"Conservative" Religion Is Fueling Hate and the Partisan Divide

As regular readers know, I view religion as one of the most poisonous forces throughout human history that has fueled hatred, violence, and mass murder over and over again over the centuries with any beneficial side effects some argue religion provides being far out weighed by the negatives. Religion has time and time again been used to label others as "other" and/or worthy of death, be it in India and Pakistan, the Middle East, 17th century France, or Northern Ireland.  In the age of Trump, religion - in this case "conservative" Christianity is repeating religion's toxic impact on society and fueling political partisanship and a willingness on the part of Republicans to destroy America's democracy in order to cling to power. In my view, no true follower of Christ can be a Trump supporter or Republican nowadays and those who do so put their hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy on open display as they support the caging of children, white supremacy and a man who is the personification of the seven deadly sins.  A lengthy piece at CNN looks at religion's toxic role in dividing American society.  The good news is that over the long term, conservative Christianity is dying in America.  It's death cannot come soon enough in my opinion.  Here are article excerpts:

The religious and cultural divide between Democratic and Republican voters is widening, pointing toward even greater partisan polarization and social tension as the nation careens into a possible impeachment vote against President Donald Trump and potential record turnout in the 2020 presidential election.

An extensive national study released Monday by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute showed that voters in each party now hold antithetical views not only on issues that dominate the immediate political debate -- such as health care and impeachment -- but also on deeper changes in the nation's demography, culture, race relations and gender roles, according to detailed results the institute provided to CNN. While whites who identify as Christians still represent about two-thirds of all Republicans, they now compose only one-fourth of Democrats, according to results provided by the Pew Research Center from a new study it released last week. Americans unaffiliated with any religion, and racial minorities who identify as Christians, now each make up a bigger share of the Democratic coalition than white Christians do, Pew found. Both groups remain only relatively minor components of the GOP coalition.

On the religious front, just as in those other arenas, the groups that favor Democrats are clearly growing. Not only have the religiously unaffiliated expanded since 2009 from about 1 in 6 to 1 in 4 adults, but the share of Americans who ascribe to non-Christian faiths, a group that also leans strongly Democratic, has edged up from 5% to 7% of the population over that time, Pew found. Simultaneously, white Christians have fallen as a share of all American adults -- from just over half in 2009, according to Pew and other data, to around two-fifths today.

The challenge for Democrats is that their potential gains from the growing groups are being muted by an increasing tilt toward the GOP among the groups that are shrinking, in this case whites who identify as Christian. (The same dynamic is evident among other contracting groups such as whites without college degrees.)

Trump has accelerated the trends on both sides of that equation, consolidating the GOP's position among blue-collar, older, non-urban and evangelical whites at the price of sparking intense resistance among younger, white-collar, nonwhite and metropolitan voters.

[E]ven as white Christians have declined as a share of the population, more of that shrinking group is aligning with Republicans. In 2009, Pew found 51% of white Christians identified as Republicans, while 37% considered themselves Democrats (the rest were independents). Today that 14-point partisan gap has more than doubled: In the latest Pew results, 63% of white Christians identify as Republicans, compared with 30% who identify as Democrats. The movement has been even sharper among white evangelical Protestants. Their share of the overall population is also shrinking: It fell to 16% in the latest Pew results, down from 19% in 2009. In 2009, they were about twice as likely to identify as Republicans (61%) as Democrats (30%), according to figures provided by Gregory Smith, Pew's associate director of research. Today 75% of white evangelicals call themselves Republicans, while just 19% identify as Democrats, a ratio of nearly 4 to 1.

Democrats rely on voters who reflect the nation's growing racial and religious diversity, while the contracting population of white Christians -- especially white evangelical Protestants -- tilt more toward the GOP as a vehicle to protect values and a vision of America that they believe is under siege from the forces of change. Across the key changes reshaping American culture, the two groups rendered almost inverse verdicts. On gender, roughly three-fifths of adults who approve of Trump agreed that "these days society seems to punish men just for acting like men." Three-fourths of adults who disapprove of Trump disagreed. The divide between the two sides was even more pronounced on issues relating to race. Fully 68% of those who approve of Trump agreed that "Today, discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities." Three-fourths of those who disapprove of Trump disagreed with that sentiment. At the heart of these contrasts are the inimical views of white evangelical Protestants and religiously unaffiliated Americans (of all races), which now arguably represent the core of each party's coalition. While two-thirds of white evangelicals, for instance, say discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination against minorities, more than 7 in 10 among the religiously unaffiliated disagree. Two-thirds of white evangelicals say immigrants are "invading" America; three-fourths of the religiously unaffiliated disagree. Three-fourths of white evangelicals say socialists have taken over the Democratic Party; two-thirds of the unaffiliated say racists now control the Republican Party. [T]he long-run threat to Republicans clearly emerges from these new studies: The party, especially as defined by Trump, faces huge resistance among the groups that are growing in society, while the groups most drawn to his racial nationalism -- such as white evangelicals -- are shrinking. Given that pace of change, it's an open question how long Republicans can rely on the Trump strategy of squeezing bigger margins from shrinking groups. On most key measures, from racial diversity to the shift away from Christian faiths, the changes reshaping America are more pronounced among the youngest generations. Among adults younger than 30, only 1 in 4 are white Christians, the Public Religion Research Institute found, with the religiously unaffiliated and those who practice non-Christian faiths accounting for nearly half and non-white Christians making up the remaining fourth.

This wave of new data on religion and partisan allegiance underscores the broader conclusion that American politics in 2020, and likely for years beyond, promises an epic collision between what America has been and what it is becoming.

The Moral Rot of Today's GOP

The Republican Party continues to have its apologists who claim that the party is not racist and generally misogynistic.  Yet, the truth is that their gyrations to explain away the moral rot that is in plain sight, starting with the occupant of the White House simply do not fly and are underscored by four state party's that have cancelled primaries so that no one can even attempt to challenge Der Trumpenführer.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at two such apologists - Ross Douthat at the New York Times and Timothy P. Carney at the Washington Examiner - who in apparent fits of delusion blame liberals for racism rather than the actions of conservatives, the vast majority of whom sold their souls to Trum as is underscored by Trump's high approval ratings among Republicans and evangelical "Christians."  I put Christian in quotes since, in my view, no true Christian could ever embrace Trump.  The simple reality today is that, if one supports the GOP, one supports a racist agenda and no amount of pretense changes that reality. Here are article highlights that look at the facts and the sad manner in which "conservative intellectuals" - an oxymoron in the age of Trump - refuse to admit that without racism, the GOP base would collapse:  

The Republican Party controls the White House, the United States Senate, and the majority of governorships and state legislatures. Champions for the political project of conservatism — specifically, the people focused on shaping law and policy and winning elections for the GOP — control the Supreme Court and the most watched network on cable television, Fox News. From this perch, they’ve pursued an agenda dedicated, in large part, to demonizing immigrants from Central America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the Middle East, while extolling the virtues of those from Europe; curtailing voting rights and seeking to reduce political representation for black and Hispanic people, for the express purpose of winning elections; and criminalizing abortion and reducing affordable health-care options in states where maternal and infant mortality rates are worse than in many less developed economies, especially for black women and children.

They’ve advanced their cause by uniting behind a president, Donald Trump, who spouts racism and xenophobia as a matter of routine, but whose approval ratings among Republican voters nevertheless consistently top 80 percent. Whenever they’re polled on the subject, large shares of these voters express bigoted views — 40 percent think black people are “lazier” than whites, nearly half think black people are more “criminal” and “violent,” and close to 60 percent hold unfavorable opinions about Islam.

This is to be expected: Racism has been fundamental to American conservatism, and the GOP in particular, since the mid-20th century realignment of the parties — even as its purportedly defining tenets have proven to be negotiable, from small government to antagonism toward autocrats to reduced deficit spending. None of this precludes the existence of non-racist conservatives, to be sure. It just makes them some of the least influential people in their movement, and renders their claims to broader relevance akin to shouting into a void.

But the void got slightly louder on Wednesday. Two op-eds by conservative columnists were published with essentially the same theme: American conservatism has a racism problem, and conservatives who care must build a movement that is unwelcoming to racists. The first, by Ross Douthat at the New York Times, uses this argument to qualify the real purpose of his piece, which is to lambast a handful of liberal commentators for falsely accusing four individual conservatives of being racists. The second piece, by Timothy P. Carney at the Washington Examiner, is more soul-searching. It documents his dismay at realizing the conservative movement has been an alarmingly hospitable home for racists; his recognition that racial disparities in America stem from racism; and his belief that “the right thing” to do for conservatives is to scare away racists and make the best interests of nonwhite people central to their politics.

Douthat and Carney both insist that liberals will invent racism where it doesn’t exist and call conservatives racist no matter what; conservatives therefore need to fight racism on their own terms, for and among one another, without worrying about what the other side says.

This casting of liberalism hinges on the belief that liberal accusations of racism are as cynical as conservative denial of them. It’s an odd way of dismissing the very people who sounded the alarm about where the GOP was headed when much of the conservative intelligentsia was busy using op-ed pages and cable-news appearances to launder its descent. It’s a tall order to thank one’s political opponents for their honest assessment of you, to be fair. But the bigger problem for Douthat and Carney is that there’s little evidence that a market for the brand of conservatism they’re proposing exists — at least not in significant enough numbers to win elections and influence policy.
[B]oth writers are strikingly focused on minutiae: Their personal discomfort, the presence at once-respected conservative think tanks and online publications of individual white nationalists, and their dogged insistence that these realities don’t actually represent conservatives, many of whom, they insist, aren’t actually racist.

But the flagrant racism conveyed in Trump’s speeches and Jonah Bennett’s emails at the Daily Caller is less intractable than a movementwide mobilization behind a racist agenda. That Republicans have built a reliable coalition of racists and purported non-racists by pairing tax cuts and abortion restrictions with the subordination of black civil rights to states’ rights suggests that even those who oppose racism are willing to overlook it for their own self-interest.

[I]t also undermines the notion that conservatism’s racism problem stems from infiltration by a few bad eggs. On the contrary, it’s been apparent since the Nixon administration that the Republican Party would collapse without support from racists. Perhaps such a demise is Douthat and Carney’s unstated goal. In any case, the GOP hasn’t been able to convince most voters that corporate welfare, reduced protections for marginalized people, and diminished health-care options for all but the most financially secure are good things on their own terms, without using racism to sweeten the deal. This wouldn’t matter if conservatism was a fringe ideology. But the writers’ portrayal of their movement as one victimized by unfair smears and mischaracterization belies its status as the most powerful political movement in America today . . . .

As a result, the implementation of conservative policies means that migrant children are dying in cages, black voters are being purged from voter rolls by the thousands, Native lands are being plundered for oil infrastructure, and black mothers are losing their lives and babies because adequate health care is out of reach. It’s unlikely that many of them are moved by the gradual awakening of some conservatives to what they’ve known all along, or by Douthat and Carney’s insistence that a more benign conservatism, of which they’ve personally seen no evidence, exists. The mid-century black exodus from the GOP was no fluke or paranoid manifestation. It was a response to sustained antagonism toward their rights by Republicans.

There are no innocents among today’s Republicans. There’s only the ugliness they’ve unleashed, and whether they’ve the courage to risk political ruin in order to eradicate it.

Congressman Leaves GOP Over Trump, Party Moral Bankruptcy

I left the Republican Party many years ago at this point because I no longer believed I could support a political party that had lost its moral compass and increasingly posed a threat to values enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.  Little did I know back then how much lower the GOP would fall and that the party would become little more than a cult following of extremists and white supremacists.  Sadly, far to many Republicans continue to put party over country and seemingly have no limit to what moral bankruptcy they will countenance. I have said it before and will say it again: one cannot be a decent moral person - much less a true follower of Christ - and remain a Republican.  Any pretense to the contrary is self delusion and lying to those around you. The crisis of what is being done to children along the nation's southern border has removed any option other than to leave the GOP or declare one's own moral bankruptcy.  Add Trump's effort today to put on his own equivalent of a Nuremberg rally (I am hoping for severe thunderstorms in DC), and the choice becomes even more stark.   Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) announced he's leaving the Republican Party and becoming an independent, taking the only course someone moral can take.  The GOP cannot be reformed from within - I figured that out close to two decades ago - now that it is in the hands of white supremacists, "Christian" extremists, and lead by the most foul individual to ever occupy the White House.  In an Op-ed in the Washington Post, Amash explains why he has taken this action of leaving the GOP.  While he takes a few shots at Democrats, there is no equivalency between the two parties despite the efforts of a lazy media to pretend otherwise. Here are op-ed excerpts (read the entire piece):

When my dad was 16, America welcomed him as a Palestinian refugee. It wasn’t easy moving to a new country, but it was the greatest blessing of his life.

Throughout my childhood, my dad would remind my brothers and me of the challenges he faced before coming here and how fortunate we were to be Americans. In this country, he told us, everyone has an opportunity to succeed regardless of background.

Growing up, I thought a lot about the brilliance of America. Our country’s founders established a constitutional republic uniquely dedicated to securing the rights of the people. In fact, they designed a political system so ordered around liberty that, in succeeding generations, the Constitution itself would strike back against the biases and blind spots of its authors.

My parents, both immigrants, were Republicans. I supported Republican candidates throughout my early adult life and then successfully ran for office as a Republican. The Republican Party, I believed, stood for limited government, economic freedom and individual liberty — principles that had made the American Dream possible for my family.

In recent years, though, I’ve become disenchanted with party politics and frightened by what I see from it. The two-party system has evolved into an existential threat to American principles and institutions.

George Washington was so concerned as he watched political parties take shape in America that he dedicated much of his farewell address to warning that partisanship, although “inseparable from our nature,” was the people’s “worst enemy.” . . . . sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty. …

True to Washington’s fears, Americans have allowed government officials, under assertions of expediency and party unity, to ignore the most basic tenets of our constitutional order: separation of powers, federalism and the rule of law. The result has been the consolidation of political power and the near disintegration of representative democracy.

These are consequences of a mind-set among the political class that loyalty to party is more important than serving the American people or protecting our governing institutions. The parties value winning for its own sake, and at whatever cost.

With little genuine debate on policy happening in Congress, party leaders distract and divide the public by exploiting wedge issues and waging pointless messaging wars. These strategies fuel mistrust and anger, leading millions of people to take to social media to express contempt for their political opponents, with the media magnifying the most extreme voices. This all combines to reinforce the us-vs.-them, party-first mind-set of government officials.

[W]e owe it to future generations to stand up for our constitutional republic so that Americans may continue to live free for centuries to come. Preserving liberty means telling the Republican Party and the Democratic Party that we’ll no longer let them play their partisan game at our expense.

Today, I am declaring my independence and leaving the Republican Party. No matter your circumstance, I’m asking you to join me in rejecting the partisan loyalties and rhetoric that divide and dehumanize us. I’m asking you to believe that we can do better than this two-party system — and to work toward it. If we continue to take America for granted, we will lose it.

A Crime by Any Name: Trump/Pence's Commitment to Cruelty

As a student of history, I have often wondered how a civilized and supposedly decent society such as that of Germany in the late 1920's could descend into the barbarism and cruelty that was the hallmark of the Third Reich. Now, we are witnessing a similar descent into cruelty and barbarism directed at those disfavored by Donald Trump and his core base comprised of white supremacists and  evangelical Christians (best defined by their hatred of others).  The questions now become (i) will the Democrat controlled House of Representatives act to de-fund Trump's parade of horrible, which include family separations and what is nothing less than child abuse, (ii) will average Americans prove themselves better than 1930's Germans and (A) work to defeat Republicans at every level to repudiate such criminal behavior, and (B) vote Trump and Pence out of office in 2020 and reclaim some semblance of moral standing for the United States of America.  If decent Americans fail to so act, they will be complicit in these crimes against vulnerable children.  First, here are brief highlights from a piece at CNN that looks at the horrors being done to children:

Pediatricians shared disturbing images drawn by migrant children who were recently separated from their parents while in US Customs and Border Protection custody. The drawings show people behind bars and in cages. The pictures were drawn last week by three children, ages 10 and 11, at Catholic Charities Humanitarian Respite Center in McAllen, Texas, after being released by CBP. "The fact that the drawings are so realistic and horrific gives us a view into what these children have experienced," said Dr. Colleen Kraft, immediate past president of the AAP. "When a child draws this, it's telling us that child felt like he or she was in jail." "The first thing that hit me when we walked in the door was the smell. It was the smell of sweat, urine and feces," she said. "No amount of time spent in these facilities is safe for children."

"This is truly a very dark spot in US history," she said. "This will be remembered as a time when the US was cruel to immigrant children. It makes me wonder what kind of country are we that that we would treat children this way." 

A second lengthy piece in The Atlantic defines the measures of the Trump/Pence regime for what they are: crimes against humanity by looking at infamous prison camps and concentration camps of the past. If these practices continue, America will have forfeited any claim to being a moral and decent nation. Most disturbing is the manner in which Trump's "Christian" supporters are applauding these horrors.  Here are article excerpts:

The horrors detailed in the press were hard to believe.  Detainees described overcrowding so severe that “it was difficult to move in any direction without jostling and being jostled.” The water provided them was foul, “of a dark color, and an ordinary glass would collect a thick sediment.” The “authorities never removed any filth.”

Such were the conditions of the Confederate prisoner-of-war camp at Andersonville, Georgia, where, as the historian James McPherson wrote, 13,000 of the 45,000 men imprisoned “died of disease, exposure, or malnutrition.”

The former Confederate captain was arrested in 1865, shortly after the close of the Civil War. The Union accused him of intending to “impair and injure the health and to destroy the lives [of the prisoners], by subjecting [them] to torture and great suffering, by confining in unhealthy and unwholesome quarters.” Wirz was charged with conspiracy to murder Union prisoners by offering them spoiled food, fouled water, and inadequate living conditions and medical care.

Wirz didn’t see it that way—he insisted that he was just following orders. The conditions at the prison camp at Andersonville were not deliberate, he argued, but the result of the Confederacy’s lack of resources.

Yet the Confederacy’s lack of resources was not the chief cause of the horrors of Andersonville, because the Rebels did not have to keep the Union troops captive. In fact, they would have preferred to send many of their prisoners back. The Union, though, would not commit to troop exchanges unless black soldiers were included. It was more important to the Confederacy to treat black men as property than to obtain the return of their own troops, more important than preserving the lives of the Union captives, more important than relieving the logistical burden on their military prisons. If the Confederacy did not deliberately murder Union prisoners at Andersonville, its unshakable commitment to white supremacy made the deadly conditions at the prison inevitable. As the historian Andrea Pitzer wrote in One Long Night, Andersonville is seen by many scholars as a “harbinger of the civilian concentration camps that soon followed.” Concentration camps antedate the Holocaust by many decades, having been used by the Spanish in Cuba, the British in South Africa, and both sides in World War I. Pitzer identified concentration camps, in short, as “places of forced relocation of civilians into detention on the basis of group identity.” They are often created as a kind of collective punishment, although she noted, “Rarely have governments publicly acknowledged the use of camps as deliberate punishment.”
 Americans have again recoiled in shock and horror over the past few weeks as observers who visited immigration detention facilities in the Southwest reported that children were being held in cruelly austere conditions. These observers told the press that the children at a facility in Clint, Texas, were sleeping on concrete floors and being denied soap and toothpaste. They described “children as young as 7 and 8, many of them wearing clothes caked with snot and tears … caring for infants they’ve just met.” A visiting doctor called the detention centers “torture facilities.” At least seven children have died in U.S. custody in the past year, compared with none in the 10 years prior.

About 2,000 children are now being held by the U.S. government on any given day. As if these conditions were insufficiently punitive, the administration has canceled recreational activities, an act that, like the conditions themselves, likely violates the law.

At a processing center in El Paso, Texas, 900 migrants were “being held at a facility designed for 125. . . . One observer described the facility to Texas Monthly as a “human dog pound.” The government’s own investigators have found detainees in facilities run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement being fed expired food at detention facilities, “nooses in detainee cells,” “inadequate medical care,” and “unsafe and unhealthy conditions.”

The initial rollout of the family-separation policy, and then its denial, showed the Trump administration that its campaign of dehumanization against Latino immigrants is weakest when it targets children. This is the reason for the secrecy behind the squalid conditions at immigrant-detention facilities holding minors, which contrasts sharply with the very public announcements of “millions of deportations” by the president himself.

“They don’t want eyeballs on the actual conditions of these places,” said Amy Cohen, a doctor who consults on cases involving the 1993 Flores settlement, which continues to govern the conditions for children in immigration custody. “What they tell you is that they are protecting the privacy of these children. That makes no sense. What we need to be doing is protecting the lives of these children. And unfortunately, that does not seem to be a priority of the government.”

The journalist Jonathan Katz argued in May that given the intent behind these facilities, and the conditions that migrants are being held in, they are best described as a concentration-camp system in the United States.

The Trump administration wants to preserve the political and cultural hegemony of white Americans, and by extension the Republican Party, over the United States, and is willing to break the law to do so. But the crime being committed is not genocide. America, though, has its own history with concentration camps, going back long before Hitler rose to power. And the malice, indifference, and deadly incompetence with which these facilities are run echoes that history.

In 1901, Colonel Jacob H. Smith was court-martialed for his use of “reconcentration,” among other brutal tactics, during the American occupation of the Philippines in 1901. The Supreme Court infamously upheld the internment of Japanese civilians during World War II, including at a site that the government now wants to use to detain migrant children. The precursor to what Americans are seeing at the border is not Auschwitz, but Fort Sill, Batangas, and Andersonville.

Trump’s approach represents a steep escalation in cruelty. . . . One pediatrician who visited a Border Patrol facility in Texas observed “extreme cold temperatures, lights on 24 hours a day, no adequate access to medical care, basic sanitation, water, or adequate food.” Photographs show migrants huddled together, languishing in filth behind chain-link fences, some with little more than Mylar blankets for shelter. The president’s defenders on Fox News have compared these conditions to summer camp and house parties.

In private, some Border Patrol agents consider migrant deaths a laughing matter; others are succumbing to depression, anxiety, or substance abuse.

The Trump administration has consciously used immigration enforcement as a tool to terrorize undocumented immigrants and their American relatives, and to delight a base that revels in the use of state violence against those they see as trying to take their country from them, even to the point of undermining Trump’s own agencies’ enforcement operations. Top immigration officials have been purged, in part because, despite the extensive suffering Trump policies have created, the president’s advisers see the political leadership at DHS as “weak.”

Above all else, the Trump administration wants to send the message that immigrants, especially those of African or Latin American descent, are not welcome in the United States, and as far as detention facilities are concerned, incompetence or indifference will serve that cause as faithfully as malice.

The Trump administration could make it easier for migrants who do not pose a threat to public safety to be released pending deportation hearings, for which the overwhelming majority of undocumented immigrants show up, despite the president’s insistence otherwise. That would relieve the pressure on overstressed detention facilities. But it would also be insufficiently cruel, and therefore weak. And the cruelty is the point.

The argument over whether or not these facilities amount to concentration camps is almost beside the point. The semantic dispute obscures the true conflict, over whether the Trump administration’s treatment of migrants amounts to a historic crime, whether future generations will wonder how those involved could possibly have gone along with it, whether there will one day be memorials erected to commemorate it, whether historians write solemn books about it, whether those looking back will vow never to repeat it.

These facilities are just such a crime, by whatever name you choose to call them.

Tomorrow is the 4th of July.  I will not be celebrating given the ugly evil that America has become under this evil White House regime. I am ashamed to be an American and will be working diligently to weaken and/or end the Trump/Pence regime through any means available. If one counts themselves as a decent. moral person, they really have no other choice than to go into full time, 24/7 opposition mode. 

Kirstjen Nielsen Enforced Trump's Cruelty at the Border

Kirstjen Nielsen - handmaiden of evil.

Hopefully, history will be very cruel to Kirstjen Nielsen who as Secretary of Homeland Security enforced Donald Trump's horrific family separation policy which has left countless children separated from the parents.  It not's too much of a stretch to imagine Nielsen as a Nazi death camp commander or SS commander who saw her victims as less than human and, therefore deserving of any imaginable mistreatment. She's a symbol of the inhumane policies of Der  Trumpenführer, yet frighteningly, her replacement may be even more morally bankrupt give that Trump's main complaint was that she was not sufficiently brutal in pushing his racist policies.  An editorial in the New York Times looks at Nielsen's departure and the possibility of worse horrors ahead.  Here are excerpts: 

Time finally ran out for Kirstjen Nielsen, President Trump’s beleaguered secretary of homeland security.

The terms of Ms. Nielsen’s departure were unclear. She met with the president on Sunday evening to discuss continuing problems at the southern border. At the conclusion of the meeting, Mr. Trump said on Twitter that Ms. Nielsen “will be leaving her position” and thanked her for her service, implying he had asked her to step down. Ms. Nielsen issued a formal letter of resignation, saying it was the “right time for me to step aside.”

Considering the long-simmering tensions between the president and Ms. Nielsen, the most surprising thing about her departure may be that it didn’t happen months ago.

She was said to have become increasingly insecure in her job in recent weeks, as Mr. Trump repeatedly railed about the chaos at the border and vowed to move in a “tougher” direction. [Trump] The president grew impatient with Ms. Nielsen’s insistence that federal law and international obligations limited her actions.

It’s no secret that Mr. Trump had a problem with Ms. Nielsen, whom he considered “weak” on matters of border security. [Trump] The president and Stephen Miller, his hard-line immigration adviser, have long grumbled privately about the secretary’s insufficiently brutal approach to the surge in migrant families across the border.

In her resignation letter released on Sunday, Ms. Nielsen noted, “For more than two years of service beginning during the Presidential Transition, I have worked tirelessly to advance the goals and missions of the Department.”

This is hardly something to brag about. Whatever the secretary’s personal views, and no matter how impossible her job, she was the face of some of the administration’s most poorly conceived and gratuitously callous policies. At best, she was complicit and, yes, hopelessly weak.

Sadly, Ms. Nielsen’s response to her boss’s displeasure and abuse was both morally anemic and strategically incoherent. Last summer, as Republicans and Democrats — and many in the American public — protested the administration’s practice of tearing migrant children from their parents at the border, Ms. Nielsen rushed to publicly defend the policy. Scratch that. She insisted, repeatedly and bizarrely, that the administration had no such policy, even as her agency was enforcing and justifying it.

On the critical question of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 elections, she was even less lucid. At times, she seemed to support the intelligence community’s findings that the Kremlin had been up to no good. Other times, she supported the view that Russia had not favored Mr. Trump in the election. Her every utterance seemed designed to obfuscate rather than clarify.

For now, Ms. Nielsen’s acting replacement will be Kevin McAleenan, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection. This leaves Homeland Security without a top official at either of its critical immigration agencies.

The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said of Ms. Nielsen’s departure, “It is deeply alarming that the Trump administration official who put children in cages is reportedly resigning because she is not extreme enough for the White House’s liking.”

If Ms. Nielsen wants to perform one last act of public service, she could come clean about the costs of the policies she enforced over the past year and half, not only to the desperate migrants seeking a better life in the United States, but also to the thousands of employees of her department charged with carrying out an inhumane and ineffective set of policies.

The Democrat Quandary of Hispanic Voters

One of the big quandaries for Democrats as they approach the 2020 elections - here in Virginia, the same applies to the 2019 elections - is how they increase their margin of support among Hispanic voters.  With Trump in office, one would think Hispanic voters would be flocking to the polls to vote for almost any Democrat yet in Florida, Republicans wooed Hispanics and increased their margins while Democrat candidates failed to adequately campaign for the Hispanic vote and seemingly took it for granted.  The other issue that applies to all Millennials, but Hispanic Millennials in particular is the lower turn out among younger voters even as they will be the ones most harmed by Trump/GOP policies over time. A column in the New York Times looks at this issue (while not mentioned, I suspect GOP appeals to conservative Catholic Hispanics is also a problem).  Here are column highlights:

The future success of the Democratic Party depends on the crucial — but unsettled — allegiance of the nation’s growing Hispanic electorate.

Fernand Amandi, a Democratic pollster and podcast host based in Miami, addressed the party’s Latino quandary in a December interview with The Associated Press: The question is not are Democrats winning the Hispanic vote — it’s why aren’t Democrats winning the Hispanic vote 80-20 or 90-10 the way they are winning black voters?

In the 2018 midterms, Democrats showed gains among Hispanic voters in most states, compared with 2014. Party operatives are concerned, however, about the slow rate of growth of these improved Democratic margins. They are equally worried about turnout — at a time when many thought that President Trump’s rhetoric and policies would produce impressive gains among Latino voters for the Democratic Party.

Take turnout. Hispanics are one of the fastest growing ethnic constituencies in the United States, but their level of political participation is not keeping pace with their overall population numbers.

[T]he number of Hispanic voters in midterm elections has grown steadily, from 2.9 million in 1986 to 6.8 million in 2014. At the same time, however, turnout — measured as a percentage of total eligible adult citizens 18 and over — has experienced a relative decline.

In a preliminary analysis of Hispanic voter turnout last year, Catalist, a Democratic firm that builds voter lists, found significant increases in turnout of three to five percent, comparing 2018 with the 2014 midterms. Texas, Nevada and California saw five percent increases, Florida four percent, New Mexico and New York three percent.

Turnout rates and levels of support are two key (but quite different) political measures. While Latinos had a turnout rate of 27.1 percent in 2014, their support for Democratic House candidates that year was 62 percent. Their support for Republican House candidates was 36 percent, according to exit polls.

Republicans won two close statewide races in Florida in 2018, one for senate and one for governor — despite the gradual erosion of Republican support among Cuban-Americans in the state and despite the continuing influx of pro-Democratic Puerto Ricans in the wake of Hurricane Maria in 2017.

Nationally, Democrats went from 62-36 (26 pts) in 2014 to 69-29 (40 pts) this election. In Florida, Democrats went from 58-38 (20 pts) in 2014 to 54-44 (10 pts) this year. . . . this shift occurred despite the fact that Trump did everything possible to alienate Latinos, along with undercutting Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis, the winning Republican candidates for Senate and governor.

By all accounts, Scott and DeSantis campaigned almost daily in Hispanic precincts, while their Democratic opponents, Bill Nelson and Andrew Gillum, took the Hispanic vote for granted.

“We had no infrastructure,” Christian Ulvert, Gillum’s director for Spanish-language media, told Politico:

And honestly, Democrats have been playing catch-up on Hispanic outreach for two decades, because Republicans have invested in it. You can’t close that gap overnight.
Despite the decline in Republican support among Cuban-Americans, Michelson emphasized that [t]here has always been a contingent of Latinos who identify as Republican and are more interested in Republican/conservative (or anti-Communist) policies than in immigration issues or racism.

Revealing a contrast to Florida, Matt A. Barreto, a political scientist at U.C.L.A. and a co-founder of Latino Decisions, analyzed turnout and voting patterns in Texas. In a March report, Barreto described a huge pro-Democratic turnout increase there, ranging from 105 to 125 percent in eight counties where Hispanics make up more than 90 percent of the population. There were significant gains in counties with white majorities of 83 to 91 percent too, but these upturns were smaller, in the 35 to 55 percent range.

The ability of two conservative Florida Republicans to make such inroads simply by campaigning diligently suggests that the Democratic hold on Latinos is less firm than many believed.

The data, provided to The Times by Public Opinion Strategies, one of the two firms that conducted the survey, found that Trump’s approval among Hispanics was highest among men and among the affluent — 40 percent for both — and among men without college degrees, at 39 percent.

While many Democrats expected Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies, especially the family separation debacle, to produce a decisive shift to the left among Hispanics, that has not proved to be the case.

Asked about the declining share of eligible Hispanics turning out on Election Day, Barreto countered that the growing numbers of eligible Latinos are almost entirely driven by U.S. born young Latinos turning 18 and entering the eligible voter pool.

In a common pattern, Barreto pointed out, “young people have very low rates of voter registration and voter turnout — especially in midterm elections.” Because of that, Barreto said that in order to get a better picture, the data should be age-adjusted so that turnout levels of older voters of different races and ethnicities could be compared.
What conclusions and what questions remain in the wake of these complex and sometimes conflicting trends in the Hispanic electorate?

First and foremost, Latinos remain a decisively Democratic constituency, with important caveats.

Latinos’ partisan loyalties are much less hard and fast than, say, those of either African-Americans or white evangelicals. The results in Florida demonstrate that Democrats risk defeat if they fail to campaign heavily in Hispanic communities, and Republicans stand to gain at the margins if they are prepared to invest time, money and energy.

The major question mark going into 2020, assuming Trump is the Republican nominee, is whether Hispanic opposition to his presidency will prevent a recurrence of the Florida 2018 phenomenon. Will Trump’s presence so nationalize the election that down-ballot Republicans will face a brick wall when they try to make modest inroads among Hispanics?

To date, Trump has shown every intention of turning the election into a referendum on himself, and all the baggage he carries, with no regard for the political survival of fellow Republicans.

If anything, he appears determined to drive up hostility to him among Latinos. For the past two days, for example, the president has ranted on Twitter, attacking Puerto Rico and its political leaders.

Behaving this way, Trump may succeed in driving up support among “his people,” as he likes to call his voters. But if he keeps it up, he will be doing both his Democratic opponent and the Democratic Party as a whole a huge favor as far as the Latino vote goes.

The Need to Make Hard Decisions on Immigration Reform

In a very lengthy piece in The Atlantic former Republican David Frum makes a reasoned case for the need for comprehensive immigration reform and the need for liberals to get on-board as a means of preventing the fascist approach of racists and bigots (he doesn't name Trump and many in the GOP, but the inference is obvious.)  Of course, the GOP base doesn't want reform and Trump is exacerbating problems driving Central American refugees northward by announcing the end of all aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, stupidly believing that "punishing" the countries will stop the flow north.  Instead, expect the exact opposite to occur since the real solution would be to end the conditions driving refugees to flee in the first place.  Here are some highlights from the piece that looks at the issue from both a historic perspective and looking for a pragmatic way forward (read the entire piece):  

Through much of the 20th century, the United States received comparatively few immigrants. In the 60 years from 1915 until 1975, nearly a human lifetime, the United States admitted fewer immigrants than arrived, legally and illegally, in the single decade of the 1990s.

If you grew up in the 1950s, the 1960s, or even the 1970s, heavy immigration seemed mostly a chapter from the American past, narrated to the nostalgic strains of The Godfather or Fiddler on the Roof. The Ellis Island immigrant-inspection station—through which flowed the ancestors of so many of today’s Americans—closed in 1954. It reopened as a museum in 1990.

Yet rather than fading into history, immigration has only been accelerating. From 1990 to 2015, 44 million people left the global South to find new homes in the global North. They came from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. They came to the United States above all, but to the nations of Europe too. The United Kingdom has received nearly as many immigrants, relative to its population, as the United States has. Germany and Sweden have received more. Some 45 million foreign-born people now make their home in the United States. About 11 million to 12 million live here illegally.

As with climate change, separating annual fluctuations from long-term trends is important. Illegal immigration into the United States by Mexicans is now declining. Border crossings by Central Americans are steeply rising. Year by year, immigration numbers may shift up or down. But decade by decade, immigration is remaking nations on a world-altering scale.

By 2027, the foreign-born proportion of the U.S. population is projected to equal its previous all-time peak, in 1890: 14.8 percent. Under present policy, that percentage will keep rising to new records thereafter.

This massive new wave of immigration has brought many benefits to the United States. Of the 122 Americans who won a Nobel Prize from 2000 to 2018, 34 were immigrants. Four of the five Americans who won Nobels in 2016 were born outside the country. Of the 41 Fortune 500 companies created since 1985, eight had an immigrant founder. In many ways, the United States is a stronger, richer, and more dynamic country because of international migration. But large-scale immigration also comes with considerable social and political costs, and those must be accounted for. In November 2018, Hillary Clinton delivered a warning to Europeans that mass immigration was weakening democracy. “I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration, because that is what lit the flame,” Clinton said, referring to the upsurge of far-right populism destabilizing countries such as France and Hungary. “I admire the very generous and compassionate approaches that were taken, particularly by leaders like Angela Merkel, but I think it is fair to say Europe has done its part, and must send a very clear message—‘We are not going to be able to continue to provide refuge and support’—because if we don’t deal with the migration issue, it will continue to roil the body politic.” Clinton’s assessment of the European political situation is accurate. According to recent poll numbers, 63 percent of French people believe too many immigrants are living in their country. One-third of the British people who voted in 2016 to leave the European Union cited immigration as their primary reason. In Germany, 38 percent rate immigration as the most important issue facing their country. Thanks in great part to their anti-immigration messages, populist parties now govern Italy, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.

And of course, anti-immigration sentiment was crucial to the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States.

Immigration on a very large scale is politically stressful. Yet acknowledging that fact can be hazardous to mainstream politicians. . . . . It wasn’t always this way, even on the left. As recently as 2015, the senator and presidential aspirant Bernie Sanders defended at least some immigration restrictions in language drawn from the immigration-skeptical tradition of organized labor.

But the political rise of Donald Trump has radicalized many of his opponents on immigration. Some mainstream liberal commentators, such as Farhad Manjoo of The New York Times, have called for completely open borders. While not many Democrats have gone that far publicly, some—including most prominently the 2020 presidential hopefuls—have expressed ever greater unease about removing people who cross borders unauthorized. . . . While it would be destabilizing and impractical to remove all the people who have been living peaceably in this country for many years, it does not follow that any non-felon who sets foot in the U.S. has a right to stay here.

Trump demagogically seized on the caravan as a voting issue before the November midterm elections—and goaded many of his critics to equally inflammatory responses. “This whole caravan in the last week of the election is a giant lie. This is Trump’s Reichstag fire. It is a lie,” said a guest on MSNBC’s All In With Chris Hayes. But however manipulatively oversold, the caravan existed . . . .

Demagogues don’t rise by talking about irrelevant issues. Demagogues rise by talking about issues that matter to people, and that more conventional leaders appear unwilling or unable to address: unemployment in the 1930s, crime in the 1960s, mass immigration now. Voters get to decide what the country’s problems are. Political elites have to devise solutions to those problems. If difficult issues go unaddressed by responsible leaders, they will be exploited by irresponsible ones.

Across the developed world, very high levels of immigration have coincided with widening class divisions, the discrediting of political and economic elites, and the rise of extremist politics. And immigration pressures will only intensify in the decades ahead, for reasons obscured by media coverage of immigrants as poor and desperate. That coverage isn’t entirely wrong.

Since 1990, the number of human beings living in extreme poverty—defined as less than $2 a day—has declined by nearly two-thirds. . . . That comparative affluence allows the strivers to buy things once impossibly out of reach: air conditioners, smartphones, motorized vehicles. But the thing those strivers want more than anything else—the great golden ticket into a whole new life—is exit from the less successful countries of the global South into the more successful countries of the global North.

We are talking here about astonishingly large numbers of potential immigrants—large and fast-growing. Egypt will add 50 million people to its population over the next three decades. Bangladesh will reach 200 million people; Pakistan, 300 million. The populations of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, countries that have already sent so many people northward, will rise by 50 percent by 2050, to more than 47 million. Twenty-six African countries will double their population by the time today’s college seniors celebrate their 50th birthday. Altogether, the population of Africa in 2050 will almost equal the entire population of the world in 1950: 2.5 billion people.

Hundreds of millions of people will want to become Americans. Only a relatively small number realistically can. Who should choose which ones do? According to what rules? How will those rules be enforced? The Trump-era debate about a wall misses the point. The planet of tomorrow will be better educated, more mobile, more networked. Huddling behind a concrete barrier will not hold the world at bay when more and more of that world can afford a plane ticket. If Americans want to shape their own national destiny, rather than have it shaped by others, they have decisions to make now.

But at present, the most important immigration decisions are made through an ungainly and ill-considered patchwork of policies. Almost 70 percent of those who settle lawfully in the United States gained entry because they were close relatives of previously admitted immigrants. Many of those previously admitted immigrants were in their turn relatives of someone who had arrived even earlier.

In almost every legal immigration category, the United States executes its policy less by conscious decision than by excruciating delay. The backlog of people whose immigration petitions have been approved for entry but who have not yet been admitted is now nearing 4 million. (Only spouses and children are exempted from annual numerical caps.)

The question before the United States and other advanced countries is not: Immigration, yes or no? In a mobile world, there will inevitably be quite a lot of movement of people. Immigration is not all or nothing. The questions to ask are: How much? What kind?

Too little immigration, and you freeze your country out of the modern world. Too much, or the wrong kind, and you overstress your social-insurance system—and possibly upend your democracy. Choose well, and you build a stronger, richer country for both newcomers and the long-settled. Choose badly, and you aggravate inequality and inflame intergroup hostility. How we choose will shape the future that will in its turn shape us.

[A]ccording to a 2016 survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and The Atlantic, nearly half of white working-class Americans agree with this statement: “Things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.”

A classic 2005 study by the social scientist Karen Stenner predicted the consequences of such feelings. In any given population, according to Stenner, roughly one-third of people will have authoritarian tendencies. This habit of mind is just part of the way human beings are, in much the same way that a certain percentage will be born with depressive tendencies.

Happily, the authoritarian tendency does not necessarily lead to authoritarian politics. In secure and stable circumstances, it goes dormant.

The extremism and authoritarianism that have surged within the developed world since 2005 draw strength from many social and economic causes. Immigration is only one of them—but it is typically the spark that ignites the larger conflagration. Immigration has done particular damage to political parties of the moderate left. From the 1970s until the 2010s, social-democratic parties dominated the politics of the European Union member states. As of last spring, among the 28 governments of the EU, only Malta, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, and Sweden were led by social democrats.

Build Central America, Not a Wall

The maternal side of my family is intertwined with Central America. My own mother was born in Honduras - which has become a hell hole on the mainland - and later lived in Panama.  I myself qualify for dual citizenship under Honduran law.  As a family, my siblings and I own investments in Honduras that were handed down through my mother's family which left Central America before I was born.  Sadly, Honduras' horrific state of affairs is  in no small part due to bad decisions made in Washington, DC, that focused on supposed strategic decisions that paid no concern for the welfare of that nation's population.  Now, Honduras is one of the main points of origin of the thousands seeking asylum in the USA to escape the fruits of the USA's bad actions and decisions.  An editorial in the New York Times argues that building the economies of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras would go much farther than building a fruitless wall is the real solution to the USA's illegal immigration issue.  Here are excerpts:

As thousands of families fleeing violence, poverty and oppression in Central America arrive at the American border, the Trump administration has responded by separating children and parents and cracking down on asylum claims.

A more humane, and effective, response would be to address the sources of the desperation that propelled these people north. President Trump chose on Monday to reaffirm his punitive bent, complaining about the exodus of migrants and saying he told the leaders of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, whose countries receive millions of dollars in annual aid, “We’re not sending it anymore.” But what if the United States truly prioritized helping these nations?

Plagued by corruption, violence and gang terror, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras need stronger and more honest judges and police officers, better schools and economic development. Elites control much of the land and avoid taxes, even at some of the lowest tax rates in Latin America. Bribery is rampant, and too often leaders lack the interest, competence or will to manage such problems.

Over the years, the United States has contributed to instability by supporting autocrats in civil wars and tolerating corruption that has bred criminality. In 2017, Washington recognized the results of the Honduran presidential election days after the Organization of American States called for new elections because of voting irregularities.

The United States has also invested in Latin America for decades to promote democracy and economic and social development. But the Trump administration has begun to place “more emphasis on preventing illegal immigration, combating transnational crime and generating export and investment opportunities for U.S. businesses,” . . .

While the administration has tried to scale back aid, Congress has resisted, appropriating $2.1 billion for the region from 2016 to 2018, roughly double what had previously been allocated.

Results are mixed: While murder rates in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras declined in 2018, they are still very high, fueled by the trafficking of 90 percent of the cocaine bound for the United States. Economic growth has been steady since 2014, but poverty rates are relatively unchanged. While officials have pursued criminal cases involving presidents and other leaders, opposition from political and economic interests threatens to upend their work.

Eradicating gangs, which drive much of the northward migration, is especially difficult. The International Crisis Group has warned that mass deportations from the United States risk fueling gang violence unless accompanied by serious economic investment in impoverished communities. Just subjecting gang members to harsh prisons and branding them terrorists has backfired, the group said.

In the end, it is Central American leaders who must carry out reforms. They are more apt to do that with international support. But America can slow the exodus of the desperate by investing in democracy, judicial reform and economic growth. So far, Mr. Trump has shown little interest.