On February 24, 2022, just over a year ago, Russia launched the largest war in Europe since the end of World War II in 1945, invading Ukraine. There have been more than 200,000 casualties, in excess of 50,000 deaths, 65,000 suspected war crimes (including Russia's targeting civilians and the abduction of more than 6,000 Ukranian children taken to camps in Russia), 8 million Ukrainian refugees who have fled the country and another 5.3 million other Ukrainians who have been displaced within their own country.
Ron DeSantis, who was born 33 years after the end of World War II and nearly 49 years after the formation of NATO, regards the 21st century Russian invasion as a “territorial dispute.” (In doing so, he is echoing Tucker Carlson’s characterization of the war as a “border dispute.”)
Why do I hate Putin so much? Has he ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs? These are fair questions. And the answer to all of them is, No. -- Tucker Carlson
Why do Democrats want you to hate Putin? Has Putin shipped every middle class job in your town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked your business? Is he teaching your kids to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Does he eat dogs? pic.twitter.com/xYEvapjbNT
Ron DeSantis, who may well be the 2024 GOP nominee, began his reply in these words:
While the U.S. has many vital national interests – securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness within our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Communist Party – becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them. The Biden administration’s virtual “blank check” funding of this conflict for “as long as it takes,” without any defined objectives or accountability, distracts from our country’s most pressing challenges.
Nowhere in his response does the Florida governor acknowledge the security our European allies, the value of NATO in keeping the peace, or the imperative of pushing back against Russian aggression. His statement will not only comfort Putin and bring consternation to democratic Europe; it will frighten our allies in Asia and elsewhere around the globe.
It also invites Russian interference yet again in a U.S. election. If one candidate is committed to Ukraine's defense, while another is indifferent, it is abundantly clear which one Putin would favor.
This morning's New York Times features an article ("Five Women Sue Texas Over the State’s Abortion Ban") on the harrowing experiences of five women whose lives were put at risk because physicians in Texas were intimidated by prohibitions on abortion from offering standard of care medical treatment.
The stories are shocking. Never mind what Texas pols say, the intimidation was intentional. The legislation banning abortion, in Texas as elsewhere, is hardly pro-life.
The radical conservative majority on the United States Supreme Court has opened the door to imposing religious zealotry on Americans whose view of life, faith, and liberty is at odds with the pro-life faction of the Republican Party.
The protesters were angry: They believed that the election they had just voted in had been unfairly conducted. And they were right. In retrospect, it is clear the 2020 election was a grave betrayal of American democracy. Given the facts that have since emerged about that election, no honest person can deny it. Yet the beneficiaries of that election continue to lie about what is now obvious. The real crime, they will tell you again and again, is not what happened on Election Day 2020. The real crime is what happened two months later, on January 6th, when Donald Trump led an insurrection against the duly elected American government.
All right then. Aaron Blake at the Washington Post observes:
Are Carlson's Fox News viewers sealed in a bubble so impermeable that they are unaware of his willingness to spread lies on TV even when he acknowledges in private that he knows that they are lies? Who knows? FNC hasn't informed its viewers what we've learned from the Dominion libel suite about the behind-the-scenes panic at Fox and the fraudulent 'news' coverage it presented, nor are the facts about that suit very much in evidence among FNC's competitors or others in conservative media's alternate universe.
What we know is that those viewers are still watching. But so is the mainstream media and so are the folks who are wide awake outside the Fox bubble. Kevin McCarthy, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, and others still indulging in election denialism and whitewashing the January 6 attack on the Capitol are trampling on the truth. But, while a faction of the GOP is taken in (or willingly going along for the ride), millions of other Americans can see what is going on.
The circus at Fox and in the Republican caucus in the House (and in states and localities across the country) is on full display. These MAGA Republicans are pushing lies and celebrating violent insurrectionists. What they are doing is despicable.
It is also right out in the open. And that's a good thing for democracy and for the next election cycle. Because most Americans, who have no affinity for violence, who love our country, who value truth, outnumber the people who have willfully sealed themselves in a bubble of deceit.
In 2016 I declared: I am your voice. Today I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.
Retribution.
And in today's New York Times, David French writes about Marjorie Taylor Greene's proposal for a national divorce. He doesn't mention DeSantis (and I have no idea whether or not French is a fan, though based on this column he shouldn't be, because DeSantis is full to the brim of animosity), but the first sentences of his final paragraph, which references liberty, would be a fitting conclusion to my previous post:
Animosity is the enemy of American liberty. It is hard to muster the will to defend the rights of people you despise.
While anti-vaxxers have been on the fringes of both the left and the right for years, the GOP embrace of medical freedom as a partisan wedge issue vastly increases the number of folks under the spell.
There will be a cost to public health in increased sickness, higher medical expenditures, more deaths, and even the return of serious diseases, from measles to polio, that have been virtually eliminated. Americans who embrace science, who regard mandatory vaccinations as offering freedom from infectious diseases in their communities and their children’s schools, and not just anti-science/anti-government partisans, will experience the downside of this campaign.
As the rhetoric demonstrates, it is part and parcel of the decades-long crusade of the GOP attacking science (as well as scientific and medical authorities and public health directives that rely on scientific evidence) – “unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science” in Mann and Ornstein’s classic description of the Republican Party as “an insurgent outlier.” Last August, DeSantis mocked Dr. Anthony Fauci during a “Keep Florida Free” rally:
This campaign isn't, of course, based on a review of evidence or a balanced weighing of risks and benefits. The conclusions, which have been reverse-engineered to own the libs, are predetermined. The belligerent rhetoric is a tip-off. Nor is there any reason to suppose that the governor chose his state's surgeon general based on a reasoned assessment. Instead, Joseph Ladapo was selected for his 'contrarian' views, which have appeared on the op-ed pages of the Wall St. Journal.
This campaign is aimed squarely at angry white evangelical voters – chiefly men, whose version of medical freedom does not include reproductive health. Consider Texas – where Governor Greg Abbott is doing his best to top DeSantis in a performative lurch toward the authoritarian right: we can see how abortion bans threaten the lives and health of women and may deny standard of care treatment, thus endangering their ability to have children in the future. The month after the Dobbs decision, DeSantis signed a bill banning abortion after 15-weeks; the governor has pledged to sign a 6-week abortion ban. That intrusion by the state into the reproductive healthcare of women is consistent, apparently, with medical freedom.
Consider Utah, among the Republican-controlled states rushing to enact anti-trans legislation. The New York Times offers an interview with the rare Republican legislator who has pushed back against the vicious partisan tide. The interview reveals a man who believes in limited government, who thinks that the state has no business interfering with the lives of the LBGT community, and whose work on hate-crimes legislation and suicide-prevention led him to learn that trans kids were especially at risk.
Don’t expect understanding or compassion from DeSantis for any group whose interests and welfare are unlikely to be met with good grace by the MAGA base. Republican attacks on the trans community serve to increase the turnout of evangelical voters. That's the point.
For Ron DeSantis, coercive state power is a tool to enforce his will, to impose his cramped vision on others. Many Republicans have gleefully embraced the DeSantis agenda. But invocations of freedom can't hide the authoritarian project that is underway.
When we step back and survey what DeSantis – whose domination of state government can be seen at every level – has actually done in Florida, the picture is hardly consistent with expanding freedom. Politico offered this recap:
This is hardly an agenda that bolsters freedom. This is divisive own-the-libs bullying. It is, as the governor sometimes emphasizes, a war on "woke." DeSantis (with MAGA Republicans across the country), leaning harder into the culture war, is taking up the mantle of strongman to divide the country and batter his opponents.
The Florida governor is riling up white voters who are fearful of change and regard themselves as victims. These are the folks most likely to cast ballots in the 2024 Republican presidential primary. DeSantis has shown them, again and again, that he will not hesitate to use the power of the state to punish those he regards as his (and their) enemies. He is serving up retribution, not freedom.
"Nixon had his enemies list and President Carter has his friends list. I guess I'm on his friends list and I don't know which is worse." -- Senator Joe Biden, 1977
This quotation appeared in a Doyle McManus column featuring Jimmy Carter, who was aloof from Congressional members even of his own party and inattentive to their interests. "Carter thought politics was sinful," Walter Mondale said. "The worst thing you could say to Carter if you wanted him to do something was that it was politically the best thing to do."
Then-senator Biden remarked, "The president is learning, but not fast enough," before mentioning the enemies and friends lists.
Politics, the give and take of negotiation, making deals to achieve something worthwhile -- these are things that a good president must master. They are hardly bad in and of themselves. They are consistent with -- in fact, they are indispensable for -- democracy. Better than threats and violence. Better than failure to approach a beneficial goal.
No one gets everything they want in a democratic system. There is conflict. People disagree, often vehemently. But if we can come together with the folks who share our country with us (or our state or community), we can often reach an accord: give up something to gain something. We may end up with half a loaf, but that is better than none.
As president, Carter was the leader of his party, which represented a broad coalition. Listening, cajoling, negotiating -- these are critical skills. Carter has been a great former-president. Because of a handful of shortcomings, he was not a great president. (Note: Carter skillfully negotiated the Camp David Accords of 1978, perhaps because he recognized higher stakes in making peace between Israel and Egypt, than, say, pleasing a senator regarding a parochial request.)
Many people disdain politics. Presidents should know better.
In the wake of "Kevin McCarthy's drawn-out humiliation at the hands of far-right tormenters as he sought to become House speaker," and attention on the GOP's "destructionists," Joshua Green finds a "hopeful sign," aptly described in the headline, "Republicans Are Finally Breaking Out of the Fox News Bubble."
More than 50 current and former Republican members of the House appeared on CNN during the final week of the speaker vote-a-thon. (It would be interesting to compare the current and former counts.) And while I'm skeptical that this is a done deal, representing a corner turned for House Republicans, rather than an anomalous blip during one week in the life of the 118th Congress -- Remember Trump's first year when analysts kept finding supposed pivots when the former guy was about to take the presidency seriously? -- Green finds reasons to account for a recent willingness of some GOP legislators to reach out beyond the safe confines of Fox News Channel and the lesser lights of conservative media.
Let's zoom in on one of the reasons that Green suggests might have moved a handful of House Republicans:
many of their own voters profess to desire something beyond endless partisan warfare. In a recent CBS News poll, 48% of Republican voters say they want the new Republican House majority to prioritize “working with Biden and Democrats.”
That's one poll [CBS News/YouGov, January 4-6, 2023]. Polling is complicated. Meaningful results can be illusive. (Both pro-choice and pro-life advocates, for instance, can cite survey responses that prove the majority of Americans side with them on the issue.) And, when push comes to shove, when there's a specific battle being waged and Fox News has weighed in, many of those Republicans in the 48% might scurry back into alignment with their party's partisan warriors and reject any actual accommodation of Democratic views.
Grant all that. Still, it's hard as a Democrat not to find in that 48% a sign of hope.
Democrats represent a diverse coalition united in a number of policy goals. When in power, Democrats try to enact legislation to implement those goals. These elected officials are pragmatic, willing to compromise and to accept half a loaf when political constraints dictate that. They will, when they share power with Republicans, seek to find a middle ground to make incremental progress possible.
Republican luminaries, increasingly committed to waging a culture war, have dismissed Democrats and Democratic constituencies as illegitimate participants in the political process and ruled out compromise with opponents that they regard as enemies. A substantial number of Congressional Republicans are (as Green notes) "destructionists," who would rather sow dysfunction and wreak havoc with what was accepted a generation or two ago as the normal, unexceptional give-and-take of politics.
While the stars of conservative media and the Republican personalities making money off of division won't countenance respectful discourse with Democrats, a huge chunk of GOP voters have a different view. In an era when one political party has embraced grievance and animosity, and lost interest in offering legislative solutions to public problems, it is heartening to find that nearly half of its voters express the desire that Americans on both sides of the divide work together.
Working together requires communicating across the aisle, recognizing that our opponents have standing to voice their views, and trusting that representative government may be a force for good. It is undoubtedly a hopeful sign when a healthy number of Republican voters wish for constructive engagement with their opponents.
As noted in my previous post, democracy won in 2022 in places where it counted. Democrats defending democracy won with a unified message that pushed back against Republicans' assaults on both democracy and fundamental freedoms that Americans have taken for granted. Furthermore, Democratic successes in repelling this extremist tide resulted from collaboration across the country, especially in the battleground states where the victories mattered most.
Election denialism and voter suppression, as well as pledges to overturn election outcomes, undermine democratic institutions. But that was only the half of it: Republicans also stood for the Dobbs decision, anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ legislation, and a host of other extreme policies. While the January 6 Committee hearings and other recent Supreme Court rulings reinforced this messaging, Democrats across the country working in concert achieved these victories.
"One of the strengths actually coming out of the 2020 election cycle, was all of us in these 6 states in particular looking around and saying we're battling the same thing, let's work together in our response...we're just gonna get stronger now"-@JocelynBenson w/ @NicolleDWallacepic.twitter.com/urqiDAiXjm
Nicolle Wallace asked Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson about this teamwork. Her response:
Yes. We are collaborating, particularly in the six battleground states – Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. We’ve been talking regularly throughout the cycle. But we recognize how powerful that coordinated message was. That unified message: to say to every voter, not just our democracy, but your rights, your fundamental freedoms are on the line — and they continue to be on the line. So one of the strengths actually coming out of the 2020 election cycle was all of us in these six states in particular looking around and saying, ‘We’re battling the same thing. Let’s work together in our response.’ And I think you saw that play out in a coordinated effort in ’22 and we’re just going to get stronger now because we’ve got more players, more folks on the field. It’s Cisco Aguilar in Nevada and other states. So we’ve now expanded our coalition that is coordinating for ’24. And it makes me encouraged, but you know, again, we need the voters to continue to prioritize democracy in order for our strength to really be realized.
As Benson notes, this expanding coalition will be critical in 2024.
Hardly an ideal result for American democracy, but not a disaster. Members of Congress don’t control elections. That’s a function of state government. And, if we look at the states where presidential elections are decided, the picture is much less bleak.
Voters in the six major battlegrounds where Donald Trump tried to reverse his defeat in 2020 rejected election-denying candidates seeking to control their states’ election systems this year, a resounding signal that Americans have grown weary of the former president’s unfounded claims of widespread fraud. Candidates for secretary of state in Michigan, Arizona and Nevada who had echoed Trump’s false accusations lost their contests on Tuesday, with the latter race called Saturday night. A fourth candidate never made it out of his May primary in Georgia. In Pennsylvania, one of the nation’s most prominent election deniers lost his bid for governor, a job that would have given him the power to appoint the secretary of state. And in Wisconsin, an election-denying contender’s loss in the governor’s race effectively blocked a move to put election administration under partisan control.
With this week’s victory in Georgia, Democrats increased their majority in the Senate. And in light of the president’s unpopularity, high inflation, and historical patterns that suggested a red wave, the story of the election was not how well Republican election deniers had done, but how well Democrats who pushed back had fared. What happened?
On Shor’s analysis: Issues and messaging in swing states and districts mattered. The Dobbs decision mattered in places where access to abortion was in play. Republican candidates who embraced conspiracies related to election integrity and to Trump’s 2020 defeat, also mattered. Democracy and January 6 were not often invoked by Democratic candidates in swing areas, but because democracy resonated with Democratic donors, Democratic campaign spending swamped Republican efforts – and that mattered.
Democracy, including backing free and fair elections and being willing to accept the results, has become a partisan issue. Democrats' victories were triumphs for democracy.
Legal scholar Richard Hasen, who has been sounding the alarm regarding threats to democracy posed by voter suppression, laws that permit overturning the outcome of elections, and disinformation invoked to justify even violence, such as we saw on January 6, pronounces himself “a bit less terrified” after the 2022 midterms than before:
Across the ballot, in the places where it mattered, Democrats, Republicans, and others poured money into defeating election-denying candidates. The message was that if these people were willing to say, against all reliable evidence, that the last election was stolen, how could you trust them to run the next one? Democracy was on the line. This time, the line held.
Professor Hasen still has grave concerns, because election deniers won victories in red regions (keeping alive conspiracies that undermine faith in elections), because Donald Trump (who made up the big lie) still stands atop the Republican Party, and because the next leader of the GOP may be more skillful at election subversion than Trump was.
There is undoubtedly continuing cause for concern. Donald Trump has insisted that massive election fraud in the 2020 presidential election justified "allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution."
Two Republican supervisors in Arizona's Cochise County refused to certify the election results (though they could point to no irregularities in the voting or the counting of ballots) until ordered to do so by a judge. And Kari Lake, the election-denying Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, still hasn't accepted her defeat.
Nonetheless, this time the line held. The Constitution is intact. Every state, including Arizona, has certified the election results. Donald Trump, Kari Lake, and numerous other candidates in the battleground states for secretary of state, governor, and attorney general remain losers.
Election deniers' 2022 defeats in the battleground states strengthen the likelihood of free and fair elections in 2024 and represent a victory for American democracy. Two other factors, not yet determined, could further reduce threats to elections in 2024.
The first is Congressional passage during the lame duck session of the Electoral Count Reform Act, which has bipartisan support in the Senate. Things look promising for success, though time is running out.
The second, is the possible rejection of the independent state legislature theory. While the decision in this case (Moore v. Harper), which was argued at the Supreme Court last week, is uncertain, oral arguments have convinced a number of critics (such as Mark Joseph Stern, who pronounces the theory "dangerous" and "an utter fraud") that ISL will not be embraced by a majority of the justices.
Both of these possibilities will, if they come to pass, serve to bolster the prospects of free and fair elections in 2024. The 2022 midterms delivered good news for American democracy. There may be further good news to come.
The mainstream media and conservative media agree -- from the New York Times and CNN to the New York Post and Fox News Channel: Donald Trump is to blame for the remarkably poor showing of Republicans in the 2022 midterms.
Donald Trump wishes to set the record straight: he is not to blame.
The media is going gaga over the almost20-percentage point victory of God's fighter, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Even granting that evangelicals may take such talk to heart, we might wish to pause and take a breath.
Ezra Klein, unconvinced that he has seen God's handiwork in the Florida election results, points to Marco Rubio and other Florida officials who did almost as well, to another governor in a state no redder than Florida (Governor Mike DeWine of Ohio) who did a bit better than DeSantis, and to numerous other governors past and present, of both parties, who have had healthy reelection numbers.
Governor DeSantis may be poised to have a strong second term in Florida. Does this mean that he is ready to grab the mantle of leadership from Trump in the run-up to the 2024 election? That's easier said than done. Trump's grip is still pretty tight. And many commentators have noted among the reasons why party leaders are fearful of Trump: he would have no qualms about blowing up the Republican Party if he were challenged.
But suppose DeSantis were to succeed. Suppose he secured the nomination without a Bull Moose-style challenge to his right or wanton sabotage from a vindictive former president. Does that mean that the rest of the country -- which just decided that it is not ready to accept with open arms what the Republican Party is offering -- would welcome a President DeSantis?
Many Republicans have convinced themselves that DeSantis can deliver Trumpism without Trump, which they believe represents a talisman that could bring them victory. Perhaps, though Donald Trump won one general election. In 2016. Against Hillary Clinton. While losing the popular vote by more than 2.8 million votes cast.
Whether or not one regards Florida as an earthly paradise, it's one state out of fifty. What Ron DeSantis is dishing out in Florida may not be palatable (even without mean tweets) to the rest of the country. He may have started out as a libertarian, but he's ready to drop that as soon as a 'woke' corporation resists his vision. He is an enthusiastic culture warrior now, a superstar on Fox, ready, willing, and (in Florida) able to employ the coercive power of the state to impose his version of the chosen way on anyone standing in his path -- whether they be Venezuelan families seeking refuge in this country, or parents wishing to make life more tolerable for their gay children in public schools, or Florida voters disadvantaged by aggressive gerrymandering.
Folks beyond Florida have seen a MAGA Republican Party develop right before their eyes since that 2015 escalator ride. DeSantis, who views the world through a partisan lens and delights in picking fights, hardly represents a change of pace. That's why he's so popular with a party fueled by grievance and animosity.
Inflation is sky high. Most Americans are unhappy with the direction of the country. Joe Biden's approval rating is in the low forties. The fundamentals pointed to a red wave that didn't happen. We'll have to wait a few months for an accurate assessment of the 2022 exit polls. But right now, it sure looks like independent voters sided with Democrats -- and thus voted in favor of democracy and a conception of freedom (contrary to Dobbs and) incompatible with the version that Ron DeSantis and MAGA Republicans are offering.
Until proven wrong, I'm willing to give voters credit. Most Americans look to elected officials to govern, to seek solutions to public problems, to act on behalf of our communities, rather than to wage a culture war that divides us.
