Commentators opine on the 1/6 hearings to be televised today

A ponderous gasbag

Two op-ed essays in the New York Times are not optimistic that the hearings will amount to much. They maybe be justified in their pessimism, or maybe cold realism for the pragmatists in the crowd. In his essay, The Jan. 6 Committee Has Already Blown It, David Brooks writes:

My Times colleagues Annie Karni and Luke Broadwater wrote an article with the headline, “Jan. 6 Hearings Give Democrats a Chance to Recast Midterm Message.” Democrats, they reported, are hoping to use the hearings to show midterm voters how thoroughly Republicans are to blame for what happened that day.

Other reports have suggested other goals. The committee members are trying to show how much Donald Trump was involved with efforts to overturn the election, so he is forever discredited. They are expected to use witnesses like the former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson to show exactly what went on inside the administration that day and in the lead-up to it. One lawmaker told The Washington Post that voters have shifted their attention to issues like inflation and the pandemic, so it is key to tell a gripping story that “actually breaks through.”

No offense, but these goals are pathetic.

Using the events of Jan. 6 as campaign fodder is small-minded and likely to be ineffective. If you think you can find the magic moment that will finally discredit Donald Trump in the eyes of the electorate, you haven’t been paying attention over the last six years.

We don’t need a committee to simply regurgitate what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. We need a committee that will preserve democracy on Jan. 6, 2025, and Jan. 6, 2029. We need a committee to locate the weaknesses in our democratic system and society and find ways to address them.

The core problem here is not the minutiae of who texted what to chief of staff Mark Meadows on Jan. 6 last year. The core problem is that there are millions of Americans who have three convictions: that the election was stolen, that violence is justified in order to rectify it and that the rules and norms that hold our society together don’t matter.

Brooks has a point. Actually, at least two points. First T**** cannot be further discredited by anything that has happened so far. Second, too many Americans now reject restraining norms. That was the glue that held us together, even if some of it was the now vilified and discredited PC. The glue is gone and with it, so is respect for democracy, the rule of law, civility and respect for inconvenient fact, truth and sound reasoning. The wreckage is gigantic.

Maybe worse from what I can tell, the same anti-democratic poison appears to be slowly seeping into America's political left.

In his essay, The Anticlimax of the Jan. 6 Hearings, commentator Jacob Bacharach focuses on the loss of respect for facts. Bacharach writes:

Even if [the televised hearings] manage to drag a few million American eyeballs away from the streaming platforms for a few evenings with some measure of spectacle and the promise of comeuppance for some of the minor and expendable figures from Trumpworld, their scope and impact are likely to be minor. The modern Democratic Party has not often shown itself to be capable of transcendent political showmanship, and the televised congressional hearing, as a genre, has likewise been in decline for a long time.

Democrats, liberals generally and a few anti-Trump Republicans who have become pariahs in their party have been burned before in their efforts to hold Donald Trump and his allies accountable — by the breathlessly anticipated report from Robert Mueller, by two impeachments that led only to acquittals in the Senate, by the steady drip-drip of petty crimes and gross corruptions out of Mr. Trump’s circle, none of which brought about the cinematic courtroom conclusion that many seemed to hope for: an unambiguous and final guilty verdict.

What’s more, there is little evidence to suggest that something as analog and old-fashioned as sworn witness testimony is going to change anyone’s mind. Frustrated Democratic voters have watched for years as the G.O.P. has wielded congressional hearings to great media effect while their own party clung to forms and procedures, unable and unwilling to do what was necessary to break through the noise.

As with so much else in America’s increasingly gerontocratic political culture, the desire for decisive congressional hearings feels trapped in amber, pure nostalgia for a now-lost and lamented era of consensus reality, when, as it has become fashionable to observe, people disagreed about politics and policies but agreed on the facts.  

What Democratic leaders fail to appreciate is that our society seems to be reverting to the factional, regional and violent version of America that existed before television — during a long 19th century from which we awoke only briefly and imperfectly. .... A terrifying historical counterfactual is that the only thing that might have gotten enough of the G.O.P. on board to matter would have been if the rioters had actually gone through with it [murdering Pence on 1/6], and even then, it’s hard to be sure.

Bacharach then turns to American history and points out that the brief period after WWII was an exceptional time when Americans generally agreed on facts. The rest of the time, there was no agreement of facts. Just political propaganda warfare. Maybe the horrors of war scared the fantasy right out of people and that got replaced with the horrors of a somewhat less fantasized reality. Some commonly agreed on facts really did exist.

But it is now clear that Americans as a whole never had the moral courage to face complete, unspun reality. All the inconvenient fact and truth that accompanies it is more than most people could take.

Bacharach cites Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon and the nothingburger the Iran-contra hearings amounted to as examples of the erosion of respect for facts and the weakening of democracy and rule of law. Bacharach described the disappointment of Iran-contra like this: “The hearings themselves were compelling; the tenor and quality of questioning can feel like a transmission from a lost world of verbal dexterity and mental acumen compared with today’s ponderous gasbagging, and one of the underlings went to prison, but many of those most responsible escaped any serious penalties.” In terms of criminal penalties, both Nixon and the high level Iran-contra criminals got off mostly or completely unscathed. The rule of law was rotting away.

Does any of that sound familiar?

Although Bacharach does not say it, it necessarily follows in logic that if facts are not agreed on, then there will be times, maybe usually, when one or bother tribes at war adopt some or many false facts as their reality. If false facts are in the mix, then what about truth and reasoning? Both of those can be fatally flawed too.

And that is why the stubborn cuss Germaine keeps referring to attacks on and disrespect for actual facts, true truths and sound reasoning as central targets for demagogues, tyrants, kleptocrats, radical extremists and the like. Those are the people who have no choice but to stand in opposition to facts or face failure. Once respect for facts are undermined and discredited, all the rest will necessarily fall. True truth and sound reasoning will bite the dust. The rule, garbage in, garbage out, applies.

In my opinion, respect for actual facts is what significantly characterized that brief period of social and political harmony after WWII.[1] Another was that the rest of the world is in ruins or the dark ages. America could compete far better than anyone else, so it was good times.

Footnote: 

1. American social and political harmony after WWII was partial, not complete. It did not generally apply to racial minorities, the LGBQT community, women and other out-groups, e.g., atheists. Americans and probably all societies cannot take undiluted blasts of reality. Reality has to dribble out to be socially absorbed over time (usually decades) in something the average non-conservative might call social progress. Presumably most conservatives would generally see social progress as social rot, but occasionally come along on the ride after a few extra decades. 

Crossing the line into neo-fascism: Republicans fabricating evidence

Since the November 2020 elections, I thought that Republicans would be tempted and cross a line from merely alleging massive fraud and crimes by Democrats to fabricating evidence to “prove” their false allegations. I expected the crackpot Cyber Ninja vote recount in Arizona to be an example of evidence fabrication, but that did not happen. The Cyber Ninjas and Republican vote fraud claims were just repeated, without any evidence of widespread vote fraud. No evidence, e.g., fake ballots with fake votes, was fabricated and shown as proof of vote fraud in Arizona.

Republican neo-fascists just didn't quite have the guts to fabricate and submit vote fraud evidence.

Republicans definitely want to commit vote fraud. So far, the clearest evidence of Republican intent to commit fraud has included the phone call the ex-president made to the Georgia Secretary of State, where he asked the Secretary to "find" about 11,780 votes so that he could be named as the faux winner of the 2020 election in Georgia. If the Secretary had done so, that would have been an example of the massive vote fraud that Republican elites have been constantly howling about. 

Now, Republicans in Michigan appear to have crossed the line into real live evidence fabrication on a large scale. Evidence of Republican fraud is fake signatures on a state ballot measure and on nominating petitions for Republican candidates for Governor of Michigan. Evidence has been fabricated. Republicans in Michigan have crossed this critically important line of defense of democracy and the rule of law.

Several sources are reporting on massive fraudulent signatures that Republicans have gathered, and in some instances, fraudulently submitted to state officials as valid signatures. Yahoo News reports:

A Republican effort in Michigan to put what they describe as an anti-voter fraud initiative on November’s ballot has failed after tens of thousands of signatures on a required petition were discovered to be fraudulent.

The Wolverine State GOP had mounted a petition drive to place something they call “Secure MI Vote” on the ballot during the November midterm elections. The initiative is nearly identical to a bill restricting absentee voting and imposing voter ID requirements that was vetoed by Governor Gretchen Whitmer last year.

If successful, the initiative would’ve enacted the restrictions into law without any chance for Ms Whitmer to veto it. 

But organisers have dropped plans to submit their petition after realizing that roughly 20,000 of the 435,000 signatures gathered were fraudulent.

There, the faux signatures were gathered, but the Republicans behind that fraud did not have the guts to submit them. They feared what is left of the rule of law.

As usual, the radical right propaganda sprang into instant damage control and spin & lies action. Truthout writes on the spin control and the actual fraud the Michigan GOP committed:

“The fact of the matter is our volunteers, our supporters had put in too much hard work for us to end up getting bounced off the ballot due to some technicality,” he told reporters at a press conference on Wednesday.

The announcement came just days after the state’s Bureau of Elections and Board of Canvassers disqualified five of the 10 Republicans running for governor, including frontrunners James Craig and Perry Johnson, after discovering that thousands of the signatures on the petitions they circulated to qualify for the ballot were fraudulent. The Bureau of Elections identified 36 petition circulators who submitted at least 68,000 fraudulent signatures in the gubernatorial primary, as well as in nine other nominating contests. Craig and Johnson argued they were victims of the fraud, not its perpetrators, but a court upheld both of their disqualifications this week. 

“At the end of the day, you have to take responsibility for who you hired to collect your signatures,” said Nancy Wang, executive director of Voters Not Politicians, a nonpartisan advocacy group that successfully backed a citizen initiative to reform redistricting.

Wang accused the campaign of trying to “abuse” the citizen initiative process.

“They’re trying to use it as a way to do an end-run around the voters,” she said. “In fact, they’re supposed to be using it to demonstrate that they have a level of support, that they have the right to be on the ballot. They haven’t been able to do that.”

Roe suggested that the petition circulators had faked the signatures. But long before Wednesday’s announcement, the Secure MI Vote drive was plagued by allegations that petition circulators were misleading voters. Numerous reports on social media and in local news outlets alleged that petition circulators made blatantly false statements to Black voters while trying to convince them to sign a petition that could “risk their own disenfranchisement.”

The ballot measure fraudsters claim that 20,000 fraudulent signatures were just a mere technicality. Just a technicality. Republican laws to subvert elections in red states rely heavily on punishing technical errors by voters in elections. Some of those errors are felonies. Neo-fascist Republicans are hell bent on severely punishing errors by voters who make honest mistakes. But Republican elites who make 20,000 mistakes, honest or not, dismiss that a just an innocent technicality. 

Here is another key trait of American neo-fascism: The laws apply to most average people, particularly non-Republicans, but they do not apply to Republican elites and rich people generally. Elite neo-fascists can break laws in the name of technicalities, while most everyone else gets the shaft. 

Also note, the GOP governor candidates who committed their fraud claim victimhood. They assert they were victims of fraud by the signature gatherers. They deny all responsibility. They have plausible deniability on their side. 

One can just feel how tempting it is to fabricate evidence. Once that line is crossed for the first time, it gets easier on the second, and even easier on the third. And then democracy and the rule of law falls to tyrant demagogues and kleptocrats.

Q: What are the odds of any Republican politician in Michigan being prosecuted for fraud?

A: Close to zero.

Q: Should Republican candidates who submitted fraudulent signatures for candidates for governor be held responsible for submitting 68,000 fraudulent signatures?

A: Opinions will vary. But Republicans will say hell no and they have plausible deniability, the fraudsters’ best friend, on their side. It does not matter what non-Republican opinions are, because plausible deniability will protect the Republican guilty, even more than it protects the non-Republican innocent.

Since we are on the subject of Wokeness.........

                             What we need is some white rapper to set us straight, damn right.

                                                And this guy, he is tellin' it like it is, y'all.

And this guy, he don't even like us SNOWFLAKES very much.

He prefers to defend AMERICA.

And believes NO LIVES MATTER.

Man, like that is tellin' us all how it is, right? RIGHT? RIGHT?

OR.......... 

OR................ he is just too way out there? 

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? 🎅🏻