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The Atlantic: The Case for Kamala Harris

I remain unable to grasp how some friends and acquaintances who I have always thought of being decent, moral people can support Donald Trump.  Supporting Trump and true morality are mutually exclusive in my view.  Some I suspect are willing to sell their souls in the quest for lower taxes - the husband and I pay plenty in taxes ourselves, so I'm not adverse to lower taxes  - but the reality is that Trump's proposed further tax cuts would not benefit most middle class and upper middle class voters and would only benefit the very wealthy , leaving most of us paying a higher percentage tax rate than the very rich.  For others, I fear the motivation for supporting Trump is more sinister and stems from toxic racism even though these people would try to claim otherwise.  Neither group seems at all concerned about the manner in which Trump and his extremists circle of advisors would shred democracy and roll back decades of social progress. For all of these people and those amazingly still on the fence as to how to vote, The Atlantic lays out an endorsement of Kamala Harris that ultimately makes the case that voting for Harris is the act of responsible citizens and a first step in repairing the nation's political landscape. . Here are highlights from The Atlantic's endorsement of Harris: 

For the third time in eight years, Americans have to decide whether they want Donald Trump to be their president. No voter could be ignorant by now of who he is. Opinions about Trump aren’t just hardened—they’re dried out and exhausted. The man’s character has been in our faces for so long, blatant and unchanging, that it kills the possibility of new thoughts, which explains the strange mix of boredom and dread in our politics. Whenever Trump senses any waning of public attention, he’ll call his opponent a disgusting name, or dishonor the memory of fallen soldiers, or threaten to overturn the election if he loses, or vow to rule like a dictator if he wins. He knows that nothing he says is likely to change anyone’s views.

Almost half the electorate supported Trump in 2016, and supported him again in 2020. This same split seems likely on November 5. Trump’s support is fixed and impervious to argument. This election, like the last two, will be decided by an absurdly small percentage of voters in a handful of states.

Because one of the most personally malignant and politically dangerous candidates in American history was on the ballot, The Atlantic endorsed Trump’s previous Democratic opponents—only the third and fourth endorsements since the magazine’s founding, in 1857. We endorsed Abraham Lincoln for president in 1860 (though not, for reasons lost to history, in 1864). One hundred and four years later, we endorsed Lyndon B. Johnson for president. In 2016, we endorsed Hillary Clinton for more or less the same reason Johnson won this magazine’s endorsement in 1964. Clinton was a credible candidate who would have made a competent president, but we endorsed her because she was running against a manifestly unstable and incompetent Republican nominee. The editors of this magazine in 1964 feared Barry Goldwater less for his positions than for his zealotry and seeming lack of self-restraint.

Of all Trump’s insults, cruelties, abuses of power, corrupt dealings, and crimes, the event that proved the essential rightness of the endorsements of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden took place on January 6, 2021, when Trump became the first American president to try to overturn an election and prevent the peaceful transfer of power.

This year, Trump is even more vicious and erratic than in the past, and the ideas of his closest advisers are more extreme. Trump has made clear that he would use a second term to consolidate unprecedented power in his own hands, punishing adversaries and pursuing a far-right agenda that most Americans don’t want. “We believe that this election is a turning-point in our history,” the magazine prophesied correctly when it endorsed Abraham Lincoln in 1860. This year’s election is another.

[W]e know a few things for sure [about Harris]. Having devoted her life to public service, Harris respects the law and the Constitution. She believes in the freedom, equality, and dignity of all Americans. She’s untainted by corruption, let alone a felony record or a history of sexual assault. She doesn’t embarrass her compatriots with her language and behavior, or pit them against one another. She doesn’t curry favor with dictators. She won’t abuse the power of the highest office in order to keep it. She believes in democracy. These, and not any specific policy positions, are the reasons The Atlantic is endorsing her. 

This endorsement will not be controversial to Trump’s antagonists. Nor will it matter to his supporters. But to the voters who don’t much care for either candidate, and who will decide the country’s fate, it is not enough to list Harris’s strengths or write a bill of obvious particulars against Trump. The main reason for those ambivalent Americans to vote for Harris has little to do with policy or partisanship. It’s this: Electing her and defeating him is the only way to release us from the political nightmare in which we’re trapped and bring us to the next phase of the American experiment.

Trump isn’t solely responsible for this age of poisonous rhetoric, hateful name-calling, conspiracies and lies, divided families and communities, cowardly leaders and deluded followers—but as long as Trump still sits atop the Republican Party, it will not end. His power depends on lowering the country into a feverish state of fear and rage where Americans turn on one another. For the millions of alienated and politically homeless voters who despise what the country has become and believe it can do better, sending Trump into retirement is the necessary first step.

If you’re a conservative who can’t abide Harris’s tax and immigration policies, but who is also offended by the rottenness of the Republican Party, only Trump’s final defeat will allow your party to return to health—then you’ll be free to oppose President Harris wholeheartedly. Like you, we wish for the return of the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, a party animated by actual ideas. We believe that American politics are healthiest when vibrant conservative and liberal parties fight it out on matters of policy.

If you’re a progressive who thinks the Democratic Party is a tool of corporate America, talk to someone who still can’t forgive themselves for voting for Ralph Nader in 2000—then ask yourself which candidate, Harris or Trump, would give you any leverage to push for policies you care about.

And if you’re one of the many Americans who can’t stand politics and just want to opt out, remember that under democracy, inaction is also an action; that no one ever has clean hands; and that, as our 1860 editorial said, “nothing can absolve us from doing our best to look at all public questions as citizens, and therefore in some sort as administrators and rulers.” In other words, voting is a right that makes you responsible.

Trump is the sphinx who stands in the way of America entering a more hopeful future. In Greek mythology, the sphinx killed every traveler who failed to answer her riddle, until Oedipus finally solved it, causing the monster’s demise. The answer to Trump lies in every American’s hands. Then he needs only to go away.

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The Conservative Argument for Kamala Harris

Having worked in the legal realm for 47 years, I have respect for the rule of law and the legal progress that has been made since the 1960's that have been made in legal rights for formerly diminished minorities - blacks, gays and Latinos - and women. This progress, founded on the rule of law, has added stability to American society and should be applauded by everyone.  Sadly, Donald Trump and the aggrieved whites to whom he panders, who see the world as a zero sum game and any advancement of others as a loss for themselves, want to shred such progress and take the country backward in time.  Worse yet, Trump seeks to pit different elements in society against each other and to create chaos and to fuel hatred to be used for Trump's own personal advantage.  None of this advances the nation as a whole as a column in the New York Times by a long time political writer notes.  Indeed, the column makes the case why a small "c" conservative should vote for Kamala Harris who, unlike Trump, respects the rule of law and seeks to create a rising tide that lifts all boats, rather than a regressive world of restored white supremacy. I remain dumbfounded as to how some I know prefer the hate and chaos offered by Trump over the progress and stability offered by Harris.  Are they truly that racist?  Here are column highlights:

In 1978, I visited my first war zone, Beirut. There were, in fact, several wars going on. The Israelis had made an incursion in the south, but there was chaos everywhere, with various local militias squaring off in the streets. Two of them had battled each other for control of the Holiday Inn. Imagine that. Beirut, clearly, had been a civilized and sophisticated city; parts of it still were — and yet it was descending into the unthinkable. The lesson was stark: My American soul, my life experience, had assumed that civilization was a rock-solid given, especially in historic cultural and commercial centers like Beirut. But it wasn’t. It was a tenuous state of grace. It needed to be nurtured, protected.

That is why I’m voting for Kamala Harris for president. Civic order is the predicate for a diverse democracy like ours. It is the predicate for freedom. And we have been flirting, dangerously, with disorder and disunity in the Trump era.

My case for Ms. Harris is a conservative one, but it has little to do with the current nihilist havoc of the Republican Party — or its precursor, the libertarian, neoliberal reaction against government led by Ronald Reagan. It rests primarily on Ms. Harris’s respect for the traditions and institutions of our remarkable country. It also rests on two necessary adjustments she’s made to Democratic Party dogma: a move away from identity politics and a move away from the notional, indulgent pessimism of the academic left. That’s it. Three words: stability, unity, optimism.

In his first Inaugural Address, in January 1981, Ronald Reagan said, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” He was wrong. Government could be arrogant and clumsy; it could make foolish attempts at social engineering and overregulation. The free enterprise system, undervalued by the left, was the most clever antidote to poverty ever invented. But capitalism could overreach, too — and government was the bulwark against the destructive excesses of greed and oligarchy.

Ms. Harris, who was trained in the rule of law, understands viscerally the importance of the stability that government provides. Donald Trump doesn’t. He has attempted to destroy our faith in the institutions that keep us safe — the courts, the F.B.I., the intelligence community, the diplomatic corps, the military, even our electoral process and, this week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Let’s focus just for a moment on the military: It is the template for the highest form of citizenship. It requires a solemn pledge to subsume your individuality to protect the greater good. According to his former chief of staff John Kelly, Mr. Trump has referred to service members as “suckers” and “losers” . . . . The former president has absolutely no idea of the rigors the military requires, the notions of service and sacrifice. He is a stranger to the most basic requirements of a democracy.

I’ve written about politics for more than 50 years. . . . . but there are signs that she [Harris] will chart a moderate course.

One of those signs came in Ms. Harris’s speech to the Economic Club of Pittsburgh late last month. Toward the end, she spoke about the American tradition, now lapsed, of building up quickly — it was once our international hallmark. It enabled us to win World War II, creating an overwhelming war apparatus from a standing start. Ms. Harris said: “The simple truth is, in America it takes too long, and it costs too much to build. Whether it’s a new housing development, a new factory or a new bridge, projects take too long to go from concept to reality. It happens in blue states. It happens in red states. And it’s a national problem.”

This is an implicit recognition, unusual among Democrats, that too much regulation can be stultifying. Yes, she is obviously a progressive, but her activism is more from the Daniel Patrick Moynihan wing of the Democratic Party than the Bernie Sanders wing.

There are two other signs that Ms. Harris may represent a more reasonable era for the Democrats. One has to do with identity politics. In recent presidential cycles, I rarely heard a Democratic presidential candidate celebrate the most remarkable American triumph of the past 60 years: the human rights advances we have achieved for women, Black people, gay people, Latinos. . . . the liberal failure to acknowledge the steady progress toward a cosmopolitan, heterogeneous society has been as purposefully myopic as Mr. Trump’s fever dream that white America is under siege — most recently, by legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.

Ms. Harris is not playing that game. Her slogan “We’re not going back” assumes that progress has been made. When asked what she would “do for” young Black men, her answer was entirely race neutral. Her proposals applied to all young men, and women, too. Her campaign has made a conscious decision to appeal to Latino voters the same way she appeals to everyone else: eschewing grievance politics, assuming that Latinos want law and order on the southern border as well.

She has refused to make a big deal, or any deal, of her own racial identity. This is smart politics. Her identity is obvious. It is a metaphor for the great choice we’re facing: whether we’re ready to follow our destiny as a wondrously creative, inclusive democracy or crash on the straitened delusions of antique white nativism, an American tendency of long standing but always a losing one in the past.

Which brings me to the final argument for Ms. Harris: her optimism. This is crucial. We have been besieged by a fashionable, irrational, cynical pessimism in recent years. Both parties have suffered from it. . . . . Some Democratic negativism was justified, especially with regard to our feckless failures abroad. Mr. Trump agreed with them on that, then curdled it with his recumbent support for tyrants overseas. Indeed, he has become the emperor of the irrational, pursuing a dismal vision of “American carnage” at a moment when crime is down, illegal immigration is down, inflation is down and our economy is the envy of the world.

The basic, irrefutable truth is that we are the luckiest people in the history of the world. We have created a stable democracy from disparate sources, from the world over. We are not in danger of becoming Beirut, not yet. And not ever, if we can respect and curate our traditions and institutions. Kamala Harris’s optimism is a sign not only that she thinks we can but also that she understands how corrosive and dangerous — and, well, un-American — pessimism can be.

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Republicans Are Drowning in Trump's Lies

Politicians have perhaps always lied a little, often through exaggeration or omission of inconvenient facts. But nothing in the past compares to the never ending stream of lies spewing from Republicans, personified by Donald Trump who has taken to incessant lying about just about any and every topic and issue.  Outright lying within the GOP came to fore with the rise of evangelicals and Christofascists in the party, a group that has long believed that the end justifies the means and has peddled lies about opponents and those they dislike for decades.  Gays and non-whites have long been vilified by this toxic element of the GOP base, but Trump has taken lying to a whole new level and, sadly, many in the GOP know they are lying, but do so to stay in the good graces of the foul orange hate merchant. Today Ivy League education Republicans who surely know they are lying quickly repeat Trump's lies with impunity.  The party base either embrace these lies either  because they demean and demonize those they dislike - e.g., black Haitian immigrants or gays - or because they live in the bubble of Fox News and its imitators where the truth simply doesn't matter.  Trying to compete with those who care nothing for the truth is an endless challenge for Democrats who seek to tell the truth and are forced to counter the endless stream of Republican lies.  A piece in Salon looks at this depressing situation:

[W]e never had the kind of debates like those that Donald Trump has participated in since 2016. It's also true that we never had election campaigns like Donald Trump's presidential campaigns and we certainly never had a presidency like his. You have to wonder, is this going to be the way it is going forward even after he's gone?

It's hard to imagine that it will be exactly the same. Trump is sui generis. But what has the next generation of GOP leaders learned from him that can be used for their own ambition? I imagine there are many things but I think there is one very clear lesson: You can lie with impunity.

Some of the new GOP leaders, like Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson, have obviously discovered that if they lie with a congenial look on their faces, there is no limit to how much they can get away with. Politicians have always lied to some degree, of course. In the past, we used to call it spin because they would not dare to just lie outright and essentially tell the voters that they shouldn't believe their own eyes or depend on their own memories. But what we are seeing today is a major shift in what is acceptable in politics — and it goes way beyond Trump.

Vance does not have a naturally pleasant personality but he discovered in that debate that if he didn't crudely disparage "childless cat ladies" or accuse Haitian immigrants of eating pets, he could lie flagrantly about the past and his plans for the future as long as he kept a smile on his face. . . . . I would guess that millions of people watching believed him because he said them with such a pleasant tone.

Out on the stump Vance plays to the MAGA crowd, but he's just as dishonest. One of his favorite lines is “They couldn’t beat him politically, so they tried to bankrupt him. They failed at that, so they tried to impeach him. They failed at that, so they tried to put him in prison. They even tried to kill him.” Whichever persona he assumes, attack dog or affable colleague, the lies are the one consistent feature of his speeches.

Another up-and-comer, Mike Johnson, ever the reasonable sounding fellow, has become adept at MAGA lying. Just this weekend he went on Fox News and said that the federal response to Hurricane Helene is a failure. . . . .That's a lie and he knows it. You can ask any of the Republican governors and local officials in the affected area and they will say that the feds have been on the ground since before the hurricane hit and have been excellently coordinating the massive response.

In the past one would have expected this sort of thing from the likes of Florida gadfly Rep. Matt Gaetz but not the Speaker of the House. This kind of blatant falsehood is now completely normal among Republicans. Johnson, like Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, sat for a Sunday show interview over the weekend and refused to acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 election. 

They are spreading these lies on social media and television and are backed up by Trump's eager endorser Elon Musk and a massive disinformation campaign. The Republican nominee for lieutenant governor in Indiana, for example, shared a fake image to blast the Biden administration's handling of hurricane relief, writing on X that "it doesn't matter if this image is AI-generated or real."

Then there is Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who was once a respectable conservative and considered a strong candidate for president. Today he sounds like a Russian trollbot going the truther route on what he falsely called "the fake" September jobs report . . . . The Bureau of Labor Statistics is a non-partisan agency. Rubio knows this. He is lying.

Republicans do this reflexively now, without any fear of repercussions from their voters, some of whom actually respect them for doing it while those poor souls who actually believe what they're saying give them money and take their lives into their hands. There is no price to be paid for dishonesty and evidently they believe they have something to gain.

This didn't start with Donald Trump, although he's the first one to turn a profit from it. This really started back in the 1990s with Newt Gingrich . . . . A few years later we were lied into the Iraq war by the Bush administration. New York Times Magazine published an article in 2004 by reporter Ron Suskind who interviewed a senior administration aide, presumed to be Karl Rove, also known as Bush's Brain:

The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.

I'm not sure Rove thought it would devolve into an orgy of lying about everything, distorting even their own concept of reality, but that's where we are now. (Thanks a lot Karl.) Perhaps it was inevitable that a celebrity demagogue and pathological liar would take the mantle of "history's actor" and turn it into political World Wide Wrestling but the consequences of this little experiment are dire.

We owe it to my young 17-year-old friend to do everything we can to turn this country back into a reality-based community. No society can function swimming in deceit and corruption for very long. And right now we are drowning in it. 

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Hurricane Milton Offers a Catastrophic Reminder

 

This blog frequently laments the reality that much of the Republican Party base votes against its own best economic interest as it rallies to Republican politicians who use "god, guns, and gays" among other issues to stir the base and distract it from the reality of the Republican economic agenda that benefits the rich at the expense of the rest of us.   Now, with a second major hurricane bearing down on Florida )including red areas of that state) in a period of two weeks that promises to bring catastrophic damage, a second insanity issue of the Republican and MAGA base is on view: the base supports Republicans who deny that climate change is real and who oppose efforts to stimulate renewable energy sources and mitigate rising sea levels and reduce carbon emissions. Indeed, Donald Trump wants to reverse the green energy policies of the Biden administration.  Meanwhile, Florida textbooks are not supposed to even use the term "climate change."  With evidence of climate change visible all around us, one has to wonder when these voters will wake up to how they have been duped and misled and demand that elected officials at all political levels end climate change denial and take real action to address its impacts.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the confounding mindset of Republican climate change deniers and the base that supports them.  Here are excerpts:

Less than two weeks ago, Hurricane Helene ravaged southern Appalachia with unprecedented floods and claimed hundreds of lives. Today, Hurricane Milton is bearing down on the west coast of Florida, which is still cleaning up from Helene’s glancing blow. And less than a month from now, voters will choose between Democrats who accept the reality of climate change and Republicans who do not.

These are not the “normal” hurricanes of the past. Hurricanes are not supposed to retain catastrophic power as they race far inland from the Gulf of Mexico, dumping a Noah’s flood of rainfall all the way to Tennessee, the way Helene did. Hurricanes are not supposed to grow from newly formed tropical storm to Category 5 monster in less than two days, the way Milton did — intensification so lightning-fast that it stunned experts.

“I can’t even find the right adjective,” University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann told me Monday about Milton. And Mann — author of the famous “hockey stick” graph showing the human-induced rise in global temperatures — pointed me to a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory rapid-attribution study reporting that rainfall from Helene was boosted 50 percent by climate change.

Warmer temperatures provide more energy and moisture to serve as fuel for hurricanes, making them bigger and wetter. It’s not that there are more hurricanes; rather, the ones that do form tend to be stronger and release much more rain. Counting Helene, the United States has seen eight Category 4 or Category 5 landfalls since 2017 — the same number as during the previous 57 years.

Milton could make it nine, though forecasters expect the storm to diminish slightly in wind speed before it lands. Another impact of climate change — roughly half a foot of sea level rise in the Gulf since 2010 — makes storm surge and coastal flooding much worse than before.

Many Republicans are reluctant even to acknowledge climate change, much less do anything about it, because of politics, not physics.

Four of the states that suffered fatalities and major damage from Helene — Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee — have Republican governors and legislative majorities. Given all the death and destruction, you might think those officials would be clamoring for urgent action to cut global greenhouse gas emissions and keep climate change short of the worst-case scenarios.

But the GOP’s unchallenged leader, Donald Trump, has famously called climate change a “hoax” and frequently rails against clean-energy power sources such as solar and wind. He says he would dismantle the tax credits and incentives in President Joe Biden’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act that encourage moving away from fossil fuels, vowing that his energy policy would be “drill, baby, drill.”

His running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), refused to give a straight answer when asked on the debate stage if he agrees climate change is a hoax.

Not all MAGA-cult Republicans are as clueless as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), who offered a hallucinatory conspiracy theory to explain the storm, posting on X: “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” Yeesh.

A Pew Research Center poll in March found that only 12 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning respondents believed climate change should be a “top priority” for the president and Congress, as opposed to 59 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents who felt that way.

But in a July 2023 poll, The Post found that 55 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents believed that human activity is “causing changes to the world’s climate, including an increase in average temperature.” That is far less than the 93 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents who believe in climate change, but it’s still a majority.

Those numbers suggest to me that Republican voters might be prepared to support policies to mitigate and adapt to climate change if the party’s leaders proposed them. But GOP elected officials must take their cues from Trump, lest he turn on them. Reality is no match for MAGA dogma.

Meanwhile, Helene and Milton and the supercharged hurricanes that will follow do not care whether the states they plow through are red or blue. Nor do the droughts, the wildfires or the punishing heat waves. Whether we like it or not, climate change is an area of common ground: We’re all in this together.

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The Phony Populism of Trump and Musk

One of the most confounding things in American politics is the cult worship of Donald Trump, a cruel, narcissistic, wealthy man who cares absolutely nothing about others, by working class individuals scrapping to get by financially and some in the middle class so consumed by racial hatred and grievance that they willingly vote against their own economic interests to the benefit of the super wealthy and corporate CEO's.  Trump continues the pretense that he cares about the little guy or gal, but in truth everything is about benefiting himself - and staying out of prison.   If his adoring cultist lay injured on the side of the road, it's a good bet Trump's motorcade would just drive on by without lifting a finger or making a phone call.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at this phenomenon of Trump and other Republicans' phony populism as they play their political base for fools.  I truly cannot understand the total and seemingly deliberate blindness of the MAGA base that mistakes Trump's railing against those they hate - racial minorities, gays, the foreign born and independent women - as proof he gives the slightest damn about them. Trump's tariffs, promised mass deportation of non-whites, and trillions of dollars of tax cuts for the very rich will make prices soar and do nothing to tangibly better the lives of the MAGA base.  All they will receive is an affirmation of their hatreds.  Here are article highlights:

A Donald Trump rally is always a strange spectacle, and not only because of the candidate’s incoherence and bizarre detours into mental cul-de-sacs. . . . . The New York Times, for one, has finally said that the candidate’s mental state is a legitimate concern. . . . Trump’s rally on Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania, was a hall-of-fame entry in political weirdness: Few survivors of an attempted assassination hold a giant lawn party on the spot where they were wounded and someone in the crowd was killed.

The candidate’s tirades are the most obviously bizarre part of his performances, but the nature of the gathering itself is a fascinating paradox. Thousands of people, mostly from the working and middle class, line up to spend time with a very rich man, a lifelong New Yorker who privately detests the heartland Americans in his audience—and applaud as he excoriates the “elites.”

This is a political charade: Trump and his running mate, the hillbilly turned multimillionaire J. D. Vance, have little in common with most of the people in the audience, no matter how much they claim to be one of them. The mask slips often: Even as he courts the union vote, Trump revels in saying how much he hated having to pay overtime to his workers.

Trump then welcomed the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, to the stage. Things got weirder from there, as Musk—who, it should be noted, is 53 years old—jumped around the stage like a concertgoing teenager who got picked out of the audience to meet the band. Musk then proceeded to explain how democracy is in danger—this, from a man who has turned the platform once known as Twitter into an open zone for foreign propaganda and has amplified various hoaxes. . . . . but his behavior reveals him as an enemy of speech that isn’t in his own interest.

What happened in Butler over the weekend, however, was not some unique American moment. Around the world, fantastically wealthy people are hoodwinking ordinary voters, warning that dark forces—always an indistinct “they” and “them”—are conspiring to take away their rights and turn their nation into an immense ghetto full of undesirables (who are almost always racial minorities or immigrants or, in the ideal narrative, both).

The British writer Martin Wolf calls this “pluto-populism,” a brash attempt by people at the top of the financial and social pyramid to stay afloat by capering as ostensibly anti-establishment, pro-worker candidates.

These movements are all remarkably alike: They claim to represent the common voter, especially the “forgotten people” and the dispossessed, but in reality, the base voters for these groups are not the poorest or most disadvantaged in their society. Rather, they tend to be relatively affluent. (Think of the January 6 rioters, and how many of them were able to afford flights, hotels, and expensive gear. It’s not cheap to be an insurrectionist.) As Simon Kuper noted in 2020, the “comfortably off populist voter is the main force behind Trump, Brexit and Italy’s Lega,” a fact ignored by opportunistic politicians . . .

One of the pioneers of pluto-populism, of course, is the late Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a rake and a grifter who stayed in office as part of staying out of jail. That strategy should sound familiar to Americans, but even more familiar is the way the Italian scholar Maurizio Viroli, in a book about Italian politics, notes how Berlusconi deformed Italian democracy by seducing its elites into joining the big con against the ordinary voter . . . .

The appeals of the pluto-populists work because they target people who care little about policy but a great deal about social revenge. These citizens feel like others whom they dislike are living good lives, which to them seems an injustice. Worse, this itching sense of resentment is the result not of unrequited love but of unrequited hate: Much like the townies who feel looked down upon by the local college kids, or the Red Sox fans who are infuriated that Yankees fans couldn’t care less about their tribal animus, these voters feel ignored and disrespected.

Who better to be the agent of their revenge than a crude and boorish magnate who commands attention, angers and frightens the people they hate, and intends to control the political system so that he cannot be touched by it?

Trump and those like him thus make a deal with the most resentful citizens in society: Keep us up in the penthouses, and we’ll harass your enemies on your behalf. We’ll punish the people you want punished. In the end, however, the joke is always on the voters: The pluto-populists don’t care about the people cheering them on. Few scores will truly be settled, and life will only become harder for everyone who isn’t wealthy or powerful enough to resist the autocratic policies that such people will impose on everyone, regardless of their previous support.

When the dust settles, Trump and Vance will still be rich and powerful (as will Musk, whose fortune and power transcends borders in a way that right-wing populists usually claim to hate). For the many Americans who admire them, little will change; their lives will not improve, just as they did not during Trump’s first term. Millions of us, regardless of whom we voted for, will have to fend off interference in our lives from an authoritarian government—especially if we are, for example, a targeted minority, a woman in need of health care, or a member of a disfavored immigrant community.

This is not freedom: As Viroli warned his fellow citizens, “If we are subjected to the arbitrary or enormous power of a man, we may well be free to do more or less what we want, but we are still servants.”

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There Is No Climate Haven

As I write this post, we are hosting friends from Asheville, North Carolina for the better part of the coming two weeks.  While their home was undamaged, there is no electricity or water and it is unclear when it will be restored.  Meanwhile, another potentially catastrophic hurricane, Hurricane Milton, appears posed to strike Florida's west coast - an area where some are still reeling from severe damage from Hurricane Helene. Yet we still have Republicans and many on the political right claiming climate change is a hoax or not a reality.  One has to wonder what it will take to make people open their eyes much less have the political will to demand more action to address an every growing problem from which no one can escape, no matter how safe they may currently feel or how much they believe the problem does not impact them.  A column in the New York Times looks at the situation and the reality that there is no haven from climate change as Asheville, North Carolina and other parts of  Appalachia found out a little over a week ago.  Denial is simply no longer and option and politicians who deny the reality of climate change need to be voted out of office.  Here are column excerpts:

Watching as Hurricane Helene slammed into Tennessee, distant friends kept checking in on us here in Nashville, but we were fine. Better than fine, in truth: After weeks of drought, we were finally getting some desperately needed rain.

But it was impossible to rejoice in the rain when the same weather system that erased Middle Tennessee’s drought was wreaking havoc just east of us. In Appalachia, from East Tennessee all the way up to Virginia and West Virginia, furious rivers were taking out roads — even highways — and washing out bridge after bridge. . . . . Mountainsides released their hold on rock, burying entire communities in mud. Whole swaths of forest were tumbling into homes and power lines and cellphone towers.

Western North Carolina seems to have taken the hardest hit, but the destruction was so widespread — covering more than 600 miles — as to be nearly beyond reckoning. . . . . As wrenching as photos of the destruction are, it’s the human losses that tear your heart to bits.

Nevertheless, the usual chorus of blame erupted on social media even as the rain was still falling: Why didn’t those people just leave? Why do they keep living in places where rivers repeatedly flood, or where forests routinely catch fire, or where hurricanes so often make landfall? . . . . And those are the kinder remarks. The cruel ones go straight to victim-blaming: Why didn’t they evacuate? Or: People who don’t believe in climate change deserve what they get.

Such questions never seem to consider the attachment to home that people feel even when home isn’t safe. How many of us would find it easy to leave behind the place where we’ve built a life — where we have family and friends and longtime neighbors? The place where we have work?

Moving costs money that many people don’t have, and evacuation isn’t cheap, either. It might not even be possible if the roads are already gone, or if there was never much in the way of roads to begin with.

I understand the impulse to believe that Southerners bring such misfortunes upon themselves by voting for scoundrels who deny the realities of climate change. When Republican officials routinely vote against measures that increase climate resilience, or when they support unchecked development on the very wetlands that protect human communities from storm surges, or when they gut legislation that would require new construction to be storm resistant, and when they then tell outrageous lies about the federal government’s disaster response . . . .

Take a look at a map of “disaster prone” areas in the United States. It’s a huge chunk of the country. Already there’s no realistic way to crowd everyone into the places that are currently  somewhat safe. Even the safe places aren’t really safe, or won’t be safe for long. . . . . Buncombe County, N.C., among the areas hardest hit by Helene, was until very recently considered a “climate haven.”

There’s no such thing as a climate haven anymore. We all live in Florida now.

Even the few remaining Americans who still dismiss climate change outright must surely know this. They simply choose to parrot the talking points of Republican politicians and right-wing media figures who are paid by Big Oil — or Big Construction — to lie to vulnerable Americans and leave them ever more vulnerable.

There’s no denying that we would be in much better shape today if utility companies and the fossil-fuel industry had not launched a huge disinformation campaign to cover up the truth of climate change decades ago, and if the Republican Party and right-wing media had not embraced it. . . . . Yet they continue to embrace it even now.

Among the most outrageous lies in circulation right now — embraced and promulgated by both Elon Musk and Donald Trump — is the false claim that F.E.M.A. has spent all its money helping undocumented migrants and therefore has no funds left to help hurricane victims. There is absolutely no truth to this story, as F.E.M.A. has explained, and even Republican elected officials like Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee, Mayor Glenn Jacobs of Knox County, Tenn., and Kevin Corbin, a North Carolina state senator, have called out the misinformation, but the rumors are still flying. Among the many ironies of these lies is that Project 2025, the Republican playbook for a second Trump presidency, calls for gutting F.E.M.A.

Maybe we’re finally at a point where even Republicans have no choice but to acknowledge that hurricanes are growing stronger. Droughts are getting deeper. Fires are burning hotter. While there’s still time — however we vote, wherever we live, whatever we believe — we must shore up against the next calamity. We must hold our elected officials accountable and force them to invest in the changes that will keep “natural” disasters from continuing to worsen. And in the meantime, we must help one another dig out.

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Trump's Mental Decline Is on Open Display

At a social gathering last evening at one point several of us discussed how we remain dumbfounded that some people we know - people educated and outwardly moral - can continue to support Donald Trump. Given that Trump's only "policy" initiatives are mass deportations on non-whites, tariffs that will supercharge inflation, and more massive tax cuts for the super wealthy, the only explanation came down to the reality that Trump validates the inherent racism of his supporters.  This is all the more true as Trump's deranged and rambling verbal diarrhea shows that his mental state is in rapid decline and that the truth on virtually any subject simply doesn't matters in his insane fantasy world where up is down and down is up and Obama is imagined to be lurking behind everything, including Kamala Harris' campaign.  A piece in New York Times looks at Trump's ever more untethered fantasy world and declining mental state.  Trump has always been a malignant  narcissist, but what is now on display is perhaps even more disturbing and makes the case that Trump should never inhabit the White House again.  Ironically, he attacks Kamala Harris mental acuity when, in fact, he needs to look in a mirror to see the real case of mental unfitness.  Here are article highlights that look at Trump's dangerous mental decline:

Former President Donald J. Trump vividly recounted how the audience at his climactic debate with Vice President Kamala Harris was on his side. Except that there was no audience. The debate was held in an empty hall. No one “went crazy,” as Mr. Trump put it, because no one was there.

Anyone can misremember, of course. But the debate had been just a week earlier and a fairly memorable moment. And it was hardly the only time Mr. Trump has seemed confused, forgetful, incoherent or disconnected from reality lately. In fact, it happens so often these days that it no longer even generates much attention.

He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought — some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical.

He voices outlandish claims that seem to be made up out of whole cloth. He digresses into bizarre tangents about golf, about sharks, about his own “beautiful” body. He relishes “a great day in Louisiana” after spending the day in Georgia. He expresses fear that North Korea is “trying to kill me” when he presumably means Iran. As late as last month, Mr. Trump was still speaking as if he were running against President Biden, five weeks after his withdrawal from the race.

A review of Mr. Trump’s rallies, interviews, statements and social media posts finds signs of change since he first took the political stage in 2015. He has always been discursive and has often been untethered to truth, but with the passage of time his speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past.

According to a computer analysis by The New York Times, Mr. Trump’s rally speeches now last an average of 82 minutes, compared with 45 minutes in 2016. Proportionately, he uses 13 percent more all-or-nothing terms like “always” and “never” than he did eight years ago, which some experts consider a sign of advancing age.

Similarly, he uses 32 percent more negative words than positive words now, compared with 21 percent in 2016, which can be another indicator of cognitive change. And he uses swearwords 69 percent more often than he did when he first ran, a trend that could reflect what experts call disinhibition.

Mr. Trump frequently reaches to the past for his frame of reference, often to the 1980s and 1990s, when he was in his tabloid-fueled heyday. He cites fictional characters from that era like Hannibal Lecter . . . . He asks supporters whether they remember the landing in New York of Charles Lindbergh, who actually landed in Paris and long before Mr. Trump was born.

He seems confused about modern technology, suggesting that “most people don’t have any idea what the hell a phone app is” in a country where 96 percent of people own a smartphone.

And he heads off into rhetorical cul-de-sacs. “So we built a thing called the Panama Canal,” he told the conservative host Tucker Carlson last year. “We lost 35,000 people to the mosquito, you know, malaria. We lost 35,000 people building — we lost 35,000 people because of the mosquito. Vicious. . . . . It just happened a little while ago.

While elements of this are familiar, some who have known him for years say they notice a change. “He’s not competing at the level he was competing at eight years ago, no question about it,” said Anthony Scaramucci, a former Trump ally who has endorsed Ms. Harris.

Sarah Matthews, who was Mr. Trump’s deputy press secretary until breaking with him over the Jan. 6, 2021, attack . . . . “I don’t think anyone would ever say that Trump is the most polished speaker, but his more recent speeches do seem to be more incoherent, and he’s rambling even more so and he’s had some pretty noticeable moments of confusion,” she said.

[H]is campaign has refused to release medical records, instead simply pointing to a one-page letter released in July by his former White House doctor reporting that Mr. Trump was “doing well” after being grazed by a bullet in an assassination attempt.

How much his rambling discourse — what some experts call tangentiality — can be attributed to age is the subject of some debate. . . . questions have been raised about Mr. Trump’s mental fitness for years.

John F. Kelly, his second White House chief of staff, was so convinced that Mr. Trump was psychologically unbalanced that he bought a book called “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” written by 27 mental health professionals, to try to understand his boss better. As it was, Mr. Kelly came to refer to Mr. Trump’s White House as “Crazytown.”

There were multiple conversations about whether the 25th Amendment disability clause should be invoked to remove him from office, although the idea never went far. His own estranged niece, Mary L. Trump, a clinical psychologist, wrote a book identifying disorders she believed he has. Mr. Trump bristled at such talk, insisting that he was “a very stable genius.”

Polls show that a majority of Americans believe he is too old to be president, . . . . Experts said it was hard to judge whether the changes in Mr. Trump’s speaking style could indicate typical effects of age or some more significant condition. “That can change with normal aging,” said Dr. Bradford Dickerson, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School. “But if you see a change relative to a person’s base line in that type of speaking ability over the course of just a few years, I think it raises some real red flags.”

Now his rallies are powered as much by anger as anything else. His distortions and false claims have reached new levels. His adversaries are “lunatics” and “deranged” and “communists” and “fascists.” Never particularly restrained, he now lobs four-letter words and other profanities far more freely. The other day, he suggested unleashing the police to inflict “one really violent day” on criminals to deter crime.

He does not stick to a single train of thought for long. . . . . And he throws out assertions without any apparent regard for whether they are true or not. Lately, he has claimed that crowds Ms. Harris has drawn were not real but the creation of artificial intelligence, never mind the reporters and cameras on hand to record them.

He claims to have been named “man of the year” in Michigan, although no such prize exists.

What should be clear to anyone other than perhaps his racist and/or Christofascist supporters who have their own dangerous agenda is that Trump should be nowhere near the White House or the nuclear codes.

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