GOP cult – Sheila Kennedy

Diagnosis And Prescription

In a recent opinion piece for the New York Times, David French shared his theory that the recent, astonishing number of sign-ups to Meta’s Threads occurred–at least in part– “because Elon Musk did to Twitter what Donald Trump did to America.”

Not that Twitter was so great before Musk acquired it–as French quite accurately notes, understanding what Musk did to Twitter doesn’t require an exaggeration of Twitter’s virtues before Musk, “any more than we should exaggerate the health of our body politic before Trump.”

Even before Musk, Twitter had become a toxic force in American culture, so toxic that I wrote last year it might be beyond repair. The site lurched from outrage to outrage, and the constant drumbeat of anger and crisis was bad for the soul.
So, yes, when Musk purchased Twitter, it needed help. Instead, he made it worse. Much worse.

For all of Twitter’s many flaws, it was still by far the best social media app for following breaking news, especially if you knew which accounts to follow. It was also the best app for seeing the thoughts of journalists, politicians and scholars in real time, sometimes to our detriment. It wasn’t the American town square — there are still many places where we talk to one another — but it was one of our town squares. Twitter mattered.

French enumerates the numerous decisions that have made the platform much worse–decisions that rather clearly rested on Musk’s flawed understanding of its strengths and weaknesses.

French’s essay makes a point that is applicable not just to the marketing of a social media platform, but to policy–and for that matter, human decision-making–more generally. As he says,

The new right’s theory of culture and power is fundamentally flawed, and both Trump and Musk are now cautionary tales for any conservatives who are willing to learn.

According to French,

The new right’s theory of power is based on a model of domination and imposition, and it just doesn’t work. In the new right’s telling, the story of contemporary American culture is the story of progressive elite capture of the nation’s most important institutions — from the academy to big business to pop culture to the “deep state” — followed by its remorseless use of that institutional power to warp and distort American values.

And what’s the new right’s response to its theory of the left’s use of power? Fight fire with fire. Take over institutions. They tried to cancel us? Cancel them. They bullied us? Bully them.

The “cautionary tale” to which French alludes is actually pretty simple: in order to fix a problem, you need to diagnose it properly. Medical personnel understand that–duh!– if the disease being treated isn’t the disease from which you’re suffering, you won’t be cured. If a social dysfunction is rooted in X and policymakers insist upon addressing it by attacking Y, the likely result will just be additional dysfunction.

That axiom is simple, but of course, its application can be complicated. The actual roots of many social problems are complex. That said, a significant cause of America’s political divisions can be found in the wildly different diagnoses of the country’s problems offered by the GOP cult and by more thoughtful Americans.

The cult is convinced that America’s problems are rooted in a modernity that has discarded “tradition,” by which they mean the dominance of White Christian males. The cult’s frantic efforts to outlaw abortion and its attacks on efforts to increase diversity, inclusion and equity grow out of that diagnosis. The most recent example: House amendments to the bill funding the military– funding that passed only after the far Right attached provisions limiting abortion rights, gender transition procedures and diversity training in the armed forces.

When a diagnosis–an explanation of causation–is rooted in fantasy, the medicine prescribed is likely to make the condition worse. Gun violence won’t be ameliorated by making more guns available to “good guys;” the working poor won’t be helped by reducing taxes on presumed “job creators;” history won’t disappear if we pass laws against teaching it…

What happens when a sizable portion of the polity misdiagnoses reality–when the “medicine” imposed by people in power is exactly the wrong prescription? We’ve seen the result. As French put it, a government that needed reform “encountered a politician who broke far more than he built. A social media platform that needed repair was purchased by its most prominent troll. The results were predictable.”

We inhabit a complicated world. It isn’t always easy to locate the roots of our problems–but government by people whose diagnoses and prescriptions are reliably simple and just as reliably wrong won’t cure what ails us.

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Identity Politics

Typically, diatribes against so-called identity politics are aimed at “woke” folks advocating for the civic equality of marginalized groups, presumably to the detriment of the common good. I want to argue for a different–and infinitely more troubling–definition, one that helps explain America’s current divisions.

Several recent events and observations have prompted this reflection. A few days ago, I attended a meeting of a group of Hoosiers concerned about Indiana’s lopsided support of Republican candidates, even when those candidates were obviously and dramatically flawed. What several of us implicitly recognized was the changed nature of political choice.

These days, Hoosiers and other American voters are not engaged in debates over policy. The policy preferences and beliefs that used to determine whether people identified with Republicans or Democrats–free trade, welfare policy, foreign policy–no longer drive that choice, and a frighteningly large number of Americans haven’t the faintest idea what positions the parties or candidates embrace–or even know enough about the issues to form a coherent opinion.

Worse still, most don’t care.

I previously noted that the very welcome result in Georgia’s Senate run-off was an uncomfortably close one–that 1,700,000+ voters cast ballots for a manifestly unqualified and arguably mentally-ill candidate.

A couple of days ago, in his daily Newsletter, Robert Hubbell noted the durability of GOP base support for Trump, despite behaviors most Americans would once have seen as immediately disqualifying:

In the three weeks since he announced his 2024 presidential bid, Trump has met with antisemites, Nazi supporters, white nationalists, and QANON members at Mar-a-Lago and called for the “termination of the Constitution.”That is the worst “roll-out” of a presidential campaign in history. And yet, Trump has a 40% favorability rating while President Biden has a 42%favorability rating. We dismiss Trump at our peril.

I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that America is now experiencing a tribal war. Our differences are not based upon contending positions on matters of policy or candidate quality; they are based upon the irreconcilable world-views of the “tribes” of which we consider ourselves part.

Policy differences can be compromised; irreconcilable world-views cannot.

Over the past few decades, we Americans have sorted ourselves into a Red tribe and a Blue tribe. The Republican Party has never been a “big tent” in the same way the Democratic Party was and still is, but it was far more capacious than it is today. There were liberal Republicans, and a significant number of Republicans for Choice (a group to which I once belonged). Foreign policy positions ranged from isolationist to interventionist.

Today, the GOP has purged virtually all “outliers.” The MAGA party has largely morphed into the White Christian Nationalist Party, with internal differences narrowed to degrees of racism, anti-Semitism and hatred of “the libs.” A “moderate” Republican today is one who limits his public pronouncements of such sentiments because he still recognizes how ugly they sound. (I use the male pronoun because most of these culture warriors are men, but not all; loony-tune shrews like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert are full-fledged members of the cult.)

Everyone who doesn’t fall within the GOP’s ambit–everyone who isn’t prepared to join the cult–is either a Democratic-leaning Independent or a Democrat, with the result that what was once that party’s “big tent'” is now a huge one, stretching from never-Trump Republicans to middle-of-the-road voters to self-identified democratic socialists. (That makes achievement of consensus the equivalent of herding cats, but that’s an issue for a different post.)

People now go to the polls to vote for their tribe, their team. America has always had an unfortunate tendency to view political contests like team sports; these days, “my team” has hardened into “my tribe, my people,” and voting has become a contest between “real Americans” and “woke liberals.” The attributes of the candidates, their positions on or evasions of the issues have largely faded into irrelevancy.

So…what now?

I fervently hope that we are simply on the cusp of permanent, largely positive social change, and that it is resistance to that change that has engendered the outpouring of fury, bile and hysteria from what Steve Schmidt calls “the belligerent minority.” I hope that the inclusive, so-called “woke” culture these folks so detest has become too embedded to be overturned.

I actually do believe that to be the case. But in the meantime, those of us who aren’t part of the cult need to understand what is motivating the legions who vote for people like Herschel Walker and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and who continue to support Donald Trump–and we need to actively oppose them.

Whoever said “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” wasn’t kidding.

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Hunter Biden And His Laptop…

One of the most interesting aspects of America’s current political environment has been the defection from the GOP of formerly high-ranking Republicans. These strategists and elected officials have recognized that today’s GOP is a very different animal than the party that once existed, and have been intellectually honest enough to say so.

One of those “refugees” from MAGA land is David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush. Frum is currently a senior editor at The Atlantic and an MSNBC contributor. (He was also the author of Bush’s “axis of evil” description–a framing I personnally found unfortunate, but hey…)

Frum has an article in the most recent Atlantic in which he predicts the behavior of the slim GOP House majority over the next two years. He began by comparing the actions of Democrats under Nancy Pelosi with the behavior of the chamber under Newt Gingrich and Tom Delay. Pelosi focused the Democrats on legislation–notably, the Affordable Care Act.

By contrast, the Republican majority elected in 1994 and 2010 lunged immediately into total war. In 1994, the leaders, Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay, wanted and led the total war. In 2010, Speaker John Boehner opposed the lunge and tried, largely in vain, to control it. In both cases, the result was the same: a government shutdown in 1995, a near default on U.S. debt obligations in 2011, and a conspiratorial extremism that frightened mainstream voters back to the party of the president.

Frum says the signs all point to the likelihood that the just-elected Republican House majority “will follow the pattern of its predecessors.” It isn’t difficult to pinpoint one of those “signs”–intemperate MAGA warrior Jim Jordan will evidently head up the Judiciary Committee. Jordan has all but licked his chops when announcing the GOP’s highest priority: investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop and tying whatever is found to Joe Biden.

As he says,

Why Republicans would want to believe this holds little mystery. From 2017 to 2021, Republicans supported and defended a strikingly corrupt president whose children disregarded nepotism rules to enrich themselves and their businesses. The administration opened with a special favor from the government of Japan to Donald Trump’s daughter and closed with a $2 billion investment by the government of Saudi Arabia for the president’s son-in-law—despite written warnings from the Saudi government’s outside advisers about excessive fees, inexperienced management, and operations that were “unsatisfactory in all aspects.”

How do partisans try to neutralize four years of nonstop genuine scandals? By ginning up an equal and opposite scandal against the other team. The Trump family may have been the most crooked ever to occupy the White House, and on a scale impossible to deny or ignore. During Trump’s administration, his hotel business exacted payments on Pennsylvania Avenue from corporations, individuals, and foreign governments as a condition of presidential favor and charged the Secret Service fees simply so that it could do its job of protecting the president. Trump himself elevated his son-in-law to de facto positions as a chief of staff and a national security adviser. Meanwhile, the president’s other children headed family businesses that profited from the presidency.

If that record cannot be denied, then maybe it can be diminished or rendered somehow acceptable by alleging that Trump’s successor is doing the same thing.

Frum proceeds to explain why the GOP’s “whataboutism” is unlikely to work, harking back to comparisons with Bill Clinton’s impeachment. But here’s the thing: if indeed Hunter Biden turns out to have been guilty of legal misconduct, most Democrats I know would agree that he should be appropriately sanctioned for that misconduct. No one’s above the law.

My own guess is that the worst thing an investigation will be able to pin on President Biden is that he has been a loving and forgiving father to a disturbed son. As Frum writes the upcoming script:

Republicans: Do you know that Hunter Biden is a financial and emotional mess?

Voters: Now we do.

Republicans: Don’t you care?

Voters: No.

Republicans: Do you know that Joe Biden wrote notes telling his son he loved him despite his troubles, and also let his son stay in his house when his son was down on his luck?

Voters: That sounds like a good thing.

Republicans: What if we told you that Joe and Hunter Biden ran a massive international-crime syndicate and that they are implicated in sex trafficking and cover-ups?

You can foresee where this dialogue is heading.

The GOP is gearing up for a re-run of “Pizzagate.” Deep in their conspiratorial bubbles, many of them actually believe the QAnon-inspired stories. As Frum writes, they are so deeply embedded in those fantasies, they forget that they were the ones who first concocted them.

And really– sex trafficking is so much more interesting than governing…

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Messaging

A longtime friend–a moderate Democrat–recently sent me the following email (I am pasting it in verbatim.)

A recent headline, “The brand is so toxic Dems fear extinction in rural US” jumped off the page. The article by AP writer Steve Peoples repeated and articulated well what so many of us have thought for several years. Ds do a terrible job of creating a desirable brand. Here, in southern Indiana, where less than 10% of the population has a college degree, Ds use terms like metric tons of CO2, while Rs talk about outrageous price per gallon at the pump. Ds read and quote the NYT and US News and condemn the idea of book police. Rs text why Coach Woodson’s player rotation is wrong. Ds promote the statistical benefits of vaccinations. Rs simply demand that the school kids not have to wear a damn mask.

I am proud to be among the 10% who read the NYT, see benefit in exposure to ideas, think the liberal arts professors are underpaid and still wear my mask into ACE Hardware. But Mr. Peoples is correct. One need only look at Indiana’s 9th congressional district to see clear and irrefutable evidence. We Ds are terrible at branding. We seem doomed to take a licking, and maybe soon stop ticking, to paraphrase John Cameron Swayze.

It’s hard to disagree with the essential point, which is that Democratic “talking points” aren’t connecting to those we think of as “average Americans.” I would also agree with the rather obvious implication of that observation, to wit: Democrats need to fashion messages that would be likely to resonate with the inhabitants of southern Indiana and the country’s rural precincts.

However.

It’s easy enough to cringe at slogans like “Defund the Police” –which not only repelled large numbers of voters, but utterly failed to describe the policy change that was being proposed. The persistent complaints about messaging, however, aren’t limited to such examples.

It may be worth taking a step back and examining the roots of that perceived messaging problem–and the extent to which it is and is not about messaging.

As I have previously noted, today’s Democratic Party is not only a far bigger “tent” than the GOP, it is a far bigger tent than it has previously been, thanks to a massive exodus of sane people from what the Republican Party has become. Devising messages that will appeal to all parts of the Democrats’ ideological spectrum–a spectum that spans from relatively conservative GOP refugees all the way to the Democrats who think AOC and Bernie Sanders are insufficiently liberal–isn’t a simple exercise in clever PR.

There is another challenge to the strategists trying to devise messaging that will appeal to “ordinary Americans” who don’t read the New York Times or accept the scientific consensus on climate change or COVID. As those of us who count ourselves among those refugees (in my case, a long-time defector) can attest, there is no messaging that will penetrate the faith-based cult that is today’s GOP. Today’s Republican Party is owned by White Christian Nationalists who cheered for Trump and Putin because they were champions for their version of Christianity–pro-patriarchy, anti-LGBTQ, anti-“woke,” etc. They aren’t going to respond to messages from a point of view that is entirely inconsistent with their hysterical effort to reinstate cultural dominance.

That leaves “messaging” directed to the dwindling numbers of “persuadable.” I agree that it would be worthwhile to find an approach that would appeal to those individuals–but I will also point out that any effort to craft such messages should be preceded by research into the reason(s) for their current status. Are they disconnected and disinterested? Disgusted by today’s political reality and loss of civility? Uninformed? All of the above?

I am by no means intending to diminish the importance of messaging. Words matter, and they matter a lot. But given where we are right now–given the substitution of a semi-religious cult for one of our only two major parties–I’d suggest putting all of our resources into messages and volunteer efforts focused on turning out the substantial majority of voters who already are in broad agreement with Democratic priorities. Polling consistently shows that the elements of Biden’s Build Back Better, for example, are widely popular.

We just have to remember that–given the multiple political and psychological barriers to casting a ballot–messages alone will not get voters to the polls.

And as Paul Ogden periodically reminds us, we also need to make sure that the people counting the votes of those we do turn out are counting them accurately.

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Facebook Is Making Me Suicidal

I’ve been trying to escape the torrent of stories about the constitutional crisis Trump has precipitated by claiming “Executive Privilege” over the entire Mueller Report and refusing to allow White House functionaries to testify to Congress.

The administration’s escalating assault on constitutional and democratic norms has plunged me into a depression–not just because there is an insane moron in the Oval Office, but–more critically– because not a single Republican Senator is willing to place fidelity to the country over fear of electoral retribution by the party’s rabid base.

Not a single one. They are all fellow-travelers to treason.

As my introductory diatribe probably indicates, I spend a lot of time muttering and despairing…so, recently, I went to my Facebook feed for distraction. (That wasn’t the brightest thing to do, because most of my Facebook friends are as politically irate as I am.)

Here’s what I saw on just a quick scroll:

A picture of the student who died in the most recent school shooting, in Colorado. He was three days from high school graduation, and rushed the shooter, saving others. I’m sure the f**ing NRA sends thoughts and prayers.
An economic analysis of Trump’s steel tariffs, showing that the cost of each American job created was $900,000. (That is not a typo.) I couldn’t tell whether that number included the extra couple hundred dollars Americans are paying for their washing machines thanks to those tariffs…
A NYTimes report that Trump lost 1.17 billion dollars over a decade–the paper obtained tax information detailing the massive losses by our self-proclaimed “deal maker” and also showing that he didn’t pay a dollar of tax during that period. (Now if we could see the more recent taxes he’s so frantic to hide…)
Several posts about new anti-choice legislation in Ohio and Georgia. The Georgia version would impose criminal penalties on women who couldn’t prove they didn’t cause their own miscarriages, and would charge women who left the state in order to get legal abortions elsewhere with conspiracy to commit murder.
Several posts highlighting despicable statements and blatant lies from Mitch McConnell, aka the most evil man in America. (No, Mitch, it wasn’t Obama’s fault that Russia interfered with our election.)
News reports about a group of Neo-Nazis who shoved their way into a Holocaust Memorial ceremony in Arkansas, shouting “Five Million More!” (I’m sure our American Fuhrer would say the group contained some “very fine” people.)
A news report that Betsy DeVos’ Department of Education rejected 99% of the applications for loan forgiveness filed by students who were bilked by bogus for-profit “educational” institutions.
And this story about a Texas Republican representative who labeled vaccinations “sorcery.” After reading this one, I couldn’t go on.

After deriding public health science as a “scam,” the Representative, one Jonathan Strickland, doubled down on the crazy, telling a pediatrician who works with impoverished children that he was a practitioner of “self-enriching science.” He then engaged in a couple of other illuminating twitter exchanges:

Replying to @RepStickland and 2 others
You are wrong in all particulars, Congressman. As a civil servant, I would expect that you would listen to experts (Peter surely is a leader here) and be…civil. BTW “self enriching science” is myth for almost all of us, but has likely saved your ungrateful life more than once.

Jonathan Stickland@RepStickland
Typical leftist trying to take credit for something only The Lord God Almighty is in control of. Repent!

David Gorski, MD, PhD
✔@gorskon
Notice how, to these “parental rights” antivaxers, it’s all about THEM: THEIR rights. THEIR religion. THEIR freedom. The child’s right not to be medically neglected, not to be left unnecessarily vulnerable to disease, never even enters the equation. It doesn’t occur to them.

Jonathan Stickland@RepStickland
Replying to @gorskon and 3 others
… You can’t seem to understand the notion of freedom and liberty…you have no right to come between me and my doctor of choice, or between me and my religious beliefs. Leave us alone.

Personal responsibility and parental rights confuse you, I get it. You’re a brainwashed commie, not all your fault.

What makes all of this so frustrating is the absolute inability to have a rational conversation, grounded in reality and evidence, with the dangerous and demented cult that is today’s GOP.

They aren’t interested in policy, they disdain science, and they’re contemptuous of the rule of law. They have invented a “Christian” theology that is consistent with their fears and hostilities. They are motivated entirely by their visceral hatred of the women and minorities that they fear are “replacing” them.

Bottom line: Facebook didn’t distract me. It just reminded me that I’m powerless to “change the channel.”

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