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MAGA Is Based on Fear, Not Reality

One of the biggest problems facing America is the willingness of a significant segment of the population - namely, the MAGA base of the Republican Party - to readily believe lies and untruths that run against reality. How does one explain this willful rejection of reality?  Personally, I believe that much of it comes (whether people will admit it or not) directly from racial animus, homophobia, and a terror of those who are different and who these MAGA adherents view as a threat either to their perceived white privilege  or their ability to impose their religious beliefs on the whole of society.  This animus generates a fear of the "other" which Fox News and similar propaganda outlets and almost every Republican politician is only too happy to stoke for political gain (one GOP congressman said migrants should be dropped from helicopters and killed).  Never mind that the fears are irrational be it on matters of the economy - the majority of Republicans say they are doing well financially even as they embrace politicians who tell them the economy is terrible - or matters of crime which has actually fallen, not that one would know this to listen to Fox News and GOP candidates and office holders.  The struggle ahead is how to return the nation to some form of unity when a large minority of Americans are rejecting objective data and reality and enthralled to an orange Jabba the Hutt.  A column in the New York Times looks at this situation.  Here are highlights: 

A few days ago, Kristi Noem, the Republican governor of South Dakota — a MAGA hard-liner sometimes mentioned as a potential running mate for Donald Trump — warned that President Biden is “remaking” America, turning us into Europe. My first thought was: So he’s going to raise our life expectancy by five or six years? In context, however, it was clear that Noem believes, or expects her audience to believe, that Europe is a scene of havoc wrought by hordes of immigrants.

As it happens, I spent a fair bit of time walking around various European cities last year, and none of them were hellscapes. Yes, broadly speaking, Europe has been having problems dealing with migrants, and immigration has become a hot political issue. And yes, Europe’s economic recovery has lagged that of the United States. But visions of a continent devastated by immigration are fantasies.

Yet such fantasies are now the common currency of politics on the American right. Remember the days when pundits solemnly declared that Trumpism was caused by economic anxiety? . . . But the anxiety driving MAGA isn’t driven by reality. It is, instead, driven by dystopian visions unrelated to real experience.

That is, at this point, Republican political strategy depends largely on frightening voters who are personally doing relatively well not just according to official statistics but also by their own accounts, by telling them that terrible things are happening to other people.

This is most obvious when it comes to the U.S. economy, which had a very good — indeed, almost miraculously good — 2023. Economic growth not only defied widespread predictions of an imminent recession but also hugely exceeded expectations; inflation has plunged and is more or less where the Federal Reserve wants it to be. And people are feeling it in their lives: 63 percent of surveyed Americans said that their financial situation is good or very good.

Yet out on the stump a few days ago, Nikki Haley declared that “we’ve got an economy in shambles and inflation that’s out of control.” And it’s likely that the Republicans who heard her believed her.

Again, this negative verdict doesn’t reflect personal experience. In December, YouGov asked Americans to evaluate 2023 in general. Republicans said it was awful for the nation, with 76 percent saying the year was bad or terrible. Strange to say, however, 69 percent of Republicans — close to the same number — said that the year was OK, good or great for them personally.

[C]rime declined significantly in 2023, which in a rational world would have added to the good economy by fostering a sense that things are improving.

But the world — especially MAGAworld — isn’t rational. And it’s a longstanding observation that Americans tend to say that national crime is rising even when it’s falling and even when they concede that it’s falling where they live.

Again, these misperceptions are strongly associated with partisanship, with a startling willingness of Republicans to believe things that aren’t true.

Falsely believing that Europe is a continent on the brink of ruin is one thing (although millions of Americans visit Europe and so get the chance to see for themselves each year). It’s much harder to excuse the belief that New York — one of the safest big cities in America — is some kind of urban wasteland. . . . only 22 percent of Republicans say that the city is safe to visit or live in.

The trashing of New York raises the question of the extent to which MAGA supporters are willing to disregard the evidence of their own eyes. People buy gas all the time; when Trump says “gasoline prices are now $5, $6, $7 and even $8 a gallon,” around twice the price plainly displayed on big signs all around the country, do his followers believe him?

And then, of course, there’s the Covid pandemic, wherein the MAGA politicization of vaccines appears to have contributed to higher death rates among Republicans.

What does this say about the future of America? It can’t be good. A large segment of our body politic has, in effect, joined a cult of personality whose beliefs are nearly impervious to reality.

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Republicans Hate America's Good Economy

If one listens to Republican politicians and the talking heads at Fox News - the same company that paid over three quarters of a billion dollars for lying about the 2020 election - and similar faux news outlets, America's economy is bad, maybe even very bad, and perhaps even heading in a dire direction.  Like so much that comes out of the mouths of such people, their narrative and lies bears no resemblance to the actual economic data which shows the current American economy to be good, especially compared to America's peer nations.  Sadly, some 71% of Republican voters have been brainwashed by the GOP/Fox News lies and believe the economy is bad.   Ironically, the true state of the economy is suggested by Donald Trump's public statements that he wants the economy to crash so as to help his election chances.   Never mind the harm and suffering countless Americans would experience should we have a severe recession.    Looking at Trump's statements in this regard, it becomes apparent that were the economy actually bad, there'd be no need for the economy to crash so that Republicans use it to bludgeon Democrats. A column in the New York Times looks at the true state of America's economy and the lies being disseminated by Republicans and a news media that prefers to create bad news and controversy to increase page views and viewers.  Here are excerpts:

“Let’s be honest, this is a good economy.” So declared Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, in his news conference on Wednesday after the Fed’s latest policy meeting. He’s right, even if the public isn’t fully convinced (although the gap between economic perceptions and reality seems to be narrowing). In fact, Powell is clearly wrestling with a dilemma many countries wish they had: What’s the right monetary policy when the news is good on just about all fronts?

Contrary to what you may have heard, this is not a “Goldilocks economy” — get your children’s stories right, folks! Goldilocks found a bowl of porridge that was neither too hot nor too cold. We have an economy that is both piping hot (in terms of growth and job creation) and refreshingly cool (in terms of inflation).

Hence the Fed’s dilemma. It increased interest rates in an attempt to reduce inflation, even though this risked causing a recession. Now that inflation has plunged, should it quickly reverse those rate hikes, or should rates remain high because we have not, in fact, had a recession (yet)?

I believe that the risk of an economic slowdown is much higher than that of resurgent inflation and that rate cuts should come sooner rather than later. But that’s not the kind of argument that’s going to be settled on the opinion pages. What I want to talk about, instead, is what the good economic news says about policy and politics.

Before I get there, a quick summary of the good news that has come in just in the past few weeks.

First, inflation. For both historical and technical reasons, the Fed aims for 2 percent inflation; over the past six months, its preferred price measure has risen at an annual rate of … 2 percent. “Core” inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, has been running slightly below target.

The Fed also looks at wage growth, not because workers have caused inflation, but because wages are usually the stickiest part of inflation and therefore an indicator of whether disinflation is sustainable. Well, on Wednesday, the Employment Cost Index came in below expectations and is now more or less consistent with the Fed’s target. On Thursday we learned that productivity has been rising rapidly, so unit labor costs are easily consistent with low inflation.

It’s true that prices haven’t actually gone back down, but a one-time jump in prices is normal after a major disruption, like the conversion back to a peacetime economy after World War II or a pandemic that temporarily shut down normal activity.

Finally, real G.D.P. grew a very solid 3.3 percent in the fourth quarter, making all those predictions of a 2023 recession look even sillier.

What does all of this say about policy and politics?

Although some on the left refuse to believe it, President Biden has spent a lot of money on progressive priorities. Many critics, including some Democrats, predicted that this spending would have catastrophic effects. Perhaps most famously, Larry Summers, a top official in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, called the 2021 American Rescue Plan the “least responsible” fiscal policy in 40 years.

We did in fact get a one-time burst of inflation, but so did other advanced countries, and America has in other ways greatly outperformed its peers — probably in part because Biden’s spending boosted growth and employment. . . . . Maybe progressive economic policies don’t necessarily lead to disaster, after all.

What about the political consequences?

Once upon a time, a president presiding over our current economy would have been strongly positioned for re-election. But we live in an age of hyperpartisanship, where the state of the economy seems to have much less effect on elections than it did a few decades ago. Indeed, many voters — especially Republicans — seem to base their evaluation of the economy on their politics rather than the other way around. Amid all the good news I’ve just laid out, 71 percent of Republicans say the economy is getting worse, while only about 7 percent say it’s getting better.

So I don’t expect Biden to ride to easy victory on the strength of economic success. But the economy is doing well enough that Donald Trump is back to insisting that the unemployment numbers are fake and claiming, ludicrously, that he somehow deserves credit for a rising stock market.

And there’s been a perceptible shift in Republicans’ messaging away from the economy (although they’re still claiming it’s terrible) to immigration — I’ll talk about their remarkably cynical strategy on that issue another day.

For now, the point is that Powell is right: This is a good economy.

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The GOP War on ‘Woke Capital’ Is Backfiring

Today's Republican Party is hysterical over anything its ignorance embracing, knuckled dragging base considers "woke" - the new bogeyman of the far right - and as highlighted by Ron DeSantis' manufactured war with Disney, what's best for a state's economy and strong investment returns take a backseat to pleasing the party base which yearns to return to the 1950's and opposes anything that challenge the base's racism, homophobia and general support for misogyny.  The result is the trend in "red states" to restrict state investments in companies and funds that take “environmental, social, and governance” matters into account in making investment/business decisions.  As a result, many good investments become off limits and rather than maximizing investment returns on state funds, states seeking to please the reactionary GOP base are earning decreased return for taxpayers and retirees.  As a piece in The Atlantic lays out, a GOP backed bill in New Hampshire seeking to ban state investments in "woke" companies underscores the idiocy of this agenda which is nothing more than self-prostituting Republican elected officials putting on performances for the party base.  Here are excerpts from The Atlantic: 

One of the stranger political crusades of the past few years has been the Republican war on so-called woke capital, which has led GOP politicians across the country to adopt a kind of anti-corporate, pro-regulatory rhetoric that one normally associates with the left wing of the Democratic Party. And among the GOP’s favorite targets in this war has been ESG investing—investment funds that take “environmental, social, and governance” considerations into account.

For Republicans, ESG funds are a Trojan horse, designed to smuggle progressive attitudes toward climate change, and diversity and inclusion, into executive suites and corporate boardrooms, all under the guise of supposedly improving investment returns. And so, in red states, state treasurers have pulled public money out of firms that are associated with ESG, including even some of the world’s biggest investment firms, such as BlackRock and State Street.

On top of that, Republican legislatures in at least 20 states have adopted anti-ESG rules of one sort or another. Last year, after the Biden administration revised a Trump-era rule to make clear that pension-fund managers could use ESG if it did not hurt investment returns, Republicans in the House and Senate (along with two Senate Democrats) passed a resolution seeking to repeal the rule. And a coalition of Republican state attorneys general filed suit in federal court to have the rule overturned. (Biden vetoed the congressional resolution, and a district court tossed out the lawsuit, so the rule remains in effect.)

But the ESG front in the right’s war on woke capital is still active. Republican legislators in New Hampshire are now trying to raise the stakes. Earlier this month, they proposed a bill that would order any government agency investing state funds to ensure that no public money goes to investors who manage their funds “with any regard whatsoever based on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria.” More striking, the bill would make it a felony to knowingly violate this order.

ESG investing is far from the vehicle for woke capitalism that Republicans say it is. Instead, it’s largely a faddish label that allows investment managers to pretend they’re doing good while mostly doing business as usual. The ESG trend also hit a wall in the past year, thanks in part to the political backlash and in part to the accurate perception that it chiefly amounts to greenwashing. The Republican Party is really battling against a specter of its own imagining.

Even so, that battle has the potential to do actual damage. ESG investing may be dumb, but laws like this possible one in New Hampshire are even dumber. For a party supposedly dedicated to the free market, the GOP has become oddly comfortable with trying to dictate how investors make decisions.

In the simplest sense, after all, the new law would effectively exclude many investment companies from consideration—even if their funds’ track records suggest that they might outperform the market. (Again, this could include giant, mainstream firms such as BlackRock.)

Most odd, the bill would effectively prohibit investments in firms that take corporate governance into account, which would keep fund managers from explicitly considering such factors as board composition, concentration of power in the hands of the CEO, executive pay, and so on. These considerations arguably fall within the fiduciary responsibility of the fund manager—the bill would outlaw the work of a professional who does basic due diligence about the security of clients’ money. Making it a felony to invest money with firms that explicitly pay attention to the problem of, say, excessive CEO power would, of course, be great for executives who want to run their companies like private fiefdoms, indifferent to shareholder interests. But it would be terrible for investors—and for companies themselves.

Naturally, the authors of the bill include some weasely language in the legislation that gives them plausible deniability when it comes to the obvious negative business consequences the law would have.

The problem, of course, is that no government officials are going to take the risk of being dragged into court because they included the wrong fund as an investment choice. So even if actually enforcing the law might be challenging—how do you prove that taking governance into account was not financially motivated?—agencies will take the easy way out, and simply blacklist any company that mentions ESG (or perhaps even the words governance and environment). And that chilling effect is, of course, exactly the point of the law.

The New Hampshire bill justifies itself by citing the need for the state to earn “the highest return on investment for New Hampshire’s taxpayers and retirees.”

The paradox is that by narrowing the range of potential investment options, while also effectively barring the state from using some of the world’s biggest investment firms, the New Hampshire law might well reduce returns, not increase them. But for the people writing such legislation, that’s perhaps a small price to pay to teach woke capital a lesson.

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Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce and a MAGA Meltdown

The far right always has something or someone to whine and complain about be it the falsely named "One  Million Moms" having a cow over advertisers using same sex couples and thus "promoting the homosexual agenda" or little rich boy Tucker Carlson and other purveyors of lies and conspiracy theories ranting that liberals are pushing "the great replacement" and seeking to make whites a minority in America.   One of the most bizarre spectacles currently is MAGA world's meltdown over Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce who are being a threat to white America's way of life.  Part of the phenomenon stems from the fact that nothing frightens right wing males and pretend "Christians" more than a smart, independent successful woman who rejects the 1950's world - women are tp be trapped in homes as subservient wives and mothers - to which they want the nation to return.  Yet some of the right wing hysteria is so insane that one has to wonder how anyone with even a tiny amount of common sense could ever believe the insane tropes. Meanwhile, the attacks on Swift will likely only alienate more women (and fathers and brothers) from the GOP and conservative's agenda. A column in the New York Times looks at this latest batshit craziness  Here are excerpts:

For football fans eager to see a new team in the Super Bowl, the conference championship games on Sunday that sent the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers back to the main event of American sports culture were sorely disappointing.

But one thing is new: Taylor Swift. And she is driving the movement behind Donald Trump bonkers.

The fulminations surrounding the world’s biggest pop icon — and girlfriend of Travis Kelce, the Chiefs’ star tight end — reached the stratosphere after Kansas City made it to the Super Bowl for the fourth time in five years, and the first time since Ms. Swift joined the team’s entourage.

The conspiracy theories coming out of the Make America Great Again contingent were already legion: that Ms. Swift is a secret agent of the Pentagon; that she is bolstering her fan base in preparation for her endorsement of President Biden’s re-election; or that she and Mr. Kelce are a contrived couple, assembled to boost the N.F.L. or Covid vaccines or Democrats or whatever.

The pro-Trump broadcaster Mike Crispi led off on Sunday by claiming that the National Football League is “rigged” in order to spread “Democrat propaganda”: “Calling it now: KC wins, goes to Super Bowl, Swift comes out at the halftime show and ‘endorses’ Joe Biden with Kelce at midfield.”

Other detractors of Ms. Swift among Mr. Trump’s biggest fans include one of his lawyers, Alina Habba, one of his biggest conspiracy theorists, Jack Posobiec, and other MAGA luminaries like Laura Loomer and Charlie Kirk, who leads a pro-Trump youth organization, Turning Point USA.

The right has been fuming about Ms. Swift since September, when she urged her fans on Instagram to register to vote, and the online outfit Vote.org reported a surge of 35,000 registrations in response. . . . And then Time magazine made her Person of the Year in December, kicking off another round of MAGA indignation.

The love story that linked her world with the N.F.L. has proved incendiary. Mr. Kelce’s advertisements promoting Pfizer’s Covid vaccine and Bud Light — already a target of outrage from the right over a social media promotion with a transgender influencer, Dylan Mulvaney — added fuel to that raging fire.

The N.F.L.’s fan base is huge and diverse, but it includes a profoundly conservative element that cheered on the star quarterback Aaron Rodgers’s one-man crusade against Covid vaccines and jeered Black players who knelt during the national anthem.

The Swift-Kelce story line, for some, has delivered a bruising hit to traditional gender norms, with a rich, powerful woman elevating a successful football player to a new level of fame.

Some of the Monday morning quarterbacking has been downright silly, including speculation that Ms. Swift is after Mr. Kelce for his money. (Her net worth exceeds $1 billion, a different universe than the athlete’s merely wealthy status.)

Other accusations appear to be driven by fear and grounded in some truth, or at least in her command of her 279 million Instagram followers: that she has enormous influence, and has supported Democrats in the past.

“I always have and always will cast my vote based on which candidate will protect and fight for the human rights I believe we all deserve in this country,” she wrote on social media. “I believe in the fight for L.G.B.T.Q. rights, and that any form of discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender is WRONG.”

She added, “I believe that the systemic racism we still see in this country towards people of color is terrifying, sickening and prevalent.”

While her early pop music may have mainly attracted teens and preteens, those fans have reached voting age, and her music has grown more sophisticated with the albums “Evermore” and “Folklore” to match her millennial roots and her fans’ taste.

Much of the Swift paranoia has lurked on the MAGA fringes, with people like Ms. Loomer, the conspiracy theorist from Florida who declared in December that “2024 will be MAGA vs Swifties” and Mr. Kirk, who declared in November that Ms. Swift would “come out for the presidential election”. . . . 

Then Swift-bashing reached Fox News in mid-January. The host Jesse Watters suggested the superstar was a Defense Department asset engaging in psychological warfare. He tied Ms. Swift’s political voice with her boyfriend’s Pfizer endorsement to the remarkable success of her Eras tour, which bolstered local economies and landed her on the cover of Time.

Andrea Hailey, the chief executive of Vote.org, made the most of the Fox News criticism, saying the organization’s partnership with Ms. Swift “is helping all Americans make their voices heard at the ballot box,” adding that the star is “not a psy-op or a Pentagon asset.”

But her appearance on the field with Mr. Kelce in Baltimore after the Chiefs beat the Ravens on Sunday, complete with a kiss and a hug, appears to have sent conservatives into a fit of apoplexy that may only grow in the run-up to Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas Feb. 11.

These anti-Swift people are truly insane.  

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The GOP’s Ongoing Moral Surrender to Trump

The Republican Party and countless cowardly Republican officeholders continue to falsely claim they support "family values" and "Christian values" and in many cases support book bans erasing the existence of LGBT people in schools saying that gays are "immoral," yet daily they support a man who embodies immorality writ large, namely Donald Trump, and who is a stunning example of what a truly moral person would never want the children or grandchildren to be. The goal of such self-prostitution and jettisoning of any shred of moral principles is all too evident: remaining in office, avoiding a primary challenge by MAGA lunatics, and avoiding Trump's wrath and the wrath of his cultist followers. But GOP elected officials are not the only ones underscoring the party's utter moral bankruptcy.   There are millions of Americans who continue to support, some quietly others openly, driven by their racism, homophobia and/or religious extremism.  Moral values and decency are nowhere in the picture even as many of those complicit in supporting Trump's immorality put on shows of false piety, pack church pews where they utterly ignore Christ's true gospel message and denigrate blacks, gays, non-whites in general, and non-Christians.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the GOP's surrender to immorality.  Here are highlights: 

The elected officials who quietly defend Donald Trump’s immorality even though they know better are just as bad as the comically devoted Trump courtiers.

“I didn’t come here,” Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina complained last week, “to have the president as a boss or a candidate as a boss. I came here to pass good, solid policy.” Tillis was referring to Republicans who were abandoning a deal on border security because they thought reaching a solution with President Joe Biden would hurt Trump’s electoral chances in the fall. It is immoral, Tillis added, to look “the other way because you think this is the linchpin for President Trump to win.”

As Bruce Willis’s fictional cop John McClane would say: Welcome to the party, pal. In theory, Republicans care deeply about the situation on the southern United States border. In reality, most of them seem to care only about whatever Trump wants at any given moment, and what Trump wants is to take refuge in the Oval Office from his multiple legal problems. Tillis’s outburst, although welcome, was a rare moment of candor from a senior Republican senator about the degree to which the party’s once and future nominee has gutted the GOP of any remaining principles.

For years, Trump has attacked and obliterated anything like virtue in the Republican Party, a process that regularly features Republicans pulling their political souls from their bodies and handing them to Trump in jars for display on his mantle at Mar-a-Lago.

But some of the less noticed enablers in the GOP are those who remain quiet in the face of Trump’s ghoulish attacks on others rather than risk Trump turning his ire—and his MAGA mob—on them. When challenged, they speak up only long enough to make excuses for Trump and engage in moral obfuscation over issues that they must certainly know are not remotely complicated . . . .

Senators Tim Scott and James Lankford, for example, were both asked over the weekend about the $83.3 million defamation jury verdict against Trump. Scott’s Trump sycophancy has now filled the core of his political existence, so there’s no point in discussing his excuse-making and what-abouting. But Lankford was hardly better. . . . . Despite Lankford’s senatorial circumspection here, these “legal cases” have already been decided, and Trump can only challenge the awards, not the verdicts that he’s liable for sexual abuse and multiple instances of defaming the victim.

Lankford resorted to mumbling about the cases against Trump that “failed,” implicitly supporting the idea that Trump’s legal troubles stem from partisan prosecutions and not because the former president was found liable for sexual abuse, defamed his victim, and may have engaged in several felonies.

Republicans such as Lankford are, in their mushy equivocations, possibly more destructive than people such as Cruz and Scott, or even Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, all of whom have chosen to become comically obsequious Trump courtiers. . . . . . the vapor of her [Stefanik’s] 180-proof ambition is so enveloping, its fumes so eye-watering, that few but the MAGA faithful can take her seriously.

When Lankford quietly throws shade at the entire judicial system, however, he is offering an escape hatch not for Trump but for ordinary Americans who otherwise would be appalled at what Trump has done. Such statements are part of a years-long Republican effort to create a permission structure for Trump supporters, to model how a reasonable person can dismiss Trump’s astounding disregard for the law and even for basic decency and yet still vote for him and other GOP candidates in the name of some greater good.

The greater good, of course, is to ensure that Republicans can keep living in Washington, D.C., and exercising power on behalf of a shrinking political minority.

A tiny handful of elected Republicans have said that they will not vote for Trump. (They won’t vote for Biden either, of course, and if Trump wins—well, such is the price of saving the republic while keeping one’s hands clean.)

Lankford is not up for reelection until 2028. When GOP leaders cannot express even a hint of principle on fundamental moral issues for fear of angering one of the most immoral presidents in modern history, then it remains a mystery what, exactly, conservative Republican leaders are hoping to conserve—beyond their own power and a home inside the Beltway.

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Dobbs Overturned Much More Than Roe v. Wade

With the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade through a tortured majority opinion that did legal and historical contortions to achieve the right wing majority's agenda of equal rights only for some citizens, equal access to abortion and in many states reproductive health care across the nation was ended.   States like Texas and Florida - to name but two - have now de facto banned abortion with six week bans that put women in a situation where by the time they know they are pregnant, it is already too late to obtain an abortion regardless of the dire medical need for one that might apply.  Now, Tennessee and Oklahoma want to basically want to restrict women's rights of freedom of travel by proposing felony convictions (with prison time) on anyone who aids a minor in securing an out of state abortion.  It is all part of the larger white Christian nationalists effort to inflict their beliefs on everyone and to again free states to erase nationwide rights within their borders.  Hence the talk of overturning Griswold v. Connecticut which legalized contraception and, of course, Obergefell which legalized same sex marriage.  Also prominent is the effort in red states to restrict voting rights of anyone who might oppose the effort to take the nation backwards in time.  Indeed, the goal is to return to the 1950's, if not the pre-Civil War era when states' rights ranked supreme.  A column in the New York Times looks at the right's agenda:

I want to highlight this report from Jessica Valenti, published in her excellent newsletter, on proposed travel bans for abortion care in Tennessee and Oklahoma. The Tennessee ban, proposed by State Representative Jason Zachary, would make it a felony to take a minor out of state to obtain an abortion. As Valenti notes, “That means a friend, aunt or grandmother who helps a teenager get an abortion could be sent to prison for 15 years.” The Oklahoma bill, if signed into law, would punish anyone who helped a minor obtain abortion care with up to five years in prison.

I have written about how abortion bans implicate a broad set of rights tied to our personal and bodily autonomy, including the right to travel between states. And I have analogized this dynamic to the legal and political conflicts over slavery, which were about not just labor but also the right of free citizens to enjoy the privileges and immunities of U.S. citizenship, wherever in the country they happen to live.

One thing to recognize about the scope of states’ power from the founding to the Civil War is that it was broader and more expansive than we tend to recognize under modern conceptions of constitutional law.  States, as most Americans understood them at the time, were governments of general jurisdiction with far-reaching police powers that gave them almost total discretion to regulate internal affairs. The federal government, by contrast, was a limited government of enumerated powers . . . . .

The police power, the historian Kate Masur notes in “Until Justice Be Done,” “was grounded not in the idea that a government’s duty was to protect individual rights but, rather, in the conviction that government’s most important obligation was to secure the health, safety and general well-being of a community.”

In the slave states, people frequently described as police laws measures designed to prevent slave uprisings and otherwise safeguard the slaveholding order.”

The Civil War and the constitutional amendments that followed brought a fundamental transformation of state and federal power. The states were now subordinate to the federal government in a way that wasn’t true before the war. And state police powers were now bounded by the rights established in the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. . . . those constituted further restrictions on the police powers of the states. The constitutional right to an abortion, for instance, put real limits on the ability of states to regulate activity within their borders.

Seen in this light, the conservative judicial attack on reproductive rights and voting rights and other breakthroughs of the 1960s and ’70s is about not just those rights but also freeing states to take a heavier hand in regulating their internal affairs.

Let’s look again at Tennessee and Oklahoma. These states (and others, like Texas, Florida and Missouri) are dominated by conservative and reactionary Republican lawmakers who are doing everything in their power to impose traditional patterns of domination under the guise of parents’ rights or family values.

What the Supreme Court is doing — and what it will continue to do — is giving conservative lawmakers the power and license to go further. To take the federal brake off the police power and give state lawmakers the right to do as much as they would like to maintain “public order.”

For as much as it is important to defend reproductive rights — and other key rights — on a state-by-state basis, this is why it is also important to defend and protect them at the level of the federal government. The goal is not just to secure rights but also to restrain the states.

Here in Virginia, with Democrats controlling both houses of the General Assembly, we are safe from these Republican efforts over the next two years.  It will be important to re-elect Democrats in 2025 to restrain these reactionary efforts.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty