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The GOP’s Culture War Shtick Is Wearing Thin With Voters

One thing I learned from my years in the Republican Party many years ago is that every time right wing Republicans go down in flames in elections, the Christofascists (and white supremacists) blame the defeat on the candidates not being far right and extreme enough.  In the wake of Tuesday's elections we are hearing that same refrain from the usual suspects - both within the GOP and the right wing "news" outlets - who refuse to face the reality that more and more Americans do not want the endless attacks on women controlling their own bodies, book banning, attacks on racial minorities, and efforts to erase LGBT citizens.  I attribute this phenomenon to two things:  the fact that these elements of the GOP that dominate primary elections (i) live in a fantasy world to start with, and (ii) are insistent on forcing their toxic and ignorance embracing beliefs on everyone no matter what.  Ironically, rats can be trained to learn from past experiences, but not so the worse elements of the GOP base.  With luck, the GOP will continue to cling to these increasingly rejected beliefs and hasten its descent into a permanent minority status.  A column in the New York Times looks at the GOP's refusal/inability to grasp that the majority of Americans do not want what it is peddling.  Here are excepts: 

The Republican Party has always leaned on culture war issues to win elections, but for the last three years, since Joe Biden won office in 2020, an aggressive and virulent form of culture war demagoguery has been at the center of Republican political strategy.

If the results of Tuesday’s elections in Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio tell us anything, however, it’s that this post-Roe form of culture warring is an abject failure, an approach that repels and alienates voters far more than it appeals to or persuades them.

To be fair to Republican strategists, there was a moment, in the fall of 2021, when it looked like the plan was working. Glenn Youngkin, the Republican nominee for governor in Virginia, ran on a campaign of “parents’ rights” against “critical race theory” and won a narrow victory against Terry McAuliffe, a former Democratic governor, sweeping Republicans into power statewide for the first time since 2009. Youngkin shot to national prominence and Republicans made immediate plans to take the strategy to every competitive race in the country.

In 2022, with “parental rights” as their rallying cry, Republican lawmakers unleashed a barrage of legislation targeting transgender rights, and Republican candidates ran explicit campaigns against transgender and other gender nonconforming people. “They kicked God out of schools and welcomed the drag queens,” said Kari Lake, an Arizona Republican, during her 2022 campaign for governor. “They took down our flag and replaced it with a rainbow.”

Lake lost her race. Michigan voters successfully amended their state Constitution to protect the right to an abortion. Spanberger won re-election, too. Overall, election night 2022 was a serious disappointment for the Republican Party, which failed to win a Senate majority and barely won control of the House of Representatives. The hoped-for red wave was little more than a puddle. The culture war strategy had fallen flat on its face.

Undaunted, Republicans stepped back up to the plate and took another swing at transgender rights. Attorney General Daniel Cameron of Kentucky, the Republican nominee for governor of that state, and his allies spent millions on anti-transgender right ads in his race against the Democratic incumbent Andy Beshear.

Youngkin was not on the ballot in Virginia, but he led the effort to win a Republican trifecta in the state, targeting Democrats once again on parents’ rights and endorsing candidates who ran hard against transgender inclusion in schools. “No more are we going to make parents stand outside of the room,” Youngkin said, to a crowd of Republicans on Monday at a rally in Leesburg. “We are going to put them at the head of the table in charge of our children’s lives.”

One candidate for State Senate Youngkin endorsed, Juan Pablo Segura, told Fox News that he wants to revisit a failed bill that would have required schools to notify parents if there was any hint a child was interested in transgender identity.

Segura lost his race and Youngkin and his fellow Republicans failed to either flip the State Senate or hold on to the House of Delegates. He’ll face a Democratic majority in both chambers of the General Assembly for the rest of his term in office.

Some Ohio Republicans also tried to turn their fight against a reproductive rights initiative into a battle over transgender rights, falsely stating that the wording of the amendment would allow minors to obtain gender-affirming surgeries without parental consent. On Tuesday, Ohio voters backed the initiative, 56 percent to 43 percent.

I can think of three reasons that voters — going back to the 2016 North Carolina governor’s race, fought over the state’s “bathroom bill” — have not responded to Republican efforts to make transgender rights a wedge issue.

There’s the fact that transgender people represent a tiny fraction of the population — they just aren’t all that relevant to the everyday lives of most Americans. There’s also the fact that for all the talk of “parents’ rights,” the harshest anti-trans laws trample on the rights of parents who want to support their transgender children.

Additionally — and ironically, given the Republican Party’s strategic decision to link the two — there’s the chance that when fused together with support for abortion bans, vocal opposition to the rights of transgender people becomes a clear signal for extremist views. The vibe is off, one might say, and voters have responded accordingly.

If the Republican Party were a normal political party that was still capable of strategic adjustment, I’d say to expect some rhetorical moderation ahead of the presidential election. But consider the most recent Republican presidential debate — held on Wednesday — in which candidates continued to emphasize their opposition to the inclusion of transgender people in mainstream American life. “If God made you a man, you play sports against men,” declared Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, at the conclusion of the debate.

So I suppose that when the next election comes around, we should just expect more of the same.

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Lame Duck Youngkin Suddenly Wants to Bipartisanship

I have only met Glenn Youngkin once in person when I was invited by his office to a supposedly pro-LGBT event in Virginia Beach due to my role in founding the local LGBT chamber of commerce. Sadly, the event proved to be anything but as advertised and Youngkin cared little about LGBT issues save erasing us from public education.  But, attending the event did, however, allow me to see Youngkin's very slick disingenuousness up close and personal.  Now, after the Republican drubbing in the elections on Tuesday, Youngkin finds himself a lame duck and his presidential ambitions very much tattered - something underscored by the fact that he is the first Virginia governor in the last 30 years whose party lost control of a chamber of the General Assembly during midterm elections.  Youngkin's response?  More pretense that he is a moderate and claims he seeks to work with Democrats, something he arrogantly refused to do during the first two years of his term. The real Youngkin is the one who as his first act signed an executive order seeking to ban accurate history and to make LGBT Virginians invisible in public schools. Only the Democrat controlled Virginia Senate prevented Youngkin and Virginia Republican extremists from turning Virginia into a warmed over version of DeSantis' Florida.   A piece in the Washington Post looks at Youngkin's much deserved lame duck status.  Here are excerpts:

For all the $190 million spent by both parties, for all the talk of national trends, the results of Virginia’s legislative elections this week prove a predictable truth: Virginia is a closely divided state that leans slightly Democratic.

The new redistricting maps made that plain, carving the state into a large number of red districts and a slightly larger number of blue ones, with just a handful of toss-ups in the middle to fight over. And Tuesday’s results bore that out, with Democrats flipping the House of Delegates to at least a 51-49 advantage (though one race is still too close to call) and protecting their majority in the Senate, 21-19.

The challenge now for Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) — whose two-point win in 2021 he routinely casts as a popular mandate — is that he will have to broker deals with newly empowered Democratic lawmakers to get anything done. And he has spent the past two years poking them with a partisan stick as he cultivated a national Republican profile — railing against critical race theory and racial equity and “woke” policies of the “radical left.”

“He’s had this habit of talking in Virginia as if he wants to work with Democrats to do things in common, then he goes on Fox News in the evening and speaks about how he’s beating the lefties. I don’t think that’ll work anymore now,” said Bob Holsworth, a longtime Richmond political analyst.

As if to illustrate that point, Sen. L. Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth), who is in line to become chairwoman of the Senate’s powerful finance committee, spent Election Day trolling Youngkin on social media with statements like, “Tell Glenn I want him to know it was me” and “If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably [is] our soon to be lame duck Governor Glenn Youngkin!”

What’s more, the Democrat who could become the first Black lawmaker to serve as speaker of the House in the General Assembly’s 404-year history — House Minority Leader Don L. Scott Jr. (D-Portsmouth) — has been one of Youngkin’s top antagonists, once prompting the governor to trek across the Capitol for an impromptu meetup at Scott’s office after he questioned Youngkin’s religious faith in a floor speech.

Youngkin expended so much money and personal political capital this year on races that failed — such as state Sen. Siobhan S. Dunnavant’s loss in the Henrico County suburbs to Democrat Schuyler VanValkenburg by an unexpectedly wide margin — that his status in Richmond could be diminished, Holsworth said.

Still, Youngkin began the work Wednesday of promising bipartisanship and [falsely] emphasizing how close the two sides are.

Youngkin noted that Virginia has a tradition of divided government — which wasn’t true during long periods of the 20th century when Democrats ran the show, but has been true in the past 30 years or so as Republicans rose to power. In that time, Youngkin is the only governor whose party lost control of a chamber during midterm elections.

Youngkin had led Republicans to run on his proposal to ban most abortions after 15 weeks, with exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. Virginia law allows the procedure through the second trimester (about 26 weeks) and into the third if three doctors say it’s necessary.

The GOP strategy didn’t work. Abortion stood out in polling before the election as a strong motivator for Democrats and for women, and it was cited repeatedly by voters during interviews at polling places around the state Tuesday.

“This is a race about reproductive rights,” voter Clint Cyr, 37, said in Newport News on Tuesday after casting his ballot for Democrats. “I’m a moderate libertarian for the government not telling people what to do with their bodies.”

The issue cut against the polarization that otherwise grips Virginia voters, said Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington. “Beyond abortion, there wasn’t a lot that Democrats or Republicans could do to convince somebody on the other side to switch teams for the election,” Farnsworth said.

Yet the decisive districts were not won by razor-thin margins. Democrat Josh Thomas won the western Prince William County House district that put Democrats over the top by three percentage points over Republican John Stirrup. In the Senate, Democrat Danica Roem’s three-point victory in Prince William County and Manassas clinched the blue majority.

Youngkin said Wednesday that he has not yet reached out to Democratic lawmakers, that he is waiting for them to select new leadership in the coming days. But he rattled off a list of priorities — economic development, workforce development, job growth, mental health services and education — where he believes they’ll find common ground.

He did not, however, back down from his stance on abortion or concede that a 15-week ban was rejected by voters.

The 15-week abortion ban “went over like a lump of coal in your sock on Christmas morning,” Swecker said after his remarks. “Voters not only in Virginia but across the country said not only no but hell no.”

With luck, Youngkin's presidential ambitions are now dead and he will be limited in the further harm he can do to Virginians who are not white evangelical/Christofascists.

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Youngkin's GOP Culture War Fizzled

Virginia Republicans are still reeling from Tuesday's election results that returned total control of the state legislature to Democrats. True, each race had its own dynamics, but overall the Republican political ads depicted Democrats as a threat to children through the catch phrase "parents' rights" and soft on crime.  Some of the ads by some GOP candidates in districts with almost no crime made it sound like they were the only bulwark against crime spree that would never even materialize.  Thankfully, culture war memes that Glen Youngkin seemed to legitimize through his election two years ago - I would ague that his dishonest campaign and feigned "moderate" positions were the real root causes of his victory - were rejected by voters who seemingly knew they had been duped by Youngkin in 2021.  One sign of this majority rejection of manufactured culture was tactics is seen in the disastrous defeats of slates of school board candidates backed by the falsely named "Mom's for Liberty," in Northern Virginia (and Pennsylvania and even Iowa).  Indeed, voters recognized that the right wing group is a threat to public education and is motivated by racial animus and evangelical/Christofascist extremists.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Virginia Republicans failure.  Here are excerpts:

The Democrats’ capture of the state legislature in Virginia on Tuesday is nothing short of humiliating for Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who staked immense political capital on the races by making them straightforwardly about his ambition to pass a 15-week abortion ban he has championed.

But the GOP governor’s comeuppance isn’t just about the durability of abortion rights as a political winner for Democrats. It also shows that right-wing culture-warring on education — built around a “parents’ rights” agenda limiting school discussion of race and gender — has utterly lost its political potency, allowing Democrats to respond with their own affirmative liberal cultural agenda.

Strikingly, more than $5.5 million was spent on ads about education in the Virginia legislative contests, according to data provided by the tracking firm AdImpact. While it’s unclear what percentage focused on “parents’ rights,” some Republicans modeled their campaigns on the way Youngkin turned that issue into a 2021 victory — an upset that led many pundits to declare education a political loser for Democrats even in blue territory.

Not this time. In Schuyler VanValkenburg’s ouster of Republican state Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant in a district near Richmond, “parents’ rights” loomed large because the GOP incumbent sponsored a law, signed by Youngkin, purportedly aimed at sexually explicit materials in schools that facilitated a rash of book removals.

Dunnavant accused her opponent of being willing to expose kids to such materials. But VanValkenburg took this head-on, running ads attacking that law and castigating book bans, while reassuring voters that as a high school teacher, he knows “the difference one book can make for a child.”

That suggests it’s politically potent to elevate the fight into a high-minded debate over the freedom of young minds to inquire, rather than letting Republicans drag it down into a muck of grubby accusations about porn in schools and “grooming” children.

VanValkenburg said he encountered many voters who perceived the right’s culture wars as not just a gratuitous attack on schools, but a broader effort to expand government intrusion into kids’ education. “The reason the book-banning is so visceral is that it hits on both those things,” he told me.

Youngkin’s first act as governor was an attempt to expunge critical race theory in schools, which included a tip line so parents could report offending teachers. Del. Rodney Willett, who won reelection in a swing district outside Richmond, said the tip line and the law facilitating book removals badly resonated with parents who have developed attachments to public schools as centers of community in the suburbs.

“They’re saying, ‘We don’t trust teachers, we’re not going to give them autonomy in the classroom,’ ” Willet said of Youngkin and Republicans, adding that voters regularly told him: “We need to be doing everything we can to keep our teachers.”

Then there’s Danica Roem, a delegate who on Tuesday was chosen by voters as the first openly transgender state senator in the South. She defeated a Republican who campaigned on banning transgender athletes from high school sports.

“She had every trans attack thrown at her, and she still won,” said Heather Williams, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee’s interim president. “These culture-war issues that Republicans are trying to lead on — they’re not where the country is.”

In a state Senate race in a suburban Loudoun County district, Republican Juan Pablo Segura leaned hard into the school wars, vowing his top priority was to notify parents of any perceived interest in transgender identity by their kids. Yet Democrat Russet Perry prevailed after stressing abortion rights and arguing that Youngkin-style culture-warring is politicizing and destroying education.

That’s instructive, because when Youngkin overperformed in Loudoun County in 2021, pundits gushed that he had cracked the code on how to wrap right-wing culture-warmongering in non-threatening packaging. . . . . After Tuesday night — in which a slate of liberals also won election to the embattled Loudoun school board — that now looks like a serious overreading. While the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned abortion rights undeniably shifted our cultural politics more than anything else, it’s also encouraging voters to be more attuned to GOP radicalism on other fronts.

“Dobbs was the lightbulb for a lot of voters on GOP extremism, making it harder to reach suburban voters with cooked up cultural grievances,” said Jared Leopold, a Democratic consultant in Virginia.

Republicans still ran ahead of where they should have in a blue state such as Virginia. But still: The right’s culture-warring fell dramatically short of the promise it held for Youngkin last time around, and the robust liberal mobilization in response shows no signs of going away.

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Democrats score big in Ohio, Virginia and Kentucky

Elections often leave me apprehensive until the final votes are tallied, but by all appearances yesterday was a good day for Democrats as they regained total control of the Virginia General Assembly in a major rebuke to Glenn Youngkin, saw an abortion rights initiative in Ohio pass by a wide margin, and a Democrat reelected as governor of Kentucky and beating Mitch McConnell's protégé.  One way to view the results is that the majority of voters are tired of the Republican agenda of giving special rights to extreme minorities - think Christofascists an white supremacists - and disingenuously talking about "freedom" as they seek to control women's bodies, ban books, and seek to erase gays and oppose accurate history courses in public schools.  Here in Virginia the results are especially sweet in that the new Democrat controlled General Assembly will be able to block Governor Youngkin's extreme agenda that would have restricted abortion rights, sought to give public school funds to private "Christian" schools, rolled back protections for LGBT Virginians and basically signaled that not everyone is welcome in the Commonwealth.  The added bonus is that with the Republican losses, Youngkin may find it harder to hold himself out as a last minute presidential candidate.  Indeed, yesterday's results suggest Younkin's own win two years ago was a fluke and not the beginning of a new kind of Republican campaign strategy.   A piece at Politico and another at at CNN look at yesterdays election results.  Here are highlights from Politico:

Joe Biden has had a very bad few days. His party just had a banner year.

In Tuesday night’s off-year elections, the incumbent Democratic governor in Kentucky — a state President Joe Biden lost by 26 points — handily won reelection. Democrats not only rebuffed Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s bid for total control of the state legislature by keeping the state Senate — they flipped the state House, too. And the party held a state Supreme Court seat in the nation’s largest Electoral College battleground of Pennsylvania.

None of these wins guarantee success for the party in 2024. . . . But for now, the results on Tuesday — taken together with a string of special elections throughout the year that showed Democratic candidates outperforming Biden’s vote shares in districts across the country — serve as a powerful counterpoint to the party’s doom-and-gloom over the president’s poll numbers.

Democrats’ victories won’t make those polls go away, but they should prompt a rethinking of the current political moment, with a year to go until the next general election.

Going into Tuesday night, Democrats were already having a strong 2023. Compared to Biden’s 2020 victory, Democratic candidates in special elections this year had been running about 8 percentage points better, on average.

There were a couple marquee victories, too, like flipping control of Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court and stopping conservatives from trying to make it more difficult to pass the abortion-rights amendment in Ohio.

Tuesday added to the winning streak: Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear won reelection. Democrats held the Virginia state Senate and flipped the state House. The party was the driving force behind a ballot measure to enshrine the right to an abortion in the Ohio state constitution. And Democrats added to their Wisconsin victory by winning a similar race in Pennsylvania.

They also won by muscle-flexing margins. Beshear beat state Attorney General Daniel Cameron by 5 percentage points; his first victory four years ago was by less than half a point. The Ohio abortion amendment passed by 12 points. Daniel McCaffery, the Democratic candidate in Pennsylvania, won by 8.

Republicans can point to a few victories this year. They easily flipped the open governorship in Louisiana last month, and Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves won reelection on Tuesday. But their successes were few and far between a year after also underachieving in the 2022 midterms.

The Ohio result marked the latest in a series of major victories at the ballot box for reproductive rights advocates in the year since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Democrats also campaigned heavily on abortion in Virginia — and even in Kentucky, where Beshear portrayed the lack of exceptions in the state’s abortion ban as too extreme.

Youngkin bet it all on the Virginia legislative races. And it looks like he is coming home empty-handed.

The wins are a rebuke to Youngkin’s efforts to consolidate power in the state by removing a Democratic roadblock to his agenda, on everything from taxes to abortion. Youngkin, unusually, launched a strategy to have Republicans run on abortion in these elections. Youngkin pushed candidates to coalesce around a 15 week ban in the state, trying to cast Democrats as extremists on the issue and Republicans as the party with the reasonable position.

Voters rejected that.

Youngkin’s loss will likely stretch beyond the commonwealth. Some Republican donors have been publicly pining for the Virginia governor to jump into the presidential race as a last-minute challenger to Trump.

That was always logistically infeasible. But, the argument went, Youngkin could build up political momentum — and the support of key donors — with a show of strength in Virginia that would catapult him to the top of the primary field.

Youngkin pointedly never ruled out a presidential run, only saying he was focused on these legislative races when asked. But Tuesday’s results will likely put an end to that talk.

But it was New York City, not Kentucky, that may have delivered the most symbolic rebuke of Trump Tuesday. Yusef Salaam, a member of the exonerated Central Park Five, won a city council seat. Trump had called for the death penalty for those five, who were wrongly accused of raping a jogger. He has refused to apologize for it. “Karma is real,” Salaam said of his win.

 

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Why Does the Right Hate America?

If one listens to Republican politicians and right wing "news outlets" you would think America has turned into an absolute hell hole with rampant crime everywhere and horrific social and economic decay.  To those on the right who endlessly malign the state of the country and their localities the root causes of it all are liberals and Democrats and, of course racial minorities and LGBT citizens - in short those who believe in equality for all citizens and democracy in general.  Of course, if one looks at objective facts, the reality of the nation is far different from what these politicians and talking heads describe.  In fact, the economy is doing fairly well despite constant inaccurate predictions of recession.  Yes, there are many real problems - e.g., nearly daily mass shootings thanks to right wing Republicans who block common sense gun control and too many so-called deaths of despair centered principally in rural areas with social norms and mindsets that make them hostile to and avoided by modern and progressive business (much of Southwest Virginia is but one example) even as they bemoan their economic plight. However, perhaps the main complaint of those on the right is increasingly they find opposition to their infliction of their antiquated and grievance driven beliefs on the whole of society.  Hence, their support of authoritarian rule where they believe others will be made subordinate to they power and control.  A column in the New York Times looks at the disturbing phenomenon.  Here are excerpts:

U.S. democracy is clearly in crisis. It’s entirely possible that in less than two years dissenters will face the power of a government with an authoritarian bent; if that sounds to you like hyperbole, you aren’t paying attention.

But is America beyond the political realm also in crisis? Are the very foundations of society eroding? Many people on the right apparently think so. A recent essay by Damon Linker in The Times profiled conservative intellectuals whose writing, he argued, helps explain where the MAGA right is coming from. What struck me, reading some of their work, is the dire portrait they paint of the state of our nation.

For example, Patrick Deneen’s “Regime Change” describes America thus: “Once-beautiful cities and towns around the nation have succumbed to an ugly blight. Cratering rates of childbirth, rising numbers of ‘deaths of despair,’ widespread addictions to pharmaceuticals and electronic distractions testify to the prevalence of a dull ennui and psychic despair.” And he attributes all of this to the malign effects of liberalism.

When I read such things, I always wonder, do these people ever go outside and look around? Do they have any sense, from personal memory or reading, of what America was like 30 or 50 years ago?

It’s true that U.S. society has changed immensely over the past half-century or so, and not entirely in good ways: Inequality has soared, and deaths of despair are a real phenomenon. (More about that later.) But many right-wing critiques of modern America seem rooted not just in dystopian fantasies but in dystopian fantasies that are generations out of date. There seems to be a part of the conservative mind for which it’s always 1975.

Start with those blighted cities. I’m old enough to remember the 1970s and 1980s, when Times Square was a cesspool of drugs, prostitution and crime. These days it’s a bit too Disneyland for my tastes, but the transformation has been incredible.

[B]etween 1990 and the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic there was a broad-based U.S. urban resurgence, largely driven by the return to city life of a significant number of affluent Americans, who increasingly valued the amenities cities can offer and were less worried by violent crime, which plunged after 1990.

True, some of the fall in crime was reversed during the pandemic, but it seems to be receding again. And Americans are coming back to urban centers: Working from home has reduced downtown foot traffic during the week, but weekend visitors are more or less back to prepandemic levels.

This doesn’t look like blight to me.

What about family life? Indeed, fewer Americans are getting married than in the past. What you may not know is that since around 1980 there has been a huge decline in divorce rates. The most likely explanation, according to the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, is that expanded job opportunities for women led to a temporary surge in divorces as women left unhappy marriages, which receded as marriages adjusted to the new social realities. I take this to mean that during the “good old days” there was a lot of quiet marital misery, some of which is now behind us.

[W]hen we talk about declining birthrates, we should note that a significant factor has been a huge decline in teenage pregnancies, especially among women 15 to 17. Is this an indicator of moral decay?

But what about those deaths of despair? They’re real and very much an indictment of our society. But while deaths from drugs, alcohol and suicide happen everywhere, they’re happening disproportionately not in liberal big cities but in left-behind rural regions, stranded by economic forces that have caused a migration of income and employment to relatively well-educated metropolitan areas.

Social change is never an unalloyed good thing. I look at how America has changed over my adult lifetime and see some things I don’t like, especially the return to extreme economic inequality. But I also see a society that offers much more individual freedom, especially for women and minorities but for the rest of us too.

Not everyone considers this a positive change. Indeed, some people on the right clearly hate the America we actually live in, a complex, diverse nation, as opposed to the simpler, purer nation of their imaginations.

And if you would prefer a society with more traditional social relationships, more people practicing traditional forms of religion and so on, that’s your right. But don’t claim, falsely, that society is collapsing because it doesn’t match your preferences or blame liberalism for every social problem.

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Are House Republicans Throwing Putin a Lifeline?

The moral bankruptcy of today's Republican Party and much of the "conservative news media" - not to mention a contempt for democracy - is increasing before our eyes. How else to explain the growing segment of the House Republican caucus that would end aid to Ukraine and in the process throw Vladimir Putin a lifeline notwithstanding the barbarism that Russia has targeted against Ukraine's civilian population.  War criminals are now admired in some GOP circles and most of the GOP remains loyal to Donald Trump who would happily suspend the U.S. Constitution and retaliate against anyone he dislikes or views as an opponent much in the way Putin has done in Russia (it's hard to keep count of the number of Russian oligarchs who have fallen from windows or down staircases).  A column in the Washington Post by George Will - with whom I frequently disagree - looks at what may be the House Republican's betrayal of democracy and aiding and abetting of Putin and the endless war crimes that continue to be committed against Ukrainian citizens. Such is the sickness and depravity of far too many in today's GOP.  Here are column excerpts:

In March 2022, three weeks into the war, the Russians dropped two 500-kilogram bombs on a theater in Mariupol, Ukraine, where hundreds of civilians, their homes having been destroyed, were sheltering. On the pavement on each side of the theater was painted in giant Cyrillic letters the Russian word for “children.” Perhaps 600 people died. The implausible idea that this was an accident became even more so 23 days later when, after a missile attack on refugees at a railway station, the words “for children” — up to 9 children were among the up to 63 people killed — were found painted on fragments of the missile.

A Russian military consistency has been barbarism: Remember the explosive toys Russians scattered to maim Afghan children who would thereafter be burdens for adults too distracted to fight. This is the Russia that some congressional Republicans would, by ending aid for Ukraine, rescue from the criminal misadventure Vladimir Putin began on Feb. 24, 2022.

Today, for a second year, Russia is engaged in what is called “weaponizing winter.” The aim, Petraeus and Roberts say, is to freeze “the Ukrainian people to death in their homes, barracks and foxholes, by destroying power stations, water treatment plants and electrical grids.” But neither Napoleon’s bedraggled troops on their 1,500-mile retreat from Moscow to Paris in 1812 nor Hitler’s ill-equipped legions, some of whose frozen eyelids fell off, were as used to extreme cold as Ukrainians are.

“It is hard to escape the conclusion,” write Petraeus and Roberts, “that by looting some museums and art galleries, and deliberately targeting others for destruction, the Russians were hoping to destroy Ukraine’s sense of cultural and historical identity.” Never mind that Putin’s war justification is that Ukraine has no distinct identity. And how should we categorize the barbarians’ would-be abettors on Capitol Hill?

Days into the war, Russians attacked Red Cross evacuation routes. Later they would use thermobaric weapons, a vacuum bomb with two charges, as Petraeus and Roberts explain: “The first disperses fuel into the air and the second ignites it, sucking all the oxygen out of people’s lungs.” It was a notable barbarity, “especially against civilians trapped in enclosed spaces.”

Russia’s war crimes — targeting civilians, kidnapping children, mass executions, torture, rape — are not incidental to, they are premeditated tactics in, the war that some congressional Republicans seem eager to help Putin win. He knows the help he needs. “If Western defense supplies are terminated tomorrow,” Putin said on Oct. 5, “Ukraine will have a week left to live as it runs out of ammunition.”

This blithe acknowledgment that killing Ukraine is his intention came as some congressional Republicans were intensifying their opposition to aiding Ukraine. Their canine obedience to Donald Trump is congruent with his vow that if reelected he will end the war “in 24 hours.” These Republicans, and the constituents to whom they pander, are not less odious than the congressional and campus progressives “contextualizing” (a progressive synonym for “justifying”) Hamas’s sadism.

Today, during the biggest European war since then [WWII], many Americans seem so indifferent to its outcome that they are prepared to decide the outcome by abandoning the bleeding victim with a low, dishonest shrug. 

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America’s National-Security Threats Are Not All Overseas

Since the outset of this blog, I have argued that Christofascists and evangelicals constitute a clear and present danger to America's democracy and constitutional order because their ultimate goal is to inflict their hate and bigotry driven beliefs - most of which stem from cherry-picked Old Testament passages and racial animus towards non-whites - on the entire nation and establish themselves as privileged with special rights to mistreat others.  Donald Trump's appeal to this demographic stems from his promise to give them political power and to establish an authoritarian regime where the rights of the majority are made subservient to the rights of the minority.  Indeed, Trump's promised model mirror's that of Vladimir Putin's Russia where the Russian Orthodox Church has been granted special rights and Putin has waged a relentless war against LGBT Russians.  Given the Republican Party's reliance on evangelical/Christofascist voter's, a number of Congressional Republicans are transforming the GOP into the party of Putin.  Hence the House Republican opposition to more aid to Ukraine and admiration of dictatorial regimes in Russia and Hungary.  With a delusional Christian nationalist now holding the position of Speaker of the House, the evangelical/Christofascist GOP base and its self-prostituting Republican allies are a threat to America's national security abroad in a time of growing threats across the globe and avowed enemies like Russia and hostile adversaries like China.  A piece in The New Yorker looks at this dangerous and frightening situation.  Here are highlights: 

Nine days ago, the idea that an obscure 2020 election denier from Shreveport, Louisiana, with less than five thousand dollars in his household’s bank accounts, a literalist’s belief in the presence of dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark, and a dubious past as an advocate of “conversion” therapy for gay teens could single-handedly shape the fate of tens of billions of dollars in U.S. military assistance to key allies at war was even more preposterous than the notion that America might soon reëlect its four-times-indicted former President.

But these are not normal times in our politics. As the new Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson now wields outsized power over which bills get a vote in Congress, and he has decided to make the first major fight of his tenure a dispute with the White House and the Democratic-controlled Senate over emergency aid to Israel and Ukraine. In the Senate, meanwhile, Tommy Tuberville, a first-term G.O.P. member from Alabama, who is better known for his years as Auburn’s head football coach, has waged a one-man campaign to block hundreds of military promotions for the past nine months.

With a new war in the Middle East and embarrassing vacancies in key Pentagon posts threatening to affect U.S. readiness, his Republican colleagues finally pushed back for real this week, spending much of Wednesday night yelling at Tuberville on the Senate floor. “I do not respect men who do not honor their word,” Joni Ernst, a senator from Iowa, huffed. Dan Sullivan of Alaska complained about Tuberville’s “national-security suicide mission.” He added, “Xi Jinping is loving this. So is Putin. How dumb can we be, man?”

The answer, of course, is very dumb. Even after getting reamed out by his fellow-Republicans, Tuberville refused to relent on his blockade. And, in the House, Johnson is standing firm on a bizarre demand—the first substantive one of his Speakership—that fourteen billion dollars in wartime assistance to Israel be offset by an equal amount in cuts to the Internal Revenue Service. Even a ruling from the Congressional Budget Office that the cuts would actually cost the Treasury nearly twenty-seven billion dollars by reducing the amount in taxes that a budget-constrained I.R.S. could collect did not deter Johnson.

While picking this fight over urgent—and historically bipartisan—money for Israel, Johnson also refused to include in the emergency spending bill sixty billion dollars in additional Ukraine aid that President Biden has requested. The result is that no one really knows yet where that leaves the money for either Israel or Ukraine. Maybe the Senate, where both parties’ leaders and a bipartisan majority support the broader funding approach, will find a way around the new Speaker, who now claims privately that he isn’t really as opposed to helping Ukraine as his record of voting against previous assistance suggests,

Such is the state of American foreign-policymaking. The week’s events on Capitol Hill ought to remind us that not all national-security threats are overseas.

I’ve been watching this all play out from Berlin, where nervous allies are asking once again what the volatile state of American politics means for the rest of the world. Few countries have more at stake in the upcoming U.S. Presidential election than Germany, a favorite target of former President Donald Trump during his four years in office.

“There’s a major land war going on a day’s drive from here, and I think that most Germans are more focussed on the fate of American democracy,” Daniel Benjamin, a former American diplomat and head of the American Academy in Berlin, which hosted me for a discussion on U.S. politics, said. “They’re scarred [by Trump], and they worry a lot about it.”

The current American President is arguably much more popular here than he is in the United States—a recent Pew poll found that sixty-seven per cent of Germans trust Biden to do the right thing in international affairs, versus ten per cent of Germans who thought Trump would do so in the final year of his Presidency.

This is not just about lefty Europeans turning up their noses at a crude right-wing American politician. Biden’s preference for working with allies rather than Trump’s bashing of them; his strong backing for Ukraine in contrast to Trump’s blackmailing of its leader; and his decades of support for NATO at a time when NATO is facing the biggest threat to European security since the end of the Cold War are all real, specific differences. Trump, . . . . just the other day he bragged to an audience in Sioux City, Iowa, that he had threatened not to defend other NATO countries, even in response to a Russian military assault. “Does that mean, if Russia attacks my country, you will not be there?” Trump quoted a fellow NATO leader asking him. “That’s right,” Trump said as his audience cheered.

Perhaps the most pressing fear one hears in Europe is about aid for Ukraine. However hard it is to imagine, given the enormous commitment that the West has made to Kyiv’s defense, congressional dysfunction in Washington might mean that American assistance dries up before the current Ukrainian counter-offensive is even over.

From the start of the war, Biden has worked arm in arm on Ukraine with Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Germany, as part of its so-called Zeitenwende, a painful and not fully complete pivot in its foreign policy since Russia’s invasion, is now committed to spend more than two per cent of its G.D.P. on defense—an increase that Trump loudly demanded but never could achieve.

And yet the more profound worry—here in Berlin, and elsewhere in the West—goes far deeper than how much is spent in sending long-range missiles to Ukraine or on helping Israel eradicate Hamas. It’s about the real possibility of America reëlecting a President who is not committed to the basic principles of either the Western alliance or, for that matter, the American Constitution. In “The Divider,” the recent book that I wrote with my husband, we recounted how John Kelly, the former Marine general and Trump’s chief of staff, was shocked by Trump’s admiration for the Nazi generals who prosecuted the Second World War. . . . Recounting this story to an audience in Berlin elicited only stunned silence.

Germans don’t get a vote in the upcoming U.S. Presidential election, but, as much as anywhere in the world, they get what is on the line. 

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