A criticism of wokeness

A recent New York Times op-ed essay argued that the Republican Party is weaponizing and demagoguing the issue of wokeness (discussed here yesterday). Although modern Republican demagoguery routinely includes hyperbole, lies, slanders, flawed motivated reasoning and so forth, there is some truth and reasonable thinking in some of their criticisms. There is some evidence that this line of attack is effective in drawing in some Hispanics and White voters to Republican candidates. 

There arguably are problems with woke radicalism and attendant rigid dogma. Most elites in the Democratic Party appear to be unaware of this issue and/or the danger it presents to the party and democracy. 

On July 7, 2020, Harper's Magazine published an open letter signed by dozens of prominent observers who see and criticize the danger of radical wokeness to the Democratic Party and democracy. The dangers include intolerance of criticism and closed-mindedness, which characterize and dominate the GOP at present. Wokeness appears to be radicalizing the Democratic Party in ways that look like what the Republican Party has degenerated into.

The letter reads:

Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us. 

~160 signatures 

Acknowledgment: Thanks to PD for citing this letter and his view on the danger of intolerant wokeness.

A possible new front in the radical right propaganda war: Attack wokeness

That should read, don't be woke

This secular, not Christian

The radical right knows that it needs to at least try to expand its base beyond angry old white men, radical Christian fundamentalists, rich capitalists and enraged far right neo-fascist crackpots. Its propaganda machine has hit on attacking and demagoguing wokeness as an issue. That strategy is drawing a lot of people to the GOP, including Hispanics. If the Democrats do not wake up to how their messaging and some of their policies is being demagogued and perceived, Republicans may not need to subvert elections to win. 

This strategy is family oriented and secular, not radical Christian nationalist. Apparently, the GOP sees the continuing decline in Christian practice and feels a need to look for another voter base to fall back on if Christianity collapses as a core unifying source of voters. That is an astute observation. If nothing else, the GOP is intelligent in protecting its own power and access to wealth.

From a New York Times opinion piece by Nate Hochman at the National Review, a solidly right source:

A new kind of conservatism, represented by right-wing elites like Ron DeSantis, Christopher Rufo and Tucker Carlson, is making itself known. We are just beginning to see its impact. The anti-critical-race-theory laws, anti-transgender laws and parental rights bills that have swept the country in recent years are the movement’s opening shots. .... this new campaign is also distinctly different from the culture wars of the late 20th century, and it reflects a broad shift in conservatism’s priorities and worldview.

The conservative political project is no longer specifically Christian. .... a reversal of the landmark 1973 ruling would be more of a last gasp than a sign of strength for the religious right. .... Instead of an explicitly biblical focus on issues like school prayer, no-fault divorce and homosexuality, the new coalition is focused on questions of national identity, social integrity and political alienation. Although it enjoys the support of most Republican Christians who formed the electoral backbone of the old Moral Majority, it is a social conservatism rather than a religious one, revolving around race relations, identity politics, immigration and the teaching of American history.

Today’s culture war is being waged not between religion and secularism but between groups that the Catholic writer Matthew Schmitz has described as “the woke and the unwoke.” “Catholic traditionalists, Orthodox Jews, Middle American small-business owners and skeptical liberal atheists may not seem to have much in common,” he wrote in 2020. But all of those demographics are uncomfortable with the progressive social agenda of the post-Obama years.

.... the right’s appeal is a defense of a broader, beleaguered American way of life. For example, the language of parental rights is rarely, if ever, religious, but it speaks to the pervasive sense that American families are fighting back against progressive ideologues over control of the classroom. That framing has been effective: According to a March Politico poll, for example, American voters favored the key provision of Florida’s hotly debated Parental Rights in Education law, known by its critics as the Don’t Say Gay law, by a margin of 16 percentage points. Support for the initiative crosses racial lines. In a May poll of likely general election voters in six Senate battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the conservative American Principles Project found that Hispanics supported the Florida law by a margin of 11 percentage points and African Americans by a margin of four points.

As the terms of the culture war shift, Barack Obama’s “coalition of the ascendant” — the mix of millennials, racial minorities and college-educated white voters whose collective electoral power was supposed to establish a sustainable progressive majority — is fraying, undermining the decades-long conventional wisdom that America’s increasing racial diversity would inevitably push the country left.

That thesis was prominently advanced by the progressive political scientists John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, but both of them have grown alarmed about the rightward movement among nonwhite voters in recent years. “If Hispanic voting trends continue to move steadily against the Democrats, the pro-Democratic effect of nonwhite population growth will be blunted, if not canceled out entirely,” Mr. Teixeira wrote in December. “That could — or should — provoke quite a sea change in Democratic thinking.” In the absence of that sea change, however, it is likely that disaffected people of all races will continue to move into the Republican coalition.

The decline in Republican church membership directly coincides with the rise of Mr. Trump. As Timothy P. Carney found in 2019, the voters who went for Mr. Trump in the 2016 primary were far more secular than the religious right: In the 2016 G.O.P. primaries, Mr. Trump won only about 32 percent of voters who went to church more than once a week. In contrast, he secured about half of those who went “a few times a year,” 55 percent of those who “seldom” attend and 62 percent of Republicans who never go to church. In other words, Mr. Carney wrote, “every step down in church attendance brought a step up in Trump support, and vice versa.”

The right’s new culture war represents the worldview of people the sociologist Donald Warren called “Middle American radicals,” or M.A.Rs. This demographic, which makes up the heart of Mr. Trump’s electoral base, is composed primarily of non-college-educated middle- and lower-middle-class white people, and it is characterized by a populist hostility to elite pieties that often converges with the old social conservatism. But M.A.Rs do not share the same religious moral commitments as their devoutly Christian counterparts, both in their political views and in their lifestyles. As Ross Douthat noted, nonchurchgoing Trump voters are “less likely to be married and more likely to be divorced” than those who regularly attend religious services. No coincidence, then, that a 2021 Gallup poll showed 55 percent of Republicans now support gay marriage — up from just 28 percent in 2011.

These voters are more nationalistic and less amenable to multiculturalism than their religious peers, and they profess a skepticism of the cosmopolitan open-society arguments for free trade and mass immigration that have been made by neoliberals and neoconservatives alike. “M.A.Rs feel they are members of an exploited class — excluded from real political representation, harmed by conventional tax and trade policies, victimized by crime and social deviance and denigrated by popular culture and elite institutions,” Matthew Rose wrote in “First Things.” They “unapologetically place citizens over foreigners, majorities over minorities, the native-born over recent immigrants, the normal over the transgressive and fidelity to a homeland over cosmopolitan ideals.”

Some of that seems to be internally inconsistent and/or overstated. Fore example, Hochman's argument that MARs are more intolerant of immigration than Christian nationalism doesn't ring true. And, what are MARs going to do when Whites are no longer the majority? But even if my perceptions of some inconsistency is mostly a mirage, it probably does not make much difference. Republican Party politics does not need to make sense or be rational or fact-based. It needs to appeal to enough voters to stay in power. 

These observations from social scientists Chris Achen and Larry Bartels from 2016 are helpful to be kept in mind. They accurately describe the mental soil that demagogues plant poisoned seeds in and carefully nurture on their way to wealth and power:

“. . . . 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.”

But stepping back and considering the broad contours of MARs as a potential new political base, what Hochman argues looks plausible. Christianity is fading and the GOP needs to either (1) look to other base human instincts and emotions to demagogue, or (2) try to play a more fact and reason-based game. Option 2 looks to be impossible because the true goal of Republican elites is wealth and power for authoritarian elites, not for MARs or anyone else. That is generally incompatible with what MARs are likely to want. GOP elites can demagogue, promise and probably give MARs most of what they want without seriously damaging their control over wealth and power. If so, this angle of attack could do in the Democrats, maybe without subverting elections much or at all.

Ballistics lessons: AR-15 rifle vs. 9 mm handgun

Given the great popularity of the AR-15 assault rifle in mass shootings, a comparison of the impact of AR-15 bullets on tissue compared to the 9 mm handgun is timely. More murders are committed in the US with 9 mm handguns, but the AR-15 is favored by most mass murderers. This 5:38 video by 60 Minutes shows the difference in tissue damage using ballistics gel that simulates human tissue and with a pork shoulder to mimic the human thigh. 

There is no human blood or gore in the video, just photos to show the difference in destructive power between an AR-15 rifle bullet and a 9 mm handgun bullet.

So, is the AR-15 a great stocking stuffer for Christmas or does the 9 mm feel more like the holidays? 🎅🏻

Bipartisan erosion of support for democracy in America

A 2020 research paper by Yale political scientists Matthew Graham and Milan Svolik indicates that Americans are valuing democracy less as polarization and extremism increases. They write:

Our research design allows us to infer Americans’ willingness to trade-off democratic principles for other valid but potentially conflicting considerations such as political ideology, partisan loyalty, and policy preferences. We find the U.S. public’s viability as a democratic check to be strikingly limited: only a small fraction of Americans prioritize democratic principles in their electoral choices, and their tendency to do so is decreasing in several measures of polarization, including the strength of partisanship, policy extremism, and candidate platform divergence. Our findings echo classic arguments about the importance of political moderation and cross-cutting cleavages for democratic stability and highlight the dangers that polarization represents for democracy.  

We show that this conventional wisdom [overwhelming public support for democracy dating back to Tocqueville] rests on fragile foundations. Rather than asking about support for democracy directly, we adopt an approach that infers Americans’ commitment to democratic principles from their choices of candidates in hypothetical election scenarios. Each candidate is experimentally assigned attributes and platforms that approximate real-world elections and, crucially, may endorse positions that violate core democratic principles, including free and fair elections, civil liberties, and checks and balances. In this framework, voters “support democracy” not when they say so, but rather when their choices reveal a preference for democratic principles over other valid but potentially conflicting considerations such as political ideology, partisan loyalty, or policy preferences.  

The following is a summary of our experimental findings: 

1. Americans value democracy, but not much: A candidate who considers adopting an undemocratic position can expect to be punished by losing only about 11.7% of his overall vote share. When we restrict attention to candidate-choice scenarios with combinations of partisanship and policies that we typically see in real-world elections, this punishment drops to 3.5%. 

2. Support for democracy is highly elastic: When the price of voting for a more democratic candidate is that candidate’s greater distance from the voter in terms of her preferred policies, even the most centrist voters are willing to tolerate at most a 10–15% increase in such a distance. 

3. Centrists are a pro-democratic force: “Centrist” voters who see small policy differences between candidates punish undemocratic behavior at four times the rate of “extremist” voters who strongly favor one of the candidates. 

4. Most voters are partisans first and democrats only second: Only about 13.1% of our respondents are willing to defect from a co-partisan candidate for violating democratic principles when the price of doing so is voting against their own party. Only independents and partisan “leaners” support more democratic candidates enough to defeat undemocratic ones regardless of their partisan affiliation. 

5. Supporters of both parties employ a partisan “double standard”: Respondents who identify as Republican are more willing to punish undemocratic behavior by Democratic Party than Republican Party candidates and vice versa. These effects are about equal among both Democrat and Republican respondents.

 A couple of points jump right out of the research. First, political extremism and polarization on the left and right tend to be anti-democratic. Second, hard core partisan voters believe they are supporting democracy even when they vote for anti-democratic candidates. As we all know, what people believe to be true can be mostly true, mostly ambiguous or mostly false. That argues for the importance and morality of honest speech and the deep immorality of dark free speech and the damage to democracy it causes.

Ratcheting toward an authoritarian abyss 

IMO (my interpretation of the results), the anti-democratic situation arguably is critical. The US is on the verge of losing its democracy. The authors data argues that people should cross party lines to vote for the pro-democracy candidate over an anti-democracy candidate. But with the Republican Party being dominated by anti-democratic authoritarian ideology, tactics (heavy reliance on dark free speech, RINO hunts, intolerance of dissent, etc.) and policies, there usually is no pro-democracy Republican choice to turn to when the Democratic Party choice is anti-democratic. 

To me, it looks like we are in a one-way political ratchet situation. America is ratcheting step by step away from democracy and toward authoritarianism. The fall of the GOP to neo-fascism leaves no alternative but to slowly inch toward an authoritarian abyss and eventually fall in. 

The entire enterprise is colored by the fact that as racial and ethnic minority influence increases, there seems to be no way to even define what centrism is. The progressive wing vs. the Biden wing of the Democratic Party illustrates this. The MSM and many people see Biden as a centrist or moderate. But lots of others do not, seeing him as mostly (not always) center right to hard right. And, after its years of RINO hunts, the GOP is far more monolith than diverse. There's very little centrism or compromise there, if any. 

Further complicating this is the fact that decades of radical right dark free speech has pushed the Overton window[1] to the extreme right. What used to be fringe crackpots (Marjorie Taylor Greene) and nutball ideas (climate change is not a serious problem) are now mainstream and dominant in the GOP. The GOP was not always anti-climate science, gun-identity infused, rabidly anti-government, anti-abortion, or etc. Neo-Fascist Republican extremists are now often (usually?) seen as merely moderate conservative, not radical right. In fact, there is little that is moderately conservative about the modern Republican Party. It is overwhelmingly radical right, aggressive and intolerant.

Footnote: 
1. Wikipedia: “The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. It is also known as the window of discourse. The term is named after American policy analyst Joseph Overton, who stated that an idea's political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within this range, rather than on politicians' individual preferences. According to Overton, the window frames the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office given the climate of public opinion at that time. Overton described a spectrum from "more free" to "less free" with regard to government intervention, oriented vertically on an axis, to avoid comparison with the left/right political spectrum. As the spectrum moves or expands, an idea at a given location may become more or less politically acceptable.”

Overton window on energy efficient buildings

But, opinions will vary:

Most people concerned about climate change 

might see the Paris Accords and legislation as 

sensible or acceptable, not radical or unthinkable

Is Trumpism a "Cult"?

 Consider the characteristics of a cult:

According to the Cult Education Institute, there are specific warning signs to look out for when considering whether a group might be a cult. Cults are characterized by:

1. Absolute authoritarianism without accountability
2. Zero tolerance for criticism or questions
3. Lack of meaningful financial disclosure regarding budget
4. Unreasonable fears about the outside world that often involve evil conspiracies and persecutions
5. A belief that former followers are always wrong for leaving and there is never a legitimate reason for anyone else to leave
6. Abuse of members
7. Records, books, articles, or programs documenting the abuses of the leader or group
8. Followers feeling they are never able to be “good enough”
9. A belief that the leader is right at all times
10. A belief that the leader is the exclusive means of knowing “truth” or giving validation

https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-cult-5078234

Here is Another one:

Cults have commonly been led by narcissists; harmful cults have been led by abusive narcissists.
The following are some common tendencies abusive narcissists share to different extents:

• They believe they are always victims and are treated unfairly.
• They consider their victims to be aggressors, and their opponents to be evil.
• In their mind they are never wrong and never apologize; they will only rectify what they said if it will earn them power.
• They consider themselves above the law.
• They manipulate the hearts and minds of their enablers and create a group of unconditional fans or codependents.
• They lie and believe their lies; whoever contradicts the lies will pay the consequences.
• They lead their loyal and strong followers to commit crimes or unethical acts; they will not get their hands dirty publicly.
• They produce codependents who will not question them or their character, since to do so would be a sign of weakness.
• They are jealous if they are not at the top of the game, and until they convince themselves and others that they are at the top.
• They are incapable of experiencing true empathy, and those at the bottom are in their mind losers; a win-win scenario is out of the picture.

https://ctmirror.org/2021/01/19/is-trump-leading-a-cult/

Does the above apply to Trump and Trump followers? Are they a Cult?

The Republican Party plan to subvert the 2022 elections is coalescing

This is another warning about the neo-fascist push by the Republican Party to kill American democracy and install a kleptocratic dictatorship. As discussed here yesterday, the GOP is focused on making fraud by Democratic voters a key part of its election subversion strategy. This post discusses another prong of attack on elections, intimidating voters at the polls and, in my opinion, that includes setting up the political infrastructure to fabricate evidence of voter fraud. The GOP is dead serious about attacking elections and Democratic and independent voters.

Politico writes:

‘It’s going to be an army’: Tapes reveal GOP plan to contest elections

Placing operatives as poll workers and building a "hotline" to friendly attorneys are among the strategies to be deployed in Michigan and other swing states.

Video recordings of Republican Party operatives meeting with grassroots activists provide an inside look at a multi-pronged strategy to target and potentially overturn votes in Democratic precincts: Install trained recruits as regular poll workers and put them in direct contact with party attorneys.

The plan, as outlined by a Republican National Committee staffer in Michigan, includes utilizing rules designed to provide political balance among poll workers to install party-trained volunteers prepared to challenge voters at Democratic-majority polling places, developing a website to connect those workers to local lawyers and establishing a network of party-friendly district attorneys who could intervene to block vote counts at certain precincts.

“Being a poll worker, you just have so many more rights and things you can do to stop something than [as] a poll challenger,” said Matthew Seifried, the RNC’s election integrity director for Michigan, stressing the importance of obtaining official designations as poll workers in a meeting with GOP activists in Wayne County last Nov. 6. It is one of a series of recordings of GOP meetings between summer of 2021 and May of this year obtained by POLITICO.

Backing up those front-line workers, “it’s going to be an army,” Seifried promised at an Oct. 5 training session. “We’re going to have more lawyers than we’ve ever recruited, because let’s be honest, that’s where it’s going to be fought, right?”

Separately, POLITICO obtained Zoom tapings of Tim Griffin, legal counsel to The Amistad Project, a self-described election-integrity group that Donald Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani once portrayed as a “partner” in the Trump campaign’s legal efforts to overturn the 2020 election, meeting with activists from multiple states and discussing plans for identifying friendly district attorneys who could stage real-time interventions in local election disputes.

On the recording, Griffin speaks of building a nationwide network of district attorney allies and how to create a legal “trap” for Winfrey.

“Remember, guys, we’re trying to build out a nationwide district attorney network. Your local district attorney, as we always say, is more powerful than your congressman,” Griffin said during a Sept. 21 meeting. “They’re the ones that can seat a grand jury. They’re the ones that can start an investigation, issue subpoenas, make sure that records are retained, etc.,” he said.  

In the introduction graphic on his training presentation, Seifried says the RNC’s goal is to “make it easy to vote and HARD TO CHEAT.” 

The recordings are among the first windows into what former Trump strategist Stephen Bannon, who’s been urging listeners to his podcast to take on election leadership positions, calls “the precinct strategy.”

But Penniman, the election watchdog, believes the strategy is designed to create enough disputes to justify intervention by GOP-controlled state legislatures, who declined to take such steps in 2020.

By now, most neutral observers can see that there are a few thin lines that still hold back Republican Party neo-fascism. One of them is crossing the line from not finding evidence to support GOP crackpottery and lies like the 2020 election was stolen. Crossing that  thin line to fabricating evidence needed to "prove" their crackpottery and lies is a huge temptation. It is just a very thin line. What harm could there possibly be in crossing it for the sake of the country?

And, once Republicans control political offices needed to pull off their crimes, that line will more likely than not be crossed for the first time (assuming it has not already been crossed). After that, it becomes easier to cross it again. Then again and again and again. The last vestige of a moral qualm will be buried under the Republican Party's overriding moral imperative: Sacred Republican Party ends justify the corrupt, immoral and/or criminal means. Republicans cannot win on the merits, so they will win on the deceit and cheat.

Then democracy and truth will die. The kleptocrat tyrant will rise, hiding behind the false claim that the effort was selfless and just for the sake and welfare of us and democracy.

Republican Party training materials in voter intimidation