Today's Republicans Are the Real Extremists

As long time readers know, I grew up in a Republican household and had both parents and grandparents who were Republicans for the majority of their lives.  I followed in their foot steps and became a party activist, served on the Virginia Beach City Committee and even incorporated that body (as Virginia SCC documents available online confirm).  Yet before the end of my parents' life times they and the rest of my family fled the GOP.  It's not that we had change.  Rather, it was the Republican Party that had changed drastically as a result, in retrospect of the Party's embrace of Christofascists and white supremacists. The end result has been a GOP that is extreme and bears no resemblance to the GOP of the 1950, 1960's or even the 1980's under Reagan.  Yet, many Republican "friends" continue to close their eyes to the reality that the GOP they remember is no more and that the party for which they continue to vote has become both extreme and something ugly, especially under Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer.  A column in the New York Times makes the case that the real extremists today are Republicans, not the Democrats they target for abuse and perhaps even violence.  Here are excerpts:

All of Donald Trump’s major policies have failed substantively, politically, or both. His one big legislative achievement, the 2017 tax cut, remains unpopular. His attacks on Obamacare have only enhanced public approval of the program. His fearmongering has cemented majority opposition to his proposed border wall.

But while today’s G.O.P. can’t do policy, it commands a powerful propaganda machine. And this machine is now dedicated to a strategy of portraying Democrats as extremists. It might work — but it shouldn’t, because Democrats aren’t extremists, but Republicans are.

The attack on Democrats has largely involved demonizing two new members of Congress, Representative Ilhan Omar and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Omar is Muslim, and the usual suspects have gone all-out in using an out-of-context quotation to portray her, completely falsely, as sympathetic to terrorists.

It’s surely not an accident that these two principal targets are both women of color; there’s a sense in which supposed concerns about extremism are just a cover for sexism and white nationalism. But it’s still worth pointing out that while both Omar and AOC are on the left of the Democratic Party, neither is staking out policy positions that are extreme compared with either expert views or public opinion.

Take AOC’s famous advocacy of a 70 percent tax rate on very high incomes. Economists who knew anything about public finance immediately recognized that number as coming from a widely cited paper by Peter Diamond and Emmanuel Saez, two of the field’s leading figures. You don’t have to agree with their analysis to recognize that AOC, far from showing her ignorance, was actually drawing on solid research.

Nor does the public find the idea outrageous. An overwhelming majority believe that people with high incomes pay too little in taxes, and polls show wide support for AOC’s proposal.

Republicans, on the other hand, really are extremists. As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it in 2012 — long before the rise of Trump — the modern G.O.P. is “ideologically extreme” and uninterested in “facts, evidence, and science.” For example, major figures in the party routinely dismiss global warming as a hoax perpetrated by a vast global conspiracy.

Or consider the views of Stephen Moore, who Trump is trying to put on the board of the Federal Reserve.

He’s a former editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal, a former chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, a fixture at conferences like FreedomFest. Given this background, it may not be surprising that he’s a firm believer in failed economic doctrines, especially the insistence that tax cuts for the wealthy have magical effects.

What’s coming out only now, however, is the extent of Moore’s political extremism. Many of his past statements — like his assertion that “capitalism is a lot more important than democracy” — sound like a liberal caricature of conservatism. But it’s not a caricature; Moore shows us what the right actually thinks.

I mentioned that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe that the rich pay too little in taxes. Moore, on the other hand, wants to eliminate income taxes and replace them with sales taxes, which would dramatically shift the tax burden away from the rich and onto the middle class.

He also wants to privatize Social Security, a program that is both hugely popular and the bedrock of retirement security for American workers. Moore would convert it into a 401(k)-type system. He is also fiercely hostile to Medicaid, which covers 65 million Americans.

Finally, Moore has proposed, in advance, a purge of the institution Trump wants him to join, calling for firing “hundreds” of Federal Reserve economists “who are worthless.” These would, presumably, be the economists who considered low interest rates and monetary expansion valuable tools in fighting the Great Recession, at the same time Moore was predicting that these policies would send inflation soaring. Guess who was right.

So even if you cherry-pick left-leaning Democrats, a look at their actual positions shows them to be not at all extreme. At the same time, pillars of the right-wing establishment hold views that are utterly at odds with both evidence and public opinion. Republicans are the real extremists.

Again, this is why I ceased to be a Republican two decades ago.

More Monday Male Beauty

Is the United States Becoming and Oligarchy?

While the United States still has the political trappings of a democracy, economically, it seems rapidly headed toward becoming an oligarchy where wealth and power is becoming increasingly concentrated in the few.  Not since the Gilded Age have we seen such extremes in wealth and and such concentrated attacks on safety and environmental protection regulations. Such attacks are, of course are motivated so that the few can amass even more wealth even as average citizens suffer physically and economically. As a column in the New York Times notes, this is NOT the model that the Founding Fathers envisioned.  Instead, they favored a political and economic system where "the greatest happiness of the greatest Number is the point to be obtained."  This concept could not be further than the model pushed by the Trump/Pence regime and today's GOP which favors the few over the many.   To win in November, 2020 - and November 2019 here in Virginia - Democrats need to push the vision of the Founders and rebut Trump's efforts to label them all as socialists (except Bernie Sanders, who outright states he's a socialist).  Here are column excerpts:

Pete Buttigieg, who’s shown an impressive knack for putting matters well in these early days of the 2020 presidential race, nailed it recently when Chuck Todd of NBC asked him about capitalism. Of course I’m a capitalist, he said; America “is a capitalist society.”

But, he continued: “It’s got to be democratic capitalism.”

Mr. Buttigieg said that when capitalism becomes unrestrained by democratic checks and impulses, that’s no longer the kind of capitalism that once produced broad prosperity in this country. “If you want to see what happens when you have capitalism without democracy, you can see it very clearly in Russia,” he said. “It turns into crony capitalism, and that turns into oligarchy.”

[H]is rhetoric reminds us of a crucial point: There is, or should be, a democratic element to capitalism — and an economic element to how we define democracy.

After all, oligarchy does have an economic element to it; in fact, it is explicitly economic. Oligarchy is the rule of the few, and these few have been understood since Aristotle’s time to be men of wealth, property, nobility, what have you.

But somehow, as the definition of democracy has been handed down to us over the years, the word has come to mean the existence and exercise of a few basic rights and principles. The people — the “demos” — are imbued with no particular economic characteristic. This is wrong. Our definition of democracy needs to change.

Democracy can’t flourish in a context of grotesque concentration of wealth. This idea is neither new nor radical nor alien. It is old, mainstream and as American as Thomas Jefferson.

I invoke Jefferson for a reason. Everyone knows how he was occupying his time in the summer of 1776; he was writing the Declaration of Independence. But what was he up to that fall? He was a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, and he was taking the lead in writing and sponsoring legislation to abolish the commonwealth’s laws upholding “entail” (which kept large estates within families across generations) and primogeniture.
He believed, as the founders did generally, that excess inherited wealth was fundamentally incompatible with democracy.

They were most concerned with inherited wealth, as was the Scottish economist Adam Smith, whom conservatives invoke constantly today but who would in fact be appalled by the propagandistic phrase “death tax” — in their time, inherited wealth was the oppressive economic problem.

They saw clearly the link between democratic health and general economic prosperity. Here is John Adams, not exactly Jefferson’s best friend: All elements of society, he once wrote, must “cooperate in this one democratical principle, that the end of all government is the happiness of the People: and in this other, that the greatest happiness of the greatest Number is the point to be obtained.” “Happiness” to the founders meant economic well-being, and note that Adams called it “democratical.”

So, yes, democracy and the kind of economic inequality we’ve seen in this country in recent decades don’t mix.

A number of scholars have made these arguments in recent years, notably Ganesh Sitaraman in his book “The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution.” All that work has been vitally important. But now that some politicians are saying it, we can finally have the broad national conversation we’ve desperately needed for years.

Bernie Sanders has proposed an inheritance tax that the founders would love, and Elizabeth Warren has proposed a wealth tax of which they’d surely approve. But you don’t have to be a supporter of either of those candidates or their plans to get behind the general idea that great concentration of wealth is undemocratic.

Policies built around this idea will not turn America into the Soviet Union or, in the au courant formulation, Venezuela. They will make it the nation the founders intended. And this, as Mr. Buttigieg’s words suggest, is how Democratic candidates should answer the socialism question (with the apparent exception of the socialist Mr. Sanders). No, I’m a capitalist. And that’s why I want capitalism to change.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

Monday Morning Male Beauty

Mayor Pete Formally Announces His Candidacy; Draws Attacks from Christofascists

As I noted in a Facebook post today, I watched Pete Buttigieg's formal announcement of his campaign for the presidency.  I found Buttigieg's remarks to be very impressive.  Just as interestingly, among those speaking before Buttigieg spoke were mainline religious clergy who were sportive of his candidacy and showed a loving face of Christianity - a face of Christianity one rarely sees when the hate merchants of the "professional Christian" set and most evangelicals speak.  Not surprisingly, Buttigieg's references to his faith are drawing shrieks and attacks from the Christofascists, especially those have sold their souls and what little shred of morality they may have possessed to chase power through supporting Donald Trump, a living embodiment of the seven deadly sins.  The contrast could not be more stark and one can only presume that the Christofascist attacks are driven by fear that Buttigieg might prompt some of their lemming like followers to question allegiance to someone as morally foul as Trump.  A piece in Huffington Post looks at the continued attacks on Buttigieg.  Here are excerpts:

The ease and openness with which Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg talks about his religious beliefs appears to be causing consternation among some conservative Christians. 

Evangelical Christians have long seen themselves as the standard-bearers for faith and family values in American politics. Buttigieg, a gay Christian, is directly challenging that, driving some evangelical leaders to try to paint his faith as an inauthentic expression of Christianity.

Franklin Graham, son of the famed evangelist Billy Graham and a supporter of President Donald Trump, criticized the faith of the South Bend, Indiana, mayor ― and progressive Christianity as a whole ― on Twitter and Facebook Thursday. 

Graham was responding to Buttigieg’s criticism of Vice President Mike Pence, a former governor of Indiana, earlier this week. Buttigieg had said Sunday that “the Mike Pences of the world” should realize that “if you’ve got a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me. Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.”

Pence characterized Buttigieg’s comments as an attack on his faith. The vice president told CNN on Friday that he is a “Bible-believing Christian” who draws his truth “from God’s word.”

Buttigieg fired back by saying that he’s not critical of Pence’s faith but is concerned about his anti-LGBTQ policies.

“I don’t have a problem with religion. I’m religious, too,” Buttigieg said on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” on Friday. “I have a problem with religion being used as a justification to harm people.”

Conservative evangelical writer Erick Erickson . . . said that progressive Christianity is a “hypocritical farce.” He denigrated the Episcopal Church, the denomination that Buttigieg belongs to, claiming that it is “no longer a Christian institution.”

For years, the loudest and most politically influential Christian voices in the U.S. have come from the religious right. The Moral Majority movement of the 1980s cemented conservative Christians’ ties to the Republican Party. Today, Trump receives counseling and advice from an unofficial cadre of evangelical Christian leaders and has repeatedly pledged that he will prioritize those leaders’ political goals.

But more and more progressive, left-leaning Christian voices are now speaking up, too. These leaders, informally known as the religious left, see their movement as rooted in the abolitionist efforts of the 19th century and the civil rights movement of the 20th century. Progressive Christians have used the Bible as inspiration for activism that is intersectional, interfaith and protective of the rights of women, immigrants, the LGBTQ community and people of color.

And unlike the majority of white evangelical Protestants, these Christians have been highly critical of the Trump administration’s conservative agenda.

Jim Wallis, a progressive Christian and founder of the magazine Sojourners, told HuffPost that he believes the religious right is “terrified” of the conversations that Buttigieg’s comments are launching. 

“They are afraid the new conversation about faith and politics, sparked by Mayor Pete Buttigieg, will get people looking and talking about the things Jesus said and did, and called us to,” Wallis wrote in an email. 

Wallis said that for him, being a Christian means taking care of the poor, immigrants and other marginalized communities. He cited Matthew 25, a chapter of the Bible in which Jesus preaches about how those who care for the hungry, thirsty, imprisoned, sick and vulnerable will be welcomed into heaven. (Buttigieg has said that’s one of his favorite biblical passages.)

“That is a very dangerous conversation to let happen when you are a totally uncritical supporter of Donald Trump, a man whose life, behavior, morality, words, and policies are antithetical to the teachings of Jesus Christ,” Wallis said. 

“The religious right and some on the secular left have one thing in common,” Wallis said. “They want Americans to believe that all religion in this country is right-wing politically.”  But it’s not, as the mayor from South Bend is reminding his fellow Americans.

The money quote of Buttigieg is this: “I have a problem with religion being used as a justification to harm people.”  Franklin Graham and his fellow hate merchants have good reason to fear the wake up call Buttigieg is sending.  It will expose their hypocrisy.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

The Danger of Electing a President Who is "Too Old"

Ageism is not a good thing.  But at the same time, ignoring the realities of the effects of age on political candidates carries its own risk, not the least of which is that the individual might die in office.  Others include the fading of intellectual and processing powers once one passes the age of 70.  The issue is timely as the country suffers under an elderly and mentally impaired occupant of the White House and two of his potential challengers are even older.  Personally, I believe that Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are too old and, if Democrats are smart, they will nominate a younger standard bearer.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the very real decline that all of us will experience as we age.  Here are article highlights:

If Biden or Sanders triumphs in 2020, we enter an unprecedented age of — well, of old age in power. If reelected in 2024, Biden would start his second term at 82, Sanders at 83. If Trump won again, he’d still be president at 78 — 15 years older than Franklin D. Roosevelt was when he died in office in 1945.

50 is a better age than 76 to undertake perhaps the hardest job on Earth. The experts on aging (none as old as I) were generally more sympathetic to the idea that someone in their late 70s might be an effective president, but no one I’ve talked to thinks this is an ideal age for the role. The specialists know the numerous studies that show, unmistakably, that on nearly every scale of intellectual capacity, people over 70 have less to offer than younger generations. The one exception is the ability to learn and recall vocabulary.

Studies of old people conclude that between 16 percent and 23 percent of Americans over 65 experience some form of cognitive impairment. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology found that these subjects performed worse than others on tasks involving working memory — the ability to remember information while manipulating it, as when calculating the tip on a restaurant bill — and that they’re more impaired when those tasks become more complex. Older adults also have difficulties with tasks that require dividing or switching attention, . . 

On tests of reasoning, memory and cognitive speed, the average scores for adults in their early 70s were near the 20th percentile of the population, whereas the average performance for adults in their early 20s was near the 75th percentile. A Mayo Clinic study of 161 cognitively normal adults between 62 and 100 years of age showed that declines in learning ability closely track the passage of time. “Research has shown that concept formation, abstraction, and mental flexibility decline with age, especially after age 70 . . . .

Per the insurers’ tables, a President-elect Biden in 2020 would have a 26 percent chance of dying within the next five years; Sanders in 2020 would face a 29 percent chance of dying within five years; for Trump, it would be about a 20 percent chance of death before 2025.

[T]he unwillingness to discuss this decline bothers some people in the field of gerontology. “If talking about someone’s age is taboo and we are immediately accused of ageism, then that shuts down the discourse,” argues Jennifer Sasser, 52, a gerontologist at Oregon State University. . . . But “you can’t stay at the height of your capacity forever. That’s not the trajectory. We do become less energetic. Our bodies and minds do change.”

[T]he exact problem: Any given human could function at a high level well into his or her dotage. But these are outliers. The overwhelming majority decline. This happens to different people at different ages, but scientists have established that decline accelerates with advancing age: In a study at the University of Virginia, adults between the ages of 61 and 96 showed a decrease in cognitive speed twice as great as adults under age 60, and a drop-off in memory four times as great. Memory loss causes “slowed processing speed, reduced ability to ignore irrelevant information, and decreased use of strategies to improve learning and memory,” according to the University of Alabama’s meta-study.

Someone in his or her mid-70s undoubtedly could perform the job of president, but how effectively? The example of our 72-year-old incumbent raises questions about the meaning of “perform.” Is there any reason to think that picking someone with at least a 20 percent chance of dying in office is a good idea? Don’t we have a great many younger candidates who are more likely to survive and thrive in this most arduous of jobs?

More Saturday Male Beauty

"Nones" Now More Numerous than Catholics or Evangelicals

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One thing the wrongly named "Christian Right" - they are neither Christian nor right - is doing most effectively is poisoning the Christian brand and driving people from religion, especially younger Americans.  As noted in the prior post, evangelical support for Donald Trump - likely the most morally bankrupt individual to ever occupy the White House - illustrates just how false and toxic religion can be (and that's without adding the horrors religion has caused over the centuries).   Adding to the exodus no doubt is the Catholic Church's never ending sex abuse scandal and the Church's refusal to hold bishops and cardinals truly accountable for their malfeasance if not active cover up of abuse. Now, for the first time, the so-called "Nones" are the largest "religious" group in the USA.  Given the current trends, their numbers will likely continue to soar (and yes, I see this as welcome news).  Politically, this new reality has not yet translated into representation in elected office, but that time is likely coming.  Here are highlights from CNN:

For the first time "No Religion" has topped a survey of Americans' religious identity, according to a new analysis by a political scientist. The non-religious edged out Catholics and evangelicals in the long-running General Social Survey.

Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University and a Baptist pastor, found that 23.1% of Americans now claim no religion. Catholics came in at 23.0%, and evangelicals were at 22.5%.  The three groups remain within the margin of error of each other though, making it a statistical tie. Over 2,000 people were interviewed in person for the survey. "Religious nones," as they are called by researchers, are a diverse group made up of atheists, agnostics, the spiritual, and those who are no specific organized religion in particular. A rejection of organized religion is the common thread they share.
 "It is the first time we have seen this. The same questions have been asked for 44 years," Burge told CNN.  The meteoric rise of religious nones began in the early 1990s and has grown 266% since 1991, he said.  Burge estimates that 'No Religion' will be the largest group outright in four to six years.
 Robyn Blumner, executive director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science, sees the change as a generational trend driven by millennials.  "We are seeing the rise of a generation of Americans who are hungry for facts and curious about the world," she says.
 Whatever the causes, the non-religious represent a growing constituency. Yet this demographic is greatly underrepresented in Washington's halls of power. There is not a single open atheist amid the most diverse Congress in history, according to a Pew study.
 The Congressional Freethought Caucus's 10 members try to represent non-theist interests while protecting the secular character of government.  "This growing group of Americans can feel like there is at least some people in Congress who believe they matter." says the co-chair and founder, Rep. Jared Huffman of California.

A piece in The Daily Mail also reports as follows:

Shifting political ideologies about social issues has also played a role, with fewer Americans comfortable with the rhetoric of their religious leaders.

'Another (theory) is that the religious right kind of cleaved moderate Christianity and a lot of moderate Christians who were moderately attached said they didn't want to defend Jerry Falwell … and all the anti-gay and anti- abortion religious rights leaders,' Burge said. 'So they said, 'You know what? I'm out.'

As the 'nones' have ascended, the number of mainline Protestant Christians has fallen 62.5 percent since 1982, to now account for just 10.8 percent of the U.S. population, according to the survey.

Again, I hope the trend continues and that politicians are forced to stop prostituting themselves to the shrinking "religious right."