Dem party update: Another Hitler-djt comparison

A recent poll reveals moderate disconnects between younger Democrats and party leaders. The main point of agreement is support for legalized nationwide abortion rights. 

The main disappointment with this is that the lowest priority for young Dems is trying to control the corrosive, corrupting, anti-democracy power of money in politics. Older Dems are more concerned about money.

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The Telegraph writes: 

We are witnessing the death of American democracy

Historian Sir Richard Evans says this Preußenschlag (Prussian coup) of July 1932 was the critical moment in inter-war Germany, opening the door for much that followed.

What Donald Trump has done by activating the California National Guard against the protest of the governor, and then bringing in US Marines – both of which his critics argue are unconstitutional – is a very light version of Preußenschlag, but in some ways it is worse. The street protests in Los Angeles were the result of his own theatrical stunt. You could be forgiven for thinking he deliberately provoked the alleged “rebellion” in order to set this precedent.

One can see now why Trump moved so fast to purge the top echelons of the US defense department, including the three judge advocates general. These officials rule on whether military orders are legal, and when they should be disobeyed. They are legally independent by Congressional statute.

Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, told us why they had been sacked: it was to stop them posing any “roadblocks to orders given by the commander-in-chief”. (emphasis added)

So there it is, djt does not want any lawyers telling him if his military orders are legal or not. He just wants to US military to do what he orders them to do, even if it means mowing people down in the streets. That amounts to dictatorship.

Political irrationality update

“. . . . the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. . . . cherished ideas and judgments we bring to politics are stereotypes and simplifications with little room for adjustment as the facts change. . . . . the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. Although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.” -- Social scientists commenting on the human state of affairs in politics -- Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, 2016, quoting Joseph Schumpeter's 1942 book, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy

Yahoo reports on some recent poll data. A fair number of Americans seem to be confused about what constitutes a crime. Maybe this is what reconstructing politics on a simpler model looks like. Assuming this data is accurate, human political reconstruction can have significant partisanship, uncertainty, distrust and/or infantile analysis in it.

44% say djt committed crimes

53% approve of djt's conviction for his felonies

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No wonder we're being run by nincompoops, blithering idiots, bigots, crackpots, grifters, liars, traitors and criminals. We can't even agree on what a crime is or what a conviction in court means. 

Majority opinion: US presidents get unfair trials because

they get unreasonably harsh treatment

Germaine: US presidents get unfair trials because

they get unreasonably lenient treatment

Plurality (45%): djt got not harsh enough treatment

Germaine: djt got not harsh enough treatment

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Q: Are we rational or what?

Ghastly MAGA updates: djt denies lethal reality; Bigoted MAGA USSC screws the LGBQT community, again

A NYT analysis piece (not paywalled) makes clear what we already knew, namely that when facts or truths are inconvenient, djt denies them: "Trump, Iran and the Specter of Iraq: ‘We Bought All the Happy Talk’ -- Today, Trump allies argue that coming to the aid of Israel by dropping 30,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on Fordo, Iran’s most fortified nuclear site, could be a one-off event that would transform the Middle East. There is a dispute over intelligence between Tulsi Gabbard, Mr. Trump’s director of national intelligence, who said in March that Iran was not actively building a nuclear weapon, and Mr. Trump, who retorted on Tuesday that “I don’t care what she said.” Iran, he added, was in fact close to a nuclear weapon."

There it is, djt does not care what reality is. He cares only about what he wants to believe, true, false, idiotic or lethal. The reality is that Iran was not close to a nuclear bomb. djt simply does not care about inconvenient US intelligence analyses. I think the day is close at hand when djt will fully neuter US intelligence capacities and simply dictate what he personally wants to believe the threat situations is.

And, just like the idiot US neocons who thought that the 2003 Iraq war would be fast, easy, low cost and decisive, they now believe that blowing major Iranian nuclear facilities to smithereens will be fast, easy, low cost and decisive. The NYT analysis points out that some of the same prominent neocon ideologues who wanted war in Iraq now want war with Iran, e.g., Bill Kristol. 

Q: Is djt a dangerous lunatic?

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The Raw Story reports about a recent anti-LGBQT USSC decision that seriously undermines the equal protection civil liberty. In this lawsuit, the authoritarian,, Christian nationalist MAGA judges, all haters of the evil LGBQT community, held that a clearly discriminatory and unconstitutional law was constitutional and not discriminatory. To arrive at that crackpot decision, the MAGA judges blew off precedent and did an end run around equal protection law using dirty tricks. 

Case summary: All six MAGA Republicans on the USSC upheld Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors, including puberty blockers and hormone treatments. Legal experts sharply criticized as clearly discriminatory. Amy Coney Barrett's pro-discrimination concurrence flat out denied heightened constitutional protections for transgender individuals, saying it is not a matter of sex discrimination. Why legally discriminatory? Because the same drugs used to treat non-transgender minors for other clinical situations can still get the same treatments as before. Only treatments of transgender minors are affected. Sotomayor argued in her dissent that the law explicitly conditions medical treatment on whether it enables a minor to "identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor's sex." That is a sex-based distinction.

Dirty tricks: Roberts wrote for the radical Republican majority, arguing that Tennessee's law classifies based on "age" and "medical use" rather than sex or transgender status, thereby avoiding the "intermediate scrutiny" analysis typically applied to sex-based classifications. Instead of analyzing the TN law using normal intermediate scrutiny for cases like this, Roberts applied the "rational basis" analysis for determining whether the TN was was constitutional and discriminatory. Rational basis "analysis" amounts to the court or any party in the lawsuit being able to dream up and argue any "rational basis" for a law to exist. That only requires someone to articulate any reasonably conceivable state of facts that sounds like a rational basis for the law to even exist. In practice, rational basis analysis often upholds even frivolous government laws.

Consequences: Immediately after the USSC published its decision, djt issued broad executive orders targeting transgender people, including orders that (1) recognize only two sexes, male and female, that are "fixed at birth", (2) withdraw federal protections for transgender people in education, housing, and immigration, (3) withhold federal funding from programs that promote "gender ideology", and (4) banning transgender people from serving in the US military.

State legislative anti-LGBQT laws are coming. MAGA's and Christian nationalism's bigoted anti-transgender hate campaign extends beyond federal action. Twenty-six states have enacted laws similar to TN's. This coordinated effort is part of the overall MAGA agenda in Project 2025, which the ACLU says seeks to "dismantle civil rights protections" and "dehumanize transgender people."[1]

Footnote:

1. Project 2025 includes the following explicit attacks on, slanders of, explicit discrimination against, and insane lies and crackpottery about the LGBQT community and the parents of LGBQT children:

• .... children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.

• Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women.

• Reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military.

• Rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics. The President should direct agencies to rescind regulations interpreting sex discrimination provisions as prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, sex characteristics, etc.*

• CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) should repromulgate its 2016 decision that CMS could not issue a National Coverage Determination regarding “gender reassignment surgery” for Medicare beneficiaries. In doing so, CMS should acknowledge the growing body of evidence that such interventions are dangerous and acknowledge that there is insufficient scientific evidence to support such coverage in state plans.**

* That is explicit advocacy of discrimination against the LGBQT community. Period.

** Russ Vought and other Project 2025 authors lied when they wrote that there is a growing body of evidence that transgender medical treatments are dangerous. As of 2019, clinical evidence was that outcomes were (1) generally positive, and (2) not dangerous. Later research on hormone therapies shows generally good mental health outcomes and apparently manageable side effects. A 2024 analysis of 3,134 patients found that gender-affirming surgery was associated with significant improvements in mental health outcomes. Hormone therapy shows consistent benefits for mental health and quality of life with fairly low side effects.

An expert discusses Christian nationalism

One of America's top CN researchers is Katherine Stewart. She wrote a short paper, Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. A few key points.

• Christian nationalism succeeds by cultivating and exploiting a mindset with four key features: the belief in a particular, authentic, and superior identity group within America; the conviction that the members of this group are the most persecuted group in society; the apocalyptic fear that the nation is on the verge of collapse; and an affinity for strongman leadership.

• What exactly is Christian nationalism? For starters, it is not a religion. It is an anti-democratic political ideology as well as a political phenomenon, more specifically a political movement. It appeals to religious ideas and tropes, yet it contains a multitude of denominations and doctrines, lacking internal theological consistency. As a political ideology, the main idea of Christian nationalism is that the United States is defined neither by its commitment to equality nor any other constitutional principle, but rather by its particular national, cultural, and religious heritage; that this heritage is now under existential threat from progressivism, “wokism,” secularism, immigration, and other supposedly anti-American forces; and that the only solution is to turn all power over to an authoritarian leader who is above the law and can defend “real” Americans against the internal enemy.

• Money plays a big role in driving the movement, and big money plays an especially central role. The wealthy funders are a diverse group who overwhelmingly hail from the very top of the economic ladder. They include evangelicals, Protestants, ultra-conservative Catholics, Jews, and even atheistic types–though the latter may adopt a quasi-religious identity for strategic reasons. The movement does invest considerable effort in grassroots fundraising, with donations from individuals, churches, and other conservative and religious organizations funneled into partisan operations. But the biggest piece of the pie comes from this relatively small number of plutocratic donors.

• Among the underappreciated parts of this political machine are the pastor networks that mobilize tens of thousands of conservative-leaning religious and community leaders, who help turn out millions of voters for far-right candidates. Movement leaders understand that their power derives from their ability to drive voters to the polls. Yet this does not mean they aim to satisfy expressed voter preferences or safeguard their interests. On the contrary, they have exploited their power to protect their agenda from democratic influences. The best illustration of this is their relentless focus on capturing and using the courts to impose policy that is broadly unpopular and, by their own admission, would not stand a chance in democratic elections.