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The Right's Hypocrisy Filled Attacks on "Elites"

One of the ironies of America today is the posturing of those who are "elites" - based on wealth, political and/or educations from Ivy League universities - on the political right masquerading as supporters of the common citizens of the nation even as they actually hold the masses in disdain and and manipulate them for their own gain be it financial or political.  Thus, we see the farce of Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Josh Hawley and many others on the political right putting on an act that they care about average Americans and down play (except for Trump) their own wealth and/or elite backgrounds.  This constant attack on "elites" is hypocrisy-filled since these individuals back policies that would slash programs that benefit millions of Americans, such as Medicare and Social Security, so that there can be ever more tax cuts for the extremely wealthy.  Sadly, far too many Americans fall for this pretense and support those who would never mix with them socially and who, if given their way, would reduce their supporters to grinding poverty while wealth disparities would soar even further.  A very long piece in The New Yorker looks at some of these faux champions of the common people and the growing social irresponsibility of the very wealthy who have forgotten the lessons of the French and Russian revolutions where the incredibly wealthy were overthrown.  Here are excepts:

As a young man in the nineteen-eighties, Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson set out to claim his stake in the establishment. His access to money and influence started at home. His stepmother, Patricia, was an heir to the Swanson frozen-food fortune. His father, Dick, was a California TV anchor who became a Washington fixture after a stint in the Reagan Administration. For fortunate clans like the Carlsons, it was “A Wonderful Time,” to borrow the title of a volume of contemporaneous portraits of “the life of America’s elite,” which included “the Cabots sailing off Boston’s North Shore, and Barry Goldwater on the range in Arizona.”

As a teen-ager, Carlson attended St. George’s School, beside the ocean in Rhode Island, one of sixteen American prep schools that the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell described as “differentiating the upper classes from the rest of the population.” Carlson dated (and later married) the headmaster’s daughter. His college applications were rejected, but the headmaster exerted influence at his own alma mater, Trinity College, and Carlson was admitted. He did not excel there; he went on to earn what he described as a “string of Ds.” After college, he applied to the C.I.A., and when he was rejected there, too, his father offered some rueful advice: “You should consider journalism. They’ll take anybody.”

[H]e found success at Fox News. There, he developed a dark new mantra. “American decline is the story of an incompetent ruling class,” he told his audience, in 2020. “They squandered all of it in exchange for short-term profits, bigger vacation homes, cheaper household help.” It was an audacious message from a man with homes in Maine and Florida, a reported income of ten million dollars a year, and Washington roots so deep that the Mayflower Hotel honored his standing order for a bespoke, off-menu salad. (Iceberg, heavy on the bacon.) But Carlson framed his advantages as proof of credibility; he told an interviewer, “I’ve always lived around people who are wielding authority, around the ruling class.”

In declaring war on the upper class that made him, Carlson joined a long, volatile lineage of combatants against the élite. From the beginning, the United States has had a vexed relationship to distinctions of status—a by-product of what Trollope called our “fable of equality.” Americans tend to root for the adjective (“élite Navy SEALs”) and resent the noun (“the Georgetown élite”).

What’s different these days is that so many of the attacks come from inside the palace walls. Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, grew up comfortably (his father was a bank president), graduated from Stanford and from Yale Law School, taught at a British school for “gifted boys,” and met his wife when they both clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts. But he ignores these credentials when he criticizes what he calls “the people at the top of our society.” As a religious conservative, he believes that his values leave him disadvantaged, writing in 2019, “Our cultural elites look down on the plain virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice.”

The Florida congressman Matt Gaetz—the son of a wealthy health-care entrepreneur who for years served as the head of the state senate—called his rival Kevin McCarthy “the most elite fund-raiser in the history of the Republican caucus.” This was instantly understood to be an insult.

Nobody in American public life has a more unsettled relationship to status than Donald Trump. For years, as he elbowed his way into Manhattan and Palm Beach, he touted the exclusivity of his golf courses (“the most elite in the country”) and hotels (“the city’s most elite property”), and he promoted Trump University with the message “I want you to become part of an elite wealth building team that works under my direction.”

None of his élite talk endeared him to what he called “the tastemakers,” who dismissed him as a boorish trespasser. Even after he turned his Mar-a-Lago estate into a private club, he still resented those who had sniffed at him, telling an interviewer, in a tone rarely employed after the age of twelve, “I have a better club than them.”

When Trump ran for President, he adopted the expected criticism of “media élites,” “political élites,” and “élites who only want to raise more money for global corporations.” But, after he took office, he didn’t seem to want to do away with the idea of an élite; he just wanted his own people to be on top.

But, if our élites are undesirable, what would a better élite look like? What, exactly, are élites for?

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, living as a wealthy recluse in Switzerland, was at work on some of the earliest statistical research into what we now call income inequality. By his count, twenty per cent of the population of Italy owned about eighty per cent of the land. . . .he adopted élite, a French word derived from the Latin eligere, which means “to choose.” Pareto intended it to be neither a pejorative nor a compliment; he believed that there were élite scholars, élite shoe shiners, and élite thieves. Under capitalism, they would tend to be plutocrats; under socialism, they would be bureaucrats.

His formulation suggests several varieties of élite influence. There is the cultural power wielded by scholars, think tanks, and talkers; the administrative power radiating from the White House and the politburo; the coercive power resident in the police and the military. . . . Looming over them is economic power, which has occupied a fluctuating position in the West—worshipped, except when it is scorned.

In ancient Athens, wealthy citizens supported choruses, schools, and temples, on pain of being sentenced to exile or death. From the late Middle Ages, philosophers proposed that, instead of banishing the rich, society should exploit their bounty. The Tuscan humanist Poggio Bracciolini argued, in “On Avarice,” that in times of public need the prosperous élite could be made to serve as a “private barn of money.”

This idea prevailed for centuries. During the American bank crisis of 1907, a group of tycoons that included John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan put up personal funds to bail out the financial markets. But that crisis also marked the end of an era: it spurred the creation of the Federal Reserve, which relieved the economic élite of an “onus they had carried since medieval times,” according to Guido Alfani, the author of “As Gods Among Men,” a new history of wealth in the West. Freed of that responsibility, the rich of the early twentieth century became both more entrenched and more extraneous, attracting criticism from regulators, muckrakers, and the growing ranks of organized labor. Alfani notes a pattern that unfolds “repeatedly and systematically across history”: when economic élites become ingrown, impenetrable, and “insensitive to the plight of the masses,” societies tend to become unstable.

The élites “accept one another, understand one another, marry one another, tend to work and to think if not together at least alike,” he wrote. Once ensconced, they rarely lost power, he warned; they simply swapped seats, moving among industry, academia, media, and public office.

A century after Pareto laid down the concept, he is rarely read, but Branko Milanovic, a former economist at the World Bank, believes that this is a mistake. In his book “Visions of Inequality,” a history of thinking on the distribution of wealth, Milanovic notes that Pareto’s era “strongly resembles current capitalist societies.” Pareto was writing at a time when vast, entrenched inequality in Europe and America fuelled calls for radical upheaval.

Even identifying who is eligible for the élite has grown more complicated. Conservatives venerate the building of wealth and political power but see themselves as persecuted by intellectuals and bureaucrats. DeSantis . . . . in a feat of rhetorical gerrymandering, he excludes Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, arguing that, although Thomas occupies the “commanding heights of society,” he “rejects the group’s ideology, tastes, and attitudes.”

Thomas, for his part, focusses his ire on academia, lambasting “know-it-all elites” and declaring that he prefers “Walmart parking lots to the beaches”—though he evidently makes exceptions for certain beaches. Last year, ProPublica reported that for decades Thomas has taken undisclosed luxury vacations, paid for by the Republican donor Harlan Crow, including tropical sojourns on Crow’s superyacht and visits to the secretive California retreat Bohemian Grove, where Thomas befriended the Koch brothers.

Some of the combatants’ definitions of “élite” are almost perfectly opposed. . . . Amid the competing accusations, you may find yourself quietly wondering: Am I in the ruling class? For Americans, that tends to be a touchy question.

Fussell, undeterred, catalogued the markers of the upper class: frequent house guests (“implying as it does plenty of spare bedrooms to lodge them in and no anxiety about making them happy”); tardiness (“proles arrive punctually”); and, as in the case of the young Tucker Carlson, rumpled bow ties. (“If neatly tied, centered, and balanced, the effect is middle-class,” Fussell wrote.)

He ended the book with a system for evaluating the class valence of the goods on display in your house: “New Oriental rug or carpet: subtract 2 (each). Worn Oriental rug or carpet: add 5 (each).’’

Forty years after Fussell’s “Class,” its most striking feature is its prescience. Before we could see the full contours of our new Gilded Age, Fussell sensed that the middle class was “sinking,” pulled down by “unemployment, a static economy, and lowered productivity.” A generation whose parents had clambered out of the working class was amusing itself to distraction in a world of proliferating screens and cheap consumption—“prole drift,” Fussell called it. The class divide was widening once more, and the greatest gap was the one separating Americans who could protect themselves with money from those who could not.

In America’s case, history holds two examples with wildly different outcomes. In the early nineteenth century, old-line Southern élites, who profited from slavery and from exports of cotton, faced competition from Northern élites, who made their money in mining, railroads, and steel. They battled first in politics—some ran for office, others funded candidates—but the élites proliferated faster than politics could accommodate them. Between 1800 and 1850, the number of America’s millionaires soared from half a dozen to roughly a hundred. During the Civil War, the North’s tycoons prospered, the South’s went into decline, and the country suffered incalculable damage.

Half a century later, America was riven once more. In the nineteen-twenties, suspected anarchists bombed Wall Street, killing thirty people; coal miners in West Virginia mounted the largest insurrection since the Civil War. But this time American élites, some of whom feared a Bolshevik revolution, consented to reform—to allow, in effect, greater public reliance on those “private barns of money.” Under Franklin D. Roosevelt (Groton, Harvard), the U.S. raised taxes, took steps to protect unions, and established a minimum wage. The costs, Turchin writes, “were borne by the American ruling class.” . . . . Between the nineteen-thirties and the nineteen-seventies, a period that scholars call the Great Compression, economic inequality narrowed, except among Black Americans, who were largely excluded from those gains.

But by the nineteen-eighties the Great Compression was over. As the rich grew richer than ever, they sought to turn their money into political power; spending on politics soared. The 2016 Republican Presidential primary involved seventeen contestants, the largest field in modern history. Turchin calls it a “bizarre spectacle of an elite aspirant game reaching its logical culmination.” It was a lineup of former governors, sitting senators, a former C.E.O., a neurosurgeon, the offspring of political and real-estate dynasties—all competing to convince voters that they despised the élite. Their performances of solidarity with the masses would have impressed the Castros.

When Trump reached the White House, he ushered in allies with similar credentials: Wilbur Ross (Yale), Steven Mnuchin (Yale), Steve Bannon (Harvard Business), Mike Pompeo (Harvard Law), Jared Kushner (Harvard).

Using data to model scenarios for the future, he concludes, “At some point during the 2020s, the model predicts, instability becomes so high that it starts cutting down the elite numbers.” He likens the present time to the run-up to the Civil War. America could still relearn the lessons of the Great Compression—“one of the exceptional, hopeful cases”—and act to prevent a top-heavy society from toppling. When that has happened in history, “elites eventually became alarmed by incessant violence and disorder,” he writes. “And we are not there—yet.”

[I]nstead of continuing to exhaust the meaning of “the élite,” we would be better off targeting what we really resent—inequality, immobility, intolerance—and attacking the barriers that block the “circulation of élites.” Left undisturbed, the most powerful among us will take steps to stay in place, a pattern that sociologists call the “iron law of oligarchy.” Near the end of the Roman Empire, in the fourth century A.D., inequality had become so entrenched that a Roman senator could earn a hundred and twenty thousand pieces of gold a year, while a farmer earned five. The fall of Rome took five hundred years, but, as the distinguished historian Ramsay MacMullen wrote, it could be “compressed into three words: fewer have more.”

Democracy is meant to insure that the élite continue to circulate. But no democracy can function well if people are unwilling to lose power—if a generation of leaders, on both the right and the left, becomes so entrenched that it ages into gerontocracy; if one of two major parties denies the arithmetic of elections; if a cohort of the ruling class loses status that it once enjoyed and sets out to salvage it.

Which brings us back to Tucker Carlson. When he tells the story of America’s élites, he often scorns them as “mediocre” and “stupid.” But he frames his own failures—the strings pulled on his behalf, the rejected applications, the cancelled shows—as jaunty diversions on the path to success.

Together, these counter-élites conjure a pervasive conspiracy—of immigrants, experts, journalists, and the F.B.I. It’s a narrative of vengeful self-pity, a pining for the wonderful times gone by. Carlson’s old friends in the ruling class occasionally wonder how much of his shtick he really believes, and how much he simply grieves for having lost the game of musical chairs to faster, shrewder, more capable élites. The latter, at least, would make his desperation understandable: he is being replaced.

In the interest of disclosure, I grew up fairly privileged: summering at a home on a lake in the Adirondacks, season passes at a ski resort in the winter, a new car when I went away to college, and a college and law school education paid for in full by my parents.  Nothing on the scale of the truly wealthy, but nothing to scoff at either.  The difference is that I have never sought to maintain my own status at the expense of others and do not play the system to avoid paying income taxes like so many of the very wealthy. 

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

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Vote for Destruction of the GOP in November

The Republican Party of today bears no resemblance to the party from the years of Ronald Reagan and decades before that.  Today's GOP has become a sectarian party ruled by a cult leader in the form of Donald Trump.   Today's GOP has no real interest in actually governing and cares nothing about the good and welfare of the country and the majority of its citizens.  Retaining power at any cost - as was demonstrated by the January 6, 2021, insurrection - and pleasing the ever more extreme element of the MAGA base are all that matters.  Hence the sabotage of a Senate deal on border security because it might help Joe Biden.  Hence the betrayal of Ukraine and many other allies by congressional Republicans.   What has become clear is that the Republican Party is beyond reforming itself from within.  Sane and responsible Republicans have either been forced out or have retired given the unworkable nature of their party.  As a column in the Washington Post lays out, only huge election losses may force the GOP to do what it otherwise will refuse to do.  If one cares about democracy and wants a sane and functioning GOP, one must vote against EVER GOP candidate come November, 2024, and sufficiently cripple the GOP to force reform.  Here are column excerpts:

Anyone who genuinely cares about the future of the Republican Party — and you should if you care about strengthening democracy — has only one option in November: Vote to destroy the party to save it.

I care about the GOP. No one has ever mistaken me for a conservative, but I believe our democracy functions best when there is healthy, fact-based competition between liberal and conservative viewpoints. Progressive ideas and policy positions are improved by being challenged, and the best decisions are forged from vigorous debate.

Now, however, we have the Democratic Party on one side and the Republican dumpster fire on the other. The GOP is a cult, held in thrall by an unstable bully and would-be authoritarian. Held captive by a man who sent armed insurrectionists to the Capitol in a violent attempt to overturn his defeat in a free and fair election. Held hostage by a man who punishes any perceived disloyalty with political execution.

At the 2020 Republican National Convention, the GOP didn’t even offer a party platform. Instead, it simply affirmed its “strong support for President Donald Trump” and his “America-first agenda,” whatever that might be at any given moment.

The nation would be foolish, at this point, to expect Republicans to rise up and free themselves. Look at how the congressional negotiations over border security and Ukraine aid have changed since Trump’s New Hampshire victory on Tuesday. Just last week, GOP senators, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), were optimistic that the package would swiftly be approved by the Senate. But on Wednesday, McConnell told a closed-door meeting of his caucus that there might no longer be a path forward for the bill — because Trump opposes any remedy for the border crisis that might make President Biden look good.

This is insanity. Democrats are offering something Republicans have wanted for years, and might never be offered again: tougher border security without a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already in the country, including “dreamers.” But Dear Leader Trump says no and, suddenly, GOP senators are afraid to say yes.

Republicans in Congress, clearly, will not free their party. And it looks doubtful that the GOP base has any intention of breaking the chains that bind it.

Former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley finished a strong second in New Hampshire, becoming the anti-Trump by default. But the next contested primary is a month away, and it is in her home state, which might not feel very welcoming. For four long weeks, she will have to survive withering personal attacks from Trump and calls from powerful Republicans to drop out of the race in the name of party unity. And then, if she makes it to Feb. 24, she will need a miracle.

The RealClearPolitics average of polls in South Carolina shows Trump with a 30-point lead. Those surveys were taken before the other GOP candidates dropped out, so Haley can be expected to close the gap. But virtually all of the state’s Republican elected officials have fallen in line behind Trump — including Sen. Tim Scott, whom Haley first appointed to the Senate in 2013 when she was governor, and who obsequiously told Trump “I just love you” during Trump’s New Hampshire victory speech.

Our political parties reform and reconstitute themselves after being soundly rebuked by the voters. After the disaster of President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation and the aimlessness of the Gerald Ford administration, Republicans regrouped and became the party of Ronald Reagan; his policies were not those I agreed with, but they were coherent and could be negotiated with. After Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis lost successive presidential elections, their party turned to Bill Clinton and the “new Democrats,” whose ideas were a break with the past — and, again, held together as an ideology.

If you want the GOP to be a serious conservative political party and not a MAGA cult, send Republicans into the wilderness. Vote for Biden. Take away Republicans’ control of the House. Give Democrats a bigger majority in the Senate. Vote Republican officials out of statehouses, city halls and school boards.

Make the metaphorical ashes from which a new GOP can rise.

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Thursday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

Biden: The Least Objectionable Candidate

I have been actively involved in politics for over three decades and while I support idealism I also recognize that it can lead to the election of those who in reality are an open threat to the ideals who want to give their votes to a perfect candidate.   The reality is that in most elections, no such perfect candidate exists and one is left with choosing between the better of the two options offered by the nation's two major political parties or, just as often, choosing the least objectional of the two main party candidates.  In 2016 some voters in a pique who disliked Hillary Clinton voted for third party candidates - and basically threw away their votes - and the result was the election of Donald Trump and the deep damage he has done to the nation and the threat he now poses to American democracy.  Self-claimed idealism and high mindedness had the opposite impact that those spurning Clinton claimed to support.   In 2024, we see a number of Democrats and independents whining about Joe Biden - e.g,. college students claiming they will vote third party over their unhappiness over the situation in Gaza - who seemingly could put Trump back in office, something that would betray their supposed humanitarian concerns.  Trump doesn't give a damn about anyone but himself and I suspect doesn't care how many Gazans die.   Let's not forget that the Trump regime literally put children in cages and tore migrant families apart.  Is Trump the man you want again setting policy?  I think not and a piece in The Atlantic looks at Biden's possible hidden strength, especially if idealists will get their heads out of their asses and face reality.  Here are excerpts:

It was a plausible plan, the political equivalent of stealing a base.

Joe Biden had promised South Carolina Democrats that their state would host the first primary of 2024. The state of New Hampshire declined to step aside. To honor his promise, Biden did not enter the New Hampshire primary.

That decision opened an opportunity for Biden detractors inside and outside the Democratic primary process: . . . How hard could it be to win a one-dog dog show?

Turns out, harder than it looks. Almost 100,000 people cast ballots in the New Hampshire Democratic primary. Not quite 25,000 chose a Biden alternative. Almost all the rest seem to have written in Biden’s name.

A lot of money has been raised and spent this cycle on the hypothesis that a big internal demand among Democrats exists for an alternative to President Biden. The anti-vaccine celebrity Robert F. Kennedy Jr. entered the Democratic contest in March 2023 (then switched to an independent candidacy in October). The gadfly academic Cornel West, seeking to attract Biden voters in the left wing of the Democratic Party, entered as a Green Party candidate before also switching to run as an independent. In the Democratic primary race proper, the spiritualist Marianne Williamson and Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota have tried their luck.

A prospective No Labels ticket now looms—premised on the assumption that millions of centrist Democrats want to join hands with moderate Republicans in equal rejection of both ex-President Trump and President Biden.

Those who promoted a Biden challenge could cite proof points: the president’s soft approval numbers, apparent disaffection among younger and minority voters, the president’s age and alleged infirmity. The challenge-promoters argued that they had the best interests of the party at heart; they wanted a candidate more certain to defeat Trump.

Yet, when put to the test in New Hampshire, the proposition met a harsh rejection. It was rejected even though Biden did not campaign in the state at all.

That New Hampshire rejection does not necessarily mean the proposition is doomed for all time. Maybe Phillips was the wrong messenger, too obviously driven by ego and pique, too void of a message more powerful than “We need an alternative.

But maybe the challenge-promoters are also missing something important. Trump has generated a deep personal bond with members of the (shrunken) Republican Party. Biden has not done that. But that is not the nature of the transaction between Biden and his party. Biden typically opens remarks with the phrase “Here’s the deal”—and that’s exactly what Biden offers: a deal, not a cult.

The Democratic Party is a big, sprawling mess, and has long been that way. In the Trump era, it spans the ideological distance from Bernie Sanders to Cindy McCain. There is no one Democratic “base” . . . . Democratic coalitions are typically assembled by highly targeted benefits rather than mobilized by big messages as Republicans often are: $35 insulin, defense of abortion rights, student-loan forgiveness, environmental measures. The current coalition includes intense supporters and intense critics of the state of Israel. Altogether, not an easy horse to ride. . . . The best rider is one who is able to keep reminding each part of the coalition that it needs to get along with the other parts.

Once upon a time, American households contained large numbers of people and a single TV set. At peak viewing times, the whole family would have to agree on a show. Dad might want an action drama, Mom might want an edgy comedy, one of the kids might want something creative, another might want something scary, but everybody liked nature shows. So that’s what the network aired on a Sunday night. Network executives described their task as inventing “the least objectionable program.” As a candidate for president, Biden may be the “least objectionable” since Dwight Eisenhower (who won reelection in 1956 despite a near-fatal heart attack the year before).

Most reelections campaigns are a referendum on the incumbent. Four more years, yes or no? More of the same or something new? The 2024 election is different. Trump insists that everything always be a referendum on him. In 2024, Biden and his party are eager to agree. The anti-Trump coalition is bigger than the pro-Trump coalition: roughly 3 million votes bigger in 2016, 7 million votes bigger in 2020, probably somewhere between those two figures in 2024.

Yet Biden’s appeal and its limits may be the wrong place to pay attention. This year’s election is a contest between the constitutional and democratic forces in American society and the anticonstitutional and antidemocratic forces. The candidates are only incidentally the story; the fateful national choice, the deep social forces driving that choice—those are the story. Biden is not really the leader of the constitutional and democratic side of this mighty contest. Biden is the instrument of the constitutional and democratic side.

Trump is not going to be beaten by some charismatic newcomer, by some artful strategy. Trump’s going to be beaten by the revulsion of American voters. The message of New Hampshire? The nominee who is needed most is the one who gets in the way least.

More Thursday Male Beauty

 

"Nones" Are Now the Largest Religious Group in America

Donald Trump and Republican candidates and officer holders up and down the ballot continue to pander to and outright prostitute themselves to evangelical "Christians" and Christofascists even as the number of such far right extremists continue to fall in numbers.  Meanwhile, as a new Pew Research survey confirms, the number of "Nones," those who have walked away from organized religion and profess no religious affiliation, have surged in numbers, likely in my view because the far right "Christians" have sullied the Christian brand and turned it into something ugly.  Tellingly, in sharp contrast to evangelicals/Christofascists who gleeful embrace ignorance, Nones put high value on scientific knowledge and logic. While the survey findings suggest why the shrinking number evangelicals/Christofascists are increasingly hysterical about inflicting their beliefs - e.g., abortion bans and book bans - on a growing majority of the population, it makes one wonder why the Republican Party continues to tie its future to a shrinking part of the overall electorate.  Yes, the "Christian" extremists show up for primary caucuses and primaries as the recent Iowa and New Hampshire events confirmed, they increasingly are not  plentiful enough in numbers to win a general election, particularly when Republicans' pushing the evangelical/Christofascist agenda alienate more secular voters.   Both NPR and the Washington Post look at the Pew findings which in a sane political party would make the GOP reconsider it unholy alliance with "Christian" extremists most notable for their hatred of others.   First, here are highlights from NPR:

When Americans are asked to check a box indicating their religious affiliation, 28% now check 'none.'

A new study from Pew Research finds that the religiously unaffiliated – a group comprised of atheists, agnostic and those who say their religion is "nothing in particular" – is now the largest cohort in the U.S. They're more prevalent among American adults than Catholics (23%) or evangelical Protestants (24%).

Gregory Smith at Pew was the lead researcher on the study, titled "Religious 'Nones' in America: Who They Are and What They Believe."  He says the growth of Nones could affect American public life.

"We know politically for example," Smith says, "that religious Nones are very distinctive. They are among the most strongly and consistently liberal and Democratic constituencies in the United States."  And that could change electoral politics in the coming decades.

The political power of white Evangelicals has been well-reported in recent decades, but their numbers are shrinking while the number of the more liberal Nones is on the rise.

While many people of faith say they rely on scripture, tradition and the guidance of religious leaders to make moral decisions, Pew found that Nones say they're guided by logic or reason when making moral decisions.

"And huge numbers say the desire to avoid hurting other people factors prominently in how they think about right and wrong," says Smith.

Demographically, Nones also stand out from the religiously affiliated.  Nones are young. 69% are under the age of fifty.  They're also less racially diverse. 63% of Nones are white.

Similar studies by Pew and other groups such as the Public Religion Research Institute have found that people of color are far more likely to say religion is important in their lives.

But Smith says to keep in mind that the Nones are comprised of three distinct groups – atheists, agnostics and those who describe themselves as 'nothing in particular.'

Nones who describe themselves are atheist or agnostic are far more likely to be white. "People who describe their religion as 'nothing in particular' are more likely," says Smith, "to be Black or Hispanic or Asian."

At first glance, Nones appear to be evenly divided be gender. But digging deeper into the data shows that men are significantly more likely to say they're atheist or agnostic whereas women are more likely to describe their religion as 'nothing in particular.'

The piece in the Washington Post has these highlights:

Over the past half-century, as the number of Americans with no religious affiliation has gone from 5 percent to nearly 30 percent, the emphasis has often been on what they were leaving. A report released Wednesday on the “nones” finds that they are diverse, young, left-leaning and may offer clues to the future of making meaning in a secularizing country.

The Pew findings seem to debunk, or at least complicate, the idea that people who leave religion are hostile toward it. The overwhelming majority of nones say religion causes division and intolerance and encourages superstition and illogical thinking, but 58 percent also say religion helps society by giving people meaning and purpose.

Trying to understand how nones construct their values, the study found that the group places a relatively high value on science. Forty-four percent of nones say there is a scientific explanation for everything, even if they don’t understand how everything works, compared with 16 percent of religiously affiliated Americans. Fifty-six percent of nones say science does more good than harm, compared with 40 percent of the religiously affiliated who say the same.

Cragun said he subscribes to a theory of Swiss sociologist Jörg Stolz that a key driving force behind religion’s decline is “the culmination of growing autonomy in society. People don’t like being told what they should do or what they should not do, especially when the teller isn’t especially qualified. Increasingly, people are saying, ‘Why do I need a pastor to tell me what to do? What makes them any more insightful than this academic journal?’ The rise of the nones is the manifestation of a move toward greater autonomy of individuals.”

Hopefully, Nones will recognize that today's Christofascist dominated GOP is a threat to their personal autonomy and get out and vote Democrat in November, 2024.   Only repeated electoral defeats will convince amoral Republicans who only care about power that it is time to jettison evangelicals and Christofascists.

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Wednesday Male Beauty

 

Today's GOP: The Party of Racial Malice

As I have often noted, I was raised in a Republican household as part of a family that had a history of supporting Republican candidates.  Later, I served for eight years as a City Committee member for the Republican Party of Virginia Beach.  Looking back, the Republican Party of yesteryear is unrecognizable when compared to what the Republican Party has become under Donald Trump and his imitators and sycophants who lack any shred of compassion for others and seek to stir racial grievance and outright malice towards anyone who is not white and preferably a white Christian nationalist.  The hate and malice that Trump and his supporters bear to anyone they label as "other" - blacks, non-whites generally, immigrants, non-Christians, and gays to name a few - is frightening and reminiscent of what was done to Jews and others labeled as inferior or vermin.  Meanwhile, many of the Trump cultists pat themselves on the back for being "good Christians" while parking their wide butts in church pews on Sundays even as they daily betray Christ's message of love and a social gospel aimed at helping those who the MAGA base actively hates. As a piece in The Atlantic by a former Republican (who worked in the George W. Bush White House) notes, these people have transformed the Republican Party into something hideous that betrays both true Christian values and the foundational ideals - however imperfectly executed  - of this nation.  Here are article excepts:

You knew it was coming.  As soon as former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley emerged as the main threat to Donald Trump in the battle for the Republican nomination, it became inevitable that she would be targeted by him. Any front-runner would do the same thing. But Trump did it with his typical touch.

Last week, Trump reposted on his Truth Social account a conspiracy theory that Haley, who was born in South Carolina, was not qualified to be president because her parents, born in India, were not U.S. citizens at the time of her birth. In fact, the Fourteenth Amendment establishes that any person born on American soil is a citizen of the United States and therefore can serve as president.

Last Tuesday, Trump decided to ratchet up the racism a few notches. On Truth Social, he wrote this about his former ambassador to the United Nations: Anyone listening to Nikki “Nimrada” Haley’s wacked out speech last night, would think that she won the Iowa Primary. . . . By Friday, the former president of the United States was referring to Haley as “Nimbra.”

There are two things to know in order to understand what’s unfolding. The first is that Haley’s given name is Nimarata Nikki Randhawa. She has gone by Nikki since she was a child—a local newspaper referred to her as Nikki when she was 12 years old and she had a role in a production of Li’l Abner; and she dropped her maiden name when she married Michael Haley in 1996.

The second is that this is a bigoted game that Trump is well versed in. In 2011, Trump was the chief promoter of the lie that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and therefore ineligible to serve as president. . . . He later implied that Obama was a Muslim and dubbed him “the founder of ISIS.” As recently as a few months ago, Trump, in blaming both President Joe Biden and former President Obama for Hamas’s attacks on Israel . . . .

In 2020, Trump did something similar with Kamala Harris, saying in a press conference that he had “heard” that Harris “doesn’t meet the requirements” to be president. Trump has perfected the just-asking-questions posture that promotes conspiracy theories without quite vouching for them. (Harris was born in Oakland; her mother was from India and her father from Jamaica. . . .)

In 2016 Trump, in his heated primary battle with Ted Cruz, referred to Cruz by his first name, Rafael, a common name in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries and among people of Latin American descent. (Cruz’s father is Cuban.) Trump raised questions about Cruz’s eligibility to be president . . . .

Trump, also in 2016, engaged in a racist attack on Gonzalo Curiel, a district-court judge presiding over a fraud lawsuit against Trump University. Trump called Curiel a “hater” who was being unfair to him because the judge is “Hispanic,” because he’s “Mexican,” and because Trump wanted to build a wall on the southern border. (Judge Curiel was born in Indiana.) Paul Ryan, then speaker of the House, rightly said that Trump’s claim was “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”

During his presidential announcement speech in 2015, Trump signaled the path he was going down. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said. “They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

The Washington Post, citing the Congressional Research Service, reported that very few undocumented immigrants “fit in the category that fits Trump’s description.” But one person who does fit in this category is Trump himself. New York District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who is presiding over the civil case brought by E. Jean Carroll against Trump for defamation, said last week, “The fact that Mr. Trump sexually abused—indeed, raped—Ms. Carroll has been conclusively established.”

IN HIS FIRST RUN FOR PRESIDENT, Trump had awful rhetoric; this time around, he has worse. His words are fascistic. Trump is repeating like an incantation the claim that illegal immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” He has referred to his opponents, whom he sees as his enemies, as “vermin.”

Since the first day Trump stepped on the presidential stage, and in some cases since long before then, he has stoked grievances, resentments, and fears. . . . As Michael Steele, the first Black man to chair the Republican National Committee, put it, “If he can race bait it, he will: These prosecutors, these Black people are coming after me—the white man.”

“When it comes to race, Mr. Trump plays with fire like no other president in a century,” the New York Times reporter Peter Baker wrote in 2019. “While others who occupied the White House at times skirted close to or even over the line, finding ways to appeal to the resentments of white Americans with subtle and not-so-subtle appeals, none of them in modern times fanned the flames as overtly, relentlessly and even eagerly as Mr. Trump.”

No president in living memory, and no major political leader since George Wallace, has said and done things that stir the heart of white supremacists—of David Duke, Richard Spencer, Nick Fuentes, and the Proud Boys, among others—as powerfully as Trump does. But his appeal is hardly limited to them.

Trump’s rhetoric is resonating with the majority of Republicans. . . . Eighty-two percent of Republicans across the country agree with Trump’s “poisoning the blood” rhetoric. In addition, two-thirds of Iowa caucus-goers said Biden did not legitimately win the presidential election in 2020. And about two-thirds of Iowa caucus-goers said they would consider Trump to be fit for president even if he were convicted of a crime.

THIS IS NOT THE REPUBLICAN PARTY I once knew. Ronald Reagan was a formative president for me; I cast my first vote for him and I later worked in his administration. He was generous toward all immigrants, even those who had crossed the southern border illegally.

In his 1984 debate with Walter Mondale, for example, Reagan said, “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and have lived here, even though some time back they may have entered illegally.” In 1986, Reagan signed landmark legislation that granted amnesty to nearly 3 million people who had illegally immigrated to the U.S.

When George W. Bush was running for president in 1999, the then-governor of Texas—speaking to a nearly all-white audience in Sioux City, Iowa—emphasized compassion toward immigrants who came to the country illegally. “I want to remind you of something about immigration,” Bush said. “Family values do not stop at the Rio Grande River. There are moms and dads who have children in Mexico. And they’re hungry.”

Bush, unlike Reagan, didn’t champion amnesty for these immigrants when he was president; instead he offered a pathway to citizenship for those who met a set of requirements, including paying a fine, making good on back taxes, learning English, and waiting in line behind those who had followed the law.

Reagan and Bush were following in the tradition of Abraham Lincoln, the greatest Republican and the greatest president America has produced. He was a supporter of immigration throughout his political career, considering it a “source of national wealth and strength.” Lincoln despised nativism and was contemptuous of the “Know Nothing” party, which was anti-slavery (at least the Northern wing was) yet ferociously anti-immigrant.

In his July 10, 1858, speech, Lincoln argued that recently arrived immigrants who were not descendants of the early colonists—German, Irish, French, and Scandinavian— could yet feel a connection with America. Citizenship was not based on racial, ethnic, or religious identity; it was based on the ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence.

The Republican Party, at its founding and at its best, was capacious, generous in spirit, welcoming to foreigners. It was conservative, and it was compassionate.

Today’s Republican Party has laid waste to those sensibilities. Donald Trump took a party that, by the time he first ran for president, was increasingly inward looking, fearful, and uncharitable, and he made it cruel, xenophobic, exclusionary, and bigoted. It is the party of malice.

I hope my former party will one day be reformed. For now, it needs to be defeated.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Tuesday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

DeSantis: The Nation’s Gain is Florida’s Loss

A column in the Washington Post picks up on a theme I made in a recent post: Ron DeSantis did great damage to the state of Florida as he pursued his national ambitions and pandered to Christofascists and white supremacists.  Now that his presidential campaign is ended, the nation has dodged a bullet - assuming Trump is defeated - but Florida is stuck with two more years of DeSantis' misrule.  One has to wonder how much more damage DeSantis will do to his state now that he has been rejected by both the MAGA base of the GOP and too many "moderate" Republicans to the extent they still exist.   Here are column highlights:

Ron DeSantis and his money-firepit of a presidential campaign didn’t even make it as far as the New Hampshire primary. Somewhere, in some magic kingdom, Mickey Mouse must be laughing.

As Florida’s governor, you will recall, DeSantis has waged a ridiculous war against his state’s biggest tourist attraction, Walt Disney World, to show Republican voters how pugnacious and “anti-woke” he is. That is his idea — his only idea, really — of a winning political message. His state, DeSantis loves to tell crowds, is “where woke goes to die.”

His candidacy died pretty much everywhere. . . . . He dropped out Sunday after reportedly deciding that a likely distant third-place finish Tuesday in New Hampshire, behind Trump and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, would further damage his political “brand.” That’s rich, given the way DeSantis has used his office not as an opportunity to serve the people of Florida but as a branding exercise. In positioning himself as the cowboy-booted crusader of anti-wokeness, he did real damage to his state and its institutions.

DeSantis launched his senseless fight against Disney, which has more than 80,000 employees in Florida, after the company criticized his “don’t say gay” legislation barring discussion of sexual identity in public schools. Rather than simply ignore a news release that hardly anyone would have noticed, DeSantis sought to punish Disney for daring to speak out.

His attempt to pander to the GOP base on social issues went far beyond “don’t say gay,” however. The Stop Woke Act that he pushed through the GOP-controlled legislature bars teachers in the public schools from teaching critical race theory — which was not being taught to begin with — and ends all DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programs in Florida’s public universities. It also seeks to restrict diversity training by private employers in the state. . . . That law is tied up in another legal battle after a federal judge blocked it and DeSantis appealed.

All this posturing has real-world impacts. Florida school districts are having trouble hiring and retaining teachers, and Florida’s state colleges, including the flagship University of Florida, are losing prized faculty members. Ultimately, it is Florida’s students who suffer for DeSantis’s ambition.

On abortion, DeSantis apparently decided not to let any potential GOP candidate outflank him on the right. Having already signed a 15-week ban into law, he went further and had the legislature pass a pitiless six-week ban with no exceptions for rape or incest.

The good news is that Florida voters might have the final word in November. Activists say they now have enough signatures to place a measure enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution on the ballot. If the DeSantis administration fails to torpedo the ballot initiative, and if Florida follows the pattern of other states, having abortion at issue will likely boost Democratic turnout and cause problems for Republicans up and down the ballot. DeSantis’s effort to leverage reproductive rights for political gain will have been counterproductive.

Just like his whole campaign.

The nation’s gain is Florida’s loss, sadly. I fear DeSantis will continue using the state as a stage to boost his MAGA profile — just like those awfully high heels on his cowboy boots.

More Tuesday Male Beauty

 

The Economic Narrative Finally Shifts

As a number of posts on this blog have noted, by all objective data, America's economy is doing well despite the naysaying of (i) Republicans - Donald Trump is on record that he wants the economy to crash - who fear a good economy will boost Joe Biden's re-election effort and (ii) far too many in the mainstream media who prefer to cast clouds over peoples lives, apparently believing that doom and gloom reporting will garner them more page views and clicks on articles.  The reality is that the stock market is at record highs, job creation has continued at a fast clip exceeding anything during the Trump regime, inflation has come way down, and major infrastructure investments are being made under Democrat passed legislation that most Republicans voted against (even as they now lie and take credit for funding they opposed).  Thankfully, the media is belatedly reporting on all the good economic news in part I suspect because the economic data simply undercuts their pessimism and threatens to show them to be spinning untruths.  Indeed, Biden's comment that Trump has already played the role of a modern day Herbert Hoover towards the end of his regime is very accurate when looks at the economic collapse under Trump versus the surging Biden economy.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the longer overdue shift in the economic narrative.  Here are excerpts:

For months now, the economy has been much stronger than political coverage — and therefore, public polling — has suggested. And though it wasn’t only in the past few weeks that 14 million jobs were created, inflation dropped below 4 percent and wages exceeded inflation, the coverage of the economy certainly has shifted quickly and dramatically.

Each bit of news is reported as confirmation that finally the economic outlook has brightened. “Americans are rapidly becoming much more upbeat about the economy,” the Wall Street Journal reported last week. “Consumer sentiment surged 29% since November, the biggest two-month increase since 1991, the University of Michigan said Friday, adding to gauges showing improving moods.” Hmm, that suggests for several months now the media continued to paint a dreary picture of the national mood when, in fact, consumers were feeling something quite different. Apparently, ordinary Americans clued in to the real state of the economy far sooner than the many in the media did.

When an article insists that this marks a “sharp turn after persistently high inflation, the lingering shock from the pandemic’s destruction and fears that a recession was around the corner had put a damper on feelings about the economy in recent years, despite solid growth and consistent hiring,” you have to wonder whether the gap in perception was thanks to overly negative coverage. (A recent Brookings Institution study concluded that “economic news has become systematically more negative … with the negative bias growing over the last three years.”)

Americans’ increasingly positive outlook is reflected in the markets, which have soared to new highs. “The S&P 500 closed at an all-time high on Friday as investors returned to buying equities in force . . . . he Dow Jones Industrial Average, which set its own record at the end of last year, added 395.19 points, or 1.05%, to end at 37,863.80.”

Much of the media appears to be scrambling to catch up to reality. That has significant political implications for President Biden, whose economic success has been played down, dismissed or ignored — on the grounds that the public does not feel better. Well, now there is no excuse for the derisive coverage of Biden’s economic stewardship.

The Post reported: “Rising sentiment among both Democrats and Republicans comes at a critical moment for the Biden administration, which has struggled to convince voters that its economic policies are making their lives better ahead of November’s presidential election.”

In North Carolina on Friday to tout new investment in high-speed internet, he told the audience, “If you look at the consumer confidence, it’s way up. Sixty-four percent — I think it may be 62 percent of Americans think their personal circumstance is good and it’s getting better.” He added that, “thanks to the Investing in America agenda, private companies have invested over $640 billion — let me say it again — $640 billion in advanced manufacturing here in America.”

The president gleefully took shots at four-time indicted former president Donald Trump, who used to boast about the stock market. “We’re doing pretty damn well economically and we’re getting better. He wants to see the stock market crash. You know why? He doesn’t want to be the next Herbert Hoover,” Biden joked. “As I told him, he’s already Hoover. He’s the only president to be president for four years and lose jobs, not gain any jobs.”

[B]oth economic sentiment and coverage have caught up to reality. That might be why Republicans have so little to say — and even less to offer — about the economy, other than vague promises of more tax cuts for the wealthy.

Biden might get one more feather in his cap before November — on taxes. Yahoo Finance reported on a bipartisan deal in the works: “A proposed tax package that would temporarily boost the child tax credit while providing more generous deductions for business investments would be fully paid for by the early elimination of a pandemic-era employee retention credit.” That is consistent with his determination to end “trickle-down” economics in favor of building the economy from “the bottom up and the middle out.”

If the economy remains the most important factor in the presidential election, as it traditionally has, then the president who can claim robust job gains, lower inflation and gas prices, major high-tech and infrastructure investment, and rising stock prices and consumer sentiment might be in a better position for reelection than many pundits predicted.