The title of this article is a recent quote from Steven Crowder, an immensely popular conservative YouTuber with almost six million subscribers. “He’s not wrong about everything,” Crowder quipped about Kanye West’s recent and obviously anti-Semitic remarks. “Is there a conversation to be had about secular humanists with Jewish last names exploiting people in Hollywood?”

Crowder went on to articulate that these “secular humanists with Jewish last names” aren’t evil “because they’re Jewish”. His distinction serves two purposes here. First, it allows a modicum of plausible deniability for anti-Semites and people foolish enough to believe “I hate Jews, but not because they are Jewish” is a legitimate opinion. Second, it allows the divorcing of Jews with non-reactionary views from the Jewish populace as a whole. It separates Jews that Crowder finds worthy–religious conservatives like Ben Shapiro, the late Sheldon Adelson, the Israeli far-right–with those he finds unworthy. The fact that Crowder was referring to wealthy Hollywood executives is irrelevant here, as he does not make a distinction between powerful Jews who aren’t religious and Jews who hold left-wing views. For Crowder, there is no water between Noam Chomsky and Harvey Weinstein. They’re both part of the same cabal.

The comment section of Crowder’s video rips the mask off this farce. It’s full of open anti-Semites. So too with “journalist” Tim Pool’s Kanye West interview, in which Pool tried to make a distinction between “the corporate press” treating Kanye unfairly vs. Jews as a monolithic bloc doing so. A large chunk of these comments consisted of Pool’s fans criticizing him for not identifying the “real problem”, i.e., Jews.

Crowder is noteworthy here because he straddles the gap between American conservatism–people like Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson–and overt fascists like Milo Yiannopolis and Nick Fuentes. That gap shrinks by the day. We may soon see mainstream Republicans running on a rhetorical platform similar to Crowder’s. Donald Trump’s admonishment of American Jews for “not caring about Israel” is probably a portent of an ever-more noxious Republican Party, one an inch from Nazi talking points on Jewish issues. The predominance of conservative discourse on “cultural Marxism” (The Nazis said “cultural Bolshevism”) means we’re already pretty close.

Where does this thinly-veiled prejudice come from? Consider Slavoj Zizek’s commentary on anti-Semitism in The Sublime Object of Ideology. In response to the overt anti-Semitism of Nazis and their ilk, Zizek writes, many will say that

‘The Nazis are condemning the Jews too hastily, without proper argument, so let us take a cool, sober look and see if they are really guilty or not; let us see if there is some truth in the accusations against them.’ Is it really necessary to add that such an approach would merely confirm our so-called ‘unconscious prejudices’ with additional rationalizations? The proper answer to anti-Semitism is therefore not ‘Jews are really not like that’ but ‘the anti-Semitic idea of Jew has nothing to do with Jews; the ideological figure of a Jew is a way to stitch up the inconsistency of our own ideological system.’

Zizek is a difficult and provocative thinker, but my interpretation of this passage is that people like Crowder will find “the Jew” a convenient ideological fantasy to justify already-held beliefs. For Crowder, whose politics revolve around disgust at those he finds displeasing–black people and LGBT people in particular–”The Jew” serves as the source of the revulsion. This is to say, Crowder and company cannot admit that queer people have a legitimate right to their gender and sexual expression, or that black people have legitimate grievances with contemporary America. There must therefore be a nefarious source spreading these ideas among the populace. The source of the “repulsive ideology” is, conveniently, “secular humanists with Jewish last names”. By situating Jews as the master manipulators, Crowder legitimizes the prejudices he previously held and espoused.

We must remember that conservatives have set the bar impossibly high for what constitutes prejudice. Donald Trump, for instance, in justifying his dinner with Kanye West, denied Kanye’s anti-Semitism by saying that Kanye did not, in that particular dinner, say anything anti-Semitic. Similarly, Steven Crowder denied Kanye’s anti-Semitism by saying that Kanye was “using a Howitzer”, but “doesn’t hate Jews.” For the modern conservative, to be prejudiced is to hold hatred for a group in one’s heart of hearts. As humanity has not yet developed telepathy, this is a standard that cannot be met. The potentially virtuous inner life of a Nazi does not prevent him from doing the things that Nazis do.

History does not look kindly on these conservative fence-sitters, those who refuse to oppose fascism. Paul Von Hindenburg is not viewed as an anti-fascist but rather as the man who invited the Nazis into government. Erwin Romell, who was perhaps not a Nazi in his political inner life, still served as the general of a fascist army. Aside from Claus Von Stauffenberg, the conservatives and monarchists who fought alongside the Nazis are remembered correctly as Nazis. Ditto with Steven Crowder.

To quote the novelist A.R. Moxon: “Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed.

That word is ‘Nazi.’ Nobody cares about their motives anymore.”

The post “Secular Humanists with Jewish Last Names” appeared first on Occasional Planet.

We all have blind spots; some of ours are greater than others. If you happen to be someone in the public eye, it’s more likely that other people will happen to see yours.

Each of us needs one or several people who can help us identify our blind spots and warn us when they seem to be leading us into a danger zone.

There may be no one in the world of politics who consistently gets duped more often than Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins. She seems to be about as well-intentioned as any Republican can be. She hopes for the best, so much so, that there are many times when she thinks that the better angels will visit upon the shoulders of someone who clearly has no intention of taking a compassionate or reasonable path. While often being naïve in judging the intentions of judicial nominees, she can be a savvy politician when dealing with the likes of Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia on possible bi-partisan agreements (this plays into his blind spot on bi-partisanship). She also knows well the playing field of her home state of Maine and consistently wins reelection by substantial margins in a fairly progressive state.

But nowhere has her blind spot been more apparent than in her assessment of Supreme Court nominees. A backdrop to this is that Collins is clearly pro-choice on the abortion issue, and she has wanted Supreme Court nominees to be committed to preserving the Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling.

She was completely duped by Trump nominees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Collins is quoted in Rolling Stone as saying the following about the leak of the Roberts Courts decision in the Dobbs case that overturned Roe, “If this leaked draft opinion is the final decision and this reporting is accurate, it would be completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings in my office.” Perhaps it would be, but clearly the two of them would not be the first individuals to walk into the office of a senator and fudge the truth. Like most others who come to visit Collins and other legislators, visitors generally say what they think will give them the greatest advantage.

Gorsuch told Collins that Roe was “the law of the land.”  Regarding Kavanaugh, Collins asserted that he “said under oath many times, as well as to me personally many times, that he considers Roe to be ‘precedent upon precedent’ because it had been reaffirmed in the Casey v. Planned Parenthood case.”

According to Rolling Stone magazine, “Collins expressed shock and deep concern when a draft of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Services decision indicated the justice would likely vote to overturn Roe was leaked to the public.” She felt that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh had misled her.

One of the most important assets that a politician can have is a strong BS detector. Not telling the truth, embellishing the truth, misleading others are all essentially components of the currency of politics. Why should nominees for the Supreme Court be any different? They want to both advance their own careers as well as the beliefs they have on issues that are likely to come before the Court.

This summer our non-profit worked with an outstanding group of high school interns. One of them, Corvin Haake, suggested that a president withdraw a judicial nominee if that nominee refuses to directly and honestly answer questions when testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Clearly, a nominee must be told in advance by the president that they must answer questions directly or their nomination will be yanked. It would thoroughly change the way in which Supreme Court justices are selected and could be a major first step in elevating the level of honesty in politics.

Maybe Susan Collins could lead the movement, by acknowledging that she has a blind spot when it comes to assessing nominees. She needs ones who would be honest, and so do the American people. She can make lemonade out of a personal lemon she has.

The nomination process is a bullshit-a-rama. We need to find a way to changed it. Senator Collins, please lead the charge!

The post Rescuing Susan Collins – Make Judicial Nominees Speak the Truth appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Can one person change the course of life for millions of others?

Radically.

We have Putin as our most conspicuous contemporary example.

Just a few moments ago in our elastic present-day concept of time here at home, we had the hotel magnate, Trump, as our elected leader, influencing our daily lives like a twin Putin autocrat.

Thanks to that very same hotelier, we now have Brett M. Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett firmly ensconced on our Highest Court, pretending to be impartial, damaging lives left, right and center.

So let me reframe the question.

Can one person change the course of life for the good of millions of others?

Right away, all of the above are disqualified.

Putin, apparently whimsically – and just because as a simple Russian bureaucrat elevated to the highest post of his land well beyond his abilities – misunderstood the zeitgeist and ordered Russian troops to invade and decimate neighboring Ukraine. Unwittingly, he relegated Russia to minor player status on the world stage going forward.

His US counterpart, Trump, tried to upend the real world here at home and declare his opponent’s election invalid. Unlike in Nicaragua, where a Trump think-alike, Ortega, has been able to maintain and enhance his power through manipulating elections since 1979, Trump failed to falsify Biden’s Presidential triumph. At least for now. Fingers crossed.

There are now six Catholic justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, 6 out of 9. That might be par for the course in Italy or France; not here in the United States. Immigration from largely Catholic Latin America has given us a Catholic population in our 50 states of about 20%. Yet according to the Pew Research Center, we identify ourselves as a country predominently Protestant, 43%, unaffiliated, 26% and Jewish, 2%. Six Catholics on the highest Court of the land is way out of proportion to our religous identity as a nation.

Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, the most recent Catholic arrivals to the Supreme Court, gave us ample reason to doubt their true personas in their Congressional hearings. A psychology professor, Christine Blasey Ford, accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault years before. Our elected Republican senators shut their ears. They voted him in anyway. OK, they seemed to say, Boys will be boys. They were fast to overlook the implications of his traditional conservative Catholicism, or perhaps eager to espouse it.

In 2020, the Washington Post reported that, while in law school, Coney Barrett

lived at the South Bend home of People of Praise’s influential co-founder Kevin Ranaghan and his wife, Dorothy, who together helped establish the group’s male-dominated hierarchy and view of gender roles.

In June of this year, London’s Guardian had this to say on the very same People of Praise co-founder:

… the People of Praise, a secretive charismatic Christian group that counts the supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett as a member, was described in a sworn affidavit filed in the 1990s as exerting almost total control over one of the group’s female members, including making all decisions about her finances and dating relationships.

Were our elected Republican senators interested in any of this? Did they care? Not at all. Coney Barret was confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice on Oct 26, 2020 with 52 of 53 Republicans voting in favor. Maine’s Susan Collins was the sole dissenting Republican.

Could we now, just possibly, be seeing People of Praise influencing a Supreme Court decision on abortion? Yes, we could.

You are totally within your rights to shout out loud about that right now. As Marcellus once said in in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”

Back to the original question.

Can one person change the course of life for the good of millions of others?

Lest we forget, the answer is yes, yes and yes again.

There are still some Americans who might fit the bill. Franklin D. Roosevelt comes to mind. How about our 16th President, Abraham Lincoln? Or our 44th, Barack Obama?

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, our 32nd President, was elected to the office four times, something no longer possible. He led us through the Great Depression and World War 2. He launched the New Deal, a transformation of American society that included the creation of the Social Security Administration, which today continues to provide essential daily benefits for more than 70 million Americans.

Abraham Lincoln was our President during our first and only – up to now – Civil War. Not only did he preserve our Union – an achievement that continues to reverberate for all 330 million + of us living in the United States today, but he also just happens to be the President who abolished slavery. At the time, the ending of slavery immediately affected the lives of four million African-Americans living in servitude. Since then, the abolition of slavery has daily touched the lives of millions and millions of others, as a constant reminder of our need, and necessity, to acknowledge and embrace each other, and to celebrate our similarities and differences.

So how many lives did Abraham Lincoln impact for the good? The number in incalculable and uncountable.

Oh and by the way, Abraham Lincoln was something called a moderate Republican, a species now apparently extinct.

Barack Obama served as our President from 2009 to 2017. In our lifetime, we have been witness to Obama’s supreme gift to our nation, the establishment of Obamacare. Thanks to Barack Obama, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services reports that we have:

35 Million People enrolled in Coverage Related to the Affordable Care Act, with a historic number of 21 Million people enrolled in Medicaid Expansion Coverage.

In terms of doing good for the greater benefit of society, that counts.

It would seem that we are in a constant back-and-forth between those who want to do good to the benefit of all of us alive on earth, and those who are equipped with an aberrant gene that is programmed to do us harm.

Unfortunately for those of us living in the United States today, we are confronted with, and confounded by, a hotelier equipped with the aberrant gene, a hotelier who would seem to be planning further assaults on our democracy.

See fingers crossed above.

Our DT, our Wizard of Doom to democracy, is still with us.

At any moment, he could rise from the ashes.  At any moment, he could still consume us, devour us, and swallow our collective notion of peaceful coexistence in one night-sweat gulp.

The post Doing the world a world of good appeared first on Occasional Planet.

You probably did not think that a key reason why the current Supreme Court is so out of whack with much of America is because of gerrymandering. This is so because the makeup of every Court is determined by the two other gerrymandered branches of government, the executive and legislative.

Twelve of the last fifteen justices have been appointed by Republican presidents, and that is not an accident. With our Constitution, it is virtually impossible not to have partisan Supreme Courts when we choose our presidents and legislators in ways that are mired in a deep gerrymandering pie, or cesspool.

Here’s how it works:

The U.S. Senate is perhaps the most insidious form of gerrymandering that we have. A good working definition of gerrymandering from Merriam-Webster is “the practice of dividing or arranging a territorial unit into election districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage in elections.” At the time that the American constitution was created, there were no political parties. But there were political interests. The most significant of these interests was what powers would individual states have as opposed to the federal government.

For example, who would be responsible for determining whether a road should be built, or whether it would be legal for a sixteen-year-old to drink whiskey? Who would be able to levy taxes, or even tariffs? At the time that the constitution was being written, there were two key interests within the states that created the groundwork for gerrymandering:

1. The smaller states such as Rhode Island or Delaware did not want to be overpowered at the federal level by larger ones such as New York or Virginia.
2. The states where slavery was legal and was commonly used wanted to have equal power to the states that did not have slavery.

Many of the founding fathers were leery of direct democracy, meaning direct votes by the people. In order to prevent runaway “popular democracy,” the founders created a Senate to go along with the House of Representatives in the Congress. The Senate was undemocratic in two ways, both of which impacted the Supreme Court.

1. Initially, Senators were chosen by state legislatures, not the people. This would be a way of better ensuring that the interests of the states, as opposed to the people, were represented in the Senate. This was clearly undemocratic, and in 1917, the 17^th Amendment was passed, allowing the people to vote for their Senators. But at that time, “the people” were essentially only white males.
2. Each state has two senators. That ensures that there is equal representation among all the states in the Senate. At the same time, it ensures that at least one house of Congress does not include equal representation of the people. For example, California has a population of nearly 40 million people while Wyoming has less than 600 thousand. For each person in Wyoming, there are over 60 in California. What that means in the Senate is that each person in Wyoming has as much power as 60 people in California. That is terribly unfair, and it means that states like Wyoming, the Dakotas, Montana, Nebraska, etc. have far more power in the Senate than states like California, Texas and New York. The same is true for southern states such as Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina which are relatively small by population. Additionally, these states are no longer politically competitive. Conservative Republicans win virtually all state-wide elections including for the Senators.

Right now, the U.S. Senate is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. But Democratic Senators represent nearly 57% of the population, whereas Republican Senators represent around 43%. If the Senate was democratic, the Democrats would have a large majority. But in today’s real world the Democrats will probably lose seats in the 2022 mid-term election and once again be a minority.

We should also point out that the House of Representatives is gerrymandered in a different way. Take Missouri for example. It has eight Congressional seats. Recently, the state has voted between 50% – 60% Republican. Even at 60%, Republicans should get only five of the seats. However, they get six and some tried to get them seven. Why does it come out this way?

It is because in Missouri the districts are drawn by the state legislature. The Missouri General Assembly is currently veto-proof Republican. What the legislature has done is to draw two “minority majority” districts. This means districts in which some minority constitutes a majority of the voters. In Missouri, it is African-Americans. One district is in the eastern part of the state, St. Louis, and the other in the western part, Kansas City. None of the other districts is competitive.

Similar to the legislative branch, the executive (presidency) is deeply influenced by gerrymandering. The way in which the founding fathers took care of that was by creating the Electoral College. The E.C. is not really a college. It is a barely known organization that only exists every four years, when there is a presidential election. The number of representatives that each state has in the E.C. is somewhat based on population, but not entirely. What is important to know is that when the Electoral College works properly, the electors from each state vote for the candidate who won the popular vote in that state. In other words, the electors in Alabama vote for whomever carried the state and the electors in California vote for whomever won that state.

Where it gets undemocratic is let’s suppose that Candidate A carries Alabama by one million votes and loses California by a 400,000 votes. You might think that Candidate A would be ahead at that point, because she has 600,000 more votes than Candidate ‘B.’ But with the Electoral College, Candidate ‘B’ is ahead with 55 Electoral Votes from California as opposed to Candidate ‘B’ who has the 9 Electoral Votes from Alabama.

The fact that a candidate can lose the popular vote and still be elected president through the E.C. is not just hypothetical. It has happened five times in our history. The two most recent are the two most consequential. In 2000, Democrat Al Gore won the popular vote from George Bush by over a half million votes. However, Bush won the Electoral vote when the Supreme Court made a decision that gave Bush Florida’s electoral votes. That would not have mattered if the decision had been made by the popular vote.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump by more than three million votes. However, Trump narrowly won “battleground states” such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and that propelled him to an Electoral victory.

It’s possible that two of our worst presidents ever were elected by the Electoral College than the popular vote. These two presidents are also responsible for five of the current six conservatives on the Supreme Court. Bush nominated John Roberts and Samuel Alito; Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

This is how the Supreme Court became impacted by gerrymandering. Without a gerrymandered presidency and a gerrymandered Senate, the Supreme Court would have been more balanced and reflective of the values of the American people.

To make matters worse, the Supreme Court itself has recently refused to overturn the creation of gerrymandered districts by the states.

The political ramifications of the gerrymandering dynamics is that Republicans are helped in all three branches. Theoretically, the three branches of government are supposed to restrain one another through a system of checks and balances. But that does not work when all three branches are dominated by one party, and that particular party is intent on thoroughly dominating government and extending very few levers of power to minority parties.

How can this change? At the moment, it’s difficult to conceive. Trump Republicans have a number of plans to further a radical right agenda in America. For our government to become more balanced it will require challenging victories by non-Republicans in congressional and presidential races. Stay tuned to see if that happens.

The post The Gerrymandering Virus – It’s Everywhere! appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The history of the Republican Party over the past seventy years includes battles between the moderates within the party against the extremists to the right. During most of the second half of the 20^th Century and some of the 21^st Century, the moderates were able to seize the presidential nomination. But the far-right Donald Trump steamroller movement seems to have almost crushed the remaining elements of the moderates.

In 1952, the Republican Party was divided between the moderates favoring General Dwight Eisenhower and the deeply conservative (though barely extremist) element favoring Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. Eisenhower won the nomination in 1952 as well as the presidential election. The same thing happened four years later in 1956.

The GOP nomination in 1960 went to Eisenhower’s vice-president, Richard Nixon. At that time in his life, he was actually quite moderate, in part because he was constantly currying the favor of Eisenhower. It was not a certainty that Eisenhower would endorse Nixon until a day before the convention. Nixon was opposed by progressive New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, but the former vice-president won the nomination, carrying all eleven states with primaries as well as every other state that did not have a “favorite son” running. Nixon’s ease with winning the nomination did not carry over to the election as he was edged by Democrat John F. Kennedy.

1964 was the first year in which a true right-wing extremist won the Republican nomination. The nominee was Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, as he defeated Rockefeller on the strength of his appeal to many voters who were angry about the progressive turns in the Kennedy-Johnson years. Goldwater became famous for uttering in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Goldwater wanted to undo much of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society as well as Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. But he carried very few moderate Republicans and was soundly defeated in November. That election, 1964, was the last time that Democrats won in a landslide.

1968 was one of the strangest and most disconcerting years in American history. Lyndon Johnson announced on March 31 that he would not seek renomination. Two other individual seemed to be likely candidates, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota and Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York. Kennedy was assassinated right after the California primary in early June. Johnson’s vice-president Hubert Humphrey ran as the “proxy Johnson” candidate. He did not enter any primaries, but with the help of Johnson in garnering support from the “party regulars,” Humphrey was able to win the nomination at the disjointed convention in Chicago where on-going violence was taking place in downtown.

On the Republican side, Richard Nixon was able to make a comeback, in large part because of the support that he had given Republican candidates across the country over the previous six years. He was opposed by newly elected governor of California Ronald Reagan and New York’s long-time governor Nelson Rockefeller. Nixon won ten of the twelve primaries and 61 % of the delegate votes. His politics fell somewhere between the progressive Rockefeller and the conservative Reagan. He won the election against Humphrey and third-party candidate Governor George Wallace of Alabama. Nixon governed moderately for his first several years, but as his anger rose, he became more and more conservative.

Even though the Watergate break-in occurred in 1972, it did not impact Richard Nixon’s reelection that year. He carried every state other than Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. He had no opposition in the Republican primary that year, and his election race against Senator George McGovern of South Dakota was a breeze for him. But he was initially worried that he would have to run against popular Maine Senator Edmund Muskie. The fact that McGovern bested Muskie for the Democratic nomination was due in part to the Nixon “plumbers” who created false and misleading information about Muskie, and they eventually trapped him into appearing very unpresidential in a press conference.

Once Nixon won reelection, his primary focus was on the Watergate cover-up. This brought out a great deal of anger and meanness on his part. It also was consistent with his notion of an “enemies list” and crafting domestic policies to undermine Johnson’s Great Society. By the time that Nixon resigned in August of 1974, his governance was quite conservative.

In 1973, after disgraced Vice-President Spiro Agnew resigned, Rep. Gerald Ford of Michigan became vice-president. He assumed the presidency upon Nixon’s resignation. He was faced with problems of inflation, recession, and an extended energy crisis. He was considered a moderate, in large part because he did not fervently support the right-wing Republican social agenda on abortion, gay rights, etc. Leading to the 1976 election, Ford was seen as vulnerable. He was challenged by the aforementioned former Governor Ronald Reagan of California. The contest was extremely tight as Ford carried 26 states and Reagan 24. Ford won 1,121 delegates and Reagan 1,078. Ford won the nomination, as a moderate, but Reagan had established himself as a national leader and was poised for 1980.

In the 1976 general election, Ford carried a great deal of Nixon’s baggage, including the fact that Ford pardoned Nixon for “all crimes committed or might have been committed.” Ford lost to energetic Democrat, former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter.

Carter had a somewhat sluggish presidency as he faced many of the economic and energy problems that Ford did and he was further burdened by the fact that 51 Americans had been taken hostage by Iran during a califate revolution. The 1980 Republican nomination was going to be a prime plumb and Reagan was poised to secure in on behalf of the conservative wing of the party. He carried 44 states to the six carried by moderate George H.W. Bush, who Reagan accepted as his vice-president. Reagan defeated Carter in a landslide. Four years later, Reagan faced nominal opposition for the nomination and then prevailed in another landslide election, this time against former vice-president Walter Mondale of Minnesota.

The race for the 1988 Republican nomination was largely between two party regulars who fell somewhere between moderation and extremism. Vice-President George H.W. Bush battled Kansas Senator Bob Dole. Extremists to the right were represented by Rev. Pat Robertson of Virginia, but he carried only four states. Dole became quite upset with some of the accusations by Bush, whose campaign was managed by one of the greatest masters of dirty tricks, Lee Atwater. The Bush campaign dispensed of Dole rather early in the primary sweepstakes and went on to carry 42 states.

The Democrats continued a habit of choosing weak presidential nominees, this time former Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. Atwater was incredibly skilled in embarrassing Dukakis, portraying Dukakis as being both soft on crime and weak as a military leader. Bush won in the third straight Republican landslide.

When Bush ran for reelection in 1992, he a tougher race. First, Atwater had died the year before from a virulent form of brain cancer, and his Democratic opponent was a strong one, former Arkansas governor Bill Clinton. Bush was also challenged from the right within his own party by former journalist and Nixon speech-writer Pat Buchanan. Bush carried all 50 states and the District of Columbia and easily dispensed of Buchanan to win the Republican nomination.

In 1988, Bush had campaigned on a very conservative plank, “read my lips, no new taxes.” He had been able to fulfill that promise until 1992, reelection year. The federal government was running short on money and new taxes were in order. He walked back his pledge, albeit with sound reasoning. But it hurt him politically. Clinton was a breath of fresh air, particularly in the debates where he came across as much more human and compassionate than Bush. Clinton won the election in a three-way race in which eccentric businessman Ross Perot ran as an independent.

While Clinton had a difficult time getting legislation through Congress, he was still popular among voters. Two veterans of previous presidential races were the top contenders for the GOP nomination in 1996, Kansas Senator Bob Dole and Virginia journalist Pat Buchanan. In this case, the moderate, Dole, achieved an overwhelming victory, carrying delegates from 46 states, this, despite losing New Hampshire to Buchanan early in the cycle. Dole was a legitimate moderate who knew as well as anyone how Congress operated, something that was tough for Clinton to do. But Clinton started his campaign well before Dole won the Republican nomination and he carried 31 states plus DC for a 379 – 159 electoral victory. Clinton won the popular vote by a margin of over eight million votes.

The fight for the 2000 Republican nomination featured moderate Senator John McCain against conservative former Texas Governor George W. Bush. While Bush seemed to many to be too naïve and inexperienced for the job, he had an extremely skilled campaign staff, and he was able to capitalize on the growing conservative movement in the country. In the primaries, he won nearly twice as many votes as McCain and carried 45 states.

In the November general election, Democrat Al Gore of Tennessee, the sitting vice-president won the popular vote by over 500,000 votes. The electoral victor depended on the vote from Florida where there was considerable confusion and malfeasance, particularly with the use of “butterfly ballots” in Palm Beach County. At first it appeared that Gore would carry Florida; then Bush, whereupon Gore conceded. But as the Florida vote tightened up again, Gore rescinded his concession. Virtually all components of the Florida race were thrown into the courts which resulted in numerous precinct recounts. Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered a decision that resulted in Bush winning the election. It was a 5-4 decision, and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor later said that she thought that she made a mistake in her vote. But Bush won and what happened in the country was quite different from what would have happened with an Al Gore presidency.

Gore graciously accepted the Supreme Court’s decision, and Bush was inaugurated as president. It remains an open question as to what Bush and the Republicans would have done had the Court ruled in Gore’s favor.

It was on Bush’s watch that nine-eleven occurred. Many scholars believe that had Gore been president, he may well have paid more attention to the CIA’s warning about Al Qaeda during the first eight months of his administration and perhaps would have been able to prevent the attack from happening. Had nine eleven occurred on his watch, it is unlikely that he would have invaded Iraq for specious reasons as Bush did.

In 2004, Bush had the most nominal of opponents in the Republican primary. In the general election, he won the popular vote by over three million votes and the determinative electoral count, 285 – 251.

Most people remember the 2008 election because of Barack Obama’s nomination win over Hillary Clinton, and then his win of the presidency. But Republicans had a very competitive race for their nomination. Eventually Senator John McCain of Arizona won the contest, winning the races in thirty-seven states. But former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney won eleven contests and nearly five million popular votes to McClain’s ten million. Both McCain and Romney were seen as moderates.

Two other candidates in the race were former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee who was on the far-right of the evangelical wing of the Republican party, and Texas congressman Ron Paul who was more of a libertarian than a Republican. In 2008, the moderates in the GOP clearly carried the day.

2012 was another year in which the moderate wing of the Republican Party prevailed. Romney won going away with 42 states and over 52% of the popular vote. His nearest competitor was former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum who was an extreme right-wing religious candidate. Also on the race were Ron Paul again as well as former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who in many ways was the father of the modern right-wing Republican Party.

Romney won the nomination but lost the general election to Obama. Even though Obama won reelection, he was being stymied with his legislative agenda, particularly with the obstinance of Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell.

Charles Darwin would have liked the 2016 Republican race, as it was clearly an exercise of survival of the fittest. The fittest won the nomination and eventually the election, but as was clear to many when he first announced his candidacy in June of 2015, Donald Trump was not the fittest to govern.

He won the nomination against fifteen other candidates who took the stage on at least one of the televised Republican debates in the 2016 cycle. Most Republicans thought that Trump’s candidacy was a “joke,” but as more and more of the other candidates dropped out of the race, Trump became more of a concern, and then a favorite. The other candidates learned rather quickly that it was not wise for them to cross swords with Trump. He had ways of humiliating others while responding to attacks on him with more vicious rebuttals on his opponents. He dispatched in quick order with some of the previously favored candidates such as Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Carly Fiorina, Santorum, Paul and Huckabee. Even before the primaries began, well-known Republicans such as former New York governor George Pataki, South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, former Texas governor Rick Perry, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal. Some of those who dropped out were moderate (Kasich and Bush) but most were extreme right-wingers. The last person standing before Trump clinched the nomination was extreme right-winger Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. Trump attacked Cruz by insinuating that his father had been part of a conspiracy to kill President John Kennedy, and that his wife was unattractive. When the Republican delegates assembled in Cleveland, Trump had nearly three times as many delegates as Cruz. Trump organized the convention to in many ways be a “hate-fest” as he and his supporters lambasted Republicans who did not agree with him as well as anyone with a ‘D’ (Democrat) after their name.

If the Trump – Clinton race has occurred in virtually any other democracy, Clinton would have won solidly, with nearly three million more popular votes than Trump. But this is the United States, and it has the anachronistic Electoral College. In that arena, Trump prevailed 306 – 225, and thus was declared the next president of the United States.

By 2020, Trump was so popular within the Republican Party that his only opposition was the not-well-known former governor of Massachusetts, William Weld, a genuine moderate. In the primaries. Weld won only 2.35 % of the vote while Trump essentially won the rest. Trump won the nomination and then went on to lose the general election to former vice-president and senator Joe Biden of Delaware by seven million popular votes, and in the Electoral College, 306-225, the same margin by which he had won four years previously. However, now, twenty months after the election, Trump still does not understand that he lost, nor do many of his supporters. That in itself exemplifies how far to the radical right the Republican Party currently sits.

The main difference in the 2022 Republican Party is that it’s virtually impossible to find a moderate Republican. Where are the Dwight Eisenhowers, Nelson Rockefellers, Gerald Fords, George H.W. Bushs, Bob Doles, John McCains and Mitt Romneys of the Republican Party? It seems that somewhere between the time that Donald Trump declared his candidacy for the 2016 Republican nomination in June of 2015 and the time that he won the nomination in July, 2016, it became virtually impossible to be a moderate in the GOP without getting verbally demolished by Trump.

Following the testimony of White House Chief-of-Staff aide Cassidy Hutchinson before the January 6 committee on June 28 of this year, it seems that Trump is not a shoo-in to win the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. But the mostly likely opponents are current “Trumpsters” such as Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, former vice-president Mike Pence of Indiana, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. If there is a well-known moderate in the party, it would be Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney. In reality, her views on most issues are strongly conservative. Where she differs from the others is in her integrity, as show so vividly in her role as vice-chair of the Jan. 6 committee.

As we see from the chart above, Republicans have won eleven of the eighteen races since 1952. Had the winner been based on the popular vote, the split would be nine each. The Republicans have won the popular vote only once in the last eight elections (W. Bush in 2004). Theoretically the Democrats should be on a roll.

But Republican extremists seem to have captured the party, though it was only ten years ago when the party nominated a moderate (Romney in 2012). Under fair and equal rules, the Democrats may have a bright future. However, the conservative Supreme Court is actively undermining democracy, and at the present time, all bets are off.

The post Are moderate Republicans dying with a whimper; or will there be a resurgence? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

We are now at the end of Women’s History Month after recognizing Black History Month in February. The United States Senate, appropriately, is now on the precipice of confirming the first Black woman to serve as an associate justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. When Senator Booker told Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson that he couldn’t help but look at her and see his own mother, I knew exactly what he meant. I saw my own mother, a Black woman, and I thought about her and what it might’ve meant to her as a little girl to have seen this moment.

Booker said “I’m not gonna let my joy be stolen, because I know – you and I – we appreciate something that we get that a lot of my colleagues don’t. I know Tim Scott does…And I want to tell you, when I look at you, this is why I get emotional. I’m sorry, you’re a person that is so much more than your race and gender. You’re a Christian, you’re a mom, you’re an intellect, you love books. But for me, I’m sorry, it’s hard for me not to look at you and not see my mom, not to see my cousins, one of them who had to come here and sit behind you. She had to have your back. I see my ancestors and yours. Nobody’s going to steal the joy of that woman in the street, or the calls that I’m getting, or the texts. Nobody’s going to steal that joy. You have earned this spot. You are worthy. You are a great American.”

Senator Booker cried, Judge Brown Jackson cried, I cried, and I imagine millions of Black people in America cried as well. This should be a moment of national solidarity and great celebration, as a Black twitter user said “If Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson gets confirmed she’ll be the first Black Supreme Court justice since Thurgood Marshall to serve. And before you try to correct me with your thinky thoughts, I know what I tweeted. Thanks for understanding in advance.”

So why doesn’t any of this feel celebratory? Why does it feel like some of my joy has been stolen?

Black History month is something like a dark joke (no pun intended) among many Black Americans. We’d gladly tell you that February is an opportunity for White people to learn about what we already know (and then promptly forget in time for next February). It’s become as commercialized and hollowed out as every other holiday in America and so we’ve even developed our own traditions, like the collective gritting of teeth when coworkers inevitably say something along the lines of “at least you get a whole month!” and of course the corporate apology for the ill-thought racist product. The curriculum offered to children in school (more on that later) is so reductive that it usually consists of a listing of inventors, a poem from Langston Hughes, watching the “I Have a Dream Speech”, and some discussion of the civil war but generally not it’s cause (slavery). There’s a Frederick Douglass speech titled “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” where he calls out the contradictions of a freedom centered holiday in a nation which at the time had over 3 million enslaved people. I’m reminded of that every year in February, and I’m reminded of it now with the President’s well-meaning gesture of nominating Judge Brown Jackson by the end of February.

I can’t say I’m as familiar with the dynamics surrounding Women’s History month, but I’m sure similar ironies and contradictions present themselves. What do I mean by contradictions? Consider the last several years which nonetheless has very public acknowledgements of Black History.

In 2005, many residents of almost entirely black neighborhoods in New Orleans were left scrambling after the worst Hurricane the region had seen in living memory. Many died without assistance during the flooding, and many of those who didn’t were met with silence from the federal government.

In 2012, Trayvon Martin was murdered in Florida and Barack Obama was pilloried for displaying a semblance of sympathy for an unarmed teenager who was killed by a racist.

In 2014, Ferguson Missouri was consumed by protests and police aggression after the shooting death of Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer. A no-fly zone was instituted by the governor, to keep the cameras from showing the despair of the people on the ground. Eric Garner, another Black man, was strangled to death by police in New York City for allegedly selling individual cigarettes. Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old, was shot for holding a plastic toy rifle. Meanwhile in Nevada, a white rancher named Bundy claimed to “know a lot about the negroes” including how “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”  All while pointing dozens of actual loaded rifles at federal law enforcement.

In 2015, a white supremacist domestic terrorist killed 9 Black parishioners in South Carolina. He did it to start a “race war”. When he was captured, the police delivered him to burger king for a hot meal before delivering him to prison. A 5-year-old survived by laying in the blood on the floor pretending to be dead.

In 2016, the man who had popularized the racist myth that the first Black President was illegitimate because he wasn’t an American citizen was elected President himself and his party won a majority of the popular vote in Congress the same year, many of them not condemning the myth and others having trafficked in it themselves with no consequence from the voting public.

Then there’s everything that’s happened since. These past two years especially have made the contradictions clearer than they’ve ever been, beginning with the international outpouring of righteous indignation at the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. But as time went on, the government’s resolve weakened and the patience of the white public which has since soured on the idea that Black Lives Matter with the media glad to write stories making imaginary links between a nonexistent defunding of police and crime. Now just 2 years shy of the anniversary of the murder and the outrage, we’re confronted nationally with a wave of white parents successfully lobbying government at all levels to erase Black people from history. To quote Senator Booker, God Bless America.

So, we arrive in February once again, the Judge is nominated, the kabuki begins and the insincere niceties are written everywhere that they can be read. Then we entered March, and that was forgotten. If you watched the confirmation, you know what I’m talking about. There’s only so many times you can see someone accused of being soft on child pornography and pedophiles. There’s only so many times you can see someone’s intelligence and credentials questioned. There’s only so many times you can watch someone be talked over, shouted down, disrespected, and condescended to. There is only so much one can withstand and still maintain their joy.

Judge Brown Jackson will become Justice Brown Jackson, and the swelling pride I feel because of her success is shared by many other Black Americans. But the joy that Sen. Booker feels I reckon still escapes most of us, it certainly has escaped me. Sen. Booker is known for being this generation’s happy warrior, it is in his nature to see our better angels first. There is a liberal tendency to cope with these moments by imagining the “end of history” and the moral arc of the universe bending towards justice or the increasing diversity or the passion of the next generation. It should be said this is a step forward and it speaks of the progress that might be possible, though not inevitable.

As Booker and Brown-Jackson and myself and the 40 million Black people living in America must know, this nomination changes the racial composition of the Supreme Court, but it does not change the soul of America.

The post Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Confirmation Should’ve Been a Celebration appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Our political system is structurally stacked against Democrats. The U.S. Senate gives overweighted power to small states, helping Republicans. The Electoral College is equally advantageous to Republicans.

Republicans have held the White House for sixteen of the 34 years since 1988, yet in only one of those eight elections since then have they won the popular vote (George W. Bush in 2004). There is little that can be done about either of these discriminatory sets of rules, short of constitutional amendments.

There is one area in which Democrats can act alone, and that is how they operate and schedule their presidential primaries. Right now, the Democratic primary / caucus schedule is heavily weighted towards small and predominantly white states. First on the list of contests in Iowa, then usually followed eight days later with the New Hampshire Primary. Both of these contests favor candidates who can attract a lot of early volunteers, because door-to-door canvassing is feasible and effective in such small states with months, even years, of lead time in advance.

For candidates whose predominant appeal is to metropolitan voters in blue states, it is an excruciating wait until primaries occur in such states. By that time, they are often out of the race because (a) they did poorly in Iowa and/or New Hampshire, (b) the media minimizes their chances, and (c) they run out of money.

Democrats could fix this by establishing their own schedule for primaries. One idea that has been suggested is setting up a series of four regional primary days, (a) Northeast, (b) Southeast, (c) Northwest, and (d) Southwest. Or, the regions could be completely different, though it helps to have clearly define geographic areas. Also, the order of the regional primaries could change in each quadrennial election year.

By changing how their party selects its presidential nominees, Democrats would demonstrate to the American people that they truly support democratic processes. It might eventually help in changing the Electoral College and bringing needed reform to the Senate.

Regrettably, when it comes to doing the heavy lifting to modify the Electoral College and the Senate rules, the Democratic Party is the equal to the Republican Party in perpetuating the status quo.

This and other systemic obstacles to Democrats is eloquently stated in Jedediah Britton-Purdy’s recent guest essay in the New York Times.

At a more basic level, today’s Republican Party succeeds only because the Electoral College, the Senate and the Supreme Court all tilt in its favor. That system has handed conservatives a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, despite the fact that only one Republican has won the presidential popular vote after 1988.

The Electoral College is like the Senate; it favors small states and is tone deaf to the margins by which candidates win individual states. Wyoming, a Republican state, has equal representation in the Senate to California, a Democratic state. Equal representation, but California has fully fifty-seven times as many people. That means that each person in Wyoming has fifty-seven times as much power in the Senate as individuals in California.

Democrats are nearly as responsible as Republicans for the perpetuation of the antiquated Electoral College. While many rank-and-file Democrats would like to see it abolished, party leaders are radio silent about it. They need to take the lead in either abolishing the Electoral College or passing the National Popular Vote Act in states totaling more than 270 Electoral votes. That act, which has passed 16 states with 195 electoral votes, instructs electors to vote for whomever wins the national popular vote. But that might be dicey now with how Republicans are trying to take power away from the electors and give them to state legislatures in Red States.

So, if Democrats wish to advance democracy without opposition from the Republicans, they may well want to focus on how they plan their primaries. Time is actually short, as plans for the 2024 primaries are already being made.

The post What Dems can actually do without Republicans appeared first on Occasional Planet.

What would you rather have in America’s schools; high test scores or students who are empathetic and have strong critical thinking skills? What good is it for an individual, or for American society, if students test well but also think that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election? What good is it if they have no interest in providing a strong safety net so that no Americans need to live in poverty?

Today, a full three-quarters of Trump voters falsely believe the election was “rigged and stolen, according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll – more than ever before. Just 9 percent, meanwhile, think Biden “won fair and square” – down from 13 percent a year ago. This is clearly stinkin’ thinkin.’ High school graduates have spent more than ten thousand hours in class, and they still cannot recognize the obvious. They are so jaded that they fall for the most unlikely of conspiracy theories.

It’s been a dozen years since we first heard of the Tea Party. They were the predecessor to MAGA. One of their strategies was to expand right-wing influence over what is taught in schools by fielding more candidates to run for school boards. Pandering to voters through fear, Tea Partiers and their allies won a number of elections and began the process of censoring more of what was being taught in schools. In the wake of the January 6, 2021 insurrection, the right has greatly increased its efforts to win school board seats and further suppress free and open thinking in our schools. New books are being added to the “banned list” such as To Kill a Mockingbird and The Hate U Give.

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg recently wrote:

There is a quote from Ralph Reed that I often return to when trying to understand how the right builds political power. “I would rather have a thousand school board members than one president and no school board members,” the former leader of the Christian Coalition said in 1996. School board elections are a great training ground for national activism. They can pull parents, particularly mothers, into politics around intensely emotional issues, building a thriving grass roots and keeping it mobilized.

Recently the right has created a straw horse in demanding that “Critical Race Theory” not be taught in our schools. First, there are hardly any schools teaching it. That does not stop people on the right from winning school board and other legislative seats because they convince many voters that white people are being denigrated. Second, what precipitated the modern opposition to teaching CRT was the 1619 Project published by the New York Times and the Pulitzer Center. The project is not about theory; it is about history. Specifically, it addresses the origins of slavery in the United States and the impact that slavery has had for over 400 years on the lives of African-Americans, and other Americans. Our history has always been heavily weighted towards teaching about white people. If we are going to become better equipped to live in the multi-cultural society that we have, it is essential for all students to learn the history of African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian- Americans, Native Americans and other minorities are included. Let us not forget that by 2045, we will be a minority-majority nation.

So, what can non-MAGA people do to support more open learning in our schools? The first thing is to recognize that our schools are in crisis, and have been for some time. The evidence is clear; more than seventy million adults voted for Donald Trump in 2020. Plainly their education was short on important values like critical thinking and empathy.

Part of the problem with our schools is that they suffer from a major problem in our body politic. I’m talking about “fake news,” which almost entirely comes from the right. Our schools unwittingly teach fake news. They do a poor job of helping students recognize fake news when they hear or see it.

Similar to our political system and our society in general, our schools are very competitive with one another. The conflicts are basically fought on two levels, substance and image. This is a central reason why so many students, and adults, have skewed views of the world.

Examples of substance being taught in schools would include teaching children how to read, providing students with opportunities to take science labs, encouraging students in social studies class to play a role in a model UN or a mock legislature, or providing students with real opportunities to be involved in school decision-making.

Unfortunately, much of school is about image and bragging rights. A big part of that is the obsession with standardized tests. Like sport contests, standardized tests are measured with numbers. Those numbers can be compared, and that means they provide platforms on which schools can compete, just like football or basketball. Students are under enormous pressure to do well on standardized tests in order to make their teachers look good, their school look good, their district look good, and their state look good.

This means that many teachers are teaching to the test. Much of that involves memorization. So, students are presumably learning how to do well on tests, both those that are standardized and those that are part of their regular classroom studies.

Teachers are also under enormous pressure to teach the state-mandated curriculum. It gets to the point where many teachers become robotic in what they present to students. Spontaneity, which is another way of saying “being tuned into the moment,” becomes more and more rare. If teachers are not questioning what they are “supposed” to do, how can students learn to peacefully question teachers, and others who are in positions of authority?

This fits right in with the right-wing agenda. Follow-orders; rarely question; and always remember that you are competing against others, particularly those from “elsewhere.”

So, how can we change schools so that students develop much more in the way of critical thinking skills and empathy? Ultimately, we need teachers who are more human, or who already are human and are not afraid to show their humanity. We need teachers who are willing to be like quarterbacks, or coaches. They need to call the right plays, and often that means calling an audible (making a last-second change). What makes teaching much more difficult than running an offense or a defense in football is that what might be a good play for one student may not be a good one for another student. Teachers need to do the best that they can at making sure that they are providing the best information and techniques for each student in their classes.

So how do we do this? Here are several suggestions:

1. Reallocate resources so that technology can do more, freeing teachers to have more time. Anyone who has taught knows that teaching is far more than a full-time job. Most teachers have several hours of work to do each evening. We need to cut back on the “make-work” that consumes many teachers, and also give teachers shorter working hours. The stress that teachers experience “trickles down” to students, sometimes like a shower. We need to reduce the amount of stress and tension in our schools.
2. If we want students to become better critical thinkers and to develop more empathy, these are two of the most important qualities that we need in our teachers. But this begs several important questions:
   1. What percentage of today’s teachers are good critical thinkers?
   2. What percentage of today’s teachers feel and express empathy to their students?
   3. If these percentages are lower than what we would want, then does it have anything to do with the ways in which we teach teachers?

So much of what teachers learn in education school is so prescribed and top-down. Over time, this squeezes some of the humanity out of students who will become teachers.

Additionally, it takes a certain type of person to decide to major in education and take classes with rigid curricula. This person is often someone who is comfortable with top-down decisions and may not value autonomy and creativity as much as others.

When they finally become teachers, combine the rigidity of their training with the pressure that parents, administrators, teachers and students all feel to achieve to the max, and you have a very oppressive environment.

We need to find ways for the nation’s best and brightest, and also most empathetic to become teachers. This means looking for individuals who will bring a maximum amount of empathy and critical thinking to the classroom, regardless of what training they have had.

This is not easy. But now is an excellent time to ramp up this movement. We have a tremendous shortage of teachers and districts are now loosening their certification requirements. If you are a person who thinks that you can humanize learning for students, and make them less likely to wind up as Tea Party or MAGA members, then it is a good time to step forward. We need teachers who are civil and civic-minded to help avoid civil war.

The post Changing Our Schools is Vital to Our National Healing appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Being a Republican in Congress is a lot easier than being a Democrat. That’s because there are very few things that Republicans have or want to do. Most Democrats have full plates in front of them as they want to reform our society so that government provides a strong and secure safety net for all of us, particularly those most at risk. If we reach a point of gridlock, of stalemate, it is the right that wins, because if nothing happens, that is exactly what they want.

In the wake of the January 6, 2021 insurrection and other rebellious acts from the right, there is increasing talk of a new American civil war. What shape it might take is open to all kinds of interpretation. It certainly would not be like America’s first civil war, or even a feared possible upcoming war between Russia and Ukraine.

That does not mean there would not be violence. The January 6 insurrection resulted in the deaths of five individuals and the injuring of hundreds. The Right certainly does not hesitate to use threats of violence against those with whom they merely disagree.

For example, Fox News anchor Jesse Watters recently told a group of conservatives to “ambush” Dr. Anthony Fauci with questions and “go in for kill shot.” Fox News has not reprimanded Watters; in fact, they have not said a word about his using their platform to threaten to kill someone. Fox did the same things with correspondent Lara Logan who compared Fauci to the Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele (also included in the clip below).

As we approach the end of 2021, the Washington Post reports “Inside the nonstop pressure campaign by Trump allies to get election officials to revisit the 2020 vote.” The Big Lie continues more than thirteen months after the 2020 safe, secure and democratic elections.

The fallout has spread from the six states where Trump sought to overturn the outcome in 2020 to deep-red places such as Idaho, where officials recently hand-recounted ballots in three counties to refute claims of vote-flipping, and Oklahoma, where state officials commissioned an investigation to counter allegations that voting machines were hacked.

The important point in the article is that the Trumpsters are continuing their efforts to intimidate Republican-controlled state legislatures to undo the past and change the future so that free and fair elections become something of the past.

A “civil war” could include numerous other acts of aggression by the right including the intimidation of teachers, vigilante forces, Congressional action to not raise the debt limit and not fund necessary programs that are the framework of our social and economic safety net.

COVID has already played a key role in dividing the nation and threatens to do so for some time to come. Samuel Goldman in The Week suggests:

I’m not the first to compare the way of thinking about the pandemic still dominant in official statements to the military disasters of the last two decades. My colleague Noah Millman and the journalist Daniel McCarthy have both noted parallels between the interminable conflicts that followed 9/11 and the “war” on COVID. “Like the old Afghan government,” Millman wrote, “those in charge of public health have little practical ability to shape events. But they speak as if they are sovereign and in control.”

It is hard to imagine what aggressive actions those on the Left may take. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, extremists far to the left of the Democratic Party engaged in bombing attacks on both public and private buildings. But there was very little coordinated about that and as it became apparent that the bombings were counter-productive, the bombings essentially ended.

Regrettably, there is very little that the Right needs to do now to win a “civil war.” The current stalemate allows those on the Right to generally get their way.

Progressive legislation will not pass. The right to safe and legal abortions will be ended in most states when Roe v. Wade is overturned, elections will be rigged to favor far-right Republicans, COVID and other infectious diseases will continue to run rampant, gun-control measures will not be passed, climate change legislation will stall and those who do not agree with those on the Right will live in fear of violence.

The only real way that progressives and others can prevent an escalated “civil war” is by winning big in elections and having protections against Republican electoral manipulation. This means that the U.S. Senate is going to have to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act in order to maximize the chances of free and fair elections. Additionally, Democrats are going to have to figure out a way to elevate the popularity of Joe Biden and improve their chances of winning 2022 Congressional races. Perhaps a backlash to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade would help, but that seems unlikely.

The stakes are truly high for progressives; we need to do all that we legally and non-violently can do.

The post Why A “Civil War” Would Be So Hard for Progressives to “Win” appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has taken a lot of flak for the slow sales of his book, Republican Rescue. During its first week in stores, it sold only 2,289 copies.

Even though Christie has been a long-time friend of Donald Trump and assisted him considerably during his campaigns and presidency, Christie generously criticizes Trump and his supporters for their penchant for falsehoods and conspiratorial thinking. He is well aware of the fact that Trump’s assertion that he won the 2020 presidential election, but it was stolen from him is clearly a Big Lie.

Christie believes that the Republican Party needs to separate itself from its right-wing extremists and revert to a conventional conservative platform based on ideas rather than myths, or simple opposition to whatever Democrats advocate.

He says,

“As Republicans, we need to free ourselves from the quicksand of endless grievances. We need to turn our attention to the future and quit wallowing in the past. We need to face the realities of the 2020 election and learn—not hide—from them. We need to discredit the extremists in our midst the way William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan once did. We need to renounce the conspiracy theorists and truth deniers, the ones who know better and the ones who are just plain nuts. We need to give our supporters facts that will help them put all those fantasies to rest so everyone can focus with clear minds on the issues that really matter. We need to quit wasting our time.”

Clearly not the word of a loyal Trumpster. Christie is not alone in asking Republicans to abandon Trump, the “Freedom Caucus” or Tucker Carlson and return to its core values of a generation ago. Georgia Lieutenant-Governor Geoff Duncan strongly critiqued his party in his book GOP 2.0. He was at Ground Zero for much of Trump’s efforts to unconstitutionally change the Georgia vote. Duncan is a solid conservative, but he believes that the party has been infected by extremism based on falsehoods tinged with absurd conspiracy theories. He stood by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and others who firmly opposed Trump’s efforts to “find nearly 12,000 votes for him” so that he could be declared the winner in Georgia.

In the wake of the poor opening sales of his book, many have said that while Christie’s ideas may be of value, he is seeking an audience that is far smaller than he anticipated. Democrats are not interested in rescuing the Republican Party and Trump supporters am not inclined to support traditional Republicans.

I would recommend Christie’s book for several reasons:

1. It provides further insight into one of the greatest mysteries for people who are not Republicans, and even some who are. I’m talking about the makeup of “the Republican Brain.” This is a phrase that became the title of Washington Post writer Chris Mooney’s 2012 book by the same name, The Republican Brain. The book is quite detailed and nuanced, but among the key points is that Republicans do not have the same level of empathy as others, nor do they engage in critical thinking the same way.
2. It is becoming more apparent that the number one challenge for Americans is preserving our democracy. This means that we should do all that we legally can do to restrain the extreme right. Progressives and other Democrats need to preserve and strengthen the traditional Republican Party, no matter how weak it might be now. Rather than mocking Christie, I think that it would be wise to support him in his party-building efforts, though not with most of his conservative social and economic policies.

Christie is interesting, because while he shows no mercy towards the Biden Administration, he supports numerous progressive ideas on community policing, eliminating debtors’ prisons, making school curricula more relevant, and providing improved and more accessible health care.

If we are going to preserve democracy, we need to be prepared to talk with the Chris Christies of the world.

The post Libs: Chris Christie’s New Book May Be Well Worth Checking Out appeared first on Occasional Planet.