We begin today with Perry Bacon Jr. of The Washington Post, stating an unvarnished truth about the overwhelming majority of Republican voters.
The political discourse in America, however, continues to ignore or play down the Whiteness of the Republican coalition. In 2015 and 2016, journalists and political commentators constantly used terms such as “Middle America” and “the working class” to describe Trump’s supporters, as though the overwhelming Whiteness of the group was not a central part of the story. In this year’s campaign cycle, recent articles, in The Post and in other outlets, have highlighted Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s supposed weaknesses with Black voters. This is a strange framing. It is likely that more than 70 percent of White voters in Georgia will back Abrams’s Republican opponent, Gov. Brian Kemp, but fewer than 20 percent of the state’s Black voters will vote for the incumbent. If Kemp wins reelection, it will be because of White Georgians, not Black ones.
Republican voters are not just White people without four-year college degrees (a group Trump won by 32 percentage points in 2020), though that has been the common framing in much political commentary. The Republican Party is the preferred choice of White people who describe themselves as evangelical Christians (whom Trump won by 69 points in 2020), White people in rural areas (Trump by 43 points), White people in the South (29 points), White men (17), White Catholics (15), White Protestants who don’t describe themselves as evangelicals (14), White people in the Midwest (13), White women (7) and White people who live in the suburbs (4). (These numbers come from post-election surveys and analysis from the Pew Research Center, the Cooperative Election Study and Eastern Illinois University professor Ryan Burge.)
In contrast, the people of color in those demographic groups (for instance, Asian Americans without four-year degrees, Black Protestants, Latina women) mostly favor Democrats.
That’s the truth.
Tom Nichols of The Atlantic knows that many Republicans of the MAGA persuasion will do and/or support anything that Number 45 does or wants them to do. Here, Nichols directs his analysis to the indifference of “ordinary Americans.”
For years, I have been wondering when Americans would draw the line on Trump and his minions. We could rehearse the litany of Trump’s awfulness: his vulgarity, his racism, his callous disregard for veterans, his pathetic submissiveness around Vladimir Putin. We could remind ourselves of the attempt to pressure the Ukrainian government that got him impeached (the first time).
None of it seems to matter, because for a large swath of the American public, nothing really matters. And here, I do not mean only the “MAGA Republicans,” loyalists who are already a lost cause. (Trump was tragically prescient when he said that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and they would not abandon him.) Nor do I mean the people who have attached their parasitical careers to their Trumpian host.
No, I mean the ordinary Americans who shrug at a violent insurrection and the near-miss of a coup. As the historian Michael Beschloss said on MSNBC last night after the hearing, Trump “probably wanted to declare martial law.” He also pointed out that the insurrection was a close-run thing, noting that if “Trump and those rioters had been a little bit faster, we might be living in a country of unbelievable darkness and cruelty.”
But who cares? After all, inflation is too high, and gas is still too expensive, and that’s a bigger problem than the overthrow of the government, isn’t it?
Dr. Ibram X. Kendi has an issue with the mischaracterization of his work by The New York Times opinion writer David Brooks.
via Thread Reader:
Brooks stresses the importance of “emphasizing how complex each person’s identity is –that it includes race but so many other things, too.” In How to Be an Antiracist, I emphasized this complexity with chapters on ethnicity, culture, skin color, class, gender, and sexuality.
Brooks claims I push “racial essentialist categories,” when in fact I spend a chapter in How to Be an Antiracist proving why we should *not* essentialize the races. I write about in How to Raise an Antiracist how we can actively protect our children from essentializing race.
Brooks is either ignorant about my scholarship or lying about my scholarship. Which one is it
@nytdavidbrooks?
Over the last week, there’s been a trickle of stories about the highly competitive U.S. Senate race in North Carolina featuring Democratic candidate Cheri Beasley. Paige Masten of The Charlotte Observer reports on items that some national Democratic leaders may not understand about North Carolina.
Ted Budd and Cheri Beasley are virtually tied in the polls. But with less than a month until Election Day, national Democrats have invested relatively few resources in the race, much to the frustration of their North Carolina counterparts.
Republicans have dwarfed Democrats in outside spending, despite Beasley’s significant fundraising advantage. It’s a marked difference from years past — the high-profile matchup between Sen. Thom Tillis and Cal Cunningham in 2020 was a nearly $300 million affair that set a record for the most expensive Senate race in U.S. history.
[...]
Beasley, for her part, is better than past Democratic candidates. While she hasn’t completely escaped the flatness that often troubles establishment candidates, she comes across as more genuine and has found a strong voice on issues like abortion. Since May’s primary, she’s done a better job of defining herself (though she has not put up a tough defense against attacks on her judicial record). Most of all, her campaign seems to understand the need to adopt a coast-to-coast outreach strategy — one that focuses on all 100 counties, not just the state’s metropolitan areas. Democrats often take Black voters for granted and overlook rural voters, but Beasley has been actively courting both.
John Cassidy of The New Yorker offers an explanation for the persistence of high inflation.
The good news is that headline inflation has fallen by almost a percentage point since June, when it had reached 9.1 per cent, and it is likely to fall further in the months ahead. But both the headline and core inflation numbers for September came in higher than economists had expected. Investors reacted by pushing up bond yields in anticipation of the Federal Reserve—which has committed to bringing down inflation—raising the federal funds rate further. Investors now expect the funds rate, which is currently set between three and 3.25 per cent, to reach nearly five per cent in the first half of next year. Twelve months ago, it was close to zero.
Earlier this year, it seemed perfectly possible that by now the inflation rate would be coming down more sharply. The presumption was that, as pandemic-related supply-chain problems got resolved, and the price of oil fell back from the highs it hit after Russia invaded Ukraine, prices for all sorts of things, particularly stuff that gets shipped from China and other places in big boxes, would decline. And, in fact, this has happened. Excluding food and energy, the prices of all other goods taken together didn’t rise at all last month, the C.P.I. report showed, and some widely purchased items fell in price. They included clothes, footwear, used vehicles, major appliances, smartphones, and sporting goods.
The problem is that such stuff makes up less than a quarter of the Consumer Price Index. And though we’ve recently seen an improvement in the inflation picture for these products, there have been offsetting price hikes for other items that play a bigger role in household budgets, such as food, energy, and services of many kinds—from rental housing to air travel and medical care. It is inflation in services, not inflation in goods, that has prevented the over-all rate from coming down very much.
Heather Cox Richardson writes, for her Letters from an American Substack, about President Joe Biden’s National Security Strategy (NSS) in light of the geopolitical and national security dangers that Number 45 posed once he realized that he had lost the 2020 presidential election.
Kinzinger’s point was that Trump clearly knew he was leaving office because he was deliberately trying to create chaos for his successor. When he abruptly pulled the U.S. out of northern Syria in October 2019, he abandoned our Kurdish allies, forcing more than 160,000 Syrians from their homes and making them victims of extraordinary violence. The Pentagon considered Trump’s November 11 instructions “a rogue order,” since they had not gone through any of the appropriate channels, and disregarded them.
The release of the Biden administration’s annual National Security Strategy (NSS) on Wednesday, October 12, 2022, highlights just how big a catastrophe we dodged.
Just as Trump’s abrupt withdrawal from Syria left a vacuum for Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian president Vladimir Putin, and as Trump’s planned but not executed withdrawal of troops from Germany would have hamstrung the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) so it could not have countered Putin’s Russia, so would the abrupt disengagement of the U.S. around the world have created a giant vacuum for authoritarian countries to fill.
Biden’s National Security Strategy reiterates his belief that we are in a global struggle between democracy and rising autocracy and that the world is at an inflection point that will determine “the security and prosperity of the American people for generations to come.”
Simon Tisdall of The Guardian says that it’s time for Western countries to sever diplomatic relations with Russia.
It’s time to stop pretending Putin’s Russia is a normal country. It’s time to admit diplomacy has failed. It’s time to complete Moscow’s isolation by withdrawing all American, European and G7 diplomats, closing all western embassies, and ostracising Russian officials in international forums, including the UN.
All Russian diplomats must simultaneously be expelled. This would rid the west of a motley crew of professional liars who pollute the airwaves with propaganda. It has the added advantage of neutralising the spies, assassins and saboteurs who use Russian embassies as cover and, for example, blew up Germany’s rail network earlier this month.
The conventional argument – that it’s vital to maintain channels of communication with an enemy – is redundant in Russia’s case. Putin’s people just don’t listen to the west or its diplomats, do not share the same basic premises concerning facts, truth and legality. This outlaw regime speaks a different language, composed of deception and denial. Its word cannot be trusted.
That’s something to ponder.
After all, Iran and the United States, for example, have had no formal diplomatic relations since 1980. That’s never meant that the United States and Iran don’t conduct diplomacy with one another, at times.
Karl Mathiesen of POLITICO Europe writes about the spat between Forza Italia leader Silvio Berlusconi and the probable future Italian Prime Minister and leader of the Brothers of Italy party, Giorgia Meloni.
Forza Italia leader Silvio Berlusconi appeared to describe Italy’s likely next prime minister and his supposed ally Giorgia Meloni as “patronizing, bossy, arrogant and offensive” in a note photographed by the press.
The epithets, scrawled on a piece of paper in the Italian parliament, were published by La Repubblica on Friday and escalated a row between two of the three parties attempting to form Italy’s next government.
“No willingness to change, she is one with which you cannot get along,” the note concluded.
“An adjective is missing: I am not blackmailable,” Meloni shot back on Friday evening.
The far-right Brothers of Italy leader is seeking to form a government after her coalition with Forza Italia and Matteo Salvini’s League swept elections last month.
But arguments over ministerial and parliamentary postings have soured the mood.
The reporter team of Monika Bolliger, Ann Dorit-Boy, Susanne Koelbl, René Pfister, and Bernard Zand write for Der Spiegel about how protests in Iran could destabilize the region.
The longer the protests last and the more people lose their lives, the more pressing becomes the question for Western countries as to how to react. Washington has imposed sanctions on seven high-ranking politicians in Tehran, while the European Union intends to follow on Monday, with entry bans and the freezing of Iranian assets. But thus far, there has been no coordinated and compelling reaction from the West. That may have to do with the fact that Iran’s leadership tends to blame the West, and the United States in particular, for all anti-regime uprisings – a canard that former U.S. administrations have long been eager to promote.
Iran isn’t just any old country in the Middle East. Its geo-political importance outstrips that of almost all of its neighbors. As the largest and most important Shiite country, Iran and the Sunni-led Saudi Arabia are the two strongest regional powers. Tehran’s confessional allies stretch from Syria to Bahrain and from the Hezbollah in Lebanon to the Houthi rebels in Yemen. The country also provides shelter to millions of refugees and migrants, and the fact that it lies at the intersection of international smuggling corridors gives the regime significant blackmailing leverage, as does its increasingly tight relations with China and Russia. [...]
But what do the protests mean for Iran and its turbulent neighborhood? Could they – following the failed student uprising of 1999, the Green Movement of 2009 and the violently crushed protests of 2017/2018 and 2019 – finally herald the end of the Islamist regime? Similar to the situation in Ukraine, Western governments find themselves in a position of weighing any reaction to the Iranian protests against the significant geopolitical risks such a response might entail.
Finally today, The Grammarian, writing for The Philadelphia Inquirer, comes out against the Oxford comma!
For those who may have unwittingly stumbled onto a grammar column, a brief primer: An Oxford comma is the comma that appears before the word and in a list of three or more things — the comma after white in “red, white, and blue.”
And they’re the downfall of society.
Oxford commas are divisive. These puny punctuation marks inspire rabid supporters and detractors, each unwaveringly convinced that they are superior. Newspapers tend to forgo the Oxford comma (including the Associated Press, whose style guidelines are followed by most American newspapers), but The Inquirer abides by it (much to the chagrin of its resident grammar columnist).
[...]
Oxford commas weaken writing for one simple reason: They’re unnecessary, and therefore make sentences less concise than they could be. Less is more — a rule that also applies to punctuation. “Red, white and blue” is functionally equivalent to “red, white, and blue,” but the latter wastes everyone’s time with its superfluous pause.
Isn’t that like, a “third rail” of grammarians?
Have a good day, everyone!