Thursday, April 25, 2024
The Republicans Who Want American Carnage
Tom Cotton has never seen a left-wing protest he didn’t want crushed at gunpoint.
On Monday, the Arkansas senator demanded that President Joe Biden send in the National Guard to clear out the student protests at Columbia University against the Israel-Hamas war, which he described as “the nascent pogroms at Columbia.” Last week, Cotton posted on X, “I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands. It’s time to put an end to this nonsense.”
This is a long-standing pattern for Cotton, who enjoys issuing calls for violence that linger on the edge of plausible deniability when it comes to which groups, exactly, are appropriate targets for lethal force. During the George Floyd protests of 2020, Cotton demanded that the U.S. military be sent in with orders to give “no quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters,” insisting unconvincingly in a later New York Times op-ed that he was not conflating peaceful protesters with rioters.
Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who had raised a fist in apparent solidarity with the mob that assaulted the Capitol on January 6 before fleeing through the halls to avoid them once the riot began, echoed Cotton’s call for deploying the National Guard to Columbia.
What Cotton and Hawley are doing is simple demagoguery. When Donald Trump was inaugurated president, he spoke of an “American carnage” that he would suppress by force. Trump’s attempts to apply the maximum level of violence to every problem did not solve any of them. Migration at the southern border surged in 2019 until a crackdown in Mexico and the coronavirus pandemic brought it down; Trump’s presidency ended with a rise in violent crime . . . . and with widespread civil-rights protests.
There have been documented instances of anti-Semitic rhetoric and harassment surrounding the protests; a rabbi associated with Columbia University urged Jewish students to stay away, and the university’s president, Nemat Shafik, recommended that students not living on campus attend classes remotely for the time being. In the same way that the Israeli government’s conduct does not justify anti-Semitism, the anti-Semitic acts of some individuals associated with the protests do not justify brutalizing the protesters.
[T]the kinds of mass violence and unrest that would justify deploying the National Guard are currently absent, and the use of state force against the protesters is likely to escalate tensions rather than quell them. . . . NYPD Chief John Chell told the Columbia Spectator that “the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.” The arrests did not end the protest.
The calls from Cotton and Hawley to deploy the National Guard are not about anyone’s safety—many of the pro-Palestinian protesters, against whom the might of the U.S. military would be aimed, are Jewish. As the historian Kevin Kruse notes, sending the National Guard to campuses facing Vietnam War protests led to students being killed, including some who had nothing to do with the protests, rather than to anyone being safer.
As we approach the summer of 2024, the economy is growing, migration to the border has declined at least temporarily owing to what appears to be a new crackdown by Mexican authorities, and in many major cities, crime is returning to historic lows, leaving protests as the most suitable target for demagoguery. The Biden administration’s support for Israel divides Democrats and unites Republicans, so the longer the issue remains salient, the better it is for the GOP. More broadly, the politics of “American carnage” do not work as well in the absence of carnage. Far-right politics operate best when there is a public perception of disorder and chaos, an atmosphere in which the only solution such politicians ever offer can sound appealing to desperate voters.
This is why the Republican Party is constantly seeking to play up chaos at the border and an epidemic of crime in American cities, no matter what the reality of the situation might actually be. Cotton and Hawley are demanding that Biden use force against the protesters not just because they consistently advocate for state violence against those who support causes they oppose as a matter of principle, but also because any escalation in chaos would redound to their political benefit. They don’t want to solve any problems; they want to make them worse so that the public will warm to “solutions” that will continue to make them worse. They don’t want order, or safety, or peace. What they want is carnage.
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
THe GOP and Turning White Anxiety Into a Movement
The twin pillars of today's Republican Party are racism and white "Christian" extremism, both of which Donald Trump has skillfully played to his advantage in all of his campaigns. Both are powered by fears of whites and Christofascists that they are losing their privilege and power and ability to dominate and ride rough shod over the rest of American society. Republican "friends" and acquaintances would deny these motivations in their support of someone as morally bankrupt as Trump, yet for the non-super wealthy who care only about lower taxes, there really is no other explanation, especially when the American economy is currently the envy of much of the world. Trump, of course, was not the first Republican to use white racial hatred and anxiety and white Christian nationalism to turn out voters. Richard Nixon used the former as the keystone of his "Southern Strategy" and George W. Bush used gay marriage opposition in his 2004 campaign where anti-gay referendums were placed on state ballots, including here in Virginia, to drive evangelicals to the polls. Indeed, Trump and his acolytes have only taken fanning white/Christofascist anxiety to new levels such accusing immigrants of "poisoning the nation's blood." A piece in The Atlantic looks how pandering to and inflaming white anxiety became a hallmark of today's GOP. Here are highlights:
In May 1995, Pat Buchanan appeared at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., to announce an immigration policy that would become the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. “We have an illegal invasion of this country,” Buchanan warned. To resist it, he called for a “Buchanan Fence” patrolled by the military along the southern border, a five-year moratorium on legal immigration, and a constitutional amendment that would deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. to undocumented parents.
The platform was designed to stave off something Buchanan had long dreaded: “If present trends hold,” he noted a few years earlier, “white Americans will be a minority by 2050.” Buchanan was the first major politician to transform white anxiety about that prospect—which the Census Bureau first predicted in 1990—into an organizing principle for the conservative movement.
Buchanan never came close to winning the presidency, but the fear he incited of a majority-minority future has become integral to the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. Like Buchanan, Trump has made opposition to undocumented immigration the cornerstone of his presidential bid. Although he and his supporters try to portray this as a matter of law and order, they often admit that their chief concern is America’s shifting ethnic composition.
“People are just alarmed by what they see in the changes in the demographics in our country,” South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, a Trump surrogate, said in Iowa this year. A few weeks earlier, Trump accused migrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.”
For Buchanan and Trump, immigration isn’t just about America’s ethnic identity. It’s also about electoral power. Even as the GOP slowly diversifies, white Americans continue to make up a disproportionate share of its base, leading many conservatives to view nonwhite immigration as an existential threat.
[T]he American right’s preoccupation with declining white power isn’t new; it shaped the right’s defense of slavery and the violent overthrow of Reconstruction. By the time Buchanan ran for president, it wasn’t new for him either. He’d begun politicizing white resentment at the start of his career, creating a blueprint that would prove hugely influential for the GOP.
As a young speechwriter for Richard Nixon, Buchanan helped conceive of the “southern strategy” that Republicans used to appeal to white voters who were alienated by the civil-rights movement. Buchanan counseled Nixon to ignore “liberal issues” like housing, education, and unemployment.
When he ran for president in the 1990s, Buchanan was still criticizing the civil-rights laws of the 1960s, trying to court revanchist white voters, such as supporters of the Klansman turned presidential candidate David Duke. He described the Voting Rights Act as “regional discrimination against the South” and visited Confederate monuments while campaigning in states such as Georgia and Mississippi. “Who speaks for the Euro-Americans?” he asked. “Is it not time to take America back?”
Buchanan first ran for president in 1992 under the slogan “Make America First Again,” a riff on Ronald Reagan’s “Let’s Make America Great Again.” . . . . Although Buchanan didn’t win a single state, Republicans adopted some of his positions on immigration as the official party platform, pledging to “equip the Border Patrol with the tools, technologies and structures necessary to secure the border.”
Four years later, Buchanan ran again and won the New Hampshire primary. During the campaign, he portrayed his effort to preserve Judeo-Christian values and white power in the face of a massive demographic shift as part of America’s oldest struggle, calling his followers “the true sons and daughters of the Founding Fathers.”
After he lost the nomination, Buchanan was sidelined by the GOP establishment. Instead of getting a prime-time slot at the convention, he was blocked from speaking entirely. . . . He spent the 2000s in the political wilderness, watching as the country’s white population grew by just 1 percent from 2000 to 2010 while the Black population grew by 15 percent, and the Hispanic and Asian populations by 43 percent. Every few years he published screeds with titles like The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization and State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. “The people who put the GOP in power are not growing in numbers nearly as rapidly as immigrants and people of color who want them out of power,” he wrote in 2006. “The fading away of America’s white majority entails an existential crisis for the GOP.”
These writings, mostly ignored at the time, appeared prophetic after Barack Obama’s election in 2008, when Republicans fretted over the diverse coalition assembled by the first Black president. As Buchanan became more marginalized, his ideas paradoxically found greater favor within the GOP. His concerns about white displacement, which Republican leaders had mostly tried to downplay in the 1990s and 2000s, were now being pushed into the mainstream of the party. . . .
These views clearly influenced Trump and his advisers. In August 2014, the GOP consultant Kellyanne Conway released polling showing that white voters who were unhappy about demographic change would turn out in higher numbers if a candidate emphasized “stricter enforcement of current immigration laws” and demanded that “illegal immigrants … return to their home countries.” While Trump prepared to launch a seemingly quixotic bid for the presidency, his chief strategist Steve Bannon called the missing-white-voter theory and Conway’s polling on immigration “the intellectual infrastructure” of Trump’s campaign.
If Buchanan helps explain the start of Trump’s presidency, he also helps explain its culmination on January 6. . . . Unlike many Republicans, the insurrectionists didn’t come from the country’s reddest or most rural counties. Instead, they were more likely to reside in counties whose white populations had experienced significant declines, such as Harris County, Texas, a majority-minority area that includes Houston. The study described a political movement “partially driven by racial cleavages and white discontent with diversifying communities.” . . .. Fears of a “Great Replacement” were the “most important driver of [the] insurrectionist movement,” the survey concluded.
The fact that Trump has found so much more political success than Buchanan did 30 years ago in exploiting white anxiety suggests that it will worsen as the supposed majority-minority tipping point approaches. That’s coming sooner than Buchanan once feared; white Americans, census data now suggest, will technically be a minority by 2045. Buchanan may have failed to hold back demographic change, but the backlash he sparked is only getting stronger.
Tuesday, April 23, 2024
The Humiliation of Donald Trump
While it falls far short of the punishment he deserves, there was no small amount of satisfaction from reports that Donald Trump had to spend much of the first week of his first criminal trial quietly taking it as mean tweets about him were read aloud in court.
Trump is such a famous narcissist he literally has a woman who follows him around with a wireless printer to keep him in a steady supply of online praise. Hearing what people outside of the paid shills have to say was, all reports suggest, very upsetting for the former president. He glowered and eventually tried to leave the courtroom so quickly that he had to be told to sit down by the judge.
The jury is now impaneled, and no longer will be asked to talk about past social media posts calling Trump "dumb as [expletive]." But, as Monday's trial opening suggested, this trial is set to put Trump's fragile ego through a lengthy battering. It's hard to believe it — considering his ridiculous hair, hideous makeup and comically oversized suits — but by all accounts, Trump seems to actually believe he cuts an impressive figure. He famously spent decades longing to be included in the ranks of Manhattan's social elite, imagining he had a "classiness" they were simply failing to see. . . . "The rich and powerful sometimes invited him to their parties, but behind his back they laughed at his coarse methods and his tacky aesthetic."
Alas, getting elected president allowed Trump to finally swaddle himself in the pomp that allows him to successfully delude himself into believing he has an air of dignified stature. . . . Trump's clownishness just made all of that seem ridiculous to those looking on, but his attempted stern-faced expressions and chin-up pride showed that he really did seem to feel he was finally being taken for the great man he wished himself to be.
Even after leaving the White House, Trump went to great lengths to keep himself in this elevated atmosphere. Unfortunately, he gets a lot of help keeping up the illusion of majesty. The presence of Secret Service protection allows him to travel with pricey black car entourages at the taxpayer's expense. He also sees a steady stream of Republican politicians visit Mar-a-Lago, allowing Trump to play the part of a king greeting supplicants who kiss the ring.
While the outcome of the trial remains weeks away, the process of being a criminal defendant has already stripped Trump of most of the trappings he uses to prop up his delusions of nobility. He has to sit still and do what he's told, which he whines about ad nauseum when he's outside of court. He keeps reportedly falling asleep and believable rumors suggest the smell of him is hard to bear.
On Monday, the humiliations continued to pile on Trump with opening arguments and the first witness, former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker. Even in this truncated day of court, the picture painted of Trump was not the regal leader of his fantasies, but who he actually is: A sleazy poseur who belongs to the world of trashy tabloids and scheming hucksters. The whole thing is a harsh reminder, to his face, that Trump is more suited to wallowing in the gutter than sitting on a throne.
The prosecutor, Matthew Colangelo, did not hold back from the salacious details in describing the alleged crimes that led to Trump sitting at the defendant's table: the extramarital sex, the hush money payments, the alleged out-of-wedlock child, the conspiracy with the National Enquirer to pay women off in a practice with the tawdry name "catch-and-kill." He spoke of Trump as such a miscreant that he required a full-time "fixer" to "take care of problems." . . . Colangelo spoke of Trump's crude bragging on the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape about how he likes to sexually assault women.
Regardless of the air quality around his desk, defense attorney Todd Blanche had a stinky job on Monday: Trying to portray Trump as somehow above the shady people he surrounds himself with. Blanche sanctimoniously called Trump "President Trump," as if saying it makes it true. He tried to humanize his glowering orange lump of a client . . . .
It may work, of course. Jurors are people and people can be bamboozled, as Trump's entire career demonstrates. But Blanche's argument just doesn't make sense. If Trump is such an upstanding citizen, then why would he need someone like Cohen to commit crimes on his behalf? Nor is Trump "just like you," unless you, ordinary person, do so many terrible things on a regular basis that you literally need a full-time fixer to clean up your messes.
Pecker only spent about 20 minutes on the stand before the judge called recess for the day, but in that brief time, the jury got another glimpse into the vulgar environments that are Trump's natural home. Pecker described his business as "checkbook journalism" and agreed with Colangelo that he traffics in "juicy stories."
Despite Trump trying to tell reporters this trial is going "very well," reports from inside the courtroom are that he was seething. No surprise there. Prior to this, Trump spent all day, every day inside a bubble, surrounded by flatterers and sycophants, always ready to tell him that he's a mighty man who definitely doesn't weigh an ounce over 215 and wins every golf game with ease. Now he's spending his days in a dingy courtroom, staying silent while other people talk about his real self: A pathetic figure who pressures reluctant women into sex, and then runs to his seedy friends and barrel-scraping employees to bail him out of trouble. If there was a hell, Trump's punishment would be to look into a mirror for all of eternity. Having to hear people tell the truth about him for hours a day is as close as we're going to get on the mortal plane.
Monday, April 22, 2024
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