Republican neo-fascism in Florida

The New York magazine Intelligencer column writes:

Florida governor Ron DeSantis has pitched himself to the Republican elite as the candidate of “competent Trumpism” — a form of authoritarian populism for conservatives who worried that Donald Trump was squandering his power, not abusing it. A picture of what that would look like in operation can be seen in DeSantis’s thuggish effort to bully Disney into supporting, or at least refraining from opposing, his “Don’t Say Gay” law.

Last week, DeSantis declared at a press conference that Disney “crossed the line” by saying it would support the repeal of DeSantis’s cherished anti-gay legislation. “We’re going to make sure we’re fighting back when people are threatening our parents and threatening our kids,” he warned.

“Fighting back” turns out not to mean refuting or organizing against Disney’s opposition to the law. It means DeSantis using his legislative majority to punish Disney on unrelated legal issues. On Friday, he claimed he was “shocked” to discover Disney has been granted sweeping autonomy to operate in his state:

“I was shocked to see some of the stuff that’s in there. They can do their own nuclear power plant. Is there any other private company in the state that can just build a nuclear power plant on their own? They’re able to do certain things that nobody else is able to do. So I think they’re right to be looking at this and reevaluating and having an even playing field for everybody, I think is much better than basically to allow one company to be a law onto itself.”

Given that this legal status has been widely known for many decades in the state where DeSantis grew up and now serves as chief executive, the governor was no doubt shocked — the same way Captain Louis Renault was shocked to discover gambling in Casablanca.

One obvious tell that DeSantis doesn’t actually care about Disney’s legal status is that his pretext for punishing the firm has changed. On Friday, he cited Disney’s special legal autonomy. The day before, the “special treatment” was a bill regulating social media that exempted theme-park operators.

Another tell is that the latter bill was signed into law by DeSantis with specific input from his staff, as the Tampa Bay Times reports. If Disney’s legislative clout is leading to outrageous favoritism, voters should be furious with DeSantis.

DeSantis is barely making any effort to hide his intentions. As he tells Fox News, “Six months ago, it would have been unthinkable” that Florida Republican legislators “would be willing to reevaluate those special privileges.” It’s almost as if the special privileges have nothing to do with the reason Republicans are looking to punish Disney! Perhaps there is something Disney can put in DeSantis’s hand that would make the thing in his other hand go away.

DeSantis: If Disney Isn’t Stopped from Imposing a ‘Woke Ideology’ It Will Destroy the Country pic.twitter.com/fGcisBn9vL

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) April 1, 2022

DeSantis is trying to establish an understanding that major corporations can expect favorable treatment from the government as long as they play along with the ruling party’s political agenda. They are allowed — nay, encouraged — to get involved in politics on the condition that they take the correct position. But should they take the wrong position, they will find themselves under legal scrutiny. Suddenly, the regulatory noose will tighten.

This is the method Donald Trump used to intimidate firms with employees who gave him a hard time. Amazon lost a lucrative Pentagon contract in retribution for Jeff Bezos’s ownership of the Washington Post, and Trump attempted to block a merger by CNN’s parent company to finish the network.

This is also a method that Trump’s favorite dictators — like Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin — use to control the political debate in their countries. DeSantis spokesperson Christina Pushaw has fired off more than a dozen tweets celebrating Orbán’s victory in Hungary and ridiculing the idea that his regime is repressive or dangerous in any way. When American conservatives tell us Orbán’s version of competitive authoritarianism is the form of government they aspire to, then show us what it would look like in practice, we’d best believe them.

The concept called “competent Trumpism,” besides being an oxymoron, is what authoritarian leadership by Republican Party elites looks like in action. Republican Party elites really do like the unrestrained power of tyrants and the wealth accumulating capacity of kleptocrats. What Republican elites are doing in Florida is what they intend to do to the rest of the country if they ever get the chance.

Also note the iron fist of Christian nationalism in the source of DeSantis' rage at Disney. To Republican neo-fascists, support for gay people amounts to threatening our parents and threatening our kids. Republicans like that are threatening truth, our democracy, our civil liberties and whatever is left of the rule of law (which isn't much when it comes to dealing with the rich and powerful).

The American political and social divide is deepening

It looks like what we are experiencing socially and politically is a new normal that will persist for a long time, maybe many decades. What is happening is deep mindset drift in two apparently opposite directions. Two different realities, identities and, in view of the deceit and false beliefs that accompany the radical right mindset, alleged moralities are emerging and crystallizing.

The New York Times writes on more evidence of what appears to be a growing, probably irreparable mindset split:

After the governor of Texas ordered state agencies to investigate parents for child abuse if they provide certain medical treatments to their transgender children, California lawmakers proposed a law making the state a refuge for transgender youths and their families.

When Idaho proposed a ban on abortions that empowers relatives to sue anyone who helps terminate a pregnancy after six weeks, nearby Oregon approved $15 million to help cover the abortion expenses of patients from out-of-state.

As Republican activists aggressively pursue conservative social policies in state legislatures across the country, liberal states are taking defensive actions. Spurred by a U.S. Supreme Court that is expected to soon upend an array of longstanding rights, including the constitutional right to abortion, left-leaning lawmakers from Washington to Vermont have begun to expand access to abortion, bolster voting rights and denounce laws in conservative states targeting L.G.B.T.Q. minors.

The flurry of action, particularly in the West, is intensifying already marked differences between life in liberal- and conservative-led parts of the country. And it’s a sign of the consequences when state governments are controlled increasingly by single parties. Control of legislative chambers is split between parties now in two states — Minnesota and Virginia — compared with 15 states 30 years ago.

“We’re further and further polarizing and fragmenting, so that blue states and red states are becoming not only a little different but radically different,” said Jon Michaels, a law professor who studies government at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Americans have been sorting into opposing partisan camps for at least a generation, choosing more and more to live among like-minded neighbors, while legislatures, through gerrymandering, are reinforcing their states’ political identities by solidifying one-party rule.

“As states become more red or blue, it’s politically easier for them to pass legislation,” said Ryan D. Enos, a Harvard political scientist who studies partisan segregation. “Does that create a feedback loop where more sorting happens? That’s the part we don’t know yet.”

With some 30 legislatures in Republican hands, conservative lawmakers, working in many cases with shared legislative language, have begun to enact a tsunami of restrictions that for years were blocked by Democrats and moderate Republicans at the federal level. A recent wave of anti-abortion bills, for instance, has been the largest since the landmark 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade.   

Similar moves have recently been aimed at L.G.B.T.Q. protections and voting rights. In Florida and Texas, teams of “election police” have been created to crack down on the rare crime of voter fraud, fallout from former President Donald J. Trump’s specious claims after he lost the 2020 presidential election.  

Carrying concealed guns without a permit is now legal in nearly half of the country. “Bounty” laws — enforced not by governments, which can be sued in federal court, but by rewards to private citizens for filing lawsuits — have proliferated on issues from classroom speech to vaccination since the U.S. Supreme Court declined to strike down the legal tactic in Texas.

From what I can tell, as long as the radical right rank and file remain in the thrall of the propaganda, lies and slanders the elites have trapped them in, nothing is going to change for the better. Loss of liberty, respect for truth and democracy will all be cynically painted as victories for liberty, respect for truth and democracy. All of it is dark free speech, so there is nothing that can or will be done to stop the neo-fascist poison from continuing to flow and gain strength.

Most of the business community has slipped quietly back into line with the Republican Party and is now on the side of American fascism. That is the case despite big corporation propaganda asserting otherwise. The press looks to be too weak, inept and subverted by the profit motive to make much difference any more. Voters are the last line of defense, and as polling seems to indicate, they are more on the side to the neo-fascists than the democrats. Inflation is too Biden's fault, Biden is too sleepy and demented, etc., is what just might dismantle what's left of democracy, the rule of law and the civil liberties we enjoy now.

My personal assessment: ~80% of the blame goes to the Republican Party, laissez-faire capitalism, Christian nationalism and their endless cataclysm of lies, deceit, irrational emotional manipulation and vicious motivated reasoning. The other ~20% goes to everything and everyone else.

Question: Is it irrational or otherwise unreasonable to assign a ~80:20 responsibility split, e.g., because the Republican Party and conservatives are patriots and truth tellers who stand for democracy, truth, the rule of law and civil liberties, not the lying, thieving, tyrannical, socialist, communist, fascist, deep state, red flag, White people and free speech canceling, Christianity-outlawing Democrats and liberals? 

‘We’ve got to stop fooling ourselves’

 Worth repeating:

‘We’ve got to stop fooling ourselves’

Enthusiasm gap keeps getting worse for Dems

The last time the voter enthusiasm deficit was this wide, Democrats lost more than 60 seats in the House.

At the end of October, Republicans held an 11-percentage-point advantage in voter enthusiasm. By January, that margin had ticked up to 14 points. Now, according to the most recent NBC News poll, it has swelled to 17 — a massive advantage that has foreshadowed devastating losses in Congress in prior years.

The latest poll would be bad enough for Democrats. But it’s the trend line that is especially grim, seemingly impervious to a series of events — including President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address and the nomination of a judge to the Supreme Court — that Democrats had predicted might improve their candidates’ prospects in the fall.

It’s beginning to look like nothing is going to bail the party out this year. The last time the enthusiasm gap was this wide, in 2010, Democrats lost more than 60 seats in the House.

“Things could change,” said David Axelrod, previously an adviser to former President Barack Obama, in an email. “But with only a quarter of the country believing things are headed in the right direction, the president sitting at a 40 or 42 [percent] approval and inflation at a 40-year high, the atmosphere clearly is not promising for Democrats to buck historical trends.”

Even without the enthusiasm gap — a measure of voters’ level of interest in the midterm elections — Democrats would be limping toward November. They are saddled with Biden’s weak job approval numbers and have fallen behind Republicans on the generic ballot — two leading indicators of midterm performance.

But now they’re confronting a super-charged Republican electorate, too. In the NBC poll, about two-thirds of Republicans say they have a high level of interest in the midterm elections, compared to half of Democrats. The party’s current enthusiasm deficit is a reversal from 2018, when Democrats retook the House.

The NBC poll wasn’t a one-off. A POLITICO/Morning Consult poll on Wednesday registered a double-digit spread between the share of Democrats and Republicans who are “extremely enthusiastic” about voting in the midterms and a smaller — but still measurable — gap when accounting for voters who say they are only “very” enthusiastic.

More of the ugly details:

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/31/enthusiasm-gap-dems-00021774

Conclusion - and a message to unenthusiastic voters:

The doctor (you) is in…

What do you make of this tweet? Click on link:

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1510332893100453891?s=20&t=8pFK75dHT-2QWgdUtJQ0Tg

-Shocking/stunning

-Right on the money

-Pre-staged for/by the interviewer

-No comment

-Other

Your psychoanalysis please.

Trumpists struggle to define their position on war in Ukraine

Trumpists are now trying to figure out a way to defend their thinly veiled support for Putin and new authoritarianism in Europe by invoking the language of pacifism and "traditional conservative non-interventionism" which contrasts itself with neo-cons, whom they claim have reasserted influence in a GOP now supporting Ukraine. They recently held an "emergency meeting" to discuss this new challenge to their influence, as most Republicans in office have unambgiuously condemned Putin and voted for sanctions and assistance to Ukraine. Politico published this informative article on the "emergency" meeting and the issues it raises for the future of the GOP. (Note that their case for "peace" has nothing to do with the well-being of Ukrainians, or an attempt to imagine a diplomatic solution to the prospect of a long-term war of attrition. As the author states of those who spoke at the meeting: “Kyiv itself was essentially MIA — serving more as a proxy for a dispute about America nationhood than about the country’s own fate as it’s mercilessly pummeled by Putin.”) 

Politico writes in an article published April 2, 2022: 

J.D. Vance was on the warpath. “Using American power to do the dirty work of Europe is a pretty bad idea,” he told a crowd on Thursday, warning against the U.S. getting more involved in Ukraine. “We don’t have that many non-insane people in Washington. I need you to be some of them.” Vance wasn’t speaking at a campaign stop in Ohio, where he is running for the U.S. Senate, but at the Marriott Marquis hotel in downtown Washington. The audience consisted of over one hundred mostly younger conservatives, and he was sounding the alarm about not just foreign intervention, but about other conservatives — the worrisome resurgence of the Republican establishment. The event was the “Up From Chaos” conference, a self-described “emergency” meeting organized by the Trumpian wing of the GOP to grapple with the political fallout from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The young men, almost all of them soberly dressed in dark suits, and women, almost uniformly wearing dresses, listened attentively as one speaker after another warned about the perils of intervention for their very own lives. 

A return to the thinking that led to Iraq and Afghanistan could result in nothing less than World War III over Ukraine, they were warned. And so, as Putin’s deadly and unprovoked assault drags on, the GOP is also going to war — against itself. As so often, the battle revolves around the America First doctrine first espoused by former President Donald Trump in April 2016, during the Republican primaries, at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel, where he promised that he would perform a U-turn in American foreign policy by shunning military intervention abroad. That promise never quite bore out. It was the Democratic President Joe Biden, not Trump, who ended up pulling American troops from Afghanistan. 

Throughout his erratic and volatile presidency, Trump never really gained control of his own national security advisers, hawkish thinkers such as H.R. McMaster and John Bolton who managed, from the perspective of Trump loyalists, to subvert his nationalist foreign policy. 

But Trump did manage to shift conservative thinking about Putin himself, a powerful adversary of the U.S. who wields power with an autocratic strength that Trump and his followers openly admire. Even the invasion of Ukraine has not prompted Trump to alter his fundamentally adoring view of the Russian leader. The most that Trump would concede is that he was “surprised” Putin had invaded. Then Trump reverted to type, trying once more to game the Ukraine crisis (as he did in 2019 during a phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that led to his first impeachment) for his own personal benefit by imploring Putin, during an interview this week on Real America’s Voice network, to release information about Hunter Biden’s nefarious activities. 

Though Trump’s view of Putin may be little changed, the Russian invasion has broken open the uneasy marriage between the followers of Trump, who abhor foreign entanglements, and the hawks of the Republican Party, who have rarely seen a war they didn’t want to enter. After the debacle in Iraq, the neoconservatives who champion a crusading foreign policy based on democracy promotion and regime change came into bad odor. But almost overnight, the hawks are mounting a comeback as a new foreign policy consensus forms in Washington around bolstering the alliance with NATO and standing up to Russian aggression. “The neocons haven’t been able to put points on the board for years,” says Melinda Haring, deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. “With Ukraine, they’re back.” 

Maybe so, but nothing provided a better window into the ideological ferment of the GOP — and the staying power of the Trump wing of the party — than the daylong conference at the Marriott Hotel. Throughout, it became clear that the war on Ukraine is not prompting the Trump-aligned right to back down. Quite the contrary. As William Ruger, a Trump nominee to become ambassador to Afghanistan and the president of the American Institute for Economic Research, told me, “The neocons seem strangely buoyed by the current crisis, and love the Manichaean rhetoric coming out of the White House about this being a fight between democracy and authoritarianism. But the forces of realism and restraint are not going to back down from the fight. 

Unlike twenty years ago, the American public will not swallow neocon bromides.” The participants generally described themselves as “realists” and “restrainers,” and the meeting featured what amounted to realist royalty — politicians and thinkers, ranging from GOP Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Reps. Thomas Massie (Ky.), Dan Bishop (N.C.) and Matt Rosendale (Mont.) to Michael Anton, Sohrab Ahmari, Mollie Z. Hemingway, and, of course, Vance. It was organized by the American Conservative magazine and American Moment, whose self-described mission is to “identify, educate, and credential young Americans who will implement public policy that supports strong families, a sovereign nation, and prosperity for all,” and which features Vance on its board of advisers. 

Their explicit aim is to create a young counter-establishment to the hawkish national security network that has flourished in Washington over the past several decades, one that could funnel ideologically reliable appointees into a future Trump, DeSantis, Cruz or Hawley administration. It was notable that at the conference, speaker after speaker targeted the GOP hawks more often than they spoke about Ukraine itself. Indeed, Kyiv itself was essentially MIA — serving more as a proxy for a dispute about America nationhood than about the country’s own fate as it’s mercilessly pummeled by Putin. The basic argument, outlined in a manifesto titled “Away From the Abyss” appearing in the new Compact magazine, is that aiding Ukraine is tantamount to hurting Ukraine. In resisting de-escalation, the U.S. and its allies, so the thinking goes, run the risk of encouraging hapless Ukrainians to battle to the last man, all in the hopes of pursuing a Western-led regime change policy toward Moscow that might well trigger a global cataclysm..... 

Several of the panelists either avoided talking about Putin or largely elided the brutality of his attempted subjugation of an entire people. But more than a few appear to harbor a conciliatory view of Putin’s prowess that was first enunciated by Patrick J. Buchanan eight years ago in a column in the American Conservative. Buchanan asked, “Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative?  In the culture war for mankind’s future, is he one of us?” The question was pretty much rhetorical. Buchanan’s argument was that America, not Russia, was the bad guy in the world. According to Buchanan, “President Reagan once called the old Soviet Empire ‘the focus of evil in the modern world.’ President Putin is implying that Barack Obama’s America may deserve the title in the 21st century. Nor is he without an argument when we reflect on America’s embrace of abortion on demand, homosexual marriage, pornography, promiscuity, and the whole panoply of Hollywood values.” 

At the conference, I asked Scott McConnell, a lapsed neocon who co-founded the American Conservative with Buchanan and Taki Theodoracopulos in 2002 to protest the Bush administration’s march to war in Iraq, why a host of conservatives shifted from the Reagan-era stance of supporting freedom abroad to backing Putin and other far-right populists like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. He explained, “Putin and Orbán are not communists. They are classic authoritarian autocrats. There is far more freedom in Hungary than there was thirty or fifty years ago.” It’s a point of view that is unlikely to disappear any time soon on the “America First” right — and that helps guarantee that the Marriott conference was but a fresh skirmish in a longer battle inside the GOP itself. 

Note: This is edited for DP. The full article (a long read) can be found here.  

Earmarks are back, and Republicans are hypocrites

One argument to explain the breakdown of congress into gridlock and chaos is that loss of earmarks transferred power from committee chairmen to rank and file members of congress. With earmarks, chairmen routinely offered earmarks for local spending back home ("pork barrel spending") as bribes for re-election in return for their votes. That system appears to have mostly gone away at some point in the past and it, along with some other things, coincided with the rise of an increasingly broken congress.

The New York Times writes:

Stuffed inside the sprawling $1.5 trillion government spending bill enacted in March was the first batch of earmarks in more than a decade, after Congress resurrected the practice of allowing lawmakers to direct federal funds for specific projects to their states and districts. Republicans and Democrats alike relished the opportunity to get in on the action after years in which they were barred from doing so, packing 4,962 earmarks totaling just over $9 billion [~0.6% of the total] in the legislation that President Biden signed into law.

“It’s my last couple of years, so I decided to make the most of it,” said Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri and a member of the Appropriations Committee, who is retiring after more than two decades in Congress. He steered $313 million back to his home state — the fourth-highest total of any lawmaker.

Often derided as pork and regarded as an unseemly and even corrupt practice on Capitol Hill, earmarks are also a tool of consensus-building in Congress, giving lawmakers across the political spectrum a personal interest in cutting deals to fund the government. Their absence, many lawmakers argued, only made that process more difficult, and their return this year appears to have helped grease the skids once again.

It is odd that some Republicans are joining in the festival of pork (porkfest) since Republican dogma claims that, e.g., all government domestic spending is bad, private sector markets and corporations (with the constitutional rights of citizens) solve all our problems, government causes all our problems, real Americans pull themselves up by their bootstraps, only weenies take tax dollars, America cannot afford domestic spending, and other hypocritical and/or mendacious drivel like that. 

On sacred principle, Republican states should refuse all of that evil spending and do their own bootstrap pulling instead of being pedophilic socialists and taking government blood money. Of course that won't happen. Those Republican states will grab every last tax penny with gusto. There will not be not one shred of concern about all those highfalutin conservative anti-government principles. All that claptrap about bootstraps and whatnot is just Republican Party propaganda nonsense. They talk the talk, but don't walk the walk.  

Hypocrisy microaggression alert!:

Republican claptrap → I hate spending, but gimme the cash

One can wonder why Democrats allow Republicans any pork at all. It is a mystery. Once the Republicans get back in power, it is reasonable to think that Democrats will get very little or no pork of their own. Guess the Dems have to learn the hard way. As Zuckerberg once said about people who used Facebook, Dumbfucks!

Alabama gets a lot of evil federal tax dollars

but won't complain about it one little bit

“I’m glad and proud of them,” said Mr. Shelby [R-AL], a legendary pork-barreler who has no fewer than seven buildings named after him in Alabama. The latest spending package adds another, renaming a federal building and courthouse in Tuscaloosa for him.

In March of 2021, the Brookings Institute wrote about earmarks:

Throughout much of the 2000s earmarking became synonymous with corruption. After a few high-profile scandals in the early part of that decade, Congress put additional rules into place in order to prevent such abuses. However, the conversation around earmarks was quickly hijacked. Some legislators and activists convinced Americans that earmarks served no purpose, were the cause of budget deficits, ballooned the budget, and were the well of legislative misanthropy.

The reality of earmarks is much different. First, they serve a real purpose, allowing legislators—who well understand the needs of their districts/states—to target funds for important projects that can solve policy problems and create jobs. Second, while abuses happen, the vast majority of earmarks were meant to respond to constituents’ concerns and needs. Third, earmarks have always composed a miniscule portion of the discretionary budget, typically less than one percent, and fall within a chairman’s mark—the top-line number set for an appropriations bill’s cost. Fourth, earmarks did not disappear with the so-called “earmarks ban” in 2011; it simply transferred the behavior to the executive branch or made them more secretive within the legislative branch. Fifth, earmarking is not a Democratic proposal. Democrats and Republicans have endorsed their use. It is also not a liberal proposal, as some of Congress’s most conservative members, like Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) have defended their use and opposed the original ban.

In a very direct way, the earmark ban stripped power from the people and their representatives in Congress and made the practice more likely to be corrupted, not less so. Zachary Courser and Kevin Kosar wrote powerfully recently as to why legislators and their constituents should embrace the return of earmarks with appropriate safeguards. They also highlight some of the institutional challenges within Congress that occurred at the same time the earmark ban was in place. My research has highlighted that federal spending power is an ongoing competition between the legislative and executive branches and when Congress fails to direct spending in specific ways, the executive branch performs that duty for them. In that setting, legislative earmarks become presidential earmarks. In that sense, Republican House members and senators who oppose legislative earmarks are working to transfer additional power to allocate federal funds to Democratic President Joe Biden.