders said. “I think that they were not likely to be reelected, and I think that shows that the support is more behind this president than it is those two individuals.”

At the Capitol, meanwhile, Republican leaders reacted cautiously Tuesday, eager to offer support to their colleagues but fearful of breaking their fragile bonds with a president who has been quick to explode at personal slights.

Following Flake on the Senate floor, McConnell thanked him “for the opportunity to listen to his remarks” and honored the Arizonan, whom he called “a very fine man, a man who clearly brings high principles to the office every day.”

Tuesday’s thunderclap exposed the threadbare relationship Trump has with the GOP. At the closed-door lunch, Trump received a standing ovation from Republican senators. Yet for months, many of these lawmakers privately have seethed at the president’s actions and language, as Flake and Corker did publicly in concluding that Trump is an unstable presence in American political life.

“This is the ice beginning to crack,” said Peter Wehner, a Trump critic who has advised several past Republican presidents. “This is an extraordinary moment because the members of the president’s own party know that he is not fit in some fundamental way to be the president. These views that they’ve kept in the shadows are now being exposed to the light.”

Democrats balked at the notion that Republicans were somehow unsullied because two GOP senators rapped Trump.

“Unfortunately, Republicans in Congress remain in lockstep with the Trump agenda and silent in the face of the president’s disgraceful behavior,” Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez said in a statement.

Flake’s Tuesday speech was the surprise culmination of more than a year of simmering criticism of Trump and the direction the party has taken under him. Flake published a best-selling book this summer, “Conscience of a Conservative,” that chastised the president’s character and ideology, stunning his colleagues and stoking Trump’s anger. The president vowed to work to defeat him if he sought reelection in 2018.

Recent polls showed Flake trailing the leading Democratic Senate candidate, Rep. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), as well as potential primary rivals.

The emerging Republican field is robust and includes Kelli Ward, a former Arizona state senator and hard-line conservative known for incendiary statements. Several members of the state’s congressional delegation, including Reps. Martha McSally and David Schweikert, are also considering bids, according to Arizona Republicans.

Flake said Tuesday that he was not comfortable making the policy concessions on issues such as trade and immigration — or withholding criticisms of Trump’s behavior — that he felt he would have to make to satisfy Republican primary voters galvanized by anger and grievance.

“Sustained incumbency is certainly not the point of seeking office, and there are times when we must risk our careers in favor of our principles,” Flake said. “Now is such a time.”

Flake, who once ran the Goldwater Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Phoenix and named for the late Republican senator Barry Goldwater, won a seat in the House in 2000 and served there for a dozen years before being elected to the Senate in 2012.

As he spoke on the Senate floor, a handful of colleagues from both parties sat grimly across the chamber. When he concluded, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), a sometime critic of Trump, clapped loudly, prompting others to stand and applaud.

McCain spoke a few minutes later and called his colleague “a man of integrity and honor and decency and commitment,” saying Flake’s service to the country is “one of honor, of brilliance and patriotism and love of country.”

Asked later by reporters if he thought other senators should speak in the same terms about Trump as Flake had, McCain demurred. “It’s up to every senator,” he said. “It’s not up to me.”

Corker unburdened himself Tuesday of his feelings about Trump — first in a trio of television morning show interviews, then in a tweet and then in a hallway gaggle with reporters.

Corker said Trump was “utterly untruthful” and called him “the L-word”; expressed hope that he would stand down to let Congress formulate a tax plan without him; said he should “leave it to the professionals” to handle the North Korea nuclear crisis; said he was not a role model for children; and urged West Wing aides to “figure out ways of controlling him.” Corker also said he would not support Trump for election again.

The succession of brittle comments seemed to enrage Trump, who responded with several tweets, calling the short-statured senator “liddle” and “a lightweight,” as well as “incompetent.”

Republican leaders were also swift to dismiss Corker’s comments as mere distractions, insistent upon showcasing party cohesion despite the evident disorder.

“All this stuff you see on a daily basis — Twitter this and Twitter that? Forget about it,” Ryan told reporters.

“There’s a lot of noise out there,” McConnell said. “We have a First Amendment in this country; everybody gets to express themselves. But what we’re concentrating on is the agenda the American people need.”

#Jeff Flake #Bob Corker #Donald Trump #Steve Bannon #Trumpism #Conservative #Republican #Politics #America

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longwindedbore · 5 years ago

Text

Submitted for your Consideration an Apophenic alternative:

Can we blame Trump for being irate? For what SPECIFIC Federal statute is he being investigated for his ONE ACTION upon which the impeachment is based. One incoherent sentence in one phone call.

He thinks he’s being played. I think we are all being played. Trump voters and Dem voters.

All I hear - and I was part of this choir - is that this Impeachment is part of a paralysis in Washington and the complete collapse of Our Democratic Experiment. Sic Semper Gloria Civitas Publicus.

Except that while this SPECTACLE is tearing apart families, friendships, communities, social media - the politicians at the center of the spectacle- seem to be able to turn it on and off.

Pelosi, Schiff, and 185 other Democrats joined Republicans to pass legislation that violates the Dems precepts as bleeding hearts for a better world and the oppressed common people. As well as more Dem campaign promises than I care to count.

These Democrats joined with their arch-enemies last week twithout rancor or posturing or barely any media notice to

Ignore the Federal Budget Deficit of a measly Trillion$$$ per year

Raise the already bloated military budget.

Create the “Space Force”.

This along with 70 other bi-partisan bills this year signed by Trump.

So what is the purpose of this Circus? This impeachment wouldn’t pass even if the Democrats held the Senate.

He’s being impeached for something that is NOT directly a felony or misdemeanor. Nor is he even being investigated for what he spent most of the phone call on - the Watergate-like request for the 2017 DNC hacked server our Adderall-sniffer-in-Chief believes has been hidden in the Ukraine by Crowdstrike, the DNC’s. Cyber Security consultant (The Ukrainians on the call must have s**t their pants! To get the funds released they’d have to seize and produce something that doesn’t exist).

Don’t get me wrong/ Trump is an epic piece of effluvium. A career criminal handed the keys to the Treasury by an idiot electorate.

Definitely - He’s committed umpteen violations of the emoluments clause PLUS witness tampering and obstruction in plain sight. Which are felonies under Federal Statutes. Already investigated by Mueller.

But he’s not being impeached for those felonies Or dozens of others. As far as I can tell he’s not even being actively investigated by the Democrats for those crimes.

Nor investigated for his obviously dangerous mental lapses. I’m not talking about his dyslexia (Bahama misread as Alabama; Balkans as Baltic). I’m talking the wandering off until he is corralled by an aide and brought back looking confused. The incoherent ramblings. Obvious drug use: Irises wide dialated even though looking at bright lights of the camera. Old pictures of his office with an open drawer on his left with a illegal stash of Prescription pharmaceuticals.

WTF is my question. Why not investigate ten of his past crimes where potential White House witnesses have already been fired by Trump? More than willing to testify.

Nooooooo. Only the very latest where he still exerts control over potential witnesses because he hasn’t said those magic words to them, “You’re fired!”

Is this an Impeachment designed to fail. But oh it rallies the voters. For both Parties. Bi-Partisanship?

0 notes

currentusapoliticsblog-blog · 6 years ago

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Elections Have Consequences

Written By: Josiah Bynum

One of the main issues dividing the two political parties, and the Nation, is immigration. Democrats heap praise on immigrants while disregarding the laws of America, and Republicans play to humanities fears by elevating particularly horrendous and rare events from outlier to average. And both, at times, exaggerate issues to take advantage of public divides, pushing to distinguish their party’s solutions. Whether the motive is political power or an improved America, these tactics are hard to rationalize logically. One way to decrease the incentives or effectiveness of such tactics is to point out their use and create a public awareness; hopefully attaching a cost greater than the perceived benefit. And there is no better place to highlight these strategies than the fertile grounds of the 2018-midterm elections.

Although far from the U.S./Mexico border the 2018 House race in Pennsylvania’s 8th District was largely centered on the issue of immigration. John Chrin, a partner at Circle Wealth Management and formally a managing director at JPMorgan Chase, challenged Matt Cartwright the Democrat incumbent. Spoiler alert, Matt Cartwright won the election on November 7th with 54.6% of the vote1. Pennsylvania’s 8th District was redrawn after the presidential election but still retains roughly the same partisan mix. President Trump won this district by 10 points at the same time Mr. Cartwright won his seat by 8 points2. This race was a chance for Republicans to cement political ground seemingly gained in 2016, and a chance for Democrats to show at least one of Trump’s victories was a fluke. John Chrin’s strategy consisted of backing President Trump and attacking Cartwright’s voting record. He pointed out that Cartwright consistently voted in support of sanctuary cities, and only voted in support of Kate’s law to appease potential voters after the 2016 election results3. Chrin also released a political ad accusing Cartwright of caring more about protecting sanctuary cities than a 5-year-old girl who was raped by an illegal alien. This was an attempt to connect Cartwright, a moderate Democrat, to some of the more progressive elements of the party. It’s hard to imagine a clearer example of elevating a horrendous and rare event from outlier to average. A spokesman for Cartwright’s campaign responded by saying Cartwright favors “securing our borders and a bipartisan plan for comprehensive immigration reform, and opposes sanctuary cities and safe havens for criminals and gangs.4” In the end, Chrin’s campaign was a failed attempt to rebrand an opponent as something he was not by using Trump style immigration rhetoric.

Another midterm election highlighting immigration was the Texas senate race where Beto O’Rourke challenged the Republican incumbent Ted Cruz. Cruz won the election by a slim margin receiving just over 200,000 votes more than Beto. Both candidates used immigration and Trump as a way to distinguish themselves in the minds of voters. Beto’s view is that Trump’s immigration stance and proposed wall is racist and immoral. On the campaign trail referencing children separated at the border he said, “even the faces of those children who have been reunited with their parents often have a vacant look because the forced separations and time apart have made it difficult for children to reconnect with their parents.5” Although Beto criticized Trump and Cruz on immigration issues, he largely tried to steer clear of the issue compared to Cruz. This may have been due to a memo circulated by the Center for American Progress that warned Democrats running for office in districts won by Trump in 2016 to avoid discussions surrounding immigration and especially sanctuary cities6. This was based on research that concluded the progressive position on immigration and sanctuary cities would be a handicap in certain districts. It appears Trump and Cruz may have sneaked a peak at the memo as well, as both tried to increase the discussion involving sanctuary cities.

Since losing to Cruz Beto has been slightly more open with his views on the wall and immigration. In an interview in El Paso he said if he had the power he would tear down existing sections of the border wall, and at a rally the night before he said, “Walls do not save lives. They end lives.7” He seems to hold the mainstream Democratic positions of closing private immigration detention centers and allowing illegal immigrants a path towards citizenship, but when pressed for details he falls back on the ‘we need to have a national conversation about this’ position. Both parties, although arguably one more than the other, are provided cover by the national media. By deciding which stories to report and how to provide context media companies can protect and amplify a politician’s message. They can also decide which public figures to investigate and which stories need to be hidden. The American political process and the national media will not change overnight. It will take millions of individual voters’ demanding more from their representatives. The men and women in politics and the media, with power to sway the American public, need to recognize the responsibility inherent in exercising that power.

Unfortunately, in politics it has been determined the surest way to victory is demonizing opponents as racist, xenophobic, or un-American. Politicians need votes, something that requires ordinary citizens to take an action beyond their normal routine. The strategies outlined above are designed to overcome the voting threshold and get ordinary Americans out to the polls. Nothing whips votes like the hatred of your enemies; it’s just a shame that in national politics the enemy is always a fellow American. In my experience the majority of Americans are not as polarized, even over polarizing issues like immigration, as the politicians they listen to and support. Politicians resort to tactics designed to win elections, and elements in the media, on both sides, distort and magnify the rhetoric into narratives of their choosing. Each evening talking heads argue back and forth in short segments, never ceding an inch of ground, more theater or WrestleMania than a real conversation. I know it’s not real because I have political conversations everyday, and they tend to end in compromise and the strong urge to research and understand a different perspective. I think this is the natural course, when those involved are conversing honestly and in good faith, which should not be surprising. Usually, the insight closer to the unknowable truth contains a tempered bit of each hardline position. Without nations there would be no safe harbor for immigrants, and as a nation turns immigrants away they also turn away from values and ideals held dear.

1. http://www.270towin.com/2018-election-results-live/state/pennsylvania

2. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/upshot/elections-poll-pa08-html

3. https://www.johnchrin.com

4. https://www.citizensvoice.com/news/political-ad-fact-check-john-chrin

1.2389597

5. https://elpasotimes.com

6. https://thehill.com/homenews/house/411522

7. https://www.theamericanmirror.com/beto-tear-down-existing-border-wall/

#politics #political science #news #current news #parties #government

0 notes

creativesage · 6 years ago

Photo

(via What Is the Equal Rights Amendment, and Why Are We Talking About It Now? — The New York Times)

It would provide equal protection to women under the law — and it could still be added to the U.S. Constitution.

By Maya Salam

Illustration by Ping Zhu

“It’s 2019 and I still don’t have equal rights under the Constitution. Neither do any of you, the nearly 162 million women across the U.S.” — Alyssa Milano, in a recent Cosmopolitan article about the E.R.A.

Do you understand the Equal Rights Amendment? That’s been my go-to party question lately, and to my surprise, most people don’t politely excuse themselves for a refill when asked.

The most common responses I’ve heard, especially from women my age, were to the effect of: “Don’t we already have that?” or “That was a ’70s thing, right?”

In fact, we don’t have it — and it wasn’t just a ’70s thing. And yet until recently, I too had little idea what it was. (Sorry to my feminist friends, young and old, who are surely horrified by this gap in knowledge. The chapter was unsurprisingly absent from my history books.) So I asked two leading E.R.A. advocates, Carol Jenkins and Carol Robles-Román, to explain what the Equal Rights Amendment is and why we’re talking about it. Here’s what I learned.

Why does the E.R.A. matter?

Because women don’t currently have equal protection under the United States Constitution. By some estimates, 80 percent of Americans mistakenly believe that women and men are guaranteed equal rights, but the only right the Constitution explicitly extends to both men and women is the right to vote.

The E.R.A., a proposed amendment to the Constitution, would guarantee equal legal rights for all American citizens regardless of sex. It would also require states to intervene in cases of gender violence, such as domestic violence and sexual harassment; it would guard against pregnancy and motherhood discrimination; and it would federally guarantee equal pay.

Doesn’t the 14th Amendment make it unnecessary?

Not exactly. The E.R.A. was first proposed in 1923 but wasn’t passed by Congress until 1972. It then needed to be ratified by 38 states by 1982 (a mostly arbitrary deadline) to be added to the Constitution, but only 35 states ratified it in time.

During the 1970s and ’80s, Ruth Bader Ginsburg helped to persuade the Supreme Court to extend the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to prohibit unequal treatment on the basis of sex — similar to what the E.R.A. would have done. But supporters said that clause doesn’t go far enough, particularly when it comes to violence against women, sexual harassment and equal pay.

The amendment also has symbolic value. “I would like to be able to take out my pocket Constitution and say that the equal citizenship stature of men and women is a fundamental tenet of our society like free speech,” Justice Ginsburg said in 2017.

Why did the E.R.A. stall?

The undoing of the E.R.A. is largely considered the handiwork of one woman: Phyllis Schlafly, a proudly anti-feminist Republican, who rallied housewives to fight the amendment in the 1970s.

Her argument was mostly that women already had equal rights, but also that the E.R.A. would tear apart the traditional family structure and strip women of remaining privileges, such as having separate bathrooms and college dormitories for men and women. These are the same arguments opponents have made in recent years as E.R.A. efforts picked up steam.

Why are we talking about it again now?

In 2017, Nevada ratified the amendment, an effort led by State Senator Pat Spearman, a Democrat. “It was then that other states said, ‘Wait a minute, you mean we can still do that?’” Robles-Román told me.

In 2018, Illinois followed suit. And last month, Virginia came close to being the 38th and final state needed to ratify the amendment — until the state House killed its progress.

So just one more state is needed for the E.R.A. to move forward?

It’s a start. Aside from finding another state to ratify, the 1982 deadline would need to be repealed or overruled — an effort to do so is currently in the works by Jerry Nadler, the House judiciary chairman, Robles-Román and Jenkins said. (There are questions about whether a deadline can in fact be imposed for ratifying an amendment.)

Another potential obstacle: Five states have since rescinded their ratifications, though the Constitution speaks only to a state’s power to ratify an amendment, not to the power to rescind a ratification, which may lead to another legal entanglement.

Regardless, there’s renewed hope among supporters, especially with the House now in Democratic control and more women than ever in office. “So much of this now is the energy and the momentum,” Robles-Román said.

Are you ready to see the E.R.A. added to the Constitution?

______

From the archives, 1977: ‘This is a strange little book’

In 1977, amid the fight for and against the E.R.A., Phyllis Schlafly wrote the book “The Power of the Positive Woman,” in which she challenged women’s movements. The book received a withering review in The Times.

“This is a strange little book,” wrote Lucinda Franks, who years earlier became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. “Whatever the secret of Mrs. Schlafly’s appeal, it certainly does not lie in the lucidity of her mind.”

“What is most disturbing about her book is its undertone of contempt for everyone,” Franks went on, saying that Schlafly was “basically anti‐woman” and also “anti‐men.”

***

Welcome to In Her Words, where women rule the headlines. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox. Let me know what you think at [email protected].

Are you on Instagram? Follow us here.

[Entire post — click on the title link to read it at the New York Times, and to view the additional illustrations.]

#era #eranow #internationalwomensday #iwd2019 #womenshistorymonth #womenshistory #womensempowerment #gettingto5050 #equality #genderparity #womensrights #equalrights #diversity #usconstitution #billofrights #amendment

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cringeynews · 8 years ago

Text

New Post has been published on

New Post has been published on http://cringeynews.com/featured/if-donald-trump-wants-to-dismantle-the-epa-here-are-all-the-obstacles-hell-face/

If Donald Trump wants to dismantle the EPA, here are all the obstacles he’ll face

Right now, there’s still a fair bit of uncertainty over what, exactly, Donald Trump will do on environmental policy. He’s vowed to tear up President Obama’s climate rules, particularly the Clean Power Plan, and ease various restrictions on coal power. His transition team is filled with climate skeptics and industry-friendly advisers who take a dim view of pollution regulations.

But radically overhauling the Environmental Protection Agency, as Trump has said he’d like to do, is a difficult task that involves navigating a complex bureaucracy bound by powerful laws like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, both passed by Congress in the 1970s. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush both came into office hoping to take apart key EPA environmental rules, yet were often stymied by the courts, by green groups skilled at litigation, by career officials, and by sheer inertia.

So what would it take for a Trump administration to come in and reshape the myriad environmental policies that Obama’s EPA has put in place?

Jody Freeman, a Harvard law school professor and former climate adviser to Obama, has been looking at this question extensively. Her view is that this won’t actually be easy for Trump — at least not without substantial help from Congress. (Republicans will control Congress next year, and they’d certainly like to dismantle Obama’s climate rules; yet Senate Democrats have also vowed to filibuster any major changes to the Clean Air Act, the source of the EPA’s authority over greenhouse-gas emissions.)

I talked with Freeman about the mechanics of a potential Trump administration: how agency rulemaking works, what it would take to revamp Obama’s EPA regulations, why some environmental rules are much more vulnerable than others, and why Trump may not be able to undo everything Obama has done on climate. It’s a little weedy, but these topics are likely to come up again and again in 2017 and beyond.

Brad Plumer

Okay, say you’re Donald Trump, and you enter the White House hoping to undo all the different environmental and climate rules that Obama has put in place since 2008 via the executive branch. What is the first thing you do on day one?

Jody Freeman

So the first thing a new White House would do is essentially issue a stop-work order to the federal agencies — they freeze any pending rules coming out of those agencies and review them. In the past, most of those rules have wound up getting finished, and only very few of them usually get rolled back or reconsidered.

Brad Plumer

That explains why we’ve seen the Obama administration rush to finalize a host of regulations this year: like the EPA’s fuel-efficiency standards for trucks, finalized in August. They want to get them done before Trump’s White House can fiddle with them.

JF: Right. Now, in Trump’s case, there’s a possibility that Republicans in the House and Senate could use a little-used law called the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to overturn some of these recent Obama regulations. Basically, any rule under Obama that was finished after late May or early June — it depends how they count it — would be potentially subject to disapproval by a simple majority vote [in both the House and Senate]. [Here is a list of Obama rules that would be vulnerable to CRA disapproval, including emissions standards for landfills, rules around offshore drilling, methane standards for oil and gas drilling, and restrictions on migratory bird hunting.]

The question here is how much they want to prioritize this. The new Congress will have to decide what’s most important on their agenda and do some triage. We’ve been hearing a lot about things they want to do on health care, on infrastructure, on tax reform. So the new Congress will have to ask if they really want to spend the first 30, 60, 100 days on Congressional Review Act fights.

Brad Plumer

As I understand it, if Congress disapproves of a regulation under the CRA, not only does it kill the regulation — but the agency can’t actually propose a similar regulation anytime in the future, right?

JF: That is what the Congressional Review Act says — the agency can’t come back with anything that’s “substantially similar” in the future. But this has actually never been tested, and no court has ever ruled on it. The CRA has only ever been used once [in 2001, to strike down a Clinton labor rule on ergonomics issued in late 2000]. So there’s a real question about whether it’s legally enforceable. Because some existing environmental laws [like the Clean Air Act] may require a certain type of regulation. So what do you do if that law says you have to regulate and the Congressional Review Act says you can’t do it? This could be a really interesting legal question going forward.

Brad Plumer

Let’s go back to the Trump White House and the Trump EPA. Let’s assume they have halted any ongoing work. And now they’re looking at all these rules that Obama has already put in place and finalized — you’ve got everything from rules on mercury pollution that were finished in 2011 to the Clean Power Plan, which is currently being debated in federal courts. Which rules are the most vulnerable?

JF: It’s easiest to just not finish rules that haven’t been finished yet. It’s also straightforward to roll back things that aren’t rules — that is, policies that have not gone through the notice and comment process. An example would be the suspension of coal leasing [from federal lands] that President Obama put in place. That was done by secretarial order in the Department of Interior; you wouldn’t have to go through a long process to lift that suspension.

The rules that are harder to rescind and roll back are rules that have already gone through the time-consuming notice and comment process and are final and have gone into legal effect already. For example, the rule on mercury pollution, or the cross-state pollution rule. That takes time and effort to rescind, and in some cases industry would have already started to comply [note: many coal plants have already shut down or spent billions installing scrubbers to comply with the 2011 mercury rule.]

The other category here are rules in legal limbo that are not yet in effect and have been stayed by the courts. So that includes the Clean Power Plan and the “Waters of the United States” rule [which redefines which rivers, streams, and lakes fall under Clean Water Act protection]. What could happen there is that, if those rules get struck down in court, the new Department of Justice in the Trump administration could decide not to defend them or to appeal them any further. In that case, it would fall to the interveners — environmental groups or states, which have to be parties to the case — to take up the mantle and appeal.

Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

Brad Plumer

Let’s take the Clean Power Plan, the rule to cut CO2 from power plants, since that’s the centerpiece of Obama’s climate agenda and the rule Donald Trump has focused on? If this rule is upheld by the court, then it’s final and goes into effect. What can the Trump administration actually do to stop it?

JF: The new administration could try to go to the DC Circuit Court — which has heard oral arguments on the Clean Power Plan already but not yet decided its fate — and do what’s called a “voluntary remand,” sending the rule back to agency. Assuming the courts agreed, which is not guaranteed, then the EPA could try to rescind the rule and replace it with something new.

But the EPA would have to go out for public comment on that — and that usually takes a year or two. The EPA would also have to address the fact that the agency already had decided the Clean Power Plan, so why are they changing their minds now? What is in the record to support that change? They’d have to make an argument for why they’re reconsidering it, and they would have to defend that in court, because any change would get challenged [either by states or environmental groups].

[The Trump administration] might try to argue that they don’t think they have the authority to regulate greenhouse gases from existing power plants. Or they could argue that even if they do have that authority, they think there’s a better approach to the standard [than the specific regulation Obama’s EPA set up]. They could say they have a narrower approach to setting the standard, and they might get deference from the court. But that would play itself out in years of litigation.

Brad Plumer

Let’s go deeper on this. How do you actually rescind a rule — like the Clean Power Plan or the mercury pollution rule — that’s already been finalized? What is the step-by-step process a Trump EPA has to go through?

JF: There’s a Supreme Court case called FCC v. Fox, which basically says that if an agency changes its mind, it has to come back in and defend the new rule the way it would defend the original rule. You have to be able to defend it as non-arbitrary. And in cases where industry is already relying on the first rule, or where there’s a really strong scientific record for the first rule, the burden on the agency is a little tougher for changing its mind. So there is a legal standard here.

But to change a rule, by law, the agency has to do a public comment period — that’s typically something like 60 days, though it can be up to 120 days. Then the agency has to take time to consider and respond to all the public comments on the proposed rule and develop a record that shows they thought carefully about them. If they try to shortchange this process and rush out a brand new rule, it really will not go well for them when they get into court. The procedural checks the agency has to go through are very important, and a court will invalidate a rule that wasn’t done correctly.

The courts will also invalidate a rule change that, in the substance of it, looks arbitrary to them. So as an example, let’s take the endangerment finding, the first big rule that EPA put out in 2009 that said greenhouse gases endanger the public health and welfare. That has a voluminous scientific foundation behind it. The Trump administration couldn’t just come in and say nope, no more endangerment! There’s almost no chance that would be upheld, because you cannot ignore this record.

Brad Plumer

So if they really wanted to overturn the EPA’s authority over greenhouse gases, they’d need Congress to amend the Clean Air Act — to say something like “okay, the Clean Air Act no longer applies to greenhouse gases.” And that all depends on whether a bill like that can get through the Senate, past Democrats who might filibuster.

JF: Right.

Brad Plumer

So if we’re just talking about what a president can do all by himself, it seems like there are real limits. We saw this during the George W. Bush era — he had a surprising amount of trouble rolling back many of Clinton’s rules.

JF: You saw this when the Bush administration tried to roll back the Roadless Rule, [a Clinton-era rule prohibiting road construction and timber harvesting on national forest land]. That went through a long, complicated litigation process, and ultimately the new administration wasn’t successful.

The Bush administration also came out and said they would reject the Clinton administration’s arsenic standard for drinking water, and that proved to be a political disaster for them — because you know, the public doesn’t like to be poisoned. And that was also litigated, and [after eight years] the Bush administration ended up sticking to the Clinton standard.

So those are cautionary tales. We have seen Republican administrations come in before and try to roll things back. And [a Trump administration] may well be successful on some of these high-profile rules, but it’s going to be trench warfare. They’ll have to pick their battles.

Letting go isn’t easy. Photo By Pool/Getty Images

Brad Plumer

So what’s the lowest-hanging fruit for a Trump administration? Where will they have the easiest time prevailing?

JF: Well, the Clean Power Plan isn’t low-hanging — it will take a lot of work to change. But because Trump has identified it on the campaign trail, and it’s in the sights of many Republicans in Congress, it’s hard to imagine they won’t take action of some type. There’s also quite a bit of congressional hostility to the Waters of the United States rule, so you’ll likely see something there.

There are easier things to do — like if the Obama administration finishes the stream protection rule [an Interior Department rule that governs mining waste disposal in waterways], you could imagine a Trump administration trying to roll that back before it becomes legally effective. And like I said, the coal leasing moratorium can be lifted with a stroke of a pen.

Brad Plumer

And of course, Trump can withdraw from the Paris climate agreement unilaterally. I’ve seen a few different ways he might do this — like withdrawing from the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the original treaty establishing international climate talks that undergirds the Paris accord. Which seems most likely?

JF: It is possible to withdraw from the Framework Convention — that’s actually faster than withdrawing from the Paris agreement, since Paris takes four years to officially withdraw, whereas withdrawing from the UNFCCC takes one year.

The problem is that the UNFCCC was a treaty unanimously ratified by Congress [in 1992], there was no real dissent, and it was negotiated by a Republican president. The UNFCCC also has no real substantive obligations in it. So it would be a very odd thing to withdraw from — it would do a lot of damage, upset our allies enormously, and you really don’t need to do it [if you’re trying to undermine the Paris deal].

What Trump could much more easily do is simply not meet the US pledge for Paris. Or he can just say, “I’m not going to be bound by that pledge, and I’m going to take apart the key programs domestically that were supposed to get us there, like the Clean Power Plan.”

Brad Plumer

Tell me about the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which is part of the Office of Management and Budget. It seems like this will really change under Trump — with potentially major implications for regulatory agencies like the EPA.

JF: OIRA is the location in the White House where they oversee agency rule-making. This office oversees the methodology that agencies use to count up costs and benefits for new rules. That can be changed with the stroke of a pen. And it sounds weedy, but it’s the kind of thing that can make it harder to issue new regulations.

So for instance, right now, the Obama administration currently uses a “global social cost of carbon” for its climate rules — that means if you have any rule that reduces greenhouse gases, the benefits counted for that rule include the [climate] benefits globally. You could imagine a Trump OIRA saying we don’t want to do that anymore. We’re not going to count the social cost of carbon as a benefit. That changes the calculus for which rules are cost-beneficial.

OIRA is also the place where, if the Trump administration were serious about their idea of trying to repeal or rescind two rules for every new one they issue, that’s where they’d do it — though it’s hard to imagine how [this idea] would possibly work.

Brad Plumer

There are also a whole bunch of executive orders that were issued from the Obama White House, not the agencies themselves. Like this 2013 order that told the agencies to help communities prepare for climate change. Those executive orders can be easily reversed, right?

JF: That’s right. That also includes guidance from the Council on Environmental Quality that governs how agencies should consider greenhouse-gas emissions when they conduct Environmental Impact Statements. Every agency has to do these Environmental Impact Statements [for instance, the State Department had to do one before approving the Keystone XL pipeline]. So [the new Trump White House] could say we don’t want you to consider GHGs anymore.

That’s stroke of a pen stuff. Every executive order can be replaced with a new executive order, or withdrawn completely. And there’s nothing that the environmental community or the states can do to challenge executive orders directly. Although there’s a twist here: when the executive orders tell agencies to do things, and then the agency do those things, that’s when they get legally challenged.

Brad Plumer

A slightly different question. Even if the Trump administration has a hard time rescinding specific Obama-era environmental rules, can’t they still weaken enforcement of these rules?

JF: There are a lot of ways to slow down implementation and to try to minimize enforcement. Everyone talks about the Reagan administration as a good example of the EPA being “dismantled from within” — by slow-walking regulations, by slow-walking enforcement.

That said, there are a lot of internal checks on this kind of dismantling from within. There’s a very dedicated career staff that knows it has to follow the law, and there are ethics rules that apply to the agencies, there are independent inspectors general that are tasked with making sure there’s not mismanagement or ethics violations. So not only will there be lawsuits from outside when agencies don’t follow the law, but there are management rules and procedures inside, that should create some obstacles to any real effort to undo them.

That said, a very determined administration that really wants to pull back on implementation and enforcement will find ways to pull back. They can give more leeway to the states, for example, when the states draft their plans for complying with their state implementation plans [for EPA pollution rules like the ground-level ozone standard]. You can imagine ways of making it easier for states that don’t want to work very hard. Or bringing fewer enforcement actions.

The president can also ask for less money. And even if he doesn’t, Congress can just cut the budget [for agencies like the EPA]. Congress can insert, in big omnibus budget bills, little riders that say agencies can’t do specific things. There can be death by a thousand cuts in this way.

So I don’t want to suggest there won’t be retrenchment. But what some people fear is that Trump is sworn into office and he eliminates the EPA. That just can’t happen, he’d need Congress to do it and I don’t think that kind of dramatic action is anything we’re going to see.

Brad Plumer

Right, it’s hard for Congress to simply abolish the EPA or rewrite the Clean Air Act — that would face a potential filibuster. But it’s far more plausible that we might see the House pass a thousand different riders that change the agency significantly. The GOP House has been trying to pass a bunch of these since 2011.

JF: I think it’s realistic to think there will be some of that. We have seen the House try to pass lots of things, though of course that was when they knew they couldn’t succeed. Then again, when you control both houses of Congress and you’ve got the presidency, you have to watch what you do. Because dismantling the nation’s environmental laws is not going to go over well with the public.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy announces new regulations for power plants at EPA headquarters June 2, 2014 in Washington, DC. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Brad Plumer

Trump hasn’t yet said who he would appoint to run any of the key environmental agencies, but what are the things to watch for here? How much leeway does the individual at the head of an agency have to change things?

JF: Well, if we see appointees to the EPA and Department of Interior and Department of Energy, all of whom have disdain for environmental protection, this would be a real potential problem, because it would mean the political appointees at the top are opposed to these agencies’ essential missions. That obviously has an impact on career staff, on the morale.

But at bottom, you have to remember that these agencies are creatures of law, they are tasked with implementing statutes, and they can’t not do it without being threatened by litigation saying they are behaving unlawfully. So even political appointees will be disciplined by legal requirements.

There’s another effect that also happens — and I’m not saying this always happens — but it’s quite standard for political appointees to come in and then be exposed to the mission of the agency, and have senior staff brief them, to learn something about the agency and enlarge their perspective. And they end up moderating some of their views.

Brad Plumer

There’s another side of this, too. The Trump administration isn’t just going to be focused on overturning Obama regulations. There are also laws that were passed by Congress like the Clean Air Act that will continue to require updates of existing regulations over time, on a set schedule. How much can appointees that are philosophically opposed to regulation really drag their heels here?

JF: There is some leeway for agencies to miss deadlines, they miss deadlines all the time. And courts don’t strictly enforce every deadline if the agency can show it’s making reasonable progress. At some point, though, courts will step in and require agencies to take some action.

But you’re asking, will there be some slippage? Certainly there will be some slippage. Agencies can miss deadlines by a year, two years, and courts will give them a lot of room, because they recognize agencies have a lot of priorities. But if an agency routinely and systematically misses deadlines and it looks like political interference, then courts may become quite skeptical.

What’s interesting is that even courts that are viewed as conservative and have a lot of conservative appointees, they respect the rule of law. And they may well wind up providing an accountability mechanism for any real effort to stymie these agencies systematically.

BP:

Okay, but what if Trump starts filling the courts with appointees more likely to rule in his favor?

JF: Yeah, you may get judges who are more skeptical of ambitious regulations — or regulations that creatively press the boundaries of a statute. But for run-of-the-mill rules and deadlines, it’s just a sort of lawyerly disposition to respect the rule of law. It’s hard to find judges that will systematically turn a blind eye to the core demands of the agency’s mission. There will be some brakes on what they can do.

I realize I sound almost cheerful — I am not! I’m not saying there’s no problem here.

BP: It does sound like the main point here is that the federal government is this vast bureaucracy that can’t just be turned around overnight.

JF: Yes, that’s exactly it.

Transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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hollywoodjuliorivas · 5 years ago

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Where the ‘Loony Libs’ Are Self-Destructing, Not Trump

To conservatives in this part of rural Iowa, the president is a beleaguered hero who is always Making America Great Again.

By Robert Leonard

Mr. Leonard is the author of “Deep Midwest: Midwestern Explorations.”

Oct. 14, 2019

Image

A Trump float in a Fourth of July parade in Independence, Iowa.

A Trump float in a Fourth of July parade in Independence, Iowa.CreditJordan Gale for The New York Times

KNOXVILLE, Iowa — To understand what many Iowans are thinking about President Trump and the impeachment investigation, first you have to know about Carson King.

During a recent Iowa-Iowa State football game, Mr. King, 24, held a sign requesting donations so he could buy more beer (specifically, Busch Light). To his surprise, the donations piled up. Given the amount, he decided to donate the funds — which ultimately totaled $3 million — to the University of Iowa’s children’s hospital.

Working on a profile of Mr. King, a reporter for The Des Moines Register discovered, in his social media history, a couple of racially inappropriate jokes from when he was 16. Mr. King publicly apologized before The Register had even printed the profile.

The episode produced a rare moment of unity among Iowans — against The Register. The backlash was harsh. For many people, the article reinforced a conservative trope: The liberal media was trying to bring a good man down.

Which is why I bring it up in the context of President Trump. It’s through the emotional lens of the King affair that many people in Iowa are viewing the Ukraine affair. As the dust has settled on the King kerfuffle but remains swirling around Mr. Trump’s troubles, many conservatives here think the “loony libs” are the ones self-destructing.

This area has been accurately described as Trump country — in 2016, twice as many residents in my county voted for him as for Hillary Clinton. It’s probably still Trump country, but his tariffs and the granting of renewable-fuel-standard waivers to large oil refineries have hammered the rural economy. Three ethanol plants in the state have closed, and most small farmers are hemorrhaging money. Even one of our Republican senators, Charles Grassley, says we have been mistreated. Mr. Trump’s farm bailouts have helped, but not enough.

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So the state of Iowa might be in play in the 2020 election. But around here, conservative rural America isn’t in play and may never be. It will stand by Mr. Trump and will likely never vote for a Democrat.

A local Republican Party official and attorney tells me the Democrats are wasting time with impeachment, and that he’s sad that their party doesn’t have statesmen anymore “like Tip O’Neill, Evan Bayh and Ted Kennedy.” They have been replaced, he said, by lefties like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.

At a coffee shop, a preachy Republican acquaintance I mostly try to avoid chortled as he lectured me about how Ms. Pelosi was handing Mr. Trump victory in 2020 and that all the Democrats have left is grandstanding. No policy. No ideas. They are “Communists out to destroy America.” He repeated the debunked notion on the right that Joe Biden is the real criminal, who as vice president withheld money from Ukraine until it stopped an investigation into a business his son was making millions of dollars from.

These types of narratives are common around here. They’re reinforced by Fox News. And “smear” or not, as Democrats call this one, they often stick. On this one, honestly, I share my conservative friends’ concerns, even if they have their facts wrong. Sure, Joe and Hunter Biden did nothing illegal, and Hunter was not a government official. Meanwhile, President Trump and his family have used the office of the president as an A.T.M., beyond his numerous moral and ethical failings.

But why would a Ukrainian gas company give Hunter Biden millions of dollars for a board seat in an industry he knew nothing about if they weren’t trying to curry favor with his father, the vice president? This is anthropology 101 — generalized reciprocity, where a gift of real value is made, with an expected return gift of uncertain or unspecified value at an undetermined time in the future. That we so easily accept this kind of payola to politicians is part of the reason it’s near-impossible to hold Mr. Trump accountable.

Anyway, fair or not, the Biden smear is certainly portrayed as truth on Fox News’s talk shows. Most of us around here seldom see that network’s news programs, which have been more evenhanded in their recent coverage of the president. When we get up in the morning to go to work, it’s “Fox & Friends” on the air. In the evening, by the time we are done wrangling kids and supper, it’s Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity.

And the local culture goes much deeper than Fox News, which doesn’t create the reality of conservatives here so much as reinforce it. To my devout conservative neighbors, liberals are tearing America apart. Mr. Trump is the only conservative with the courage enough to stand up to their way.

They see the hand of God in this, and many truly believe he is the “chosen one.” To them, Democrats are amoral and spiritually empty. Where evangelical Republicans worship God and see Jesus as the only path to him, Democrats have banned Jesus from the public sphere at great cost to society and the potential salvation of millions.

To rural white conservatives, their culture is being rubbed out right before their eyes. Compared with that, Mr. Trump’s sins — Ukraine and all — are trivial, while the Democrats are unrepentant and persist in their wrongdoing.

So, yes, the dismal rural economy, brought on directly by the president’s actions, may prompt independents and some Republicans to vote for a Democrat, because they will see it in their economic interests to do so.

But most Republicans I know don’t vote in their economic self-interest. They vote in terms of what they perceive to be in their spiritual self-interest.

Which brings us back to the confluence of the Carson King brouhaha and the Trump impeachment narrative. For the conservatives here, they come from the same source, the media. Mr. King and Mr. Trump are both targets of a politically correct mob that is quick to judge and slow to forgive, so that the slightest deviation from an ever moving liberal moral standard can destroy a person’s career.

Carson King’s posts as a 16-year-old are nothing alongside Mr. Trump’s actions. But that doesn’t matter. Conservatives see the two cases as illustrating a pattern of misbehavior by liberals and the media.

Which, of course, plays into Mr. Trump’s “victim” mentality. Many in the conservative Christian right share this mentality, despite being among the most privileged people in the history of the planet.

In his own mind, and in the minds of many of my Republican friends here in this corner of Iowa, Mr. Trump can never be the fall guy. He’ll always be a beleaguered hero on a journey to Make America Great Again. And to many, God is with him.

Oh, and on a recent Saturday, courtesy of our Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, Iowa celebrated Carson King Day.

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thisdaynews · 5 years ago

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How Climate Could Tear the Democratic Party Apart

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-climate-could-tear-the-democratic-party-apart/

How Climate Could Tear the Democratic Party Apart

Elissa Slotkin has learned that climate change is both a national emergency and a political opportunity. As an assistant secretary of defense under President Barack Obama, she helped lead the Pentagon’s first study of how climate change threatens U.S. military bases. Then as a Democratic candidate for Congress in 2018, she attacked her Republican opponent for questioning the scientific consensus on climate change—and that’s one reason she’s now a Democratic member of Congress.

“We talk about the weather all the time in Michigan, and we all know it’s getting weird,” she says. “To most people, straight-out denial feels extreme.”

Story Continued Below

But even though Slotkin has shown how the climate crisis can be a winning issue, she’s not on board with the most prominent progressive effort to make it a national issue, the Green New Deal, backed by her more famous House classmate Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She thinks it’s too radical, too polarizing, a gift to President Donald Trump and other Republicans who want to portray Democrats as socialists. “My district is very worried that Democrats are lurching to the left,” she says. “I know AOC’s face will be on every ad against me in 2020.”

Slotkin doesn’t see why a plan to fix the climate needs to promise universal health care and a federal job guarantee, and she doubts a lefty wish list disguised as an emergency response will play well in her suburban Michigan swing district, which Trump won by seven points.

“I’m a pragmatist, and I represent a lot of pragmatic people,” says Slotkin. “Why say we need massive social change to reduce emissions? How does that build consensus?”

The politics of climate change are changing fast, partly because global heat waves, fires in California and the Amazon, Midwestern floods and increasingly brutal storms keep focusing attention on its nasty consequences, and partly because the Green New Deal has thrust it to the center of the national conversation. Polls suggest climate change has emerged as one of the top two policy priorities for Democratic voters, rivaled only by health care. The party’s presidential candidates are releasing remarkably aggressive plans to wean America off fossil fuels, which they discussed briefly during each Democratic primary debate in Miami and Detroit this summer, and will debate in more detail at forums devoted exclusively to climate on CNN and MSNBC in September.

Meanwhile, even though Trump is an unapologetic climate-science denier and fossil-fuel promoter who has claimed that wind turbines cause cancer, other Republicans are retreating to more nuanced and factually defensible positions, acknowledging that greenhouse-gas emissions are a problem while calling for “innovation” and “adaptation” (as opposed to Green New Deal-style economic transformation) to deal with them. Corporate America is evolving, too. Dozens of big companies—including oil majors like BP and Shell—descended on Capitol Hill this spring to lobby for modest carbon taxes, responding to pressure from their shareholders and the public to support some kind of climate action.

As a rift builds between Republicans who do or don’t want to acknowledge climate change as a problem, another wedge is growing between Democrats who support radical solutions and those, like Slotkin, who want somewhat less radical solutions. It is mainly playing out through the internal battle over the Green New Deal, which so far is more of a call for dramatic action to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions than a specific legislative agenda, but has been effectively branded by conservative outlets like Fox News as a leftist crusade to ban meat and air travel.

It’s not a coincidence that Trump has vowed to run for re-election against the Green New Deal, or that Senate Republicans gleefully forced a vote on it, or that no Senate Democrats dared to vote yes. Even liberal House speaker Nancy Pelosi, while supporting deep emissions cuts and denouncing Trump’s efforts to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord, has declined to endorse “the green dream or whatever.”

Activists often say climate change shouldn’t be a partisan issue, but in the U.S. it still is. Democratic-controlled states like New York, California, Washington, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada and Maine have all passed sweeping bills requiring economy-wide climate neutrality by 2050 or earlier. States where Republicans hold power haven’t passed legislation like that, and the Republican Senate minority in blue Oregon managed to block a similar bill by fleeing the state to avoid a quorum. Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, who chairs a new Democratic committee on the climate crisis, devoted an entire hearing in July to conservatives who support climate action, and he’s hopeful about some modest bipartisan efforts to promote clean energy infrastructure and research. But Schatz says it’s far more important for the health of the planet for Democrats to defeat Trump in 2020 and take full control of Congress.

“As a practical matter, 2020 will decide whether we re-enter the realm of responsible nations, or not,” Schatz says. “It’s not a super-complex policy question. Climate is going to be on the ballot, and Democrats just have to win.”

The question is whether the current politics of climate is making that more or less likely. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, widely considered the scientific gold standard on the issue, has called for “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” to slash emissions. But it can be politically risky to support rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society. The Washington establishment seems convinced that as a generic long-term issue requiring politicians to dosomething, climate change makes Republicans look out of the mainstream, but as a demand for massive upheaval on a tight planetary timeline, the Green New Deal makes Democrats look just as far out of the mainstream.

And it’s exposing real tensions inside the Democratic Party—between center and left, congressional leaders and insurgents, labor groups and green groups, and even among various factions inside the Green New Deal movement.

***

In the past,climate was rarely more than a check-the-box afterthought on the campaign trail, so it’s notable that it has finally broken through as a top-tier issue for Democratic voters. In one CNN poll, 96 percent of registered Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said it was important that a presidential candidate support aggressive action against climate change, higher than any other issue; in several other polls, climate change has been cited as the number-two Democratic priority, ahead of guns, jobs and education, just behind health care.

“That’s worth underlining and bolding and italicizing,” says Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale University Program on Climate Communication.

The Democratic presidential field has absorbed the message; one potential problem with the CNN and MSNBC climate-only quasi-debates might be the lack of substantive disagreements for the candidates to debate. Until he dropped out of the race last week, Washington governor Jay Inslee had built his entire campaign around climate, billionaire Tom Steyer is a top funder of climate activism, and populist senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have called for a war on fossil fuels. Even former vice president Joe Biden, who was attacked from the left over early reports that he’d carve out a “middle ground” on climate, has unveiled a plan to decarbonize the entire country by 2050.

There are subtle differences among the candidates, mostly involving the specificity of their plans and their willingness to embrace “keep-it-in-the-ground” fossil-fuel policies that pro-pipeline construction unions oppose. But all the Democrats represent a stark contrast with Trump, who has appointed like-minded fossil-fuel advocates throughout his administration and the judiciary, made the U.S. the only nation to reject the Paris accord, routinely attacked climate-friendly pollution and efficiency regulations, and publicly dismissed the National Climate Assessment released by his own administration as left-wing “deep state” alarmism.

Still, even though Trump has made headlines with his attacks on Obama’s climate policies and his mockery of climate science, and even though the floods ravaging Midwestern farms and the heat wave broiling Europe have highlighted the urgency of the climate issue, it probably wouldn’t have risen this high on the political agenda if Ocasio-Cortez hadn’t become Capitol Hill’s top celebrity. Democratic leaders may be annoyed that she gets so much press, and the president may enjoy using her outspoken “Squad” of left-wing women of color as foils, but her Green New Deal has called more attention to climate than any phenomenon since the 2006 Al Gore documentaryAn Inconvenient Truth.It’s also mobilizing the green young voters Democrats will need to beat Trump in 2020—even if it’s mobilizing them with rhetoric and tactics that make establishment Democrats uncomfortable.

The youth-oriented Sunrise Movement was an obscure year-old organization with just 20 chapters when Ocasio-Cortez stopped by its climate sit-in at Pelosi’s office last November. It now has more than 200 active chapters that have held town halls all over the country, building pressure for the Green New Deal, accusing their elders in both parties of consigning their generation to a fossil-fueled dystopia. The IPCC has called for drastic emissions reductions by 2030 to avoid the worst climate scenarios, and with U.S. emissions rising under Trump, groups like Sunrise argue that gradual and incremental political changes are not going to cut it.

“We’re at the start of a paradigm shift, and it’s wild,” says 29-year-old Rhianna Gunn-Wright, who helped craft the Green New Deal resolution as policy director for the progressive think tank New Consensus. Gunn-Wright says younger voters have just as little patience for half-measures, delay, and “hand-wringing from moderates” as they have for Trump’s snide how-about-that-global-warming tweets on cold days. “People want actionnow,” Gunn-Wright says. “Calling the people trying to solve the problem socialists might work for a while, but it’s going to get tougher and tougher to say we can’t afford to address this crisis.”

She may be right that the long-term politics of climate favor action, but in the short term it matters a lot whether calling climate-friendly Democrats socialists will work for Republican candidates in 2020. Some politicians in both parties believe the issue could play out the way gay marriage did in 2004, rallying the conservative Republican base and helping to re-elect a conservative Republican president even though large majorities later came to agree with the Democrats. Democrats may be magnifying their problems with a circular firing squad, as the establishment echoes Republican talking points about left-wing extremism while the left attacks even minor deviations from Green New Deal purism as shameful inaction.

“Denying the science is not a sustainable position, and more Republicans need to face reality on this issue,” says Rep. Garrett Graves of Louisiana, the ranking Republican on the new House committee investigating climate change. “But there’s a civil war happening on the Democratic side, too. If the Green New Deal can’t get a single vote in the U.S. Senate, they obviously haven’t figured this out, either.”

In fact, six months after the Green New Deal resolution was unveiled, with far-reaching climate goals but few specific climate policies, its supporters have yet to introduce substantive legislation for achieving those goals. Meanwhile, House Democrats skeptical of the Green New Deal have introduced two alternative green blueprints, both calling for net-zero emissions by 2050, but those are also primarily plans to have a plan, not actual plans. So far, the political sweet spot seems to be to announce a climate-friendly destination without detailing exactly how to get there.

***

In the past,climate change has been such an unsexy campaign issue that there has never even been a question about it in a general-election debate. In 2012, CNN moderator Candy Crowley said she considered including one for “you climate change people,” as if the broiling of the planet were a niche concern for tree-huggers, but decided it would have distracted from her focus on the economy. In 2016, one town-hall debate did include one thoughtful question about energy and the environment, but the question was overshadowed by an Internet furor over the questioner, a cardigan-clad insta-celebrity named Ken Bone.

In 2018, though, climate was a key theme for Democratic congressional candidates such as Slotkin and Harley Rouda of California, a moderate who successfully challenged the eccentric conservative Republican Rep. Dana Rohrbacher. Rouda considers climate “the number one issue facing humankind,” and he knew it mattered to voters in his coastal Orange County district, where rising seas have forced local officials to raise a seawall on Balboa Island. “Climate is a bigger infrastructure issue here than widening the 405,” he says. Rouda also saw climate as an ideal way to paint Rohrbacher as an extremist who, when he wasn’t floating conspiracy theories that Democrats organized the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville or suggesting that homeowners should be able to discriminate against gays, was dismissing climate change as “liberal claptrap” and suggesting that carbon emissions actually help the planet.

“It fit in with the outlandish stuff he said every day,” says Rouda, who now chairs the House’s key subcommittee on environmental oversight. “And it really resonated with everyone who wasn’t a hard-core Trump supporter.”

Climate denial was not always a Republican value. As recently as 2008, the Republican presidential nominee against Obama, John McCain, campaigned on a cap-and-trade plan to rein in carbon emissions, while former GOP Speaker Newt Gingrich and Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi filmed an ad for Gore’s non-profit in which they sat on a sofa and agreed that climate action shouldn’t be partisan. Things changed after Obama’s election and the rise of the Tea Party, as Washington Republicans came together to shoot down Obama’s cap-and-trade plan and climate became a new battleground in America’s political culture wars. Conservative media routinely portrayed global warming as a loony-lefty scam for the Birkenstock crowd, and the few Republican politicians who embraced the science tended to become ex-politicians.

Trump amped up that skepticism as a candidate, dismissing climate change as a hoax manufactured in China while pledging to restore the coal industry to its former glory. That hasn’t happened during his presidency, but not for lack of trying. His administration has pushed hard to ease rules limiting pollution by coal plants and other fossil-fuel interests, heavy industry, agriculture and other major emitters of greenhouse gases. The president often portrays the climate movement as an elitist plot against the American economy; his top climate adviser compared the campaign against carbon to Nazi Germany’s “demonization of the poor Jews.”

Still, Trump’s advisers can read the polls suggesting voters outside his base are concerned about his anti-environmental record, which helps explain an unusually defensive speech he recently delivered highlighting America’s relatively clean air and water. He’s particularly out of step with young Republicans; more than one third of his own supporters under 40 disapprove of his brazen denial of climate science, which helps explain why some Republicans who can usually be relied on to defend his policies are distancing themselves from his stance on global warming.

ClearPath director Rich Powell, whose group advocates conservative approaches to climate action, says there’s been a “sea change” among congressional Republicans, with consensus-builders replacing bomb-throwers atop several key committees, and back-benchers who represent coastal states and suburban districts starting to endorse climate policies beyond “no.” In recent months, Republican stalwarts have proposed tax credits for clean-energy innovation, investments in clean-energy research, and modest carbon taxes to encourage a shift away from emissions. Even Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), a staunch Trump ally from a district along the Gulf of Mexico, unveiled a “Green Real Deal” that would accelerate renewable energy projects on public lands and upgrade the electric grid, while urging his Republican colleagues to “support a solution, not just stick their heads in the sand.”

“That’s a sign of the times,” Powell says. “Swing voters really care about this. Even for the base, dismissing climate change isn’t necessarily a slam dunk.”

In fact, some Democrats are worried that the new GOP rhetoric on climate could help blur partisan distinctions on the issue in 2020, shifting the debate from basic science to complex policy. In an interview before he launched his White House run, Steyer argued that Republicans who acknowledge climate science but call for more study or warn against economically disruptive responses are as committed to inaction as outright deniers. But he acknowledged that the yes-but crowd might sound more compelling to low-information voters than the hell-no crowd.

“It’s like the civil rights movement. It’s almost better to have Bull Connor on the other side, so everyone understands the enemy,” Steyer said. “It’s one thing when they say: ‘The earth is flat.’ But when they say, ‘Oh, we’re reasonable, but you crazy socialist eggheads are going to kill millions of jobs,’ the politics are tougher.”

The politics are especially tough when Fox News is hammering away at the crazy-socialist-egghead message. Polls show that frequent Fox watchers hear much more about the Green New Deal than other Americans do, and dislike it much more than other Americans do. Data for Progress, another liberal group pushing the Green New Deal, has found in its focus groups that Fox messaging is having a powerful effect, with many voters associating the plan with “cow farts” and a tendentious “$93 trillion price tag” that Fox personalities keep flogging. Fossil fuel interests have also poured money into PR campaigns and think tanks pushing against climate action; Steyer says he started intervening in energy-related state ballot initiatives because environmental groups were getting outspent by 25-to-1. “We’re up against a very effective and centralized propaganda machine, and we need to fight back,” says Julian Brave NoiseCat, a 26-year-old indigenous rights activist who is now the strategic director at Data for Progress. “We can’t just remain in a defensive crouch, and that’s what Democratic leaders in Congress have done.”

NoiseCat’s dissatisfaction reflects another challenge for climate politics, the divisions within the Democratic Party. And those divisions have less to do with the substantive details of climate policy than contrasting visions of what the party is about, how the party should behave, and who is going to decide.

***

Whether or not they support the Green New Deal,most Democrats support aggressive investments in wind and solar power, energy efficiency, electric vehicles, public transit, and just about any other proven approach to reducing emissions. Similarly, most Democrats want to reduce government subsidies and other support for fossil fuels, tighten regulations on carbon and other pollutants, and undo just about everything Trump has done in the climate arena.

There are some internal disputes about whether to encourage carbon-free nuclear power or technology to capture carbon from fossil-fuel plants, how much climate policy should rely on market-oriented solutions like carbon taxes or cap-and-trade, and how aggressively to pursue keep-it-in-the-ground policies on federal and private land. But the Green New Deal was careful to sidestep those disputes, proclaiming the need for spectacularly ambitious changes without spelling them out.

“The truth is, the situation is so dire that we don’t need to argue which of these policies is best,” Schatz says. “We literally need to do all of them.”

Still, the arguments persist, and they help explain why congressional Democrats have been so vague about their climate policies. They also could cause problems for the party’s presidential nominee, who will irritate some Democrats whether he or she comes out as pro-nuclear, anti-nuclear or somewhere in between. The troubling reality of climate math has created an internal dynamic where just about any candidate’s plan can be criticized as inadequate by activists who don’t like the candidate. When Beto O’Rourke unveiled a far-reaching $5 trillion plan to zero out emissions by 2050, exactly what the scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have recommended, the Sunrise Movement trashed it as weak sauce that would fail to “give our generation a livable future.”

Climate wonks complained publicly that O’Rourke was being punished for echoing the science, and several climate activists grumbled privately that their movement was being hijacked by Sanders fans who cared more about a socialist takeover of the Democratic Party than serious emissions reductions. “Are we in this to do climate, or are we in this to nationalize industry?” one Green New Deal activist asked me. Sunrise later backed off a bit, acknowledging that its initial statement was too negative, but not before O’Rourke signed a pledge that he wouldn’t accept donations from fossil-fuel interests, a demand Sunrise had been making for months.

“We need a president who will stand up for our generation, and it can’t just be any Democrat,” says Stephen O’Hanlon, Sunrise’s 23-year-old spokesman. “We’re putting a lot of pressure on the candidates, and we’re gaining a lot of traction.”

The most prominent Democratic dispute about climate policy is whether it should focus exclusively on climate, or whether it should take on broader issues of economic injustice. The Green New Deal resolution was widely criticized for tacking on utopian progressive ideas like job guarantees (“to assure a living wage job for everyone”) as well as universal health care and the even broader mandate for “any other measure the committee deems appropriate for economic security.” Some centrists in Congress and even some mainstream environmental groups believe those contentious add-ons will send a politically damaging message that Democrats don’t welcome bipartisan cooperation, that their most strident radicals will be running the show. “I’m worried about the focus on the loudest voices,” says the moderate Rep. Slotkin, who served as a CIA analyst before working for Obama in the Pentagon.

But Green New Dealers argue that a single-minded focus on emissions targets and warming scenarios would be bad politics and bad policy, narrowing and demoralizing the potential coalition for climate action, increasing the danger of a backlash like the “yellow vest” protests against France’s carbon taxes. They argue that climate hawks should focus on economic fairness and justice, on helping inner-city residents who breathe dirty air from coal plants, on dismantling power hierarchies that favor oil billionaires and agribusiness conglomerates over low-income minority consumers. They say the only way to fix the climate will be to inspire a new progressive coalition to take back Washington, and they’re skeptical that a technical goal like keeping average global temperature increases below 2 degrees Celsius will offer enough inspiration to mobilize the poor, the young, and other less reliable voting groups to the polls.

It’s no coincidence that the Democrats arguing for the political benefits of full-menu progressivism happen to be full-menu progressives. But there is a real strategic argument behind the ideological opportunism, a climate version of the debate among Democrats about whether to target base voters or swing voters, whether persuasion or mobilization is the key to victory in 2020. Steyer points out that in 2018, he financed mobilization campaigns that helped carry clean-energy ballot questions to victory in the swing states of Michigan and Nevada, although a similar campaign failed in Arizona after Republican politicians changed the wording.

“Intensity is what drives turnout,” Steyer told me. “And climate lends itself to intensity. People are trying to kill your kids! Those are the facts. Why be polite?

It’s also no coincidence that Steyer, before launching his own presidential campaign, was the leading advocate for Trump’s impeachment. There are real divisions among Democrats over pipelines, carbon taxes and the Green New Deal, and the rise of climate-curious Republicans is a real phenomenon. But the president has a knack for dominating the national conversation, and it’s hard to imagine that the climate conversation will be any different in 2020. As the Trump administration whacks away at fossil-fuel regulations, while the Trump campaign sells plastic straws designed to mock concern for the environment, Democrats hope and Republicans fear that the complex nuances of climate politics will be boiled down to whether voters care or don’t, believe experts or don’t, trust Trump or don’t. In that scenario, every climate-driven heat wave, fire and flood can help persuade swing voters that the president is ignoring a problem—and help turn out the base, too.

Then again, Trump has already signaled his plan to switch the spotlight to the radicalism of the Green New Deal and Democratic climate action in general. The problem for Democrats is that their plans, assuming they’re serious, really are quite radical, because they’re all in line with the international scientific recommendations, which are also quite radical. A dramatic shift away from fossil fuels could impose dramatic costs on fossil-fueled states, which helps explain why the Brookings Institution found that the 13 states with the highest per-capita emissions all voted for Trump in 2016, while the eight states with the lowest per-capita emissions voted for Hillary Clinton. The solar and wind boom is quickly changing the energy mix in red states like Texas and Georgia, but it’s not clear the changes will be quick enough to matter in 2020.

Mark Muro, a Brookings senior fellow, says those fossil-fueled red states could form a “brown wall” protecting Trump and other Republicans before they transition to clean energy. “Some of these red states are decarbonizing fast, and that’s incredible, but political realignment doesn’t usually happen that fast,” Muro says. “Tribalism is pretty durable.”

Trump has framed climate as a classic tribal issue, another us-against-them battle in America’s political culture war, pitting coal miners in hard hats and dirt farmers in overalls against pointy-headed scientists and kale-eating environmentalists. So far, he doesn’t seem to be persuading many Americans outside his base. But he gets to make a case against wrenching change, while Democrats have to argue for upending the status quo and imposing some short-term costs in order to avoid hard-to-quantify disasters in the future. And they can’t even promise that their actions will make things better; in fact, scientists believe that things will almost certainly get worse even actions are taken to avoid catastrophe.

“It’s the policy problem from hell,” says Yale’s Leiserowitz. “Politicians need to take hard decisions now to help the world in 2050, when all the political incentives favor short-term thinking. The danger is that by the time we feel serious pain and it’s really obvious we need to act, the situation will be beyond repair.”

In other words, the new inconvenient truth is that it might be good politics for Trump to campaign against uncomfortable change. But the climate doesn’t care about politics. It’s already changing, and the results will be uncomfortable no matter who wins in 2020.

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