As a Personal Note: Need to Read More of This Montesquieu Guy

For all that I've read about the foundations of the American political experiment that is our Constitution... why is it only NOW am I hearing about this guy? Robert A Ballingall over at Crooks & Liars wrote a big article on Montesquieu's contributions to the Founders' political philosophy:

How are people in the U.S. to make sense of these trends? As Americans celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary, how faithful is the U.S. today to its founding principles? I’m a political philosophy scholar who studies constitutional government. In my view, an especially helpful approach to answering such questions is to revisit the towering but neglected influence of the French philosopher Montesquieu on the founding of this country...

On the separation of powers, Montesquieu was, in James Madison’s words, “the oracle who is always consulted and cited.” Of all authors cited in political writings published by Americans between 1760 and 1805, none was more frequently mentioned. He loomed so large that “American republican ideologues could recite the central points of Montesquieu’s doctrine as if it had been a catechism,” according to historian Forrest McDonald.

Montesquieu was especially celebrated for his account of how and why political power needs to be separated into branches. But behind this now familiar idea was another that is less remembered: Montesquieu’s theory of liberty inspired the founders’ own understandings of this core concept of American politics...

For all that I've been told about Locke, and Mill, and that other guy, nobody's talked about Montesquieu until now.

Dammit now I got more homework to finish.

How To Lose A Kingdom Without Even Trying: UK 2026 Edition

And I thought American politics was a complete shitshow. What the hell, Great Britain? (via Lauren Frayer at NPR)

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has resigned as leader of the United Kingdom's governing Labour Party, clearing a path for the country's seventh prime minister in a decade.

Starmer said he will remain as caretaker prime minister until his party selects a new leader, asking his party to begin nominations on July 9.

Andy Burnham, the popular former mayor of Greater Manchester, England, confirmed on social media that he'll seek to succeed Starmer. Another potential contender, former U.K. Health Secretary Wes Streeting, posted a letter saying he would back Burnham's bid. So Burnham could run for the Labour Party leadership — and ultimately prime minister — uncontested, and enter office in late July.

The center-left Labour Party was elected two years ago with a landslide majority in the U.K. Parliament. Since then, Starmer's personal approval ratings have slumped to a historic low. Polls show voters believe he failed to deliver palpable change after austerity and budget cuts under 14 years of previous Conservative Party rule. He was also criticized for appointing Peter Mandelson, a close friend of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as British ambassador to Washington.

This is the seventh turnover at 10 Downing Street since David Cameron resigned ten years ago. At this point, just fucking promote Larry the Cat to PM.

At least Starmer lasted longer than Liz Truss, but considering it's less than two years since that huge electoral win in July 2024, this is not a great sign for Labour on how they're handling things in the UK.

I mean, look back at how things were that 4th of July:

I'm not sure how the Tories are going to convince themselves they know what they're doing after a massive shift in voter support like this. They had picked up a major victory in 2019 gaining an 80-seat majority, and by the next election are losing 170 seats. A comparable situation would be like the House Republicans getting their 6-seat majority in 2022 only to have the Democrats flip it to a 60 seat majority in 2024 (postscript: goddammit American voters)...

Next will be a question of how Labour is going to fix all the damage - the austerity economics getting out of the Great Recession, the various scandals over their tenure, and of course Brexit - this inept, corrupt Tory leadership has done since 2010.

And that was the thing: Starmer and the Labour Party had a huge mandate from their voters, a massive shift of control in Parliament that had to be an angry response from their nation over the decades-long failures of the Conservative Party. The mandate was obvious: Do Anything and Everything Opposite of What the Bloody Tories Did.

And then Starmer... kind of did nothing. Other than perform miscue after miscue, failing to push needed changes to the economy, and getting ensnared in scandals that were easily avoided (via Jill Lawless and Pan Pylas with AP News, but linked through PBS Newshour):

It's a precipitous downfall from July 4, 2024, when Starmer brought the center-left Labour Party back to power after 14 years, winning 411 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons.

Standing outside 10 Downing St. the next day, Starmer pledged to restore "respect to politics" and lead a government of "public service." After the chaos of the last years of Conservative rule, which saw a constant churn of scandal and the toppling of prime ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss in quick succession, Starmer promised to lower the temperature and make politics a little bit more boring.

Some of the problems that felled him were baked into his victory, which was built on a wide but shallow base of support. Labour won a huge majority in Parliament but was backed by only 34% of voters — and many of those appeared motivated by anger at the Conservatives rather than enthusiasm for Labour. It's been termed the "loveless landslide."

This lack of excitement for his government was compounded by missteps. An early furor over accepting valuable gifts, including designer spectacles and Taylor Swift concert tickets, was followed by a series of policy U-turns, especially clumsy attempts to cut welfare spending that stirred anger in Labour ranks.

What ultimately destroyed his credibility was his appointment of Peter Mandelson to the plum post of the United Kingdom's ambassador to the U.S. It was an error of judgment he couldn't shake off.

Mandelson, a Labour Party elder statesman nicknamed the "Prince of Darkness," was seen as someone who could help Britain navigate U.S. President Donald Trump's second term. His trade expertise and comfort around the ultra-rich were considered major assets.

But the choice of Mandelson — who in 2003 called himself Epstein's "best pal" — backfired spectacularly when documents came to light in September 2025 showing how close his ties to Epstein had been. Starmer fired Mandelson, but further revelations in the following months plunged his leadership into crisis...

First elected to Parliament in 2015, Starmer was picked to lead and rebuild Labour five years later after the party's worst election result since 1935. Starmer dragged Labour toward the political center after taking over from veteran socialist Jeremy Corbyn, who led Labour to election defeats in 2017 and 2019. Starmer ditched some of his predecessor's more left-wing policies and apologized for antisemitism that an internal investigation concluded had been allowed to spread under Corbyn.

Starmer's forensic and prosecutorial skills were on display in Parliament, where he tormented the three Conservative prime ministers he faced. He was especially scathing in attacks on Boris Johnson, who allowed parties inside Downing Street during the COVID-19 pandemic, in violation of the country's lockdown rules.

But being prime minister required a different skill set and Starmer often fell short, lacking the flexibility and political instincts that the job requires — at least on the domestic front.

He attracted a level of vitriol from some voters out of step with his managerial demeanor. Hard-right activists shouted crude abuse at protests, he alienated retirees and working-class families with attempts to cut welfare benefits and angered pro-Palestinian voters with a perceived reluctance to criticize Israel during the Gaza war...

A number of other things happened - and didn't happen - which condemned the Labour leadership. The overt attempts to pander to a "centrist" position alienated the left-leaning base and did nothing to draw the right-leaning voters away from the extremism of Farage. Above all, what ruined Starmer was inaction resolving the major political issue of the United Kingdom - Brexit - that politicians didn't even want to discuss while a growing majority of Brits hate it and want it gone.

For any deeper insight on Brexit, I read Chris Grey's Brexit blog: His observations a week back - during the theatrics of by-elections leading up to Starmer's resignation - are thorough.

After all, assuming that, as polls increasingly suggest is likely, Andy Burnham wins in Makerfield that seems likely to herald several weeks of a Labour leadership contest ending, potentially, with yet another new Prime Minister. That seems all the more possible with the resignation of the Defence Secretary yesterday, followed by that of the Armed Forces Minister, adding to the existing sense that Keir Starmer’s leadership is in crisis and its days are numbered. Perhaps a Burnham premiership would bring some fresh momentum to politics, and some impression of direction, but it’s hard to be optimistic about that, if only because not only are Britain’s problems deeper than its leader but they also tend to militate against any leader being effective...

That is frankly pitiful given that the reset was Labour’s central policy on what has been the defining political issue of the last decade, and that David Lammy, the then Shadow Foreign Secretary, said in 2023 that it would be Labour’s “number one” foreign policy priority if they came to power. It is all the more pitiful given the profound changes and dangers in international relations since then. And if it is true (which seems highly plausible) that it is agreeing a YMS which is holding things up then that is not just pitiful but shameful, in two ways. First because it shows a lack of realism, given that this was always the key EU requirement if there was to be a deal on the UK’s priorities. And secondly because it shows another of the ways that the government has chosen to be driven by the anti-immigration agenda of Reform.

The latter connects with the much deeper reason why the present moment is not just wearisome but one of despair and, even, fear. It is apparently now inevitable that every time there is a serious crime which has any connection with immigration it will be followed by street violence accompanied by a vicious, frenzied ‘debate’ conducted in terms framed by Nigel Farage and others on the far right, not least because major broadcasters, most importantly the BBC, are prone to adopt that framing. This is not simply an opinion on my part, or an evidence-free jibe: it flows directly from the plans the BBC drew up last year to win over Reform voters, who it feared were losing trust in its output, by changing both its news “story selection” and drama offerings so as to appeal to them...

This is part of why Starmer and Labour are struggling: They're fighting a Far Right fearmongering Narrative that their nation's own media deploys to the detriment of everyone, which drives the party to tack to a centrist spot that's not even centrist (it's racist. I digress). Regarding a murder case where "reverse racism" was tossed about creating disinfo and distrust, Grey noted:

In short, this case does not demonstrate the “two-tier policing” or the “anti-white prejudice” Farage claimed, in a preposterously self-important “emergency address” to the nation. Yet such claims had the unsurprising consequence of significant public disorder in Southampton, just as the furore after the Southport murders did (and, as in that case, the treatment of the rioters was treated as further evidence of two-tier policing). Equally unsurprisingly, it turned out that, far from being ‘ordinary decent people’ expressing their ‘legitimate concerns’, many of the Southampton ‘protestors’ were neo-Nazi activists, whilst one of the first to appear in court was a thug with a string of previous convictions for violence.

It has been suggested, not implausibly, that Farage was motivated to stir up, in his words, “pure, cold rage” partly as a distraction from the questions he has sought to avoid about his £5 million gift and partly to respond to the electoral threat from Rupert Lowe’s Restore party in the Makerfield by-election and the more general competition between the two men and their parties. Perhaps, but it is surely the case that, even without those incentives, he would have done the same thing since he routinely does so...

This highly febrile moment was the worst imaginable time for the news that a grotesque attempted murder had been allegedly committed by a Sudanese refugee in Belfast. The case was very different in its details, but the familiar patterns of social media outrage quickly led to far more extreme violence in Belfast than had occurred in Southampton. In Belfast, gangs of masked men sought out individuals and families who were refugees, or simply ‘foreign’, to attack them and burn their homes, along with wider violence against the police and other targets. Evidence is now emerging that a ‘target list’ of immigrants’ addresses had been drawn up months ago, well before this week’s stabbing, suggesting that this was merely a pretext.

These were not, as the Telegraph described them, “protests”. A more accurate term was that used by the Times: it was a “pogrom”. That term, more often associated with anti-Semitic violence, has a particular, and controversial, historical association in Northern Ireland, dating back to the 1920s and in that and other ways the meaning of this week’s violence in Northern Ireland is somewhat different to that in mainland Britain...

As for Farage, if he had indeed felt any sense of shame the previous week there was no sign of it in his response to the Belfast violence as he gloatingly ‘warned’ that “things will continue to kick off” and will continue to do so “over the course of the summer”, whilst claiming that “the vast majority” involved in the disorder are not “bad actors” but (he implied but did not say) just ordinary decent people with legitimate concerns. He could hardly conceal his glee, any more than could those recycling the now-popular predictions of imminent civil war.

It's in that kind of social media environment - a Far Right mob one match away from starting an inferno - similar to the conditions here in the United States over the past 20-30 years, where Culture War upstarts, thence Tea Party protestors, thence MAGA insurrectionists skew the public discourse towards racism, anti-immigration outrage, and threats (and acts) of violence towards those liberals they deem "enemies". As much as we've seen the likes of Obama and Biden try to placate the other side of the aisle with bipartisan appeals, none of it ever worked. And it's in that kind of environment Starmer offered similar appeals and failed.

Starmer has been quite robust, ever since the asylum hostel riots shortly after he first came to power, in condemning far-right violence. Yet he and his government have done nothing to counter the general proposition that immigration and asylum seekers are a ‘problem’ requiring draconian restrictions. Indeed, as regards Brexit, specifically, there can be no doubt that the main reason for the ‘red lines’ is to forestall the return of freedom of movement of people. The most charitable reading of Labour’s approach to immigration is that it is a tactic to de-fang the far right: if so, it is abundantly clear that it has failed.

Not mentioned in Grey's article was the speech Starmer offered back in 2025 that could highlight the moment Starmer lost his own party base: the "Island of Strangers" anti-immigrant screed that immediately backfired on him (via Rajeev Syal at the Guardian):

The rhetoric was likened by some critics to the language of Enoch Powell, and the prime minister was accused of pandering to the populist right by insisting he intended to “take back control of our borders” and end a “squalid chapter” of rising inward migration.

Some politicians claimed that his words had echoed Powell’s notorious “rivers of blood” speech, which imagined a future multicultural Britain where the white population “found themselves made strangers in their own country”.

When asked to respond to accusations he had adopted Powell’s rhetoric, Starmer told the Guardian: “Migrants make a massive contribution to the UK, and I would never denigrate that.”

But in words that could further enrage his critics, Starmer insisted that new migrants must “learn the language and integrate” once in the UK. He said: “Britain is an inclusive and tolerant country, but the public expect that people who come here should be expected to learn the language and integrate.”

Several Labour MPs questioned whether Starmer’s policies were fuelling racism. Sarah Owen, the Labour chair of the women and equalities committee, who is of Malaysian-Chinese heritage, said: “Chasing the tail of the right risks taking our country down a very dark path.

“The best way to avoid becoming an ‘island of strangers’ is investing in communities to thrive – not pitting people against each other.”

Rose Judson over at Balloon Juice - the resident UK resident for that site - shared a few snippets of Starmer's failure including a Bluesky skeet that showed how that "island of strangers" speech angered the Labour base and did nothing to appeal to the racist Right:

Then came a new flashpoint: the "islands of strangers" speech. Labour, Lib Dem and Green voters reacted strongly against it, with Starmer losing net positive favourability among 2024 Labour voters for the first time, while receiving absolutely no credit from voters on the right.

[image or embed]

— Dylan Difford (@dylandifford.bsky.social) June 21, 2026 at 1:20 PM

Just in case the skeet disappears or the embed fails...

Pandering Never Works, case study no. 9876543210.

Judson has to live with this mess, and she's not thrilled about how it's staging to be the same old same old:

And there isn’t a woman or non-white person in the frame anywhere, which tells you a lot about the state of this party. It’s a depressing brew made from the dregs of Blairism, which was the dregs of Thatcherism, and all of it poisoned by Brexit.

Will an ambitious metropolitan mayor bring change at Number 10? For reasons, I have my doubts, especially since Burnham’s recent public statements include a bit of tacking to the center. We’ll see what happens in the coming months. Fingers crossed it won’t be same shit, different hair.

The best that the people of the United Kingdom can hope for is that the incoming PM - Burnham until further notice (or scandal) - makes a strong plan to undo Brexit and restart their struggling economy (which is now performing worse than Mississippi, one of the poorest states we've got), that he confronts the likes of Farage and hold him accountable for his incitements to race riots, and that he gets on the BBC's case and brings Doctor Who back out of hiatus, preferably with Emilia Jones as the new Doctor.

...I'm not joking.

The Problem With Liberalism

(This is, by the by, NOT an April Fools prank. Sorry about the timing, I've been working on this for a month...)

(also wik, this is my 2,500th blog post. It's a question if any of us will be here for the 3000th...)

With all of the current chaos in the United States - with trump and his Far Right MAGA brownshirts rampaging through our federal government - there's discernable alarm among the Democratic faithful wondering why the hell their own party leadership - who ought to be opposing trump's smash-and-grabs more forcefully - is publicly playing nice with a conservative Republican party that keeps punching Dems in the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) face.

There's a number of theories why the modern Democratic Party seems so apprehensive in the face of historic destruction by Far Right Wingnuts. I'll throw this one hypothesis out here to give me the excuse to discuss yet another political philosophy (those -isms) of how Liberalism - as a core foundation of modern Democratic Party world-view - is the source of this seeming inaction and timidity.

Liberalism I would argue started as the American world-view, back when it wasn't confined to just one political party. If you look up the term in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (3rd ed, 2009), liberalism "is the belief that it is the aim of politics to preserve individual rights and to maximize freedom of choice." (p. 306) As a philosophical response to the shifts in the United Kingdom from absolute monarchism - the Divine Right of Kings argument that had led to Charles I's execution and then the end of Stuart rule with James II's expulsion in 1688 - the emerging Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and John Stuart Mill developed ideologies justifying the actions against the British kings that didn't want to play nice with others.

Locke in particular had a major influence on American political (liberal) thinking. In Locke's First Treatise of Government, he directly countered the Divine Right of Kings - posited in Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha - as a form of slavery (from York University's PDF archive):

To make way for this doctrine, they have denied mankind a right to natural freedom; whereby they have not only, as much as in them lies, exposed all subjects to the utmost misery of tyranny and oppression, but have also unsettled the titles and shaken the thrones of princes... However we must believe them upon their own bare words, when they tell us, “We are all born slaves, and we must continue so;” there is no remedy for it; life and thraldom we entered into together, and can never be quit of the one till we part with the other... (p.8)

Locke made this point, against the ill intents of absolute rulers:

The great question which in all ages has disturbed mankind, and brought on them the greatest part of those mischiefs which have ruined cities, depopulated countries, and disordered the peace of the world, has been, not whether there be power in the world, nor whence it came, but who should have it. The settling of this point being, of no smaller moment than the security of princes, and the peace and welfare of their estates and kingdoms, a reformer of politics, one would think, should lay this sure, and be very clear in it: for if this remain disputable, all the rest will be to very little purpose; and the skill used in dressing up power with all the splendor and temptation absoluteness can add to it, without showing who has a right to have it, will serve only to give a greater edge to man’s natural ambition, which of itself is but too keen. What can this do but set men on the more eagerly to scramble, and so lay a sure and lasting foundation of endless contention and disorder, instead of that peace and tranquility, which is the blurriness of government, and the end of human society? (p.69)

Having argued against Divine Right in the First part, Locke dug into the Second Treatise (same PDF source):

To this purpose, I think it may not be amiss to set down what I take to be political power. That the power of a magistrate over a subject may be distinguished from that of a father over his children, a master over his servant, a husband over his wife, and a lord over his slave. All which distinct powers happening sometimes together in the same man, if he be considered under these different relations, it may help us to distinguish these powers one from another, and show the difference betwixt a ruler of a commonwealth, a father of a family, and a captain of a galley... Political power, then, I take to be a right of making laws, with penalties of death, and consequently all less penalties for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community in the execution of such laws, and in the defence of the commonwealth from foreign injury, and all this only for the public good... (p.106)

To understand political power aright, and derive it from its original, we must consider what estate all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of Nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man. A state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another, there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of Nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another, without subordination or subjection, unless the lord and master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another, and confer on him, by an evident and clear appointment, an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty... (p.106)

That is where the basic element of classical liberalism - the rights of an individual compared to the power of the state - takes root. Locke does care to set limits:

But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence; though man in that state have an uncontrollable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, yet he has not liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any creature in his possession, but where some nobler use than its bare preservation calls for it. The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions... (p.107)

There's arguably a lot more I can quote from Locke, but I'll stop here because this is the point where we can see Locke's influence on Thomas Jefferson, whose work on the Declaration of Independence is the keystone of American political philosophy: From which we derived the belief "that all men are created Equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."

You might notice Jefferson switches out "possessions" or "property" for "happiness", because that created back in 1776 a rather sticky moral conflict with America's UN-Equal system of chattel slavery on Blacks. Which does point to a more subtle yet still potent problem with liberalism as a political -ism that refers to the main problem overall.

What Locke - and Jefferson, and the rest of the liberal movement of the late 18th Century - aimed for was the establishment and reinforcement of the idea of The Social Contract (edited/cited by Alex Tuckness at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): 

Locke used the claim that men are naturally free and equal as part of the justification for understanding legitimate political government as the result of a social contract where people in the state of nature conditionally transfer some of their rights to the government in order to better ensure the stable, comfortable enjoyment of their lives, liberty, and property. Since governments exist by the consent of the people in order to protect the rights of the people and promote the public good, governments that fail to do so can be resisted and replaced with new governments...

The most direct reading of Locke’s political philosophy finds the concept of consent playing a central role. His analysis begins with individuals in a state of nature where they are not subject to a common legitimate authority with the power to legislate or adjudicate disputes. From this natural state of freedom and independence, Locke stresses individual consent as the mechanism by which political societies are created and individuals join those societies...

Into all of this Locke and other liberals built up the the concept of "The Rule Of Law": 

The Rule of Law comprises a number of principles of a formal and procedural character, addressing the way in which a community is governed. The formal principles concern the generality, clarity, publicity, stability, and prospectivity of the norms that govern a society. The procedural principles concern the processes by which these norms are administered, and the institutions—like courts and an independent judiciary that their administration requires...

In this, Liberalism subsists on a structured, procedural form of governance where the people as is their right elect leaders, the leaders create laws and enforce them, and the courts balance things out by defining the laws. If that system breaks down in any way, liberals - if any were in charge - would make changes to the laws and realign the administration and argue for judicial decisions to keep the system going.

This is how the Founding Fathers - balanced between more "conservative" world-views of business and class culture, with the "liberal" world-views of democratic/republic principles and legal stability - worked themselves from makeshift state-level confederations into a "strong" federal Constitutional system designed to provide the individual freedoms promised by their liberalism while guaranteeing that chaos/anarchy and the threat of European monarchism (the Absolutism of the day) did not threaten the American way of life. 

This is why when arguing about the nature (well, the sins) of Conservatism I disagreed with Frank Wilhoit's contention that Conservatism was the only American -ism. Wilhoit believed Conservatism - the modern, twisted version of it - had driven all other -isms out of the political landscape. My contention is that Conservatism - obsessed with seizing and maintaining political/economic/social control for the elite few - exists today as a counterpoint to Liberalism - the guarantees of individual rights within a shared community - which persists as a primary American ideology because the institutions it built - our entire Constitutional system of checks and balances - remain standing.

The problem with our modern Liberalism is how it has blinded itself to the perpetuation of that constitutional system, even as it is collapsing on itself from Far Right conservative misrule.

That Rule of Law that liberals insist on - believe still functions normally - is under attack as trump and his underlings both in the Executive and Legislative branches work to undo all of it: Either through attacking civil liberties of Americans and legal residents, or dismantling/shutting down federal agencies without following procedure or getting legislative consent as Locke intended. I've said this before: A lot of our constitutional federal system relied a lot on Good Faith, that all parties involved were acting for a common purpose or at least with genuine conviction to do the right thing. Without that, without the "unwritten rules" of governance that our nation's relied on for centuries to make things work within both the letter and the spirit of the law, the system's falling apart.

And yet, our current Democratic liberal leadership - that should be in active opposition to the damage trump and the radical Conservative Far Right are inflicting on that system - are still acting - almost deluding themselves - as though the political norms can still be upheld. They're so beholden to the Liberal ideology of the Social Contract that they're opening themselves to manipulation by their Conservative opponents to accelerate the constitutional system's collapse.

The likes of Minority Leader Schumer, and half the state governors planning to run for the Presidency in 2028 - as though a corrupt trump won't shut down elections altogether to seize power permanently - are going through the motions like the political norms they're used to will still be there after trump and the wingnut conservatives have burned it all down. They don't see the urgency or dangers of the moment, because they want to believe the liberal foundations of our nation will somehow survive even without action or defense on their part. They don't want to act in ways that would upset their understanding of that Social Contract: those unspoken norms, those natural rights.

The other problem with adhering to those norms of The Social Contract - that individual rights are upheld through the law, and with justice for all - is how uneven how unequal the enforcement of that Social Contract can be. Even as liberalism as an ideology demands equality for all as a right, in practice our liberal systems have a hard time enforcing or even defining those equal rights because even liberalism desires stability - a status quo - over change. 

You have to remember, even the liberal Founding Fathers compromised on the American system of Black slave labor to get the Declaration approved and the Constitution enacted. The liberalism of early American politics, business, and culture allowed slavery to thrive and spread to where it threatened our nation's well-being by the 1850s, and did little to stop the steady march towards Civil War when the spiritual and political harm of slavery could no longer be tolerated. It became the breaking point of the Social Contract, one that required a full Reconstruction and amendment reforms to repair... and which was left unfinished by the 1870s once the Social Contract (between White leaderships) was reimposed, leading to a century of Jim Crow inequality requiring another round of Civil Rights reforms by the 1960s to achieve even a modicum of justice under the Rule of Law. (All now threatened by a very anti-liberal trump regime undoing every Civil Rights act and social shift of the last 60 years)

Even as that Civil War allowed more left-leaning progressives among the liberal powers to enact major reforms involving education, agriculture, business, and law, and even as the Civil Rights movement attempted even further reforms, those reforms were not equally enforced to ensure the liberal system lived up to its own ideals. This is Liberalism's darkest flaw: It relies on a shared agreed-upon social order that bends too much to the corrupt world-view of more conservative, self-serving ideologues.

This is why there's a power struggle between traditional (classical) Liberals and more progressive (socialist) elements of the Democratic Party pushing for radical reforms and stronger equality for all to undo the damages of conservative elites eager to bring back Divine Right of trumps Kings to dominate us all: Liberals are wary of even incremental changes to the political system if it throws their understanding of the Social Contract into chaos.

There are other elements of Liberalism - such as the early adoption of Capitalism as an economic reform against the authoritarian corruption of mercantilism, without realizing how greed undermined Capitalism like any other economic -ism - that would require more discussion, but I've spent too long trying to hammer this essay out and I need to refocus on other outrages and observations of the current train wreck(s) we're enduring.

In short: Liberalism's problem isn't that it's weak, or vacillating when confronted by conservative or even fascist opposition. It's a genuinely well-informed, well-founded -ism compared to the other more destructive political beliefs that rise and fall with the cycles of history. Liberalism's problem is that it holds too much faith in a Social Contract that's too easily shredded and requires the same repatching over and over. At some point, our modern system of liberalism (neoliberal, I think) has to reposition itself on the chessboard and realize a more profound, truly just system of equality and opportunity has to be forged.

The Sins of Conservatism

In my ongoing rants against -Isms, I came across a tweet back in May 2022, realized I was due to rant about this, then got distracted by other news cycles, and kept referring back to this while expanding my -Isms outrage into a book project:

 

I need to fcking tag this quote. https://t.co/Xvl5LXlxx1

— Witty Librarian For Ukraine (@PaulWartenberg) May 5, 2022

There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham's Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation.

There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect...

That interpretation of Conservatism by Frank Wilhoit was pretty much spot on, but confusion rose up as to which Frank Wilhoit it was. Early interpretation was that it was (Francis) Wilhoit the political sciences professor, but instead it turned out to be Wilhoit the musical composer (who also posts comments on a lot of blogs including this one, hi Frank!).

Wilhoit the Composer may not be a certified expert on politics like Wilhoit the Professor, but his insight on Conservatism fits absolutely everything we've seen out of Conservatives since... well, the dawn of American politics.

If I'm bringing this back up now, a year later in 2023, it's because we're at yet another moment where American Conservatives - represented today by the Republican Party - are poised to wreak economic and social cruelty across every corner of the nation.

Right now, a lot of Republican-controlled states are passing anti-abortion laws that would punish women and doctors for even natural miscarriages, and forcing women to suffer through medical crises that could kill them. The Republicans are passing gender laws to punish trans teens (and even adults) as well as force gay/lesbian teens to hide from public view, all to uphold their conservative "gender role" bullshit. Republicans are ensuring easier access to firearms and easier public displays of guns especially around children, ensuring more gun violence and fear in our streets. 

At the federal level, the Far Right factions controlling the House GOP are making demands on Biden's administration to gut his own infrastructure and spending bills passed last year, putting chainsaws to Social Security and Medicare, and insisting on making the massive deficit-inducing tax cuts for the rich the GOP passed in 2017 are made permanent (they're set to expire in 2025 I believe). Otherwise they'll use the Debt Ceiling hostage AGAIN to force the U.S. government to default (causing a global economic meltdown).

And I'm not even getting into the viciousness the Conservatives aim at immigrants.

None of these things, by the way, are popular with the majority of Americans. Most Americans are okay with women having the right to choose. Most Americans are okay with gays and lesbians nowadays - having shifted to acceptance under Obama - and don't want to see trans teens abused by the states. Most Americans want gun reforms like universal background checks, safety locks to protect kids, and bans of military-grade assault rifles. Most Americans don't want tax cuts for the rich, Most Americans do want the social safety net working, and Most Americans don't want a public default to kill the global economy. 

Which is the problem with modern Conservatism. As Wilhoit noted, conservatives don't care what the majority wants, they care what they want at the expense of that majority.

Jamelle Boule at the New York Times spelled it out as the Four (Anti-)Freedoms (link provided as a gift, this may be temporary):

...All across the country, Republicans have passed laws to do exactly that wherever they have the power to do so, regardless of public opinion in their states or anywhere else. The war on bodily autonomy is a critical project for nearly the entire G.O.P., pursued with dedication by Republicans from the lowliest state legislator to the party’s powerful functionaries on the Supreme Court.

You might even say that in the absence of a national leader with a coherent ideology and agenda, the actions of Republican-led states and legislatures provide the best guide to what the Republican Party wants to do and the best insight into the society it hopes to build...

There is the push to free business from the suffocating grasp of child labor laws. Republican lawmakers in Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri and Ohio have advanced legislation to make it easier for children as young as 14 to work more hours, work without a permit and be subjected to more dangerous working conditions...

Elsewhere in the country, Republican-led legislatures are placing harsh limits on what teachers and other educators can say in the classroom about American history or the existence of L.G.B.T.Q. people. This week in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill that bans discussion in general education courses at public institutions of “theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political and economic inequities.” He also signed a bill that prohibits state colleges and universities from spending on diversity, equity and inclusion programs beyond what is necessary to retain accreditation as educational institutions...

Last but certainly not least is the Republican effort to make civil society a shooting gallery. Since 2003, Republicans in 25 states have introduced and passed so-called constitutional carry laws, which allow residents to have concealed weapons in public without a permit. In most of those states, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, it is also legal to openly carry a firearm in public without a permit...

What should we make of all this? In his 1941 State of the Union address, Franklin Roosevelt said there was “nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy” and that he, along with the nation, looked forward to “a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.” Famously, those freedoms were the “freedom of speech and expression,” the “freedom of every person to worship God in his own way,” the “freedom from want” and the “freedom from fear.” Those freedoms were the guiding lights of his New Deal, and they remained the guiding lights of his administration through the trials of World War II.

There are, I think, four freedoms we can glean from the Republican program.

There is the freedom to control — to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.

There is the freedom to exploit — to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.

There is the freedom to censor — to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.

And there is the freedom to menace — to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.

Roosevelt’s four freedoms were the building blocks of a humane society — a social democratic aspiration for egalitarians then and now. These Republican freedoms are also building blocks not of a humane society but of a rigid and hierarchical one, in which you can either dominate or be dominated...

Again, fitting Wilhoit's original observation: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect...

How did America's Conservativism even reach this point? Through long hard work, that's how. Decades of building up an agenda to achieve political power and then keep it at the expense of those they oppose. 

I've noted this before, when Conservatism in the United States early on bent to the whims and needs of the upper-class slaveowners of the South, who as a major faction in the Democratic Party pushed and fought against the more liberal ideologies - like the newly formed Republicans in the 1850s that called for abolition of slavery - to where they ruled and ruined the federal government into Civil War. 

For a time post-War conservativism was split between economic and social beliefs, uniting to maintain Jim Crow segregation but otherwise without a coherent banner to rally around. However, the dynamics of the liberal New Deal during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the rise and strength of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and international pressures of the Cold War forced the conservatives to gain a foothold in the 1960s to the Republican Party as reimagined by Barry Goldwater, and brought to power by 1980 by Ronald Reagan. A radical shift within the parties by the 2000s - pushed by the first stage of the Culture War in 1992 - made Republicans into hard conservatives with almost no true Moderate or Liberal left among their ranks, making it so much easier for the modern Republican Party to fulfill Wilhoit's definition.

Making it worse in all this was how Reagan brought to the Conservative movement the religious evangelicals - something even Goldwater refused to do - empowering the Republicans into an absolutist, God-given belief structure that doubles down on the "We are the TRUE Americans and all power should be OURS" world-view turning this into a power struggle between the "righteous" and the "dread Other" who must be purged from the (Christian) national body like a disease. Never mind the corruption and violence that comes with such a world-view.

If Conservatism is so corrupting, so prone to self-empowering to the point of self-destruction, so intent on denying any power-sharing (or wealth-sharing) with others to where it never holds a true majority of people, how can it still be popular enough to hold any semblance of power in the first place?

Well obviously, Conservativism appeals to those who seek power and influence and wealth. They will buy into such an -Ism in the hopes they will profit from being in the elite few. This is why you will see women, Blacks, Latinos, other ethnic and gender minorities align themselves to a conservative movement that would deny basic human rights to their own. Because they believe they are in - or can conform to - the upper class - an elite made of money, of celebrity - protected by other conservatives.

But how can such Conservatism - defined by that elitist world-view - appeal to those still outside of that upper elite class? Why are there a vast number of those in poverty - such as the rural regions of the Midwest or the Deep South - in the lower classes still willing to vote for something against their own economic and legal interests?

Because that Conservatism still tells those among the lower classes that their social status - defined by racial ethnicity - grants them higher standing over others in the same economic levels. Yes, the low-income voters making up the Republican Conservative base are driven by racism, and that's what empowers the Culture War cruelty that the Republican leaders are inflicting on their own states.

The shortest, most polite way to describe Conservatism in America: It is a sociological, economic, and political philosophy that insists on maintaining a racist Status Quo that benefits those on the "right" side of the racist dividing line (White, Male, and/or Rich, preferably all three).

There's a lot more to be said about Conservatism - for one, I would argue against Wilhoit's point that there are no other philosophies, because I believe Conservatism is a reaction against Liberalism - but that's where my book project comes into play. More on that hopefully later when I find time to effing write it past the outline stage (the research is mostly done).

One of the things I argue about -Isms is how they are competing and oft-times conflicting ideologies, burdened by the reality that all of them can be wrong about the Human Condition in any given moment but will insist on being absolutely right. Conservatism is no different: It will insist on its own philosophical purity while ignoring the damage it does even to its own adherents.

The problem with modern Conservatism - at least here in the United States - is that conservatives are fully aware of the damage they can do and still push their agenda. The whole argument of "The Cruelty Is The Point", and what Boulle details as the Republican agenda to grant only themselves the Freedoms for their own power, proves how dangerous this -Ism has become.

Taking a Break February 2023 Edition

I'm going to avoid blogging for this month of February so I can focus on a novel project I really REALLY want to get done: A book on American political ideologies (aka the -ISMs). I'm focused on this because  my nephews and niece are now in their 20s, and I'm a little worried their political belief structures are going to get overwhelmed in this age of misinformation.

That means I'm re-reading what I know about Liberalism and Conservatism, and gearing up to tear apart Libertarianism - I'll probably just quote verbatim from that book about bears - as well as a quick explanation why Socialism never worked out here in the states the way it did in Europe.

I'm going to have to figure out how to fit Moderate - which has a function in politics but not its own party - into a chapter. Can Moderatism (see, I get a redline spelling warning, that's not a real word dammit) fit into the -Ism model? Maybe conflate with Pragmatism?

I've already read through a number of books, but got about five more to crunch into the coming weeks. Busy already.

Stay safe out there, blog readers.

(Having promised this, watch as prosecutors in Georgia, New York, and DC file criminal charges on trump this month. ...sigh)

Update: Okay, yeah, the whole Chinese Spy Balloon Saga got waaaaaay too silly but what the hell, they'll be partying in Surfside Beach, SC this weekend celebrating the shootdown!

Upcoming Projects for 2023

Couple of personal notes intermixed with the blogging: 

Driven by the need to have a printed book to apply Royal Palm Literary Award stickers on the covers, I will be putting together key articles from this blog for publication. I did it before with Surviving the Age of Obstruction back in 2016, and I figure a good follow-up to that would be articles about the rise of trump and the destruction he wrought upon the world for 6-plus years.

...

I shall not use the obvious title "Surviving the Eternal Shitgibbon" since I don't own the trademark on "Shitgibbon," so I DO need a better title to market the damn thing. The subtitle "A Diary of the Trump Years" I think is unavoidable.

I may pull the first book from print, though. It never sold - it had to be the weak title I gave it, and publishing through a bad POD service didn't help - and I want to start fresh.

The other project on my mind is writing a book on American -Isms. Having blogged a bit about libertarianism and pragmatism, I figure I need to define the other major -isms - liberalism, conservatism, socialism, fascism, populism, racism - in our nation's political forums. I want to do this for my niece and nephews, all of whom are in their early 20s and I worry about the disinformation floating out there threatening to suck their brains dry.

So I may be busy this Saturnalian weekend as well as the early months of 2023 getting projects done.

I do know I need to keep blogging here. After all, tomorrow Monday promises to be a busy day.

Putin As Failed Machiavellian

I know I take Machiavelli a little too serious when it comes to history and leadership evaluations.

I know this because his reputation post-Prince is a mixed bag at best. Bouncing between criticisms of immorality and glamorizing criminal behavior in politics, to either being a wry satire of other political polemics of its day and thus should not be taken literally, to being a bad influence on 20th Century dictators, and more recently a dated, unrealistic how-to manual to manage political high office.

However, I'm kind of with Erica Bremmer at The Guardian when it comes to understanding The Prince: a neutral reading of the work showed me how Machiavelli was trying to warn leaders about avoiding despotism that tends to leave their empires in ruins. As Bremmer notes:

Yet the more I read, the more I questioned this story. I started noticing that Machiavelli’s writings speak in different voices at different times. At one moment he seems to applaud men who break their oaths at will, caring little for just dealings. But he also says – in a passage most scholars pass over – that “victories are never secure without some respect, especially for justice”. For every cynical Machiavellian precept, I found two or three others that clashed with it...

Where suggestions in The Prince would justify some underhanded tactic like bribery, or use of force, Machiavelli would then also offer warnings, reminders that the powers-that-be need to temper their actions lest they cross a line with their citizenry that can't be undone.

One of the Prince's most famous philosophical debates is the question: Is it better to be Loved or Feared? Machiavelli noted that being both Loved and Feared is the best possible state, but difficult to achieve. Being Loved is good but relies too much on mercy and leniency, and vulnerable to others who would abuse that Love for their own greed. 

The argument falls on Being Feared as the more manageable, but even then Machiavelli gives a great warning that leaders must avoid letting that Fear become Hate:

For a man may very well be Feared and yet not Hated, and this will be the case so long as he does not meddle with the property or with the women of his citizens and subjects. And if constrained to put any to death, he should do so only when there is manifest cause or reasonable justification... a wise Prince should build on what is his own, and not on what rests with others. Only, as I have said, he must do his utmost to escape hatred...

A later chapter goes into a little more detail:

A Prince, as I have said before, sooner becomes hated by being rapacious and by interfering with the property and with the women of his subjects, than in any other way. From these, therefore, he should abstain. For so long as neither their property nor their honour is touched, the mass of mankind live contentedly, and the Prince has only to cope with the ambition of a few, which can in many ways and easily be kept within bounds...

Or as Guido the Killer Pimp once said (paraphrasing), Never ever fuck with another man's livelihood. In short, do not fuck with a person's employment or personal life. As long as you don't piss off too many people, you'll stay a Prince:

To be brief, a Prince has little to fear from conspiracies when his subjects are well disposed towards him; but when they are hostile and hold him in detestation, he has then reason to fear everything and every one. And well ordered States and wise Princes have provided with extreme care that the nobility shall not be driven to desperation, and that the commons shall be kept satisfied and contented; for this is one of the most important matters that a Prince has to look to...

It's not said directly in his work, but later political observers and philosophers interpreted from Machiavelli's warnings that the real answer is that the leader must seek Respect above all else. You can be Loved and Respected for your integrity, valor, courage, what have you, and stay in power: You can be Feared and Respected for your cunning, decisiveness, judicious application of force, what have you, and stay in power. As long as your soldiers/office workers/voters Respect you for getting the job done, you're solid and cool.

One reason why I keep referring back to Machiavelli: When I read my histories and witness the evils of war, bloodshed, and strife - and sometimes when I reviewed the Characters of our American Presidents using Professor Barber as a guide - I keep spotting where the political leaders responsible for a lot of the suffering tended to be the Machiavellian types seeking to rule by Fear but failing to retain - or even failing to gain in the first place - the Respect of those they sought to rule.

Good Presidents - at least the ones we admire and respect even decades after their deaths - are the ones who performed competently even in matters of, well, moral uncertainty. As long as most of your citizenry prosper and are left untouched by some of your questionable decisions, you should do well as a leader.

So how does all of this talk about Machiavelli involve Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin? The Prince of Russia, leader of one of the major global powers, backed by a massive mechanized army and a nuclear arsenal, overseeing a financial kleptocratic empire that has inspired fear and dread among other nations and his political enemies for over 20 years?

Because Putin, with regards to his invasion of Ukraine this past month, screwed up royally.

The entire endeavor - spurred on by Putin's gaslighting over Ukraine's very existence and by his desire to rebuild a greater Russian empire - exposed both Russia and Putin for levels of incompetence and brutality that eliminated any respect that outside observers had of them. The political leadership under Putin failed to properly plan for the early days of the invasion, relying on a military force that proved to be under-trained, under-supplied, and way under any level of morale. As a result of those miscues, Putin appears to be doubling down on committing enough atrocities towards Ukrainian civilians in order to weaken their defiance into enough fear to make them surrender.

But that's not going to happen because Ukrainians already hated Putin - and they hated the Russian arrogance that treated them as second-class citizens under Tsarist and then Communist rule - to where they will never surrender to him.

In this, Putin had already failed as a Machiavellian figure. Despite all these years of him committing enough crimes - the blatant fraud, the wars against Chechnya and Georgia, the undisguised assassinations and attempts on his exiled critics, the success of manipulating the rise of populist Far Right governments across the western democracies, seizing Crimea and Eastern Ukraine in a border clash when Ukrainians overthrew a corrupt pro-Putin regime - to generate fear of him as a Prince, in just two weeks of stiff Ukrainian resistance he has been exposed as an arrogant bully. More clueless and desperate for violent victory than the rest of the world had realized.

It's gotten to where Putin is no longer feared, but openly hated. And not just among Ukrainians (who have obvious reasons right now). 

Hatred for Putin is something getting suppressed in homeland Russia, but the resentments among Russians are building up now that the overt corruption is exposing the once-hidden incompetence. And in spite of martial law and stiff penalties issued against protesting, a lot of Russians are risking all of that out of hatred for Putin (via Rachel Treisman at NPR):

Thousands of people turned out in cities across Russia this weekend to protest the war in Ukraine, risking arrest in a country where such demonstrations are illegal. Many of them were detained and some subjected torture as a result, according to an independent Russian human rights group.

Police detained more than 4,640 protesters in 65 Russian cities on Sunday, according to the monitoring group OVD-Info. It says more than 13,000 Russians in 147 cities have been detained at anti-war rallies since Russia first invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24...

Those may not sound like big numbers in a Russia with around 130 million souls, but each of these protestors are representative of hundreds of others who dare not risk the arrests. For now.

Based on a lot of the military assessments getting leaked to the press, the analysts experienced in these matters are suggesting that the Russian invasion is due to fail soon to both catastrophic loss of supplies and collapse of troop morale. It's not 100 percent a given, but all signs do point to at worst a prolonged struggle that Putin's ongoing propaganda efforts back home can't cover up.

Francis Fukuyama once wrote at the end of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War a little thing called The End of History, which made him a media darling when it came to talking about Russia vs. The West. So when he pens an online essay about "Preparing For Defeat," there's a reason to pay attention:

Russia is heading for an outright defeat in Ukraine. Russian planning was incompetent, based on a flawed assumption that Ukrainians were favorable to Russia and that their military would collapse immediately following an invasion. Russian soldiers were evidently carrying dress uniforms for their victory parade in Kyiv rather than extra ammo and rations. Putin at this point has committed the bulk of his entire military to this operation—there are no vast reserves of forces he can call up to add to the battle. Russian troops are stuck outside various Ukrainian cities where they face huge supply problems and constant Ukrainian attacks...

The collapse of their position could be sudden and catastrophic, rather than happening slowly through a war of attrition. The army in the field will reach a point where it can neither be supplied nor withdrawn, and morale will vaporize. This is at least true in the north...

Putin will not survive the defeat of his army. He gets support because he is perceived to be a strongman; what does he have to offer once he demonstrates incompetence and is stripped of his coercive power?...

The lies selling this war are going to pile up to where even Putin's hardest supporters will doubt his word, and the setbacks can well get bloody to where enough Russian families are horrified by the loss of their loved ones to set blame on leader Putin who led them to such a fate. Any respect Putin relied on to rule - that reputation as a strongman - is already out the window (metaphor intended) across the world, and that will eventually reach the eyes and ears of most Russians.

It's not that Putin could have ever ruled through Love. It is that Putin did a decent enough job early on to rule through Fear by burnishing his power to be the biggest kleptocrat, and by silencing a number of critics and rivals through assassination and brutality to enforce his strongman image at home.

But Putin isn't a strongman anymore. He's just another struggling dictator starting unjust wars just like all the other failed monsters of history.

It's terrifying that Putin's failure is going to cost so many innocent lives.

Post 2000: The Road Travelled and the Road Ahead

Reaching my 2000th blog rant with this essay. With all the madness still going on this 2021, building on the madness we've witnessed since the year 2000 itself, this is a moment for reflection and introspection.

Looking back, I had started blogging to talk about reforms, needed Constitutional amendments to make our broken federal system correct itself. Along the way, I found myself diving into the partisan debates to the point I became a sideline critic. I think it was the aftermath of the 2008 elections - when Obama came to office and the Republicans doubled down on the obstruction - where I realized that sensible reforms were unlikely as long as one of the two major parties - who know which one, I'll give you a hint the name rhymes with "Republi-can't" - was batshit insane. I'll keep referring to John Cole about this forever and ever:

I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years.

And he wrote that back in 2009. That was my wake-up call about how broken everything had gotten and was going to stay that way.

None of the changes I keep blogging in favor of - the end to gerrymandering, an end to the logjam in the Senate caused by Filibusters and Secret Holds, fair primaries for the Presidential campaigns, holding liars accountable, holding corrupt politicians accountable, getting rid of deficit-inducing tax cuts for the super-rich, holding the media accountable for their follies, building a better brighter world for our children to inherit - are going to happen because there are enough corrupt powers in high places - not just the whole Republican Party but also enough "centrist" Democrats eager to maintain their own power and wealth - who would rather keep the corrupt status quo or even make it worse.

Even when these reforms would benefit the Democratic Party overall - especially eliminating the gerrymandering going on right now that would skew U.S. House seating to Republican control in spite of the real demographics favoring Dems - we are all witnessing delays and foot-dragging due to the rigged Filibuster rules even with the Democrats in control of both houses of Congress and with Democratic President Biden sitting in the Oval Office prepared to sign any electoral reforms into law.

It would be pretty to think that eventually things will break in favor of reforms and opportunities for most Americans still struggling day to day. It won't come through thinking, though. It's going to have to come through action, especially the ones in office who have an obligation to fix the damage getting done and give us all an opportunity to breathe again.

It will take more commitment that just mere blogging, obviously. I have to - as much as the rest of us - do my part to push and motivate in the real world, to march when the moment of action arises, to speak in public when our voices should be heard, to vote and encourage others to vote to break the suppressive efforts the corrupt powers push down on us. 

Everything I've seen the past decade-plus while writing this blog has documented this spiral path downward, through the highs of witnessing Obama's transformational administration and the lows of trumpian rage, incompetence, and misrule. All the ongoing bloody struggle between the irrational and rational factions of America, with occasional glimpses of hope that this madness will pass.

That's what I have right now, looking ahead to the rants and posts awaiting me in the future on this blog. Just a little more hope.

Just a little more... 

Republican Party Won't Truly Die. It'll Just Keep Purging

So in the moment right now, the Republican Party has a bit of drama with Liz Cheney - Dick's kid who bought her way into a Congressional seat in Wyoming - trying to carve out a spot as The Voice Of Reason in a party that's long gone batshit insane. Per Mistermix at Balloon Juice: 

I’ve said it before, but Cheney is in a weak position at home and in Congress. She didn’t have the political backing to run for the Senate seat vacated by Mike Enzi — instead, the absolutely terrible Cynthia Lummis won it. The fact that Cheney didn’t even try shows how little pull she has in Wyoming, despite her name. Her dad has been out of the state for 30 years, and she’s a carpetbagger herself in a state where almost every pickup has a “native” bumper sticker. My guess is that another Republican like Lummis, who voted against impeachment and against certifying the election, will give Liz a run for her money in the 2022 primary. Losing her job as conference chair is just the beginning...

Cheney's leadership position with the House Republicans is pretty much taken from her, even with all the whispered rumors that a sizable number of fellow Republicans agree with her that trump's Big Lie of a stolen election will wreck the Republican Party's reputation (if not their party's ability to gerrymander and suppress votes to stay in power anyway).

But to anyone (like Beltway pundit Jennifer Rubin) thinking that Liz Cheney - or Mitt Romney, or Joe "What Child Support" Walsh, or David Jolly - can become a beacon of a Third Party to rise up and save True Conservatism from themselves, forget it. I've said it before: There is no GOP Savior coming to rescue a party that's been consumed by rage and lies for the last three decades.

What we're getting is this ongoing fantasy, this wish fulfillment, among the Far Right pols and pundits desirous for The Return Of The Reagan Heir: the Prince That Was Promised. We're talking about a set of people pining for the days when it was 1985: when Reagan stomped the hell out of Mondale and his dirty hippie librul army of Electoral College no-shows, Bipartisanship meant Democrats paid for the bar tabs, Capitalism was ascendant, Soviets were getting blown up in Afghanistan, Wall Street was peaking, Grenada was pacified, MTV gave us endless loops of "Money For Nothing", and it was safe for decent honest hard-working folk to openly declare they were proud to be Republicans Americans.

These pundits and pols still don't get it: that was all an illusion...

When the modern Republican Party is pining for a Savior, they're really pining for a candidate who can be this Passive-Positive person, someone likable and pleasing to the audience. Which was why a lot of pundits kept falling in love with these photogenic types like Marco Rubio or Scott Walker. But that person doesn't exist anymore. And for one very good reason.

The Republican Party doesn't HAVE anyone anymore who is genuinely likable or congenial. The Far Right has driven everyone out who can be open-minded and receptive and appealing on a personal level. They've created an environment within their party ranks that every member HAS to support a dogmatic agenda - restrict or kill a federal government they view as "bad" - that can only be backed by Active-Negative types of dour and sour politicians. That type of agenda can only attract that type of candidate, no matter how hard they try to fake empathy.

This is it, Republicans. This is it, Bill Kristol and Erick Erickson and David Brooks and others raging against the oncoming storm that is Trump. No more lies, no more illusions. The reason you're getting Trump as your banner-carrier is because all your efforts the last 30 years to build a new Reagan has instead built a toxic stew of racism, sexism, anti-Establishment anarchy, and failure of leadership within your own ranks...

I am not seeing anything now that changes my mind. The current party leadership still kowtows and worships at the foot of the man who staged an insurrection that almost got themselves killed. Minority Leader McCarthy isn't leading anything but a mob of wingnuts who spew every QAnon conspiracy at the TV cameras any chance they get.

This is not a Republican Party that is in the mood to change its mind. They have spent the last thirty years shilling a Narrative that Democrats are Socialist-Commie criminals worse than child molesters (even when those molesters are other Republicans), and they're so dug into that world-view they dare not admit how much of a lie that is. They've become so calcified in their political ideology that they don't even need to post a party platform to campaign on anymore.

There is no GOP Savior coming to save them because there's nothing left of the Republican Party to save.

If there is any real, honest way for the Republican Party to regroup and rethink itself, it has to happen through straight-up implosion: Enough of the Party elected officials across the board giving up on the madness and walking away. Much in the same way the Whigs of the 1850s fell apart when their party collapsed over their failures to combat the slavery issues made worse by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act.

Problem with that scenario is that any disaffected Republican leaders in this situation will have nowhere else TO go. There is no standing Third Party of repute - sorry, Libertarians, you don't count - where these ex-GOP apostates can regroup. These ex-Republicans would have to form a new party by scratch, and I've blogged before about how hard that can be. 

The biggest issue would be money: the Sensible GOP Faction - they'll need to come up with a name if they do split off - are going to need a massive bankroll to get on state-level ballots and set up campaigns. While these ex-parrots ex-Republicans can reach out to corporations and rich folk to help out, there's no guarantee enough of them will abandon the existing Republican Party and risk it all on a brand-new Third Party. How many deep-pocket SuperPACs support the fearmongering against minorities, feminists, and immigrants? Too many, alas...

A lot also depends on how this anti-trump GOP Savior Party identifies itself: Are they going to dismiss a lot of the Culture War hysteria, the racism and sexism that has been the meat-and-potatoes of the modern Republican Party? They could form themselves as a pro-business faction and denounce the wingnuttia that has consumed the Republican base... but would enough voters swing away from that madness? When you have 70 percent of the existing GOP base believing trump's Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen, there's a good bet your new anti-trump party isn't getting that 70 percent bloc and you'd be damn lucky even to get the 30 percent that still live in the Real World.

In the end, like I keep saying, there IS NO Savior coming to rescue the Republican Party from itself.

All we're going to get is a fresh new cycle of purges, similar to the RINO hunts of the 1990s that began the party's descent into the madness we see today.

It will only be a purge of any elected officials who oppose the Far Right Narrative. The Republican voters themselves won't get purged, with every sign the base will gleefully stay with a party that plays to their fears and nothing else.

Gods help us. Always. 

Democratic Gamemanship, Also Known as Competency

If you're not following Balloon Juice website you should, it's magazine-quality blogging at a fraction of the price and with 150 percent more "OH HELL YES" you can enjoy reading.

Blog overlord John Cole is a rare poster but he will provide input from his frozen corner of West Virginia, where like myself he's stuck in a deep Red state praying for sanity to rain down and wash the Far Right wingnut madness into the ocean. One thing he's aware of is his state's major Democratic figure, Senator Joe Manchin, who likes to play throne-maker as a conservative Centrist holding the keys to Senate control to keep his more liberal party from doing much to actually benefit the nation. So this happened recently for Cole to cheer about:

There are two easy ways to fail as a Democratic politician. The first is to listen to the bobbleheads in the media, and the second is to listen to the online left on twitter and elsewhere. The Biden campaign famously ignored both of them, including yours truly, who consistently lobbied for him to not run. So when you see the Politico writing that Biden and Harris fucked up by having Harris speak to West Virginians, or you see the dumbest man in American politics call it a mistake, ignore it.

There is a reason VP Harris spoke directly to West Virginians, as I noted the other day, and here you have the fruits of that labor:

“Well, first and foremost, I wish we’d all come together,” Justice responded. “But, on the flip side of that, we’ve got a lot of people in West Virginia that are still struggling with paying their power bill because they got laid off because this pandemic just swept their job away from them.”

Justice continued: “What we need to do is we need to understand that trying to be, per se, fiscally responsible at this point in time, with what we’ve got going on in this country, if we actually throw away some money right now, so what?”

The governor added that “we have really got to move and get people taken care of and get people back on balance. I want to work with the Biden administration, just like I worked with the Trump administration, and I want us to move forward...

That was Republican governor Jim Justice, when asked by the state’s biggest political radio guy, Hoppy Kerchival, whether or not the COVID stimulus needs to be bipartisan. The only people who give a fuck about Joe Manchin and whether or not this was a mistake by the Biden team are Joe Manchin and the beltway morons. Governor Justice and the people don’t give a fuck about process or procedure or whose feelings were hurt, they want results. They don’t give a shit about bipartisanship or Rand Paul’s feels about the budget, they want to feed the kids and keep the power on and make sure grams doesn’t die from the ‘rona...

And you know what? Pelosi and Schumer just did this:

As President Joe Biden attempts to pass his $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief proposal with Republican support, Senate Democrats are working to move ahead without the GOP using an obscure, but powerful, procedural tool known as reconciliation.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Monday that they have filed a joint budget resolution — the first step to potentially enacting a budget reconciliation bill.

“It makes no sense to pinch pennies when so many Americans are suffering,” Schumer said in floor remarks Monday. “The risk of doing too little is far greater than the risk of doing too much.”

Pelosi and Schumer would not do this if they did not have the votes, so what you can bank on right now is that Manchin is one of those 51 votes in the Senate. So no, Biden and Harris didn’t fuck up by going directly to the people of WV and Arizona. They got Manchin and Sinema in line.

Much like Cole, I'm getting good vibes from this. If the Democrats in Congress are serious about getting things done, they have to bulldoze their way past any obstructionist efforts that McConnell can toss up in the Senate, and the powers in Reconciliation allow them that chance. That much of what needs to get done to resolve our pandemic woes fits the parameters of budgeting - the spending needed to keep people housed and fiscally safe, to keep businesses in the black on their spreadsheets, to help hospitals and medical suppliers - is something that the Republicans can't stop.

Oh, the Far Right - especially in the media - will try to push a "bipartisan" argument that Biden and the Democrats need Republican votes to make any pandemic aid package work, but what the Republicans have brought to the table so far - a miniscule package that only pays for a third of what's proposed, and doesn't include any stimulus checks most Americans need - is pretty much a joke.

The Congressional Democrats can push ahead with their stimulus package of $1.9 trillion dollars without ANY Republican votes, which would - guess what - make the Republicans look bad because a majority of Americans will see the Democrats claim this win while the GOP is pouting in a corner threatening to take their toys home (see if they care).

This is a moment where Biden can sign a much-needed and much-welcomed relief bill to the benefit of his own party, and where Biden can tell Mitch McConnell - bastard that he is - to go sink into the deepest pit of hell where Mitch belongs.

Have at it, Democrats. Get the sh-t done that a competent, well-versed political party can get done for America.

The Calmness After The Dread

(Update: Many thanks to Infidel753 for adding me to Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Roundup! I need to note Infidel does a weekly roundup every Sunday - included there as well this past weekend, thanks again - so it should behoove you to check that blog every Sunday morning! IO SATURNALIA!)

It's been a month since the Election Night, after all that build-up, all that anxiety, all the stress that the results would be chaotic as hell.

There was, let's admit it, an open dread that the response to whoever won - Biden or trump - would lead to violence in the streets: That protests by one side or the other would lead to riots, police beatdowns, or worse.

Stores in major cities boarded up windows. Social media prepped for long fiery nights.

And... so far, it's been insanely quiet. Oh, trump and his lawyers are still stirring up bullshit over ballot counts and certifications, we've got a number of wingnut demagogues - especially just-pardoned Mike Flynn, who is falling further into seditious behavior - calling for shutting down everything and stealing the win for trump. We've had the pro-trump rallies screaming for arrests and acts of force in places like Georgia where the Senate runoff campaigns retained national attention.

But the oversized fears of nationwide rioting and blood in the streets hasn't happened, and it's looking like it might not happen even when the Electoral College officially calls it for Biden on December 14. (Of course, Gods help me if I've jinxed us all on this...)

It's a bit puzzling that all this brouhaha turned into a meh-haha. Bonnie Kristian at The Week is equally vexxed:

We've weathered four weeks of uncalled races, recounts, lawsuits, and allegations with relative calm. There was some rioting in Portland, where a Molotov cocktail was thrown at police, but tumultuous protests have been a fixture there for half a year now. In Michigan, some chanting Republicans attempted to force their way into a vote counting center but were restrained by police. Demonstrators assembled in other cities, too, and certainly some scuffles broke out. Yet the "dozens" of arrests reported nationwide are hardly the envisioned catastrophe...

I decided to revisit the forecasts. One of the most notable came from the International Crisis Group, a think tank that seeks to prevent war by "sound[ing] the alarm to prevent deadly conflict." Usually this work concerns places that are, well, not here, but for the 2020 election, the group issued its first report about the United States. "The 2020 U.S. presidential election presents risks not seen in recent history," the report said. "It is conceivable that violence could erupt during voting or protracted ballot counts."

The Crisis Group identified 11 risk factors, which it condensed to four larger themes in the executive summary: "political polarization bound up with issues of race and identity; the rise of armed groups with political agendas; the higher-than-usual chances of a contested outcome; and most importantly President Donald Trump, whose toxic rhetoric and willingness to court conflict to advance his personal interests have no precedent in modern U.S. history."

The first of these four is impossible to dispute. We are increasingly polarized and that polarization does involve identity as well as related issues of misinformation, information segregation, epistemic crisis, and institutional distrust spelled out in the longer risk list. With the benefit of hindsight, we also know the outcome has indeed been contested and Trump has missed no opportunity to spread division and undermine public trust and goodwill. The president still has supporters — as many as half of Republicans, per a mid-November poll, the most recent I could find — who believe he "rightfully won" the election and is being defrauded...

And yet, for some reason, the possibility of violence has not turned - not yet, I must caveat - into reality. Kristian considers why:

...One is that some of the proposed conditions went unmet: Trump didn't win; there wasn't a wildcard event; and the election contestation — the real procedure of it, as opposed to vivid nonsense the president and his surrogates have spouted on television and Twitter — has been fairly mundane. We've seen nothing so exciting as Bush v. Gore in 2000. Biden won the closest state races by margins of tens of thousands, not a mere 537 votes.

A second reason, as I wrote before Election Day, is that most Americans (including most Republicans) were prepared to wait for results. Everyone knew this year would be weird. How could we not? Trump's claim that any delay was a sign of cheating and a Democratic attempt to "creat[e] havoc" never made sense, so when the expected delay arrived, nobody panicked.

Or, at least, they didn't panic in real life. Maybe they panicked online, and maybe that, as New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has theorized, served as a way to "playact extremism, ... to approach radical politics the way they approach a first-person shooter game — as a kind of sport, a kick to the body chemistry, that doesn't put anything in their relatively comfortable late-modern lives at risk."

That brings me to my third and most significant reason: Whether because we're getting our extremist impulses out online (or by donating to Trump's still-fundraising campaign) or because we're among the plurality of Americans who don't align with either partisan extreme, most of us are not actually interested in participating in civil strife...

For all the rhetoric, for all the chest-thumping, for all the loud screams by the extremists that "they" number in the millions... when it comes down it the extremists are an extreme minority of malcontents who overstate their numbers either out of arrogance, ignorance, or projection.

We have strong, albeit violated, norms against political violence in America, and there is little post-election rioting in our national history. Worries about civil war cycle with each election, but that's not the same as an appetite for street fighting, for making your hate tangible enough to shoot your neighbor for putting out the wrong yard sign. Even the alarming willingness to say violence may be "justified" to advance a political cause — which has risen in recent years, though much less than a Politico report initially suggested — is not the same as readiness to personally enact that violence.

Those "armed groups" who want to fight are a tiny minority of dunces. The rest of us may be very angry at each other, but we are mercifully not stupid enough to think violence will help...

This should not overlook the actual history we have with politically-motivated violence. We've had mad bombers and street shooters fighting over arguments - usually race-related - for decades. Redeemer governments of the late 19th Century - well into the 20th Century in some counties - made ready use of guns and rope to enforce their will. There's still a possibility that violence over who won the 2020 Presidential election - hint, Biden - can still erupt.

What's happening right now is that the fighting over this election is still relatively early, and it's focused mostly on courtroom battles where trump and his team of irrational lawyers keep losing their cases due to the simple fact they can't produce any actual evidence of voter fraud. There isn't necessarily any panic buttons getting pushed right now. Most of the trump supporters are still happily spinning conspiracy bullshit that once this all gets to the Supreme Court, trump's hand-picked Justices will SAVE 'MURIKKKA, nullify 80 million votes, and hand trump a gift-wrapped stolen election.

So what happens when all of trump's half-assed court appeals reach the Supreme Court... and a solid majority of Justices all say "This Court can only rule on the appropriate legality of the lower court rulings, and they were all relying on your evidence you never produced, there's nothing we can do, by the way where's the damned evidence?"

When we get to that moment, we may indeed see violence in the streets from the extremist trumpsters unable to cope with reality. But how bad could it get?

The scary news is that so far there's about 73 million Americans who voted trump. That's a lot of people to be worried about.

The good news is that - as Kristian pointed out - a vast majority of Republican voters are not extremists or violent towards their communities. I've noted before, most Republicans are hard-wired to vote Republican but are otherwise honest, decent people (who can't accept the fact their own party is led by crooked, vulgar people). If trump flashes out a Tweet for WAR to foment a coup takeover, many trump voters will shake their heads and mutter "okay, that's a little too far."

What we have to worry about are the trump extremists who have crossed that line of morality. The guy making pipe bombs in trump's name, for example, or the gunmen caught plotting to kidnap and kill governors.

We're not talking millions of Americans at this point: These numbers are mercifully few and far between - they have to bus in people from out of state to make their wingnut rallies number in the thousands, after all - but there's still enough of them to make the days between now and January nerve-wracking. All it will take is just one of them packing enough firepower to wipe out an entire city block to ruin everybody else's day.

Even with that dread, I am tired of talking like a Debbie Downer. There may be a nice little silver lining to celebrate in this: That in the end, a sizable number of Republicans - even ones who for godforsaken reasons VOTED FOR trump - are still able to respect the civil norms of a democratic-republic nation the same way a sizable number of Democrats do. 

Now if we can just get everyone to WEAR THE DAMN MASKS (and over the nose, everybody!) we can save our United States of America...