I’m going to try something a little different this morning in how I’m approaching and organizing the APR. It’s not vastly different — I’m still starting by dumping the contents of several editorial pages into a big heap, then reading through that heap. And I’m still inserting my own, none-too-well-considered sleep-deprived opinions into the middle of articles that someone with an arguably much better insight spent much longer composing during hours when they were, presumably, much more awake. And I’m still reserving the right to throw out George Will, Maureen Dowd, and Ross Douthat no matter what topic they select — and I’m still wondering just how long it will take for the Washington Post and New York Times to join me in that one. Oh, and while I’m thinking about it, add climate change-denying asshole-apologist Bret Stephens to the list of people You Won’t See Here, even when he blunders into an something close to a decent idea.
But while a lot remains the same, I’m trying to be a little more conscious of organizing that weekly heap by topic. Plus … other nitpicky, formatty, mostly pointless little things that you may notice as you go along. The goal is to make the Sunday APR a bit easier to read, easier to navigate, and to make it easier to hop to a topic that’s at the top of your interest list.
But … I’m trusting you. Because you—you fantastic Sunday APR reader, with your steaming coffee cup in one hand and a really warm bagel in the other—you can be trusted. Even if you are getting cream cheese on the mouse. You can be trusted to read about topics that might make you wince a little, or topics that might seem a little heavy for a chilly winter morning when you still haven’t taken off the PJs. You’re going to read them all. I know you will.
So come on in, give some feedback, and next week I’ll be back up top with a real essay, not a discussion of text formatting.
It’s not that Democrats are offering alternatives that empower black voters, whether women or men. Being better than a party that is actively antagonistic is no great claim to virtue.
If there’s anything more amazing than the ability for the Trumpists to openly draw power from racism and bigotry, it’s that they can actively seek to assault women — not sexual assault. Sexist assault. An assault that denies women even the dignity of recognizing the inequalities they face … and too often this assault doesn’t appear to damage Republican support.
While Republicans are still spreading the incredible rumor that Democrats somehow “cheated” in Alabama — somehow busing in thousands of voters from … somewhere, so that they could vote in Alabama’s extremely restricted system … somehow, the truth is just the opposite.
Republicans cheated in Alabama. They just failed to cheat enough. Don’t expect them to repeat that mistake.
In fairness, I’d like to point out that my group, that being old white men, are infinitely worse than women of any race. I felt the need to insert that in case it feels like women are taking a shot here. Honestly, the only reason people are talking about making a bigger effort to bring white women around, is because they believe that white women, as a group, can still be saved.
And for all those people thanking black women, this would be a great time to not just speak, but listen.
Instead of taking this political talent, enthusiasm and energy for granted — and instead of wasting energy on white voters who don’t share its values — the Democratic Party should invest in amplifying black women’s proven dedication to the party. As a first step, perhaps some would-be candidates who think of themselves as “next in line” should step aside and make space for more black women like Tishaura Jones in St. Louis and Stacey Abrams in Georgia.
The Washington Post on Republicans whining that Democrats didn’t play fair.
In the party of President Trump, who asserted, without a scintilla of evidence, that he lost the popular vote in the presidential election because up to 5 million people voted fraudulently, veracity has gone out of fashion. Consequently, many GOP candidates ... lack the spine to utter what is plainly true — namely, that there is no evidence whatsoever that voter fraud is prevalent in the United States.
As to why Republicans tell those stories … look a couple of items up at Mikki Kendall’s op-ed. Republicans want to hold back the tide of changing demographics … and if it takes destroying democracy to get there, they’re fine with that idea.
The Republican project is clear. Facing disadvantageous demographic trends — specifically, an increasingly diverse electorate — GOP lawmakers across the country are using the specter of fraudulent voting to justify rules, including tougher state voter ID legislation, tailor-made to deter minority and young voters, who lean Democratic.
Corey Robin offers one summary of Jones’ Alabama victory.
Alabama’s a red state, as red as they come. The last time it elected a Democratic senator–a quarter-century ago–he was a Republican. Three years ago, Donald Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, won re-election to the Senate with 98% of the vote: no Democrat had dared challenge him.
When Democrats started wondering if Moore’s sexual predations might sink him, it seemed a case of either wishful thinking – why would the state that rewarded Donald Trump’s alleged harassment with 63% of its vote care about Moore’s harassment? – or defining deviancy downward. Next to Moore, liberals seemed to suggest, Trump didn’t look so bad, a point Paul Begala actually made even before the news of Moore’s predation broke.
But now that Moore has done what virtually no one thought he could do, liberals have turned around to say his loss is not that significant. What really matters, says Ezra Klein, is the fact that Moore almost won, that he got 48% of the vote and 91% of the Republican vote.
Klein is wrong. Moore’s defeat is hugely, enormously, even bigly important. It’s important because it shows that, while there may be no bottom to what the alt-Reich’s will accept, or encourage, to remain in power, there are still limits to how much ability it has to execute on it’s authoritarian vision.
For now.
Anne Applebaum has her take on how Doug Jones won.
This was the same question asked after the victory of Emmanuel Macron in the French elections, and part of the answer, in both cases, was luck. Nobody predicted a Roy Moore sex scandal. Nobody predicted that the French political establishment would fold so quickly either. …
If they hadn’t reached for something higher, victory might have eluded them. Modern democracy is by definition an exercise in coalition-building, whatever the voting system. In big, diverse, complicated countries, where people have vastly different interests and backgrounds, politicians seeking national office (or in the United States even statewide office) have to find common denominators as well as specific messages for particular groups. The nation that we all share, our common history and aspirations, is the most obvious.
As these elections prove, an appeal to national pride doesn’t have to be xenophobic or close-minded. At least some Alabamians — as I know from my family there — voted for Jones because they want to see their state as part of an American story that includes the civil rights movement and the emancipation of women. They want to live in an America that is tolerant and open. An appeal to that strand of the American tradition can win them over.
I’m not sure how much weight I would give that last part — a non-xenophobic version of national, or state, pride — against the obviously important first part: Luck.
But I’d like to think it’s true.
Colbert King on Moore writ yuuuge.
Alabamians cannot be thanked enough for keeping Moore at home. They, as great Americans, did all they could. The awful truth, however, is that Tuesday’s voting went only so far. It kept Moore out of the U.S. Senate. But keep that glee in check. Tuesday’s result did not rid Washington of Moore. He remains ensconced within the fence and barricades that circle 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. Yes, beloved: Roy Moore is in the White House.
Moore is all there in Trump: the pomposity and overweening egotism, the predatory behavior that causes women to line up to tell their stories about sexual misconduct and abuse. In Trump, as in Moore, can be found the inability to come clean about anything, the ability to tell bald-faced lies, the harboring of racism and religious bigotry. Their capacity to pander to base instincts has no equal. Neither does their meanness.
As enticing as it may be to believe that “Moore-ism” was defeated, there’s nothing that Moore said, did, or was accused of doing that he doesn’t share with Donald Trump. It would be temping to turn back the Fascism Watch with Moore’s defeat, but even though his victory would certainly have accelerated the goosestep brigades, there’s not a lot of evidence that his defeat has done much to slow the march that was already going on.
David Von Drehle with the most hopeful read of what Alabama means for Trump.
The margin of victory for Democrat Doug Jones was — like Trump’s own victory last year — small in terms of ballots but huge in its implications. The last time that Senate seat was before the voters, the Republican ran unopposed and won 97 percent of the ballots. Last year, Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Alabama by almost 2 to 1. But when the president tried to hoist Moore into office, he found he had lost his pull. He tried tweeting; he tried rallying; he even bestowed his personal benediction on Moore. “He says it didn’t happen,” Trump observed in dismissing multiple accounts of sexual impropriety. The very same standard to which Trump holds himself. ...
The loss of a Senate seat may well put the brakes on his judicial juggernaut, with moderate Republicans now controlling enough votes to block right-wing nominees. Last year’s dreams of a filibuster-proof Republican Senate majority have turned to the possible nightmare of an impeachment-minded Democratic majority in the House in 2019.
Of all the laws in all the books, perhaps the most stubborn are the laws of math and physics. Trump has tried to transform politics from a game of addition to a game of division, but math is catching up with him. And the law of gravity is taking hold.
Puerto Rico
Jared Bernstein does what the Trump White House hasn’t — come up with a plan.
The people of Puerto Rico — who are, of course, U.S. citizens — have been and remain in very serious trouble. Their economy was already stalled before their debt crisis revealed their unsustainable financial situation. Then, Hurricane Maria led to a humanitarian crisis that persists to this day, and much of the island remains without electricity almost three months after the storm. It is unimaginable that such devastation would go unaddressed in any state in our union.
It will take a three-tiered approach to address a challenge of this magnitude: First, immediate disaster relief, health support and debt forgiveness. Second, a multiyear commitment to rebuild. Third, a long-term growth plan.
Republicans have already written their script for Puerto Rico. It’s called “blame Puerto Ricans.” Blame them for more than a century of neglect, abuse, and wildly fluctuating legislation that comes with treating an island that’s home to millions of people like an afterthought suitable only as the subject for clumsy experimentation. They’re spinning out that narrative now with right-wing sites working hard to villainize San Juan Mayor Carmen Cruz as just one part of a story in which there’s no point “throwing money down that rat hole.” Democrats need to do a lot more than just ignore that narrative.
Each step is equally vital. Without straightforward, complete debt relief (which should occur in court, as established by recent legislation that created this option), the island will be stuck in the fatal vice grip of this perilous inequality: debt growth>income growth. Without a commitment to rebuild, Puerto Rico will have no economic infrastructure to support the third part of the plan: a growth agenda.
Misogyny
Melissa Richmond tells a personal, and disturbing, story of her association with Trent Franks.
… when a middle-aged man stopped me in a parking garage and asked me to jump-start his car several years ago, I was happy to help. As we worked to get his car running, we talked. I mentioned I was a first-year law school student who had worked in politics. He said he was impressed that I had jumper cables (he didn’t) and that I knew how to use them. He also said he was a member of Congress and asked me to follow up with him if I wanted a summer internship.
Richmond followed up, did multiple interviews with Franks’ staff, and was offered a position. And then …
Several weeks went by. Then something unusual happened. The congressman called me on my cellphone — from his cellphone — late on a Sunday night. He mentioned that his family wasn’t home and asked me whether I could come over that night for a “final one-on-one interview” with him.
I was stunned. Senior members of his staff had interviewed me weeks before and offered me the position. After speaking with my family, I called the congressman back and told him I didn’t feel comfortable going to his house. In that case, he told me, the internship offer was rescinded.
Richmond didn’t buckle to Franks’ pressure … but neither did she report the incident to anyone else. Yes, she was a 23-year-old seeking an internship, but she was also an experienced, political-savvy law student. Like many people placed in a similar situation, she found herself confused, and even embarrassed, by what had happened. Which is exactly the reason that guys like Franks, and many others, could make this kind of play again and again and not worry that it was going cause any issues.
Franks, by the way, denied Richmond’s story.
Kathleen Parker is … consistent.
On Wednesday afternoon, it ended for Kentucky state Rep. Dan Johnson (R) on a remote bridge, where he shot himself with a .40-caliber handgun. In an apparent suicide note posted (briefly) on Facebook, he wrote: “GOD knows the truth, nothing is the way they make it out to be. . . . I cannot handle it any longer . . . BUT HEAVEN IS MY HOME.”
Johnson was referring to accusations published two days earlier by the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting that he had fondled a 17-year-old friend of his daughter during a New Year’s Eve sleepover in 2013. According to his accuser, now 21, a drunk Johnson slipped his hand under her top and down her pants as she was sleeping on a couch. She begged him to stop, which, ultimately, he did.
Parker’s concern here is with Johnson. And honestly, no one deserves to die, not for this. Not for anything. But Parker’s argument that Johnson killed himself because he couldn’t get a fair hearing … is a foul charge.
An accusation isn’t a conviction or even an indictment, of course. Yet, the draconian actions we’ve witnessed as each case comes to light have provided cause for concern even in the most despicable of alleged offenses. We’ve rather quickly moved away from a society that embraces the suspension of judgment pending a fair trial to one in which opinion — or fear of financial repercussions — justifies harsh sentencing.
What draconian actions is that? Draconian actions like almost but not quite electing someone to the Senate? No one is being chased through the street with torches. Even Harvey Weinstein, who at last count had topped ninety accusers, is neither locked in irons or exiled to an desert island. He’s still wearing his disturbing bathrobe somewhere, sipping champagne and dispatching denials through his publicist. In short, what #$%^ing “harsh sentencing” is Parker talking about? Have some people lost positions in Congress? Yup. Because being in Congress is not an inalienable right, and someone facing accusations of improper, harmful actions from numerous witnesses, is likely to be a very ineffective representative of the voters. If those voters weren’t concerned, you can bet that no one would be in a hurry to depart their high-paying, high-perks position.
If the question is “didn’t Johnson have a right to a hearing before the information was published” the answer is no. If the question is “didn’t Johnson have the right to stifle his accuser” then the answer is no. Johnson’s death is a tragedy. What he may have done to a teenage friend of his daughter would also be a tragedy. But trying to paint Johnson’s death as a murder by #MeToo is simply ridiculous.
Alt-Reich Religion
Amy Sullivan on Fox-vangelism.
“Never in my lifetime have we had a Potus willing to take such a strong outspoken stand for the Christian faith like Donald Trump,” tweeted Franklin Graham, the son of the evangelist Billy Graham. The Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress sees a divine hand at work: “God intervened in our election and put Donald Trump in the Oval Office for a great purpose.”
Of course, what Graham means is “Trump will repress the rights of people not like us.” Which is the major tenant of the this new protestant faith.
Testimonials like this confound critics who label conservative evangelical figures like Mr. Graham and Mr. Jeffress hypocrites for embracing a man who is pretty much the human embodiment of the question “What would Jesus not do?”
But what those critics don’t recognize is that the nationalistic, race-baiting, fear-mongering form of politics enthusiastically practiced by Mr. Trump and Roy Moore in Alabama is central to a new strain of American evangelicalism. This emerging religious worldview — let’s call it “Fox evangelicalism” — is preached from the pulpits of conservative media outlets like Fox News. It imbues secular practices like shopping for gifts with religious significance and declares sacred something as worldly and profane as gun culture.
Christians often get offended by the idea that fascism and Christianity are connected. And they should be—the stated principles of each are near polar opposites. But that’s not how fascists see it. Not in the 1930s. Not now. Bringing down the barriers between church and state is one of the biggest goals of authoritarian rule. After all, what better ally can any despot hope to find than an organization that claims to speak for God?
Journalists and scholars have spent decades examining the influence of conservative religion on American politics, but we largely missed the impact conservative politics was having on religion itself. As a progressive evangelical and journalist covering religion, I’m as guilty as any of not noticing what was happening. We kept asking how white conservative evangelicals could support Mr. Trump, who luxuriates in divisive rhetoric and manages only the barest veneer of religiosity. But that was never the issue. Fox evangelicals don’t back Mr. Trump despite their beliefs, but because of them.
Christine Emba on Paul Ryan’s call to be fruitful and multiply.
2017 draws to a close. “Feminism” has been declared the word of the year. And House Speaker Paul D. Ryan has just urged women to have more babies for the good of the state.
A joke? An outtake from “The Handmaid’s Tale”? Alas, neither. At his weekly news briefing Thursday, Ryan (R-Wis.) suggested that the most important way to shore up the economy was for Americans to have bigger families.
Emba goes on to talk about America’s baby bust, which has deepened sharply since the election of Trump. Maybe Russia’s scheme all along was to destroy America by making too many Americans think about Donald Trump while in the bedroom.
But while Emba looks at the sexist economics behind Ryan’s statement and the way the new tax bill makes having a child even more difficult …
Yet rather than promoting policies that might ease the economic pressure, Ryan and his party are peddling a “tax reform” bill that prioritizes fiscal favors for corporations, which cannot have children, over everyday citizens who can. And once passed, the bill will cripple our country’s ability to pay for the sort of safety net that could make a new baby a cause for celebration rather than alarm.
That’s far from the only way to read Ryan’s statement. After all, while non-Hispanic whites are failing to even keep ahead of death when it comes to reproducing themselves, that’s not true of all groups. Which suggests that what Ryan is really saying is “breed like bunnies, white people, and we can hold off the brown tide.” Just because his statement is sexist, doesn’t mean it’s not also racist.
Republican Tax Bill
The New York Times on the tax scam.
Most Americans know that the Republican tax bill will widen economic inequality by lavishing breaks on corporations and the wealthy while taking benefits away from the poor and the middle class. What many may not realize is that growing inequality helped create the bill in the first place.
As a smaller and smaller group of people cornered an ever-larger share of the nation’s wealth, so too did they gain an ever-larger share of political power. They became, in effect, kingmakers; the tax bill is a natural consequence of their long effort to bend American politics to serve their interests.
Multiple aspects of the tax bill are designed to amplify that power. For example, killing the Johnson Amendment may seem like it’s being done so preachers can openly endorse right-wing candidates from the pulpit. That’s a side note. The real deal is that by repealing that amendment, tax-exempt organizations can engage in, manage, and even initiate political campaigns … and still count as a tax-deductible charity. That means that every big money donor to the GOP can move their current PACs over to “charitable” organizations that will maintain all the same privacy, while giving them at least an additional 25 percent bang for their buck. Small donors contributing $5 or $10 are unlikely to alter that amount if told it’s tax-deductible. That’s especially true when Republicans are making it more difficult for tax-payers in the bottom 90 percent of the scale to take anything other than standard deductions. But the guys at the top, they will appreciate the kickback. And if they can pay 20 percent more than last year and still discover that they end up with more in their bank accounts … it’s just another way they can say thank you for a job well done. The tax bill may seem chaotic in some of its changes, but many, many of them are about not just rewarding corporations, but easing the way for that money to enter Republican pockets.
As things stand now, the top 1 percent of the population by wealth — the group that would primarily benefit from the tax bill — controls nearly 40 percent of the country’s wealth. The bottom 90 percent has just 27 percent, according to the economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. Just three decades ago these numbers were almost exactly the reverse: The bottom 90 percent owned nearly 40 percent of all wealth. To find a time when such a tiny minority was so dominant, you have to go back to the Great Depression.
Going back to the Great Depression, is pretty much their entire idea.
Poem
To My Daughter
Hyam Plutzik, 1911 - 1962
Seventy-seven betrayers will stand by the road,
And those who love you will be few but stronger.
Seventy-seven betrayers, skilful and various,
But do not fear them: they are unimportant.
The remainder of the poem can be found at the poem-a-day page at Poets.org.