Tom Nichols, a staff writer for The Atlantic, posed the question that is the title of this post. Nearly half the voters of Georgia cast a ballot for a man who was manifestly unqualified for the office, by any measure. Republicans thought it was cunning to pick a Black candidate, hoping to peel support away from Senator Warnock. It didn’t work. Walker got very few Black votes. Warnock won with unified Black support and a multiracial coalition.
Nichols fears that Trump has dumbed down expectations for Republican candidates to an alarming degree. Following his model, they can be stupid, they can be immoral, they can be liars, they can be adulterous and flaunt it, they can mock democracy. There is no low too low for them.
Nichols writes:
Walker’s candidacy is a reminder of just how much we’ve acclimated ourselves to the presence of awful people in our public life. Although we can be heartened by the defeat of Christian nationalists and election deniers and other assorted weirdos, we should remember how, in a better time in our politics, these candidates would not have survived even a moment of public scrutiny or weathered their first scandal or stumble.
And yet, here we are: An entire political party shrugs off revelations that a man running on an anti-abortion platform may have paid for an abortion (possibly two), has unacknowledged children, and may also be a violent creep. Not long ago, Walker would have been washed out of political contention as a matter of first principles.
Think of how much our civic health has declined in general. Only 35 years ago, during the long-ago Camelot of the late 1980s, Gary Hart had to pull out of the Democratic primaries for getting caught with a pretty lady on a boat named “Monkey Business,” and the televangelist Jimmy Swaggart stood with tears streaming down his face because he’d been caught with a prostitute in a Louisiana motel. In 1995, Senator Bob Packwood (again, more tears) resigned in the aftermath of revelations of sexual misconduct just before being expelled from the Senate.
The Republicans were once an uptight and censorious party—something I rather liked about them, to be honest—and they are now a party where literally nothing is a disqualification for office. There is only one cardinal rule: Do not lose. The will to power, the urge to defeat the enemy, the insistence that the libs must be owned—this resentment and spite fuels everything. And worst of all, we’ve gotten used to it. I’m not sure who said it first, but the Doobie Brothers said it again in the title of their 1974 album: What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits.
There’s a lot of blame to go around, but no one did more to pioneer the politics of disgust than Donald Trump, who took the outrageous moments of his two presidential campaigns and turned them into virtues. Trump ran, and still runs, as something of a dare, a challenge to see if we’re just a bunch of delicate scolds who get the vapors over things like veterans or foreign influence or nepotism. Are you really going to let the commies and immigrants from the “shithole countries” take over? he seems to ask at every turn, just because of little nothing-burgers like whether I’m keeping highly classified documents in the magazine rack next to my gold toilet?
As usual, however, the real problem lies with the voters. The Republicans are getting the candidates they want. This is not about partisanship—it’s about an unhinged faux-egalitarianism that demands that candidates for office be no better than the rest of us, and perhaps even demonstrably worse. How dare anyone run on virtue or character; who do they think they are?
It’s terrifying to realize that totally unhinged candidates, not only in Georgia but in other states, like Arizona, received almost half the vote.
My hope lies with changing demographics and our youth. Young people who have grown up in the 21st century are likely to replace the shrinking generations of old white bigots, who are now the GOP base. America will be a better nation in the years ahead, as these voters make better choices and choose a better future where all of us make progress. Together.
The Senate race in Georgia was incredibly close, with the lead seesawing back and forth after the polls closed. The legislature changed the election law in hopes of reducing the African American vote. The polls closed at 7 pm, whereas in many other states the polls stay open later so that working people can vote.
About 10:20 pm, the major networks called the race for Democrat Senator Warnock.
Democrats in the Senate can no longer be held hostage by one member (Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia). Democrats will have a majority on Senate committees instead of equal numbers with Republicans.
This is a big night for the Democratic Party and another defeat for a candidate selected by Trump.
Georgia’s African Americans voted overwhelmingly for Warnock. Whites and Trump Republicans voted for Herschel Walker.
Warnock assembled a multi-racial coalition of blacks and whites.
And Republicans will have to figure out what to do with their titular party leader, Trump, who is an albatross around the party’s neck. A three-time loser: 2018, 2020, 2022.
Just days ago, The Former Guy (Trump) said that all rules that prevent him from regaining the Presidency that he decisively lost in 2020 should be terminated, including the Constitution. The Constitution does not have a Sore Losers clause. The Republicans in the House intend to read the Constitution out loud on their first day as a majority. Do they not understand that the only way to honor the Constitution is not to read it but to act on its requirements? The titular leader of their party says the Constitution should be “terminated.” Do they agree or disagree?
As Dan Rather said in a wonderful post this morning, the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution to protect the Republic from men like Trump, flimflam men who would stoop to any lie or trick to gain power. Rather and his co-author Elliott Kirschner said: “Many in the press and pundit world worry that words like “fascism” and “autocracy” are too extreme to apply to American politics. Perhaps that was once the case, but there is also a danger in tiptoeing past the truth. Because what is being said here, with all the subtlety of a Harley revving through a yoga retreat, is that this man, who six years ago pledged an oath to defend the Constitution, now seeks to destroy it. This is the definition of autocracy. It is the seed of fascism.”
Who will hold Trump accountable? Polls show that he leads the Republican pack. The Founding Fathers would have arrested him for treason.
On Friday, November 25, 2022, just over a week ago, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) announced, “On the very first day of the new Republican-led Congress, we will “read every single word of the Constitution aloud from the floor of the House—something that hasn’t been done in years.”
Yesterday, on Saturday, December 3, 2022, former president Donald Trump, the presumptive leader of the Republican Party, mischaracterized a Twitter thread to claim that Joe Biden’s presidential campaign had successfully pressured Twitter to suppress the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop—the thread actually said something else entirely—and called for overthrowing the Constitution. Trump wrote:
“So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential election results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great “Founders” did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”
In case anyone didn’t get the point, Trump followed that post up with another: “UNPRECEDENTED FRAUD REQUIRES UNPRECEDENTED CURE!”
On Sunday, December 4, all but one Republican lawmaker who expects to stay in office for the next two years stayed resolutely silent about Trump’s open attack on the U.S. Constitution, this nation’s founding document, the basis for our government.
That one lawmaker was Representative Michael Turner (R-OH), the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, who this morning on CBS’s “Face the Nation” condemned Trump’s attack on the Constitution. But Turner would not say he would not support Trump if he were the party’s nominee in 2024.
Even at that, Turner’s was a lone voice. When George Stephanopoulos, host of “This Week” on ABC News, asked Representative David Joyce (R-OH) if he would support Trump in 2024 after the former president had called for “suspending the Constitution” (to be clear, Trump had called for “terminating” it), Joyce tried to avoid the question but finally said, “I’ll support whoever the Republican nominee is.” Joyce is the chair of the Republican Governance Group, whose members claim they are the party’s centrists.
Not all Republicans reacted to Trump’s truly astonishing statement with such easy acceptance. Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), who was removed from party leadership for holding Trump responsible for the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and who has lost her seat in Congress to a Trump supporter, responded to Trump’s statement by saying: “Donald Trump believes we should terminate ‘all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the Constitution’ to overturn the 2020 election. That was his view on 1/6 and remains his view today. No honest person can now deny that Trump is an enemy of the Constitution.”
Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who, like Cheney, took a seat on the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6thAttack on the U.S. Capitol and will also be leaving Congress, tweeted: “With the former President calling to throw aside the constitution, not a single conservative can legitimately support him, and not a single supporter can be called a conservative. This is insane. Trump hates the constitution.” Kinzinger tagged McCarthy, third-ranking House Republican Elise Stefanik (R-NY), and Jim Jordan (R-OH), who is expected to take over the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over issues involving the Constitution.
None of them commented.
Conservative Bill Kristol made his questioning broader: “The Federalist Society claims to defend the Constitution,” he tweeted. “Donald Trump, the ex-president with whom the Society worked so closely, has just attacked the Constitution in an incendiary way. Do the Federalist Society or its members have a word to say in defense of our Constitution?”
Crickets.
McCarthy’s statement a week ago that the whole Constitution hadn’t been read on the floor of Congress “in years” was technically true, but it was misleading. It sounded as if McCarthy was promising to do something novel to demonstrate the Republicans’ loyalty to the Constitution.
In fact, Republicans demanded a reading of the Constitution in the House for the first time in its history in 2011 to try to demonstrate that the government had gone beyond the Framers’ intent, although they also cut out all the parts the Framers wrote that have been amended since the document was written. (That meant they cut out the infamous three-fifths clause counting enslaved African Americans as three fifths of a white person for purposes of representation, leading to accusations that they were cherry-picking the Framers’ words.)
Since then, the House has read the Constitution at least twice more, in 2015 and 2017, to promote the idea that Republicans, and Republicans alone, are standing on the U.S. Constitution, while Democrats are abusing it.
The leader of the Republican Party has called for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” and party leaders are silent.
Representatives had not taken the time to read the entirety of the U.S. Constitution on the floor of the House before 2011 because they were presumed to know it. What they did have to say aloud was something far more important for each individual to have on record: their oath of office.
It reads: “I…do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
Our reader Joel is a retired union worker. He shared his thoughts about the deal that the Biden administration and Congress imposed on the nation’s rail workers’ unions to avert a strike. Biden feared that a rail strike would cripple the economy and lead to widespread layoffs. Critics of the deal complained that rail workers get only one paid sick day a year (members of Congress get unlimited paid sick days). The critics are right to insist that rail workers get more paid sick days, but Joel points out that a national strike now would do incalculable damage to organized labor.
Joel writes:
Union Leadership understands that one has to pick your fights carefully.
The cause of the workers’ grievances focuses on forced overtime and being on call far too often with little input in scheduling . This has been caused by efficiency measures that cut nearly 30 % of the workforce. If the gripe is the forced overtime than the answer is to bring back the workers whose dismissal caused the need for that overtime. Not that the employers would be happier with that than the paid sick time .
The contract negotiated between Biden, the Union Leadership, and the Railroads back in September did provide for sick days. It provided for scheduled doctors’ visits. It provided 1 additional paid holiday. It provided a 24 % wage increase retroactively, graduated from 2020 through 2024. It called for more flexibility in scheduling, and it froze health insurance premiums, I believe, beyond the contract period. Without those PAID sick days it was a damn good contract that the leadership of the 12 unions pushed their members to accept. 8 of the 12 did, Including the IBEW of which I am a retired member as a construction electrician.
But if grueling working conditions caused by forced overtime and standby status is your beef, why would being paid for the day off come into play. The answer is it does not. Most like the overtime or they would insist on bringing staffing levels back up to eliminate it . More workers equals less forced overtime for each and less grueling schedules . That proposal was not put on the table to my knowledge. And I understand why . The leadership would have their heads handed to them by the same members asking for paid sick time to alleviate the grueling schedules.
Been there seen that, in the 1970s in a time of high unemployment in NYC’s construction industry. Overtime was eliminated by my Union. Accomplished by forcing the worker to take a day off if he worked more than 3hrs OT in that week . That forced the contractor to either not work overtime. Creating work for more members by, if anything, forcing projects to take longer or hiring additional workers to be able to man the job during regular hours. The union’s noble object was to put the unemployed members to work. In the 1990s when unemployment returned that was dropped. The leadership decided that it was better to hear 10-15 % gripe about unemployment than the 85% bitch about taking the bread and butter out of their mouths.
So I suspect the dynamic is similar.
That said what are the down side risks for the economy, the Democrats, the workers, the employers and the Unions?
This is not a Cheerios factory closing down .This is not Air travel shutting down as in 1980 . A strike that lasts as little as a week will effect vast portions of the economy. It will cause a huge spike in prices and unemployment. A total no win for Biden and Democrats that will hang around their neck like an albatross. The workers may or may not get what they are getting now if Congress is forced to step in after Economic Armageddon sets in. The Employers: if I were the employer knowing how quickly Americans turn against other workers or any policy that calls for personnel sacrifice, I would stretch this out till Public Sentiment turned massively against the Unions and the Administration. The Republicans were so concerned about the working conditions that only 3 in the House and 6? in the Senate voted for the additional sick days . Both the Employers and the Republicans would salivate at the opportunity to drive Democrats from power, driving a stake in the heart of organized labor. And you can be sure the oligarchy who owns the media would be all over it.
Sitting in front of the Taliban 6 in the SCOTUS is a case that could bankrupt almost every Union that chose to strike. It would allow employers to sue for losses caused by the strike. For example: A supermarket chain could sue for lost produce , dairy ,meats … I don’t hold much hope out for them not supporting the employers in this case. A rail strike not only will give them cover to do so but will have a huge majority of the American Public supporting them.
A wave of strikes in 1947 allowed Republicans and Dixiecrats to gut the NLRA with Taft Hartley . That was when Unions were 31 or 32 % of the workforce.
After Reagan fired the Air Traffic Controllers, he set an example that led to an orgy of Union busting when Unions were 22% of the workforce. The American people overwhelmingly re-elected Reagan in a race against one of the most pro-labor Senators in the Country. Sending Democrats into the wilderness until they became under Clinton and Obama, Eisenhower Republicans at best. All but abandoning the New Deal and Great Society as well as relegating Labor to lip service, while passing Trade agreements that decimated American Labor worse than anything Reagan did.
A rail strike would make the media frenzy about Inflation, Crime and Afghanistan look like a practice run. Organized Labor would take the hit opening us up to the effective repeal of all union rights in the NLRA.
In a comment yesterday, Joel amplified his argument on behalf of the Biden settlement, pointing out that Biden has no authority to issue an executive order.
Joel wrote:
An executive order to do what (either way)? This is private sector commerce. The President can do little other than ensure Public Dollars are used in certain ways. So he can sign an order calling for Project Labor Agreements in the spending of Federal Dollars, or Buy American provisions with those dollars . We see he can not even mandate life saving vaccines using OSHA .
Article 1 section 8 clause 3. So now envision a strike that lasts 3 weeks into the new Congress. A strike that puts up to 7 million out of work as supply chains snarl and prices soar . Now envision the contract that could be ordered by that Fascist Right Wing House of Congress. A strike would give them a Scott Walker moment they have dreamed of for decades. As the American people spurred on by daily media stories of the pain caused by strikers called for the Guillotines.
The new Congress, under the Commerce Clause the only Branch entitled to regulate private Commerce, would deliver those Guillotines.
If I were the Railroad CEOs and the Oligarchy, I would assure the baskets were in place to catch the heads .
One of the best programs created by the Biden administration was the Child Tax Credit. It cut child poverty in half. But Republicans, with the crucial vote of West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, killed the program at the first opportunity.
The New York Times reviews the effects of the program and predicts that Democrats will seek to revive it. It’s hard to imagine a future for the Child Tax Credit so long as Republicans control the House of Representatives. The House controls appropriations. I’m afraid I don’t understand a political party whose ideology is to oppose any program other than tax cuts for corporations and wealthy individuals. Why fight a program that gives millions of children a better life? I don’t get it.
Jason DeParle wrote:
A pandemic-era program that sent monthly checks of up to $300 per child to most families drove down poverty rates. Amid new research about its merits, some Democrats are vowing to bring it back.
WASHINGTON — When the history of American hardship is written in some distant decade, two recent events may capture the whipsaw forces of the age.
Child poverty fell to a record low. And the program that did the most to reduce it vanished.
The story of that temporary program — technically, a tax-credit expansion but more plainly a series of monthly checks to most families with children — was extraordinary in every way. A guaranteed income in a country long resistant to one, the expanded child tax credit emerged from obscurity to win support from most of the Democratic Party, aided millions of low- and middle-income families during the pandemic and helped cut child poverty nearly in half.
Then it died, as President Biden’s efforts to preserve it drew unified Republican opposition and the defection of a crucial Senate Democrat. Critics called the monthly payments of up to $300 per child an expensive welfare scheme that would deter parents from working by providing cash aid regardless of whether they had jobs.
The checks have ended, but the battle has not. Supporters say new evidence shows the payments lowered hardship and nurtured children without reducing parental employment. Some Democrats hope to revive payments to small groups of parents as part of a year-end tax deal, and despite Republicans taking control of the House in January, restoring the full program remains a long-term Democratic goal.
“It was soul crushing not to get it, but the commitment to the tax credit remains — absolutely,” said Maria Cancian, a former Obama administration official who is dean of the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. “We’ve shown that we can get money in the hands of parents and really make a difference.”
Skeptics argue the payments’ six-month run was too brief to test whether the guaranteed cash weakened incentives to work, and they find the short-term benefits less impressive than supporters say.
“There was a meaningful reduction in material hardship, but the reduction has been exaggerated,” said Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute. “It’s much smaller than you would expect when hearing the phrase, ‘Cut child poverty in half.’”
Each side might find support in the experience of Thomas Horton and his wife, Pamela Mudge, who are raising three children in Pitcairn, Pa., outside Pittsburgh.
Mr. Horton, 38, and a teenage son receive disability benefits, which became the family’s main support after Ms. Mudge lost work at the start of the pandemic. Tax credit payments of $750 a month raised their cash income by nearly 50 percent and lifted them above the poverty line.
While most of the aid went to bills, Mr. Horton cited two breaks from frugal norms that lent the children a boost. One was a trip to Walmart, to quiet their classmates’ taunts over their thrift-shop clothes. Another was the family’s first vacation — a single night in a state park, where they pitched a borrowed tent and made s’mores. “I saw a happiness in my wife and kids I hadn’t seen in a long time,” he said. “I felt like father of the year.”
At the same time, Mr. Horton acknowledged the payments’ end hastened his wife’s return to work — a point the program’s detractors would emphasize — and that her earnings roughly replaced the lost aid. (She works part-time so she can assist with his care for a bone disease that has required several back operations.) Mr. Horton said she would have returned to work anyway and, had the payments continued as supporters hoped, the children would be better off.
“We’re back to the everyday struggle,” he said.
Many countries offer cash aid to subsidize child-rearing costs. But historically the idea gained little traction in the United States, where faith in upward mobility held greater sway and racial divisions slowed the growth of the welfare state. As recently as the 1990s, a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, eliminated guarantees of cash aid to poor families.
In part the growing interest in family aid is rooted in concerns about inequality. It also reflects science that showed the importance of the formative years and research (summarized in an influential 2019 report) that found government aid helps children advance.
An unlikely force accelerated the drive: a Republican tax cut. A 2017 law elevated the child tax credit by doubling its value and extending it to high-income families while keeping earnings requirements that denied the poorest third of children the full benefit.
Republicans argued that tax credits logically favor taxpayers, but Democrats saw inequity in a children’s policy that excluded children who most needed help. They sought to subsidize all poor and middle-class families, regardless of parental employment, and increase the benefit.
The pandemic offered the chance. The aid Mr. Biden won last year included six monthly payments (of $250 a child or $300 for those under 6) and a lump-sum payment for an additional six months that was paid this spring. Supporters had hoped that the program, kept temporary to limit costs, would prove too popular to lapse.
“That’s a very big impact — very big,” said Elaine Waxman, a researcher at the Urban Institute. “People clearly used the money to buy food or we wouldn’t be seeing those kinds of numbers.”
“To put it bluntly. the child tax credit was a really good thing,” said Megan A. Curran, an analyst at Columbia’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy who published a review of recent studies. “These are some of the most impressive results we’ve ever seen from a single policy.”
The payments’ effect on parents’ decisions to work has drawn extensive interest. One study found the aid coincided with an employment decline of two percentage points, though only among the least-educated parents. But at least sixstudies found no change in parental employment, though a decline would likely take longer than six months to fully appear…
Scott Winship of the American Enterprise Institute argues that last year’s program has little predictive value because the conditions were so unusual, with short-lived payments, other forms of temporary aid, and a job market skewed by the virus. “Studying a six-month program in the midst of a pandemic just doesn’t give you much information,” he said.
But others say a real-world test that involved more than 60 million children is more rigorous than the small experiments that often shape policies. “It’s worlds ahead of the kind of evidence we usually have,” said H. Luke Shaefer, a researcher at the University of Michigan who found that hardships fell as soon as the payments started and rose as soon as they stopped.
Last year, Mr. Biden’s lengthy attempt to continue the payments failed to persuade Senator Joe Manchin III, a West Virginia Democrat who criticized the program’s costs and said aid should be limited to parents who work.
Despite bets on its popularity, the program expired with little political backlash, and Democrats, accused of inflationary spending, said little about it in congressional campaigns. The credit reverted to its previous state: a $2,000 annual benefit that includes high-income families but fails to fully reach those in the bottom third…
Robert Greenstein of the Brookings Institution, a longtime advocate for safety net programs, urged Congress to reinstate payments to some parents in exchange for preserving a corporate tax break that expires this year. “Its benefits are proven, while the idea that the there might be some small adverse effect down the road is merely speculation,” he said…
Supporters of the credit often lament that the United States has higher child poverty rates than many advanced countries (with poverty defined as half of each nation’s median income). Zachary Parolin, a researcher affiliated with Columbia University, found that the expanded credit raised the American rankto 21st of 53 nations, from 40th — to a place beside Germany, rather than Bulgaria.
He was stunned when the payments ceased. “I had this theory that once the policy is there there’s no way to get rid of it,” he said. “I was wrong — it’s gone.”
Having gone to college many years ago in Massachusetts, I have an idyllic view of small-towns in New England. Thus, I was shocked to read this article from InDepth New Hampshire about hate groups that are active in Franklin, New Hampshire. True, NH has its Free Staters, rabid libertarians who want no government at all, but you will read here about a different type of extremism, based on hate.
What’s happening to our country? when I read articles celebrating the last election as a rebuke to Trumpism, I remind myself that many important votes were very close. In many states, reason won by 50.4%. Or 51%.
A new hate incident in Franklin, this time white supremacist graffiti painted on a downtown building, has city leaders looking for answers.
Mayor Jo Brown said the city’s task force to combat hate, formed after a Jewish business owner was targeted by a hate group this summer, is working on stifling hate with education and positivity…
It is not clear who is behind this week’s graffiti, Brown said. This is the second time this year Franklin leaders have dealt with hate-influenced issues. Over the summer, members of the notorious hate group, NSC 131, targeted Miriam Kovacs, owner of the Broken Spoon, which is a Jewish-Asian fusion takeout restaurant.
NSC 131, also known as the Nationalist Social Club, is a neo-Nazi hate group active in New England. The group has a chapter active in New Hampshire. In the past year, the group has targeted businesses on the Seacoast for harassment, and even threatened former Nashua Democratic state Rep. Manny Espitia.
State Rep. Charlotte DiLorenzo, D-Newmarket, recently spoke about receiving a racist email from a different group. Attorney General John Formella is investigating the email from a man who identified himself as the founder and president of a group called the New England White Network.
NSC 131 was founded in eastern Massachusetts and its members are tied to violent Neo Nazi groups like The Base, Aryan Strike and Patriot Front. The group has off-shoot chapters in Europe and some southern states. NSC 131 graffiti has been spotted all throughout southern New Hampshire, and the group has made appearances at Nashua City Hall and Nashua School Board meetings, among other incidents.
This summer, the group hung two banners over a highway in Dover that read: “Keep New England white” and “Defend New England.”
The group is virulently anti-Semitic and calls for expelling Jewish people from the United States. The group also calls for violence against Jews and minorities.
“110 and never again. Jews have been expelled from 109 countries make America 110. Any nationalist of action will agree, 110 and never again,” on NSC 131 poster wrote on Telegram.
How do we make sense of the last six years, and how do we figure out what we do next?
I’m wrestling with the dilemmas intertwined with the wisdom of Michelle Obama: When they go low, We go high.
To go high, we must wrestle with the irrational and anti-Semitic statements of Kanye West. We must confront the MAGA right wing propaganda while also responding to his words, “Hurt people hurt people – and I was hurt.”
I was born in the middle of the luckiest generation in history. My first memory is a metaphor for the opportunities that were bestowed on Baby Boomers, that have been in decline. I was “twaddling” across the living room to the “win-dome” when adults were watching television, and they exploded with joy. The news, I was told later, was that the polio vaccine had been released!
Our parents’ generation survived the Great Depression and World War II, they were committed to our generation having far greater opportunities. Time after time, when I walked somewhere, worked with neighbors, and played with their children, I found one mentor after another. I was repeatedly told, “Pay close attention, I’ll only show you once;” reminded that my job at school wasn’t high grades but “Learning how to learn;” and “Your job is to be ‘inner-directed’ not ‘outer-directed’” like those who were “like the Red River, ‘a mile wide and a foot deep.’”
Of course, we felt the uneasiness of neighbors watching the Sputnik satellite cross the night sky, of “duck and cover” drills at school, and the Cuban Missile crisis (which only affected me by the news alerts interrupting the World Series.)
And I was clueless about Jim Crow until we went to a restaurant during the Sit-In movement. The owner directed us to the fancy room where, that evening, prices were not higher than the big serving area, because we shouldn’t have to eat with N—–rs. We shouted to our parents, “You’re not supposed to say that word! Why did he say that word?” My dad tried to remain calm but he exploded, “there’s not a god-damned reason” and tore into the racist owner. It took the full police line to pull my dad off him.
Of course, Oklahoma was incredibly corrupt and my dad would jokingly point out concrete examples such as “the road to Nowhere” (which led to our top oligarch’s property,) the Turner Turnpike, and the photo at church of a Supreme Court Justice who was convicted of bribery in conjunction to with the turnpike and other cases. But, as I began to lobby and/or interview members of the “Greatest Generation,” I realized that that criminal behavior was far more common back then, but their handshakes had to be good. In the last few decades, I asked powerful people if corruption had declined significantly, and whether norms have also dropped. They agreed but, a decade ago, a State Auditor added a disclaimer; so many behaviors by elites that used to be felonies were now legal.
And that gets us to the intertwined forces of the last fifty years that laid the foundation for Trumpism. In the 1970s, rightwing think tanks sold the theory that corporations were only beholden to the share owners, not the stakeholders, the community, and the United States of America. Then, the Reagan administration’s Supply Side Economics quickly wiped out good-paying industrial jobs, which undermined communities, especially in places like rural Oklahoma which became Trumpland.
As the economic pie became more unequal, more hurt people hurt people. The willingness to share declined. And, eventually, hope declined, and life expectancy dropped for whites who hadn’t attended college, especially in places like eastern Oklahoma.
Rightwing spin masters convinced rural Oklahomans that Reagan “brought America back,” and immigrants and people of color “cut in line” in front of whites. I plead guilty to being slow to admit the importance of racism in fueling Trumpism. My wife and I have had an Obama bumper sticker on our car since 2008. I don’t recall any rudeness by Oklahomans in response to it. As soon as we crossed into Texas, and many other states, we’d be shouted at and given the finger.
Since my family came from “Little Dixie,” I was embarrassingly slow in admitting why counties in Southeast Oklahoma instantly turned Republican between 2006 and the 2008 presidential race. Similarly, Oklahoma passed one of the nation’s most punitive immigration laws, and I’d seen large numbers of attacks on Hispanics in our high school. But in my experience, Oklahomans also respected the work ethic and family values of immigrants. I saw our welcoming side until, surprise!, the nonstop anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic, and anti-Muslim propaganda sunk in.
While acknowledging my excessive optimism, I believe we can build on our strengths – the values that gave so much hope to this young Baby Boomer. Given my experience as an inner-city teacher, I will draw on my students’ moral cores. But I see those experiences as metaphors for how we can “go high” when reversing a full range of interconnected economic, social, political, and civility challenges.
Starting with economics, the worship of Free Markets began with Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction.” Corporate school reformers (like other true believers in the Market) adopted the same mindset, which they called “creative disruption” as the lever for transforming schools and rebuilding them through “venture philanthropy.” They became very skilled at “kicking down the barn,” and attacking teachers, hoping to quickly fire enough teachers (especially Baby Boomers) while training young teachers to obey top-down, teach-to-the-test mandates.
But, both sides of the “Teacher Wars” were bipartisan. Up until three or four years ago, I was very successful working with conservative Republicans who also didn’t trust the “Billionaires Boys Club” which dominated the Bush and Obama education policies. And many or most were angry at other big corporations.
If we could admit that neither Democrats or Republicans stood up to our neoliberal and their conservative funders, we could restart conversations about schools as a public good, not just a Free Market experiment. Then, maybe we could discuss the privatization of health care, the social safety net, and the other institutions on Gov. Stitt’s and other MAGA’s hit list.
Hopefully, Democrats and Republicans could join together in community building; the first step could be full-service community schools, which could also serve as community hubs. We could admit that both sides bought into the simplistic, false meme that teachers, alone, could drive transformative change of our highest-challenge schools.
Of course, teachers deserve more respect. But so do cafeteria ladies, bus drivers, counselors, tutors, parent liaisons, mentors, apprentices, and volunteers. And, sharing the respect and the credit with education teams will also create good will that would assist the dialogue we need.
As the MAGA Republicans ramp up the campaigns for vouchers, we will have new opportunities for bridging differences with rural areas. And, students can lead the way in explaining that accusations of spreading Critical Race Theory and Socialist propaganda are false.
In the late 1990s, during a community discussion about public health, my students asked white participants about the more humane way that Meth, as opposed to crack, was being handled. Perhaps because the students were so polite, the adults didn’t understand that the teenagers were contrasting the cruelty of the War on Drugs during the crack epidemic with the more empathetic public health response to the new, predominantly white epidemic. Afterwards, they told me that the white participants didn’t understand what they were saying, but they had hope for future conversations and, at least, the more humane response to Meth was a first step.
A decade later, Big Pharma profited by promoting Opioid addiction in the MAGA areas, significantly lowering life expectancy for under-educated whites. Rather than condemning “deplorables,” we should have recognized that “Hurt people hurt People.” Now, it won’t be easy, but perhaps we could unite, regulate, and control the corporate dominance that is spreading destruction across the world.
Finally, we must move on from the failed experiment of Creative Disruption. We should build on both, social and cognitive science, as well as what has worked for centuries. After all, teaching is an act of love. Neighborliness can be the driving force for community schools. Defending our children’s schools, as well as privatization battles ranging from public health to global warming, will require cross-generational, cross-cultural discussions. When they go low, we should go high by bringing the full diversity of our communities into schools, and bringing students out into the full diversity of our community.
Ohio is a state dominated by Republicans. When progressive candidates won seats on the state board in the recent election, Republicans moved swiftly to strip the state board of its powers and transfer them to a new state agency.
The state board has 19 seats. Eleven are elected. Eight are appointed by the Governor, Republican Mike DeWine.
For the first time in years, progressive candidates will control the elected seats on the executive agency, regulating if a resolution is able to pass or not. Candidates are voted on as nonpartisan candidates, however, each leans conservative or progressive and will be endorsed by a party. School board candidates tend to share their beliefs publically.
Three of the five seats up for grabs were taken by liberal candidates. Tom Jackson, of Solon, beat out incumbent Tim Miller by about 50,000 votes. Teresa Fedor, a now-former state senator from Toledo, beat opponent Sarah McGervey by more than 30,000 votes. Katie Hofmann, of Cincinnati, beat out incumbent Jenny Kilgore by around 30,000 votes.
“We’re just looking forward to getting back to Columbus and doing the people’s work,” Jackson told News 5.
Now, seven of the 11 elected seats are held by Democrats. The elected seats ensure that the total board can’t pass all resolutions it wants, since it needs a 2/3 majority. Of the 19 total seats, eight were appointed by Gov. DeWine. Now, with 12 GOP seats, a Democrat would need to switch over for policy to pass. This could change depending on attendance.
Even though Republicans hold a majority, they don’t have a 2/3 majority, and they won’t be able to pass resolutions without at least one Democrat.
Gov. Mike DeWine said Wednesday he supports an Ohio Senate bill that would overhaul the Ohio Department of Education, gut powers from the Ohio State Board of Education and give his office more oversight of education.
“I think virtually every governor for 40 or 50 years has wanted to have more control in regard to the Department of Education,” DeWine, a Republican, told reporters. “So this governor is not going to be different. You know, I support the bill.”
Senate Bill 178 would put the Ohio Department of Education under a cabinet-level official in the governor’s office and rename the agency the Department of Education and Workforce, which would be called by the acronym DEW. The cabinet official would oversee the department, a task currently held by the state school board. The department would have two divisions: one for primary and secondary education and one for workforce training.
The 19-member state school board, made up of 11 elected members and eight members appointed by the governor, would continue to exist, but it would be stripped of most of its duties. It would oversee educator licensing and select the superintendent of public instruction, who would be a secretary to the board and an advisor to the DEW leader in the governor’s office.
“Candidly, the bill was not our idea, but I support the bill,” DeWine said. “I think what the public expects is accountability. And it’s hard to have accountability under our current system. You know, having the Department of Education with kind of a joint control between the governor’s office and the governor on certain areas, and other areas be the state elected Board of Education, I think is a very significant improvement.”
We have seen the same anti-democratic move in other states, like Indiana and North Carolina, where the legislature removed powers from the Governor or state superintendent so as to keep control of education in Republican hands, disregarding the voters’ wishes.
Trump (The Former Guy) sent a message to his cult by inviting the rapper Ye (formerly Kanye West) and white nationalist Nick Fuentes to dine with him at Mar-a-Lago. Fuentes is a Holocaust denier, a racist, and an anti-Semite, also a homophobe, of course. Ye is a loud anti-Semite. Are Ye and Fuentes friends, even though Ye is Black? Trump claims he didn’t know Fuentes but it’s hard to believe anything he says, or that a total stranger would be admitted to dine with him.
On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, November 22, former president Trump hosted the antisemitic artist Ye, also known as Kanye West, for dinner at a public table at Mar-a-Lago along with political operative Karen Giorno, who was the Trump campaign’s 2016 state director in Florida. Ye brought with him 24-year-old far-right white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Fuentes attended the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and in its wake, he committed to moving the Republican Party farther to the right.
Fuentes has openly admired Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and authoritarian Russian president Vladimir Putin, who is currently making war on Russia’s neighbor Ukraine. A Holocaust denier, Fuentes is associated with America’s neo-Nazis.
In February 2020, Fuentes launched the America First Political Action Conference to compete from the right with the Conservative Political Action Conference. In May 2021, on a livestream, Fuentes said: “My job…is to keep pushing things further. We, because nobody else will, have to push the envelope. And we’re gonna get called names. We’re gonna get called racist, sexist, antisemitic, bigoted, whatever.… When the party is where we are two years later, we’re not gonna get the credit for the ideas that become popular. But that’s okay. That’s our job. We are the right-wing flank of the Republican Party. And if we didn’t exist, the Republican Party would be falling backwards all the time.”
Fuentes and his “America First” followers, called “Groypers” after a cartoon amphibian (I’m not kidding), backed Trump’s lies that he had actually won the 2020 election. At a rally shortly after the election, Fuentes told his followers to “storm every state capitol until Jan. 20, 2021, until President Trump is inaugurated for four more years.” Fuentes and Groypers were at the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, and at least seven of them have been charged with federal crimes for their association with that attack. The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol subpoenaed Fuentes himself.
Accounts of the dinner suggest that Trump and Fuentes hit it off, with Trump allegedly saying, “I like this guy, he gets me,” after Fuentes urged Trump to speak freely off the cuff rather than reading teleprompters and trying to appear presidential as his handlers advise.
But Trump announced his candidacy for president in 2024 just days ago, and being seen publicly with far-right white supremacist Fuentes—in addition to Ye—indicates his embrace of the far right. His team told NBC’sMarc Caputo that the dinner was a “f**king nightmare.” Trump tried to distance himself from the meeting by saying he didn’t know who Fuentes was, and that he was just trying to help Ye out by giving the “seriously troubled” man advice, but observers noted that he did not distance himself from Fuentes’s positions.
Republican lawmakers have been silent about Trump’s apparent open embrace of the far right, illustrating the growing power of that far right in the Republican Party. Representatives Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) have affiliated themselves with Fuentes, and while their appearances with him at the America First Political Action Conference last February drew condemnation from Republican leader Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), now McCarthy desperately needs the votes of far-right Republicans to make him speaker of the House. To get that support, he has been promising to deliver their wish list—including an investigation into President Joe Biden’s son Hunter—and appears willing to accept Fuentes and his followers into the party, exactly as Fuentes hoped.
Today, after the news of Trump’s dinner and the thundering silence that followed it, conservative anti-Trumper Bill Kristol tweeted: “Aren’t there five decent Republicans in the House who will announce they won’t vote for anyone for Speaker who doesn’t denounce their party’s current leader, Donald Trump, for consorting with the repulsive neo-Nazi Fuentes?”
Robert Hubbell is a favorite blogger of mine because he makes so much sense of events. His views are informative and often reflect what I think but have not yet written. He posted this right before Thanksgiving.
He writes:
Although there were many significant political developments on Tuesday, I want to start by focusing on gratitude for what we achieved during the midterms. Because we were able to defy “conventional wisdom” about midterm losses by the party in power, we have fundamentally altered the political dynamic for the better going into 2024.
The threat to democracy remains, but Republicans are chastened rather than emboldened, and Democrats are emboldened rather than discouraged. It could have been otherwise—and would have been but for the incredible devotion of tens of millions of Americans who made incredible sacrifices to defend democracy.
Everyone who contributed to the victory should be proud in equal measure, no matter how large or small your contribution. Indeed, the simple act of voting in a system designed to suppress some voters can be a noteworthy accomplishment. So, I hope you will take a moment over the next few days to recognize the accomplishment achieved by Democrats in the 2022 midterms.
I recommend that you read Rubin’s essay in full, but in case you don’t, here is a fair sampling:
I’m grateful not to wake up every morning with a sense of impending doom that a cast of election deniers will control key roles in administrating elections in 2024.
I’m grateful many in the media helped identify election deniers for Americans and educated them about the danger of granting them power to discard the will of voters.
I’m grateful to voters, who for the third consecutive election, showed there is a majority — even if a frightfully narrow one — that rejects authoritarianism, crude appeals to racism and xenophobia, and downright nutty and mean candidates.
I’m grateful younger voters are developing a habit of voting in midterms.
I’m grateful to the thousands of election officials, workers and volunteers who pulled off another exceptionally efficient and peaceful exercise in democracy.
I’m grateful to the lawyers who litigated in defense of voting access and impartial election administration.
I’m grateful voters did not ignore their concerns for democracy and women’s rights just because inflation is high.
I’m grateful that nearly all broadcast networks refused to break from regular programming to cover Donald Trump’s presidential campaign announcement.
I’m grateful voters are becoming accustomed to early voting and voting by mail.
I’m grateful President Biden disregarded cynical pundits and reporters to focus on the threat from MAGA extremism.
Jennifer Rubin’s list continues, but you get the point. I hope that you can see your contribution in the list above. We have much to be thankful for. Let’s find the time in the next few days to discern the reasons for gratitude in our lives. Those reasons are abundant—but we need to look for them amid the din and distractions of modern life.
More on GOP’s LGBTQ attacks.
Three days after the mass killing at Club Q, GOP candidate Herschel Walker released an ad that criticizes Raphael Warnock for supporting the rights of an LGBTQ athlete. See CNN, ‘This ad is hate’: CNN guest shreds Herschel Walker for anti-transgender ad hours after Club Q shooting. Of all of the issues that confront the American people, Herschel Walker chose to continue the culture war on LGBTQ. The insensitivity and cruelty of the timing speaks volumes about who Walker is . . . or at least, who the people are who are telling Walker what to say.
The ad features a female swimmer who complains about having to compete against a “biological male,” but she fails to mention that both she and the “biological male” were beaten by four female swimmers. That is what counts as a tragedy in the GOP culture war. But the point is not whether it is “fair” for transgender athletes to compete in college sports; it is that the GOP has chosen this moment and this issue for political advantage—before the victims of the Club Q mass murder have been buried.
Legal developments in the effort to hold Trump accountable.
In rapid succession, Trump suffered a series of setbacks in his efforts to evade accountability for his crimes. And in most instances, Trump didn’t merely lose—he lost “bigly.”
The Supreme Court rejected (9-0) Trump’s last-ditch efforts to prevent the House Ways & Means Committee from obtaining the last five years of his tax returns. See CNN, Trump tax returns: Supreme Court clears way for House to get former president’s taxes. As a result, the Treasury Department must turn over the returns. The question is, “When?” Republicans will take over control of the Committee on January 3, 2023—and will likely rescind the request for the returns. Let’s hope that the Treasury Department moves with dispatch. But even so, the returns must remain confidential within the Committee; the public will not likely see the returns anytime soon. Still, the disclosure to a congressional committee is progress.
A panel of the 11th Circuit eviscerated Trump’s arguments in defense of the special master appointment in the Mar-a-Lago search. Every observer agrees that the 11th Circuit will overrule Judge Cannon’s order appointing the special master—and may dismiss the case entirely. Trump’s lawyer, Jim Trusty, could not answer basic questions about why Judge Cannon should have exercised jurisdiction over Trump’s lawsuit. As a result, the DOJ (through special counsel Jack Smith) will be able to continue the Mar-a-Lago investigation without interference by Judge Cannon or oversight by special master Judge Dearie.
Trump’s lawyers tried unsuccessfully (for the third time) to dismiss the New York Attorney General’s civil suit against the Trump organization. New York state judge Arthur Engoron shut down Trump’s attorney time and again. Rather than accept defeat, Trump’s attorney blamed the judge. Alina Habba said,
This is why we shouldn’t be before you. You have a clear bias against our client. You have for a year and a half. Every time we come to court, you’re prepared to rule against us.
Of course, one explanation not considered by Ms. Habba is that Trump’s arguments are losers.
In the above lawsuit against the Trump Organization, Judge Engoron rejected a request by Ivanka Trump that her finances be excluded from oversight by a court-appointed monitor. The monitor, retired federal judge Barbara S. Jones has been charged with compiling a “full and accurate description of the corporate structure” of the Trump Organization. The Trumps, including Ivanka, must also inform the monitor 30 days in advance of shifting any assets. See The Daily Beast, Ivanka Trump Tried to Dodge Her Court-Appointed Financial Monitor.
There’s more, but you get the point. Trump is fighting multiple losing battles. One of them is bound to stick.
McCarthy’s demand is simultaneously pathetic and outrageous. It is doubtful that the House would impeach Mayorkas, but the Senate would never convict. So, what’s the point? McCarthy would be pursuing the same grievance-fueled messaging that resulted in a disastrous midterm for Republicans. McCarthy must be desperate. Indeed, it appears that McCarthy has dwindling prospects for being elected speaker. See Charlie Sykes, The Bulwark / Morning Shots, Kevin McCarthy’s “Crossover” Problem.
I know many readers are worried about the supposed onslaught of investigations in the GOP House during the next session of Congress. But there is reason to believe that those investigations will be a flop. See David Frum in The Atlantic, Another Flop From GOP Productions. The GOP broke its pick on ten Benghazi investigations for years and came up with nothing. As Frum notes, the most likely result of an investigation of Hunter Biden’s laptop will be the revelation that Joe Biden is a loving father who was desperately trying to help a son in trouble.
How do Republicans expect Americans to react to that disclosure? If congressional Republicans had empathy and decency, they would understand that Americans would find those disclosures endearing. So, let’s relax and see whether Republicans can do anything in their investigations and impeachments besides embarrassing themselves.
Helping the Georgia Alliance for Progress “get out the vote” for Senator Warnock.
For those of you looking to donate in the final push in Georgia, please consider joining Jessica Craven of Chop Wood Carry Water, along with Senate Circle, Markers For Democracy, Team Min, Downtown Nasty Women’s Social Group, and The Wednesday Group who are hosting Christine White of the Georgia Alliance for Progress. The group is working to fund the best grassroots organizations in Georgia—specifically their canvassing programs— who are still underfunded with only weeks to go. You can give here, and please feel free to share the link with friends and family who want to give. The Zoom is on Monday, November 28 at 8:00 PM Eastern/7:00 PM Central, /6:00 PM Mountain/5:00 PM Pacific/4:00 PM Alaska.
