Update: Post election analyses

Just get 'er done, damnit!

People are still trying to figure out why the election turned out as it did. My working hypothesis is that (i) anger and alienation about wokeness, (ii) Biden-caused inflation (mostly a mirage), and (iii) the border immigration mess were the top reasons for Harris losing. The Hill discusses data from a recent poll:

Our poll, the first postelection poll specifically focused on trust in government, reveals that while voters are less trusting of the government as a result of the election, they believe the government will be more effective and can get things done.

Put another way, our poll suggests that Democrats ran the wrong campaign. Whereas they ran a “values campaign,” focused on a government Americans could trust, what voters really wanted was an effective government, and on that, they preferred Donald Trump.

Indeed, we found that a plurality (39 percent) of Americans said the 2024 election results made them less trusting of the government. Similarly, a 41 percent plurality of Americans say the election makes them less confident that the government will share “fair and accurate information.”

And yet, a plurality (40 percent) of Americans believe the government will be more effective at getting things done going forward, versus 36 percent of Americans saying the government will be less effective.

Among independents, the discrepancy is even more pronounced, underscoring this voting bloc’s desire for an effective government over one that is trustworthy.

By a 13-point margin (39 percent to 26 percent), independents said they are less — rather than more — trusting of government following the election. And by a similar 11-point margin (39 percent to 28 percent), they feel less — rather than more — confident that the government will share fair and accurate information going forward.

That is a take on it that I wasn't aware of. Some people want government to do something, even if it amounts to doing bad things. I'm among the 40% plurality of Americans who believe the government will be more effective at getting things done going forward. The things I am highly confident it will get done is mounting and sustaining an all-out attack on American democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties. That applies especially to minorities that God and MAGA both hate and want to oppress. 

How far DJT, MAGA, the billionaire oligarchs and Christian nationalists will get in their quest for corrupt authoritarianism is the open question. I suspect they will get pretty far because there is nothing likely to stop or significantly slow them that I can see. DJT and MAGA definitely are gonna try to git 'er done come hell or high water.

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Institutional distrust

Slate writes:

A Novel Theory of Why Trust in Everything Is Declining

The evidence that residents of the United States don’t trust their institutions goes beyond election results. It’s also visible in the falling number of Americans who get news from what were once known as “mainstream” sources, and in the declining share of people who say in polls that they, uh, trust institutions.

Whose fault is this? Some influential voices toward the center of the political spectrum—Nate Silver, Matt Yglesias, the New York Times’ David Leonhardt—blame the influence of bumbling, know-it-all leftist elites in media and politics. Silver calls it the Indigo Blob, an informal alliance of “progressive institutionalists”—educated media figures, academics, activists, and political staffers who (among other things) pushed the Democratic Party too far left on social justice and “identity politics” issues, triggering a working-class backlash over issues ranging from police reform to COVID-era shutdowns. To that list, Yglesias would add issues of “biological sex” (i.e., trans rights), while Leonhardt blames the left for Biden’s alleged lenience on border security. Broadly, they say, the self-appointed progressive “expert class” and its values are out of step with the public.

The federal judge who issued a key ruling ordering Biden to reopen the border to asylum applicants was a 77-year-old first appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan. These perceived institutional failures can’t entirely be pinned on highly educated progressives.

Americans also despise—or at least distrust—a number of groups that aren’t affiliated in the common imagination with Democrats or liberals at all. “Defunding the police” might not be popular, but only a modest 51 percent of respondents in Gallup’s trust survey this year said they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the police as an institution. “The medical system” clocked in at 36 percent, churches and organized religion at 32 percent, and both banks and “large technology companies” at 27 percent. “Big business” (16 percent) was one of the least popular institutions named in the poll, ....

Perhaps the answer has something to do with the first institution I mentioned: Our beloved free press. Thanks to the innovative work that tech monopolies have done in the advertising market, it’s increasingly difficult to sustain a media outlet whose business mostly involves the costly process of nonpartisan fact-gathering and reporting. That’s especially true at the local level, where newspapers often simply don’t exist anymore—but it’s also true nationally, where the country is headed in the direction of having one reportorial omnipublication (the New York Times) and a few others that are mostly for people who work in business. Concurrently, the right wing has developed its own media apparatus, while social media and streaming platforms now allow public personalities to build their own audiences directly.

All else being equal, people prefer to hear what they want to hear, and disregard the rest. What this often (though not always!) rewards is pandering to simple, polemical worldviews—Everyone else is stupid, they’re all lying to you, this or that particular group is responsible for everything in the news that is upsetting—rather than uncertainty or curiosity. It’s a good time to be a person who says everything is bullshit.

Groups that feel like they’re under attack will look for their own messengers to deliver polemical responses which reject every criticism and assign blame somewhere else; this is what “stanning” is. Crucially, the political center is just as subject to these incentives as everyone else; there are centrism stans, too, who find “illiberalism” at the scene of every crime. It is a polarization-optimized discourse. And everything it touches gets a little dumber and more difficult to trust.

[Stanning in politics refers to the phenomenon where individuals exhibit an intense, often obsessive, form of support for political figures, akin to the fanatical devotion seen in celebrity fandoms. This term has evolved to describe a deeply personalized and extremely online devotion to politicians, characterized by one or more of (i) one-sided relationships with politicians, feeling a personal connection despite no real interaction, (ii) development of cult of personality where politicians are the center of a cult-like following and supporters view them as saviors or messianic figures, (iii) extreme devotion that leads to a lack of accountability with politicians not held responsible for their bad actions or corrupt policies, (iv) etc. .... In summary, stanning in politics represents a shift where political support transcends traditional voter-politician relationships into something more akin to celebrity fandom, with all its associated behaviors and implications for political engagement and accountability.]

On the other side of the partisan spectrum, the ascendant figures are free/non-thinkers like RFK Jr. and Joe Rogan who “question everything,” even things that don’t need questioning, like the polio vaccine or federal deposit insurance.

Why don’t our institutions, with the exception of the hornet eradication apparatus, work? One reason might be that polarization-optimized discourse does not tend to build consensus around measured, fair, and accurate assessments of institutional failures. It fails to create the shared sense that something scandalous is happening; even when Republicans and Democrats are both angry about the same thing, it can be for different reasons.

Having just written an entire article about the dangers of universalized single-cause explanations, though, I would be remiss in putting the blame for dysfunction and discontent entirely on the media. As a mid-level member of the Indigo Blob, I also believe the usual suspects are at fault too: money in politics and the sclerotic U.S. legislative system, the failure of regulation to check the stock market’s collective expectation of indefinite earnings growth, the concentration of wealth and rise in the relative cost of basic components of the American Dream, bad-faith right-wing propaganda, the refusal of older generations to loosen their grip on their property values and political norms, blah blah blah.

Without a system that can build consensus, though—even the kind of phony, hypocritical, ideologically bracketed consensus we used to manufacture right here at home when this country was great—all of that stuff is academic.

On reflection, I'm confused by that analysis. Not sure what the point is. In summary: Various things caused the results we got.

And that ends this incisive update about what happened and why.

Invasive rot in the USSC

The six radical right authoritarian judges that dominate the USSC, have made clear their intention to be unprincipled, making things up as they go. They are contemptuous of norms that get in the way of cementing kleptocratic authoritarianism into American law. The moral and legal rot process is well underway. It's rationally not deniable. Litigator Sherrilynn Ifill writes about a norm, adding things to the record without notice, blatantly broken by the deeply corrupt cynic Sam Alito:

I am still enough of an institutionalist that it pains me to hear Supreme Court justices embarrassing themselves on the bench. So as I listened to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito engaging with Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar during oral argument in the case challenging Tennessee’s ban on the provision of gender-affirming drugs for minors earlier this month, I couldn’t help but cringe.

Shuffling through papers that he suggested were studies from various European countries that urged caution in the provision of puberty blockers to teens, Alito engaged in a “gotcha” line of questioning, insisting that Prelogar—the meticulous and unmatched litigator who has masterfully led the solicitor general’s office under President Joe Biden—had somehow misled the court about the accumulated scientific consensus on the effectiveness of puberty blockers for teens experiencing gender dysmorphia. His derisive tone and relentless questioning were typical for Alito and not what concerned me.

It was instead the contempt that Alito showed for the rules that govern the boundaries of litigation in our system. None of the studies he referenced as the basis of his questions to Prelogar had been part of the record in the case. None had been presented before the judge who tried the case. Justice Alito appeared to have, as the saying goes, “done his own research,” which he was now injecting into the case. And this embarrassed me. [embarrassed her, scares and angers me]

What has received too little attention is how this court’s headlong rush toward achieving its [kleptocratic authoritarian] ideological aims is undermining the rules that govern our system of litigation in its wake.

Why do all these rejections of previous norms and rules of litigation matter, one might ask? What difference does it make how the court strips away rights and protections? What matters is that they do it, and that the lives of millions of Americans will be affected, surely? In my view, the way they do it matters because the conservative justices in their haste and stubborn determination are pulling down not only long-standing substantive protections for marginalized people, but also the standards that hold our system of litigation together.   

More and more, the conservative majority’s approach has put the rules and norms that govern our system of litigation in the crosshairs as much as the substantive rights of marginalized groups. (emphasis added)

That speaks for itself. Our democracy, the rule of law and our civil liberties are all under severe, direct attack. That is a fact, not an opinion.

The restructured MSM; Tales from the capitalism crypt; Public distrust rising

The American Prospect writes about the reality of the modern MSM and the critical importance of independent news media:

Democrats Lost the Propaganda War

The intra-Democratic argument over what should be done following their loss in 2024 goes on. Bernie Sanders is arguing for working-class populism. Matt Yglesias has been flogging a “Common Sense Manifesto” arguing for Bill Clinton–style triangulation.

I have my own thoughts on messaging topics. But all this is putting the cart before the horse. Democrats are missing something that is arguably a prerequisite for ideological messaging to have any effect whatsoever: a media apparatus that can get these messages in front of swing voters. The content of the message doesn’t matter if voters never hear it. An obvious place to start would be to build up straightforward reporting operations in news deserts in critical states, and to stop making traditional election broadcast ads the core focus of campaign spending.

If advocates of “popularism” like Yglesias are correct, how did Donald Trump win with such wildly unpopular proposals and behaviors?

I believe two things happened here. First and most importantly, there is a vast and exceptionally well-funded right-wing propaganda machine that pipes Republican messaging directly into tens of millions of homes, day in and day out, influencing people both directly and through conversations with families and neighbors.

Second, the mainstream media, for a variety of sociological and political reasons—including outright meddling from Trump-supporting billionaire owners—refused to give Trump the full-blown scandal treatment, with many consecutive days of inflammatory headlines and articles, no matter what he did. Democrats have relied on the MSM to do their messaging for them, but they did not and will not do it. As Josh Marshall writes, “Democrats need to organize their future politics around the simple reality that the establishment media is structurally hostile to the Democratic Party.”

As a result, most swing voters simply did not hear about Trump’s platform, or did not believe it if they did. .... In a large chunk of the country, there is no local paper even available, and in a much larger chunk the few papers that remain are private equity–gutted carcasses with little aside from Associated Press reprints.

A recent study by Paul Farhi and John Volk at Northwestern found an even more stark gap in the worst-off counties. Trump won 91 percent of “news desert” counties—where there is no local coverage of any kind—by an average of 54 percentage points.

Absent any action, Trump is likely to make this worse. His antitrust authorities are going to be far more lenient than their predecessors in the Biden administration. That ensures significant media consolidation, which if history is any guide will deprive large parts of the country even further of real news and information, in favor of hot takes and ideological scandalmongering.

This all suggests an obvious opportunity: Democratic funders could set up new local papers in strategic counties, or buy up some of the remaining husks and staff them up. ....

To drive home the importance of real news reporting in a democracy, DJT is suing a newspaper in Iowa because it published poll data just before the election that turned out to be wrong. His lawsuit alleges “brazen election interference” for a poll published shortly before the election that showed Ms. Harris leading in Iowa by three points. DJT said, “I have to do it. We have to straighten out the press.”

By straightening out the press, he means getting killing it and turning the corpse into a giant authoritarian propaganda, lies, slander and crackpottery machine, just like Putin did to Russia and the Chinese government did to China.

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When a lot of money is involved, capitalism tends to become shockingly callous to human life and the environment. Capitalism tends to be loaded with seething hate of government, business regulations and protections for consumers and workers if any of that might get in the way of profits. Profit threats have to be obliterated. Project 2025 is quite clear and explicit about these priorities. The NYT published (not paywalled) an on-point article about drug industry callousness toward human life in ruthless pursuit of profit:

Giant Companies Took Secret Payments 

to Allow Free Flow of Opioids

Drugmakers including Purdue Pharma paid pharmacy benefit managers not to restrict painkiller prescriptions, a New York Times investigation found

In 2017, the drug industry middleman Express Scripts announced that it was taking decisive steps to curb abuse of the prescription painkillers that had fueled America’s overdose crisis. The company said it was “putting the brakes on the opioid epidemic” by making it harder to get potentially dangerous amounts of the drugs.

The announcement, which came after pressure from federal health regulators, was followed by similar declarations from the other two companies that control access to prescription drugs for most Americans.

The self-congratulatory statements, however, didn’t address an important question: Why hadn’t the middlemen, known as pharmacy benefit managers, acted sooner to address a crisis that had been building for decades?

One reason, a New York Times investigation found: Drugmakers had been paying them not to.

For years, the benefit managers, or P.B.M.s, took payments from opioid manufacturers, including Purdue Pharma, in return for not restricting the flow of pills. As tens of thousands of Americans overdosed and died from prescription painkillers, the middlemen collected billions of dollars in payments.

The P.B.M.s exert extraordinary control over what drugs people can receive and at what price. The three dominant companies — Express Scripts, CVS Caremark and Optum Rx — oversee prescriptions for more than 200 million people and are part of health care conglomerates that sit near the top of the Fortune 500 list.

Money talks and corpses walk, sort of.

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Gallup reports about the state of public trust in the courts. It is low.

This year marks the first time on record that judicial confidence among those approving of U.S. leadership has ever dipped below 60%, and the first time that confidence in the courts has been below 50% among both those who approve and those who disapprove of U.S. leadership, a double whammy pushing the national figure to its lowest in two decades.

Documenting the collapse of democracy

It's looking more and more like I was right about DJT and MAGA, and less and less like a hyperbolic crackpot, or whatever. Even the restrained MSM is starting to come to see the ugly vision of kleptocratic authoritarian DJT-MAGA reality that has been staring it in the face since 2016. NYT opinionologist Michelle Goldberg writes:

The Great Capitulation

At a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Monday, Donald Trump described recent visits from Tim Cook, C.E.O. of Apple, Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, and other tech barons. “In the first term, everyone was fighting me,” he said. “In this term, everyone wants to be my friend.” For once, he wasn’t exaggerating.

Since Trump won re-election — this time with the popular vote — many of the most influential people in America seem to have lost any will to stand up to him as he goes about transforming America into the sort of authoritarian oligarchy he admires. Call it the Great Capitulation.

Following Jan. 6, Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook co-founder, suspended Trump’s account. But last month at Mar-a-Lago, The Wall Street Journal reported, Zuckerberg stood, hand on heart, as “the club played a rendition of the national anthem sung by imprisoned” Jan. 6 defendants. (It’s not clear if Zuckerberg knew what he was listening to.) He’s pledged a million-dollar donation to Trump’s inauguration, as did the OpenAI C.E.O. Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos’ company Amazon, which will also stream the inauguration on its video platform.

After Time magazine declared Trump “Person of the Year,” the publication’s owner, the Salesforce C.E.O. Marc Benioff, wrote on X, “This marks a time of great promise for our nation.” The owner of The L.A. Times, the billionaire pharmaceutical and biomedical entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong, killed an editorial criticizing Trump’s cabinet picks and urging the Senate not to allow recess appointments.

Most shocking of all, last week ABC News, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, made the craven decision to settle a flimsy defamation case brought by Trump.

In The New Yorker, Jonathan Blitzer wrote of the current administration’s refusal, at least so far, to renew the humanitarian parole of immigrants from countries such as Venezuela and Haiti to possibly shield them from deportation under Trump. “For a president who considers Trump a fascist and has warned about the horrors of mass deportation, the atmosphere of Biden’s White House has struck several people I spoke with as curiously sedate,” Blitzer wrote.

One of Kamala Harris’s pollsters, Politico reported, recently warned the Democratic National Committee leadership against pearl-clutching over Trump’s transgressions, including the wildly unfit characters he’s announced for his administration. The voters, she said, “don’t care about who he’s putting in cabinet positions.”

Collectively, all these elite decisions to bow to Trump make it feel like the air is going out of the old liberal order. In its place will be something more ruthless and Nietzschean.

Clearly, the light of kleptocratic authoritarianism is dawning for those who have the guts to see it for what it is. The rest? Still either in head in sand mode, or a mood of elation at what will come, whether it bites them or helps them, or not.

Nietzschean: focused on subjective reality and individual achievement, with rejection of absolute truth.

The Rambo effect

 Wanna know why Trump is so popular? He acts like Rambo.

Abraham Lincoln, now there was a "man." Ditto Ronald Reagan. Though not as macho, JKF and Bill Clinton and Obama still oozed sex appeal. What did one term Jimmy Carter ooz? Or one term Joe Biden? Or candidate Kamala Harris? She oozed "joy." THAT is not where Americans are at. They want heroes. Even corrupt, dishonest, and dangerous ones like Trump will do.

The making of an American hero, and what his ascendance tells us about our society — and ourselves.

And that is how we all now view ourselves — as heroic in our certainty, our clarity, our superiority to our fellow passengers, whom we regard as intellectually and morally disingenuousness for failing to see things the way we do.

We are all Rambo. God bless us… and God help us.

https://medium.com/@glandrybeam/the-rambo-effect-67fb887f04d

The prospect that the nation might knowingly put back in power a man who cozies up to authoritarian leaders, tried to overturn the results of a free and fair election, and promises to be a dictator himself (if only, he says, for a day) has not only alarmed but baffled Democrats. 

That conclusion ignores a very uncomfortable and inconvenient truth: A big chunk of the public actually wants an authoritarian leader.

https://newrepublic.com/article/183866/americans-want-authoritarian-president-trump

YABBUT what about democracy, the rule of law, common decency and Mom's apple pie? Forgettaboutit.

THE LEFT needs to meet Americans where they are, and provide them with what they want..................

A FRIGGIN' RAMBO!!

MAGA taming MSM criticism by killing the Sullivan defamation standard

CONTEXT

As I predicted last month, DJT and his morally rotted, kleptocratic authoritarian wealth and power movement are moving briskly to reign in the MSM (mainstream media). They are deploying one of the best, most effective weapons they have, defamation lawsuits. MAGA and the radical right generally have been chafing under the old Sullivan standard for defamation of a public official or famous person. In a nutshell, here's the existing defamation law that MAGA is focused on taking down to neuter the MSM and all other significant critics:

In the landmark 1964 U.S. Supreme Court case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the USSC held that for a public official to succeed in a defamation lawsuit, they must prove that the defamatory statement was made with "actual malice." This means the defendant either knew the statement was false or recklessly disregarded whether it might be false. Later the USSC expanded the standard to include public figures. Public officials include, law enforcement personnel, members of legislative bodies, mayors, governors, and other elected representatives at various levels of government, officials appointed to positions of authority, such as judges, commissioners of state agencies, and members of state boards. Under the Sullivan standard, a famous person, or public figure, is defined as someone who has achieved a role of special prominence in society due to notoriety (accidental or not), achievements, or by actively seeking public attention.

Authoritarian regimes frequently engage in crackdowns of criticism by the media and prominent public figures as a means to maintain control over information, suppress dissent, and ensure political legitimacy. Common methods of crackdown include (i) enacting legislation or regulations to restrict freedom of speech and press or to limit media competition (DJT already did that the last time he was in office), (ii) getting judges who create new definitions of defamation (what MAGA is trying to do right now), (iii) increased prosecutions of journalists, (iv) economic pressure or sanctions to muzzle criticisms, e.g., having authoritarian billionaires buy media conglomerates, (v) economic sanctions with the redistribution of media assets to pro-government sources, and (vi) intimidation and threats of violence. Defamation lawsuits aim to intimidate and financially burden media organizations, a tactic reminiscent of most other authoritarian leaders and movements that use lawsuits to exhaust journalists and media outlets.

DJT and MAGA have employed several such strategies to crack down on media criticism. In addition to filing defamation lawsuits, DJT and MAGA have repeatedly threatened to revoke media broadcast licenses, e.g., revocation of broadcasting licenses for CBS, ABC, and NBC. DJT and MAGA have also unleashed rhetorical assaults, calling the MSM the "enemy of the people", repeating classical 20th century tyrant rhetoric.

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DJT AND MAGA ATTACKS ON THE SULLIVAN STANDARD

The NYT writes about the onslaught against the MSM (not paywalled):

Trump and His Picks Threaten More Lawsuits Over Critical Coverage

The small flurry of threatened defamation suits is the latest sign that the incoming Trump administration appears poised to do what it can to crack down on unfavorable media coverage.

The legal threats have arrived in various forms. One aired on CNN. Another came over the phone. More arrived in letters or emails.

All of them appeared aimed at intimidating news outlets and others who have criticized or questioned President-elect Donald J. Trump and his nominees to run the Pentagon and F.B.I.

The small flurry of threatened defamation lawsuits is the latest sign that the incoming Trump administration appears poised to do what it can to crack down on unfavorable media coverage.

On Saturday, ABC News said it had agreed to give $15 million to Mr. Trump’s future presidential foundation and museum to settle a defamation suit that Mr. Trump filed against the network and one of its anchors, George Stephanopoulos. Mr. Trump sued in March after Mr. Stephanopoulos inaccurately said the former president had been found “liable for rape” in a civil trial in New York, though the judge in the case later noted that the state has a narrow legal definition of rape. In fact, Mr. Trump had been found liable for sexual abuse.

The settlement followed months of attacks by Mr. Trump and his allies on ABC News, with the once and future president going so far as to say that the network should lose its federal broadcast license.

The deal set off criticism of ABC News by those who perceived the network as needlessly bowing down to Mr. Trump.

Regarding the settlement with ABC News, the NYT quotes an expert, RonNell Andersen Jones, a professor of law at the University of Utah:

“What we might be seeing here is an attitudinal shift,” she added. “Compared to the mainstream American press of a decade ago, today’s press is far less financially robust, far more politically threatened, and exponentially less confident that a given jury will value press freedom, rather than embrace a vilification of it.” 

 

In [the E. Jean Carroll sex abuse] case, a federal jury found Mr. Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll, but it did not find him liable for rape. Still, the judge who oversaw the proceeding later clarified that because of New York’s narrow legal definition of rape, the jury’s verdict did not mean that Ms. Carroll had “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”

Newsweek writes about the settlement with ABC News:

ABC News is facing backlash from both Democrats and Republicans following its $15-million settlement with Donald Trump.

The settlement describes the funding as a "charitable contribution" from the broadcaster. Additionally, the network will pay $1 million in legal fees to Trump's attorneys.

Trump filed the defamation suit after Stephanopoulos claimed during a March 10 segment of ABC News' This Week while interviewing Representative Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, that Trump had been "found liable for rape" in connection to writer E. Jean Carroll's lawsuits. Neither verdict involved a finding of rape as defined under New York law.

"People are not going to forget what ABC did," the Republicans Against Trump X, formerly Twitter, account said.

Conservative political scientist Norman Jay Ornstein added: "Add ABC to the basket of cowards in our media."

Democratic attorney Marc Elias wrote: "Knee bent. Ring kissed. Another legacy news outlet chooses obedience."

Reporter Oliver Willis also chimed in, writing on Threads: "This is actually how democracy dies."

The malicious, anti-democratic intent of DJT and MAGA attacking the MSM could not be much clearer. They want to force the MSM to shut down or stop criticizing him, his political wealth and power movement and his cadre of enabling MAGA thugs, perverts, grifters, deranged zealots, cranks and criminals. It really is just that simple.

Qs: Is it really just that simple, or if not, why not? Too hyperbolic/alarmist? Not supported by sufficient facts? Flawed reasoning? Too partisan biased?