We start today with Christopher Hooks of Texas Monthly, and a righteous and eloquent rant about the year of “saving” children in the state of Texas.
Texas, a friend used to say, is hard on women and little things. That would come to mind over the years when reporting seemed to bear it out. In 2015, I watched a foster mother testify in court, via telephone from her daughter’s hospital bedside, that state cuts to the Medicaid acute therapy program were having disastrous consequences for her child’s incurable, debilitating genetic disorder. In 2021, an eleven-year-old boy in Conroe suffocated from carbon monoxide poisoning after seeing snow for the first time, as his family tried to keep their home warm after the collapse of a horribly mismanaged electrical grid. And then there were the perennial horror stories from the state’s spike-pit child welfare system—a three-year-old found dead, bleeding from the ears, after his day care repeatedly warned state agents about signs of abuse by his foster parents; a teenage girl who killed herself the moment she could despite orders that she was never to be left alone; and countless others who survive through the heavy prescription of psychotropic meds before being kicked out to the streets at the age of eighteen.
Each revelation of new misery brings a new wave of revulsion, but—I hate to say this—as you learn more about how the social safety net works in Texas, the revulsion starts to fade, and it becomes a dull undercurrent to an awareness of the world instead of something sharp that pokes through. As it fades, so comes the realization that it has faded in the same way for those in power—and that nothing gets fixed because leaders have been immunized from caring to an even greater degree. The grid remains unsteady; children in foster care still get abused. Legislators make a show of passing partial, temporary fixes and resist looking at problems head-on. The Texas Legislature, with all its self-regard and jocularity and pride in itself as an institution, turns out to be suffused with a very dull and banal kind of evil.
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Appearing on Newsmax TV the day of the shooting, state attorney general Ken Paxton suggested that more armed guards at schools would help, “because it’s not going to be the last time.” Can you believe that, as a response from one of the most powerful elected officials in the state to a massacre of fourth graders? “It’s not going to be the last time.” There used to be at least a perfunctory mourning period, some hugs given in front of cameras, before those in power turned to one another other and shrugged. But in truth, leaders are only handling this the way they think about the foster care system they oversee, and every other death trap run by the state. The revulsion dulls, the novelty fades, and it becomes normal.
Joshua Blank of POLITICO notes that a majority of Texans are in favor of stricter gun la, but the GOP leadership in the state is going the other way.
There’s a disconnect in Texas between public sentiment toward guns and the state’s increasingly lenient public policy toward gun ownership. As part of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, we’ve been polling Texas voters for more than a decade on this topic, and it turns out that Texans, like most Americans, favor stricter gun control laws. But for the past decade, up to and including laws passed in 2019, the first legislative session after mass shootings in El Paso and Odessa, the state Legislature has continuously and steadily loosened the state’s gun laws. And in the wake of another horrific mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, it’s hard not to imagine more of the same.
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Despite this consistent desire for stricter laws, or at least, to maintain the status quo, GOP leaders and the Republican dominated state Legislature have continued to advance legislation limiting requirements for firearm training while expanding access. A smattering of examples includes, but is not limited to: giving Texans the right to store firearms in their cars; allowing licensed gun owners the ability to openly carry a handgun in a holster in public; requiring the state’s public universities to allow those licensed to carry a concealed weapon to be able to do so on campus (including in dorms, classroom, and campus buildings); removing the cap on the number of school marshals who can carry a firearm in K-12 schools; clarifying the right of handgun owners to carry their weapon in a church or other place of worship; and, most recently, allowing anyone over the age of 21 who is not prohibited from owning a gun to be able to carry one in public without a permit or training.
At the same time, Texans have also continually expressed an openness to the kinds of gun and firearm restrictions that most Americans appear to embrace. As recently as June 2021, 71 percent of Texans, including 61 percent of Texas Republicans, expressed support for universal background checks on all gun purchases. Polling in October 2019 found 68 percent of Texas voters, including 53 percent of Texas Republicans, in support of red flag laws — one of a handful of policy responses considered (but eventually jettisoned) by Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick following mass shootings that had occurred around the time. Even Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke’s apparent Achilles’ heel in the gun debate — his support during his failed presidential bid for a mandatory assault weapon buyback program — found 59 percent of Texans roughly on his side and in support of a far stricter nationwide ban on semi-automatic weapons.
Zack Beauchamp of Vox says that, in fact, mass shootings in the United States tend to lead to looser gun laws.
Recent research finds that this seemingly perverse response — the use of a mass shooting as a justification for loosening gun laws and calling for more guns — is actually the norm in the United States. One study, published in the Journal of Public Economics in 2020, examined state legislatures’ policy responses in the wake of mass shootings — and found that they were heavily tilted toward lax regulation.
“In states with Republican-controlled legislatures, a mass shooting roughly doubles the number of laws enacted that loosen gun restrictions in the year following the incident,” the authors write. “We find no significant effect of mass shootings on laws enacted when there is a Democrat-controlled legislature. We also find no significant effect of mass shootings on the number of enacted laws that tighten gun restrictions.”
Jack Healy and Natalie Kitroeff of The New York Times write that as Uvalde grieves, its citizens are debating about the culture of guns.
Uvalde, a largely Mexican American city of 15,200 near the U.S. southern border, is a far different place from Parkland, Fla., or Newtown, Conn., which became centers of grass-roots gun control activism in the aftermath of the school shootings there.
Gun ownership is threaded into life here in a county that has elected conservative Democrats and twice supported former President Donald J. Trump. Several relatives of victims count themselves among Texas’ more than one million gun owners. Some grew up hunting and shooting. Others say they own multiple guns for protection.
In Uvalde, the debate has unfolded not through protests and marches, as it did after Parkland, but in quieter discussions inside people’s living rooms and at vigils, in some cases exposing rifts within grieving families. The grandfather of one boy killed on Tuesday said he always keeps a gun under the seat of his truck to protect his family; the boy’s grandmother now wants to limit gun access.
Yesterday in Buffalo, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke at the funeral for Buffalo victim Ruth Whitfield.
The vice president also called for a ban on assault weapons.
Jack Crosbie of The New Statesman writes that notions of “American exceptionalism” are leaving the door wide open for fascism.
As Thomas Pepinsky, a professor of government at Cornell University, wrote in 2017: “Everyday life in the modern authoritarian regime is, in this sense, boring and tolerable. It is not outrageous.” Authoritarian regimes – many of which the US’s Republican Party is increasingly emulating – have a vested interest in keeping some base standard of living for their constituents while consolidating power and capital in their own hands. What Yglesias’s point misses is that even if America’s problems worsen, it will still remain a decent place to live for many of its residents. This comfort doesn’t blind American exceptionalists to the country’s problems; Yglesias is certainly aware that they exist. Instead, exceptionalism does something more insidious: it convinces those who are insulated from the country’s worst problems that what the US provides for them is worth the price it takes from others.
At its worst, exceptionalism discourages people from seeking to change things. Dictators and authoritarians often provide social services at whatever level they think will keep people complacent, and all too often use examples to show that things could be worse. And the transition from a flawed-but-functioning free society to one in an authoritarian grasp can be subtle.
“Most Americans conceptualize a hypothetical end of American democracy in apocalyptic terms,” Pepinsky wrote in 2017. “But actually, you usually learn that you are no longer living in a democracy not because The Government Is Taking Away Your Rights, or passing laws that you oppose, or because there is a coup or a quisling. You know that you are no longer living in a democracy because the elections in which you are participating no longer can yield political change.”
Most so-called “great powers” usually have some sort of myth of exceptionalism; I believe that the oldest (and possibly the finest) expression of the exceptionalism myth that I can think of is the Funeral Oration of Pericles, in Book 2 of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (many scholars can’t determine if the words of the Funeral Oration are Pericles’ own words.)
America is very far from unique or exceptional in that respect.
Paul Krugman of The New York Times writes that GOP is increasingly missing out on what seems to me to be a key ingredient of so-called “exceptionalism”: a sense of civic virtue.
OK, I think everyone realizes that none of what Republicans are saying about how to respond to mass shootings will translate into actual policy proposals. They’re barely even trying to make sense. Instead, they’re just making noise to drown out rational discussion until the latest atrocity fades from the news cycle. The truth is that conservatives consider mass shootings, and for that matter America’s astonishingly high overall rate of gun deaths, as an acceptable price for pursuing their ideology.
But what is that ideology? I’d argue that while talk about America’s unique gun culture isn’t exactly wrong, it’s too narrow. What we’re really looking at here is a broad assault on the very idea of civic duty — on the idea that people should follow certain rules, accept some restrictions on their behavior, to protect the lives of their fellow citizens.
In other words, we should think of vehement opposition to gun regulations as a phenomenon closely linked to vehement (and highly partisan) opposition to mask mandates and vaccination in the face of a deadly pandemic, vehement opposition to environmental rules like the ban on phosphates in detergent, and more.
Where does this hatred of the idea of civic duty come from? No doubt some of it, like almost everything in U.S. politics, is related to race.
Pericles expounded on the exceptionalism of Athens while commemorating the death of Athenian soldiers in one of the early battles of the war against Sparta. Ted Cruz invoked “American exceptionalism” over the dead bodies of massacred children.
Why do people come for president pro tempore of the Virginia Senate L. Louise Lucas, when she didn’t send for them at all?
Renée Graham of The Boston Globe says that President Barack Obama was right all along about his 2008 “bitter” comments.
As he recalled in his memoir “A Promised Land,” Obama said someone at a 2008 fundraiser in San Francisco asked him why Pennsylvania’s working class “continued to vote against their interests and elect Republicans.” After talking about voters who felt neglected and unheard, he said, “So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
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Obama later called his comments “the biggest mistake of my campaign.” But look for a lie in what he said. You won’t find one.
Nothing Obama said was false. Speaking more like the community organizer he once was than like the president he wanted to be, Obama spoke of decades of white grievance (without referencing race) and its devastating impact on a nation in which millions would rather protect guns as “a God-given right” (which they are not) than protect even its most vulnerable citizens.
With the slaughter of 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, that impact was made manifest again in a state where it’s easier to buy and carry a gun without a permit than to get an abortion, teach the award-winning “1619 Project” in schools, or find gender-affirming health care for trans youth. Today America has more guns than people.
Finally today, Stuart Lau of POLITICO Europe writes that polling shows, that if parliamentary elections were held today, the Labour Party would win the most seats and Bojo the Clown would lose his own seat.
While the next general election is due to take place by January 2025 at the latest, the results nonetheless paint a dire picture facing the Tories in the wake of the Partygate scandal.
Tories are projected to be able to hold on to just three of 88 “battleground” parliamentary seats, according to the pollster YouGov, referring to seats that the Conservatives won from Labour in the 2019 election or currently hold with a marginal majority of less than 15 percentage points.
“Boris Johnson’s seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip would likely fall into Labour hands, with current results suggesting a 5pt Labour lead in the constituency,” YouGov said in a statement.
Johnson has refused to step down despite a damning report last week that found “failures of leadership and judgment” on the part of Downing Street over 16 gatherings that took place there during government-imposed pandemic lockdowns. Dubbed Partygate, these events featured pizza, Prosecco and a karaoke machine — at a time when most of the public were asked to stay home and stop meeting family and friends.
Peace out!