The Origin of Republican Authoritarianism: Race?

GERMAINE’S DELISH TOXIC STEW

Ingredients:

1 mendacious, narcissistic cult leader (~330 lb)

1 corrupt, enraged republican party in existential crisis

2 buttloads (metric) lies, slanders and crackpot conspiracy 

theories (Fox News, Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, Qanon, etc.)

1 society in social and racial flux

½ buttload out-group bigotry

Seasoning: weak public education, 4 buttloads of 

special interest money in politics, a pandemic, lots of grumpy,

misinformed voters, lots of angry White supremacist groups, 1 weird guy with a funny hat

Washington Post editorialist Dana Milbank opines:

On the conservative Bulwark podcast this week, two admirable never-Trumpers marveled at what has become of the Republican Party since President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the election.

“I am a little amazed by the willingness to go just authoritarian, to really go anti-democratic,” Bulwark editor-at-large Bill Kristol said.

Columnist Mona Charen was likewise puzzled. “The attraction of authoritarianism, I don’t know, Bill,” she said. “I’m really at a loss.”

And I’m at a loss to understand their confusion. The Republican Party’s dalliance with authoritarianism can be explained in one word: race.

Trump’s overt racism turned the GOP into, essentially, a white-nationalist party, in which racial animus is the main motivator of Republican votes. But in an increasingly multicultural America, such people don’t form a majority. The only route to power for a white-nationalist party, then, is to become anti-democratic: to keep non-White people from voting and to discredit elections themselves. In short, democracy is working against Republicans — and so Republicans are working against democracy.

Then, on Wednesday, House Republicans mounted lockstep opposition to H.R.1, a bill by Democrats attempting to expand voting rights. The bill would, among other things, create automatic voter registration, set minimum standards for early voting and end the practice of partisan gerrymandering.

In the House debate, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), sounding like Trump, made unfounded claims of “voter fraud” and asserted that the law would mean “future voters could be dead or illegal immigrants or maybe even registered two to three times.”

“This,” McCarthy said, “is an unparalleled political power grab.”

So, in the twisted reasoning of this white-nationalist incarnation of the Republican Party, laws that make it easier for all citizens to vote are a power grab by Democrats.

The toxic stew

Milbank's explanation is arguably somewhat off. It's more than race that has turned the GOP into an authoritarian personality cult. Race is one of the core drivers of the irrational fear, but it's not the only factor. Other significant factors include blind loyalty to the cult leader and widespread belief in his main lies about stolen elections and a satanic, socialist-communist democratic party. And there is a perceived existential threat that the republican party will become, or already is, a long-term or maybe permanent minority. 

But the factors overlap. The republican lust for power drives widespread voter suppression efforts in the anti-democratic but innocent-sounding name of "election integrity." Part of that is indeed aimed at racial minorities. But part of it is also aimed at democrats, the LGBQT community and other out-groups the republicans love to hate and slander. Another part is what Erich Fromm called the urge to escape from freedom due to an unsettling and changing society. The psychological burdens of freedom are more than some people can bear. They want to escape from freedom to authoritarianism, even if a fascist personality cult is the only escape route.

When one tosses all those ingredients into the cauldron, the stew gets pretty toxic. Some way to soften the fears, prejudices and susceptibility to the dark free speech would be helpful to say the least. This is where Mona Charen’s comment “I’m really at a loss” is appropriate.

Funny hat guy’s mug shot

Quote after his arrest: “I was wrong. Period.”

Trump’s Kryptonite…

 I'm still waiting to stumble upon it.

Just as Trump barely WON the presidency in 2016 by merely a handful of popular votes in critical “electoral-votes” states, he barely LOST the presidency in 2020 by that same critical handful.  But in that interim, between 2016 and 2020, we all got an up-close-and-personal look, indeed on a daily basis, at who Trump the man was and continues to be.

So let’s look at what HASN’T been his kryptonite so far.  Over these last 5-ish years, we’ve seen and/or heard about:

• Pu$$y grabbing and rape accusations
• Porn star payoffs
• 500K+ deaths from a botched virus containment
• 30k+ lies and misleading statements, per WaPo
• Staff turnovers dropping like flies in winter (due to scandal and/or disgust)
• Nepotism-ing his administration with blatant overriding of FBI security rules/checks
• Used ethnic and/or other slurs (Pocahontas, Little Marco, Lyin’ Ted, etc) on his opponents
• Advocated separating migrant children from their families at the southern border
• Trying to bribe a desperate Ukrainian ally
• Withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement
• Throwing paper towels at a hurricane ravaged country
• Mocked a disabled reporter
• Has no problem calling women he doesn’t like “pigs, dogs, slobs, disgusting animals”
• The hiding of his financials
• Palling around with dictators (Kim, Putin, Erdogan, etc)
• “Sharpie-gating” weather maps
• Proclaiming John McCain was not a war hero
• Called the military “suckers and losers”
• Called white supremacist “very fine people”           
• Told the Proud Boys to “stand by”
• Betrayed our Kurdish allies
• Suggested injecting bleach and/or light into the body
• Accused President Obama of spying on him
• With rare exceptions, refused to wear a mask, not setting a good example
• Two failed impeachment trials
• The pardoning of traitors
• A bloody and deadly D.C. insurrection in his name (“You’re very special, we love you”)
• Heretofore secret Covid shots for him and Melania in January
• A media who can’t quit him
• A GOP who can’t quit him

And hell, I’ve just touched on the more blatant shenanigans that immediately come to mind.  We have been here and historically witnessed, firsthand, all of this and so much more.

So other than his physical demise itself (likely attributable to too many Big Macs and KFC Buckets), I’m truly baffled at what on earth Trump’s Kryptonite could possibly be.  Truth hasn’t been able to do it.  His bad behavior hasn’t been able to do it.  His incompetence hasn’t been able to do it.

Question: Is there anything, anything known to humankind, that can finally “inactivate” Trump?  Any Ideas??

Myself, the only thing I can think of is if it is “proven” that he has paid for an abortion.  And even that will be iffy, since “proven” has become something in “the eye of the beholder,” it seems.  Time and distance, like with many (all?) things, could be another cure.  But we can’t seem to get away from him.  They won’t let us (she said, as she posted this OP 🤯).  So, I’m out of ideas. :/

Thanks for helping me out here.

Perception of Race and Political Ideology

A fascinating article, The neural basis of ideological differences in race categorization, examines if and how political ideology might influence perception and categorization of race by White liberals and White conservatives. Mixed Black-White images were used to elicit responses by Whites. The results hint at, or are consistent with, the possibility that there are differences in specific brain response activity (anterior insula) between liberals and conservatives. The insula plays a key role in processing emotional responses. The brain response was attributed mostly to racially ambiguous faces (racial ambiguity), and not to skin tone darkness and Afrocentric features (Black prototypicality). 

When people see racially ambiguous faces, there is an unconscious bias to categorize the face as belonging to a subordinate racial group, i.e., Black in this research. Other research found that this kind of discrimination (hypodescent categorization or discrimination) is more likely among conservatives than liberals. 

The researchers write:

Multiracial individuals are often categorized as members of their ‘socially subordinate’ racial group—a form of social discrimination termed hypodescent—with political conservatives more likely than liberals to show this bias. .... We found that conservatism was related to greater anterior insula activity to racially ambiguous faces, and this pattern of brain activation mediated conservatives’ use of hypodescent. This demonstrates that conservatives’ greater sensitivity to racial ambiguity (rather than Black prototypicality) gives rise to greater categorization of mixed-race individuals into the socially subordinate group and tentatively suggests that conservatives may differ from liberals in their affective reactions to mixed-race faces. .... White Americans’ use of hypodescent is often motivated by a desire to preserve the status quo racial hierarchy with Whites on top, and political conservatives tend to engage in hypodescendant categorization more strongly than liberals.

Whites perceive mixed Black-White faces in at least two different ways, on the basis of (i) prototypical features (skin tone and Afrocentric features), and (ii) racial ambiguity. The researchers used brain scan technology because standard behavioral research methods cannot disentangle how and why conservatives tend to categorize multiracial individuals as members of their most subordinate racial group more often than liberals.[1] 

Conclusion: One can see how complex and tentative this kind of research is. As usual, this work needs to be replicated and confirmed. To see how widespread and influential the differential race perception phenomenon is, the research needs to be expanded to include other mixed race images, e.g., Hispanic-White, Black-Asian, Asian-White, etc. If the results hold up, this knowledge can possibly shed some light on the biological source of one of the key issues that is tearing American society and politics apart, i.e., racial discrimination, racial bigotry and racism. 

It may be the case that the biological-cognitive source of conservative unease and its move toward authoritarianism can be slowed or stopped if the source of the fear can be understood and addressed. Conservative fear of the impending majority White to majority minority transition may be a significant driver of the social and political toxicity that is killing American democracy and social cohesion. If so, confirmation and more knowledge about the phenomenon could be very helpful to say the least.

Footnote:

1. For the science wonks in the crowd: The researchers comment that there are at least two possible explanations for the observed conservative vs liberal differences in race categorization. One is that conservatives have stronger tendency compared to liberals to categorize mixed-race faces as Black could be explained by sensitivity to increases in the Black prototypicality of mixed-race faces, and a desire to maintain a clear boundary around the conception or definition of Whiteness. 

The other is that conservatives might categorize mixed-race faces as Black because of a greater sensitivity to racial ambiguity.  Past research indicates that conservatives tend to show a stronger aversion to general ambiguity than liberals. Because of that, racial ambiguity might be particularly aversive to conservatives. The researchers write:

Political ideology has been associated anatomically with individual differences in insula grey matter volume and functionally to insula activity in response to political outgroup members, information about ingroup politicians, reactions to disgusting images and risky decisions. Furthermore, the anterior insula has been implicated in the learning of political allyship and White decisionmakers exhibit stronger insula activity when processing Black (versus White) faces.

In an article about this paper, the lead author, Amy R. Krosch (Cornell University), commented:

"We knew from our previous work that conservatives tend to categorize more mixed-race faces as their 'socially-subordinate' race, or according to hypodescent," Krosch said, "a principle closely related to notorious 'one-drop' rules, used to subjugate individuals with any nonwhite heritage by denying them full rights and liberties under the law from the earliest days of American slavery through the Civil Rights Era."  

Mixed-race faces vary on at least two critical dimensions, Krosch wrote: "Do conservative and liberals differ in their sensitivity to the racial content or racial ambiguity of such faces? Such questions are difficult to separate in behavioral investigations but might be critical to understanding the link between ideology and hypodescent."

 

March 4

 AS WE ALL KNOW BY NOW, DONALD TRUMP WILL BE INAUGURATED ON MARCH 4th, THIS YEAR.

READ ALL ABOUT IT!

https://disqus.com/home/discussion/snowflakes-forum/trump_to_be_inaugurated_as_president_march_4th/

But for those of us who would prefer to avoid the celebrations, what else is March 4th good for?

2021 Daily Holidays that fall on March 4, include:

• Benjamin Harrison Day 
• Brain Injury Awareness Day 
• Courageous Follower Day 
• Holy Experiment Day 
• Hug a GI Day
  
• International GM's Day - (GM = Game Masters)
• International Scrapbooking Industry Day 
• March Forth Do Something Day 
• Marching Music Day 
• National Backcountry Ski Day 
• National Dance the Waltz Day 
• National Grammar Day 
• National Hospitalist Day - March 4, 2021
• National Pound Cake Day 
• National Snack Day 
• National Sons Day
• Old Inauguration Day 
• Toy Soldier Day 
• World Book Day - March 4, 2021  - First Thursday in March (Primarily in United Kingdom and Ireland - most other Countries observe this day on April 23rd)
• World Hearing Day 

2021 Weekly Holidays that include March 4, are:

• British Pie Week - March 1-7 (Observed for 7 days starting on March 1st)
• Endometriosis Awareness Week - March 3-9, 2021
• Fairtrade Fortnight - February 22 - March 7, 2021
• Hearing Awareness Week - March 1-7
• Lent - February 17 - March 29, 2021
• Make Mine Chocolate - (Campaign kicks off annually on Feb 15, and ends on Easter which is April 4, 2021)
• National Aplastic Anemia & MDS Awareness Week - March 1-6
• National Cheerleading Week - March 1-7
• National Ghostwriters Week - March 1-7
• National Green Week - February 7 - April 30, 2021
• National Pasty Week - February 28 - March 6, 2021
• National Pet Sitters Week - March 1-7
• National Write a Letter of Appreciation Week - March 1-7
• Newspaper in Education Week - March 1-5, 2021 (First Full School Week in March)
• Read Across America Week - March 1-5, 2021 (M-F week of Dr. Seuss Birthday on March 2)
• Telecommuter Appreciation Week - March 1-7, 2021 (Week that includes Alexander Graham Bell's Birthday of 3/2)
• Universal Human Beings Week - March 1-7
• Will Eisner Week - March 1-7
• World Orphan Week - March 4-11

AS AN ADDED BONUS:

• 1952 - Ronald Reagan marries Nancy Davis
• 1960 - Lucille Ball files for divorce from Desi Arnaz

ALL THE GOOD NEWS HERE:

http://www.holidays-and-observances.com/march-4.html

 

The Ex-President's Accomplishments

Peek-a-boo: unintended consequences

Politico lists 30 things that happened during the last administration. Some of them are interesting and some are important. Some led to unintended consequences. Here are a couple of them.

Politico writes: 

Silver-loading

The move: House Republicans had tried for years to cut off subsidies that helped low-income Obamacare enrollees with the co-pays, co-insurance and deductibles that come with their health plans. In 2017, Trump finally did it through administrative means after the GOP effort to replace the law fell apart — and he immediately drew intense outcry from Democrats and policy experts who called the move “sabotage.”

The impact: The health exchanges didn’t collapse, as Trump had hoped. Instead, health plans and states quickly figured out a way to claw back the federal dollars they lost: They built the costs of the subsidies into premiums for Obamacare’s benchmark “silver” policies. This meant that premiums for these “silver” plans spiked and as a result, the premium subsidies the government had to pay for low-income enrollees vastly increased. The concept, known as “silver-loading,” grew government subsidizing of the exchanges by upwards of $20 billion per year.

The upshot: While Trump’s moves made Obamacare plans increasingly unaffordable for the unsubsidized, Democrats quickly tamped down their criticisms since it accomplished their goal of significantly boosting funding for Obamacare. The incoming Biden administration isn’t likely to reverse course.

Pandemic incompetence

The move: Despite pressure from Democrats, unions and worker advocates, OSHA refused to set rules for worker safety during the pandemic. Republicans defended the decision by saying the burden on companies struggling to stay afloat amid the recession would be too great. In the absence of a standard, employers have only had to comply with a mix of optional guidelines, able to pick and choose what precautions they take.

The impact: The agency’s backseat approach to workplace safety means Americans still face a dangerously unpredictable range of safety conditions when they show up to work. Though OSHA has cited some companies for coronavirus-related transgressions, many large corporations received meager fines even in cases where workers died from Covid-19. Democrats have attempted to include language mandating an emergency temporary standard in future rounds of pandemic aid — but their efforts have been unsuccessful.

The upshot: One of the first things a Biden administration will likely move to do is instruct OSHA to step up worker safety enforcement — including by enacting an emergency standard and ramping up penalties on violators. Biden’s campaign also pledged to double the number of OSHA investigators to enforce the law and existing standards.

Merging state tax dollars with the needy church

The move: DeVos tweaked a wide range of federal education policies, large and small, to bolster faith-based organizations. She changed regulations, for example, to make it easier for members of religious orders to access federal financial aid and expanded federal Public Service Loan Forgiveness to cover clergy members. And she created new protections for faith-based campus organizations at public universities.

At the K-12 education level, DeVos stopped enforcing a policy that had prohibited religious organizations from providing publicly funded services—such as tutoring, technology and counseling—in private schools. And she opened up federal grants for charter schools to religiously affiliated organizations.

The impact: Many religious education groups praised DeVos’ changes, which she often described as effort to expand religious liberty. “Too many misinterpret the ‘separation of church and state’ as an invitation for government to separate people from their faith,” she said.

The upshot: The Biden administration is expected to move quickly to roll back many of DeVos’ education policies, but it’s not yet clear how the incoming administration will approach her various policy tweaks to promote religious organizations.

Shining a light on the creatures hiding in shell companies

The move: Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin personally negotiated the anti-money laundering safeguards with Republicans and Democrats who crafted the deal. The new law would require millions of business entities to report their true owners, puncturing the veil of anonymity that shell companies give to money launderers and tax evaders and making it easier for prosecutors to literally follow the money.

The impact: The information businesses report to the Treasury Department would be accessible to law enforcement agencies that would have an unprecedented tool to investigate shell companies. Banks, which are responsible for policing criminal activity by their customers, would also be able to tap into the database.

The upshot: Criminals will keep finding ways to operate in the shadows. But the new disclosure rules could give law enforcement leverage over their frontmen and may make it harder for bad guys to find lawyers willing to help hide their money because of the new paper trail.

The anti-money laundering law was targeted mainly at terrorists and drug dealers, but it will probably have the unintended consequence of being able to track regular tax cheating rich business people who just hate taxes. This could blow back on people like the ex-president who tries as hard as he can to hide as much as he can. It is reasonable to think that the democrats drafted the law broadly while talking about terrorists and drug dealers, but also wanting to get at crooked business people. This could be a case where conservative ideology blinded the republicans to the true reach of the law they co-drafted with democrats. If that hypothesis is correct, the unintended consequences here are highly beneficial for everyone except people trying to hide their money, some of whom have good reason to hide and some don't.

Politico also reported on impacts on (1) food stamps where about 755,000 Americans lost access to food aid (food stamps), (2) student loans where loan forgiveness for schools that defraud students is now significantly harder to prove, and (3) toxic chemical regulation, which was reduced probably allowing less protection of the public against toxic chemical exposure. 

Differences of Opinion in the Democratic Party

An interesting assessment by FiveThirtyEight, Democrats Are Split Over How Much The Party And American Democracy Itself Are In Danger, finds three different mindsets about the current political situation. The first group sees a "Democratic and democratic emergency", the second sees a possible emergency, but just do popular stuff, while the third group sees no problem and wants to keep the filibuster and pass legislation on a bipartisan basis.

My assessment of the three groups is that there are two groups, the first two are basically close variants of each other, while the third is truly different. The second group, which includes Stacey Abrams, Rep. James Clyburn, Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders, is interesting. It wants to get rid of the filibuster so that legislation to protect voting rights can be passed. IMO, when voting rights in a democracy are under the severe attack the fascist GOP is now fully engaged in, democracy is in an emergency situation. Getting rid of voting rights to rig elections for the GOP is how the American experiment can come to an end and be replaced by fascism or some other form of far right authoritarianism.

FiveThirtyEight writes:

We're in an emergency

Ideas: Persuade Justice Stephen Breyer to retire as soon as possible and quickly confirm his replacement; get rid of the filibuster; with the filibuster out of the way, pass structural reform legislation, such as an updated Voting Rights Act, a raft of electoral reforms (H.R. 1), statehood for Washington, D.C., and an expansion of the Supreme Court by adding four new justices, as well as creating additional judgeships at the lower court levels.

The people in this camp don’t agree on everything, but they foresee a nightmarish (and fairly plausible) scenario for Democrats, and they’re proposing a series of steps to avoid that calamity. Here’s the Democratic nightmare: Biden and congressional Democrats pass a few major bills over the next two years but leave the filibuster in place, preventing the passage of major reforms to America’s electoral system. A federal judiciary stacked with Trump appointees strikes down all or parts of many of the laws the Democrats do pass as well as many of Biden’s executive actions, leaving Democrats few permanent policy victories and driving down the president’s approval ratings.

Meanwhile, Republicans use their control of most state legislatures to draw state legislative and U.S. House district lines in ways that are even more favorable to the GOP than the current ones and enact laws that make it harder for liberal-leaning voting blocs to cast ballots. Combine gerrymandering, voting limitations, lackluster poll numbers for Biden and the historic trend of voters rejecting the party of the incumbent president in a midterm election, and it results in the Republicans winning control of the House and the Senate and making even more gains at the state legislative level in November 2022.

Maybe we're in an emergency

Ideas: Get rid of the filibuster to pass popular legislation such as a new Voting Rights Act (H.R. 1), expanded background checks on gun purchases and an increased minimum wage.

The people in this group generally aren’t as alarmist as the this-is-an-emergency camp. They aren’t arguing that American democracy and the Democratic Party are at risk. And thus, this group generally isn’t pushing the most aggressive reform ideas, such as adding justices to the Supreme Court.

But they are pushing for some democratic reforms — in particular, getting rid of the filibuster. I included a number of major Black politicians in this camp because they tend to focus on getting rid of the filibuster as a means of passing laws that protect voting rights. From this camp’s point of view, an updated Voting Rights Act is a moral imperative, regardless of its electoral impact, and the filibuster must go if it stands in the way. When Obama referred to the filibuster as a “Jim Crow relic” in his speech last year at Rep. John Lewis’s funeral, he shifted the discourse in the Democratic Party on the filibuster, in my view, by casting it as a barrier to racial justice, a powerful message in an increasingly “woke” party.  

This camp is thinking electorally too, though. For people in this camp, getting rid of the filibuster is a path to passing a bunch of provisions that are popular with the public, such as making it easier to vote and increasing the minimum wage. Getting those kinds of bills passed, in this camp’s view, would help Democrats win in 2022 and 2024. So one reason this group is not likely to push for adding seats to the Supreme Court, even if the filibuster is gone, is that adding justices isn’t that popular an idea. In fact, there is talk in liberal circles about carving out exceptions to the filibuster for voting rights bills instead of completely gutting it. That approach might appeal to this bloc in particular.

Nah, there's no emergency

Ideas: Keep the filibuster in place and get more legislation passed on a bipartisan basis.

Democrats would need every Democratic senator on board to get rid of the filibuster, so these members are super-important. And over the last few months, Manchin and Sinema have said they are strongly opposed to getting rid of the filibuster. Longtime senators like Feinstein have hinted in the past that they are wary of such a move too.

Part of this opposition to getting rid of the filibuster reflects ideological differences — Manchin in particular is more conservative than most (if not all) congressional Democrats. So he probably isn’t dying to get rid of the filibuster to vote for a $15 federal minimum wage, for example, because it’s not clear he favors that idea anyway.

But this bloc also disagrees with the this-is-an-emergency camp about the state of American politics right now. Feinstein is fairly liberal on policy issues. But she, like Manchin and Sinema, has suggested she wants to work in a Senate that is not hyperpartisan and seems to believe that is possible. In the view of people in this camp, the Republican Party is not completely dominated by an anti-democratic wing that won’t work with Democrats. So members in this camp view getting rid of the filibuster and other more aggressive moves as not only unnecessary but potentially really bad — making the Senate and Washington overall even more gridlocked and polarized than they already are.

In view of the last ~30 years of American politics, the third group seems to be the most delusional about the situation. The GOP really is dominated by an anti-democratic wing that won’t work with Democrats. Republican political leaders and activists openly call the democrats and the press anti-American communists who are enemies of the people. That some democratic politicians cannot see that reality probably reflects an anti-democratic, pro-authoritarian streak in their mindsets and/or some mental weakness. The evidence of fascist GOP intransigence is overwhelming. So is the evidence that most congressional republicans buy into the lie that the 2020 election was corrupt and that the 1/6 coup attempt was something they could rationalize into acceptance. That leaves the ex-president an acceptable candidate if he chooses to run again in 2024 despite his dominant role in fomenting the coup attempt.