A Sobering New Year
“The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat.”
― Confucius
Welcome to 2022.
I took some some time off to recharge, so I’m genuinely grateful that I didn’t have to comment on the stories about the Let’s Go Brandon Christmas phone call; the Manchin meltdowns; the MTG/Claremont National Divorce insanity; or the whole Where’s Ron DeSantis thing. The annus horribilis was already dumb enough that I didn’t need to wallow in the various inane tweets from TedCruzMarcoRubioMadisonCawthorn.
And, of course, I got to sit out the whole Donald Trump vs. Candace Owens spat over vaccines. To his (quite limited) credit, Trump came out strongly in favor of the vaccines, which he pointed out had saved the lives of millions. His comments enraged some precincts of MAGAWorld, and led to this extraordinary beyond-parody moment in which Candace explains that Trump is old, and unfamiliar with “obscure websites” or internet conspiracy theories.
Some of the guano-sniffers took it even harder. “Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones issued a "warning" to former President Donald Trump, calling him either "ignorant" or "evil" for encouraging people to take the coronavirus vaccine.”
Predictably, this inspired the usual wish-casting punditry that has surrounded Trump for the last six years or so: Was MAGA finally, finally breaking with him… over vaccines?
Spoiler Alert: No.
But it’s complicated, because the kerfuffle is yet another indication that Trumpism has slipped the surly bonds of Trump himself, and taken on a populist/nihilistic life of its own.
One Year Ago Today:
They were alarmed… and they should have been.
The time to question election results has passed, and there is no role for the military in changing them, all 10 of the living former defense secretaries said in an extraordinary rebuke to President Trump and other Republicans who are backing unfounded claims of widespread fraud at the ballot box.
The Axis of Authoritarianism
Words like “fascist” are thrown around too casually. But, how do you describe this bit of fascist-adjacent face-licking without using the word?
A Sobering New Year
Two bracing reality checks to help you ease into the New Year:
(1) This, from Don Moynihan’s newsletter:
The longer the pandemic goes on, the more trust will decline in institutions that have to make visible, salient decisions amidst changing circumstances, information and trade-offs while serving a population with wildly varying preferences.
Moynihan writes:
This somewhat depressing insight may or may not seem obvious to you, but it wasn’t apparent to me until recently. The emergence of Omicron, which will propel us into a third year of the pandemic, and growing liberal dissatisfaction with the Biden administration helped crystalize this realization. My thinking on this is based on fitting what we know about certain biases (motivated reasoning, negativity bias, hindsight bias) on the dynamics and longevity of the pandemic.
As the pandemic continues, a series of forces will combine to reduce faith in political institutions. The third year of the pandemic will be extraordinarily damaging.
**
(2) The Divide Over January 6
There are a bunch of polls out this week, and they all tell the same story: Roughly 70 percent of Republicans do not think that Joe Biden was legitimately elected. Chew on that.
But it gets worse. Via the Wapo:
A year after a pro-Trump mob ransacked the Capitol in the worst attack on the home of Congress since it was burned by British forces in 1814, a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll finds that about 1 in 3 Americans say they believe violence against the government can at times be justified.
The findings represent the largest share to feel that way since the question has been asked in various polls in more than two decades.
And there this is from CBS:
A new CBS/YouGov poll finds that 68 percent of respondents see the Jan. 6 attacks as “a harbinger of increasing political violence, not an isolated incident,”
“There is 12% of the country, and a fifth of Trump's 2020 voters, that want Trump to fight to retake the presidency right now, before the next election. … [A] third of the people within that 12% say he should use force if necessary. While that only amounts to 4% of the population, it still translates into millions of Americans effectively willing to see a forceful change in the executive branch.”
**
There is one bright spot, however. Another new poll shows that the public strongly supports the January 6 committee. Via Politico’s Playbook:
On Capitol Hill, Republicans overwhelmingly oppose the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. But in the rest of the country, it’s a different story. That’s one topline of a new POLITICO/Morning Consult survey that finds 40 percent of Republican voters approve of the Jan. 6 committee, while 44 percent disapprove and 16 percent have no opinion.
“Overall, three-fifths of those surveyed backed the Jan. 6 committee, and two-thirds said it was important that the federal government probe the events surrounding the attack on the Capitol,” writes Nick Niedzwiadek.
**
But lest we get giddy with unwonted optimism, there are sobering numbers here in the new UMass poll.
But it is not clear that the GOP will actually pay a substantial electoral price for last year’s events:
**
So, are you ready for a reality check? In an email (published here with permission), our colleague Linda Chavez provides this analysis:
What this poll suggests to me is that the Jan. 6th Committee’s findings will have little to no bearing on the next election.
A large majority of Republicans take it as a matter of faith that Joe Biden was not legitimately elected, and as in most matters of faith, evidence to the contrary won’t move the needle.
For independents, the group that is most crucial in determining the next election, neither the last election’s results nor the events of Jan. 6th will play much of a role in their votes next time. We are expending a tremendous amount of energy and focus in trying to persuade the unpersuadable as well as those for whom the issue isn’t salient, I fear.
Justice requires that the perpetrators be prosecuted, but most of the voters we need to win next time have moved on. A sorry state, but one that we need to accept and figure out what will persuade these voters and start making that the focus of our efforts.
Quick Hits
1. Five Rudys from the Abyss
Philip Rotner reminds us that if Giuliani-like sycophants had replaced just five officials, Trump’s coup would have succeeded.
Substitute Rudy Giuliani—or Sidney Powell or Jim Jordan or any other Trump cultist—for just five people who held state or federal office at the time of the 2020 election and think about what might have happened.
Put a Rudy in the place of Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state in Georgia who stood his ground in the face of hellish pressure from the president of the United States and certified Joe Biden’s win in the state.
Replace Michigan Board of State Canvassers member Aaron Van Langevelde, who bucked GOP pressure to provide the swing vote to certify Biden’s win in Michigan, with a Rudy.
Make a Rudy the secretary of state of Pennsylvania instead of Kathy Boockvar, who certified Biden’s win in that state.
That puts 42 electoral votes in play in Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania alone. Forget about Arizona and Wisconsin—Trump wouldn’t need them. He only lost by 38.
2. What It Means to Be a Republican in 2022
Amanda Carpenter, in today’s Bulwark:
What does it mean to be a Republican in the year 2022? Being hated. Yes, by the left—but more importantly, also by members of your own party.
Here in the bad, red place, hardly anyone gets along. Especially after January 6th. Why? Consider this a simple question: Whom does Donald Trump actually like?
In the old days, all a Republican had to do to make Trump happy was kiss his ass with some cheap flattery. Say he’s the biggest, strongest, handsomest, smartest, richest dude in history and that would be enough. But today, being on Trump’s good side requires accepting his 2020 election lie and endorsing his various schemes to overturn the results.
And if you’re not gonna do that? Then GTFO. Trump doesn’t want you around. As long as Trump is in charge, your future in the GOP is dead.
Just ask Mike Pence.
3. Joe Biden’s Year of Hoping Dangerously
Susan Glasser in the New Yorker:
But the national mood is sour, and understandably so. Sanity, competence, and civility have not exactly returned to Washington; normalcy is not just around the corner. Biden, it is now clear, promised what he couldn’t deliver in a nation divided against itself. He trafficked in hope that was arguably as misleading in its own way as Trump’s lies. More than four hundred thousand Americans have died of covid since Trump left office—many of them because they refused to get a free, lifesaving vaccine.
More than two-thirds of Republicans to this day refuse to accept that Biden is the legitimately elected President, preferring Trump’s Big Lie to the uncomfortable truth of his defeat. There is no restoration possible in such a country.
Cheap Shots
Remember them:
Here comes the GOP gaslighting.
The question.
Welcome back!
Now on to the comments. It's not surprising that the January 6th stuff is irrelevant to a populace who thinks we're in a recession. The truth is, voters are not persuadable in the sense that voters care about anything resembling a coherent worldview. That's not how people are. Most voters decide who to vote for in the final month of an election. Which means everything before and after is just noise.
The problematic reality is that for all the talk of 'persuadable' voters, there really aren't any. At least, not enough to swing elections. Independents are growing in number, but not ideologically. What's happening is that more people are bucking the label of a party in favor of saying they're independent, while voting along party lines all the time. Because a true 'independent' would have to lack anything resembling a coherent worldview politically in order to swing between such ideologically opposed parties.
What this means is that ultimately, a lot of energy is expended on both sides over voters they want to exist but don't. Voters who are 'independent' or 'swing' tend to be those whose entire political process is to look up in a haze, make a gut check about how they feel, and then vote based on that. And because American voters are always, always unhappy, that usually means they vote against the incumbent. It doesn't matter if it's 2006 or 2010 or 2014 or 2018. Voters tend to always be unhappy.
Ultimately, that's what makes a lot of highly educated and media types really unhappy: that most voters don't really care about democracy and don't see a difference between the parties. To people who have the time and energy to actually pay attention, it seems insane that voters look at Trump and Biden, or Pelosi and MTG and go 'basically the same' but they do. And that's a problem for political types, and not the voters. Because just like in business, the customer is always right, especially when they're wrong.
I think one other thing we need to talk about is that for Americans, 'Fascist' conjures up Nazis. But not all fascists are nazis. In fact most of them aren't. The Imperial Japanese in WW2, Franco's Spain, Mussolini, Peron, ect were all fascists. And the current American right is absolutely fascist in the same vein. They're not nazis. But they are absolutely fascists. They are blood and soil nationalists who fetishize violence against political others and wish to establish a stronger volk over the country. You have Claremont and Lincoln fellows talking about Americans as not being Americans. At some point you need to call a spade a spade.
The fact that so many people are worried about what to call the thing, and not the thing itself, is part of the issue. The other part is that not a lot of people are as uncomfortable as we might hope with this sort of thing.
The final bit is that, as I and other people have been saying for a long time, Trump is not the movement. He is the leader of it, but he was a figurehead who could channel the movement. The crazy existed before him, and it will exist after him. The danger was never Trump himself, who was a buffoon at the best of times, but that the people around him would be dangerous and capable enough to engineer success through him. The real danger is whoever takes up the mantle after him. Because Trump was a grifter himself, and he saw the movement as a way to raise his own profile. But true believers want their crazy straight. And they'll go further than Trump would because they won't care about their own self interest in the same way. Revolutionaries aren't concerned about their brand.
"Warning: I'm Back" C'mon Charlie, this is the most welcome news yet of the new year!
On whether the Jan. 6 commission will have an effect on the 2022 midterms: Surely Liz Cheney speaks for some small percentage of people on the right. Democrats need to be messaging that they are the party of constitutional governance and Republicans are destroyers of same.