A thread for Democrats Only
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Trump’s Second Term Would Look Like This
The former president and his allies have explained their plans quite clearly.
By Jonathan Rauch
Ever since the U.S. Senate failed to convict Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 insurrection and disqualify him from running for president again, a lot of people, myself included, have been warning that a second Trump term could bring about the extinction of American democracy. Essential features of the system, including the rule of law, honest vote tallies, and orderly succession, would be at risk.
Today, however, we can do more than just speculate about how a second Trump term would unfold, because the MAGA movement has been telegraphing its plans in some detail. In a host of ways—including the overt embrace of illiberal foreign leaders; the ruthless behavior of Republican elected officials since the 2020 election; Trump allies’ elaborate scheming, as uncovered by the House’s January 6 committee, to prevent the peaceful transition of power; and Trump’s own actions in the waning weeks of his presidency and now as ex-president—the former president and his allies have laid out their model and their methods.
Begin with the model. Viktor Orbán has been the prime minister of Hungary twice. His current tenure began in 2010. He is not a heavy-handed tyrant; he has not led a military coup or appointed himself maximum leader. Instead, he follows the path of what he has called “illiberal democracy.” Combining populist rhetoric with machine politics, he and his party, Fidesz, have rotted Hungarian democracy from within by politicizing media regulation, buying or bankrupting independent media outlets, appointing judges who toe the party line, creating obstacles for opposition parties, and more. Hungary has not gone from democracy to dictatorship, but it has gone from democracy to democracy-ish. Freedom House rates it only partly free. The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance’s ratings show declines in every democratic indicator since Fidesz took power.
The MAGA movement has studied Orbán and Fidesz attentively. Hungary is where Tucker Carlson, the leading U.S. conservative-media personality (who is sometimes mentioned as a possible presidential contender), took his show for a week of fawning broadcasts. Orbán is the leader whom the Conservative Political Action Conference brought in as a keynote speaker in August. He told the group what it loves to hear: “We cannot fight successfully by liberal means.” Trump himself has made clear his admiration for Orbán, praising him as “a strong leader and respected by all.”
. . .
Naturally, the president’s corrupt and lawless actions incite a blizzard of lawsuits. Members of Congress sue to block illegal appointments, interest groups sue to overturn corrupt rulemaking, targets of investigations sue to quash subpoenas, and so on. Trump meets these challenges with long-practiced aplomb. As he has always done, he uses every tactic in the book to contest, stonewall, tangle, and politicize litigation. He creates a perpetual-motion machine of appeals and delays while court after court rules against him.
Ultimately, however, matters come to a head. He loses on appeal and faces court orders to stop what he is doing. At that point, he simply ignores the judgments.
A famous precedent suggests that he would get away with it. In 1832, the Supreme Court ruled that states were illegally seizing Indian lands. President Andrew Jackson, a racist proponent of forced assimilation, declined to enforce the verdict. The states continued stealing Indian lands, and the federal government joined in. Trump, who hung a portrait of Jackson near his desk in the Oval Office, no doubt knows this bit of history. He probably also knows the consequences Jackson faced for openly defying the Court: none.
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20220831002335/https://www.theatlantic.com
/ideas/archive/2022/08/trump-2024-reelection-viktor-orban-hungary/671264/
The Joss Whedon script for Sereni
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The Republican Paradise
Mississippi has long been America’s poorest state, with real gross domestic product per person only about 60 percent of the national average. The United States, however, is a rich country, so Mississippi doesn’t look that bad by international standards. Specifically, it’s roughly on a par with southern European countries: a bit poorer than Spain, a bit richer than Portugal.
It’s also worth noting that because Mississippi is part of the United States, it gets huge de facto aid from richer states: It benefits enormously from federal programs like Medicare and Social Security, while its low income means that it pays relatively little in federal taxes. Estimates from the Rockefeller Institute suggest that in 2019 Mississippi received net federal transfers of almost $24 billion, roughly 20 percent of the state’s G.D.P. — far more than the aid that, say, Portugal receives from the European Union.
Yet the citizens of Portugal and Spain have things that not all citizens of Mississippi have, things like universal health care — and running water.
On Monday the water supply to Jackson, the state’s capital and largest city, collapsed. Much of the city has no running water at all; nowhere in the city is the water safe to drink. And it’s not clear when service will be restored. The city’s water system was already failing, the result of years of neglect.
This neglect, in turn, was essentially a political decision. Mississippi as a whole, despite relatively low income by U.S. standards, surely has the resources to provide safe drinking water to all its residents. However, Jackson — a largely Black inner-city core whose economy has been hollowed out by white flight — does not. And the state refused to help, even as the coming water crisis became ever more predictable.
But never fear: Back in April, Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, announced that he was making “an investment in Mississippians” — by “an investment” he meant a tax cut rather than spending on, say, education or infrastructure.
The political scientist Brendan Nyhan likes to point to examples of democratic erosion and ask, “What would you say if you saw it in another country?” Well, what would we say about a place that won’t even ensure that its capital has a reliable water supply?
To put all this in perspective, you need to know about two trends, one economic, one political.
On the economics: Mississippi has, as I said, long been America’s poorest state. In fact, in the early 20th century the Deep South was, in effect, a developing nation embedded in the world’s most advanced economy. In the decades after World War II, however, Mississippi and other Southern states achieved rapid income growth, narrowing although not closing the gap with the rest of the country.
Then the relative progress stalled. In fact, by some measures, Mississippi began to fall behind again; for example, life expectancy in the United States as a whole rose about seven years between 1980 and 2015 but increased only three years in Mississippi.
We have a pretty good idea of what happened after 1980. The most likely story is that as America increasingly became a knowledge-based economy, high-value economic activities — and skilled workers — gravitated toward metropolitan areas with good amenities and highly educated work forces. Places like Mississippi, which had relatively few college-educated workers in 1980 and fell further behind over time, found themselves on the losing end of this change.
There are no easy answers to the problem of left-behind regions. But one thing is for sure: Imagining that tax cuts will bring prosperity to a poorly educated state that can’t even provide its capital with running water is just delusional.
Which brings us to the political trends that lie behind these delusions.
Since Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party has been dominated by anti-government ideology. As the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist famously put it, the goal was to shrink government to the point that you could “drown it in the bathtub.”
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These Disunited States
Emancipation of the enslaved in 1863, the defeat of the Confederate states in 1865, and postwar Reconstruction did not prevent the reestablishment of an informal confederacy. The imperative of reincorporating the South into the Union led northern elites to tolerate and eventually internalize the gauzy southern myth of the Lost Cause: a gracious agrarian culture, guided by an honor code and a noble aristocracy, that was defeated by a soulless industrial society. Contemporary Republicans have refashioned that myth into one of a predominantly white, Christian America that other races and cultures have compromised and that is bound to perish unless prompt and decisive action is taken; that is the fundamental if unspoken meaning of Trump’s “Make America Great Again.”
The conflation of Christianity and Republican politics fostered by political elites and powerfully felt at the grassroots level is encouraging absolutism on the right. Political rallies for Republican candidates and causes, especially those anticipating Trump’s second coming, are increasingly infused with religious language and symbols, and feel akin to evangelical revival meetings.
Several commentators have suggested that, historically, radical swings in domestic politics and virulent strains of racism and fascism have in fact been normal in the United States, and that talk of prospective large-scale political violence is therefore overblown. But the breadth and depth of the present threat to the country seems unprecedented in post–Civil War America.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/09/22/these-disunited-states-ste
ven-simon-jonathan-stevenson/
"Our Country is Going to Hell"
– Donald Trump doing an imitation of a preacher condemning the sinful Democrats to Hellfire.
Sep 3, 2022 Former president Donald Trump heads to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, for his first rally of the midterm election season.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Death of Democracy?
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“Without religion, normal people will do normal things and bad people will do bad things. But for normal people to do bad things, that takes religion.” --
What Weinberg is saying that people who are otherwise reasonable and uncontroversial and boring in their lives will do something exceptionally bad because of religion. This discrepancy is not limited to religious ideology – the Nazis at Auschwitz were also otherwise “normal” people who had families and pets and hobbies – but religious ideology, because of its unreason and reliance on blind faith, seems to pose a particularly all-pervading example. Religion may not be the root of all evil, but it certainly may be the root of the most diverse evil.
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2022/09/the-root-of-diverse-evil
.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Republican Rampage: If your medical treatment offends their religion, you are in trouble
Plaintiffs in Texas argued that the system by which the federal government decides what preventive services must be covered by employer insurance plans is unconstitutional.
The lawsuit filed by Austin-based attorney Jonathan Mitchell - who is credited with devising the state's six-week abortion ban - brings together self-proclaimed Christian businesses and employers.
One plaintiff in the case, Dr. Steven Hotze, argued that covering PrEP drugs for his employees would be contrary to his "sincere religious beliefs".
The physician, who is a megadonor to the Republican party and a frequent litigator on behalf of conservative causes, claimed common over-the-counter medications like Truvada and Descovy can "facilitate or encourage sexual behavior".
District Judge Reed O'Connor ruled on Wednesday that the government can NOT require "private, religious corporations" to cover the drug. He wrote that PrEP specifically violated the plaintiffs' constitutional rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The RFRA is frequently invoked in challenges to abortion access.
More https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62827615
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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I Watched the Hunter Biden Movie So You Don’t Have to
To watch My Son Hunter is to experience an attempted red-pilling, directed by the bad guy from Goonies.
By Dana Stevens
Sept 09, 2022 5:40 AM
A vaguely pornographic looking publicity still shows a man (Laurence Fox as Hunter Biden) passed out on the coach, his shirt unbuttoned, and scantily clad strippers all around him, posing for a selfie.
Publicity still via MySonHunter.com
Breitbart Media makes its first foray into feature film distribution with the release of My Son Hunter, a lurid satire about the alleged international shenanigans of the current president’s wayward second son. The scandal of “Hunter Biden’s laptop,” long the source of amusement on the left and furious what-abouting on conservative cable TV, is now a major motion picture, or at least a motion picture shot in Serbia on a crowd-funded budget of $2.5 million. “This is not a true story,” announces Gina Carano, playing a Secret Service agent fond of addressing snarky asides at the camera, in the movie’s hectic opening moments. “Except for the facts.”
Carano’s name may unfortunately be most familiar because of her 2021 firing from the Disney series The Mandalorian, rather than because of her memorably raw performance in the Steven Soderbergh action thriller Haywire or her earlier career as a pro mixed martial arts fighter. Like several other cast members of My Son Hunter, Carano is now a self-announced victim of “cancellation,” cast out of mainstream entertainment for her controversial comments about vaccine mandates, Black Lives Matter protests, and the, in her view, illustrative analogy between the Jewish genocide of the Holocaust and the silencing of conservative voices.
Carano’s fed-up Secret Service agent is far from the central character of My Son Hunter, which takes place mainly over one debauched night in 2019 in the hookers-and-blow-filled Chateau Marmont suite of the prodigal younger son. For the first 40 minutes or so, the protagonist seems to be Hunter himself, a drug-crazed, sweat-glazed, pitifully self-deluded but not entirely unsympathetic figure as played by the nothing-if-not-all-in Laurence Fox. Fox is a British actor, a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art who appeared in supporting roles in Robert Altman’s 2001 drawing-room mystery Gosford Park and the long-running ITV detective show Lewis, but who has become better known in recent years for his crusades against “extreme political correctness.” He has caused controversy for his remarks about COVID lockdowns and casting diversity, and he ran for mayor of London last year on the ticket of his own self-founded “Reclaim Party,” winning just 1.9 percent of the vote.
More at https://slate.com/culture/2022/09/my-son-hunter-biden-laptop-movie-bre
itbart-review.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The United States will soon drop out of the Top 50 nations in terms of life expectancy.
Every country above us has a public option for health insurance of a publicly funded healthcare system. Not some. Not most. Every single one.
https://twitter.com/johngreen/status/1567578183683162116
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Religion and Samuel Alito’s time bomb
By Andrew Koppelman, Opinion Contributor - 09/11/22 3:00 PM ET
An irresponsible sentence that Justice Samuel Alito wrote eight years ago may now excuse religious people from nearly every legal obligation they have, so long as a hypothetical, nonexistent government program could substitute for it.
That became clear this week when Judge Reed O’Connor declared in Braidwood Management v. Becerra that employers with religious objections may offer health plans without drugs that prevent transmission of HIV, contraception, the HPV vaccine and screenings and behavioral counseling for STDs and drug use. The employers claim that providing such coverage makes them complicit in homosexual behavior, drug use and sexual activity outside of marriage.
. . .
Alito’s irresponsible sentence mused that the “most straightforward way” of providing coverage “would be for the Government to assume the cost of providing the four contraceptives at issue to any women who are unable to obtain them under their health-insurance policies due to their employers’ religious objections.”
Alito’s dictum was the basis for Judge O’Connor’s decision last week. Quoting “Hobby Lobby,” O’Connor wrote that the Biden administration had not “shown that the government would be unable to assume the cost of providing [HIV preventive] drugs to those who are unable to obtain them due to their employers’ religious objections.”
And that was that. With this one sentence, the employees’ coverage disappeared. Gone are Kennedy’s concerns about the difficulty and expense of demanding entire new programs. Or the certainty that those programs will not in fact ever be enacted, so that the employees must simply do without. And a majority of the new, extremely conservative court appears likely to agree with Alito.
I’ve focused at length on what Alito wrote in Hobby Lobby because O’Connor’s decision shows that it was a time bomb, one now in the process of exploding. It is available in any case where any obligation could imaginably be fulfilled by the government.
Where is the stopping point to the ‘let the government pay’ alternative? Suppose an employer’s sincerely held religious belief is offended by health coverage of vaccines, or paying the minimum wage, or according women equal pay for substantially similar work? Other costly mandates are landlords’ obligations to keep premises safe, or employers’ duty to purchase expensive safety equipment. And what about religious people who object to paying taxes?
More at https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/3637154-religion-and-samuel-alit
os-time-bomb/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Where is the stopping point to the ‘let the government pay’ alternative? Suppose an employer’s sincerely held religious belief is offended by health coverage of vaccines, or paying the minimum wage, or according women equal pay for substantially similar work? Other costly mandates are landlords’ obligations to keep premises safe, or employers’ duty to purchase expensive safety equipment. And what about religious people who object to paying taxes?
This is a paragraph meant to influence stupid people.
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Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
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