Next week, post-election, I hope I can fill the entire Abbreviated Pundit Roundup with smiley faces.
Bob Moser at The New Republic writes—The GOP’s Sneakiest Voter Suppression Tactic:
With Election Day approaching, an odd little story from Dodge City, Kansas, made headlines in The New York Times and The Washington Post last week. Local elections officials in the Wild West outpost of yore, now a meatpacking center that’s majority-Latino, had moved their lone voting place outside the city limits, more than a mile from the nearest bus stop, as anti-immigration crusader Kris Kobach—the state elections chief—was fighting off a strong Democratic challenge in his quest for the governorship.
The whole controversy seemed so obviously outlandish—the kind of over-the-top effort to deter voters of color that could only happen in the Deep South or Kobach’s Kansas—that it’s no wonder the story was catnip for national reporters. While another secretary of state overseeing his own election for governor, Kobach’s Georgia ally Brian Kemp, had been garnering scrutiny for months with his massive “purges” of registered black voters, and while reports on the perils of voter ID laws have become numbingly familiar, the Dodge City tale offered a colorful twist on the theme of race-based voter suppression. The Times editors couldn’t resist a cheeky headline for this saga: “To Cast Their Ballots, These Voters Will Have to Get Out of Dodge.”
But the only unusual thing about this story was that it made news at all. Over the past decade, Republican elections officials have been shuttering polling places in minority neighborhoods, low-income districts, and on college campuses at a feverish pace. When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, the U.S. had more than 132,000 polling places; by the time Donald Trump ascended to the White House, eight years later, more than 15,000 of them had been closed nationwide. After 2013, when the U.S. Supreme Court basically lifted federal Voting Rights Act oversight from states that were particularly notorious for racial discrimination in elections—including Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, and Texas—the pace of poll closures went into hyperdrive. Thanks to Shelby County v. Holder, if you ran elections in a majority-black county in Georgia, or a booming Latino neighborhood in Houston, you no longer had to ask the Department of Justice to approve a change in where people could vote, or to prove the intent wasn’t discriminatory. […]
Joel Bleifuss at In These Times writes—Yes, Voter Suppression Is Real. But Young Voters May Bridge the Gap:
The critical 2018 midterms will determine whether the 116th Congress can put the brakes on President Donald Trump and the Koch-Adelson agenda. The outstanding question is: Will enough Democratic voters turn out November 6 to overcome institutionalized efforts at voter suppression?
In 1789, the U.S. Constitution allowed the states to determine which of their residents would be allowed to participate in elections. Initially, all states extended the franchise only to white men who owned land or paid taxes. Since then, progressive activists have fought—and died—to secure voting rights, while the forces of reaction, presently incarnate in today’s Republican Party, have sought to limit who is granted access to the ballot box. [...]
The good news is that on the Left, electoral politics is being enthusiastically embraced, particularly by young people. According to Pew Research surveys, 2018 will see a record turnout of 18- to 34-year-olds for a midterm election. What’s more, 57 percent of millennials who are registered to vote plan to vote for Democrats, and only 37 percent for Republicans. Voting habits and political commitments are established when people are young. Given the enthusiasm among youth for the common sense social democratic proposals of Bernie Sanders and rising stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, we have reason to hope that 21st-century America, marked thus far by lawless wars and hideous inequality, may break its fever and begin a turn toward something like common decency.
The New York Times Editorial Board concludes the Best Way to Fight Climate Change? Put an Honest Price on Carbon:
Will voters in Washington State breathe new life into the idea of taxing carbon emissions? Plenty of people worried about the earth’s future certainly hope so.
Climate scientists and economists have long argued that the single best way to slow global warming is to put a price on greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels and raise that price over time, thus creating a sensible market incentive to reduce emissions and invest in cleaner energy sources. Carbon pricing was also high on the list of urgent recommendations of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which warned in a major report this month that without swift action to control emissions the world will begin suffering global warming’s worst consequences — including, but not limited to, the displacement of millions of people by drought and sea-level rise — as early as 2040, much sooner than previously forecast. [...]
If the proposal, Initiative 1631, wins — as we hope it does — the result could ripple beyond Washington’s boundaries. [...]
Initiative 1631 is substantially different from the measure that failed spectacularly two years ago, and which Mr. Inslee voted against. That measure was advertised as revenue-neutral (meaning no net gain to the government). The money raised through carbon taxes would have been mostly returned to state residents through a reduction in the sales tax. This was intended to appeal to conservatives who didn’t want the tax to underwrite new government programs, but it turned out that many conservatives, like a lot of others, wanted real programs for their money, not just a tax shift.
Matt Ford at The New Republic writes—Trump’s Closing Argument to Voters: Fascism. The president insists that he, not the Constitution, determines who is an American:
[...] Republicans are struggling to make the case for retaining power after two years of unified control of the government. The president’s party usually loses seats during the first midterm election, and the unpopularity of both Trump and the GOP’s legislative agenda isn’t helping. Not only did the Affordable Care Act largely survive an all-out push to repeal it, but many Republican lawmakers are now being forced to defend their votes to strip coverage requirements for people with pre-existing conditions. Most voters also rightly think that the GOP’s tax-cut package, once touted as a near-certain midterms boon, was simply a handout to the rich and powerful.
Thus, Trump is trying a different message with voters: a virulent mélange of nationalism and authoritarianism, largely centered on the caravan of several thousand migrants traveling toward the U.S. from Central America. He has likened the caravan to a foreign “invasion,” and is using it to justify extraordinary measures. He ordered more than 5,000 troops to the border with Mexico on Monday, though their mission is limited and largely theatrical. He’s also reportedly mulling an executive order to close the southern border to asylum-seekers.
Then came Tuesday’s news. Trump is considering an executive order that would unilaterally reinterpret the Fourteenth Amendment to scrap birthright citizenship, a bedrock principle of post-emancipation American democracy. “It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment,” he told a reporter. “Guess what? You don’t.”
Elected officials have a habit of over-promising and under-delivering during campaign season, but Trump’s moves over the past two weeks go far beyond that. He’s deployed the military within the U.S. against a phantasmal threat. After one of his supporters was arrested for sending mail bombs to his political adversaries, the president responded by warning that he “could tone up” his rhetoric even further. Now he’s asserting the power to single-handedly narrow the definition—and thus the protections—of American citizenship. In effect, Trump is posing a question to the American electorate: What level of racist authoritarianism are you willing to accept? [...]
Timothy Snyder at The Guardian writes—Donald Trump borrows from the old tricks of fascism:
[...]The governing principle of the Trump administration is total irresponsibility, a claim of innocence from a position of power, something which happens to be an old fascist trick. As we see in the president’s reactions to American rightwing terrorism, he will always claim victimhood for himself and shift blame to the actual victims. As we see in the motivations of the terrorists themselves, and in the long history of fascism, this maneuver can lead to murder.
The Nazis claimed a monopoly on victimhood. Mein Kampf includes a lengthy pout about how Jews and other non-Germans made Hitler’s life as a young man in the Habsburg monarchy difficult. After stormtroopers attacked others in Germany in the early 1930s, they made a great fuss if one of their own was injured. The Horst Wessel Song, recalling a single Nazi who was killed, was on the lips of Germans who killed millions of people. The second world war was for the Nazis’ self-defense against “global Jewry”. [...]
Trump and some of his supporters mount a strategy of deterrence by narcissism: if you note our debts to fascism, we will up the pitch of the whining. Thus Trump can base his rhetoric on the fascist idea of us and them, lead fascist chants at rallies, encourage his supporters to use violence, praise a politician who attacked a journalist, muse that Hillary Clinton should be assassinated, denigrate the intelligence of African Americans, associate migrants with criminality, run an antisemitic advertisement, spread the Nazi trope of Jews as “globalists”, and endorse the antisemitic idea that the Jewish financier George Soros is responsible for political opposition – but he and his followers will puff chests and swell sinuses if anyone points this out.
If Trump is not a fascist, this is only in the precise sense that he is not even a fascist. He strikes a fascist pose, and then issues generic palliative remarks and denies responsibility for his words and actions. But since total irresponsibility is a central part of the fascist tradition, it is perhaps best to give Trump his due credit as an innovator.
I’m always appreciative when anyone in the mainstream American press talks truth about economic inequality and class politics because it’s such a rare thing. The pretense that we have no real classes in the US of A is deeply embedded in the American psyche, embedded, it should never be forgotten, by the 1 percenters. They certainly have no doubt that we do have a class system with them at the apex, even if a few boys and girls manage to rise out of humbler beginnings to become billionaires. Exceptions conceal the rule.
But while I am grateful even for scraps about what plutocrats are up to that may affect the well-being of us rabble, Chuck Collins at The Guardian includes this in his commentary: “One troubling indicator that we are drifting toward a society governed by the wealthy is the expanding fortunes of multi-generational wealth dynasties.” Ahem. We are damn well already arrived at a society governed by the wealthy and we didn’t drift there, we were driven by policy-makers at the behest of their patrons and puppeteers. But Collins has some useful details in The wealth of America's three richest families grew by 6,000% since 1982:
[…] Each year new eye-popping statistics juxtapose the reality of decades of stagnant wages for half the country’s workers with today’s extreme concentrations of wealth and power.
The top three wealthiest billionaires in the US – Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett – now have as much wealth as the bottom half of the US population combined.
This is possible because the bottom fifth of US households are underwater, with zero or negative net worth. And the next fifth has so few assets to fall back on that they live in fear of destitution. [...]
The three wealthiest US families are the Waltons of Walmart, the Mars candy family and the Koch brothers, heirs to the country’s second largest private company, the energy conglomerate Koch Industries. These are all enterprises built by the grandparents and parents of today’s wealthy heirs and heiresses.
These three families own a combined fortune of $348.7bn, which is 4m times the median wealth of a US family.[...]
Paul Krugman at The New York Times writes—The Great Center-Right Delusion. Politicians and pundits get America wrong:
What’s driving American politics off a cliff? Racial hatred and the cynicism of politicians willing to exploit it play a central role. But there are other factors. And an opinion piece by Hertel-Fernandez, Mildenberger, and Stokes in today’s Times (which is actually social science, not opinion!) seems to confirm something I already suspected: misunderstanding of what voters want is distorting both political positioning and public policy.
What the authors of the piece show is that congressional aides grossly misperceive the views of their bosses’ constituents; this is true in both parties, but more so of Republicans. What they don’t point out explicitly is that with the exception of A.C.A. repeal, Democrats err in the same direction as Republicans, just less so. Specifically, both parties believe that the public is to the right of where it really is. [...]
Anyway, what I’d really like to see are comparable surveys of other groups — say, political analysts for major media organizations. Why? Because I suspect we’d see a similar result: people who opine on politics also imagine that voters are farther to the right than they really are. What I’m suggesting, in other words, is that there’s a shared inside-the-Beltway delusion: that America is a conservative, or at most center-right nation, a view that isn’t grounded in reality.[...]
E.J, Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—The midterms pits the polarizer against the problem-solvers:
[...] There he was on Wednesday morning, back to tweets about his favorite topic, the immigrant “Caravans” from Central America, and charging — without any evidence, of course — that they are “made up of some very bad thugs and gang members.”
Any normal president would be ashamed of ripping the nation apart on this issue soon after the slaughter at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. The attack was allegedly unleashed by an anti-Semitic gunman who appeared motivated by the work of a Jewish group on behalf of refugees. But Trump is an abnormal — and normless — president. This is all he has.
Yet on the ground, Democratic candidates are not taking the bait. They are insisting that the country is exhausted by acrimony, by the cries of right-wing ideologues and by the evasion of the day-to-day issues — health care, education, job training — that they believe most Americans want their politicians to grapple with.[...]
[Abigail] Spanberger is a 39-year-old veteran of the CIA, a mother of three, and one of four Democrats in Virginia with a chance of taking a Republican seat. She faces tea party Republican incumbent Dave Brat. It has become a neck-and-neck race in an area where, until recently, Democrats were barely a presence.
She doesn’t bring up Trump and doesn’t have to. Should her campaign and the Democrats prevail, she said, the victory “will be about decency, modeling good behavior, being enthusiastic about who we are as a people and what this country has to offer; it will be about solving problems and working with other people and working across party lines.” Citizens, she said, are tired of politicians “who are just ideologues, and trying to stop things.”
[...]
Gail Collins at The New York Times writes—Imagining the Ideal Trump Rally. No one expects much, but we deserve something slightly less terrible:
[...] We really need a rest. The country’s been through a terrible streak of terrorism — the pipe bombs followed by the mass shooting in Pittsburgh. And generally, the president has been worse than useless. His rhetorical high point probably came when he went to the synagogue where 11 people were murdered and didn’t say anything. [...]
Hours after the synagogue shooting, Trump was already back at a rally, before his howling supporters in Illinois. To be fair, he began by speaking about “the hateful poison of anti-Semitism” and the need “to renew the bonds of love and loyalty that hold us all together as Americans.”
He pursued this theme for six minutes. That was it. Then he lapsed back into his beloved Size of The Crowd mode. (“… I hate to say it but outside you have a group that’s almost as big or just as big trying to get in.”) On Wednesday in Florida it took only a minute and a half for Trump to move from “unity and togetherness” to “the far left media” being “the enemy of the people.”
Trump is absolutely driving home the fact that he is not going to improve his act just because we’re in a crisis.[...]
Karen Tumulty at The Washington Post writes—These contests could matter more than the battle for Congress:
Though most of the nation’s attention has been focused on the battle for control of Congress, the fights that may have longer-lasting implications for the balance of power in this country are the ones being waged in the 36 states where gubernatorial contests are topping the ballot.
Right now, the Cook Political Report rates a dozen of these races as toss-ups. Ten of them are in states where the governorship is held by Republicans, and eight of those are in states Trump won in 2016.
Democrats everywhere believe they will benefit from national political trends and Trump’s unpopularity. In every contest, they are attacking their GOP opponents on health care and education. But governor’s races also have their individual rhythms, driven by local concerns, which is why, for instance, Whitmer’s rallying cry to repair Michigan’s roads has caught on. [...]
The stakes up and down the ballot could hardly be higher, given that more than two dozen of the governors elected next Tuesday will have veto power over how political lines are drawn when their states undertake redistricting in 2021.[...]
Michael T. Klare at TomDispatch writes—The New Global Tinderbox. It’s Not Your Mother’s Cold War:
[...] The bipolar world of the Cold War was followed by what many observers saw as a “unipolar moment,” in which the United States, the “last superpower,” dominated the world stage. During this period, which lasted from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, Washington largely set the global agenda and, when minor challengers arose -- think Iraq’s Saddam Hussein -- employed overwhelming military power to crush them. Those foreign engagements, however, consumed huge sums of money and tied down American forces in remarkably unsuccessful wars across a vast arc of the planet, while Moscow and Beijing -- neither so wealthy nor so encumbered -- were able to begin their own investment in military modernization and geopolitical outreach.
Today, the “unipolar moment” has vanished and we are in what can only be described as a tripolar world. All three rivals possess outsized military establishments with vast arrays of conventional and nuclear weapons. China and Russia have now joined the United States (even if on a more modest scale) in extending their influence beyond their borders diplomatically, economically, and militarily. More importantly, all three rivals are led by highly nationalistic leaders, each determined to advance his country’s interests.
A tripolar world, almost by definition, will be markedly different from either a bipolar or a unipolar one and conceivably far more discordant, with Donald Trump’s Washington potentially provoking crises with Moscow at one moment and Beijing the next, without apparent reason. In addition, a tripolar world is likely to encompass more potential flash points. During the whole Cold War era, there was one crucial line of confrontation between the two major powers: the boundary between NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations in Europe. Any flare-up along that line could indeed have triggered a major commitment of force on both sides and, in all likelihood, the use of so-called tactical or theater atomic weapons, leading almost inevitably to full-scale thermonuclear combat. Thanks to such a risk, the leaders of those superpowers eventually agreed to various de-escalatory measures, including the about-to-be-cancelled INF Treaty of 1987 that banned the deployment of medium-range ground-launched missiles capable of triggering just such a spiral of ultimate destruction.
Today, that line of confrontation between Russia and NATO in Europe has been fully restored (and actually reinforced) along a perimeter considerably closer to Russian territory, thanks to NATO’s eastward expansion into the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and the Baltic republics in the era of unipolarity. Along this repositioned line, as during the Cold War years, hundreds of thousands of well-armed soldiers are now poised for full-scale hostilities on very short notice.
At the same time, a similar line of confrontation has been established in Asia, ranging from Russia’s far-eastern territories to the East and South China Seas and into the Indian Ocean. In May, the Pentagon’s Pacific Command, based in Hawaii, was renamed the Indo-Pacific Command, highlighting the expansion of this frontier of confrontation. At points along this line, too, U.S. planes and ships are encountering Chinese or Russian ones on a regular basis, often coming within shooting range. The mere fact that three major nuclear powers are now constantly jostling for position and advantage over significant parts of the planet only increases the possibility of clashes that could trigger a catastrophic escalatory spiral. [...]