The Carpentariat

There's only one state law that matters

​​​​​In an oxymoronic moment of infuriated amusement, I caught perhaps two minutes of former RNC chair Michael Steele yesterday on MSNBC cheerfully explaining that no matter how many voting barriers Republican state legislatures throw up, voters are going to vote. In droves. The host and another guest smiled in comfortable reassurance.

Yet just seconds before that prediction, Steele had briefly touched on the grotesque reality that said legislatures are rigging the electoral process itself — that is, they'll soon determine in key battleground states which votes are counted and which are "fraudulent." Neither host nor second guest paused to note the throbbing contradiction of Steele's mass-voting triumphalism paired with Stalinesque vote counting.

Of no liberating consequence is the number of voters voting if Republican goons can simply throw out any number of pesky Democratic votes.

Also largely inconsequential are the growing number of states passing restrictive voting laws and the number of laws themselves. Only one law is needed to kill American democracy — that of election subversion, cited above. And merely one or two states with such a law are enough to swing a presidential election and determine Congress' partisan composition.

For the love of God, the left, center-left and center need to abandon their worry over voter IDs or whether a voter in line can be handed a bottle of water. The looming monster to be singularly confronted is any state law that hands the counting of votes to partisans. That alone is destined to kill American democracy.

Anatomy of the Big Lie

Philip Bump:

"A pattern has emerged in Republican politics over the past several years, a three-part system by which to generate a cloud of uncertainty about certain things. One component is to suggest a failure to treat something unserious as serious is a reflection of an unwillingness to debate, that the party considering the unserious thing as unserious is somehow afraid to confront it."

An addendum: The "unserious thing" must be gargantuan in scope and magnitude, thus signifying that only an immensely powerful, secretive cabal could pull it off — and would be likely to, since power is never sated. 

"Another is cherry-picking from huge pools of information, using isolated and usually misconstrued claims to construct alternative narratives."

This is one strongly preferred method among conspiracy theorists: the amassing of intricately entwined, always "documented" evidence which proves the conspiracy, even though the evidence can be easily debunked and is often contradictory.

"The third is the existence of a sympathetic media and social universe that collectively agrees the unserious and unproven thing is, in fact, both proven and serious."

In other words, an allied, "respectable" network of charlatans.

Bump omitted one other Big Lie methodology, perhaps because it's too obvious: Subject the lie — i.e., the conspiracy theory — to remorseless repetition. Just ask any ethically flexible ad agency how to promote the most dubious of products.

The most frightening aspect of not so much conspiracy theories as the democracies that drive them has been identified by a fascistically exploited truth:

The broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily — A. Hitler, 1925

The final and profoundly interesting element of the Big Lie is that its corrupt purveyors are always genuine in their pursuit of virtue.  

The false, malicious promise of Republican Caesarism

Krugman argues that current economy data and recent Federal Reserve statements should render mute all those hysterical cries of inflation.

"Recent price rises are … not coming from food and energy so much as from pandemic-related disruptions that caused surging prices of used cars, lumber and other nontraditional sources of inflation. But the Fed’s view has been that this episode, like the inflation blip of 2010-11, will soon be over. And it’s now looking as if the Fed was right. Lumber prices have plunged in recent weeks. Prices of industrial metals like copper are coming down. Prices of used cars are still very high, but their surge has stalled and they may have peaked."

As for the "alternative" cry of the Pandemic Effect — another classic case of too much suddenly freed-up money chasing too few goods — Krugman notes that "to buy into this story … you have to claim not just that the coming boom will be truly huge … but also that the Fed, which is fully capable of reining in a runaway boom, will stand idly by while inflation gets out of hand." Which, as the Fed has made clear, it won't. Inflation-mongering economists, however, appear not to have heard of the Fed's inflation-battling weapons.

Both are sensible, reasonable arguments against "the vehemence of the inflation rhetoric," which "has been wildly disproportionate to the actual risks." Yet what startled me about Krugman's piece is that he derides only Friedmanesque economists for hustling such irrationally vehement rhetoric, when — who else? — it's fearmongering Republican pols who've been screaming much louder.

In the Twittersphere, published commentary and television interviews, they have howled for weeks that the nation is languishing hopelessly in an inflationary death spiral — no question about it. Their relentless doomsdaying is, of course, designed only to dispirit an otherwise rightfully upbeat public — and thus to turn it, once again, to the salvation of Republican Caesarism. 

Let's face it. You can't put your finger on any regnant national "malaise" — each containing enormous destructive power — without seeing Republicans behind it, ceaselessly peddling it, ensuring it. In short, it's Republicans who are the undisputed "enemy of the people," in fact, Public Enemy #1.

Borowitz reports

How does one "slyly" expose the obvious?

Catherine Rampell writes excitedly that Sen. Joe Manchin "gave Republicans what they said they wanted, and they still rejected his offer out of hand!" Thus "by ceding ground on 'election security'" — e.g., accepting voter ID as a national requirement — "and effectively taking the issue off the table, Manchin just proved Republicans never actually cared about election security" (her emphasis).

Of course they didn't. There was never evidence that they did. In fact the entirety of contemporary Republican hypocrisy — from crocodile deficit tears to Stop the Steal via Control the Steal — is but a public playbook of extraordinary chutzpah. Their game is to strut doubleplusgood duplicity right out in the open. And the game is not just possible but bewitchingly irresistible, since they also know the projectionist base revels in the party's unscrupulousness.

So, the West Virginia senator and his fellow Democrats now say they also want redundant "election security"? Well fuck Joe Manchin and his fellow Democrats, say Republicans who demanded it. And just to make sure the base is in on the unsubtle joke — one never knows what might go sailing over the hayseeded cracker head — they further declare the senator's voting-rights compromise to be a black woman's "substitute."

Rampell again underscores Manchin's dazzling exposure of Republican doublespeak: "[He] slyly revealed Republicans’ stated concerns about stolen elections — and their professed desire to work across the aisle — as the baloney they always were."

He revealed nothing. All along, Republicans have insisted that their baloney be easily decipherable to even a three-year-old, since their prepubescent base insists on baloney for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

The long slog of prosecuting Trump - ultimately

​​​​​Allen Weisselberg, the poor man's Meyer Lansky of the Trump crime syndicate, is nevertheless practicing omertà with the ritziest of them.

"Every day that [he] arrives for work at Trump Tower … could be seen as a public signal that he is sticking with Trump," which, reports the Washington Post, is why investigators "have grown frustrated about what they view as a lack of cooperation from Weisselberg."

Nothing says "this guy is dirty" like a mob associate's selective memory. In past depositions Weisselberg has shown an impressive capacity for recalling details, such as the number of Trump's golf course memberships or the precise cost of his West Palm Beach clubhouse. But when asked about holes in Trump’s depositions or instances of discernible wrongdoing, Weisselberg has been stricken by memory loss or fits or shoulder-shrugging.

He "ran the whole company," says one former investigator. He was there for the charity frauds, he supervised spending for the Trump University grift, he literally signed off on illegal hush-money payments to his boss' paramours. Hence credulity is tortured when asked to believe that Weisselberg knew nothing about the Trump Organization's plate-spinning rigmarole of asset inflation and devaluation. If Trump knew about them — and at least one former casino employee has said he did — then Weisselberg knew.

Proving what everyone knows he knew is another matter, although the burden of proof might well be eased if Weisselberg's son, Barry, comes to face prison time for evading taxes on his plush, organization-provided lifestyle. Dad's memory might suddenly improve.

For now, though, mum is the word for Trump's chief financial officer. Re-quoting the Post, "he is sticking with Trump." Yet one should ask how often has "sticking with Trump" worked out for the mobster-loyal associates? Once the conspicuous answer to that question settles painfully in Weisselberg's brain, he'll flip, says the smart money.

The crazy keeps spilling out

Outgoing N.C. Republican senator Richard Burr tells Politico he was dumbfounded by Trump’s endorsement of Rep. Ted Budd as his Senate replacement, not only because Burr has "never seen individuals endorse a candidate a year before the primary," (the senator's words), but also because Burr is "telling everyone that [former governor Pat] McCrory is the only one that has a chance to win." So let's hear it for Trump's judgment.

Why Budd? Why else? He opposed Joe Biden's certification of Electoral College votes. That's it, that's all there is to it. (Budd also has the powerful endorsement of Eric Trump's wife.)

In other Trump news — this, via The Hill — it seems he cleverly "suggested sending Americans infected with COVID-19 to Guantanamo Bay in an effort to stem the rapidly growing number of cases on U.S. soil in the early days of the pandemic." That's merely one scoop from the highly sourced Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History, by two Washington Post journalists.

The book also reports that Trump, while screaming to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar about the politically damaging lack of early covid testing, blurted that "testing is killing me! I’m going to lose the election because of testing! What idiot had the federal government do testing?"

Replied Azar: "Uh, do you mean Jared?"

There's just nothing like the political smarts of Trump & Family.

The Taliban — and Republican — offensive

The NY Times:

"The Taliban entered two provincial capitals in northern Afghanistan Sunday, local officials said, the culmination of an insurgent offensive that has overrun dozens of rural districts and forced the surrender and capture of hundreds of government forces and their military equipment…. The looming U.S. withdrawal means Afghan troops will be left without the kind of combat support that has stopped such Taliban offensives in the past."

Republican pols who so recently — and overnight — supported Trump's isolationism will now — again, overnight — reinvent themselves as farsighted interventionists and altogether bury the fact of Trump's ordered withdrawal by indignantly framing Biden's as being singularly weak on terrorism. What they won't say is that the same would have happened had U.S. troops remained for the next 30 years; rather than yesterday and today, the Taliban's pounding offensive would have happened in 10,950 days plus one, and at the insane cost of more American lives, money and material resources.

Insane, because no amount of U.S. troops and other foreign assistance can effectively kill Afghanistan's culture of bloody tribalism, unscrupulous warlords and religious fanaticism. Even Republican voters should be capable of grasping that. After all, their political leaders are cultivating an American version of it all.

The weirdest filibuster defense you'll ever read

You have to read all of Mike Solon and Bill Greene's Wall Street Journal op-ed on the glories of the filibuster to appreciate how really awful it is. And after reading it, you'll be left wondering how in God's name these two Republican "theorists" ever got jobs with a former Senate majority leader (McConnell) and former House Speaker (Boehner). In defending the filibuster, a C- college sophomore could do better.

The thrust of their argument is that dismantling the wretched thing "would end the freedom of America’s political innocents" — i.e., those simple, carefree, everyday Americans who now spend their lives "playing, praying, fishing, tailgating, reading, hunting, gardening, studying and caring for their children." With Norman Rockwell dead, the new national sport of politics would become heated and fractious, and so "two parties wouldn’t be enough." Hence a factional labyrinth of coalition governments would emerge in which the formerly wholesome innocents would drop their fishin' poles, cease praying and neglect their children, since their lives would then be consumed by "rallying, canvassing, picketing, lobbying, protesting, texting, posting, parading and, above all, shouting."

Kind of leaves you speechless, no? But that's some downright formidable critical thinking when you compare it to Solon and Green's wrap-up:

"All this sacrifice would be made on the false premise that the Senate can never act because it can never agree. But the filibuster doesn’t block legislation where a consensus exists, as evidenced by the existence of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and a minimum wage, all of which were passed when the cloture vote requirement was two-thirds…. The movement to end the filibuster is less about a Senate that doesn’t work than it is about a socialist agenda that doesn’t sell."

To speak of bipartisan consensus today is, of course, just silly. Indeed it's too silly to bother refuting. Somehow, though — and this is remarkable — Solon and Greene manage to cite and implicitly praise the hugely popular socialist agendas of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and even a minimum wage while arguing against the evils of socialist agendas which, at any rate, they say, don't sell.

In a quite narrow and the most cynical of ways, they're right. None of them could pass Congress today, because of the filibuster. But that would be OK. At least we could keep playing and fishing — and, especially, praying, since we'd be up to our asses in impossible debt and bankruptcy courts. 

A thought, a question, on the paranoid style

The Bulwark's Charlie Sykes takes note of a tweet that underscores the madness of the right's conspiracy theories about Jan. 6:

"Antifa did it. And it was totally peaceful. And we were expressing our righteous and justified indignation at the Democratic vote steal. And Portland was worse. And the FBI entrapped us."

— David Frum (@davidfrum) June 16, 2021

Sykes remarks that "the point is that many folks in the MAGAverse believe it all… simultaneously." And he assigns Hannah Arendt to explain: "In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true."

She wrote those words in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), and they accord perfectly with Richard Hofstadter's illuminations on "the paranoid style" (1964) then raging in the United States, which I touched on yesterday in addressing the right's massive resurgence of political paranoia, couched in Jan. 6 conspiracy theories.

Hofstadter concludes his essay with these words: "We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well." Yet I wonder about the degree to which political paranoids actually suffer. For that matter, to what degree did Hofstadter actually believe in their suffering? I ask because of how I interpreted his thesis yesterday: "[Paranoid conspiracy theorists'] anxiety arises from the feeling of being out of control over whatever alternative situation they preferred — and that feeling is one of inferiority, which must be extinguished by feeling in control."

Put another way, feeling powerful. As Sykes' colleague, Tim Miller, writes: "For [the purveyors of Jan. 6 theories], their narrative doesn’t have to make sense. None of the different stories and arguments need to tie together. Because the lies" — the conspiracy theories themselves — "are a demonstration of power. The lies are a signal that as long as you are on the right side, there are no red lines. That anything goes."

Indeed it would seem that even Hofstadter questioned his assertion of the paranoid-as-double-sufferer, since just prior to his essay's conclusion he writes that the "afflicted" paranoid is nevertheless "assured of ultimate triumph." Could it be that the paranoid is, at root, free of suffering? 

The paranoid style will always be with us, so let's hope the press understands it

Jack Shafer, Politico's media correspondent, argues this morning that because there's a "fat chance" that Republicans will ever permit Congress to adequately investigate the attempted Trumpian coup of Jan. 6, it will be up to the press to answer heretofore unaddressed questions and, equally important, to "sort the Jan. 6 sense from the nonsense wherever and whenever it appears" — nonsense such as Antifa's involvement, of "peaceful protesters," and most recently of Tucker Carlson's "tangled commentary that proposed that the FBI itself helped perpetrate the riots."

Still stinging from all the Stop the Steal nonsense, Shafer asks, "How long must we suffer" from lunatic conspiracy theories? "The short answer is 'forever,'" he writes, since "the human appetite for alternative, and usually hair-brained, explanations for why events blossomed the way they did can never be sated." That's true, although the observation also leaves us with the decidedly uncomfortable conclusion that sorting "sense from the nonsense" is in fact a hopeless venture, as far as any permanent correction goes.

Shafer then adds this rather startling line: "As long as anxieties about an uncertain future persist, people will devise irrational and inconsistent theories." Anxieties, yes. But conspiracy theories have much more to do with the past and present than any undetermined future. Even more than that, they have to do with some people's superior self-image.

Their initial anxiety arises from the feeling of being out of control over whatever alternative situation they preferred — and that feeling is one of inferiority, which must be extinguished by feeling in control. This, as historian Richard Hofstadter brilliantly showed in his 1964 Harper's essay, leads to seeking special inside knowledge of "what really happened," which we ignoramuses and "elitists" either cannot grasp or purposely refuse to accept. Hence the gathering or assimilation of pedantic "evidence" whose whole overwhelms the parts, such as Carlson's piecing together of FBI involvement in Jan. 6. — and as for that darkest of days, cynical Republican pols, who know better, have been all too happy to exploit conspiratorial Trumpers' sense of epistemic superiority.

My advice? That each member of the Fourth Estate read Hofstadter carefully before attempting to counter the almost innumerable conspiracy theories now surrounding Trump's coup. Assuming, that is, that the historian's delineation of the paranoid style won't leave them too depressed to carry on.

One surprise in this otherwise no-surprise poll

That only 9% of these clowns view President Biden favorably is a bit of a yawner. But I'm also shocked. Only 19% of Trump voters still possess a fondness for that capital fellow among Trump's very bestest, dictatorial BFFs? Perhaps the morons are still swooning for the news-fading Kim Jong-un, who, let's face it, deserves a resurgence of Trumpian fanfare. After all, he's much bolder than Vladimir when it comes to fascism.   

Biden regains international respect. Our "democracy" doesn't.

From Pew Research, the good news:

The bad news (from surveys conducted in non-European nations as well):

Actually, not really bad news so much as an honest portrayal of American democracy badly wounded and on life support, at best. When only "17% say [still] democracy in the U.S. is a good example for others to follow," any even half-conscious American can know that Trumpism was no internationally known blip of reprehensible aberration, but an enduring, internal manifestation of democracy-as-minority-mobocracy.

And those who would protect America's traditional political system can't even gather the votes to drive a filibuster-ending stake through the heart of those still cheering the corruption of Trumpism, rendering American democracy an international joke. Rightfully so. 

The enduring sickness of states' rights

It wouldn’t matter if it was a degree of federal involvement or total federal involvement, I’d still think that was not the right place for the federal government to be.

An antebellum argument advanced by Democratic U.S. senators against federal encroachment on the slavocracy? Yes. And in the above instance, it's a contemporary argument advanced by Republican U.S. senators — the statement is from Roy Blunt of Missouri, a former slave state — against voting rights aimed at slavery's descendants.

Its intent is much the same: the repression of human rights still packaged in the slavocracy and Jim Crow names of states' rights — where everyone's freedom to choose their leaders is, as Republican Sen. John Barrasso puts it, "radical," "extreme," "dangerous" and "scary."

Emboldened by redneck mobs fanatically stirred by resurrected fire-eating despots, Sen. Blunt has chosen to be explicit about his party's objectionable prey: "When [a black woman] immediately endorsed Sen. Manchin’s proposal [for a voting rights compromise], it became [a black woman's] substitute, not the Joe Manchin substitute."

Thus has Blunt's Senate leader observed, "All Republicans, I think, will oppose [debate]" — which they can do successfully via that other, still-extant remnant of slavocracy and Jim Crowism, the filibuster. The Old South's Democratic Sen. John Calhoun would be proud of his Republican relief pitchers.

A subtler World War III

Earlier this morning, after surveying Republicans' unremitting endeavors to destabilize the United States I wrote that "the world's Vladimir Putins are a redundancy, a superfluidity. Our stronger, similar enemy lies within." It's certainly no exaggeration to add that the implications for not only the U.S. but Putinesque authoritarianism itself are global, and potentially world-shattering.

Edward Luce, a British-born U.S. political and foreign policy columnist for the Financial Times, agrees that what essentially is World War III — the war between democracy and authoritarianism — is actually "taking place" right here, within our shores. "America’s friends are watching the direction of US politics with genuine trepidation," he notes. "Far from banishing the forces of Trumpism, Biden’s victory has hastened their full takeover of the Republican party. To European observers, the world’s most consequential democracy vs autocracy battle may in fact be taking place within the United States." In fact. 

By contrast, this USA Today editorializing is vexatious in its sunny forecast: "The world might never know why Trump debased himself [in Helsinki], or why he persisted with an odd affinity for dictators and autocrats throughout his tenure. But all of that seemed washed away Wednesday when Biden had his turn with Putin."

No doubt the Trump imagery of America's debasement before autocracy was washed away by President Biden. The substance of Trumpism and encroaching Republican authoritarianism, however, remain buried not among the American majority, but within the state and congressional halls of Republican power. That's where the hottest war between democracy and autocracy lies, with potentially devastating implications for the entire globe. Absent America's democratic beacon and leadership, the world will be adrift — ultimately drifting to where America wound up.

Thus the war must be fought here; if necessary, in the streets.