I don’t want any more time to go by before noting the findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee that found there really was all kinds of cooperation between the Trump campaign and Russia in 2016. For good summaries, see Nancy LeTourneau, A Bipartisan Rebuke of Barr’s Attack on the Trump-Russia Investigation and Jennifer Rubin, As it turns out, there really was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

So that was the real conspiracy. Now we go to Greg Sargent, Trump’s backing of far-right conspiracy theorist frames the stakes for 2020.

This isn’t just highly newsworthy on its own. It also illuminates the stakes of the 2020 presidential race in a fresh way — one that should help forestall the sort of terrible errors in media coverage of President Trump’s hate-mongering that we saw in 2016.

The virulently Islamophibic far-right conspiracy theorist endorsed by Trump is Laura Loomer, who is indeed a far-right conspiracy theorist on the far-right fringe of the far right. Loomer won the Republican primary to run for the U.S. House seat in Florida’s district 21, West Palm Beach. According to the Palm Beach Post, with Loomer when she celebrated her victory were Roger Stone, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes. Among the vilest of the vile.

Loomer is so toxic that some other Trump supporters are upset he congratulated her.  Example:

A gun-rights advocate who recently announced he had joined President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign team appeared to split with the president Tuesday over his support for Laura Loomer, who claimed victory in her Republican congressional primary in Florida.

“Great going Laura,” Trump wrote in a tweet, celebrating the right-wing politician’s victory. “You have a great chance against a Pelosi puppet,” he said, suggesting he believes Loomer, who has repeatedly come under fire over racist comments, could defeat Democratic incumbent Lois Frankel.

Tweeting out against Trump’s endorsement, JT Lewis, a gun rights advocate who lost his brother in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, said he believed Loomer has no place in the GOP.

“Laura Loomer is a Parkland and Sandy Hook hoaxer. She has no place in the Republican Party I know!” Lewis wrote on Tuesday.

I suggest Mr. Lewis doesn’t know the GOP very well. It’s little more than a freak show now.

Robby Soave, a senior editor at the libertarian Reason, wrote an editorial headlined The GOP Should Shun Laura Loomer. Conservative journalist Brad Polumbo also objected. “This is an embarrassment for the GOP,” Polumbo wrote for the Independent (UK). “Loomer is an extremist with bigoted views. She is not worthy of conservative support.”

Hey, the entire Republican Party is not worthy of conservative support. Where have you been?

I was not aware that I had ever paid attention to Loomer, but it turns out she was one of the wackjobs who tried to shut down a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar back in 2017 because she felt it was insufficiently respectful to Donald Trump. And note the irony that it’s wingnuts who perpetually whine about “Cancel Culture.”

How nutty is Loomer? Her Wikipedia profile says she was banned from the 2019 CPAC convention “after attempting to heckle reporters after chasing them through the conference.” She’s been permanently banned from Twitter, Facebook, GoFundMe, VenMo, PayPal, Instagram, Lyft, and Uber. Did I mention she used to work for James O’Keefe?

I don’t know what Loomer’s chances are in the general. She’s running against an incumbent Democrat, Lois Frankel, who served in the Florida legislature for many years and is a former mayor of West Palm Beach.

Greg Sargent points out that even as Trump is embracing the likes of Loomer, he is trying to paint Joe Biden as a far-left extremist.

Through sheer force of his magical lying, Trump is trying to transform this embrace of diversity into something hermetically sealed off from reality. In Arizona, Trump claimed Biden and Democrats are “sick.” That they want the “complete elimination of America’s borders.” That they want to give every migrant “a free ticket to invent an asylum claim.” That Biden would “unleash a flood of illegal immigration like the world has never seen.” That Biden’s campaign is a “cult” for open border “zealots.”

All of these are lies. While Biden has edged somewhat leftward on immigration, for instance supporting a limited expansion of procedural avenues to legal immigration and a temporary moratorium on deportations, Biden doesn’t support open borders, and his immigration agenda is largely a mainstream Democratic one.

Biden basically backs restoring the pre-Trump asylum status quo, while seeking a regional, negotiated international solution to better regulate migrant flows, which would be good policy.

Biden also supports largely maintaining current (pre-coronavirus) flows of legal immigration and legalization for undocumented immigrants, including for people brought here illegally as children (whose protections Trump tried to end). Those have broad majority support, so if that’s zealotry, a large majority of Americans are zealots.

And, of course, Biden supports rescinding Trump’s quasi-veiled Muslim ban, which should come up again in the context of the endorsement of Loomer.

And, once again, I wonder how much of a hot extremist mess the GOP convention will be. See this in the Daily Beast:

Over the last few U.S. presidential election cycles, the major television networks have chosen to broadcast just one hour each night from the respective parties’ political conventions, usually out of concern that anything more would impact viewership numbers and ad revenues.

But this year, another explanation was offered for keeping the broadcasts short: uncertainty over what airing President Donald Trump’s coronation event might look and sound like.

I’m anticipating a hastily assembled mashup of Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film Triumph des Willens (1934), D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), and every film Tim Burton ever made.

Multiple sources told The Daily Beast that when Democratic officials met with various broadcast network executives about their convention coverage plans, the executives stressed that they could not broadcast two hours each night in part because they then would have to give the same airtime to Trump, and all the wild unpredictability that might entail from an editorial perspective.

“We don’t know what that content is going to be,” was the line offered up, according to one source.

As I wrote yesterday, the Dems have been preparing for a virtual convention for several weeks. And so far, it’s gone very well. The Republicans didn’t commit to a virtual convention until July 23, less than a month ago. The networks still don’t know what the Republicans are going to put on the screen, other than the McCloskeys and the asshole kid in a MAGA hat who dissed the Native American Elder. It’s possible the Republicans still don’t know what they’re going to put on the screen. Maybe they’ll bring back Clint Eastwood and his chair.

I understand that ratings for the Dem convention are down a bit from 2016, which is a shame, but on the other hand convention videos are all over social media. So maybe the television ratings don’t matter. Historically, I believe the conventions really have impacted the elections. Past candidates have gotten as much as a 14-point bounce in the polls from their conventions. Whether the virtual conventions will have a similar influence remains to be seen.

There is no way the Republicans can top the Democrats’ roll call, especially the calimari guys from Rhode Island. Charles Pierce:

Let’s face it. The Democrats Over America Tour ’20 roll call on Tuesday night was a hit from the moment that Alabama kicked it off with Rep. Terry Sewell casting the state’s votes from the foot of the delicately illuminated Edmund Pettus Bridge. This may have been the greatest innovation in political conventions since the invention of papier-mâché. The roll call showed America in all its vast complications—its natural beauty, its popular diversity, its hope, its anger, and even its imperial pretensions. (I can’t be the only one who was moved by the poignant appeal of the delegates from the Northern Mariana to the rest of us not to inflict El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago on them again because we can vote and they can’t. We’ve done enough damage to these folks already without that.) It’s hard to see how this doesn’t become a permanent fixture at these gatherings going forward. I can’t wait for next week when the Republicans cop this device, also beginning in Alabama, with Roy Moore standing outside the Gadsden Mall.

Maybe Florida can have Laura Loomer futilely trying to summon an Uber driver in West Palm Beach.

The changing face of the Republican Party

I was pleasantly surprised by the first night of the Dem virtual convention. There were a few small glitches, as there always are with live events, but on the whole the evening was engaging, inspiring, and often gripping. Clearly, the Dems had thought this process through and took care to get the details right. I think they should consider doing conventions this way from now on, in fact.

Not everyone agrees; a couple of people at Slate thought the evening was weird.  But Michelle Obama’s talk got five stars.

See also Paul Waldman, Trump’s unhinged Twitter meltdown shows Michelle Obama drew blood.

I believe the Democrats committed to a mostly virtual convention some time in mid June. The Republicans, meanwhile, wasted a lot of time and money trying to accommodate Trump’s insistence on a live, maskless, no-social-distancing event. They didn’t give up on that plan until July 23.

This means the Republicans gave themselves a lot less time to pull something together to put on the teevee screen. Their convention begins is next week.

According to news stories, among the mostly still unknown speakers will be the McCloskeys and Nick Sandmann, the Catholic schoolkid who became famous for dissing a Native American elder. The theme for the RNC convention is, apparently, “Fear, Grievance, and General Whining.” I’m looking forward to more videos of rioters burning cars.

The RNC does have some recent experience to go on, such as the virtual Texas Republican Convention. Which was a disaster. Texas Monthly called it a “goat rodeo of galactic proportions.” But maybe Republicans will have learned from mistakes. Or will at least use a different technical team.

Right-wing media is dismissing the first night of the Dem convention as a snooze. Some guy at Townhall called last night “the night Trump won re-election.” He was especially outraged at one speaker who blamed Trump for her father’s death.

But what’s left of the establishment Republicans must realize they’ve got a big act to follow. They’ve got to be nervous.

Now back to the first night of the Dem convention, which is getting mostly glowing reviews in the mainstream press. This is from the Washington Post theater critic.

Without convention floors and podiums to cover, the cable channels and other outlets gave the Democratic National Committee extraordinary control over the evening’s content. Not only did that sideline the anchor folk for much of the proceedings, but it also allowed for a smooth and surprisingly rich program of videos and live speeches to flow dynamically from segment to segment. And with actress Eva Longoria Bastón serving as a serene and confident host from a Los Angeles studio, Night 1 of the four-night production came across as an elegant, multidimensional campaign ad.

As television drama you can’t beat the old days when the conventions really chose the nominees. But since the primary system took over the conventions have just been television extravaganzas anyway. I don’t miss the spin room interviews and the stupid hats. Dana Milbank:

Gone, mercifully, are the corporation-financed parties where lobbyists ply their trade and big donors buy access to public figures. Absent, thankfully, are the convention-floor pageantry and theatrics that haven’t meant a thing for decades. Missing, too, are the preening journalists bagging trophy interviews on media row. Vanished are the scores of interest groups threatening to withhold support if they don’t get their moments in the spotlight and their planks in a platform the nominee will eventually ignore.

Milbank had good things to say about Bernie Sanders’s talk:

In apocalyptic terms, Sanders made the case for his former opponent. “Joe Biden will end the hate and division Trump has created. He will stop the demonization of immigrants, coddling of white nationalists, racist dog-whistling, religious bigotry and the ugly attacks on women. My friends, I say to you, to everyone who supported other candidates in the primary, and to those who may have voted for Donald Trump in the last election: The future of our democracy is at stake. The future of our economy is at stake. The future of our planet is at stake. … My friends, the price of failure is just too great to imagine.”

Indeed. So, good first night. I have concerns about the second night:

The old-guard of the Democratic Party — in speeches by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, former Secretary of State John Kerry and former President Bill Clinton — will share the spotlight with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez of New York, the young progressive star who, despite being given only a minute to speak, could provide the night’s most closely watched moment.

AOC should get more time. Maybe not a primary slot — she’s a junior congresswoman — but more than a minute.

And here’s the closing musical number, which MSNBC walked over so I couldn’t watch it last night.

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Rep. Ann Wagner (R-MO) is not my congresswoman. Her district is made up of St. Louis suburbs. She is a far-right fruitcake who is a reliable vote for whatever Republicans are pushing. Her Democratic opponent is state Senator Jill Schupp, whose voting record looks pretty good to me, and I would have no problem voting for her if I lived in her district.

I bring this up only because I am subjected to Ann Wagner’s television ads on the St. Louis stations. I’ve been all over the web this morning trying to find a video of the latest one, and I’m sorry I couldn’t find it. It is absolutely hysterical. A voice speaking over dark images of rioters setting fire to cars and buildings accuses Schupp of being a friend of sex offenders and sex traffickers and a member of the “far left mob.” It’s so over-the-top one would have to be an idiot to believe it. But we’re talking about Republican voters, so they probably do.

“These are the times that try men’s souls,” Thomas Paine wrote back in 1776. We might update that to “These are the times that have turned us all into a bundle of raw nerves.”  Less catchy but more inclusive.

The business about Schupp and sex traffickers is left over from an earlier race. In 2014 she defeated Jay Ashcroft, the son of Bush II era Attorney General John “Crisco” Ashcroft, to be elected to the Missouri state senate. Ashcroft accused Schupp of “siding with dangerous predators” mostly because she initially opposed a bill to allow prior convictions to be admissible in criminal trials for sex crimes. You can read about the Ashcroft accusations here. Wagner is just repeating the old charges.

But the obsession with sexual traffickers and predators takes us to QAnon, which is a very dangerous thing that’s not going to go away if Trump is defeated in November. If you haven’t been paying much attention to QAnon, I urge you to read The Prophecies of Q by Adrienne LaFrance at The Atlantic. QAnon began as Pizzagate and has since grown into a massive complex of absolutely batshit conspiracy theories and endtime apocrypha all bundled together and fervently believed by way too many people.

QAnon is emblematic of modern America’s susceptibility to conspiracy theories, and its enthusiasm for them. But it is also already much more than a loose collection of conspiracy-minded chat-room inhabitants. It is a movement united in mass rejection of reason, objectivity, and other Enlightenment values. And we are likely closer to the beginning of its story than the end. The group harnesses paranoia to fervent hope and a deep sense of belonging. The way it breathes life into an ancient preoccupation with end-times is also radically new. To look at QAnon is to see not just a conspiracy theory but the birth of a new religion.

The notion that the Democratic Party and the “deep state” are fronts for a massive child sex trafficking/cannibal cult is at the center of QAnon, but it has become something of a global collaborative effort and is always sprouting new variations of crazy. They make the old Tea Party and John Birch Society seem rational. And there is good reason to believe the movement or mass psychosis or whatever it is will become increasingly dangerous, especially if Trump loses in November. See Jason McGahan, Inside QAnon, the Conspiracy Cult that’s Devouring America.

Defense lawyers for the man charged in the murder of the underboss of the Gambino crime family in New York City, say their client is obsessed with conspiracy theories and believed the mobster was a member of the “deep state.” (The same man had previously attempted to make citizen’s arrests of Schiff and Congresswoman Maxine Waters.) The landscaper arrested for igniting the 2018 wildfire that burned nearly 20,000 acres of Orange County and destroyed a dozen homes had posted dozens of conspiracy videos on his Facebook page, including some about a satanist cult that ruled the world and a mysterious U.S. intelligence insider who is working with Donald Trump to thwart it. A QAnon believer and self-identified member of the alt-right Proud Boys in Seattle killed his brother in January by stabbing him in the head with a four-foot-long sword, later claiming he thought his brother was a lizard. In June of last year, an armed man inspired by a Q post barricaded himself in an armed vehicle and blocked traffic on the Hoover Dam bridge for hours. He was demanding the Justice Department release a (nonexistent) secret report on Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server that Q had claimed was being stashed at the dam.

Granted, the guy who thought his brother was a lizard probably had issues that went beyond conspiracy theories. But I think nearly anyone who soaks himself in stuff like this could lose his grip on reality. See also Conspiracy theories like QAnon could fuel ‘extremist’ violence, FBI says.

David Atkins writes that the Republican Party can’t control QAnon because it’s little  more than a conspiracy cult itself.

The problem is that Republican Party has been relying on only slightly milder forms of conspiratorial politics for years now. It’s staggering to ponder the implications of modern Republican ideology all at once, but consider a few examples. To be a modern Republican you have to believe that thousands of climate scientists are engaged in a worldwide conspiracy to falsify data for grant money, while oil executives are victims trying to expose the truth. You have to believe that hundreds of thousands or even millions of people are engaged in coordinated voter impersonation fraud, abetted by hundreds of local elections officials in both blue and red areas, and no one has ever leaked it or been caught. You have to believe in a massively coordinated effort to take away guns not to protect children from being shot in schools and movie theaters, but to leave white people defenseless in a race war or implement a Stalinist state tyranny. You have to believe that social services are a racket to keep racial minorities voting for Democrats, rather than an attempt to mitigate the inequities of brutal capital markets in a society riddled with horrific structural racism. And so on.

And you’d have to be demented enough to believe Ann Wagner’s television ads, for that matter. Seriously, what else does the Republican Party have to offer any more? They used to call themselves the “party of ideas” even though it often seemed their only idea was to cut taxes. But now they have no interest in government at all, except as a means to preserve the wealth and privilege of the already wealthy and privileged.

Ezra Klein has a great piece up called Why Republicans are failing to govern that’s very much worth reading all the way through. I just want to point to this bit:

Politically, the Republican Party’s current approach is so self-sabotaging that I figured I must be missing something. Someone must have a plan, a theory, an alternative. Chaos is Trump’s brand, but surely McConnell won’t walk passively back into the minority. And so I began asking Republican Hill staffers and policy experts for correction. What wasn’t I seeing? What was the GOP’s policy theory right now? What do Republicans actually want?

I posed these questions to Tea Party conservatives, populist reformers, and old-line Reaganites. The answer, in every case, was the same. Different Republican senators have different ideas, but across the party as a whole, there is no plan. The Republican Party has no policy theory for how to contain the coronavirus, nor for how to drive the economy back to full employment. And there is no plan to come up with a plan, nor anyone with both the interest and authority to do so. The Republican Party is broken as a policymaking institution, and it has been for some time.

“I don’t think you’re missing anything,” said a top Republican Senate staffer. “You have a whole bunch of people in the Senate posturing for 2024 rather than governing for the crisis we’re in.”

“There hasn’t been a coherent GOP policy on anything for almost five years now,” a senior aide to a conservative Senate Republican told me. “Other than judges, I don’t think you can point to any united policy priorities.”

Oh. Well, then.

Basically, the GOP doesn’t have anything else to run on but to accuse their opponents of eating babies.

See also Paul Waldman, Is QAnon the shape of the Republican backlash to come? And sorta kinda related, there’s a fascinating piece at Rolling Stone by Andy Kroll called Killing the Truth on the Seth Rich conspiracy theory. I tend to tune this stuff out, but perhaps we should be paying attention.

A woman holds a QAnon flag as protesters gather outside Governor Kate Brown’s residence in Salem, Ore., on April 25, 2020, calling for novel coronavirus restrictions to be lifted so that people can get back to work. (Photo by Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

According to Fox News, Trump is holding the Postal Service hostage to force Democrats to negotiate. Seriously.  This morning, Fox News reported that chief of staff Mark Meadows says Trump is ready to sign a compromise bill, if only those stubborn Democrats would compromise.

“If my Democrat friends are all upset about this, come back to Washington, D.C.,” White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows told CNN’s “State of the Union.” “Let’s go ahead and get a stimulus check out to Americans. Let’s make sure that small businesses are protected with an extended [Payroll Protection] Program and put the postal funding in there. We’ll pass it tomorrow. The president will sign it.”

“This will all go away because what we are seeing is Democrats are trying to use this to their political advantage,” Meadows continued.

And, of course, Democrats passed a bill with all those things in it back in May. It stalled because of Mitch McConnell. Fox News viewers and QAnon believers probably don’t know that. As a political ploy, claiming that he’s screwing with the Postal Service to force Democrats back to the negotiating table is not bad, I suppose. It’s better than admitting he’s screwing with the Postal Service to stop mail in voting, as he has already done. And which has been all over the news, although perhaps not Fox News.

However, just yesterday Trump was telling reporters that “the time is not right” for him to negotiate with Democrats.

We might be seeing an admission on Meadows’s part that screwing with the Postal Service for any reason was a bad move. I have not yet seen any polls that include the postal service issue, but even the St. Louis local television news reported that Trump is screwing with the postal service to stop vote by mail. For them, that was ballsy. And there are local news stories all over the country about mail being slow, veterans not getting their medications, people waiting for checks to arrive, etc. And all these news stories mention Trump.

And now there’s going to be a price increase for commercial mail, which is going to piss off business owners. I should say, further piss off business owners.

This is not 12 dimensional chess. This is Trump’s id getting ahead of him, as usual. The Washington Post reported yesterday that Trump is obsessed with the Postal Service.

Then Trump complained to senior White House advisers that Jeff Bezos — a presidential foe in part because he owns The Washington Post, whose news coverage the president thought was unfair and too tough on him — was “getting rich” because Amazon had been “ripping off” the Postal Service with a “sweetheart deal” to ship millions of its packages, one of them recalled. They explained that this was not true and that the Postal Service actually benefited from Amazon’s business, the adviser added, but the president railed for months about what he described as a “scam.”

Trump really is like an old-time Mafia boss who can’t let go of vendettas.

Trump’s fury with the Postal Service and mail-in balloting has become something of an obsession in recent weeks. The president devotes extensive time to reading news reports and other materials about mail-in ballots, talking about the topic with his advisers and thinking about how to block such voting, according to one senior administration official.  …

…Trump’s ire at the Postal Service grew so intense in the spring of 2018, a time when he was routinely attacking Amazon on Twitter, that his advisers griped privately about the presidential preoccupation.

As Larry Kudlow prepared to take over for Gary Cohn as National Economic Council director in 2018, Kudlow told Cohn, “I just talked to the president and we have got to do something about this special deal Amazon has with the Postal Service,” according to two former senior administration officials who described the episode, which has not previously been reported.

Cohn burst out laughing and told Kudlow: “It’s not my problem anymore. I’ve heard about this all the time since I’ve been here, and I’ve tried explaining that the post office actually competes for and wants last-mile delivery.”

Trump will not understand anything he doesn’t want to understand. It was explained to him repeatedly that the deal between the Postal Service and Amazon was a good thing and that he didn’t have the authority to cancel the contract. The WaPo article points out that Trump’s business experience is in real estate, golf courses, and marketing, none of which depend much on logistics. But most businesses do depend on logistics, in one way or another. Trump has no clue what role the Postal Service plays in the U.S. economy.

But now he’s got his own guy, Louis DeJoy, in the Postmaster General job. And he’s appointed several people to the Postal Service Board of Governors. So he’s free to screw with the Postal Service.

Everybody assumes that DeJoy is making changes in the Postal Service to deliberately slow down service and discourage vote by mail. And maybe that’s true. But there’s another possibility. I worked in book and magazine publishing for many years, for both small companies and international corporations. I realized early on that the people in the top executive suites — especially in the big corporations but to a remarkable extent in small companies as well — had no idea how the product got made. This was usually because they came from the marketing and finance departments, not production, manufacturing, or editorial. We worker bees who turned manuscripts into books were alien creatures to them.

From time to time, they’d bring in outside consultants who were supposed to “streamline” our department and make it more “efficient.” The consultants inevitably screwed everything up, because they had no experience doing what we did and had no clue why we did what we were doing. Nor did any of them ever talk to us worker bees about our jobs and what we’d like to see improved. Instead, they’d observe us for maybe half a day and then change our workflow in some gawdawful way that produced all manner of bottlenecks and errors. And for doing that I’m sure they collected a six-figure check. Usually after a few months the vice president in charge of whatever would get tired of missed deadlines, costly mistakes, and listening to us bellyache and let us go back to doing things as we preferred to do them.

And after going through this a few times, nothing terrified us bees more than seeing men in expensive suits strolling through our department. No good ever came from that.

So when I heard LeJoy say he was streamlining the Postal Service, it rang bells. I’m sure he never bothered to consult anyone with actual experience at getting the mail out, because the big shots never do. Of course, it’s possible he really is trying to slow the mail down, but IMO it’s just as possible he’s just the standard overpaid white man in an expensive suit who thinks he knows everything.

The next question, of course, is what will Democrats do about it? Right now all of Congress in enjoying the traditional August recess, and I am sure most members of Congress have scheduled that time for campaigning. But over the past few hours the House Democrats have gone from “considering” cutting the recess short to scheduling DeJoy to testify before a House Oversight panel on August 24. That’s still a week away, but I guess that was as soon as they could get the gang together.

Another update: We’ve all heard that DeJoy ordered sorting machines to be dismantled and discarded because they weren’t being used right now. A lot of postal workers have testified to this. (Such activity is typical of Stupid Consultant Ideas, mind you.) Now the White House is denying anybody is messing with the sorting machines.

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said in an interview on Sunday that US Postal Service mail-sorting machines will not be taken offline between now and Election Day — a statement at odds with reports that the Postal Service is decommissioning 10 percent of its machines this year under a new policy.

The way Meadows made the claim — by denying they were being removed in the first place, and making questionable claims in response to an on-air fact check by CNN’s Jake Tapper — left it unclear if he was actually pledging a reversal of the ongoing decommissioning of machines. …

…On CNN’s State of the Union, Meadows first told Tapper that sorting machines being taken offline was “not happening” and that claims to the contrary were simply the product of Democrats trying to “stoke fear” with a “political narrative.”

When Tapper asked if Meadows was denying that sorting machines have been taken offline and removed recently, Meadows initially replied by dodging the question: “I’m saying that sorting machines between now and the election will not be taken offline,” Meadows said.

Then Meadows went on to say that machines were taken down during the Obama Administration, not by the new guy. Yes, blame Obama.

When Tapper persisted in asking why sorting machines have been taken offline recently under new rules, Meadows said, “Get your producer to share where exactly those sorting machines were taken offline. Let them whisper in your ear, because what I’m telling you is you’re picking up on a narrative that’s not based on facts.”

Later in the episode, after being updated by a producer, Tapper fulfilled Meadows’s request: He cited Chris Bentley, president of the National Postal Mail Handlers Union Local 297, which covers Kansas and part of Missouri, who told CNN that postal management “has already taken out four machines in Kansas City, two machines in Springfield, Missouri, and one machine in Wichita, Kansas, that is earlier this year — under this new postmaster general.”

Go ahead and read this whole article. It’s a hoot.

Not to be an alarmist or anything, but all over social media I’m seeing Biden voters giving each other advice that will help re-elect Trump.

I am trying to get the word out that people need to vote in person if they can. I realize there is a pandemic. I realize a lot of polling places will be formidably crowded, slow, and frustrating. I realize that for some people in-person voting is genuinely dangerous or even impossible. But most of us can do it.

And those who can, should, because otherwise there is a real possibility that no one’s mailed or hand-delivered ballot will be counted, ever. This is true even if the postal service delivers your ballot on time. This is true even if you are planning to get your mail ballot to your board of elections without using the postal service. And Trump will get a second term no matter how we all voted.

Ed Kilgore explained this just a couple of days ago:

For months now, I and other observers have suggested that the president’s demonization of voting by mail wasn’t just aimed at securing restrictions in the practice by the states. He also wants his own supporters to vote in person. Why? Well, because if they comply, he is likely to take an early lead in Election Night returns that will only slowly erode as disproportionately Democratic mail ballots drift in after being authenticated and then tabulated. Since he has taken the position that mail balloting (except in Florida!) is fraudulent, and that elections decided after Election Day are “rigged” and stolen, then he will be in a position to claim victory and then contest any reversal of fortune.

If that’s the plan, it’s well on its way to implementation, as a new national survey from Pew Research indicates. Asked how they intend to vote, 80 percent of Trump supporters say they will vote in person (either on Election Day or earlier) and only 17 percent will vote by mail. Among Biden supporters, 58 percent say that will vote by mail as opposed to 40 percent who will vote in person.

If on the morning after the election Trump has a lead, or trails Biden very narrowly, you can count on weeks of contested vote counting. And the Trump campaign is already preparing for this. The Washington Post reported last week that Republicans are planning for “weeks-long legal fights in an array of states” to challenge the mailed votes.

The campaign plans to have lawyers ready to mobilize in every state and expects legal battles could play out after Election Day in such states as Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan and Nevada, they said.

It won’t happen? Remember Florida 2000? What’s going to stop them from disqualifying ballots wholesale? The courts? Those are packed with Trump judges. Election officials will be terrorized until they comply. And it won’t be just a “Brooks Brothers riot” stopping the count this time. I can easily imagine mobs of armed MAGA goons breaking into election offices and destroying ballots. And the police will help them.

The only way that’s not going to happen is if Biden has a decisive win on election night. But there will be no decisive win on election night if 58 percent of Biden voters vote by mail. In that case, even without challenges and interference it could be a week or more before we know how all the states voted. And we can’t afford to take that risk.

Jamelle Bouie, New York Times:

There’s no mystery about what President Trump intends to do if he holds a lead on election night in November. He’s practically broadcasting it.

First, he’ll claim victory. Then, having spent most of the year denouncing vote-by-mail as corrupt, fraudulent and prone to abuse, he’ll demand that authorities stop counting mail-in and absentee ballots. He’ll have teams of lawyers challenging counts and ballots across the country. …

… The only way to prevent this scenario, or at least, rob it of the oxygen it needs to burn, is to deliver an election night lead to Biden. This means voting in person.

And if you really can’t vote in person …

No, not everyone will be able to do that. But if you plan to vote against Trump and can take appropriate precautions, then some kind of hand delivery — going to the polls or bringing your mail-in ballot to a “drop box” — will be the best way to protect your vote from the president’s concerted attempt to undermine the election for his benefit.

However, your hand-delivered ballot won’t be counted as quickly as the in person votes. States have different procedures about this, but usually the mail and absentee ballots are not counted until after in-person results are tallied.  This has resulted in a new phenomenon called the “blue shift.” Early returns lean right; later returns lean left. See David Graham, The ‘Blue Shift’ Will Decide the Election.

This brings me to the other way that advice on social media can be wrong. Every state has its own election laws and procedures. If you absolutely must vote by mail, don’t assume that what works for your Facebook friend who lives in another state will be true for you. For example, in some states mailed ballots must be received by election day, and in others they must be postmarked by election day. Some states have drop boxes for ballots; some do not. You may need to get your ballot notarized, and you may have to pay for that. Or not. It’s all different around the country.

To find out what will be true for you, don’t go by what you read on Facebook. Go to your state’s webpage. In some states, running elections is the job of the secretary of state. In others, there is some appointed official, or possibly an elections commission. If you have questions about procedures in your state, check out that entity’s web page, and if you don’t find an answer call the office.

And don’t plan on using UPS or Fedex to deliver your ballot. By law, private delivery services may not handle ballots. Only the USPS, or an election official, or you, can handle your ballot. If a non-official third party handles your ballot, it probably will be invalidated.

Again, though, if you can vote in person, please vote in person. We must get as many in person votes “in the bank” on election day as we possibly can to avoid a stolen election. This is our Valley Forge. Do it for your country.

It has come to Trump’s attention that he is losing the women’s vote.

I have done more for WOMEN than just about any President in HISTORY! As we celebrate the 100th Anniversary of women’s voting rights, we should build a BEAUTIFUL STATUE in Washington D.C. to honor the many brave women who made this possible for our GREAT COUNTRY…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 14, 2020

The most recent data I could find says that women favor Biden over Trump by 23 points. And that data was compiled before Kamala Harris was named to the veep slot. This may be the biggest gender gap in U.S. presidential election history. And the only thing Trump can think of to win over women is … build us a statue?

Trump has tweeted more than once about how “suburban housewives” should vote for him because he’ll keep “affordable housing” (e.g., Black folks) out of the suburbs. These days women who live in suburbs tend to be college educated. They tend to have professions. And they are not all white any more.

I think it’s possible that someday, scholars will study the polling data from the Trump administration and decide that Trump lost re-election when he nominated Brett Kavanaugh. We’ll see. A lot of women remember Harris from those hearings.

Trump remembers that also.

 Wielding one of his favorite epithets for powerful women, he called Harris “nasty” three times during a press conference this past week. He claimed that Harris was “angry” and “mad” when she left the Democratic primary race after falling in the polls. He called her a “madwoman,” because she was so “angry” at Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh at his confirmation hearings. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Trump said. “She was the angriest of the group, and they were all angry.”

It was okay with Trump that Kavanaugh was angry, of course. Men, especially white men, are entitled to their anger. Nonwhites and women are not allowed to display anger because it makes white men uncomfortable. I’ve written about this before; see Who Gets to Be Angry and Who Gets to Be Angry II.

Trump is not helping himself with women, especially college educated women, by complaining about Harris being angry. And she wasn’t angry; see the video. She did not yell. She did not call names. She spoke quietly. Clearly, her face said she was not impressed with Beer Bong Brett, but I didn’t see anger. Jim Jordan can yell and scream and smart off all he likes; it’s allowed, because he’s a white man. Black and women officials cannot do that without being raked over coals for it. And those suburban women, “housewives” or not, know that.

But Trump is ready to give us a statue. That’s supposed to make it all better.

The Nineteenth Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution on August 18, 1920.

More on the onging Postal Service crisis:

Postal Service warns 46 states their voters could be disenfranchised by delayed mail-in ballots

Internal USPS Documents Outline Plans to Hobble Mail Sorting

Obama: Trump is trying to ‘actively kneecap’ and ‘starve’ the postal service

There is a riotously funny article at Reason magazine about Kamala Harris’s racial identity. It’s not meant to be riotously funny, but it is, because the author is such a turd and is so unconcious about it.

In Is Kamala Harris Legally African American, Indian, Both, Neither, or Something Else?, some guy named David Bernstein wastes about 900 words in an utterly anal discussion of Kamala Harris’s “legal” racial identity. He eventually decides that Harris is “legally” African American. Wow. I infer he is obsessed with whatever benefits she receives as some kind of minority that he isn’t getting. And it seems to bother him that Harris is hard to fit into whatever racist conceptual boxes live in his head.

He also mentions that “several commentators” have attacked Harris as not really African American. I take it this is because she gets her blackness from her Jamaican father, meaning none of her ancestors worked on a plantation in Mississippi.

Isabel Togoh writes at Forbes,

Conservative pundit Mark Levin opened his BlazeTV show on Tuesday by making remarks about Harris’ heritage and rejecting claims she would be the nation’s first African American VP: “Her ancestry does not go back to American slavery,” he said.

Jamaican Blacks are the descendents of enslaved Africans taken to Jamaica in the same British slave trade that operated in the British colonies to the north, like Virginia. The transatlantic slave trade took people from from West Africa to the Caribbean, where most were sold to sugar plantations. Raw sugar, and the remaining people, were then taken to the 13 colonies in the north and sold there. The British slave merchants used the profits to purchase goods in North America like furs, firearms, and rum. Some of this merchandise was shipped to Europe, and some was taken to Africa to barter for more people to be sold into slavery. Slavery in Jamaica and Virginia was part of the same trading system, early on. Dude, learn some history.

When Senator Harris was announced to be the vice presidential pick, the Right collectively had a racist-misogynist meltdown. I have yet to see a criticism of the Senator from the Right that wasn’t rooted in racial or gender bias, other than the attempts to paint the moderate and politically mainstream Harris as a far-left loon.

Paul Waldman:

“Biden’s big mistake of course was narrowing his choice on the basis of skin color,” said Laura Ingraham on Fox News. “On Planet Earth that used to be called bias or even racism.”

One could argue that nearly every candidate for president, starting with George Washington, was chosen on the basis of skin color. That color was white. And they’ve all been chosen on the basis of gender, which is male. In a sense, all politics in the U.S. is identity politics, and always has been.

Back to Paul Waldman:

Whatever you think of their policy agendas, we have one party that is diverse and progressive, and growing more so on both counts, and another party that is not only almost all white but is being dragged down by extremists and loons.

Something I didn’t know until I heard it on the teevee last night — the last Democratic presidential candidate to receive the majority of white votes was Lyndon Johnson in 1964. That’s possibly one reason our presidential candidates have struggled. But the percentage of whites among all U.S. voters is shrinking. The Census Bureau projected a couple of years ago that whites would be a minority of the population by 2045. Last year we learned that less than half of U.S. children under age 15 are white. And that’s right now. Our term for today, boys and girls, is majority minority.

Voters of color are the future. The Democratic Party seems, in its lumbering way, to be adjusting to that. The Republican Party is not.

What Democrats — and lefty-leaning voters who are perpetually pissed at Democrats — are struggling to learn, seems to me, is that power comes from supporting each other. I’m sure I’ve written in the distant past of the time in the 1970s and 1980s when the New Left was gone. What remained were a lot of different single-issue organizations competing with each other for donations and attention. There was no cohesion. And the Democrats, who no longer had the old New Deal Coalition to support it, moved right and began to line up after the Republicans to take money from corporations and financial interests. This gave us Clintonism and the Democratic Leadership Council. And so on.

The Democrats are poised to move away from Clintonism and back to the left, which was in fact the Vital Center of many years ago. The generation that came up the ranks with the Clintons is not quite yet with the program, but some of them are learning. I think Joe Biden is learning. That’s a good sign. For the progressive left, Biden is far from the perfect candidate, but I think he is educable. (See The Best Thing About Biden Is His Malleability.) That generation will be gone in another ten years, and by all appearances the next leadership group will be a lot more progressive, assuming the nation survives that long.

And part of the progressive left needs to learn that you get a better seat at the table if you can be trusted to show up and vote for Democrats, even if you don’t get everything you want that election cycle.

Republicans, meanwhile, are acting more and more like a wounded animal, thrashing around and biting at whatever moves. They still win elections. They’ll win a lot of elections in November. But at least some of them must know, or at least feel, that they’re on a trajectory to nowhere. They can’t continue being the party of bigoted white people and expect to survive another forty years. Not without destroying democracy and establishing a right-wing dictatorship, anyway, which some are trying to do.The writing is on the wall, and it says majority minority 2045. If not sooner.

Between now and the general election we’ll see a tsunami of ugliness from the Right. Republicans and their media flunkies cannot speak of Harris without their bigotry showing. It’s not going to help them.

Trump has another brilliant idea for juicing up the economy. You will never guess what it is.

He wants to cut the capital gains tax. Yeah, he came out with that today. I’m serious.

He said today he is also “looking at” a lot of tax cuts, including expanding the tax cuts that already have been cut, and a middle-class tax cut. No specifics. But since all of this would have to originate in the House, it ain’t gonna happen, anyway. Trump doesn’t seem to know that, but it ain’t.

Trump’s twitter feed today is full of tweets like this:

I am sending $15M from @USDOT to beautiful North Dakota! This federal funding will support bus service for people from Bismarck to Grand Forks and several other areas statewide. Congratulations!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 12, 2020

Similar congratulations are aimed at several other states — Colorado, Texas, Wisconsin, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Louisiana, New Jersey, Utah, Nebraska, Alabama, Oklahoma. I get the impression Trump discovered some money he had the disgression to disburse without congressional permission. Improved bus service on the way, folks. Just the thing during a pandemic! This seems to not have been on anyone’s radar. And aren’t most of those states either conservative or swing states? Hmm.

We’re now had a few days to digest the Great Signing of four memoranda and one executive order that was supposed to fix everything. Where are we with that?

Let’s start with the $400 supplement for unemployment benefits. I direct you to this article in Forbes by Shahar Ziv. Here’s what he says:

Of that benefit, $300 is supposed to come from the Department of Homeland Security’s Disaster Relief Fund (DRF). States have to add $100, supposedly from their allocation of the Coronavirus Relief Fund (CRF). But the states are saying that they don’t have that money any more. All the CRF funds are allocated, earmarked, or spent. Not all have weighted in, but I have yet to hear of one state saying yeah, we can do that. So according to the current terms, nobody gets any money. Mnuchin has hinted that Trump could waive the requirement for states to put in $100, but Trump himself hasn’t addressed that.

Further, the DRF funds probably won’t last long even if allocated. According to Ziv:

Trump’s order looks to leverage money in Homeland Security’s Disaster Relief Fund, which currently has $70 billion available. His action states that the increased benefits will be available “for eligible claimants until the balance of the DRF reaches $25 billion or for weeks of unemployment ending not later than December 6, 2020, whichever occurs first, at which time the lost wages assistance program shall terminate.”

According to expert estimates, the money in the DRF may only last four to five weeks before expiring, a far cry from the December 6, 2020 date in Trump’s executive order. At that time, the White House would probably need to look to Congress and legislative action to continue benefits.

There are also legal questions about whether Trump can allocate the DRF money as he intends. Legal experts are not all in agreement, but a big chunk of them think the whole plan is illegal. However, I doubt anyone will bother to challenge it in court, because it probably won’t happen anyway.

Going back to the desperate situation of the states, get this:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s refusal to provide coronavirus relief to cities and states facing massive budget shortfalls due to the pandemic could deal a devastating blow to the economic recovery, leading to millions of job losses.

Moody’s Analytics told the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday that if Congress does not agree to give more aid to cities and states, the economy would contract by 3% and more than 4 million jobs could be lost.

The ball is in your court, Mitch.

Then there is the payroll tax deferment. Joseph Zeballos-Roig at Business Insider writes that it’s possible few workers will see any extra money in their paychecks, because it’s likely a lot of employers will hang on to that money so that they can pay it back to the IRS when the deferment period ends. And, of course, the deferment isn’t going to people who aren’t getting paychecks.

The remaining memorandum defers student loan payments from October 1 to the end of the year. There are many complaints that isn’t enough. And the one and only actual executive order doesn’t do anything. It merely directs HHS Secretary Alex Azar and CDC Director Robert Redfield to “consider” whether there should be a continued ban on evictions from properties with federally backed mortgages, and if so, how such a ban would work. Don’t hold your breath, in other words.

On election night 2016 I was camped out by the teevee with my trusty laptop. I had set up an Excel file so that I could quickly monitor the Electoral College tally as states were called. I had figured which states were “pre-ordained” for both candidates and which were not and had these in separate columns. And as states were called, it soon became clear that Clinton was in trouble. Somewhere between 9:30 and 10:00 central time the column tallies were telling me Hillary Clinton could not possibly win.  The race was called by media a little before 2 am EST, but it by then it had been obvious for hours that Clinton had lost.

As much as I want a cathartic night in which Trump is crushed in a single evening, that’s probably not going to happen this time. And the reason for that is partly illustrated by the 2018 midterm vote. On election night I was disappointed that the hoped-for blue wave hadn’t materialized. But over the next few days we learned that Dems actually had done pretty darn well. Matt Yglesias:

The narrative that congealed election night before polls had even closed on the West Coast was that while Democrats may have taken the House, they also underperformed relative to expectations and the hoped-for blue wave had turned into, in the words of columnist Nick Kristof at the New York Times, “only a blue trickle.”

This was a questionable interpretation at the time it was offered, but subsequent events have shown it to be almost entirely a psychological illusion based on timing.

Like in any election, Democrats both won some squeakers and lost some squeakers. They overperformed expectations in some races and underperformed them in others. And in 2018, it happens to be the case that Democrats got some of their most disappointing results in East Coast states with early closing times, while the GOP’s biggest disappointments came disproportionately in late-counting states.

Consequently, what felt to many like a disappointment as of 11 pm Eastern time on election night now looks more and more like a triumph.

It’s worth reading Yglesias’s column all the way through, because a lot of it applies to what we’re about to experience in November. For example, he wrote, states with the earliest poll closings tend to be red; states with late poll closings and a lot of mail-in votes to count tend to be blue. It is possible — nay, probable — that the early votes reported on November 3 will favor Trump, even if he goes on to lose. And with a whole lot more people voting by mail than ever before, it could be a few days before we know the winner.

At The Atlantic, David Graham calls the phenomenon of late Democratic victories the “blue shift.”

This sort of late-breaking Democratic vote is the new, though still underappreciated, normal in national elections. Americans have become accustomed to knowing who won our elections promptly, but there are many legitimate votes that are not counted immediately every election year. For reasons that are not totally understood by election observers, these votes tend to be heavily Democratic, leading results to tilt toward Democrats as more of them are counted, in what has become known as the “blue shift.” In most cases, the blue shift is relatively inconsequential, changing final vote counts but not results. But in others, as in 2018, it can materially change the outcome.

Although it is slowly dawning on the press and the electorate that Election Day will be more like Election Week or Election Month this year, thanks to coronavirus-related complications, the blue shift remains obscure. But the effect could be much larger and far more consequential in 2020, as Democrats embrace voting by mail more enthusiastically than Republicans.

And here’s the problem:

If the public isn’t prepared to wait patiently for the final results, and if politicians cynically exploit the shifting tallies to cast doubt on the integrity of the vote, the results could be catastrophic.

Again, this is almost certain to happen. So we need to be prepared, and we need to do whatever we can do to prepare the public for this.

Imagine that as November 3, 2020, ticks away, President Donald Trump holds a small lead in one or more key states such as Pennsylvania—perhaps 10,000 or 20,000 votes—and seems to have enough states in his column to eke out an Electoral College win. Trump declares victory, taunts Joe Biden, and prepares for a second term. But the reported results on Election Night omit tens of thousands of votes, including provisional ballots and uncounted mail-in votes. Over the coming days, as those votes are counted, Trump’s lead dwindles and eventually disappears. By the end of the week or early the next, Biden emerges as the clear victor in Pennsylvania—and with that win, captures the race for the presidency.

If that’s how things unfold, Trump is unlikely to take defeat snatched from the jaws of victory graciously. He has already spent months attempting to delegitimize the election system. So imagine that he instead cries fraud and insists he’s the target of a criminal Democratic coup. What if he encourages his supporters to take to the streets, where there are violent clashes between partisans? He might even urge the Republican-led Pennsylvania General Assembly to submit a slate of Trump-backing electors, citing the Election Day returns, even if the full tally clearly shows Keystone State voters chose Biden.

The only way that’s not going to happen is if the results are such a landslide that it’s obvious on election night, or some time the next day, that Biden is the winner. But the longer the vote count drags out, the more likely Trump will find a way to seize another term even if he, eventually, clearly loses the election.

Aaron Rupar at Vox:

Imagine this election night scenario: With a decisive number of mail ballots yet to be tallied, President Donald Trump enjoys a narrow lead over Joe Biden. But before all the votes can be counted — a process that could take days — Trump declares victory, citing purported irregularities with mail-in votes.

You can even picture Trump insisting that the preliminary election night tally must stand as final with a tweet that reads similarly to this one he posted in November 2018, when Florida’s US Senate and gubernatorial elections were still undecided:

 

The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged. An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 12, 2018

So, yeah, that’s what he will do. He’s done it before.

“That is my nightmare scenario,” said Paul Gronke, professor of political science at Reed College in Portland and director of the Early Voting Information Center. “We gotta slow down. Trump’s gonna be tweeting, the media, you, all of your counterparts, have to slow down. Because he’ll claim victory, or he’ll start to claim malfeasance and fraud, lawyers will be climbing into airplanes and arriving in all these small jurisdictions, and it will be not good.”

And you know that if it turns out that Democrats take leads based on mail-in ballots, Trump and the rest of the Republican party will be crying foul. It’s also entirely possible that the team of Trump cronies now running the Postal Service will manage to lose a whole lot of ballots, or else see to it that they are not postmarked or delivered properly.

And this takes us to Jamelle Bouie in today’s New York Times:

The only way to prevent this scenario, or at least, rob it of the oxygen it needs to burn, is to deliver an election night lead to Biden. This means voting in person. No, not everyone will be able to do that. But if you plan to vote against Trump and can take appropriate precautions, then some kind of hand delivery — going to the polls or bringing your mail-in ballot to a “drop box” — will be the best way to protect your vote from the president’s concerted attempt to undermine the election for his benefit.

He’s right.

Trump is desperate to hold on to power, but he probably can’t win a fair fight. His solution, then, is to do everything in his power to hinder the opposition and either win an Electoral College majority or claim victory before all the votes have been counted.

A key element of Trump’s strategy is to undermine the Postal Service’s ability to deliver and collect mail. The president’s postmaster general has removed experienced officials, implemented cuts and raised postage rates for ballots mailed to voters, increasing the cost if states want the post office to prioritize election mail. And Politico reports that Trump’s aides and advisers in the White House have been searching for ways to curb mail-in voting through executive action, “from directing the Postal Service to not deliver certain ballots to stopping local officials from counting them after Election Day.” …

…Earlier this year, a group of more than 100 people — Republicans, Democrats, senior political operatives and members of the media — gathered to role play the November election, using predetermined rules and procedures. “In each scenario other than a Biden landslide,” writes Nils Gilman of the Berggruen Institute, who helped organize the exercise, “we ended up with a constitutional crisis that lasted until the inauguration, featuring violence in the streets and a severely disrupted administrative transition.”

There you have it. To head off the worst outcomes, Trump must go down in a decisive defeat. He’s on that path already. The task for his opponents is to sustain that momentum and work to make his defeat as obvious as possible, as early as possible. The pandemic makes that a risk, but it’s a risk many of us may have to take.

See also Andy Kroll at Rolling Stone. There are steps the states could take to make the mail-in ballots more secure and the counting faster, but that would cost money the states don’t have right now. This is probably a major reason Republicans don’t want to include more money for states in future pandemic relief bills.

We all need to think hard about this. People with health vulnerabilities in high-risk areas may have no choice but to vote by mail, and that’s understandable. But otherwise I strongly urge everyone to consider voting in person, if you can.

Here’s an op ed by Crispin Hull from the Canberra Times, We are witnessing the fall of a great power. That would be the United States. I mostly agree with is, although I have quibbles about one section. It begins:

Just how rotten is the United States’ political system? The answer is rotten, as in it will only take a small kick for the whole edifice to fall in, let alone a big kick like COVID-19.

Then we have some passages about the past falls of great powers. There is a strong tendency in long-established powers to ignore warning signs and assume that the nation will right itself when faced with multiple crises. This section reminded me of some passages from Paul Krugman’s 2003 book The Great Unraveling, which criticized the George W. Bush administration. He described the Bush II Republicans as revolutionary powers that did not accept the legitimacy of long-established norms and were working to destroy the nation from within, and of course they’ve gotten worse since.

Hull continues,

Look at the US now. Its president is so psychiatrically disordered with narcissism that he is incapable of dealing with the COVID-19 crisis in a coherent, empathetic way. Everything he says and does is through a prism of himself. He has now turned his whole re-election campaign into one of race hate, law and order and a bizarre invention of a threat from “left-wing fascists”.

Can’t argue with that.

But worse, the US seems to have a national self-delusion that once Trump loses and is gone, everything will return to normal. The delusion extends to a belief that the COVID-19-stricken economy will bounce back to normal in a V shape.

A whole lot of us know better, actually, although many citizens who are not politics nerds probably don’t grasp what we’re in for.

Here’s the section that falls short:

The underlying weakness in present US democracy is that partisanship has become so extreme that the nation is incapable of dealing with the major issues that face it. COVID-19 has illustrated that starkly, with every word and act predicated on party allegiance. Meanwhile, other problems like race, police violence, gun control, inequality, the health system, climate change and energy policy go unattended.

There are two underlying weaknesses in the U.S. that have been eating at it for a long time. One is that there is just too damn much wealth. Over time — especially since the 1970s but arguably since World War II —  the whole country has been corrupted into a vast machine creating more wealth for the wealthy. I guess it was always assumed there would be enough crumbs to keep the proles happy.

The U.S. middle class has been shrinking since 1971. Income and wealth inequality in the United States is substantially higher than in almost any other developed nation, and it is on the rise, it says here. There are communities so impoverished they might as well be in a third-world country.

Much of the middle and working class has gone along with this because it was happening slowly enough that people didn’t see it happening. Or they didn’t see it until it happened to them. The rise of two-income families enabled people to maintain a standard of living that one salary used to support.

The other underlying weakness is our great original sin, racism. This is the great wedge issue that has pushed middle- and working-class whites into voting against their own interests for years. The Jim Crow laws that blocked Black Americans from normal participation in the economy held economic growth back, especially in the South. In the early 20th century the Ku Klux Klan kept union organizers out of the South, because unions were associated with eastern Europeans. In the 1950s and 1960s, hysteria over school integration turned a big chunk of white Americans against the whole idea of public schools, and our schools have suffered. When Lyndon Johnson enacted the Great Society program that, basically, extended the New Deal to help African Americans, suddenly whites who owed their own financial status to the New Deal turned against “government programs.” And so on.

Racism is the deep poison that we’ve never been able to cure, and it’s still central to the partisanship that Hull talks about. It’s racism more than anything else that has enabled right-wing politicians to enjoy the support of poor and working-class whites, even though the political Right in the U.S. offers them nothing but hurt.

See my recent post Missouri and Medicaid — it was the poor rural folks who have no insurance, whose hospitals are closing, who turned out to vote against Medicaid. And a big reason for that is that they got glossy postcards warning them that Medicaid would give free healthcare to illegal immigrants.

Are both parties equally guilty of feeding partisanship? In some ways yes, in some ways no. The Republican Party turned itself into nothing but a corrupt machine in support of more corruption, exploitation, and inequality. But Democrats failed to put itself on the side of poor and working-class folks and instead became a party supported mostly by urban, college-educated upscale professionals. The Dems for too long tried to find a middle ground, supporting policies that at least wouldn’t piss off Big Money while carving out some benefits for the little people. It abandoned the rural poor entirely. And let’s not get started on the ways the Obama Administration failed to hold accountable the people who caused the 2009 financial crash.

So it was that we went into 2016 with the Democratic Party faithful certain that the nation was doing well, or at least heading in the right direction. But they were seriously out of touch. (See my 2016 post, Resist the Return to Normalcy.)

And partisanship? The Democrats too long negotiated with themselves to appease the Right and otherwise worshiped at the altar of “reaching across the aisle,” even after years of having their hands bitten as they reached. Even during the recent Democratic nomination debates, half of those Dem promised to “reach across the aisles.” Including our nominee, Joe Biden.

Now we get to the Bernie Sanders section of Hull’s op ed:

The electoral process has also been corrupted by runaway bribery through political donations.

Another vicious circle has emerged. The politicised Supreme Court from 2010 on has refused to control corporate and individual political donations – thus favouring the Republicans.

Donations from billionaires, mainly to the Republicans, consequently boomed from just $17 million in 2008 to $611 million in 2018 – and rising. This results in policies more skewed to the wealthy and conservatives, and therefore greater inequality. These policies include engaging in wars in remote places where the only real US interests are those of war profiteers. In turn, these policies result in more donations from billionaires, who get repaid manyfold, and who now have as much if not more control of the process than voters.

Yep, that’s all true, and many of us have been bitching about this for many years.

Tragically, American exceptionalism – “we are the first and best democracy on Earth” – contributes to the self-delusion of indestructibility. There is nothing automatically self-correcting in US democracy. Even the so-called checks and balances are not working – they are causing gridlock, rather than adding a bit of mild caution to a system that is overall supposed to be geared to problem-solving, not political point-scoring.

American exceptionalism is a big reason people have refused to see how the U.S. has been deteriorating and falling behind other first-world democracies in many respects. For too long, any attempt to explain this deterioration, or to ask why other countries are able to provide health care and child care and better wages, etc., for their people, hits a wall of American exceptionalism. Remember Hillary Clinton’s “We are not Denmark“?