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Defeat MAGA and Save Democracy From the Bottom Up

Perhaps it is because I have been actively engaged in politics or well over three decades and grew up in a politically engaged family, but I find it maddening that one hears of those who whine that they are not excited about candidates and may not vote or who in protest vote for a third party candidate with not the slightest chance of winning.  Both approaches by default amount to a vote for the least favored of the two main candidates and can result in the election of a candidate that will directly harm their interests and the nation as a whole. I have similar lack of respect for those who only vote in presidential election years - a symptom more prevalent among lukewarm Democrats - and allow Republican victories at the state level that result in similar harm.  Last year Virginia dodged a serious bullet when Democrat turnout gave control of the Virginia General Assembly and stopped GOP governor Glenn Youngkin and right wing extremists from turning Virginia into a warmed over version of DeSantis' Florida.  As the 2024 elections heat up, Democrats are adding a strategy of winning elections from the local and state level upward by focusing on issues like abortion, voting rights, worker safety protections and LGBT rights where state and local candidates can defeat the MAGA agenda and in the process hopefully drive turnout that will benefit the top of the ticket.   A piece in The Atlantic looks at the effort.  Here are excerpts:

On Indivisible’s website, the first words you’ll find—in large font and all caps—are “Defeat MAGA. Save democracy.” The progressive organizing group, formed shortly after Donald Trump’s 2016 win, sees the stakes of this fall’s presidential election as enormous, even existential. Yet when it deploys more than 2,000 volunteers to canvass neighborhoods in Arizona over the next seven months, the presidential race is the last topic it plans to bring up.

“We’re not going to be knocking on doors trying to convince people to vote for Joe Biden,” Indivisible’s co-founder Ezra Levin told me. Instead, its volunteers will be trying to turn out voters for just about every other Democrat on the ballot—including the party’s nominees for U.S. Senate and House seats and its candidates for the Republican-controlled state legislature—as well as a referendum that could restore abortion rights in Arizona.

Groups like Indivisible believe that although many Democrats are unenthusiastic about Biden, they’ll vote for him if they can just be persuaded to go to the polls. “If you get people out for the reproductive-rights amendment,” Levin said, “they’re not going to vote for the guy who overturned Roe.”

Democrats are betting that they can reverse long-held conventional wisdom on voting behavior. Support is generally thought to flow from the top of the ticket down: State and local candidates “ride the coattails” of the presidential nominee, and parties sink or swim on the strength of their standard-bearers. Not this year, Levin told me. “A large part of the theory of victory is the reverse coattails,” he said.

The strategy is a gamble. . . . Nevertheless, faith in the reverse-coattails effect is fueling Democratic investments in down-ballot races and referenda. In North Carolina, for example, party officials hope that a favorable matchup in the governor’s race—Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein is facing Republican Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, who has referred to homosexuality as “filth” and compared abortion to slavery—could help Biden carry a state that Trump narrowly won twice. Democrats are also trying to break a Republican supermajority in the legislature, where they are contesting nearly all 170 districts. “The bottom of the ticket is absolutely driving engagement and will for all levels of the ballot,”

Meanwhile, in key states across the country, Democrats and their allies are planting ballot initiatives both to protect reproductive rights where they are under threat and to turn out voters in presidential and congressional battlegrounds. They’ve already placed an abortion measure on the ballot in Florida . . . and they plan to in Arizona, whose highest court recently ruled that the state could enforce an abortion ban first enacted during the Civil War. Democrats are also collecting signatures for abortion-rights measures in Montana, home to a marquee Senate race, and in Nevada, a presidential swing state that has a competitive Senate matchup this year.

The Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee are endorsing these ballot measures even as they dispute the suggestion that the president will need help from down-ballot races to win. “Just like they did in 2020, 2022, 2023, and 2024, voters across the country will reject Trump and MAGA Republicans’ extreme plans to drag our country backwards and side with President Biden and Democrats’ unified and positive agenda of protecting our rights and freedoms this November,” Rhyan Lake, a DNC spokesperson, said in a statement.

“It would be unusual,” Abramowitz told me, for a ballot measure to increase the number of people who vote in a presidential election year. “Generally it’s the presidential election that drives turnout.” A quick look at just about any state’s results helps explain why. The number of votes for president, at the top of the ballot, typically exceeds the total for any other race further down; referenda usually appear at the end of a multipage ballot.

But there are reasons to think that dynamic could change this year. Polls show that voters are unexcited about the Biden-Trump rematch, and since 2022, when Roe was overturned, abortion-related ballot measures have produced stronger-than-expected turnout just about everywhere, including during midsummer special elections in red states such as Kansas and Ohio. “If there’s any issue that has the potential to drive turnout above and beyond the presidential turnout, it might be the abortion issue,” Abramowitz said.

[T]urnout, of course, is only half of the equation. In swing states such as Arizona and Nevada, Democrats will need voters who show up to support abortion rights to also cast their ballot for Biden. That’s no sure thing. In Kansas and Ohio, abortion-rights referenda passed easily but didn’t produce a groundswell for Democratic candidates. The same has been true with other policy areas; a majority of voters, for example, have repeatedly voted to increase state minimum wages on the same ballot in which Republican candidates who opposed lifting the wage have won election.

Democrats are trying to prove that analysis wrong. They point out that, unlike in some presidential-election years, their candidates up and down the ballot are running on a unified message on issues such as abortion, which could strengthen the connection that voters make between the policy and the nominees running on it. Indivisible is also hoping that a new strategy built around “relational organizing” will attract votes for both abortion rights and Biden. Rather than sending out volunteers to knock on the doors of people they’ve never met, the group will ask those volunteers to contact members of their own community with whom they already have some ties. The Biden campaign and other Democratic groups also plan on incorporating it into their ground games this fall.

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Much of the GOP Controlled South Is Hostile Towards Workers

The history of the American South is one of huge wealth disparities and underpaid workers, first in the form of slaves and their plantation masters and then by sharecroppers struggling to get by financially and in many cases the same large landowners who were former slaveholders.   While prosperity blossomed in many parts of the North and far West under thanks to unions and tax policies that did not give breaks to the wealthy while placing much of the burden of paying for government services and infrastructure on the lower and middle classes, the South clung to a past of control by the privileged few and labor laws that favored big businesses and large landowners to the detriment of workers.  One hears endless platitudes from southern Republicans about wanting to bring "good paying jobs" to their states, yet they push rabidly anti-labor policies under the guise of "right to work" laws and anti-unionism,  policies that continue even in Virginia although the population/ economic explosion of Northern Virginia and parts of the so-called urban crescent somewhat mask the phenomenon. Indeed, some southern states are even seeking to roll back bans on child labor.  Now, the United Auto Workers is pressing to unionize plants in the South and the usual suspects within the GOP are acting as if organized labor is an existential threat to society.  A column in the Washington Post looks at what's happening and the hysterical over reaction from Republicans.  Here are highlights:

Last year, the United Auto Workers announced an ambitious plan to organize workers and unionize foreign-owned auto plants in the South.

“One of our biggest goals coming out of this historic contract victory is to organize like we’ve never organized before,” Shawn Fain, the president of the U.A.W., said after winning significant wage and benefit gains in negotiations with Ford, General Motors and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler). “When we return to the bargaining table in 2028, it won’t just be with the Big Three. It will be the Big Five or Six.”

U.A.W. is targeting 13 automakers — including Toyota, Hyundai, Honda, Nissan, Volvo and Tesla — employing around 150,000 workers in 36 nonunion plants across the South. It faced the first major test of its strategy on Wednesday, when 4,300 workers at a Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tenn., began voting on whether to unionize. The vote ends Friday. If it’s successful, it will be a breakthrough for a labor movement that has struggled to build a footing in the South.

The mere potential for union success was so threatening that the day before the vote began, several of the Southern Republican governors announced their opposition to the U.A.W. campaign. . . . “As governors, we have a responsibility to our constituents to speak up when we see special interests looking to come into our state and threaten our jobs and the values we live by.”

It is no shock to see conservative Republicans opposing organized labor. But it is difficult to observe this particular struggle, taking place as it is in the South, without being reminded of the region’s entrenched hostility to unions — or any other institution or effort that might weaken the political and economic dominance of capital over the whole of Southern society.

The history of Southern political economy is to a great extent a history of the unbreakable addiction of Southern political and economic elites to no-wage and low-wage labor. Before the Civil War, of course, this meant slavery. And where the peculiar institution was most lucrative, an ideology grew from the soil of the cotton fields and rice paddies and sugar plantations, one that elevated human bondage as the only solid foundation for a stable society.

“In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,” Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina declared in an 1858 speech. . . . .A decade later and the slave system was dead, crushed underfoot by the armies of emancipation. The landowning Southern elite had lost its greatest asset — a seemingly inexhaustible supply of free labor. They would never regain it, but they would fight as hard as they could to approximate it.

The next 30 years of Southern political life would be a roiling battle to stymie Black political and economic power, part of a larger struggle to control Southern labor, Black and white alike. By the turn of the 20th century, Southern elites had silenced the Populist movement and agrarian rebellion of the 1890s — which brought poor Southerners of both races together in a fledgling and fragile political alliance — with Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement.

As the sociologist Jack M. Bloom puts it in “Class, Race and the Civil Rights Movement,”

The apparent defeat of Populism and the subsequent disenfranchisement of blacks brought about a severe setback for these whites, as well. Many of them lost the right to vote. They were subject to the harsh terms of their employers, and they remained without labor unions to counter the power the wealthy retained. When they did try to form unions, they found the region’s tradition of violence turned against them.

White supremacy had triumphed, but not all whites would be supreme.

Jim Crow did not eradicate Black political action or erase class conflict among whites. Nonetheless, it established a hierarchical order of social and economic dominance by the owners of land and capital. It also produced a world of poverty and disinvestment, of Robert Penn Warren’s torn-down mills and grass covered tracks and “whitewashed shacks, all just alike, set in a row by the cotton fields.”

It was in defense of this world that Southern political and economic elites bitterly resisted organized labor as it grew by leaps and bounds in the 1930s, backed by Franklin Roosevelt, Robert Wagner and the National Labor Relations Act.

Organized labor was, is and remains an existential threat to the political and economic elites of a region whose foremost commitment is to the maintenance of an employer-dominated economy of low-wage labor and its attendant social order. Where an earlier generation complained of C.I.O. “communism,” this one warns of U.A.W. socialism. “They proudly call themselves democratic socialists,” the statement issued on Tuesday by the Republican governors says.

You may have heard the phrase “New South.” It first took hold in the last decades of the 19th century, a slogan meant to distinguish the forward-looking merchants and industrialists of the post-Reconstruction years from those whose gaze was fixed hopelessly back toward a bygone age.

The term made a bit of a comeback in the mid-20th century to describe the modernization of the South in the years and decades after World War II. This New South was, as a result of the victories of the Civil Rights movement, a more moderate South of integration and economic growth.

Neither the vote in Chattanooga, nor the upcoming vote of auto workers at the Mercedes-Benz plant near Tuscaloosa, Ala., will be dispositive for the ultimate success of the U.A.W. campaign in the South. Win or lose, this will be a long march for organized labor.

But like a gardener taking stock of her plot for the season ahead, victory might mean the chance to refresh the soil in preparation for a new kind of New South.

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The Republican and Christofascist Assault on Librarians

As a shy child - and later as a closeted teenager - who loved to read, the public school libraries and local public library afforded me a way to both expand my knowledge and eventually come to realize that I was not some lone freak attracted to other boys.  The books I read in the latter case were anything but pornographic - e.g., Mary Renault's historical novels, many set in Classical ancient Greece - and helped in small way for me to achieve some level of self-acceptance.  Now, Christofascist white Christian nationalists and the self-prostituting Republican candidates and office holders who pander to them are waging a war on libraries and librarians who offer those like me as a youth a means to see themselves represented  or expand their knowledge about others.  Hence the rash of book banning laws and laws that would criminalize librarians for doing their jobs.  While the proponents of such laws pretend they are seeking to "protect children" and limit access to "obscene" materials (with obscene being defined bby the extremists), the real agenda is to erase segments of the population form view.  Indeed, the vast majority of targeted books involve LGBT and/or black characters and themes.  In some states, things have gotten out of control and even Florida has limited the number of book challenges one can bring in recognition that right wing activists - some who have no children in public schools - are systematically challenging large numbers of LGBT or black themed books.  While a number of so-called "blue states" are seeking to counter the right wing assault on libraries and librarians, in red states, librarians are quitting their jobs rather than face prosecution pushed by extremists.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the rights effort to censor books and ease those they hate from public view.  Here article highlights:

Sam Lee, a leader of the Connecticut Library Association, heads to work these days torn between hope and fear.

She’s encouraged because legislators in her state proposed a bill this year making it harder for school boards to ban library books. But she’s fearful because Connecticut, like America, is seeing a sustained surge in book challenges — and she wonders if objectors will see the legislation as a reason to file more complaints.

The bill in Connecticut, pending before an education committee, is one of a raft of measures advancing nationwide that seek to do things like prohibit book bans or forbid the harassment of school and public librarians . . . . Legislators in 22 mostly blue states have proposed 57 such bills so far this year, and two have become law, according to a Washington Post analysis of state legislative databases and an EveryLibrary legislative tracker.

But the library-friendly measures are being outpaced by bills in mostly red states that aim to restrict which books libraries can offer and threaten librarians with prison or thousands in fines for handing out “obscene” or “harmful” titles. At least 27 states are considering 100 such bills this year, three of which have become law . . . Lawmakers proposing restrictive bills contend they are necessary because school and public libraries contain graphic sexual material that should not be available to children.

But other lawmakers say bills like Steele’s are ideologically driven censorship dressed up as concern for children. They note that, as book challenges spiked to historic highs over the past two years, the majority of objections targeted books by and about LGBTQ people and people of color.

“To attack library books, you’re attacking the ability to learn, grow, think,” said Missouri state Rep. Anthony Ealy (D), who introduced a bill this year to prohibit book bans in public libraries. It “has nothing to do with protecting kids.”

A bill pending in New Jersey grants librarians the right to sue if they suffer “emotional distress, defamation, libel, slander [or] damage to reputation” due to harassment from someone displeased with their books. Another, in California, stipulates public libraries cannot remove books “for partisan or political reasons.”

Still other measures, focused on public libraries, build on state and federal laws that forbid discrimination in public places due to a person’s race, sex or gender. These bills assert that removing titles about, say, LGBTQ people, would violate the equal protection clause of the Constitution.

“If we’re not turning people away from the door based on the color of their skin or the fact they’re wearing a rainbow pride flag, we should not be taking their books off the shelf,” said Chrastka of EveryLibrary.

Other protective bills outlaw book removals. Some draw inspiration from an Illinois law enacted last year that prohibits “the practice of banning specific books or resources.” At the time, Gov. J.B. Pritzker declared his state was “showing the nation what it really looks like to stand up for liberty.”

This year, Vermont lawmakers have proposed three protective bills. One would prohibit removing library books due to “school board members’ or member of the public’s discomfort, personal morality, political views, or religious views.”

Some restrictive library bills give parents more power over book selection, for example requiring schools obtain parental sign-off before providing children sexually explicit content. Another common move is to require that libraries post lists of their books for parental review.

But the majority of the bills work the same way. They eliminate long-established exemptions from prosecution for librarians — sometimes teachers and museum employees, too — over obscene material. Almost every state adopted such carve-outs decades ago to ensure schools, museums and libraries could offer accurate information about topics such as sex education.

Removing the exemption means librarians, teachers and museum staffers could face years of imprisonment or tens of thousands in fines for giving out books deemed sexually explicit, obscene or “harmful” to minors. For example, an Arkansas measure passed last year says school and public librarians can be imprisoned for up to six years or fined $10,000 if they hand out obscene or harmful titles.

It has forged a poisonous atmosphere for librarians, said Megan Tarbett, a county library director in West Virginia and president of her state’s library association. West Virginia considered a bill this year ending exemptions from prosecution over “obscene” material for schools, public libraries and materials, but it failed to pass.

In some places, librarians have already called it quits. . . . Tara White was appointed Elkhart Community Schools’ director of literacy in 2015. For the first several years, she never fielded a book challenge — until 2021, when community members objected to 60 titles, she said. When she defended the books, a conservative website claimed she was fighting for porn in school.

Then last year, Indiana passed a law declaring school employees can face criminal prosecution — leading to a possible $10,000 fine or 2½ years of jail time — for handing out sexual material that is “harmful to minors.”  White resigned.

“I loved being a librarian and … helping every student find themselves in a book,” White said. But while certain she wasn’t actually “breaking the law, nobody wants to go through that process.” Nobody wants to go to jail, she said, for giving children books.

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Conservative Rule in the UK: A Cautionary Tale for America

While Donald Trump lies and fulminates about his criminal trial in New York City, voters need to not allow themselves to be distracted from the many frightening things Trump and his minions would unleash on America should he regain the White House.  The details of their proposal should frighten every sane American and could inflict significant economic harm across the country just as the far right in the United Kingdom reaped significant damage on that nation's economy as it pursued its delusional quest to regain the British Empire through Brexit.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at some of team Trump proposals - including tariffs that would increase costs for consumers and weakening the dollar  - that could harm businesses and make the now slowing inflation look minor in comparison.  Here are excerpts:

Remind me again why Americans think Donald Trump would be so much better on inflation and the economy?

Trump’s policy team is reportedly scheming to devalue the U.S. dollar. This might well be Trump’s most inflationary and economically destructive idea yet. That’s quite an achievement, considering everything else he and his advisers have cooked up (universal tariff hikes, deficit-financed tax cuts, huge reductions in the labor force, etc.).

Trump’s objective, Politico reports, is to boost U.S. exports and reduce imports. Basically, if a dollar buys, say, fewer euros or Japanese yen than it currently does, that makes U.S.-made products look a little cheaper and potentially more attractive to European and Japanese customers (among others).

That is, until you consider everything else that might happen if we deliberately tried to weaken our currency, which would open a Pandora’s shipping container of disastrous consequences.

It’s true the dollar is unusually strong right now, although probably not for reasons Trump is happy about. Exchange rates typically reflect a country’s macroeconomic conditions (among other factors, such as interest rates). Thanks to a variety of factors — including our relatively limited exposure to the war in Ukraine — we’re doing better than most of our peer countries.

If not via recession, how would Team Trump weaken our currency? That’s not totally clear. He might try to force the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates. This is something Trump already wants to do for other reasons. (For instance, he owes a lot of debt, so lower rates would help his own finances.) Or maybe he would bully lots of other countries into raising their interest rates, which seems unlikely to happen. But if it did, it might result in a global recession.

Whatever the mechanism, a weaker dollar would likely lead to higher prices for American consumers — and not just during their summer vacations to Italy. Americans buy a lot of imported goods, from fruit to toys to cars to home furnishings. Those would all get more expensive as the purchasing power of the dollar fell.

So much for Trump’s pledge to vanquish inflation. And that’s not the only problem with his plan. . . . Deliberately weakening the dollar, or even attempting to, also threatens its role as the world’s “reserve currency.” . . . Eroding the dollar’s global use might make it more expensive for the U.S. government to keep borrowing so much (which means taxes might need to rise, or spending decline, to cover budget shortfalls).

What's driving this push for policies that would severely harm American consumers?  Obviously, a economic turn down or recession would bring lower interest rates that would benefit Trump personally.  But perhaps more important is the political far right's growing isolationism and an ideology that fails to grasp real world realities.  Something the United Kingdom continues to suffer from in the wake of Brexit which was pushed by right wing ideologues and members of British society, especially in more rural areas. A very long piece in The New Yorker looks at the United Kingdom and the pain it continues to suffer as a result of Brexit - something Trump seemingly wants to emulate.  Americans need to wake up before we find ourselves in a similar nightmare.  Here are article highlights:

My life divides, evenly enough, into three political eras. I was born in 1980, a year after Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street with the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi on her lips: “Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.” The Conservative-run Britain of the eighties was not harmonious. Life beyond the North London square where my family lived often seemed to be in the grip of one confrontation or another. The news was always showing police on horseback. There were strikes, protests, the I.R.A., and George Michael on the radio.

I was nearly seventeen when the Tories finally lost power, to Tony Blair and “New Labour,” an updated, market-friendly version of the Party. Before he moved to Downing Street, Blair lived in Islington, the gentrifying borough I was from. Boris Johnson, an amusing right-wing columnist, who was getting his start on television, also lived nearby. Our local Member of Parliament was an out-of-touch leftist named Jeremy Corbyn.  New Labour believed in the responsibility of the state to look after its citizens, and in capitalism to make them prosper. Blair was convincing, even when he was wrong.

I was turning thirty when Labour eventually ran out of road, undone by the Iraq War, the global financial crisis, and the grim temper of Gordon Brown, Blair’s successor. He was caught in a hot-mike moment describing an ordinary voter, who was complaining about taxes and immigration, as a bigot.

Since then, it’s been the Conservatives again. In 2010, the Party returned to government in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Since 2015, it has held power alone. Last May, the Tories surpassed the thirteen years and nine days that New Labour had held office. . . . There has been no dominant figure or overt political project, no Thatcherism, no Blairism. Instead, there has been a quickening, lowering churn: five Prime Ministers, three general elections, two financial emergencies, a once-in-a-century constitutional crisis, and an atmosphere of tired, almost constant drama.

The period is bisected by the United Kingdom’s decision, in 2016, to leave the European Union, a Conservative fantasy, or nightmare, depending on whom you talk to. Brexit catalyzed some of the worst tendencies in British politics—its superficiality, nostalgia, and love of game play—and exhausted the country’s political class, leaving it ill prepared for the pandemic and the twin economic shocks of the war in Ukraine and the forty-nine-day experimental premiership of Liz Truss.

Last year, I started interviewing Conservatives to try to make sense of these years. “One always starts with disclaimers now—I didn’t start this car crash,” Julian Glover, a former speechwriter for David Cameron, the longest-serving Prime Minister of the period, told me. I spoke to M.P.s and former Cabinet ministers; political advisers who helped to make major decisions; and civil servants, local-government officials, and frontline workers hundreds of miles from London who had to deal with the consequences.

Some people insisted that the past decade and a half of British politics resists satisfying explanation. The only way to think about it is as a psychodrama enacted, for the most part, by a small group of middle-aged men who went to élite private schools, studied at the University of Oxford, and have been climbing and chucking one another off the ladder of British public life—the cursus honorum, as Johnson once called it—ever since. The Conservative Party, whose history goes back some three hundred and fifty years, aids this theory by not having anything as vulgar as an ideology. “They’re not on a mission to do X, Y, or Z,” as a former senior adviser explained. “You win and you govern because we are better at it, right?”

[T]he Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole explains Brexit by describing Britain’s fall from imperial nation to “occupied colony” of the E.U., and the rise of a powerful English nationalism as a result. Last year, Abby Innes, a scholar at the London School of Economics, published “Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail,” which argues that, since Thatcher, Britain’s political mainstream has become as devoted to particular ideas about running the state—a default commitment to competition, markets, and forms of privatization—as Brezhnev’s U.S.S.R. ever was. “The resulting regime,” Innes writes, “has proved anything but stable.”

These observations are surely right, but I worry that they obscure two basic truths about Britain’s experience since 2010. The first is that the country has suffered grievously. These have been years of loss and waste. The U.K. has yet to recover from the financial crisis that began in 2008. According to one estimate, the average worker is now fourteen thousand pounds worse off per year than if earnings had continued to rise at pre-crisis rates—it is the worst period for wage  growth since the Napoleonic Wars. . . . “This is what failure looks like.” 

“When you start talking about this to Tories, they go, Oh, Dominic, you sound like a terrible central planner,” Cummings said. “And you go, That’s America. This is not weird left-wing shit.”

The pandemic bore out truths about the British state. There were bright spots: the vaccines and their rollout by the N.H.S.; the intervention of the Treasury, under Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, whose furlough plan protected millions of jobs. More generally, though, the virus revealed tired public services, a population in poor health, and a government that was less competent than it thought it was.

High levels of employment and immigration, coupled with the enduring dynamism of London, mask a national reality of low pay, precarious jobs, and chronic underinvestment. The trains are late. The traffic is bad. The housing market is a joke. “The core problem is easy to observe, but it’s tough to live with,” Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, told me. “It’s just not that productive an economy anymore.”

With stagnant wages, people’s living standards have fallen. In 2008, Brown’s Labour government commissioned Michael Marmot, a renowned epidemiologist, to come up with ways to reduce England’s health inequalities. Marmot made suggestions in six policy areas, including better access to child care, walking and cycling programs, social-security reforms, and measures to improve people’s sense of agency at work. . . . “The problem was they then didn’t do it.”

Ten years later, Marmot led a follow-up study, in which he documented stalling life expectancy, particularly among women in England’s poorest communities—and widening inequalities. “For men and women everywhere the time spent in poor health is increasing,” . . . . “The damage to the nation’s health need not have happened,” Marmot concluded in 2020. He told me, “It was a political choice.”

And that is the second, all too obvious, fact of British life throughout this period: a single party has been responsible. You cannot say that the country has been ruled against its will. Since 2010, the Tories have emerged as the winner of the popular vote and as the largest party in Parliament in three elections. In December, 2019, Boris Johnson won an eighty-seat majority in the House of Commons, the Conservatives’ biggest electoral success since the heyday of Thatcherism.

How is this possible? The opposition has been underwhelming. . . . In many ways, the two momentous decisions of this period—what came to be known as austerity and Brexit—are now widely accepted as events that happened, rather than as choices that were made. Starmer’s Labour Party does not seek to reverse them.

If you live in an old country, it can be easy to succumb to a narrative of decline. The state withers. The charlatans take over. You give up on progress, to some extent, and simply pray that this particular chapter of British nonsense will come to an end. It will. . . . But Britain cannot move on from the Tories without properly facing up to the harm that they have caused.

In the spring of 2009, Cameron told a gathering of Party members in Gloucestershire, “The age of irresponsibility is giving way to the age of austerity.” . . . between 2010 and 2019, British public spending fell from about forty-one per cent of G.D.P. to thirty-five per cent. The Office of Budget Responsibility, the equivalent of the American Congressional Budget Office, describes what came to be known as Plan A as “one of the biggest deficit reduction programmes seen in any advanced economy since World War II.”

Like the choice of the word itself, austerity was politically calculated. Huge areas of public spending—on the N.H.S. and education—were nominally maintained. . . . But protecting some parts of the state meant sacrificing the rest: the courts, the prisons, police budgets, wildlife departments, rural buses, care for the elderly, youth programs, road maintenance, public health, the diplomatic corps.

At the general election in 2015, the Conservatives won a majority in the House of Commons, with proposals to make a further thirty-seven billion pounds’ worth of cuts.

“It was devastatingly politically effective,” Osborne told me, of austerity. It’s just that the effects were so horrendous. Between 2010 and 2018, funding for police forces in England fell by up to a quarter. Officers stopped investigating burglaries. Only four per cent now end in prosecution. . . . Last fall, hundreds of school buildings had to be closed for emergency repairs, because the country’s school-construction budget had been cut by forty-six per cent between 2009 and 2022.

. What was less forgivable, in the end, was the cuts’ unthinking nature, their lack of reason. In the fall of 2013, a staffer named Giles Wilkes, who worked for a senior Liberal Democrat minister in the coalition, became alarmed by projections that showed ever-reducing government budgets. . . . And so stupid things happened. Since 2010, forty-three per cent of the courts in England and Wales have closed. No one thinks that this was a good idea. For years, the Conservatives cut prison funding and staffing while encouraging longer jail times.

The long-term effects of austerity are still playing out. A 2019 paper by Thiemo Fetzer, an economist at the University of Warwick, asked, “Did Austerity Cause Brexit?” Fetzer found that, beginning in 2010, the parts of the country most affected by welfare cuts were more likely to support Nigel Farage’s U.K. Independence Party, which campaigned against immigration and the E.U. The withdrawal of the social safety net in communities already negatively hit by globalization exacerbated the sense of a nation going awry. . . . More broadly, austerity has contributed to an atmosphere of fatalism, an aversion to thinking about the future. “It is a mood,” Johnna Montgomerie, a professor at the University of British Columbia who studies debt and inequality, has written. “A depression, a chronic case of financial melancholia.”

British social-security payments are at their lowest levels, relative to wages, in half a century. Under a steady downward ratchet, started by Osborne and continued by his successors, household payments have been capped and income thresholds effectively lowered. In 2017, a “two child” limit was placed on benefits for poor families. In November, 2018, Philip Alston, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty, toured the U.K. When we spoke, he recalled a strong sense of denial, or ignorance, among British politicians about the consequences of their decisions. “There was a disconnect between the world and what senior ministers wanted to believe,” he said.

The fall in Britain’s living standards isn’t easy for anyone to talk about, least of all Conservatives. . . . household incomes are clearly lower than France or Germany or the Netherlands.” Part of the problem, Willetts explained, was that Britain’s richest twenty per cent had largely been spared the effects of the past fourteen years—and that made it genuinely difficult for them to comprehend the damage. “We are all O.K.,” he said. “The burden of adjustment has almost entirely been borne by the less affluent half of the British population.”

The perception of the Brexit vote as a cry of anguish from deindustrialized northern towns or from faded seaside resorts isn’t wrong—it just leaves out the rest of England. Two weeks after the referendum, Danny Dorling, a geography professor at the University of Oxford, published an article in the British Medical Journal showing that Leave voters weren’t defined neatly either by geography or by income. Fifty-nine per cent identified as middle class, and most lived in the South.

During the Brexit campaign, the E.U. came to represent not just a supranational monolith across the English Channel but profound distances within the U.K. itself. And the politicians who defended the E.U. looked and sounded, for the most part, as if they spent more time in Tuscany each summer than they had spent on Teesside in their lives. “The kind of globalism, the internationalism, the liberal élite view, was seized on by people who thought that they’d been spoken down to for decades,” John Hayes, a Tory M.P. and a Brexiteer, told me.

Overnight, and against the will of its leaders, the country abandoned its economic model—as the Anglo-Saxon gateway to the world’s largest trading bloc—and replaced it with nothing at all. “I can’t think of another occasion when a party has so radically changed direction while in office,” Willetts said. Thatcher was an architect of the E.U.’s single market, which in time became a heresy.

In the second half of 2016, May worked with a small group of advisers to formulate a Brexit strategy that ultimately satisfied nobody. “It was incredibly poor statecraft,” a former Cabinet colleague said. “Absolute shit. Abominable.” The abiding image of the Brexit talks was a photo of Michel Barnier, the E.U.’s chief negotiator, with his colleagues and their neat piles of paper on one side of a table, while their British counterparts, led by David Davis, a bluff former special-forces reservist, sat on the other side with a single notebook among them.

Cummings believes that Britain must rediscover its ability to build things—roads, railways, houses, research institutes, products that people want to buy—in order to prosper again. He argues that it is America’s ecosystem of universities, entrepreneurs, and government procurement departments that have helped maintain its economic and technological edge, not just lower taxes or a freer form of capitalism. “When you start talking about this to Tories, they go, Oh, Dominic, you sound like a terrible central planner,” Cummings said. “And you go, That’s America. This is not weird left-wing shit.”

If Americans are not careful, Trump and his far right advisers will inflict similar pain and stagnation on America.  Vote Democrat in November.

More Wednesday Male Beauty

 

Trump’s Alternate-Reality Criminal Trial

Like everything else in MAGA world, Donald Trump's description of his ongoing criminal trial bears no relation to reality.  This is after all the man whose regime coined the phrase "alternative facts" and who is whining that he is being persecuted and treated unfairly.  In reality, as laid out in a long piece in Politico, Trump has received deference and special treatment that no other criminal defendant would be likely to ever receive.  Indeed, for his attacks on judges, their families, the courts, potential witnesses and jurors, any other defendant would likely be chilling behind bars for contempt of court or worse.  Sadly, Trump's sheep-like followers who live in a bubble of lies and disinformation disseminated by Fox News, a/k/a Faux News, and its imitators will likely never grasp the reality that they are being played for fools - just as they will never grasp the fact that Trump actually cares nothing about them save for the monetary contributions he asks them to make and their willingness to be manipulated by lies.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at  the alternate reality being spun for MAGA world versus objective reality.  Here are highlights:

“I JUST STORMED OUT OF BIDEN’S KANGAROO COURT!” Donald Trump wrote in an email to supporters late yesterday afternoon, shortly after the end of the first day of his trial on charges of hiding hush-money payments during the 2016 campaign.

The statement led off a fundraising appeal, and it was, somewhat predictably, a lie. Trump had walked out of the courtroom when the proceeding ended, made a few comments to reporters, and left.

In historical terms, what happened in the Manhattan courtroom was momentous: the start of the first-ever criminal trial of a former U.S. president. But in particulars, it was as dull as any other typical day in court. Judge Juan Merchan heard a series of motions from lawyers, ruling more often in favor of the prosecution but occasionally in favor of the defense, and punting other motions to later.

It was, in other words, a snooze fest—perhaps literally in Trump’s case. As reporters watching the proceeding in the courtroom and in an overflow room said, he appeared to nod off at one point early on.

The usual cliché for such widely divergent accounts is to call this a “split-screen moment.” But the trial is not televised, so the only screen is the one outside the court. That’s lucky for Trump, and not only because his impromptu nap wasn’t captured on tape for the nation to watch. The absence of any video evidence allows Trump to project the story he wants onto the trial.

So, inside Merchan’s courtroom, things went by in normal fashion. Neither Trump nor his lawyers said anything about it being a kangaroo court or election interference, as he has alleged elsewhere. . . . . Trump didn’t deliver any of the outbursts that got him scolded by Justice Arthur Engoron, in his civil-fraud trial, or Judge Lewis Kaplan, in the defamation suits against him, though it’s probably just a matter of time. . . . he can talk a good game without doing things that might risk judicial sanctions.

Later yesterday, Trump logged on to Truth Social and delivered something in the form of anguished plea. “Who will explain for me, to my wonderful son, Barron, who is a GREAT Student at a fantastic School, that his Dad will likely not be allowed to attend his Graduation Ceremony, something that we have been talking about for years, because a seriously Conflicted and Corrupt New York State Judge wants me in Criminal Court on a bogus ‘Biden Case’ which, according to virtually all Legal Scholars and Pundits, has no merit, and should NEVER have been brought,” Trump wrote.

This was not, in fact, what Merchan said. . . . . if reality doesn’t make for a good story—or a useful political bludgeon—then it’s easy for Trump to make up a better one.

I continue to be confounded by the willingness of MAGA cultist to embrace lies and untruths.  Seemingly, their hatreds and bigotry and false sense of grievance blinds them to everything else.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Monday Male Beauty

 

Trump's Immunity Claims Tell Voters All They Need to Know

Donald Trump - himself and through his, in my view, morally compromised attorneys - has made the incredible argument that presidents should be total immune from prosecution for actions taken while in office. In oral arguments the inference was that a president could order the execution of political and other rivals with no consequences.  Indeed, under Trump's vision, a president would be unrestrained from breaking the law and ordering others to commit crimes and illegal acts. In short, Trump longs to be a dictator in the style of Vladimir Putin, Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin.  This reality should terrify everyone  - including his sycophants and Republicans rushing to prostitute themselves to him as noted in a column in the Washington Post that makes the case that these same people could see Trump turn on them as soon as their usefulness has passed - who cares about the rule of law and legal protections for citizens.  Next week, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments rather than having merely affirmed the well reasoned Circuit Court of Appeals ruling against Trump.   A second piece in the Post looks at the message voters need to take away.  Here are excerpts:

When a nation allows the outlandish to become routine and accepts dangerous claims as normal, it loses its moral compass and its capacity to sustain liberty.

So do not shrug off how significant it is that the Supreme Court will soon hear Donald Trump’s claim that presidents should enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution for illegal acts performed in office. How the court handles this case involving the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election — and how the country responds — are tests of the nation’s capacity for self-government under the rule of law.

One temptation to resist: Denigrating the case as just another instance of Trump’s willingness to litigate anything to delay his various trials until after November’s election. This fails to take seriously what this case tells us about how he would govern if he returns to power.

Trump is saying something no other presidential candidate has ever said: That the only way to be an effective president is to be willing to break the law. “A denial of criminal immunity would incapacitate every future President with de facto blackmail and extortion while in office, and condemn him to years of post-office trauma at the hands of political opponents” , , , ,

Well. Let’s leave it to psychiatrists to determine what “post-office trauma” might be. The breathless subtext echoing throughout their brief is that it takes a criminal to be a good president. This has implications voters should take very seriously, including for national security.

In one of the most powerful amicus briefs filed with the court, a group of retired generals and admirals and former service secretaries warned that absolute immunity would “severely undermine the Commander-in-Chief’s legal and moral authority to lead the military forces, as it would signal that they but not he must obey the rule of law.” Think about that. “Under this theory, the President could, with impunity, direct his national security appointees to, in turn, direct members of the military to execute plainly unlawful orders.”

This would threaten the proper functioning of our military and also constitutional democracy. “Particularly in times like the present, when anti-democratic, authoritarian regimes are on the rise worldwide,” they write, “such a threat is intolerable and dangerous.”

Trump’s startling desire for presidential dictatorship has been partly obscured by seemingly sober legal arguments over whether any presidential acts should be shielded from prosecution.

 The Supreme Court signaled that this is the issue it wants to rule on when it explained why it took the case — as opposed to affirming, as it should have, a well-argued court of appeals decision denying Trump’s claims.

There are multiple problems with the Supreme Court’s decision-making so far. The justices could have accepted special counsel Jack Smith’s request last December to skip the appeals process and take the case immediately. This would have allowed plenty of time for the interference case to go to trial before this year’s election.

Instead, the court rejected Smith’s request, let the appeals process go forward and then, when it finally did take the case, scheduled its hearing on the last day of its term, April 25.

The court did not have to use this litigation to make a broad pronouncement on presidential immunity. . . .   Besides, as a group of historians of the founding period noted in a brief to the court, “the Framers never contemplated giving the President any role in the conduct of elections or transfer of power.” It’s a stretch to see Trump’s meddling as “official.”

And as former officials from five past Republican administrations argued in another brief, “even if one could hypothesize a circumstance in which immunity for a former President might be warranted, no tenable formulation of immunity could reach defendant’s machinations alleged here.”

Having pushed this case so late, the Supreme Court has an obligation to rule as quickly as it did last February in restoring Trump to the ballot after multiple states attempted to disqualify him. And voters, who will have the final say, would do well to be wary of a candidate who tells them he believes a president’s powers are limitless.                  

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Sunday Male Beauty

 

Is the Right-Wing Media in Trouble?

Fox News, a/k/a Faux News, and its imitators have inflicted huge damage to America's political and social landscape through their promotion of deliberate lies, insane conspiracy theories and, in my view, giving the equivalent of lobotomies to their viewers - one study found Fox News viewers living in a bubble of misinformation were among the least informed of any segment of adults. Equally damaging has been the role these fake "news" outlets have played in promoting demagogues, particularly Donald Trump.  On Facebook and other social media outlets it is too common to see "friends" and acquaintances repeating falsehoods with which they have brainwashed by Fox News and other right-wing media.   Potentially good news for the country and our political system is the ongoing decline in viewership on right-wing sites that have fanned ignorance, bigotry and hatred towards others.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the phenomenon which hopefully not only continues but accelerates and may shift, at least slightly, the political conversations.  Here are article highlights:.

[M]ainstream news organizations are facing a financial crisis. Many liberal publications have taken an even more severe beating. But the most dramatic declines over the past few years belong to conservative and right-wing sites. The flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing, as in the rest of the industry; it’s utterly collapsing.

This past February, readership of the 10 largest conservative websites was down 40 percent compared with the same month in 2020, according to The Righting, a newsletter that uses monthly data from Comscore—essentially the Nielsen ratings of the internet—to track right-wing media.

Some of the bigger names in the field have been pummeled the hardest: The Daily Caller lost 57 percent of its audience; Drudge Report, the granddaddy of conservative aggregation, was down 81 percent; and The Federalist, founded just over a decade ago, lost a staggering 91 percent.

FoxNews.com, by far the most popular conservative-news site, has fared better, losing “only” 22 percent of traffic, which translates to 23 million fewer monthly site visitors compared with four years ago.

Some amount of the decline over that period was probably inevitable, given that 2020 was one of the most intense and newsiest years in decades, propping up publications across the political spectrum. But that doesn’t explain why the falloff has been especially steep on the right side of the media aisle.

What’s going on? The obvious culprit is Facebook. For years, Facebook’s mysterious algorithms served up links to news and commentary articles, sending droves of traffic to their publishers. But those days are gone. Amid criticism from elected officials and academics who said the social-media giant was spreading hate speech and harmful misinformation, including Russian propaganda, before the 2016 election, Facebook apparently came to question the value of featuring news on its platform. In early 2018, it began deemphasizing news content, giving greater priority to content posted by friends and family members. In 2021, it tightened the tap a little further.

All of this monkeying with the internet’s plumbing drastically reduced the referral traffic flowing to news and commentary sites. The changes have affected everyone involved in digital media, including some liberal-leaning sites . . . . Unsurprisingly, the people who run conservative outlets see this as straightforward proof that Big Tech is trying to silence them.

A simpler explanation is that conservative digital media are disproportionately dependent on social-media referrals in the first place. Many mainstream publications have long-established brand names, large newsrooms to churn out copy, and, in a few cases, large numbers of loyal subscribers. Sites like Breitbart and Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire, however, were essentially Facebook-virality machines, adept at injecting irresistibly outrageous, clickable nuggets into people’s feeds. So the drying-up of referrals hit these publications much harder.

And so far, unlike some publications that have pivoted away from relying on traffic and programmatic advertising, they’ve struggled to adapt. Rather than stabilizing amid Facebook’s new world order, traffic on the right has mostly continued south.

Compare that with prominent mainstream and liberal sites, which, although still well below their 2020 heights, have at least stanched the bleeding. Traffic to The Washington Post and The New York Times from February 2023 to February 2024 was essentially flat. Slate’s was up 14 percent.

For conservative media publishers, the financial consequences of such a steep decline in readership are hard to know for certain. None of the best-known names publicly reports revenue figures, and many are supported by rich patrons who may not be in it for the money. But the situation can’t be good. Digital media still rely on advertising, and advertising still goes to places with more, not fewer, people paying attention. Traffic also drives subscriptions.

More broadly, the loss of readership can’t be helpful to the ideological cause. Top-drawing sites like the conspiratorial Gateway Pundit and Infowars help keep the MAGA faithful faithful by recirculating, amplifying, and sometimes creating the culture-war memes and talking points that dominate right and far-right opinion. Less traffic means less influence.

The trouble is that there are now alternatives to the alternatives. The Righting’s proprietor, Howard Polskin, pointed out to me that the websites that dominated the field in 2016—Fox News, Breitbart, The Washington Times, and so on—are no longer the only players in MAGA world. The marketplace has expanded and fragmented since then, splintering the audience seeking conservative or even extremist perspectives . . . .

The precipitous decline in traffic to conservative publications raises a larger and possibly unanswerable question: Did these operations ever really hold the political and cultural clout that critics ascribed to them at their peak? Recall the liberal anger in 2020 when Ben Shapiro was routinely dominating Facebook’s most-engaged content list, generating accusations that Facebook’s algorithm was favoring right-wing posts and pushing voters toward Trump. Yet Joe Biden went on to win the election easily, and Democrats overperformed in the 2022 midterms.

Now, as conservatives cry that Big Tech has crushed their traffic, Trump is running neck and neck with Biden in the polls, even with a legal cloud hanging over him and shortfalls of campaign cash. Maybe who wins the traffic contest doesn’t matter as much as it once appeared.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty