Defunding the Police

Rep. Abigail Spanberger has gone out of her way to condemn Black Lives Matter and progressives for slogans like "Defund the Police". I think she needs to read this article in The New Yorker about the police force in a California city in the Bay Area. Among other things, the article cites a study which found that police violence against citizens is much higher where police are represented by unions than those that are not. The police department in this article may be an extreme example, but the difference is in degree and not in kind.

My position on this is that we have tried police "reform" for a long time, to no avail. The problem will not be solved without some sort of defunding or other form of de-powering of police departments. Spanberger doesn't like those words. Maybe she can come up with a better slogan; I say go for it. But what I do know is that if the Democratic Party can only win elections by avoiding talking about controversial issues that make white people uncomfortable, then maybe they don't deserve to win those elections.

Saturday Opinions

 

• Trump's pardon of Michael Flynn weeks after he lost the election is, in my mind, prima facie proof that everyone in Trump's orbit believes that Flynn is guilty.

• The story about McKinsey & Company's contribution to the opioid crisis along with Purdue is not pretty. My experience with these kinds of consulting companies is that their work never benefits ordinary folks, only the corporate elite. But they have built an infrastructure in today's capitalism in which the very same corporate elite relies on McKinsey and others to justify its existence, like a feedback loop. It is not lost on me that there is some of this dynamic in the Democratic Party establishment, where the Party exists for the benefit of the consulting class and vice versa. And that consulting class is interested primarily in perpetuating its own existence rather than the interests of the Party's rank and file.

• I can be as cynical and negative as anyone, but there is this: defeating an incumbent president is a big deal. And especially one who probably could have guaranteed his reelection if he had been only half insane throughout 2020 instead of full-bore insane.

• Call me naive, but I doubt that assassination is a viable and sustainable strategy in dealing with Iran.

• I must admit that I am more than a little concerned that some of the folks in Biden's potential national defense team are too comfortable with the idea of military intervention as a foreign policy tool.

How Not to Build a Coalition

There are probably many ways for the Democrats to go about building a lasting coalition. But I do know some ways not to build one.

1. Don't ask progressive Democrats like me to support and contribute money to the campaigns of moderate Democratic candidates and then--when we do exactly that--blame progressive Democrats like me when they lose.
2. I support the Democratic Party because it supposedly represents values like racial justice, income equality, affordable healthcare, human rights in international affairs, and strong labor unions. Telling me that Democrats can only win if we abandon some or all of those things is hardly the way to maintain my support.
3. Putting all of the party's efforts toward wooing suburban white Republicans (who turn out to be not very reliable long-term supporters) and then bad mouth progressives like Rashida Tlaib and AOC (who worked tirelessly to turn out voters) is inviting just what happened. Like it or not, the Republicans don't forget who their base is. The Democrats can only ignore their base at their own peril.

Thanksgiving Eve

 

• So a bunch of authoritarian countries in the Middle East have gotten together and made some kind of diplomatic agreements--some of which seem pretty cosmetic and meaningless--and this is some sort of good thing? Yawn.
• I am to the left of all of Biden's Cabinet picks, but Biden is the one the Democratic voters wanted in the primary, and the American voters wanted in the general, so these picks are as good as we're gonna get. But I find it comical to have Republican Ivy League grads lecturing us about elitist picks (especially since Trump's Cabinet was full of elitist Ivy Leaguers and Wall Streeters).
• So...as this President descends deeper and deeper into lunacy--with the quiet approval of 90% of Republican politicians--he expects us to believe that this unhinged guy living in an alternate universe has won a trade war with China and made the United States respected once more? The four-year shit show is coming to an end, but don't ever think that we have reached bottom.

 

• Letter to the Editor in the Times: "Irony of ironies. If Donald Trump had spent a fraction of the energy on fighting Covid-19 as he has trying to overturn the election, he would have won the election."

  Bobbie Kaplan
  New York

• Of all the "farmers" that got welfare checks from the Vote Buyer in Chief, what percentage voted for Trump in 2020? I'd guess in the 95+% area. All we got from Obama was free phones. Ain't capitalism grand?

• Kudos to the one Michigan Republican who wasn't bullied by Trump and his cultees into not doing his duty. (Pretty bad when you have to congratulate someone for doing his routine duty, but here we are.)

• Most of Biden's Cabinet picks seem okay so far. He does have to get them by the Senate, so there is that constraint.

Biden Needs the Left

From Jamelle Bouie's opinion piece (here) in today's New York Times:

We now know that Biden will be president, but he won’t have the votes for F.D.R.-size legislation. This doesn’t mean he’s dead in the water, but it does mean that Biden will have to marshal every resource and rely on every possible ally to win whatever victories he can. And he should know, as Roosevelt did, that this means grappling with the left — all of the left, including its most radical edges.

... 

There was no building the American welfare state without the left, and if it’s to be rebuilt, the left will have to be part of it. Democrats, especially would-be heirs to F.D.R., should take care to remember that fact.

Social Security would not exist today without the acivism of the left (yes, this includes Communists) in the 1930s.

Thursday (continued)

 

• Pompeo says the BDS movement is anti-Semitic. Is he doing cancel culture?
• Do I think that this Supreme Court is capable of overturning this election result? I think it is unlikely, but I also think the probablility is greater than zero. Nota bene: this is not a compliment to the current Court.
• In public, Giuliani alleges fraud. But when he is in court he is careful to say he is not alleging fraud. One big reason is that (I think) he could go to jail for knowingly lying in court.
• It's pretty amazing to me that one of the few persons to show some integrity and backbone through this is a fairly right-wing Secretary of State in Georgia. The Republicans in Michigan seem to be full-blown QAnon groupies.
• Headline in today's New York Times: "Charges Against U.S, Protesters Are Being Dismissed by the Thousands".

Thursday Opinions

 

• Iowa's governor just issued a mask order. It's pretty clear she waited longer than she should have because she didn't want to piss off Trump before the election. More people will be dead because of that.
• Trump's call to that Michigan election board member was very Maduro-like. I think the US has lost whatever moral high ground it ever thought it had (which was never nearly that much in the eyes of the rest of the world anyway). It'll be nice to have the Mar-a-Lago mafia out of the White House.
• I really hope that the Dems win both of the Senate seats in Georgia, but I have no illusions of what that would mean in practice. We have Manchin, Sinema, and others who would constrain a lot of good things. It wasn't Republicans who made the ACA less that it could have been; it was the centrist Democrats.
• Republicans aren't satisfied with suppressing the Black vote before the election. Now they are trying to suppress it after the election, too. Then they pretend their tender feelings are hurt when they are accused of racism. Well, it quacks like a duck, so there you go.

Wayne County, MI

 

I see that a lot of Republican Trumpies are claiming that the Wayne County (MI) Election Board was unfairly bullied into reversing its decision of not certifying the election results, because they were accused of racism. While I personally hesitate to call people racist when I don't know them, what the two Republicans on the board did (since reversed) was indeed racist. That is judging the action and not the heart. It really doesn't matter if they are racists. They are either racists or might as well be. The result is the same. And when you do racist stuff, some people are going to call you racist. Pretty simple.

A Quickie

I am wondering why Trump and his Lindsey Graham stooges aren't arguing that Black votes should only be counted for three-fifths of a vote. That might sway the originalists if it ever gets to the Supreme Court.

Student Loans

There's a pretty interesting piece today on Jacobinmag.com. https://www.jacobinmag.com/author/christof-rindlisbacher) It encourages Biden to totally wipe out student debt by executive order as one of his first acts as president. There have been other similar ideas floated around, and especially since the Senate is almost certainly going to be under Republican control.

There are a few reasons why something like this would be a good idea. Firstly, it would be a gesture to the base of the Democratic Party. Now, we can argue all we want about whether the country is center-right, center-left, or whatever. But in my mind, the party's base is definitely some combination of Black and Left. Joseph Biden would not be president-elect without progressives voting overwhelmingly for him. And all the moderates that lost their Senate and House races were not for lack of votes from the base; rather, they were abandoned by centrists and the elusive swing voters that the party has been chasing. In any case, this is something Biden could do that would be enthusiastically embraced by the base without (I hope) turning off the centrists.

Plus, it is the right thing to do. And it would be economically stimulative.

Finally, it would be something to kind of dare the Supreme Court to overturn. Since we are in an environment where the Court has become just another political branch, it is a good issue to show whose side SCOTUS is really on. I understand Biden's tendency toward compromise. It is part of his brand. But there are a few areas where throwing down the gauntlet would be worth it (immigration is another). Eliminating student debt would be a good start.

Sunday Morning

• At one time, there might have actually been something you could call White Evangelical vote, but it has really evolved into what can more accurately be called the White Supremacist vote. It is instructive that support for Trump among this group seems to increase when he is more viciously racist and xenophobic. He doesn't become more Christian or Evangelical; he just vocalizes more racism. Many in this group hide behind the smokescreen of Evangelicalism, but the racist underbelly of it is always lurking. My view on this is not based on vague impressions from the media or elsewhere. For a leftie, I know a disproportionate number of people from the White Evangelical Right. At least anecdotally, what I described above is true.
• I have watched with sadness, dismay, and astonishment as my former church body, the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), has become a conduit of validation for its members who support this White Supremacy
• So we lost House seats because we turned off suburban voters by talking about racial justice? Does this mean the Democratic Party should become less committed to racial justice?  I am not sure what else to conclude. As I've said before, if that's what it takes to get the suburban whites to vote for Dems, then maybe they should be looking elsewhere for more reliable and desirable coalition partners.

Puccini Flashmob

If you want to feel better about life, I recommend that you watch/listen to this YouTube video at least once a day.

 

Swift-Boat Ben

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/why-gop-superlawyer-ben-ginsberg-is-bucking-his-party-and-blasting-trumps-baseless-election-claims/2020/11/10/f2aa7056-236d-11eb-8599-406466ad1b8e_story.html

It is hilarious in a black-comedy sort of way to watch guys like Swift-Boat Ben Ginsberg try to put all the toothpaste that they've been squirting over the years back into the tube. He is as responsible as anyone for why we are where we are today. I love to see these folks become so highly-principled all of a sudden. Better late than never I guess, but he has a long way to go to atone for all the damage he's done to help get us Donald Trump and today's Republican party.

Random Bullets

 

• When I chalk up the Senate scorecard, I mentally disregard the Doug Jones loss in Alabama. He never should have had the seat. Any Republican who wasn't a child  molester would have won the seat in the special election. It was good while it lasted but it was a one-off fluke. So I regard this year's election as +2 for the Dems. Still not great, unless we get awfully lucky in Georgia (or Alaska?).
• If Biden manages to squeak it out in Arizona it's gonna be by a toenail. If he does hang on there, it will be by fewer votes than in Georgia. 
• I know I am just a legal layperson, but it sure seems to me that the concept of "standing" is something that is conjured case-by-case, depending on where you want to end up.
• If the entire ACA is thrown out, doesn't that eliminate all the money the Feds are currently sending to the states for Medicaid. That would be bad at any time but with Covid draining state coffers, this would be utterly disastrous for many/most states.

Addendum to My Last Post

As a follow-up to my last post, here is another good piece by Jeet Heer in The Nation making the case that Biden's very successful presidential campaign may have hurt Congressional candidates. By overemphasizing Republicans like Kasich, The Lincoln Project, etc., at the Convention and during the campaign at the expense of actual Democrats:

"In using Republicans to delegitimize Trump, Biden was also in effect legitimizing the Republican Party. His implicit argument was that the only real problem was Trump and that once Trump was out of the way, the two parties could go back to normal cooperation. Biden completely ignored the extent to which the GOP had become Trumpized and major Republicans like Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell had been deeply complicit in Trump’s corruption.

Biden gave voters who leaned Republicans a plausible argument to vote for him. But he also gave those voters, and also many centrists, permission to split the ticket. After all, if the only problem is Trump, why punish the GOP? If Biden knows how to work with Republicans, why not have a divided government?

The real lesson of the election is that if you run a Republican campaign, you will get Republican results."

I think this is a legitimate take, and one you're not likely to hear on any national news outlet, especially television.

Still Waiting for PA, GA, and AZ

Some musings while I wait for the final count in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona.

• Exit polls have proven to be pretty iffy in the past. With such a high percentage of votes by mail, how can exit polls have any validity this year?
• Still pretty disappointed at the moderate Dems who want to blame everything on the lefties in the party. I am in favor of a broad big tent, and once again I voted for a candidate way the to right of me, and I did so gladly. We even gave money to all those moderate Senate candidates who lost. But it seems like too many in the party want our votes but not our voice. Telling people they are welcome in the party as long as they shut up is hardly a way to build a broad and lasting coalition.
• This article from Jacobin offers an alternative take to the mostly fawning image of the Lincoln Project. If they helped beat Trump, that's great. But if it means that these Republicans are setting the policy agenda, it's not good. According to this piece, Trump got a higher percentage of white women than he did against Hillary did in '16 (but as I said above, not sure how much stock to put into exit polls this year). And if it sucked oxygen out of the economic message that was needed in the House races, it also might have hurt.
  

While I'm Waiting for Pennsylvania

• Indiana is amazing to me. Obama carried it in '08. In '20 (with 84% of the vote in) Trump is up by 59-38. It's really become a southern state. More southern than Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina. What makes it even more amazing is how Trump used the state for photo ops about keeping jobs in the state,  and then all those jobs left anyway as soon as Trump was out of sight. He doesn't give a rat's ass about workers, but they are convinced he has their back. Hard to figure.
• With the Democratic majority reduced in the House somewhat in this election, we will have to face the significant probability/possibility that they could lose control of the House in the 2022 off-year elections, if history holds.
• I predicted a long time ago that the centrist Dems were setting up the left to take the blame if things didn't work out as they hoped. Sure enough, there's this story in today's Washington Post describing a meeting of Congressional Dems, where the Blue Dogs and other centrists blame the left for them losing some of the seats they flipped in 2018. This is entirely to expected. The centrists always take credit for successes and blame others for failures. If the only way for Dems to succeed is to appear less committed to justice, antiracism, affordable health care, opposition to police murders, etc., that is not a sustainable or desirable strategy. Apparently these white suburbanites are not reliable coalition partners if they jump ship so easily. Maybe the Dems need to solidify their true base by getting more young people of all colors to come out and vote. Telling people that it is bad to fight for what they believe in is hardly a message I am willing to get on board with.

Pre-Election Reflections

I am a seventy-something white guy. Between the almost four years of Donald Trump and eight months of Covid-19, I have had lots of reasons (and in 2020, lots of time) to reflect. Reflect on my own life and how I got to where I am, and reflect on my country and how it got to where it is.

It has occurred to me that--in some ways--my life has really been a process of unlearning and relearning the truths about America: what it was, what it is, and what it's always been. One of my life's regrets is that it has taken me so many years to get here.

And it's not only America. Among the "friends" of the United States, most (excepting most of our European allies, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) are run by undemocratic or anti-democratic tyrants, often fueled by religious hatreds analogous to the Religious Right bigots in the US: India, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, Philippines, Brazil, Egypt, et al. The idea that the arc of history bends toward justice sounds poetic and lovely, but it's wishful thinking.

So what sorts of things did I have to relearn? I went to pretty good schools in Wisconsin. But a lot of what I learned was at the very least a matter of using incorrect words. We learned terms like "manifest destiny", which was a euphemism for "genocide". Or "federalism" and "states rights" as substitutes for "Jim Crow". We never learned the rich history of slave rebellions. But we did learn that America supported democracy throughout the world, when in fact Yankee Imperialism backed despots everywhere and actively participated in anti-democratic coups all over the world, particularly in our own hemisphere. American history textbooks presented slavery as kind of a secondary cause of the Civil War.

Has America been heroic and good at times? Absolutely. And we have also been very wrong and very bad at times. That makes us like most other countries. The concept of American Exceptionalism is a sham, whether it's espoused by Reagan or Obama. (As a Christian I consider it out-and-out idolatry.) White folks show brief flashes of support and empathy when police murder George Floyd or Breonna Taylor. But the Whitelash is swift and unforgiving when the reaction isn't as nice and pretty as they'd like.

No matter who the winners are in the upcoming election, America has a lot of work to do. Trump's term has been unquestionably the worst of my lifetime, without any redeeming qualities. (This is quite a high--or is it low?--bar to clear, considering the disaster of George W's presidency.) America in my lifetime has done far worse under Republicans than Democrats, but the problems we face were created in a markedly bipartisan way. I will be looking for ways to take a more active part in that fight (and it is a fight). I think it is not too late. 

Headline of the Day

Headline from Nate Silver's Fivethirtyeight website:

We Can’t Believe We Have To Say This, But You Win An Election By Being Ahead When All The Votes Are Counted