#^d 2020-05-24 #^h Weekend Roundup
Robert Christgau wrote an impassioned piece last week on why it matters for people to vote for Biden and the Democrats against Trump and the Republicans in November. You can find it here and here -- scroll down to the last question and answer. I agree substantively, but have a few quibbles.
First, I gagged on the phrase "criminally stupid." Stupid, maybe, but that isn't (and shouldn't be) a crime. Gauging the importance of any election requires both a lot of information and a good sense of political dynamics over time. How difficult it is should be clear from our different estimates and prognoses of what a Trump victory would mean. (Which, just to be clear, don't diminish our agreement that this election is "crucial" and that if it goes the wrong way a lot of very bad things will happen.)
For instance: "Abortion will end, feminism atrophy, gay rights shrivel." If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, states will be free to outlaw abortion (and for that matter birth control), but only a few states will. Same with LGBTQ rights. The effect will be to undermine rights that currently all Americans share, but unless this can be followed up with new federal legislation the effect will be to make red and blue states diverge further. Granted, if Republicans win by landslides (augmented or enabled by gerrymandering and voter suppression, which is the only way that seems possible) they might be able to rewrite federal law to force their views on blue states. They might even amend the constitution to get rid of parts they don't like (although most likely they'll be happy enough to have their packed courts read the constitution their way).
None of this woud cause feminism to "atrophy": if anything, it will make it sharper and more necessary. Indeed, while we prefer not to speak of it, one thing that invariably happens is that when power tilts one direction, resistance grows. A lot of bad things have happened since 2016, but resistance has grown, both in numbers and in clarity and resolve. The lines about what Hillary would have done differently aren't very convincing -- especially the one about billionaires, because while she was chummy with different ones than Trump was, she was always very deferential to them (as were Democrats like Obama and Biden). At least with Trump as president, we don't have to go through this election defending her. I'm not a person who believes that things have to get worse before they can get better, but I do recognize that people often learn things only the hard way. I voted for Hillary even though I thought she was fucking awful, because I understood how much worse Trump was, but also because I thought we'd be better off starting from her as a baseline than we'd be with Trump.
Obviously, I think that with Biden vs. Trump, as well. I voted for Bernie Sanders, and Biden was one of my least favorite candidates, so I'm not happy he's the nominee, but I'm also not very unhappy with the way the race has shaped up. Aside from the necessity of beating Trump and the Republican ticket -- which in terms of policy (if not personality) if anything worse than Trump -- the second most important thing for me is to advance the ideas of the left. While Sanders and others have made remarkable progress, it was clear that they have not swayed the powers in the party, and that the latter would stop at nothing (including self-defeat) to keep control of the Democratic Party. With Biden we have a seat at the table to argue for policies on their merits, and we shouldn't have to spend much of our energy fighting off internecine attacks from the right. Nothing is certain, but as I keep insisting, the answers to our major problems are on the left. Biden needs answers as much as we do.
The Democratic Primary in Hawaii went for Joe Biden (63.23%), over Bernie Sanders (36.77%). You can draw either conclusion from this. On the one hand, Biden has drawn consistent majorities everywhere since shortly after Super Tuesday, and there's no real chance he's going to weaken. On the other hand, there's still a sizable bloc of Democrats who think we can do better, and that too -- despite the campaign blackout and Bernie's own endorsement of Biden -- shows no sign of weakening.
Some scattered links this week:
Jon Lee Anderson: The coronavirus hits Brazil hard, but Jair Bolsonaro is unrepentant.
Kate Aronoff: America's deadly obsession with intellectual property.
Andrew Bacevich: Still, the Global War on Terrorism goes on.
Zack Beauchamp:
The American right's favorite strongman: "Viktor Orbán dismantled Hungary's democracy. Conservatives love him." What they really love about him is how his party (Fidesz) has managed to lock themselves into power even if elections turn against them.
In the United States, the Republican Party has shown a disturbing willingness to engage in Fidesz-like tactics to undermine the fairness of the political process. The two parties evolved independently, for their own domestic reasons, but seem to have converged on a similar willingness to undermine the fairness of elections behind the scenes.
Extreme gerrymandering, voter ID laws, purging nonvoters from the voting rolls, seizing power from duly elected Democratic governors, packing courts with partisan judges, creating a media propaganda network that its partisans consume to the exclusion of other sources -- all Republican approaches that, with some nouns changed, could easily describe Fidesz's techniques for hollowing out from democracy from within.
In this respect, Hungary really is a model for America. It's not a blueprint anyone is consciously aping, but proof that a ruthless party with less-than-majority support in the public can take durable control of political institutions while still successfully maintaining a democratic veneer.
Trump says he's taking hydroxycloroquine. Related:
Ariana Eunjung Cha/Laurie McGinley: Antimalarial drug touted by President Trump is linked to increased risk of death in coronavirus patients, study says.
Stuart Emmrich: Is Donald Trump lying about taking hydroxycloroquine?
Josh Marshall: Hydroxychloroquine isn't a joke it's a scandal.
Morgan Gstalter: GOP lawmaker says his entire family is taking hydroxychloroquine: Roger Marshall (R-KS), who by the way is an MD (OB-GYN), and is running for Senate, in a race where he used to be regarded as the sane one. This strikes me as a stunt to draw Trump votes away from Kris Kobach.
Barbara Boland: IG fired days after inquiring about Pompeo's 'donor dinners'.
Megan Cassella: Reopening reality check: Georgia's jobs aren't flooding back: "A month after easing lockdown restrictions, the state is still seeing a steady stream of unemployment claims, economic data shows."
Amee Chew: Stop the $2 billion arms sale to the Philippines.
Duterte's human rights record is atrocious. If the arms sale goes through, it will escalate a worsening crackdown on human rights defenders and on dissent -- while fomenting an ongoing bloodbath. Duterte is infamous for launching a "War on Drugs" that, since 2016, has claimed the lives of as many as 27,000 souls, mostly low-income people summarily executed by police and vigilantes.
In Duterte's first three years of office, nearly 300 journalists, human rights lawyers, environmentalists, peasant leaders, trade unionists, and human rights defenders were assassinated. The Philippines has been ranked the deadliest country for environmentalists in the world, after Brazil. Many of these slayings are linked to military personnel.
Now, Duterte is using COVID-19 as a pretext for further militarization and repression, despite the dire consequences for public health.
Andrew Desiderio: Fired watchdog was investigating arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
Chauncey DeVega: Trump's HHS secretary accidentally tells the truth: Racism is driving pandemic policy.
Jason Ditz:
Trump administration discussing new nuclear test, first since 1992.
US clears more UAE arms sales despite evidence of past violations: "UAE transferred US arms to al-Qaeda, other terrorists."
US withdraws from Open Skies treaty. Also see: David E Sanger: Trup will withdraw from Open Skies arms control treaty."
With the loss of INF, Open Skies, and the imminent expiration of New START, the US and Russia are going to find themselves with few treaties designed to prevent military exchanges, and a lot of new opportunities for arms races.
Mark Fitzpatrick: Will the US try to interdict Iranian tankers bound for Venezuela?
Laurie Garrett: Trump has sabotaged America's coronavirus response: I mentioned this article in Book Roundup, but one to note one more thing: the date (January 31, 2020). That's pretty early (before the first US cases were reported), although much of what's here has since become common knowledge:
For the United States, the answers are especially worrying because the government has intentionally rendered itself incapable. In 2018, the Trump administration fired the government's entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure. In numerous phone calls and emails with key agencies across the U.S. government, the only consistent response I encountered was distressed confusion. If the United States still has a clear chain of command for pandemic response, the White House urgently needs to clarify what it is -- not just for the public but for the government itself, which largely finds itself in the dark.
Colin Gordon: The coronavirus wouldn't be decimating meatpacking plants if company bosses hadn't busted the unions. Although western Kansas hasn't gotten much publicity, Ford and Finney counties have the highest per capita infection rates in Kansas.
Murtaza Hussain:
With a distracted public, the Pentagon tries to get away with killing innocent civilians. To be fair, they've been getting away with it for decades, whether the public was distracted or not.
There's no one worse than Trump on climate and war. Only comparisons here are with former presidents, mostly Obama (but he's not very hopeful about Biden), so wannabes like Lindsay Graham aren't given their due.
Umair Irfan/Jen Kirby: The other plague: Locusts are devouring crops in East Africa and the Middle East.
Eileen Jones: There's nothing good about Phyllis Schlafly: Deconstructing Mrs. America.
Fred Kaplan:
This is not a good time to start a new arms race: "And there is no good reason for one." But that's what Trump is aiming for in withdrawing from Open Skies and INF and New START -- arms limitation treaties with Russia.
The ultimate disgrace of Mike Pompeo: "THe IG firing shows the sordid truth behind the secretary of state's moralistic sneering."
"Obamagate" is a 3-year-old story that wasn't a scandal the first time.
Jen Kirby: Inspectors general, explained by a former inspector general: Interview with Clark Ervin, following Trump's firing of State Department IG Steve Linick.
Michael T Klare: The US and China are dangerously close to a military confrontation in the South China Sea.
Ezra Klein:
Why "essential" workers are treated as disposable: Interview with SIEU president Mary Kay Henry.
Why are liberals more afraid of the coronavirus than conservatives? My answer is that liberals still think reality matters, and as such respond to real problems, whereas conservatives live in a fantasy world where political will creates its own reality. Klein, liberal that he is, surveys the research, and even quotes Jon Haidt: "Conservatives react more strongly than liberals to signs of danger, including the threat of germs and contamination." On the other hand, people of all political stripes tend to react as herds, and right now conservative leaders have their own reasons for making light of the pandemic, and that's emboldening conservative followers. It's tempting to say that the scales would be tipped if Obama were president and spouting his usual lines about confidence. Still, the flip wouldn't be symmetrical: Democrats are more likely to trust the science, because they believe that government should serve the public, especially in times of crisis. Republicans, on the other hand, seek power to favor private interests, and even go so far as to deny that public interests exist (except for national security, which they conflate with the needs of private arms merchants), and would like to cripple government's ability to help, lest people look to government for help in the future. (Although note that Republican governors are the first in line for federal relief when disaster strikes their states.)
German Lopez: Biden's opposition to marijuana legalization is at odds with most Americans' views.
Robert Mackey:
Trump hails "good bloodlines" of Henry Ford, whose anti-semitism inspired Hitler: I think it would be more accurate to say that Ford and Hitler came to anti-semitism independently, although their times and fame made sure that they would inspire and comfort each other (well, until Hitler went a bit too far; Ford died in 1947, 2 years after Hitler, but his anti-semitic rants go back to 1922). Still, the Trump quotes on "good bloodlines" and "good DNA" are pretty creepy.
Alarm and confusion at Fox News as Trump says he takes hydroxychloroquine.
Windsor Mann: Trump's lethal aversion to reading: "Trump is a know-it-all who knows almost nothing and refuses to read anything except his own name."
Greg Miller/Josh Dawsey/Aaron C Davis: One final viral infusion: Trump's move to block travel from Europe triggered chaos and a surge of passengers from the outbreak's center.
Ian Millhiser:
Ella Nilsen: Democrats suddenly have a much better chance of retaking the Senate in 2020.
Anna North:
Osita Nwanevu:
We're not polarized enough: Review of Ezra Klein's book, Why We're Polarized.
Nevertheless, the health and stability of the American political system depends on the defeat of the Republican Party. Absent a radical shift in the right's priorities, the only way to depolarize our institutions is to win and win big against those who want to keep them undemocratic, protecting the right from the moderating influence more competitive elections could have. Those victories will depend on reformers successfully marshaling the forces driving group identity, rather than assuming the balance of power in America has been set primarily by immutable psychologies. The way forward lies in convincing Americans not to retreat from national politics but to think even more broadly and abstractly about where this country ought to go. Why We're Polarized does some of the job, but leaves a daunting truth unsaid: To fight polarization, we'll have to get much more polarized. The only way out is through.
Workers deserve to be owners, too. I think extending significant ownership shares to workers is one of the most important things that can be done in America.
Ari Rabin-Havt: Inside the latest plan to "bankrupt" and privatize Social Security: Bankrupting, sure, but I don't see anything here about privatizing, which -- beyond the push toward optional 401(k) plans -- has always been a pipe dream. One can imagine ending Social Security and plunging millions of elderly and disabled Americans back into poverty, but one cannot imagine a privatized system where most (let alone all) Americans would be better off.
Aaron Rupar:
New Fox News poll finds Biden with healthy lead, sends Trump into tailspin: "The president is mad that Fox News isn't rigging polls for him."
Trump's remarks about firing the State Department IG show how he's destroyed the norm of oversight.
Trump's latest tweet about coronavirus testing is like a greatest hits of his favorite lies.
Matthew Sitman: Why the pandemic is driving conservative intellectuals mad: Not as broad as I'd like, focusing as he does on one R.R. Reno, although he does bring Peggy Noonan into it.
Danny Sjursen: US regional imperialism: big sticks, and even bigger guns.
Sarah Stillman: Will the coronavirus make us rethink mass incarceration?
Matthew Walther: A predictable catastrophe in Michigan: Multiple dams failed alog the Tittabawassee River, causing massive flooding.
These are the sorts of problems no one wants to address until it's too late, not just in Michigan but across the United States, where the phrase "crumbling infrastructure" has been with us so long that it too is probably on the verge of collapse. We are an old broken-down country, physically and spiritually, incapable of meaningful action until we find ourselves in the middle of a totally predictable crisis. So many of the issues that have arisen during the current pandemic -- the dangers of nursing homes, racial inequality, social atomization -- were ones that should have been familiar to us and dealt with long before we found ourselves faced with a novel virus. Instead we waited as we always do until the dams burst, metaphorically and otherwise.
Also see:
Alex Ward:
Philip Weiss: Peace process was never intended to give Palestinians a state -- true confessions from Council on Foreign Relations. Cites an article by Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Matthew Yglesias:
A huge boost in infrastructure spending is very popular -- if rich people pay for it. Argues that it's going to be very hard to get a big boost in infrastructure (or other pubic service) spending if most people perceive it's being paid for out of their own pockets. (Paying for it by taxing the rich is OK, and indeed the most popular tax proposal on a long list is the wealth tax.) Personally, I think this would be a very good time to raise the gas tax. Sure, a flat sales or excise tax isn't progressive, but prices at present are so depressed consumers come out ahead anyway. And to the extent that the tax increase reduces demand (and global warming), that's not such a bad thing either.
Neil J Young: Flooding the swamp: "Why Trump's many scandals never seem to stick." Alternate title: "There's always a bigger scandal.
Li Zhou/Ella Nilsen: Congress should consider these 7 ideas for the next stimulus package. Bold ideas, no chance of surviving a Republican veto, and indeed it's not clear even to me where the money comes from.