Republican attacks on elections infrastructure continue

“People are free to vote in The Soviet Union because their votes mean nothing. The people who count the votes mean everything.” --- paraphrasing the well-known authoritarian Joseph Stalin, expressing the well-known authoritarian attitude toward elections (the attribution is false, Stalin didn’t say that, but I’m sure he wishes he did)

By now, it is clear to almost everyone who can accept it. The Republican Party has become authoritarian and most of its rank and file still falsely believe the 2020 election was stolen. In response, Republican politicians and average voters nationwide are continuing to directly attack the infrastructure that used to protect election integrity. In at least 17 states where the ARP (authoritarian Republican Party) is in power, laws to suppress votes and/or rig elections have been passed. The election rigging laws allow the ARP to simply invalidate an election vote they dislike. There may be nothing unconstitutional about this. State legislatures may be able to nullify any elections they want to nullify for any real or fake reason or no reason.

The elections clause of the Constitution reads as follows: The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of choosing Senators.

The Washington Post writes on the ongoing ARP effort to subvert elections:

In Michigan, local GOP leaders have sought to reshape election canvassing boards by appointing members who expressed sympathy for former president Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 vote was rigged.

In two Pennsylvania communities, candidates who embraced election fraud allegations won races this month to become local voting judges and inspectors.

And in Colorado, 2020 doubters are urging their followers on conservative social media platforms to apply for jobs in election offices.

A year after local and state election officials came under immense pressure from Trump to subvert the results of the 2020 White House race, he and his supporters are pushing an ambitious plan to place Trump loyalists in key positions across the administration of U.S. elections.

The effort goes far beyond the former president’s public broadsides against well-known Republican state officials who certified President Biden’s victory, such as Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey. Citing the need to make elections more secure, Trump allies are also seeking to replace officials across the nation, including volunteer poll watchers, paid precinct judges, elected county clerks and state attorneys general, according to state and local officials, as well as rally speeches, social media posts and campaign appearances by those seeking the positions.

If they succeed, Trump and his allies could pull down some of the guardrails that prevented him from overturning Biden’s win by creating openings to challenge the results next time, election officials and watchdog groups say.

“The attacks right now are no longer about 2020,” said Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D). “They’re about 2022 and 2024. It’s about chipping away at confidence and chipping away at the reality of safe and secure elections. And the next time there’s a close election, it will be easier to achieve their goals. That’s what this is all about.”

A spokesman for Trump did not respond to a request for comment. [no surprise there]

Supporters of the former president who are seeking offices that would give them oversight of elections say they just want to make the system secure. 

Voters have a right “to scrutinize the election process,” Kristina Karamo, a candidate for Michigan secretary of state, told several hundred demonstrators gathered on the lawn of the state Capitol in Lansing last month in support of a “forensic” audit of the 2020 results. 

One leader of the effort to challenge the 2020 vote in the state, West Michigan lawyer Matthew DePerno, is seeking the GOP nomination for attorney general. DePerno, who waged a failed legal battle over an election-night vote-counting error in Antrim County, has built his campaign around a vow to expose fraud.

“The elites in this state, the elected officials they don’t want you — the voter, the common man, the taxpayer — they don’t want you to see the voting data,” DePerno told the cheering crowd at the Lansing rally, adding: “The Democrats and the establishment don’t understand the power of the grass roots movement in Michigan.” 

“This is a great big flashing red warning sign,” said Jeff Timmer, former chair of the Michigan Republican Party and a Trump critic. “The officials who fulfilled their legal duty after the last election are now being replaced by people who are pledging to throw a wrench in the gears of the next election. It tells you that they are planning nothing but chaos and that they have a strategy to disrupt the certification of the next election.”

In Genesee County, home of Flint, Michelle Voorheis, a 13-year Republican veteran of the county canvassing board, said in an interview that she believes the local GOP committee did not renominate her this year because she defended the outcome of the last election on social media.

The fact that elections were secure in 2020 makes no difference in ARP ‘thinking’ or propaganda. Voters are told they can scrutinize the process. But now the process can be subverted and nullified by partisan legislatures or partisan elections officials for partisan advantage. All the voter scrutiny in the world cannot affect toxic partisanship that subverts elections. 

ARP promises of transparency do not have to be kept because transparency for the public has not been put into any ARP election laws. Some ARP politicians and propagandists claim they want voters to see the voting data. In fact, seeing election subversion is consistent with the ARP's unjustified attacks on elections and voting rights. Transparency for voters has nothing to do with it. 

Thus it is reasonable to believe that ARP politicians and operatives would hide that data if they choose to nullify an otherwise valid election result. The ARP is no fan of transparency or inconvenient truth. Opacity and mendacity is the normal mode of operations for the elites who run the ARP.

We will have to wait for the 2022 and 2024 elections to see how badly the ARP has damaged elections and voting rights. The time of free and fair elections in America just might have come to an end. 

Questions: 

1. Was the 2020 election stolen as the ARP elites and rank and file constantly claim to the public, and as it relies on to justify voter suppression and election rigging laws, and the ARP’s overt efforts to oust honest elections officials? 

2. Is seeing ARP laws and actions as attacks on election integrity consistent with what the ARP is has done and still is doing to election infrastructure? If not, then why is the ARP doing what it is clearly doing and has done by (i) passing Republican elections-related laws in some states, and (ii) opposing a proposed voter protection law in congress? 

3. Do ARP claims of transparency for voters ring true, or is that just more ARP mendacity?

4. Do Democrats and the establishment not understand the power of the grass roots movement in Michigan as one ARP politician claims, or do rank and file ARP supporters in Michigan not know they have been deceived and arguably betrayed by ARP elites?

Changes in Evangelical Christianity and its involvement in politics

Context

I have a deep concern for the future of American democracy, the rule of law, civil liberties and social respect for facts and truth. I see a non-trivial possibility of the rise of an authoritarian American state with politics akin to fascism. The 2022 and 2024 elections should shed light on what direction American is likely to go in. Democracy does fall to  recently passed Republican Party vote suppression and election rigging laws in at least 17 states. If that happens, authoritarianism could rise. In that scenario, the American experiment would have ended, probably for a very long time. 

Two forces seem to be the key drivers of the rise of radical right authoritarianism in the modern Republican Party. One is special interest money working in the name of laissez-faire capitalism and unregulated markets. Those politics usually operate at the expense of the public interest, including the environment. That political force has been around at least since the mid to late 1800s. Lately, it has come to significantly control the GOP. 

The other is the rise of radical right evangelical fundamentalist Christian nationalism. That is a more recent source of influence in the GOP. Its modern origin arguably arose primarily with the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that desegregated public schools and the fall of Jim Crow laws in the 1960s after federal voting and civil rights laws were passed. Those events enraged many religious conservatives and they are still enraged today. They were galvanized against the precipitating events and started to involve conservative Christianity directly in politics. 

The backlash against Christian nationalism

Today, there is a backlash within the political Evangelical Christian movement. Most young people are leaving it, often at least partly because they dislike church involvement in politics. They appear to see conservative political Christianity as a perversion of Christianity and Christian teachings and morals. An Oct. 24, 2021 article in The Atlantic, The Evangelical Church is Breaking Apart, describes what is happening. If too many young people leave the religious conservative movement, its power in the GOP might wane to a point where it is no longer a major force in the party or a major threat to democracy. The Atlantic writes:

The election of the elders of an evangelical church is usually an uncontroversial, even unifying event. But this summer, at an influential megachurch in Northern Virginia, something went badly wrong. A trio of elders didn’t receive 75 percent of the vote, the threshold necessary to be installed.

“A small group of people, inside and outside this church, coordinated a divisive effort to use disinformation in order to persuade others to vote these men down as part of a broader effort to take control of this church,” David Platt, a 43-year-old minister at McLean Bible Church and a best-selling author, charged in a July 4 sermon.

Platt said church members had been misled, having been told, among other things, that the three individuals nominated to be elders would advocate selling the church building to Muslims, who would convert it into a mosque. In a second vote on July 18, all three nominees cleared the threshold. But that hardly resolved the conflict. Members of the church filed a lawsuit, claiming that the conduct of the election violated the church’s constitution.

Platt, who is theologically conservative, had been accused in the months before the vote by a small but zealous group within his church of “wokeness” and being “left of center,” of pushing a “social justice” agenda and promoting critical race theory, and of attempting to “purge conservative members.” A Facebook page and a right-wing website have targeted Platt and his leadership. For his part, Platt, speaking to his congregation, described an email that was circulated claiming, “MBC is no longer McLean Bible Church, that it’s now Melanin Bible Church.”

What happened at McLean Bible Church is happening all over the evangelical world. Influential figures such as the theologian Russell Moore and the Bible teacher Beth Moore felt compelled to leave the Southern Baptist Convention; both were targeted by right-wing elements within the SBC.

“The divisions and conflicts we found are intense, easily more intense than I have seen in my 25 years of studying the topic,” he [a religious sociologist researcher] told me. What this adds up to, he said, is “an emerging day of reckoning within churches.”

The root of the discord lies in the fact that many Christians have embraced the worst aspects of our culture and our politics. When the Christian faith is politicized, churches become repositories not of grace but of grievances, places where tribal identities are reinforced, where fears are nurtured, and where aggression and nastiness are sacralized. The result is not only wounding the nation; it’s having a devastating impact on the Christian faith.

The first step was the cultivation of the idea within the religious right that certain political positions were deeply Christian, according to [historian George] Marsden. Still, such claims were not at all unprecedented in American history. Through the 2000s, even though the religious right drew its energy from the culture wars—as it had for decades—it abided by some civil restraints. Then came Donald Trump.

“When Trump was able to add open hatred and resentments to the political-religious stance of ‘true believers,’ it crossed a line,” Marsden said. “Tribal instincts seem to have become overwhelming.” The dominance of political religion over professed religion is seen in how, for many, the loyalty to Trump became a blind allegiance. The result is that many Christian followers of Trump “have come to see a gospel of hatreds, resentments, vilifications, put-downs, and insults as expressions of their Christianity, for which they too should be willing to fight.”

“What we’re seeing is massive discipleship failure caused by massive catechesis failure,” James Ernest, the vice president and editor in chief at Eerdmans, a publisher of religious books, told me. Ernest was one of several figures I spoke with who pointed to catechism, the process of instructing and informing people through teaching, as the source of the problem. “The evangelical Church in the U.S. over the last five decades has failed to form its adherents into disciples. So there is a great hollowness. All that was needed to cause the implosion that we have seen was a sufficiently provocative stimulus. And that stimulus came.”

But when people’s values are shaped by the media they consume, rather than by their religious leaders and communities, that has consequences. “What all those media want is engagement, and engagement is most reliably driven by anger and hatred,” Jacobs argued. “They make bank when we hate each other. And so that hatred migrates into the Church, which doesn’t have the resources to resist it.”

Scott Dudley, the senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Washington, refers to this as “our idolatry of politics.” He’s heard of many congregants leaving their church because it didn’t match their politics, he told me, but has never once heard of someone changing their politics because it didn’t match their church’s teaching.

The article goes on to discuss interviews with pastors who see the problem. One historian points out that Trump did not appear out of no where. She argues that Trump represents the fulfillment, not the betrayal, of many of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values. American evangelicals worked for decades to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism. She defines Christian nationalism as “the belief that America is God’s chosen nation and must be defended as such.” That attitude which is a good predictor of attitudes toward things like immigration, race, guns and non-Christians. 

One expert asserts that the former president normalized discourse shocking rhetoric. He asserts that the “pugilism of the Trump era, in which anything short of cruelty is seen as weakness.” The problem facing the evangelical Church, then, is not just that it has failed to inculcate adherents with its values—it’s that when it has succeeded in doing so, those values have not always been biblical.

Some have resigned and some left the ministry entirely. Many Evangelical churches have become a hostile environment. Insufficiently incorrect pastors are slandered and demeaned by disrespectful and angry congregants. In some cases, organized groups of congregants demand firing of insufficiently correctly political pastors. These politicized Evangelicals tend to be more driven by political agendas than spiritual matters.

USA Today writes:

Division is causing people to abandon Christian churches. Last year, Barna found that the share of practicing Christians has dropped nearly in half since 2000. Gallup recently reported that U.S. church membership fell below 50% for the first time in eight decades.

But how many are leaving political Christian nationalism and how fast are they going? FiveThirtyEight writes in an article entitled The nones are growing, but it’s hard to know exactly how many there are:

By nearly all measures, the nones now represent at least a fifth of all American adults, rivaling Catholics and evangelical Christians as the nation’s largest cohort in terms of religious faith (or lack thereof). They are the fastest-growing religious/nonreligious cohort — the nones went from 12 percent of American adults in 1998 to 16 percent in 2008, to 24 percent in 2018, according to data from the General Social Survey. Gallup puts this group at about 21 percent. Pew Research Center says 26 percent. The Cooperative Election Study suggests their ranks are even larger, at about 32 percent.  

Part of that decline is about young people — elderly members of these denominations [mainline Protestant churches and Catholicism] who die are not being replaced by a younger cohort. But older people are now increasingly shifting from Christian to unaffiliated too — particularly older people who lean left politically. As a result, mainline Christianity is not only declining but becoming more conservative. Between 2008 and 2018, three of the largest mainline traditions (the United Methodists, the Episcopalians and the United Church of Christ) all became more Republican.

It’s fair to say that both the mainline and evangelical traditions in the United States are losing members. But that seems to be happening a bit asymmetrically. Evangelicalism is undoubtedly down from its peak in the early 1990s. But it’s reached a bit of a stasis in recent years, being buoyed by some inflows from the mainline tradition and enough younger families to offset some of the losses through death.

Questions: 

1. Is it reasonable to believe that conservative, political Christian nationalist fundamentalism is going to decrease such that the threat to democracy and the rule of law recedes before some form of radical right authoritarianism with staying power is installed by the GOP? Or, is it too early to predict?

2. Does the political Evangelical rhetoric The Atlantic article quoted sound or look a lot or exactly like standard post-Trump Republican Party rhetoric, talking points and behaviors?

America's commercial future?

The New York Times hypothesizes about what the consumer commercial landscape will look like in 2041:

Starbucks, whose longtime chief executive Howard Schultz pioneered a new wave of liberal corporate activism in the early part of the century, still dominates the coffee scene in college towns and blue-state urban centers. But Black Rifle Coffee, now publicly traded with a $250 billion valuation, is flourishing in suburbs across the country and in cities large and small across the Deep South and Mountain West.

Online, the partisan rift is equally wide. Facebook has become essentially a one-party site, a forum for conservatives — and occasionally for conspiracy theorists — to discuss the perils of immigration and excessive government regulation. Snapchat has become the go-to social network for liberals to share videos calling for voting reform and raising taxes for social programs.

“This is permanently part of the social context of business,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at Yale’s School of Management who has helped chief executives formulate their responses to hot-button issues. “It’s the job of C.E.O.s to elevate issues and explain how it matters to them.”

Yet for the most part, corporations did their best to steer clear of the culture wars.

The 2016 election of Donald J. Trump changed all that. Mr. Trump’s positions on issues ranging from immigration to race relations to climate change forced companies to make their positions clear. Oftentimes, under pressure from employees and customers, corporations broke with the president. After Mr. Trump equivocated in his response to an outburst of white nationalist violence in Charlottesville, Va., for example, two advisory councils stacked with prominent business leaders disbanded, with many of them repudiating the president and his response.

More than four years of this dynamic finally led many senior Republicans to begin pushing back against big business. This year, as companies rallied against restrictive new voting laws being advanced by Republicans around the country, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky told chief executives to stay in their lane.

“My warning, if you will, to corporate America is to stay out of politics,” he said in April. “It’s not what you’re designed for. And don’t be intimidated by the left into taking up causes that put you right in the middle of America’s greatest political debates.”

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida posted a video in which he called companies speaking out against Republican laws “woke corporate hypocrites.”

And Stephen Miller, an adviser to Mr. Trump, said on Twitter that big businesses were “openly attacking sovereign U.S. states & the right of their citizens to secure their own elections,” in what he called “a corporate ambush on Democracy.”  

John Schnatter, the founder of Papa John’s International, was ousted from the pizza chain he founded after uttering a racial slur on a corporate conference call. He recently called his exit from the company he started “a crucifixion,” blaming the “progressive elite left” for his downfall.

The hypocrite pot calling the kettle black

Rubio calls companies that speak out woke corporate hypocrites if they speak against bad things the authoritarian GOP does. The hypocrite is the Rubio and the rest of the GOP leadership, not corporations that speak out. Remember, it was the GOP that gave corporations free speech rights, calls them people, calls campaign contributions free speech and coddles them with tax breaks and deregulations that aid in profits and/or disadvantage consumers. 

Republican hypocrisy here is unlimited and shameless.

Even more ghastly in the hypocrisy and lies department is McConnell’s warning to corporate America is to stay out of politics because it’s not what corporations are designed for. Like hell corporations aren't designed for politics. They have been doing politics for decades, but just in private and secrecy. What in tarnation does McConnell think corporate lobbyists who secretly lobby himself and other Republicans (and Democrats) in congress are doing? They are demanding their quid pro quo return on investment for their campaign contribution participation in pay-to-play politics. That's called politics whether the public knows about it or not.

Equal to McConnells hypocrisy and lies is Miller’s assertion that criticism of GOP voter suppression and election rigging laws amounts to a corporate ambush on Democracy. The GOP is ambushing democracy, not corporate critics of the ambush.

The shamelessness is just breathtaking. 

How likely that the hypothesis will turn out to be about right is unclear. Probably unlikely. Companies are quietly backing off from the little spate of criticism after the 1/6 coup attempt. They are quietly reopening the campaign contribution taps to Republican authoritarians all over the country. The spasm of corporate social conscience has subsided in view of how incredibly deregulated and profitable it will be to help authoritarian Republican politicians finish ambushing and killing democracy.

Or, is that assessment of corporate morals, or lack thereof, too harsh and unreasonably inaccurate?

Boycott Papa John's!

A coordinated corporate attack on the free press

The Atlantic writes in an article entitled A Secretive Hedge Fund is Gutting Newsrooms about the intentional killing of local newspapers for profit and maybe other things. The article starts with a description of the Chicago Tribune's headquarters, which was completed in 1925. The tribune tower was a magnificent building designed by the best architects of the times. The Atlantic writes:

To find the paper’s current headquarters one afternoon in late June, I took a cab across town to an industrial block west of the river. After a long walk down a windowless hallway lined with cinder-block walls, I got in an elevator, which deposited me near a modest bank of desks near the printing press. The scene was somehow even grimmer than I’d imagined. Here was one of America’s most storied newspapers—a publication that had endorsed Abraham Lincoln and scooped the Treaty of Versailles, that had toppled political bosses and tangled with crooked mayors and collected dozens of Pulitzer Prizes—reduced to a newsroom the size of a Chipotle.

Spend some time around the shell-shocked journalists at the Tribune these days, and you’ll hear the same question over and over: How did it come to this? On the surface, the answer might seem obvious. Craigslist killed the Classified section, Google and Facebook swallowed up the ad market, and a procession of hapless newspaper owners failed to adapt to the digital-media age, making obsolescence inevitable. This is the story we’ve been telling for decades about the dying local-news industry, and it’s not without truth. But what’s happening in Chicago is different.

In May, the Tribune was acquired by Alden Global Capital, a secretive hedge fund that has quickly, and with remarkable ease, become one of the largest newspaper operators in the country. The new owners did not fly to Chicago to address the staff, nor did they bother with paeans to the vital civic role of journalism. Instead, they gutted the place.  

[Alden's two founders] are also defined by an obsessive secrecy. Alden’s website contains no information beyond the firm’s name, and its list of investors is kept strictly confidential. When lawmakers pressed for details last year on who funds Alden, the company replied that “there may be certain legal entities and organizational structures formed outside of the United States.”

The Atlantic goes to note that two days after Alden took control of the Tribune, it announced a round of employee buyouts that caused an exodus of journalists. Alden's corporate bloodletting got rid of the Metro columnist who reported on the problems that occupants of a messed up public-housing complex faced. The editor who maintained a homicide database that the police couldn’t manipulate was also pushed out. A quarter of the newsroom was eliminated. Major stories were no longer covered, including stories of corrupt politicians trying to sleaze their way out of legal troubles. Employee moral dropped and more professionals at the paper just gave up and resigned. 

For it’s part, Alden refuses to talk about what it had done or why. A former Tribune reporter commented that the Tribune was dying not because it could not stay alive. Instead, Alden was intentionally killing it: “They call Alden a vulture hedge fund, and I think that’s honestly a misnomer. A vulture doesn’t hold a wounded animal’s head underwater. This is predatory.” 

This was not something new for Alden. After the great recession, the hedge fund started buying newspapers and then later quietly gutted them. The point was profit. Alden’s business model was ruthless and directly on point. Gut the staff, sell the real estate, increase subscription prices, and wring out as much cash as possible before allowing the business to collapse. 

The Atlantic notes that in the past 15 years, more than a quarter of American newspapers have gone out of business. The survivors are smaller, weaker, and generally vulnerable to acquisition. Financial firms now control about half of all daily newspapers, according to an analysis by the Financial Times. That is likely to increase.

Randall Smith and Heath Freeman, the co-founders of Alden Global Capital devised and implemented the business model. They have been purely mercenary, with no interest in even pretending to care about their publications’ long-term vitality or service to the public interest. With this model, the newspapers can be profitable for a number of years before the business collapses.

Randall Smith

Heath Freeman -- claims he wants to save 

local news reporting (no one believes him)

The Atlantic comments on the consequences of the demise of local newspapers:

This investment strategy does not come without social consequences. When a local newspaper vanishes, research shows, it tends to correspond with lower voter turnout, increased polarization, and a general erosion of civic engagement. Misinformation proliferates. City budgets balloon, along with corruption and dysfunction. The consequences can influence national politics as well; an analysis by Politico found that Donald Trump performed best during the 2016 election in places with limited access to local news.

For laissez-faire capitalism and corrupt and/or authoritarian politics, it is undeniably important to control public information. It is thus easy to see why targeting and killing newspapers while profiting in the process would appealing to both corporations and politicians. Bad news gets suppressed, the public remains ignorant and plausible deniability for everything gets to run about as free and wild as unregulated markets and corrupt governments can devise.

The article is long and goes into details of how some local newspapers crumbled under the dead weight of Alden and, as one burned out reporter called them, “the lizard people” who control Alden. 

 

Questions: 

1. It is clear that both big corporations and dictatorship governments have things to hide and would thus would have a keen interest in seeing the corruption of US journalism into a gigantic sham. Therefore, is it reasonable to think that foreign enemies such as the Russian and Chinese governments are among the “certain legal entities and organizational structures formed outside of the United States” that invest in Alden? 

2. Is it reasonable to see what Alden is doing as inherently authoritarian, e.g., because the public becomes less informed and plausible deniability for crimes and fascism easier to deny in the absence of contrary information?

3. Would it be legal or illegal for a politician, billionaire, political party or corporation to secretly invest in Alden, and then ask it to kill a troublesome newspaper? After all, it’s just a business investment. [Seems legal to me.]

Gerrymandering is ending free and fair elections

Not peaceful tourists not peacefully visiting a popular scenic site on 1/6/21

The New York Times writes in an article entitled, G.O.P. Cements Hold on Legislatures in Battleground States:

Democrats were once able to count on wave elections to win back key statehouses. Republican gerrymandering is making that all but impossible.

Republicans are locking in newly gerrymandered maps for the legislatures in four battleground states that are set to secure the party’s control in the statehouse chambers over the next decade, fortifying the G.O.P. against even the most sweeping potential Democratic wave elections.

In Texas, North Carolina, Ohio and Georgia, Republican state lawmakers have either created supermajorities capable of overriding a governor’s veto or whittled down competitive districts so significantly that Republicans’ advantage is virtually impenetrable — leaving voters in narrowly divided states powerless to change the leadership of their legislatures.

Although much of the attention on this year’s redistricting process has focused on gerrymandered congressional maps, the new maps being drafted in state legislatures have been just as distorted.

And statehouses have taken on towering importance: With the federal government gridlocked, these legislatures now serve as the country’s policy laboratory, crafting bills on abortion, guns, voting restrictions and other issues that shape the national political debate.

“This is not your founding fathers’ gerrymander,” said Chris Lamar, a senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center who focuses on redistricting. “This is something more intense and durable and permanent.”

This redistricting cycle, the first one in a decade, builds on a political trend that accelerated in 2011, when Republicans in swing states including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan drew highly gerrymandered state legislative maps.

Since those maps were enacted, Republicans have held both houses of state government in all three places for the entire decade. They never lost control of a single chamber, even as Democrats won some of the states’ races for president, governor and Senate.  

Gerrymandering is a tool used by both parties in swing states as well as less competitive ones. Democrats in deep-blue states like Illinois are moving to increase their advantage in legislatures, and Republicans in deep-red states like Utah and Idaho are doing the same.  

As Democratic voters have crowded into cities and commuter suburbs, and voters in rural and exurban areas have grown increasingly Republican, G.O.P. mapmakers say that they risk running afoul of other redistricting criteria if they split up those densely populated Democratic areas across multiple state legislative districts.

“What you see is reflective of the more even distribution of Republican and right-leaning voters across wider geographic areas,” said Adam Kincaid, the director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust. Trying to draw more competitive legislative districts, he said, would result in “just a lot of squiggly lines.” 

Republicans in the Texas Legislature, however, say that the state’s maps are a fair representation of voters, and that if any districts are unfair, it is largely the result of incumbents on both sides protecting themselves. 

“Incumbents generally get to draw their own maps, so that’s how it’s done — it’s each member being able to draw it for their re-election,” said Briscoe Cain, a Republican state representative from the Houston area. “It’s a big state, we’ve got many regions and cultures. I believe the Texas House reflects those distinctions.”  

In Ohio and North Carolina, however, Republicans are taking a forceful tack. By keeping some districts moderately competitive, they are taking more risks in an attempt to create significant majorities or supermajorities — and in doing so, they are often flouting laws or court decisions.

In Ohio, after Republicans drew themselves supermajorities in both the State House and Senate in 2011, voters approved a ballot initiative creating a bipartisan commission to draw the maps and dictating that “no district plan should be drawn to favor or disfavor a political party.”

But this year, Ohio Republicans ignored the commission, creating a House map that favors roughly 67 percent of G.O.P. seats and a Senate map that gives Republicans an advantage in roughly 69 percent of districts, preserving supermajorities.  

Republicans are “willing to be a bit more aggressive in a state like Ohio and in North Carolina,” said Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice. “They’re daring the courts to strike them down.”

Yes, Democrats gerrymander too. But not in California. But it appears that nationally, Democrats have lost the battle in the war to save democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law. They are losing the war. There is no obvious reason to believe that more than a trivial few, if any, pro-authoritarian voters are going to change their minds in any state, red, blue or whatever.

Republicans argue their advantage and thus moral and political justification lies in larger geographic areas. They have to argue that because they lose in terms of larger populations in smaller areas. They have no choice. For Republicans, power, not population or public opinion counts. That is authoritarianism, not democracy.

The libertarian and Republican brands of authoritarianism hold that property rights, including land area, trump human being rights and well-being. One acre or one million dollar asset gets one vote, but no acres or million dollar assets get ~0.7 vote, or something about like that. Maybe that is the modern equivalent of the old 3/5 vote for slaves back in the bitterly fought and still unresolved fight for a Constitution in the late 1770s. 

Questions: 

1. Is it reasonably fact and reason-based to believe that on the national level the 2022 elections and thereafter will probably (>50% chance) be no longer be a matter of one person one vote, but instead the Republican party and its more than one vote per person will prevail on the national level?

2. Is it plausible to believe that the radical right Republican Supreme Court, which is already hostile to free and fair elections, will intervene to defend the one person, one vote concept?

Some thoughts on religion, politics and the impending storm

A major storm is coming

These are insightful comments about the nature of religious belief and mental reasoning that dcleve and PD posted to a discussion here last October, The Limits of Knowledge:

dcleve: It is only possible to lie to ourselves, if selfhood is "multiple", and we are able to compartmentalize, to ignore conflicts between the "truths" for those subaspects of self.

All worldviews are incomplete, and contain contradictions -- that is one of my claims for pluralism. As none of us can ever construct a single fully coherent worldview, the ability to ignore the risk of logic explosion this implies, seems to be something we have innately, We compartmentalize as an innate skill of feature of our psychology. That brings on the strong possibility of lying to oneself.

People I know who lost their religious view -- "faith" in a different meaning -- "knew" of incompatibilities between that view, and critical issues of truth and/or morality for a while. But for quite some time, if they were asked, they would publicly deny this disconnect. IE -- they were lying to themselves. When one fully admits to oneself that one's religious views appear to be falsified -- that is called a "dark night of the soul", in at least some traditions.

These "dark nights" are transitory. A religious member either finds some other way to reconcile the issue, and bury any further doubts (lie to oneself again), or they leave that religion. 

[My atheist friend] had concluded rationally that his prior [atheist] convictions were themselves less certain than they had seemed to him for so long. (I think atheist worldviews, based on my thinking and experience, face a different set, but basically similar self-incompatibilities to religious views). So he made the leap based on the incompleteness of all worldviews, based on the benefits to his personal life that the leap gave him.

PD: As I said in the last para, I was not thinking about strong and weak fideism, but rather I was taking issue with Harris' claim that we can dispense with the concept of faith and in so doing achieve a better understanding of religiosity. (I think you concurred).

The examples that you give don't really strike me as getting to the heart of "dark night" experiences, much less full on Job-like struggles with suffering and adversity as *parts of * the divine experience (Job suffers not in spite of but because of God, and yet ultimately affirms his love of and trust in God).

I think the greatest challenge to the serious religious person is the problem of suffering apparently senseless yet profound pain and injury in a world understood as God-willed. This is not the sort of thing that can be confined to intellectual arguments, or arguments used to deflect other religions or atheism, or to convert unbelievers, etc. No. These are the sorts of experiences that can shake the most steadfast believers to the core, sometimes resulting in apostasy, and at other times resulting (according to those who report the experiences) with a deepening of faith.

Your description of your friend still sounds to me like the reasoning of the gambler, weighing pros and cons/ costs and benefits, degrees of uncertainty, etc., so as to place his Pascal-like wager. Reading the stories of those in, for example, Aushwitz, one is brought face-to-face with experiences so unholy, inhuman, incomprehensible and, it seems, so incompatible with the Covenant, that even those who kept their faith did so only with the greatest difficulty. Wiesel recounts 3 profoundly religious Jewish scholars in the camp that put God on trial for crimes against humanity and indifference to human suffering, found Him guilty and then said evening prayers, i.e. maintained their religion even in the midst of such heartbreak and pain. This is not a calculation on their part. It is not a cerebral but deeply emotional commitment uninformed by any consideration of gain or reward. They've *just found God guilty of inhumanity.

This is just where many others lose faith (not evidential belief, but confidence even in the goodness of God, and the worthiness of the religious life). The dark night of the soul has less to do, very often, with belief and unbelief. It has more to do with the *quality* of one's religious experience. One loses something deeper than evidential beliefs. One loses *inspiration,* one loses reverence for the Divine, even if the divinity is not called into question as imaginary. Very few human beings are brought into the Hell-scape of Aushwitz; but related *feelings* of being abandoned by God in one's direst hour of need are common enough. Priests and ministers console us by reminding the suffering believer that even Christ on the cross exclaimed, "Father why hast thou forsaken me?" It's important to keep in mind that is not doubting God the Father, but rather addressing him the way one might address a cruel or callous father. So theodicy is less about belief than forbearance in the face of seeming cruelty,evil or absurdity.

These are the sorts of trials and tribulations around which a whole genre of wisdom literature in religion evolved. Few of us can sustain purely unconditional relationships-- and so of course the kind of cost-benefit thinking you describe is part of religious life. But the scope within which such thinking operates is limited. Most of us, at some point or other, are brought to the very brink of that which has explanation--of that which can truly be comprehended. These liminal experiences can be sublimely beautiful or unbearably painful. When they are sublimely beautiful, they may be experienced as Grace or mystical awakenings. But when the threshold of the comprehensible is crossed leaving us with incomprehensible, unbearable seemingly senseless pain (that most find hard to square with omnipotence and the perfect goodness of all-loving God) rationality and evidential beliefs alone may not suffice to carry the religious believer through. 

What is needed to maintain religiosity at such times is a deeper fortitude in the face of evil and abject suffering. Faith is not just confidence in beliefs and principles, but in the ultimate value of the relationship between the Holy and the human. This, like all strong relationships, can't be reduced to logic and epistemology. Faith names something deeper and more elusive than any justifying beliefs. It involves a letting-go of preconceptions and conditions, a trusting openness to the other, whether friend, lover or God. I am not saying faith flies blindly and lacks any justifying beliefs. Only that it requires something more than those. It includes a strong sense of trust and confidence in the unfolding of outcomes that defy easy categorization as assets and liabilities, pros and cons. Since we "see through a glass darkly," we are not really able to know which outcomes are most beneficial and which most harmful, as this Taoist story illustrates:

Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.” The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.” The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.” . . . . . 

In a theistic context, along with the embrace of unknowable consequences, there is an affirmation that God's will for humans is all for the best, even if we do not (cannot) know its content. This becomes harder to maintain when situations result in great pain and loss.

______________________________________________________________________________

Even though I've been an atheist for as long as I can remember, the uncertainty inherent in my belief means there has to be an element of faith there. I had not consciously considered the pragmatism in converting from atheist to theist when circumstances made that the logical choice, as dcleve's friend apparently did. Some others, such as Francis Collins, head of the NIH, converted in three steps from rock solid atheist to doubting atheist to deeply devout Christian. According to his own account, Collins' mental transition was driven purely by the workings of his own mind. He did not mention any external personal circumstances as being relevant. One can wonder how frequent such major mindset changes are in the two scenarios, i.e., change driven by compelling life circumstances vs. change driven purely by mind.

Stepping back to politics, PD's argument about what can bring some people to lose faith makes modern tribe and ideology-driven politics feel to me even more like a religious mindset than before. In his 2012 book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Religion and Politics, psychologist Johnathan Haidt's grouping of both politics and religion in the same general mental category. I was aware of that. 

But the kind of painful experiences that lead some to question God, e.g., senselessly suffering in a Nazi prison camp, but remain faithful reinforce the idea of how rare it is for a major mindset change to occur. Minds really do not change. Facts, truths and sound reasoning are feeble in the face of far more powerful mental processes. There is just too much psychological and social baggage to make mindset chance anything but rare, at least under current circumstances. In my opinion, current toxic circumstances make such mindset transformations even rarer than in normal recent times (~40-50 years ago) when facts, truths and sound reasoning carried more weight with more people in both religion and politics. 

I can clearly see huge storm clouds on the near horizon. The coming authoritarian storm is going to be cruel and painful. The storm is probably going to literally kill some people, something that has arguably already happened as the first small squalls hit home.  

Questions: 

1. Is my reasoning about mindset change and a coming political storm not rationally linked to dcleve's and PD's comments, i.e., am I full of baloney, driven by flawed motivated reasoning and seeing things that are just not there? Are those political storm clouds a personal illusion?

2. Is this discussion just too dark and/or wonky?

American storm troopers

Troopers in Detroit

Some thoughts on fascism

Vice President Henry Wallace

To some people, what the Republican Party has become constitutes some form of fascist or something approaching that. Naturally, Republicans and most conservatives generally strongly dispute that. They consider the GOP and themselves to be democratic patriots valiantly fighting against the Democratic Party and liberal efforts to destroy America, outlaw Christianity and impose some form of evil socialist or communist tyranny. 

A short post at Free Thought Blogs considered what fascism is in a post entitled The different forms of fascism:

The specter of fascism in the US has been raised with the presidency of Donald Trump. While he has openly flirted with neo-Nazis and white supremacists, his defenders have said that his behavior does not imply fascist sympathies.

The problem is that fascism does not take a single form. In an article in the April/May 2020 issue of The Progressive, John Nichols looks back at the warnings that Henry Wallace, a progressive who in 1944 was vice-president to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, gave about the danger of fascism emerging in the US then and what were some of its signs.

“The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way,” argued Wallace in his essay. He charged that those who sought to divide the United States along lines of race, religion, and class could be “encountered in Wall Street, Main Street, or Tobacco Road.”

“Some even suspect,” Wallace wrote, “that they can detect incipient traces of it along the Potomac.”

Wallace did not limit his critique of American fascism to the overt racists and anti-Semites that at least some of the mainstream politicians of his day decried. He was determined to go deeper, to talk about the enablers of the racists and anti-Semites.

“The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others,” Wallace wrote. “The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis.” Rather, he warned of “a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information and those who stand for the KKK type of demagoguery.”

This was a definition of fascism that brought the issues of authoritarianism and totalitarianism, of media manipulation and political machination, home to America. Wallace even saw the prospects of an American fascism in the predictable machinations of big business.

“Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise,” he wrote. “In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself.”

…

Even today, there are debates about how to define fascism, but we recognize now that it cannot be identified by a single rigid set of characteristics. Fascism “takes on the colors and practices of each nation it infects,” author Adam Gopnik observed in 2016. “In Italy, it is bombastic and neo-classical in form. In Spain, Catholic and religious. In Germany, violent and romantic.” He added: “It is no surprise that the American face of fascism would take on the forms of celebrity television.” 

And Henry Giroux, a cultural critic who has written extensively on authoritarianism, says: “Fascism looks different in different cultures, depending on that culture. In fact, it is the essence of fascism to have no single, fixed form.”

 

Wallace’s strong critiques of the enablers of American fascism earned him the ire of the ruling classes and the supporters of big business including, of course, establishment media like the New York Times. Their opposition led to him being denied the re-nomination as vice-president in 1944, replaced by FDR with Harry Truman.

The Nichols essay in The Progressive Magazine includes this: 

Wallace did not limit his critique of American fascism to the overt racists and anti-Semites that at least some of the mainstream politicians of his day decried. He was determined to go deeper, to talk about the enablers of the racists and anti-Semites.

“The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others,” Wallace wrote. “The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis.” Rather, he warned of “a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information and those who stand for the KKK type of demagoguery.”

This was a definition of fascism that brought the issues of authoritarianism and totalitarianism, of media manipulation and political machination, home to America. Wallace even saw the prospects of an American fascism in the predictable machinations of big business.

“Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise,” he wrote. “In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself.”

This was all too much for the editorial page of The Times, which took the extraordinary step of denouncing Wallace’s essay on the very Sunday it was published in the newspaper’s magazine. Decrying what it referred to as the “shrill cries of ‘Fascist’ ” that foster “an atmosphere charged with emotion, suspicion, and bitterness,” the Times editorial accused Wallace of going too far in his denunciations of monopolies and cartels.

“It is astonishing that Mr. Wallace cannot see that in going to such lengths he approaches the very intolerance that he condemns,” the editorial said. The Times was effectively arguing that “it can’t happen here.”  

Wallace initially ignored The Times editorials demanding that he explain what he meant when he spoke of the “American fascist.” But he eventually wrote his famous reply, which filled three pages of its Sunday magazine on April 9, 1944.

“The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact,” Wallace wrote. “Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy . . . . They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.”

The fight against American fascism would not be waged by pointing fingers of blame at this industrialist or that editor, Wallace wrote, but rather by remaining on “guard against intolerance, bigotry, and the pretension of invidious distinction.”

That was the 1940s. Is it true that, as the New York Times wrote that fascism can't happen here, and simply condemning it in blunt terms amounts to something that approaches the intolerance that actual fascism usually evinces? Does what Wallace tried to warn about in the 1940s look a lot like the Republican Party of 2021?

How Joe Manchin and his family makes his money and betrays West Virginia

This 8 minute video goes into some detail about Manchin and his family and how Manchin serves the people of West Virginia. I have argued here before that both Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are corrupt. This gives a hint at how deeply corrupt Manchin really is. This is more evidence that ethics in the federal government is a toothless norm that has been blown to smithereens. Ethics in government is now mostly extinct in view of how corrupt a US Senator can be and not be prosecuted. 

The disappearing small family farm

Jeff Uhler in his 1980s vintage harvester that 

he cannot afford to replace so keeps repairing himself

The New York Times writes about the impossible economic situation that many small and medium sized farms face. The economics are just not there to support small or midscale farming. The NYT writes about a struggling farm family in Nebraska:

In his earliest memories of his family’s farm, Ethan Uhlir rides in an old truck with his grandfather Arden, feeding cattle and mending fences.

Before Arden’s death five years ago, he “reminded me that I was a good cattleman,” Ethan said, and “I have to keep it like that.”

Ethan, now 17, still notices his grandfather’s wiring technique in fence posts scattered across the farm in the rolling plains of northeast Nebraska, along the South Dakota border. He walks along the same paths as six generations of Uhlirs, but Ethan may be the last to work the land.

“There’s enough labor for four people but not enough income for one,” his father, Jeff, said.

Like most farmers, Jeff sells his cattle, corn and soybeans at prices set by a global commodities market, but only large farms can absorb the narrow profit margins.

Though the family’s small farm is valuable — its 880 acres [1.375 sq. mi.] are assessed at $1.3 million — property taxes eat up most of the money it does make.

Even in a good year when the farm grosses $60,000, Jeff feels lucky if he has money left over for savings. [what constitutes a bad year, ~$40,000?]

“I’ll have to work an hour before my funeral,” Jeff, 51, said. “I have no retirement.”

For families like the Uhlirs, farming is increasingly unsustainable, as drought and extreme weather, fluctuating commodity prices and rising costs alter the economics of running a small- to midsize operation. Hundreds of family farms file for bankruptcy each year in the United States, with the largest share routinely coming from the Midwest.

Nebraska’s high property taxes, which it collects from its 93 counties and reapportions, are compounded by Knox County’s shrinking population.

About 8,400 people live in the county, down 26.8 percent over the last 40 years. With fewer taxpayers, farmers who own hundreds of acres must shoulder the cost of schools, roads and other public services. After paying for necessities like fertilizer, seed and pesticides, Jeff must cover a $15,965.68 property tax bill.

Nebraska’s agricultural land property taxes are 46 percent higher than the national average, according to a 2019 report by the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and most farmers pay 50 to 60 percent of their net income in taxes [that seems too high].

Sixty percent of Nebraska property taxes pay for schools.

Next fall, Ethan hopes to pursue an associate degree in nursing. “I don’t think that I would be able to financially support myself just living off the farm,” he said.

On a crisp, bright afternoon in early October, Ethan watched his father weld their broken 1980s combine harvester head, which cuts and threshes corn.

Most of “the equipment we have, my grandfather bought,” Ethan said.

Ethan had once hoped to be named the Future Farmers of America’s “Star Farmer,” just like his grandfather Arden in 1960.

During the 1980s farm crisis, Arden nearly lost the farm. He took on debt and worked to pay it off up until the last few years of his life. His wife, Karen, worked for 16 years in an Alzheimer’s unit at an assisted-living facility in Verdigre.

“They never went to the dentist. They couldn’t afford to,” Jeff said. “They never went on vacation. They never spent any money on each other.”

Seeing his parents struggle, Jeff has avoided debt.

“I’d love to be able to buy land close to me and expand what I do, but there ain’t no way at 51 years old,” he said. “I’d have to live to 160 to be able to pay it off.”

Jeff’s financial situation is worse than previous generations, he said. “Every year, the property valuations get higher and everything else don’t keep up.”

The family has farmed the land for 151 years, he said. “How do I sell it?”

Knox County classifies four soil types when taxing agricultural use of land, and much of Jeff’s soil received the highest rating and a higher tax rate, despite lower yields than farms in other counties with less sandy soil. “We're taxed based on sales and soil composition,” he said. “At no point does rainfall become a factor.” [F]or more than two months, “we didn’t get a drop” of rain. Drought yielded short ears of corn and tiny, pea-sized soybeans.

Farming becomes more challenging as he ages, Jeff says, and he wonders what it will be like without Ethan next year, when he’s at college. “As my helper goes away, things get tougher.”

“At some point, the people raising your food are going to be dead,” Jeff said. “Once we’re gone, we’re not coming back.”

Karen and Jeff Uhler

This story resonated because my dad worked on farms all over Eastern Nebraska years ago. He probably worked on the Uhlir farm at some time or another. I might have worked there with him. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the farm economy was better and small to medium sized farm operations generally did better. The little towns still had some life in them. Now many small towns are withering away. The economy is forcing many family farmers to sell, sometimes to agriculture giants like Cargill ($115 billion revenue in 2020) and ADM ($64 billion).

When the economy does not support something, it has to eventually cease operating or be independently supported somehow. What, if anything, should be done? 

American democracy gets downgraded as it drifts into right wing authoritarianism

American fascists exercising their right to

speech and assembly

“We need to make sure that we're getting to the bottom of some very abnormal, anomalistic, strange or irregular things that happened, so that we don't have a repeat of that. We've got to have confidence in our election.” --- Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX), House Freedom Caucus, 2021

After the 2020 US presidential election Donald Trump refused to concede, alleging widespread and unparalleled voter fraud. Trump’s supporters deployed several statistical arguments in an attempt to cast doubt on the result. Reviewing the most prominent of these statistical claims, we conclude that none of them is even remotely convincing. The common logic behind these claims is that, if the election were fairly conducted, some feature of the observed 2020 election result would be unlikely or impossible. In each case, we find that the purportedly anomalous fact is either not a fact or not anomalous. --- A.C. Eggers, H. Garro, and J. Grimmer, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Nov. 9, 2021, 118 (45)  e2103619118;   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2103619118  

One group of democracy watchers has downgraded America's democracy to "backsliding" status as anti-democratic authoritarianism continues its relentless attacks on democracy. The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance writes: 

Perhaps the greatest blow to democratic ideals was the fall of the people’s government in Afghanistan, which has seen war being waged for the sake of preserving democratic principles. Significantly, the United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale.

This is a story in which democracies are being weakened because the underlying polis—without which no set of democratic institutions is durable—is being rent asunder by different forces, from the polarization nurtured by social media and disinformation to grotesque levels of economic inequality. It is also a tale in which democracies are hollowed out by the citizens’ loss of faith in the ability of democratic institutions to respond to social demands and solve problems, as well as by the toxic disease of corruption, which demolishes any semblance of trust. Add to this the credibility-sapping blunders performed by leading democratic powers over the past two decades—from the invasion of Iraq to the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 and to the violently contested elections in the United States—and the simultaneous emergence of credible alternative models of governance, and we have the equivalent of a witches’ brew for the global health of democracy. The pandemic has simply made that brew thicker and more poisonous.

The Global State of Democracy 2021 shows that more countries than ever are suffering from ‘democratic erosion’ (decline in democratic quality), including in established democracies. The number of countries undergoing ‘democratic backsliding’ (a more severe and deliberate kind of democratic erosion) has never been as high as in the last decade, and includes regional geopolitical and economic powers such as Brazil, India and the United States. 

More than a quarter of the world’s population now live in democratically backsliding countries. Together with those living in outright non-democratic regimes, they make up more than two-thirds of the world’s population.

Electoral integrity is increasingly being questioned, often without evidence, even in established democracies. The former US President Donald Trump’s baseless allegations during the 2020 US presidential election have had spillover effects, including in Brazil, Mexico, Myanmar and Peru, among others.

Democratically elected governments, including established democracies, are increasingly adopting authoritarian tactics. This democratic backsliding has often enjoyed significant popular support.

Authoritarianism is deepening in non-democratic regimes (hybrid and authoritarian regimes). The year 2020 was the worst on record, in terms of the number of countries affected by deepening autocratization.

Disputes about electoral outcomes are on the rise, including in established democracies. A historic turning point came in 2020–2021 when former President Donald Trump questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election results in the United States. Baseless allegations of electoral fraud and related disinformation undermined fundamental trust in the electoral process, which culminated in the storming of the US Capitol building in January 2021.

Over the past two pandemic years, different groups’ varying levels of enjoyment of civil and political liberties have also become apparent. In many of these cases, these inequalities are longstanding; the context of the pandemic, however, has refocused attention on them. In the United States, for example, research indicates that some states’ voter registration and voting laws, either recently approved or currently under discussion, end up disproportionately affecting minorities in a negative way.

CBS News comments on the report:

The United States has joined an annual list of "backsliding" democracies for the first time, the International IDEA think-tank said on Monday, pointing to a "visible deterioration" that it said began in 2019. Globally, more than one in four people live in a backsliding democracy, a proportion that rises to more than two in three with the addition of authoritarian or "hybrid" regimes, according to the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.

"This year we coded the United States as backsliding for the first time, but our data suggest that the backsliding episode began at least in 2019," it said in its report titled "Global State of Democracy 2021."

International IDEA bases its assessments on 50 years of democratic indicators in around 160 countries, assigning them to three categories: democracies (including those that are "backsliding"), "hybrid" governments and authoritarian regimes.

"The visible deterioration of democracy in the United States, as seen in the increasing tendency to contest credible election results, the efforts to suppress participation (in elections), and the runaway polarization... is one of the most concerning developments," said International IDEA secretary-general Kevin Casas-Zamora.

Questions: 

1. Although Republicans claim their new election laws are not intended to suppress votes or rig elections and instead just attack the massive vote fraud that made the 2020 election invalid, is their explanation credible based on facts available to the public and unbiased reasoning?

2. The think tank analysis claims that American democratic deterioration became visible in 2019, but were there earlier signs of decline such as how the Republican Party ignored political norms, e.g., with the Merrick Garland nomination, refusal to compromise and refusal to exercise power in good faith? Or, has the GOP been exercising power in good faith all along, including in its messaging?

The elite conservative Republican mindset: Authoritarian, deceived and enraged

Some of the speakers at the conference

“The left’s ambition is to create a world beyond belonging,” said Hawley. “Their grand ambition is to deconstruct the United States of America. .... The deconstruction of America depends on the deconstruction of American men.”

“The left’s attack is on America. The left hates America,” said Cruz. “It is the left that is trying to use culture as a tool to destroy America.”

“We are confronted now by a systematic effort to dismantle our society, our traditions, our economy, and our way of life,” said Rubio. -- Republican Senators speaking to the National Conservative convention in Orlando, Florida, Oct. 31 - Nov. 2, 2021

A Nov. 18, 2021 article by New York Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks in The Atlantic, The Terrifying Future of the American Right, conveys some direct evidence from the mouths of hard core conservatives about perceptions of reality and other things that are driving them and their toxic brand of politics. These people are terrifying, authoritarian and shockingly deceived. And they are seething with anger and resentment.  TA writes:

Rachel Bovard is one of the thousands of smart young Americans who flock to Washington each year to make a difference. She’s worked in the House and Senate for Republicans Rand Paul, Pat Toomey, and Mike Lee, was listed among the “Most Influential Women in Washington Under 35” by National Journal, did a stint at the Heritage Foundation, and is now policy director of the Conservative Partnership Institute, whose mission is to train, equip, and unify the conservative movement. She’s bright, cheerful, and funny, and has a side hustle as a sommelier. And, like most young people, she has absorbed the dominant ideas of her peer group.

One of the ideas she’s absorbed is that the conservatives who came before her were insufferably naive. They thought liberals and conservatives both want what’s best for America, disagreeing only on how to get there. But that’s not true, she believes. “Woke elites—increasingly the mainstream left of this country—do not want what we want,” she told the National Conservatism Conference, which was held earlier this month in a bland hotel alongside theme parks in Orlando. “What they want is to destroy us,” she said. “Not only will they use every power at their disposal to achieve their goal,” but they’ve already been doing it for years “by dominating every cultural, intellectual, and political institution.”

As she says this, the dozens of young people in her breakout session begin to vibrate in their seats. Ripples of head nodding are visible from where I sit in the back. These are the rising talents of the right—the Heritage Foundation junior staff, the Ivy League grads, the intellectual Catholics and the Orthodox Jews who have been studying Hobbes and de Tocqueville at the various young conservative fellowship programs that stretch along Acela-land. In the hallway before watching Bovard’s speech, I bumped into one of my former Yale students, who is now at McKinsey.

Bovard has the place rocking, training her sights on the true enemies, the left-wing elite: a “totalitarian cult of billionaires and bureaucrats, of privilege perpetuated by bullying, empowered by the most sophisticated surveillance and communications technologies in history, and limited only by the scruples of people who arrest rape victims’ fathers, declare math to be white supremacist, finance ethnic cleansing in western China, and who partied, a mile high, on Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express.”  

The atmosphere is electric. She’s giving the best synopsis of national conservatism I’ve heard at the conference we’re attending—and with flair! Progressives pretend to be the oppressed ones, she tells the crowd, “but in reality, it’s just an old boys’ club, another frat house for entitled rich kids contrived to perpetuate their unearned privilege. It’s Skull and Bones for gender-studies majors!” She finishes to a rousing ovation. People leap to their feet.

I have the sinking sensation that the thunderous sound I’m hearing is the future of the Republican Party.  

This is national conservatism pursued to its logical conclusion: using state power to break up and humble the big corporations and to push back against coastal cultural values. The culture war merges with the economic-class war—and a new right emerges in which an intellectual cadre, the national conservatives, rallies the proletarian masses against the cultural/corporate elites. All your grandparents’ political categories get scrambled along the way.  

The NatCons are wrong to think there is a unified thing called “the left” that hates America. This is just the apocalyptic menace many of them had to invent in order to justify their decision to vote for Donald Trump.

They are wrong, too, to think there is a wokeist Anschluss taking over all the institutions of American life. For people who spend so much time railing about the evils of social media, they sure seem to spend an awful lot of their lives on Twitter. Ninety percent of their discourse is about the discourse. Anecdotalism was also rampant at the conference—generalizing from three anecdotes about people who got canceled to conclude that all of American life is a woke hellscape. They need to get out more.

Brooks points out that there are three groups in the NatCon authoritarian movement. The old guard of conservatives over 50 who have been radicalized by liberals and their rhetoric and behavior. Liberal rhetoric about race radicalized one of these people, a Brown University economist. The second group consists of mid-career politicians and operatives who adapting to the populist rage. This group includes Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard), J. D. Vance (Yale Law), and Josh Hawley (Stanford and Yale).

The third and largest group is young Republicans who grew up with Facebook, MSNBC and identity politics. Brooks writes that this group went to “colleges smothered by progressive sermonizing.” That experience turned them into radicalized authoritarian Republicans. Brooks writes that he disagreed with most of what he was hearing at this national conservatism conference in Florida, but he disturbingly mused, “If you were 22, maybe you’d be here too.” That is really frightening. 

NatCons (national conservatives), as they call themselves, see a world in where corporate, media, political and academic elites are all bound together into an axis of evil. According to the NatCon narrative (propaganda and lies), the liberal axis dominates all institutions and it controls the “channels of thought.” One can only wonder, if the channels of thought the that liberals control include Breitbart, Fox News, The Federalist, and the like, these NatCon folks are seriously deluded and way beyond radical extremist conservatism -- they are pure dictator material. 

These people are serious about all of this. And, they are resentful, enraged and organized.

NatCons see big tech companies as part of the enemy axis, despite being long-term major donors to Republicans. Ted Cruz summed the NatCon anti-big tech mindset up for the Florida crowd: “Big Tech is malevolent. Big Tech is corrupt. Big Tech is omnipresent.” The NatCons see America as a surveillance state, with every move monitored in the name of liberal control. The propaganda holds that big tech czars secretly decide what ideas and stories get promoted, what get suppressed as part of how “surveillance capitalism” works day-to-day. 

NatCon martyrdom propaganda includes sad stories of how evil big tech companies like Twitter and Facebook suppressed a New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop. In the minds of NatCons, radical right lies and propaganda are reality and reality is lies and propaganda. That state of affairs is what Hannah Arendt warned the world about in 1951. Brooks writes that NatCon narrative is one where “profiteers of surveillance capitalism see all and control all.” That is the kind of terrifying deep surveillance state that China has made itself into and uses to monitor and control and shape reality, thought and behavior. 

Questions: 

1. Is American big tech and liberal politics really as pervasive and all-powerful as the NatCon narrative says? Do liberals routinely arrest conservative dissidents?

2. If what Brooks writes is basically accurate is it reasonable to see the NatCon movement, or whatever one calls this thing, as authoritarian, mostly deceived by propaganda and lies and/or enraged and resentful?

3. Does this article evince what appears to me to be massive projection by what the the radical right believes and does onto the left, e.g., Ted Cruz arguing “It is the left that is trying to use culture as a tool to destroy America”?  

4. Is there a liberal axis of evil among big tech (which tends to donate to Democrats), liberal academics, etc., that operates in the name of surveillance capitalism with the aims of destroying America and imposing some form of atheist or socialist liberal tyranny?  

Nostalgia: A human emotion that can be manipulated

Nostalgia marketing

The NPR program Throughline broadcast a fascinating 58 minute program, The Nostalgia Bone, on the origins of nostalgia, what behaviors it can lead people to engage in and how it can be manipulated for profit and power. The program description is this: 

The global pandemic has spawned a different type of epidemic, one of an entirely different nature: a nostalgia outbreak. Longing for 'simpler times' and 'better days', many of us have been turning to 90s dance playlists, TV sitcoms, and sports highlights. We're looking for comfort and safety in the permanence of the past, or at least, what we think the past was. But, when it first appeared, nostalgia itself wasn't considered a feeling; it was a deadly disease. This episode traces the history of nostalgia from its origins as an illness to the dominating emotion of our time. And in doing so, we wrestle with its eternal paradox to both hold us back and keep us going.

A couple of points merit mention. In early written sources, nostalgia was described in Homers' ~8th century BC poem Odyssey. Although Homer described nostalgia, the concept had not crystallized into a discrete disease. It was a state of mind. A later Portuguese writer described it as a pleasure you suffer and an ailment you enjoy. Nostalgia has been described in essentially all cultures.

10:00 Centuries later, it was identified by an inquisitive 19 year old medical student, Johannes Hoffer, in the 1680s as a serious disease after he became aware of a strange new set of previously unrecognized symptoms. Nostalgia had appeared in a group of Swiss mercenaries with symptoms that included fainting, voice and visual hallucinations, serious depression, lack of appetite, inability to fight and intense homesickness and longing for home cooked food. The symptoms were contagious and more mercenaries succumbed to the disease as time passed. The symptoms appeared to be triggered by the onset of autumn. 

Hoffer wrote his medical dissertation on this new disease and he named it nostalgia, based on the Greek words nostos and algia, roughly 'the ache for home.' Hoffer described one symptom as "stupidity of the mind based attending to nothing hardly other than the idea of the fatherland." This arose in mercenaries in foreign countries with alien customs and Hoffer believed that the afflicted simply did not know how to accustom themselves to local culture, foods, manners and other customs. Some of the afflicted mercenaries may have died from nostalgia (some death certificates named nostalgia as the cause of death). 

The only treatment of the time was to send the afflicted person back home for a while to recover. Army generals of the time found that treatment to be unacceptable, so they tried to suppress the rise and spread of nostalgia in their soldiers by banning things that reminded the troops of home, e.g., popular songs from home were banned and the afflicted were put in isolation, which tended to make the problem worse. 

18:00 Written records show that nostalgia spread with the rise of imperialism. It was seen in British soldiers in India and in French troops outside France. One aspect of being a soldier, usually a young person, is experiencing a loss of control relative to life before the confines of military life asserted itself. 

Some American soldiers in the US Civil War experienced serious bouts of nostalgia, so they were encouraged to write letters to fend off the disease. Soldiers in the Civil War who did not experience nostalgia were observed to be ones who tended to be solidly ideologically committed to their cause. Slave owners came to believe that their slaves captured in Africa were incapable of forming any attachments to their homes or families and thus could not experience nostalgia or homesickness. Emotions could not apply to property, including slaves. 

The 1800s medical establishment shared that false belief and thus did not even consider it or write about it, leaving very little written record on the subject. Signs of nostalgia were categorized to conform with the false belief. Thus slaves who tried to run away in hopes of getting back home were diagnose with a slave disease such as "the madness to flee the plantation" or a pseudoscientific label. The prescribed treatment of such slave diseases was regular whippings for slaves. Similar White-centric responses arose when Indians were forced off their lands, their feelings were trivialized, e.g., American Indians forced off their land would feel no different from White settlers leaving the East to settle in the West. President Andrew Jackson saw no difference subjugated Indians forced off their land against their will to places with no prospects, and White folks deciding to move West to seek their fortune. 

{Comment: The point of this state of denial for slave owners and Whites who displaced American Indians is obvious now but was unknown then (more accurately, unacceptable then), namely defense against cognitive dissonance. Slave owners and Indian abusers needed to believe that slaves and Indians were not partly or fully human and therefore not either susceptible to human emotions and feelings or came from causes no different that what ordinary White people would experience. The power of motivated reasoning is on display in that blast of blatant social self-deception. The contrary evidence was obvious and undeniable, yet it was unseen and thus there was no need for White people in power to deny anything.}

23:00 It turned out that sending people home to cure nostalgia usually did not work. Sometimes, home had changed. Sometimes people had false memories of what home was really like. Feelings of nostalgia spread from soldiers who returned home to local residents. The medical community was baffled. The idea that slowly seemed to make more sense was that nostalgia was associated more with time than longing for a home or place. Change was what was triggering nostalgia. The medical community stopped looking for Hoffer's postulated broken "nostalgia bone" (physical cause) and started to believe that nostalgia had a mental cause that arose in reaction to modernity itself and the constant changes it imposed on people. 

More and more people were moving to respond to more rapidly changing conditions and opportunities, and a loss of control tended to accompany the changes. Rural people moved to towns and worked in factories under a boss instead of working for themselves on farms. Even people who did not move were also facing significant changes, e.g., mechanization of agriculture. Modernity forced time itself to be viewed differently to adapt to the demands of industrialization and the ever more intrusive global economy.

The backlash to industrialization was the rise of romanticism, sentiment and emotion in literature, art and philosophy. It was a backlash against the enlightenment, reason and rationalism. Nostalgia was absorbed into the romanticism movement. The poetry of English poet William Wordsworth fostered the integration of nostalgia into the backlash movement, e.g., in his nostalgic unattainable thing (the fictional woman Lucy) poems. This backlash movement was global, not just Western. In view of impending uncertainty from modernity, people were grasping for the past by latching onto the certainty in (sometimes false -- usually?) memories of how life and they themselves used to be. 

35:30 It took until the 1960s for the medical community to finally accept the idea that nostalgia was a mental state of mind, not a physical malady. Science was starting to accept the idea that nostalgia was a mood or emotion. Once nostalgia came to be seen as not serious or pathological, the business community immediately started asking, how can we use this for profit? How can marketers direct those normal human feelings to generate sales and profit? 

In 1974, the TV series Happy Days came on the scene as a nostalgia marketing vehicle. It was all about growing up in the Midwest in the 1950s, with the drive-ins and hair gel and leather jackets, i.e., the Fonz. Ads sold homes linked to the 1950s, a time when jobs were more stable and homes more affordable. The appeals were directed to White middle class Americans. Product life cycles were extended by appealing to nostalgia to sell products at the end of their run of consumer popularity. The "nostalgia tail" was added to marketers' conception of the product life cycle. (Anyone up for a "classic" pet rock? Hula-hoops anyone? Re-runs of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air?) Marketers were laser focused on how to milk profit out of this new found source of human manipulability. A whole new area of the human mind to sell to. Exciting times for sure. 

44:30 The 1970s were the start of a massive nostalgia-based marketing wave. It or successors to it continues today. But there is a new nostalgia wave going on now, starting about 15-20 years ago. Recent chaos and demographic and social changes have instilled another wave of nostalgia in many Americans. The pandemic is part of the current wave of chaos, crisis and change. Crises and loss of control foster nostalgia. COVID has done that. We get endless Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Law & Order reruns. Nostalgic people tend to spend if they believe they can buy some little sliver of something that are linked to a past they want to hold onto.

48:15 Not surprisingly, playing on nostalgia has oozed into politics. Now things get ugly. The program highlights the ex-president as the prime example of direct appeal to nostalgia in a ruthless political quest for power and money. Make America Great Again is a direct appeal. The origin was with Ronald Reagan and his use of the exact same tag line in the 1980s. That resonated with a lot of people in the 1908s and again in 2016. 

Of course, Biden does the same with Build Back Better. The question is what are the goals and underlying morals behind the appeals? 

Depending on how it is used, nostalgia can hold individuals, groups of people and even whole societies back. That is something that both marketers and politicians can and do use to their advantage. By fostering an ongoing low-level state of nostalgia, corporations and politicians keep people engaged and buying or supporting. Nostalgia is used to cloak or fog the past much more than it is used to reveal past reality. Nostalgia in the hands of emotional manipulators is more about the present than the past. It is used to deceive and manipulate.

Nostalgia can also be use to help people cope with loneliness, sadness, anger or grief if that is one's intention, e.g., grief over what is happening to the environment. The Throughline hosts postulate that as political, social and environmental concerns intensify, feelings of nostalgia will become more prominent. People will become more susceptible to nostalgia-based deceit and manipulation. They warn that society needs to become aware of this aspect of the human mind to help ward off people who use dark arts on feelings of nostalgia to achieve their self-serving ends.

Nostalgia, like all other aspects of the human mind that can be appealed to, will be used for both good and bad. The question is how well will society cope in the face of (i) intensifying environmental and social concerns, and (ii) ongoing efforts by bad people to divide, deceive and manipulate using nostalgia as their weapon.