Most Americans See Trump As a Racist Madman

I suspect that core Donald trump supporters who are poorly educated white males would call me an elitist.  Then, of course, I'm a "faggot" in their eyes as well, so I am not doubt doubly suspect in their eyes.  That said, I find myself feeling like some decent, moral Germans did watching Hitler's rise in the early 1930's and wondering what was wrong with their countrymen.  How could they be rallying to a demagogue of questionable sanity?  Inexplicably, in my view, other than through an admission that many Americans are not nice and decent people despite their self-congratulations to the contrary, there seems to be little to explain Donald Trump's continued polling that puts him close to Hillary Clinton, but at least for now still behind.  Making the situation more bizarre are polls that show a majority of Americans see Trump as a racist madman.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the disturbing phenomenon.  Here are excerpts:

As of this writing, Donald Trump trails Hillary Clinton by three points in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, while FiveThirtyEight’s election forecast gives the Republican nominee a 40 percent chance of winning the White House this November.

The fact that an emotionally volatile, authoritarian demagogue — who has campaigned on his contempt for minority groups and the norms of liberal democracy — could prove so competitive in a presidential race has led many pundits to accuse the news media of abject failure: Clearly, the fourth estate has not given the American people an accurate assessment of the choices before them.

There’s some sound evidence for this view. The media’s fixation on Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server has left much of the public ignorant of virtually everything else the Democratic nominee brings to the 2016 race.

Meanwhile, Trump is the most mendacious candidate in modern American history — and yet voters see him as “more honest and straightforward” than his opponent. What’s more, even though his economic program consists of supply-side tax cuts and deregulatory schemes that most Americans oppose — and his career in business has been marked by corruption and incompetence — many polls show a majority of voters saying Trump would be better at handling the economy.

Still, it’s hard to pin full blame for these latter misapprehensions on the media: Trump has been fact-checked with unprecedented aggression — by newspapers, cable news anchors, even chyron writers. 

But the Republican nominee boasts many deficiencies that are easy to convey. It’s not hard to show the public that Trump is bigoted, ill-tempered, and unpredictable in his behavior — you just need to broadcast his rallies. And, at that task, cable news has excelled. A pair of new polls show that the message of those rallies has gotten through to the electorate.

An Associated Press–GfK survey released Friday finds that a majority of Americans think Trump is at least somewhat racist, while 60 percent say he does not respect ordinary people, and nearly three-quarters say he is neither civil nor compassionate — a sentiment endorsed by 40 percent of Trump’s own supporters.

A new SurveyMonkey poll shows Americans taking an even darker view of the Republican nominee, with a majority of voters saying Trump would abuse the power of the presidency to punish his political opponents, allow the U.S. to default on its debt, inspire “race riots” in major cities, create a database to track Muslim Americans, and order air strikes against the families of terrorists.

A full 46 percent of the electorate says Trump will detonate a nuclear weapon during his time in office, while 44 percent say he will establish internment camps for illegal immigrants.

The upshot of both of these surveys, when taken together, is that Donald Trump has not been “normalized.” Most Americans see him as a racist would-be authoritarian who is highly likely to start a nuclear war. The trouble is, some voters apparently like that in a president.

According to SurveyMonkey, 48 percent of Trump supporters believe he will create a database for monitoring Muslims; 33 percent think he’ll let the government default on its debt; 32 percent say he’ll use the Executive branch’s authority to persecute political opponents and establish internment camps for the undocumented; and 22 percent — nearly a quarter — say he’ll probably start a nuclear war.

Due to a combination of party polarization, Hillary Clinton’s high unfavorable numbers, unusually popular third-party candidates — and an openness to extremism far more widespread in the electorate than most political observers had realized — it now seems possible that Trump could win the presidency this November, even as more than half the country sees him as a bigoted madman.

Be very, very afraid.

Donald Trump's Ideology of Violence

Following up on the last post, Ezra Klein has a piece in Vox that looks deeper into Donald Trump's responsibility for the growing violence his supporters are willing to direct at those Trump is labeling as "other" or "them."  Like his Nazi predecessors, the fault for the circumstances in which his supporters find themselves is never due to their own failings - e.g., not finishing high school, clinging to and embracing ignorance, etc. - but due to someone else's behavior or undermining.  Those falling into the "other" or "them" categories are blacks, Hispanic immigrants, non-whites, non-Christians - the list is long.  And while Trump tries to blame the violence on outside protesters, he is continually send them message that is is perfectly alright - perhaps desired - that protesters be met with violence.  It is very, very scary.  That evangelical Christians are rallying to such a message shows the reality that conservative Christianity is itself a threat and evil as well.  Here are article highlights:

During a rally in St. Louis Friday, Donald Trump lamented that "nobody wants to hurt each other anymore." Yes, lamented.

The topic was protesters, and Trump's frustration was clear. "They're being politically correct the way they take them out," he sighed. "Protesters, they realize there are no consequences to protesting anymore. There used to be consequences. There are none anymore."

"Our country has to toughen up folks. We have to toughen up. These people are bringing us down. They are bringing us down. These people are so bad for our country, you have no idea."

This is more than an aside; this is the core of Trump's ideology. The protesters who interrupted his rally, the political correctness that kept the police from cracking their skulls, the press that takes the hippies' side — this is why America has stopped being great. We were strong, and we were tough, and we didn't take this kind of shit from anybody. And now we are weak, and we are scared, and we take this kind of shit from everybody.

How is a country that can't shut down a protester going to out-negotiate the Chinese? How is a country that that is so afraid of hurt feelings going to crush ISIS?

Violence is scary. But violence-as-ideology is terrifying. And that's where Trump's campaign has gone.

On February 1st, Trump made a promise to an angry crowd. You protect me, he said, and I'll protect you. "If you see someone getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. Knock the hell out of them. I promise you I will pay for the legal fees. I promise."

No one threw a tomato at that rally. But a few weeks later, Donald Trump showed that he meant what he said — if you used force to protect him, he'd have your back.  Trump was leaving a rally when Michelle Fields, a reporter for the Trump-friendly Breitbart News, stepped forward to ask a question. Corey Lewandowski, Donald Trump's campaign manager, grabbed her by the arm and threw her out of the way. His grip was hard enough to leave bruises on her arm. The moment was witnessed by Ben Terris, a Washington Post reporter, and there's audio and video record of it.

Donald Trump will pay your legal fees. He will believe your baldfaced lie. He is on your side against the protesters, the press, the losers who are bring America down. He knows things get rough sometimes. He's got your back.

The great mistake the media makes with Donald Trump is to pretend he has no ideology — that he's just a celebrity, a carnival barker, a reality star.

As my colleague Matt Yglesias has written, Trump does have an ideology. He does have an agenda. The core of Trumpism is "a revived and unapologetic American nationalism, which will stand for American interests abroad while defending the traditional conception of the American nation at home."

Like most nationalists, the emotional center of Trump's ideology is an Us vs. Them argument. "These are not the people who made our country great," Trump told the crowd in St. Louis. "We're going to make it great again, but these are not the people. These are the people that are destroying our country."

This is what Trump supporters hear at his rallies. They are told that America is no longer great. They are told who to blame. They are told that the reason these losers are dragging America down is we have become too politically correct, too scared, too weak, to stop them. They are told Trump will pay their legal fees if they want to do what's necessary. "There used to be consequences," Trump sighs. The crowd knows what he's asking. Make Consequences Real Again.

This is ugly, but it is coherent. What Trump is offering is an explanation and a solution; an argument and an ideology. It is dangerous, and it is violent, but it is not confusing, and it is not unclear.

And this is why Trump is something different and more dangerous in American life. He is a man with an evident appetite for suppressing dissent with violence, a man who believes America's problem is that it's too gentle to its dissidents. Trump is making an argument for a politics backed by force, for a security service unleashed from "political correctness," for a country where protesting has consequences. The results are playing out before us, night after night, on our televisions.

If Trump wins and this country goes down a dark path, we will never be able to say we didn't see it coming. We will never be able to say we weren't warned. 

Be very afraid - but also, do not sit back and quietly let this ugliness grow.  Trump and the ugliness that he and the GOP represent must be defeated.  Get involved and for God's sake get out an vote Democrat come November.

"Last Supper" Flap Dredges Up the Real Ken Cuccinelli

Once again the Virginia GOP and Ken Cuccinelli have garnered negative national attention for Virginia.  This time the negative image arose from the joke told by cretinous John Whitbeck, the Virginia 10th Congressional District Republican Committee chairman, at a campaign rally in Northern Virginia that disparaged Jews.   It's a strong reminder that today's Virginia GOP - and the national party as well - is all about exclusion.  If you are not a white, racist, anti-Semite, homophobic Christofascists, you are not welcome in the GOP.  Ken Cuccinelli and Mark Obenshain have been trying to blow smoke screens in the campaigns to hide this truth ("Bishop" Jackson is seemingly too delusional to grasp that extremist insanity doesn't win over most voters).  As a piece in The Daily Beast notes, the anti-Semitic brouhaha is a good reminder of what the real Ken Cuccinelli is all about.  Here are highlights:

Once again, wordplay and ethnicity wounded an office-seeking Virginia Republican. On Tuesday John Whitbeck, Virginia’s 10th Congressional District Republican Committee chair, made the news as he warmed up a Constitution Day rally at which Ken Cuccinelli was the featured speaker by telling a joke that ran counter to the spirit of Vatican II, to say the least, and again brought into focus the Virginia GOP’s dual problems with modernity and electability.

Whitbeck got the crowd going by reciting a tale about how the head of the Jewish religion presented the pope with a bill for the Last Supper. Apparently, there’s nothing like the tropes of deicide and frugality to get voters to the polls. Or not.

Within hours, the Twitterverse lit up like an ecumenical Christmas tree, the Virginia Democratic Party circulated a video of Whitbeck’s attempt at a few yuks, and the Cuccinelli campaign sought to put some distance between Whitbeck and its candidate, who wasn’t yet on the stage.

Virginians had seen this movie before. Sort of. 

Back in 2006, then–U.S. senator George Allen (R-VA) hurled the North African pejorative “macaca” at his opponent’s video tracker, S.R. Sidarth, an Indian-American. Allen went on to lose his reelection bid by less than 1 percent to Jim Webb (D-VA) . . .

As a practical matter, Whitbeck’s remarks will personally offend only a sliver of the electorate, with Jews making up only 3 percent of Virginia’s voters in 2012, according to exit polls. More broadly, though, Whitbeck’s attempt at humor will likely remind folks about things that Cuccinelli & Co. wish people would just forget, things like Cuccinelli’s own brushes with birth, ethnicity, and nationality.

In a 2010 interview, Cuccinelli raised the possibility of tying Virginia’s challenge to Obamacare to the president having been born in Kenya and thus ineligible for office—despite that Obama’s mother was American born, raised in Kansas, and a descendant of New England abolitionists.

[T]he Cuccinelli campaign sought to quickly douse the fire of Whitebeck’s Last Supper joke.  . . . . For good measure, LaCivita added, “I don’t even know who the guy is.”

Dissociation is one thing, but denial is another—especially when it is false, especially when the guy you claimed not to know is the guy who actually nominated your guy for governor, and especially when the guy you claimed not to know previously emceed a campaign event for your guy.

Alas for Cuccinelli, as his brush with modernity now appears to be short-lived. For the next 24 hours, the candidate will likely be left to clean up a mess that was not of his own making—for once.

Back in the spring, the race appeared winnable for Cuccinelli, as polls showed him leading by as many as 10 points. Not anymore. Since then Cuccinelli has been saddled with defending his own record on social issues and ethics and with a running mate for lieutenant governor, the Rev. E.W. Jackson, who makes Cuccinelli look, well, moderate. Back in May, Cuccinelli announced that he was “just not going to defend” Jackson’s “statements at every turn.” Now, with time running out, Cuccinelli has embraced the once unembraceable.

It would do the New Jersey–born Cuccinelli well to remember that Virginia is very much part of the 21st century.

Ouch!!  That's right, Cuccinelli was once again caught lying.  He knows Whitbeck well and probably laughed it up when he heard the joke until he realized it would not play well outside of the GOP bubble.  It is also laughable that Cuccinelli claims that Terry McAuliffe "isn't a Virginian" when he himself was born in New Jersey.  McAuliffe has lived in Virginia as long or longer than Kookinelli as an adult.

Quote of the Day: The GOP Is a Religious Organization, Not a Political One.

As regular readers know, I come from a family of former Republicans and served myself some years ago on the City Committee for the Republican Party of Virginia Beach.  I remember when what began as an  infiltration of the GOP by Christofascists commenced and, as the GOP moved away from honoring the concept of the separation of church and state I resigned from the GOP.  Things have only gotten far, far worse over the years since I walked away in from the GOP in a combination of disgust and fear.  At this point, all of my immediate family members have walked away from the GOP as well - as did my late parents before their passing.  The fusion of religion and politics was the number one reason we all walked away.  Andrew Sullivan has a spot on description of what today's GOP has become.  Here's the pertinent language:

The GOP, at its core, is a religious organization, not a political one. It is digging in deeper on immigration reform, and marriage equality, and abortion. It is not acting as a rational actor in political competition but as a fundamentalist movement, gerrymandering its way to total resistance to modernity’s increasing diversity of views and beliefs. It is emphatically not a socially conservative force: it is a radical, fundamentalist movement, incapable of accepting any political settlement that does not comport with unchanging, eternal dicta.

It is the great tragedy of the era that Republicans targeted one of the few grass-roots, genuinely conservative movements [gay marriage proponents] as their implacable enemy in the last quarter century. They went after the one group truly trying to shore up and support marriage – and they even wanted to amend the Constitution to do so. They did so, I believe, for one reason alone: fundamentalism. And that is not conservatism. In so many ways, it is conservatism’s eternal nemesis: the refusal to adjust to the times in favor of an ideology that never changes.

Candidly, I do not see how the Christofascist take over can be easily reversed.  Particularly here in Virginia where the Virginia GOP is an arm of The Family Foundation, a virulently anti-gay and anti-minority organization of extremists.

The Incredible, Shrinking Virginia Republican Vote

As the last two presidential elections have shown, when a majority of voters turn out at the polls, in state wide races Virginians increasingly support progressive, future facing Democrat candidates.  Part of the phenomenon is due to Virginia's changing demographics, but it is also a result of the increasing extremism of the Virginia GOP which caters more and more to far right theocratic religious extremists, anti-modernity conspiracy theorists and racist white supremacists. Many of my former GOP colleagues continue to refuse to face the reality of what the GOP has become and/or seem to now be drinking the racist/ignorance embracing/religious extremist Kool-Aid themselves.  The good news, however, is the overall GOP voter base in Virginia is shrinking.  A column in the Richmond Times Dispatch looks at the trend and the growing insanity of the Virginia GOP.  Here are column excerpts:

Scott Lingamfelter is among seven candidates for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor. Attempting to stand out in the crowded field, Lingamfelter is emphasizing his record as a state legislator. These days, that includes going toe-to-toe with a menacing threat to the free and sovereign people of Virginia: busybodies — his word — at the United Nations.

Lingamfelter, a former Army artilleryman who now lobs bombast, is thundering over Agenda 21, a voluntary U.N. program that promotes environmental protection and controls on growth. To tea party Republicans such as Lingamfelter, Agenda 21 is overreach by an unelected de facto global government.

Not to be outdone, Steve Martin, a Chesterfield County senator and one of Lingamfelter’s rivals for the nomination, is proposing a wild and crazy idea that has nothing to do with fixing roads, improving schools and expanding health care: putting the General Assembly on record against a U.N. nuclear arms treaty.

The Lingamfelter missive is a reminder that, as the big party in state government, the GOP often thinks small. It has to, if it is to retain the power that depends on shrinking voter turnouts and sharply partisan redistricting, both of which ensure that the most conservative voters, including Lingamfelter’s fellow one-world worrywarts, have the greatest influence.

In last year’s election, President Barack Obama held Virginia with just under 2 million votes. His winning territory included Lingamfelter’s Prince William County-anchored House of Delegates district. However, the eight Republican incumbents in the state’s 11-member U.S. House delegation were re-elected with a combined total of about 1.6 million votes.

Congressional lines drawn by a Republican-controlled General Assembly and approved by a Republican governor bundle Republican voters.

The pattern is repeated at the legislative level and reinforced by the GOP’s nominating process; this year, a convention. It is an insiders-only exercise that attracts a sliver of the electorate, usually those voters with the strongest feelings about the narrowest issues. Among them: Agenda 21, which the uninformed might mistake for a Manhattan nightspot for the well-organized.

In Virginia, more than 5 million people are registered to vote. The Republican convention in Richmond would be a barn-burner if it drew 10,000.

Del. Rob Bell of Albemarle, running for attorney general, may have perfected the narrow-casting that gets Republicans nominated but not necessarily elected.

Bell is again carrying the so-called Tebow bill. Defeated last year, it is named for the home-schooled pro quarterback and would allow future Tim Tebows in Virginia to do as he did in Florida: participate in public school athletics.

Bell is proposing a no-exception rule that Virginians produce a photo ID at the polls. Current voter ID laws, demanded by Republicans in Virginia and other states in the run-up to the 2012 election, allow a variety of documents and records. In Virginia, that includes utility bills.

But the new law hasn’t ended Republican fussing over alleged voter fraud, a rarity in an era of electronic voting.  Talk about busybodies.

The entire approach to the GOP's efforts to retain power while alienating more and more of the electorate is to gerrymander districts and to seek to disenfranchise as many Virginians as possible.  Welcome to democracy Virginia GOP style.

How the G.O.P. Became the Anti-Urban (and Anti-Knowledge) Party

There are many things wrong with today's Republican Party not the least of which is its transformation into a sectarian party controlled by the most extreme elements of the ignorance embracing, objective reality denying Christian Right.  Thus, as a lengthy column in the New York Times examines, today's GOP has largely rejected cities from its agenda since urban areas typically do not buy into the party's anti-knowledge agenda and thinly veiled racism and anti-gay bigotry.   Symptomatic of this reality is that even in Virginia, the more urban cities tend to almost uniformly vote Democrat.  In doing so, however, the GOP and its Christianist/Tea Party base sharply narrow the pool of would be supporters.  Here are some column highlights:

A LEADING Republican columnist, trying to re-stoke her candidate’s faltering campaign before the first presidential debate, felt so desperate that she advised him to turn to cities. 

“Wade into the crowd, wade into the fray, hold a hell of a rally in an American city — don’t they count anymore?” Peggy Noonan lamented in The Wall Street Journal. “A big, dense city with skyscrapers like canyons, crowds and placards, and yelling. All of our campaigning now is in bland suburbs and tired hustings.” 

But the fact is that cities don’t count anymore — at least not in national Republican politics.  The very word “city” went all but unheard at the Republican convention, held in the rudimentary city of Tampa, Fla. The party platform ratified there is over 31,000 words long.

The very few sections that address urban concerns contain similar complaints about cities’ current priorities — not to mention the very idea of city life. The Republican platform bitterly denounces the Democrats for diverting some highway fund money to Amtrak and harrumphs that it is “long past time for the federal government to get out of the way and allow private ventures to provide passenger service to the Northeast corridor. The same holds true with regard to high-speed and intercity rail across the country.” 

The Obama administration, the Republicans conclude damningly, is “replacing civil engineering with social engineering as it pursues an exclusively urban vision of dense housing and government transit.” 

Unsurprisingly, the chairman of the Republican platform committee, Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia, is from a state that has no city with a population of 500,000 or more. One of his two “co-chairmen” was Senator John Hoeven of North Dakota, which ranks 47th among the states in population density. The other was Marsha Blackburn, who represents a largely suburban district of Tennessee. 

IT could hardly be otherwise. The Republican Party is, more than ever before in its history, an anti-urban party, its support gleaned overwhelmingly from suburban and rural districts — especially in presidential elections.   This wasn’t always the case.  During the heyday of the urban political machines, from the Civil War to the Great Depression, Republicans used to hold their own in our nation’s great cities.

In the 1928 presidential election, the Republican Herbert Hoover swept to victory while carrying cities all across the country: Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Chicago; Detroit; Atlanta; Birmingham, Ala.; Houston; Dallas; Omaha and Los Angeles. With the possible exception of Houston or maybe Omaha, it’s all but inconceivable that Mr. Romney will carry any of those cities.

The Great Depression secured their loyalty to the Democratic Party. Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the cities showcases for the New Deal — especially New York, under the liberal Republican reformer, Fiorello H. La Guardia. Federal money poured in, but in the end the New Deal was about more than building new bridges or getting people off the bread lines. Contrary to Mr. Romney’s contention that government aid automatically turns people into “victims” and “dependents,” Washington’s intervention turned urban Americans from subjects into citizens who could claim the necessities of life as a right, not a favor. 

Save for mavericks like La Guardia, Republicans had little to add to this battle for the soul of the city. Increasingly, a Republican mayor of a major city became a curiosity. In presidential elections, big cities went Republican only during landslides.  

FOR Republicans, cities now became object lessons on the shortcomings of activist government and the welfare state — sinkholes of crime and social dysfunction, where Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” cavorted in their Cadillacs. 

But urban living was far from dead. Instead, the American economy began to reinvent itself in cities, as they became cleaner, greener, safer, more prosperous, more fun. As the demographic wheel turned again, both new immigrants and a generation of Americans born and raised in the ’burbs moved back in.  

Today, four-fifths of the population lives in an urban area — the highest percentage in our history. Although the country remains largely suburban, one in 12 Americans lives in a city of over a million people. More than ever, they are stakeholders, owning where previous generations rented, creating their own jobs and opportunities. . . . . Most of these individuals are skilled, highly educated “job creators” for themselves and others — the very demographic that Republicans claim to want to attract. 

Yet the national Republican Party still can’t get seem to get past its animus toward the very idea of urban life. The only place that Amtrak turns a profit is the Northeast corridor — yet all Republicans can think to do is privatize it, along with the local rail lines on which millions of Americans have been commuting into cities to work for as long as a century and a half. Republicans promise to ban same-sex marriage, make it easier for anyone to get a gun, delegitimize and destroy what they mockingly call “public employees’ unions,” and deport the immigrant workers performing so many thankless but vital tasks. 

In short, they promise to rip and tear at the immensely complex fabric of city life while sneering at the entire “urban vision of dense housing and government transit.” There is a terrible arrogance here that has ramifications well beyond the Republicans’ electoral prospects.

A Republican Party seeking to actively win cities, not just vilify them or suppress their vote, could open the party up to all sorts of new immigrant voters, like Asian and Latino Americans — and maybe even bring back part of an old voting bloc: black people.  

The prospects for any such change don’t seem high right now. But that may change, too, out of necessity. The Republican refusal to contest the cities has left them in a permanently defensive stance in national campaigns. . . . . Republicans increasing their percentage of the vote mainly in aging districts that are losing population. In the meantime, as urban areas continue to grow, they become more and more intertwined with what were once distant suburbs, making “urban” issues all the more pertinent to everyone. 

Republicans may not want to go to the cities. But that doesn’t much matter. The cities are coming to them. 

Personally, I hope the GOP does not wake up to the fact that its anti-city mindset is part of what I hope and believe is slow form of suicide.  One can only hope that the resultant death comes sooner as opposed to later.

Today's Republicans And Their Antipathy Towards Democracy

Mixed throughout much of the hate and vitriol disseminated by today's Republican Party against those who are not whites, straight, conservative Christians - and according to Mitt Romney the 47% of Americans who are parasites - is a mindset that all others are not "real Americans."  So what does one do if you are a member in today's Republican Party?   You try to disenfranchise "those people" who do not look like you, think like you or subscribe to a fear and hate based version of Christianity.  In short, you try to distort democracy so that those you don't like cannot vote.  The GOP backed voter ID laws are a prime example.  Laws that seek to address a problem that doesn't exist and the real goals of which are to disenfranchise blacks, Hispanics, the poor, etc.  The people that per the GOP aren't "real Americans" and who I suspect Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan and their "family values" Christofascist view as something less than fully human. Ana Marie Cox has a piece that looks at the GOP antipathy towards democracy where all citizens get to vote.  Here are excerpts:

The Drudge Report, which I've always considered more mischievous than malicious, gave "Unskewedpolls.com" some link love earlier this week. The site tinkers with the poll results of major firms by re-weighting them  . . . .

At their heart, Unskewed Polls express a pseudoscientific rationalization for a pre-existing belief: the mathematical equivalent of intelligent design. But the site represents more than just modern conservatism's skepticism about science; it underscores what has become a more animating and alarming concern – conservatives' distrust of democracy as a process.

This is nothing new, of course. . . . .  Anti-Federalists. . . . pushed successfully for the US constitution to mandate election of senators by state legislatures and not voters – a quaint affectation that was superseded by the 17th amendment in 1913.  There is a growing movement among Republican elected officials to repeal that amendment; among those advocates are five Republican Senate nominees.

However, it is one thing to wonder if the mass electorate can make good decisions and quite another to back-engineer the exclusion of a specific class of voters for the sake of a specific outcome. That, of course, is what voter ID laws do.

But voter ID laws are just a specific, particularly obvious example of a generalized contempt for voters. A better reflection of the mood: Romney's careless dismissal of 47% of America. The comment wasn't just callous and strategically idiotic (Karl Rove, who masterminded the GOP's outreach to "ungettable" voters, must have hurt his head banging it against the wall when he heard); it reflected also the apparently widespread presumption among GOP supporters that democracy is a zero-sum game – and that voters are motivated out of greed.

Republicans' assault on democracy (the voter ID laws, the repeal of the 17th amendment, the creeping disempowerment of women) is probably designed to scare those exact voters they want to disenfranchise as much as it is to legally disenfranchise them. Anti-voter ID activists often say that making someone believe their vote won't count is as effective as actually barring the vote.

So, you know, bring it on. It's not the 47% that needs to worry; it's Romney.