Friday, April 10, 2020
Quarantine Diary, Day 28
Just a placeholder for now. But I've tired of looking at the impeachment post, especially given the disastrous things that have followed. I think I'll start collecting a record of various writings and posts here at the ol' Patio Boat. But for now, have a pretty picture of crocuses:
Friday, January 31, 2020
Impeachment: The Fix Was In All Along
Breaking the long silence on political blogging to note that I was wrong when I wrote in October that I thought the Senate would ultimately decide to move on from Trump.
Trump is the Republican Party and the Republican Party is Trump. The final Senate vote should come in a day or two, but it's obvious that the Republicans in the Senate have no interest in removing the sheer lawlessness and abuse of power that is the Trump Administration. Up until a week or two ago I still thought the potential electoral suicide of sticking with this disastrous administration would awaken their self-preservation instincts and lead them to dump Trump. But I was wrong.
So what's going on? At some level, I obviously don't understand it, so given my track record in predicting political outcomes in the Trump era, I'd recommend a big grain of salt. But here goes:
1. They're high on their own supply -- Given the extent to which Republican voters and elected officials live within the right-wing information bubble, I've come to believe that it's gone beyond cynically propagating a lot of that stuff to gain and hold power, which was the case for most of the last 30 years. A majority of Republican Congressmen fairly obviously believe the crazy. And by crazy I mean "repeatedly proven to be untrue and counterfactual."
There's a tendency to talk about the modern GOP as if it's a cult. Having spent some time reading about cults last year, it's in many ways a better way to understand their behavior than thinking about them as the usual sort of political party we've had in this country for most of our existence.
We live in an America of two distinct information bubbles. The right-wing bubble dominated by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and his ilk, and an online ecosphere that gets increasingly toxic and racist and crazy the farther down the rat hole you go. And there's a fact-based bubble in which everybody else finds a niche. The phrase "facts have a well-known liberal bias" shouldn't be true. But it's true in 2020.
I wouldn't have believed that most Republican Congressmen believed this stuff myself until I saw it spewed in the House and Senate for the last three months. I would've thought they were cynically using it to manipulate voters. But they've convinced me. They believe this stuff. And it's industrial-strength poison to democracy.
2. There's something shady going on -- And something shady beyond just the garden-variety system of legalized bribery that has grown like a cancer on our system (direct campaign contributions from lobbyists, nepotism, etc.) for a long time.
The money trail from Russia into the National Rifle Association and from there into Republican campaigns has been pretty well proven at this point, and it has dozens of variants in other GOP SuperPACs and lobbying organizations. And the money trail from American billionaires who only care about keeping and maintaining the GOP's political power to benefit themselves is far more robust than that. The Citizens United v. FEC case in the Supreme Court threw the windows open for untraceable money and the money has been blasting through those windows ever since. All that money is probably playing out in two ways:
2A. For God's sake, don't look at what we've been doing! -- Most Republican members of Congress are desperate to keep from any further scrutiny of their money trail. Desperate. Because most of them have been on that campaign finance gravy train themselves and they don't want anybody to know it. I don't think all of them are in over their heads, but they're all at least hip-deep or ankle-deep in the muck.
2B. Partisan funding means party discipline -- If you've never been involved in campaign finance you may not realize the extent to which internal party goodwill makes an enormous difference in a candidate's ability to finance an election campaign. This problem has grown enormously over the last thirty or forty years. There's a long version of that statement that I might write about one day, but the point is that for most legislators, crossing party lines on an important issue endangers their job. Most legislators have lost their fundraising independence in recent years.When you hear discussion around the point that some of these senators are afraid of a primary challenge, you should realize that this means, "The party mechanisms will find a challenger and shift the money train to the challenger."
I had thought the obvious general election downside of voting against removal (supported by voters by a margin of something like 48%-45% for most of this process) or even voting against a full trial with witnesses and evidence (supported by around 75% of voters) would ultimately move senators, especially those up for election in 2020. Obviously, it didn't.
3. They think they can get away with it, and riding the Trump train is their best chance -- Given the wave of voter suppression, gerrymandering, etc., that followed the 2010 election, the GOP has been riding in power with the support of a minority of voters for quite a while. For most Republicans in Congress, what they've been doing has worked, so why would they change? This isn't about "the will of the people" and hasn't been for some time. It's about keeping power. When Alan Dershowitz stands in the well of the Senate and argues that if the President believes his re-election is good for America then anything he does in pursuit of that is unimpeachable, fascism has officially arrived on our shores.
If you think the Republican electoral abuses of the last ten years were something, just wait until you see what's going to happen this year now that they've collectively decided that any violation of existing law in pursuit of their own hold on political power is legal and good for America.
4. Game theory: There's no upside in voting for removal. There's only downside. -- If you're a Republican Senator and you vote to remove Trump and keep your seat, you will likely become a pariah in your own party. (Hello, U.S. Rep. Justin Amash.) You'll face blame from your political base and a likely loss of fund-raising clout. If you keep your seat you'll be greatly weakened. If you lose your next election or retire you'll be cut off from the lucrative gravy train of lobbying, Fox News contracts, corporate board appointments, etc., that has greeted your fellow former GOP Congressmen.
And what's the upside? Protecting the rule of law and the constitution? We've already seen that Justin Amash was the only Republican Congressman who cared about any of that. And they literally threw him out of the party for it.
If you vote to keep Trump you can hope the voters have a short memory, which has often proven to be the case. And you probably think that nobody will blame you if you all stuck together on it.
-----
Put it all together, and it's probably some combination of those things plus other dynamics I haven't figured out that is responsible for what's been happening, and for what's about to happen in the Senate. Politics is complicated. There's a lot afoot here, and the iceberg principle probably applies: 90% of it is out of sight.
What can we all do about it? Vote in November 2020. Vote in overwhelming numbers. The basic mechanisms of elections are still spread out and diverse enough that it's possible to overcome everything that will happen in the next nine months. But it will take a wave of voters like we haven't seen in ages.
And for me?
In 2016 I discovered with Trump's election that the America I live in is worse than the America I thought I lived in.
In 2020 I've discovered that the basic political calculations that I have relied on to understand how our political systems function no longer work in the year 2020.
I need to improve my understanding of the world that I do live in. I need to better understand how I can make it more like the world I want to live in.
I'm going to spend some time mulling that.
Trump is the Republican Party and the Republican Party is Trump. The final Senate vote should come in a day or two, but it's obvious that the Republicans in the Senate have no interest in removing the sheer lawlessness and abuse of power that is the Trump Administration. Up until a week or two ago I still thought the potential electoral suicide of sticking with this disastrous administration would awaken their self-preservation instincts and lead them to dump Trump. But I was wrong.
So what's going on? At some level, I obviously don't understand it, so given my track record in predicting political outcomes in the Trump era, I'd recommend a big grain of salt. But here goes:
1. They're high on their own supply -- Given the extent to which Republican voters and elected officials live within the right-wing information bubble, I've come to believe that it's gone beyond cynically propagating a lot of that stuff to gain and hold power, which was the case for most of the last 30 years. A majority of Republican Congressmen fairly obviously believe the crazy. And by crazy I mean "repeatedly proven to be untrue and counterfactual."
There's a tendency to talk about the modern GOP as if it's a cult. Having spent some time reading about cults last year, it's in many ways a better way to understand their behavior than thinking about them as the usual sort of political party we've had in this country for most of our existence.
We live in an America of two distinct information bubbles. The right-wing bubble dominated by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and his ilk, and an online ecosphere that gets increasingly toxic and racist and crazy the farther down the rat hole you go. And there's a fact-based bubble in which everybody else finds a niche. The phrase "facts have a well-known liberal bias" shouldn't be true. But it's true in 2020.
I wouldn't have believed that most Republican Congressmen believed this stuff myself until I saw it spewed in the House and Senate for the last three months. I would've thought they were cynically using it to manipulate voters. But they've convinced me. They believe this stuff. And it's industrial-strength poison to democracy.
2. There's something shady going on -- And something shady beyond just the garden-variety system of legalized bribery that has grown like a cancer on our system (direct campaign contributions from lobbyists, nepotism, etc.) for a long time.
The money trail from Russia into the National Rifle Association and from there into Republican campaigns has been pretty well proven at this point, and it has dozens of variants in other GOP SuperPACs and lobbying organizations. And the money trail from American billionaires who only care about keeping and maintaining the GOP's political power to benefit themselves is far more robust than that. The Citizens United v. FEC case in the Supreme Court threw the windows open for untraceable money and the money has been blasting through those windows ever since. All that money is probably playing out in two ways:
2A. For God's sake, don't look at what we've been doing! -- Most Republican members of Congress are desperate to keep from any further scrutiny of their money trail. Desperate. Because most of them have been on that campaign finance gravy train themselves and they don't want anybody to know it. I don't think all of them are in over their heads, but they're all at least hip-deep or ankle-deep in the muck.
2B. Partisan funding means party discipline -- If you've never been involved in campaign finance you may not realize the extent to which internal party goodwill makes an enormous difference in a candidate's ability to finance an election campaign. This problem has grown enormously over the last thirty or forty years. There's a long version of that statement that I might write about one day, but the point is that for most legislators, crossing party lines on an important issue endangers their job. Most legislators have lost their fundraising independence in recent years.When you hear discussion around the point that some of these senators are afraid of a primary challenge, you should realize that this means, "The party mechanisms will find a challenger and shift the money train to the challenger."
I had thought the obvious general election downside of voting against removal (supported by voters by a margin of something like 48%-45% for most of this process) or even voting against a full trial with witnesses and evidence (supported by around 75% of voters) would ultimately move senators, especially those up for election in 2020. Obviously, it didn't.
3. They think they can get away with it, and riding the Trump train is their best chance -- Given the wave of voter suppression, gerrymandering, etc., that followed the 2010 election, the GOP has been riding in power with the support of a minority of voters for quite a while. For most Republicans in Congress, what they've been doing has worked, so why would they change? This isn't about "the will of the people" and hasn't been for some time. It's about keeping power. When Alan Dershowitz stands in the well of the Senate and argues that if the President believes his re-election is good for America then anything he does in pursuit of that is unimpeachable, fascism has officially arrived on our shores.
If you think the Republican electoral abuses of the last ten years were something, just wait until you see what's going to happen this year now that they've collectively decided that any violation of existing law in pursuit of their own hold on political power is legal and good for America.
4. Game theory: There's no upside in voting for removal. There's only downside. -- If you're a Republican Senator and you vote to remove Trump and keep your seat, you will likely become a pariah in your own party. (Hello, U.S. Rep. Justin Amash.) You'll face blame from your political base and a likely loss of fund-raising clout. If you keep your seat you'll be greatly weakened. If you lose your next election or retire you'll be cut off from the lucrative gravy train of lobbying, Fox News contracts, corporate board appointments, etc., that has greeted your fellow former GOP Congressmen.
And what's the upside? Protecting the rule of law and the constitution? We've already seen that Justin Amash was the only Republican Congressman who cared about any of that. And they literally threw him out of the party for it.
If you vote to keep Trump you can hope the voters have a short memory, which has often proven to be the case. And you probably think that nobody will blame you if you all stuck together on it.
-----
Put it all together, and it's probably some combination of those things plus other dynamics I haven't figured out that is responsible for what's been happening, and for what's about to happen in the Senate. Politics is complicated. There's a lot afoot here, and the iceberg principle probably applies: 90% of it is out of sight.
What can we all do about it? Vote in November 2020. Vote in overwhelming numbers. The basic mechanisms of elections are still spread out and diverse enough that it's possible to overcome everything that will happen in the next nine months. But it will take a wave of voters like we haven't seen in ages.
And for me?
In 2016 I discovered with Trump's election that the America I live in is worse than the America I thought I lived in.
In 2020 I've discovered that the basic political calculations that I have relied on to understand how our political systems function no longer work in the year 2020.
I need to improve my understanding of the world that I do live in. I need to better understand how I can make it more like the world I want to live in.
I'm going to spend some time mulling that.
Friday, January 10, 2020
Just cleansing the visual palate for 2020
I just thought I'd at least post a pretty picture, so as to cleanse the visual palate of the ol' Patio Boat after it's been sleeping the last couple of months. More actual posts coming this year, but for now please enjoy a mid-winter view in black and white.
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