More Wednesday Male Beauty

 

The Capitol Insurrectionists Weren’t "Low Class"

Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenfuhrer, reportedly complained about the "low class" nature of the insurrectionists he recruited to come to Washington, DC, and then incited to attack and sack the U.S. Capitol. One of the myths of Trump's 2016 surprise election victory was that he had won the support of financially insecure working class voters who wanted someone to champion their concerns.  Of course, numerous studies subsequently found that racism, not financial worries and insecurity, was the prime motivator for many of the voters who flocked to Trump in 2016.  I suspect future studies will confirm a similar phenomenon for 2020 Trump's voters despite their claims to the contrary.  Increasingly it appears that many, if not a majority, of the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, were not impoverished or low class. They had the financial means to travel cross country and stay at at pricey Washington, DC, hotels. That said, they certainly seem to have been intellectually stupid in that they thought the could sack the Capitol, have photos of themselves all over the Internet and on national news shows and even bragged about their actions on social media yet somehow thought there'd be no consequences for their actions. A case of dumb and dumber even if not low class financially.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at these insurrectionist who hopefully face harsh punishments a draws parallels with past racist movements that involved so-called respectable people.  Here are excerpts:

They were business owners, CEOs, state legislators, police officers, active and retired service members, real-estate brokers, stay-at-home dads, and, I assume, some Proud Boys.

The mob that breached the Capitol last week at President Donald Trump’s exhortation, hoping to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, was full of what you might call “respectable people.” They left dozens of Capitol Police officers injured, screamed “Hang Mike Pence!,” threatened to murder House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and set up a gallows outside the building. Some were extremists using the crowd as cover, but as federal authorities issue indictments, a striking number of those they name appear to be regular Americans.

Although any crowd that size is bound to include people who are struggling financially, no one should be shocked to see the middle classes so well represented among the mob.

The notion that political violence simply emerges out of economic desperation, rather than ideology, is comforting. But it’s false. Throughout American history, political violence has often been guided, initiated, and perpetrated by respectable people from educated middle- and upper-class backgrounds. The belief that only impoverished people engage in political violence—particularly right-wing political violence—is a misconception often cultivated by the very elites who benefit from that violence.

The members of the mob that attacked the Capitol and beat a police officer to death last week were not desperate. They were there because they believed they had been unjustly stripped of their inviolable right to rule. They believed that not only because of the third-generation real-estate tycoon who incited them, but also because of the wealthy Ivy Leaguers who encouraged them to think that the election had been stolen.

There’s ample precedent for this. When the Ku Klux Klan formed during Reconstruction, according to the historian Eric Foner, its leadership “included planters, merchants, lawyers, and even ministers. ‘The most respectable citizens are engaged in it,’ reported a Georgia Freedmen’s Bureau agent, ‘if there can be any respectability about such people.’”

Respectable people can be very dangerous. President Ulysses S. Grant responded to the outrages of the KKK in the Reconstruction South by sending the military to crush the Klan and the newly formed Department of Justice to prosecute it. For a time, the effort was successful.

In New Orleans, “carpenters, grocers, and tinsmiths belonged [to the White League], as did laborers and stevedores,” according to the historian Justin Nystrom, but “more common were professional men from Factor’s Row: clerks, accountants, sugar and cotton factors, weighers, and lawyers.” In South Carolina, a leader of the Red Shirts, Benjamin Tillman, was born into a wealthy slave-owning family. His men were made up of “substantial landowners already prominent in local agricultural societies, Granges, and conservative political clubs,” the historian Steven Hahn wrote. The white-supremacist militants who massacred Black people and overthrew the government of Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898 were described as “reputable white citizens” in contemporary accounts.

The elite leaders of white-supremacist organizations, however, were content to cultivate the perception that the outrages condemned by northern newspapers were the work of lower-class white men, which only increased the urgency of their political project: restoring the rule of the white elite, so that the alleged passions of the white lower classes could be restrained, and the supposed corruption of Black men and their white allies could be punished. In truth, however, it was when Black and white laborers formed alliances—such as the Readjusters in Virginia—that the white supremacists were most effectively resisted.

After Republicans retreated from Reconstruction, making clear they would neither defend the rights of Black people nor prevent Democrats from violating them, the respectable men who had overthrown the Reconstruction governments were far more open about their deeds. They became mayors, governors, congressmen, and senators. They erected monuments to the Confederate Army and its valor in defending the institution of human bondage, both to celebrate their accomplishments and to dissuade Black southerners from ever again contemplating political equality with white people.

Of course, it was their success in seizing power and disenfranchising their political rivals that allowed them to maintain their respectability. Had they failed, had the South’s brief experiment in multiracial democracy succeeded, they would have been seen as the bandits, assassins, and terrorists that they were. Impunity is what makes murder and terrorism respectable. After all, if these deeds were actually crimes, they would have been punished.

Watching the mob ransack the Capitol last week, Trump is reported to have been initially enthusiastic about the riot, but later disgusted by “what he considered the ‘low-class’ spectacle of people in ragtag costumes rummaging through the Capitol.”

Now we know the truth. They weren’t “low class.” They were respectable. They almost always are.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

A Time for Consequences

For more than four years Donald Trump was aided and abetted by Republicans - Vichy Republicans, if you will - who refused to hold him accountable for outrage after outrage and acted to encourage more bad behavior.  When not looking away or mumbling outrage in private, many of them adopted and promoted Trump's lies, the most vivid example being the large number of Republicans who voted against certification of the Electoral College results. The result was an endless lack of needed consequences and punishment, something that must now change if the nation is to move forward long term. But it is not only Trump and Vichy Republicans who must see consequences.  The right wing media, social media platforms and the mainstream press also must change and see consequences for their aid to the Trump show of horrors. The obvious first start is for the main stream press to begin calling lies for what they are. Social media needs to cease giving a platform for outright lies and disinformation.  Trump should have been banned by these platforms years ago.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at where things need to go. Here are highlights:

The most immediate challenge any new president faces is deciding what not to do. For Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the catastrophes of the past four days have not radically changed the way they should make those choices. One week ago, it was imperative that they mainly look forward, to the public-health, economic, and foreign-affairs emergencies that they are inheriting. That is still their duty and imperative now.

But for the rest of the government, and much of society, the barbaric and potentially catastrophic storming of the U.S. Capitol, and the culpability of public and private figures who egged the mob on, demand a response. The response of Congress should be to impeach; that of law enforcement should be to arrest and prosecute every participant who can be identified; and that of civil society should be to ensure that there are consequences for those who chose violence and fascism at a decisive moment in the country’s history. Usually “letting bygones be bygones” is wise advice for individuals and for societies. Not in this case.

For this new president and vice president, clearheadedness about this choice is more important, and more difficult, than it was for nearly any of their predecessors. It’s more important because they are moving into a house that’s on fire. They are taking responsibility for a range of emergencies not seen since Franklin D. Roosevelt followed Herbert Hoover in 1933, and exceeded only by what Abraham Lincoln faced in 1861. Just a few items on a very long list are a surging pandemic, a damaged and unsustainably imbalanced economy, and a governing system whose basic principles are under direct attack and whose operational competence has been hollowed out.

And their decisions are harder than for most new administrations, because in addition to looking forward, to all the problems they are now supposed to solve, they must look backward, to reckoning with what Donald Trump and his enablers have done.

President-elect Joe Biden faces a decision rare in American history: what to do about the man who has just left office, whose personal corruption, disdain for the Constitution, and destructive mismanagement of the federal government are without precedent.”

To boil it down, I argued:

• On matters of corruption, they should leave the work to state-government authorities, in New York and elsewhere, who already have investigations under way. And for possible violations of federal law, from ignoring the Hatch Act to impeding the U.S. Postal Service, they should appoint an eminent, independent attorney general, and also inspectors general in the executive-level departments, and leave the rest to them. 

·         On corrosion of federal competence, from the State Department to the CDC, a new president can and must act directly and immediately. Of the 4,000 political-appointment positions in the executive branch, some 3,000 do not require Senate confirmation. The Biden team can and should get them in place, right away. And because the victories of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in Georgia have put the Democrats in control of the Senate, Biden can get the other 1,000 in position without undue delay.

·         On the catastrophes of this era, from pandemic management to the rise of white-supremacist violence, I suggested longer-term responses a new administration could authorize and encourage. These would include the creation of top-level national commissions, on the model of the Kerner Commission on racial justice in the 1960s or the 9/11 Commission after the attacks of 2001, as the least polarizing, most promising ways to deal with white-hot public crises.

For Biden and Harris, the right path remains what it had been. Their main job is to cope with the emergencies at hand. Vaccines and resources to deal with the pandemic. Relief, renewal, and innovation to address the grossly uneven effects of economic collapse. Investments, vision, and coordination to make “Build back better” more than just a slogan. The nation’s recovery depends on their focus on such tasks—not to mention their political fortunes, and the Democratic Party’s.

The new president and vice president can’t afford to look back. The rest of us have to. The person with the most individual responsibility for this week’s carnage is, of course, Trump. He is stained, culpable, unfit, and forever disgraced. But that is who he has always been—as I argued in 152 “Time Capsule” installments during his 2016 rise, and as he prefigured in his appalling “American Carnage” inaugural address.

Trump could not have fulfilled his dark potential without a complaisant, also culpable supporting cast. That includes a political organization that converted itself from the “Grand Old Party” to a group of “Vichy Republicans,” who cowered rather than standing up to Trump. It includes a highly partisan press claque that magnified Trump’s lies (as Margaret Sullivan has again emphasized), and a self-consciously nonpartisan mainstream press that seemed terrified of using the word lie.

And it includes social-media companies, notably Facebook and Twitter, that have knowingly been crucial parts of the ecosystem of disinformation. Twitter provided Trump a megaphone for lies and incitement for nearly a decade, until its overdue but welcome decision to deny him an untrammeled platform. Facebook’s own employees have protested the role it played.

These groups acted as they did because they feared the consequences of doing otherwise. The GOP and Fox News info system feared the wrath of Trump and the passions of the base he kept ever more fervently riled up.

The mainstream media acted as they did largely because of a culture that feared criticism for “taking sides.” The social-media companies feared giving up the convenient pose that they were strictly “platforms,” as opposed to being “publishers,” and therefore could not be held responsible for what appeared on their sites.

Few consequences existed for going along—for standing with a president for whom many senators and representatives express their private contempt (always private), for describing as “controversial” or “without evidence” views that reporters knew to be flat-out lies, for letting social-media technology become the organizational backbone of disinformation and hate. These behaviors, which erode democratic governance in the long run, have carried too few consequences in the here and now.

Peggy Noonan, the onetime Ronald Reagan speechwriter, made an impassioned argument for, as she put it, lowering the boom on those directly and indirectly responsible for the desecration of the Capitol. “When something like this happens it tends to be repeated,” she wrote. “It is our job to make sure it is not. And so we should come down like a hammer on all those responsible, moving with brute dispatch against members of the mob and their instigators.”

Those instigators, she wrote, began with Trump but included the congressional Republicans who stood with him and against the peaceful transfer of power, notably Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. “They are clever men, highly educated, well-credentialed”—Hawley a product of Yale Law School, Cruz of Harvard Law. “Here’s to you, boys. Did you see the broken glass, the crowd roaming the halls like vandals in late Rome, the staff cowering in locked closets and barricading offices? Look on your mighty works and despair.”

Actions should have consequences, and consequences will affect future actions. How could consequences be adjusted after this week? A non-exhaustive starter list:

Impeachment. Nearly two years ago, Yoni Appelbaum argued in an Atlantic cover story that Trump had already far passed the threshold that would justify impeachment. . . . Given the calendar, even a successful impeachment effort is not likely to remove Trump from office much faster than the constitutional deadline will. But it will force members of his party to go on the record for him or against him. It would signal to the world, and to our own country, an awareness that something terrible has happened, and cannot happen again. Societies that shrink from, fictionalize, or paper over the ugliest parts of their past invite even uglier episodes.

Reputation. This matters to people, in practical and emotional terms. Cabinet members and White House staffers are discovering that Trump has at last gone “too far,” and are trying to leap from his diminishing ice floe back onto firmer ground. Resigning “on principle” at this point is a cheap stunt and should be seen as such. It is worse than a stunt for Cabinet members, including Elaine Chao and Betsy DeVos, in that it spares them the obligation of taking a side in a Twenty-Fifth Amendment vote to remove Trump from office. Having stayed with Trump, and having lied or dissembled on his behalf, should lastingly stain his associates’ reputations. . . . Senators Cruz and Hawley might prefer to be known for other things, but the dominant item on their résumé should always be their role in the disaster of January 6.

The press and social media. . . . The “established” press, and the new digital and social media, has not caught up with the realities of this era—and has to adapt much more quickly than it has so far.

The mechanics of democracy. The Vichy Republican efforts of the past year have been in direct service of Donald Trump. But their indirect targets have been the fundamentals of American democracy as a whole, of which the most important is a willingness by the losers to respect an election’s outcome.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s main contribution to the defense of democracy should be to faithfully execute the office they have democratically attained. The rest of us need to get to work on these other fronts.

More Tuesday Male Beauty

 

Mitch McConnell Views Impeachment as Way to Rid GOP of Trump

With Mike Pence proving one last time that he is a servile bootlicker by refusing to invoke the 25th Amendment, the House of Representatives is poised to vote to impeach Donald Trump for inciting insurrection tomorrow with some Republicans announcing they will vote to impeach, most notably Liz Cheney, the third highest ranking Republican in the GOP in the House.  Based on reporting in the New York Times, Mitch McConnell seems pleased, apparently believing it offers the Republican Party the best opportunity to purge Trump from the party.   The reality is that the GOP can attempt to reform itself in the hope of regaining control of the Senate in 2022 if Trump remains the face of the Party and likely alienating even more suburban and women voters who want nothing to do with Trump's hideous base of extremists, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and Cristian fanatics. Here are highlights from the Times piece:

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, has told associates that he believes President Trump committed impeachable offenses and that he is pleased that Democrats are moving to impeach him, believing that it will make it easier to purge him from the party, according to people familiar with his thinking. The House is voting on Wednesday to formally charge Mr. Trump with inciting violence against the country.

At the same time, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader and one of Mr. Trump’s most steadfast allies in Congress, has asked other Republicans whether he should call on Mr. Trump to resign in the aftermath of the riot at the Capitol last week, according to three Republican officials briefed on the conversations.

While Mr. McCarthy has said he is personally opposed to impeachment, he and other party leaders have decided not to formally lobby Republicans to vote “no,” . . .

Taken together, the stances of Congress’s two top Republicans — neither of whom has said publicly that Mr. Trump should resign or be impeached — reflected the politically challenging and fast-moving nature of the crisis that the party faces after the assault by a pro-Trump mob during a session to formalize President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s electoral victory.

As more violent images from the mayhem wrought by the rioters emerged on Tuesday, including of the brutal attack that ultimately killed a Capitol Police officer, and as lawmakers were briefed about threats of more attacks on the Capitol, rank-and-file Republican lawmakers grew angrier about [Trump's] the president’s role in the violence.

Yet as they tried to balance the affection their core voters have for Mr. Trump with the now undeniable political and constitutional threat he posed, Republican congressional leaders who have loyally backed the president for four years were still stepping delicately. Their refusal to demand the president’s resignation and quiet plotting about how to address his conduct highlighted the gnawing uncertainty that they and many other Republicans have about whether they would pay more of a political price for abandoning him or for continuing to enable him after he incited a mob to storm the seat of government.

Making their task more difficult, Mr. Trump has shown no trace of contrition . . . . Mr. McConnell has indicated that he wants to see the specific article of impeachment that the House is set to approve on Wednesday, and hear the eventual arguments in the Senate. The House is expected to pass the single charge on Wednesday, and a senior administration official said the White House expects about two dozen Republicans to support it. Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the party’s No. 3 in the House, announced on Tuesday that she would be among them.

But the Senate Republican leader has made clear in private discussions that he believes now is the moment to move on from the weakened lame duck, whom he blames for causing Republicans to lose the Senate.

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

GOP Cynics Have Coddle Crazies for Decades

There were crazies in the Republican Party during my years as a party activist but they were a small minority.  Towards the end of my involvement in the GOP a cynical outreach occurred that saw more and more Christofascist voted onto city and county committees. This had two effects: (i) it added to party governing bodies numbers of people who rejected science and knowledge if it did not support their fairy tale beliefs, and (ii) it added individuals who wanted a Christian dominion so that religion, not democracy would be the guiding principle.  Indeed, a movement was afoot to wipe away the concept of separation of church and state. The additional thing that happened was that open racism became more acceptable given the reality that a majority of Christofascists, especially in the South, embraced white supremacy.   The cynics who brought these people into the party governance believed they could control this lunatic factions but overtime the inmates took control of the asylum and the result is the GOP of today controlled by Trump and filled with elected officials who are terrified of the party base and, therefore, pander to people who ought to be social and political outcasts. A column in the New York Times looks at this history of embracing lunacy.  Here are highlights:

One striking aspect of the Capitol Hill putsch was that none of the rioters’ grievances had any basis in reality.

No, the election wasn’t stolen — there is no evidence of significant electoral fraud. No, Democrats aren’t part of a satanic pedophile conspiracy. No, they aren’t radical Marxists — even the party’s progressive wing would be considered only moderately left of center in any other Western democracy.

So all the rage is based on lies. But what’s almost as striking as the fantasies of the rioters is how few leading Republicans have been willing, despite the violence and desecration, to tell the MAGA mob that their conspiracy theories are false.

Bear in mind that Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, and two-thirds of his colleagues voted against accepting the Electoral College results even after the riot.

Or consider the behavior of leading Republicans who aren’t usually considered extremists. On Sunday Senator Rob Portman declared that we need to “restore confidence in the integrity of our electoral system.” Portman isn’t stupid; he has to know that the only reason so many people doubt the election results is that members of his party deliberately fomented that doubt. But he’s still keeping up the pretense.

And the cynicism and cowardice of leading Republicans is, I would argue, the most important cause of the nightmare now enveloping our nation.

Of course we need to understand the motives of our homegrown enemies of democracy. In general, political scientists find — not surprisingly, given America’s history — that racial antagonism is the best predictor of willingness to countenance political violence.

But neither racism nor widespread attraction to conspiracy theories is new in our political life. The worldview described in Richard Hofstadter’s classic 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” is barely distinguishable from QAnon beliefs today.

If there are or seem to be more such people than in the past, it probably has less to do with intensified grievances than with outside encouragement. . . . For the big thing that has changed since Hofstadter wrote is that one of our major political parties has become willing to tolerate and, indeed, feed right-wing political paranoia.

This coddling of the crazies was, at first, almost entirely cynical. When the G.O.P. began moving right in the 1970s its true agenda was mainly economic — what its leaders wanted, above all, were business deregulation and tax cuts for the rich. But the party needed more than plutocracy to win elections, so it began courting working-class whites with what amounted to thinly disguised racist appeals.

Not incidentally, white supremacy has always been sustained in large part through voter suppression. So it shouldn’t be surprising to see right-wingers howling about a rigged election — after all, rigging elections is what their side is accustomed to doing. And it’s not clear to what extent they actually believe that this election was rigged, as opposed to being enraged that this time the usual vote-rigging didn’t work.

But it’s not just about race. Since Ronald Reagan, the G.O.P. has been closely tied to the hard-line Christian right. Anyone shocked by the prevalence of insane conspiracy theories in 2020 should look back to “The New World Order,” published by Reagan ally Pat Robertson in 1991, which saw America menaced by an international cabal of Jewish bankers, Freemasons and occultists. Or they should check out a 1994 video promoted by Jerry Falwell Sr. called “The Clinton Chronicles,” which portrayed Bill Clinton as a drug smuggler and serial killer.

So what has changed since then? For a long time Republican elites imagined that they could exploit racism and conspiracy theorizing while remaining focused on a plutocratic agenda. But with the rise first of the Tea Party, then of Donald Trump, the cynics found that the crazies were actually in control, and that they wanted to destroy democracy, not cut tax rates on capital gains.

And Republican elites have, with few exceptions, accepted their new subservient status.

Trump’s party didn’t balk at his corruption and abuse of power; it stood by him when he refused to accept electoral defeat; and some of its members are responding to a violent attack on Congress by complaining about their loss of Twitter followers.

And there’s no reason to believe that the atrocities yet to come — for there will be more atrocities — will make a difference. The G.O.P. has reached the culmination of its long journey away from democracy, and it’s hard to see how it can ever be redeemed.

Final Monday Male Beauty

 

States and Localities Ready for Insurrectionist Violence

Some who dismissively say they don't like/follow politics or who think that last week's storming of the U.S. Capitol do not impact them and/or think they they are safely away from the threats posed by Donald Trump's neo-Nazi and white supremacist supporters, may receive a harsh wake up call, if you will.  Things may be coming much closer to home in the coming days if Trump incited insurrectionists have their way.  ABC News is reporting as follows:

The FBI has also received information in recent days on a group calling for “storming” state, local and federal government courthouses and administrative buildings in the event President Donald Trump is removed from office prior to Inauguration Day. The group is also planning to “storm” government offices in every state the day President-elect Joe Biden will be inaugurated, regardless of whether the states certified electoral votes for Biden or Trump. . . . "They have warned that if Congress attempts to remove POTUS via the 25th Amendment, a huge uprising will occur."

We are not talking about peaceful protests.  We are talking about far right domestic terrorists - the number one threat within the nation nowadays.  These people are talking about a violent assault against the government at all levels and want to undermine or overthrow the government much in the manner of Hitler's brown shirts so that they can install their favored would be despot as a fascist ruler. Thankfully, Virginia officials - and officials in other states - appear to be taking the threat seriously as reported by the Virginian Pilot.  Here are article highlights:

Gov. Ralph Northam’s office is working with police agencies to be ready for violence after news of an FBI warning of a nationwide threat to state capitol buildings.

The warning, first reported by ABC News, said the FBI has received information that an insurrectionist group is calling for “storming” state government buildings and state and federal courthouses.

“We are actively monitoring these reports and have been coordinating closely with law enforcement agencies,” said Alena Yarmosky, Northam’s press secretary.

Those agencies include the Virginia Capitol Police, Richmond Police Department, Virginia Commonwealth University’s police force and federal law enforcement officials, she said.

“Virginia Capitol Police have been planning with our law enforcement partners and other stakeholders for quite some time as we prepare for the 2021 General Assembly session and its related activities,” said agency spokesman Joe Macenka.

He said he could not share plans or intelligence information.

Elsewhere, a Georgia State Patrol SWAT team walked the perimeter of that state’s Capitol, wearing fatigues and carrying rifles while lawmakers gathered inside for the start of a two-year term.

Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee activated hundreds of National Guard troops to help state police keep order at the state Capitol and defend security fencing.

The doors to Idaho’s state Senate and House chambers, usually propped open, were locked shut Monday. Two state troopers were stationed at each entrance.

Make no mistake.  These Trump incited insurrectionists are not nice or decent people. Law enforcement needs to treat them very harshly and treat them as terrorists.