democratic impasse.com

While the most significant election news after the midterms will focus on control of Congress, the measure of success of a slew of election deniers, and what the results mean for the increasingly conspiratorial and authoritarian Republican Party and for the country’s democratic institutions, in this post I focus briefly on the mayoral race (nominally nonpartisan) in a large Democratic city in the largest blue state. The campaign for mayor of Los Angeles, which has attracted national attention, features several factors -- big money, partisan polarization, voter turnout, and racial relations -- worthy of attention.

Rick Caruso is on track to spend more than $100 million by Nov. 8 in his bid for Los Angeles mayor, an astounding sum that puts the real estate developer on par with candidate outlays in some of the country’s most closely watched and expensive midterm races.

The latest reporting period (10/22/22) shows Caruso spending $92,272,088, compared with $8,141,094 by his opponent Karen Bass. Most of Caruso's lavish campaign spending has delivered wall to wall television advertising. (Note: Bass’s campaign has relied on matching funds from the city; Caruso, who declined to stay within proscribed spending limits, was ineligible for matching funds, relying instead on the billionaire’s own deep pockets.)

With no single ad or image dominating, it’s the sheer size of Caruso’s advantage that will leave the most lasting impression of the 2022 campaign. Caruso is sometimes recognized at campaign stops by Angelenos who have no real idea who he is — beyond the certainty that he must be famous because they’ve seen him on TV.

This media barrage has included, of course, “tens of millions of dollars spent on attack ads that appear to have succeeded in raising doubts about Bass in many voters’ minds.”

As election day approaches, polling suggests that the lead Bass held over Caruso in the June primary has shrunk considerably. When all the votes have been counted, what will have made a difference in the outcome?

Let's begin with a bit of context. In a discussion of the battle for Congress, Jonathan Bernstein offered commentary that's instructive in this mayoral race: Elections may not turn on factors such as "policy questions or advertising or the candidates themselves."

This is perhaps a counterintuitive conclusion. The tendency is always going to be to assume that whatever the winning party did helped them and whatever the losing party did hurt them. But the truth is far more complicated. The big things that drive elections are largely out of the control of campaign operatives and perhaps even out of the control of elected officials. And the small things that may matter at the margins almost certainly don’t all push the results in the same direction.

I acknowledge Bernstein's take on campaigns and elections. I have no crystal ball. I don't know who will win. I don't know which factors will determine, or will be regarded as determinative, in the outcome. Nor will I comment on the most widely discussed issues, such as homelessness (a highly visible issue that has divided neighborhoods), crime (often linked to the homeless among the folks most concerned about it), or charges of corruption (hurled, unconvincingly in my view, by both camps at the other). Instead, I simply comment on three factors that I regard as significant.

First, partisan polarization

Caruso became a Democrat a few weeks before declaring his candidacy for mayor. (Don't doubt for a minute that he'd still be a Republican if the number of registered Republicans in the city were within shouting distance of the number of registered Democrats.) Even as a Democrat, he'll pick up most of the votes cast by registered Republicans, but also many tens of thousands of votes (which would not be there if Caruso had not changed his party affiliation) from registered Democrats.

Caruso's consultants undoubtedly watched Alex Villanueva's successful campaign for sheriff in Los Angeles County four years ago. While Villanueva touted himself as a "reformer," savvy observers couldn't help but notice that he had the strong backing of the Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs, which has consistently opposed reform.

The bilingual Villanueva pitched himself as a Latino advocate and emphasized (in a nonpartisan race) that he was a Democrat (while his opponent, an independent, was a former Republican). He ran as a Democrat in a heavily Democratic county:

It has been 138 years since our last Democratic Sheriff. In order to protect our communities and our families we need to elect a Democrat for Sheriff.
This November, help make history. Elect a Democrat for Sheriff.
Vote Democrat for LA County Sheriff. Vote Alex Villanueva.

The strategy worked. The Los Angeles County Democratic Party and Democratic clubs across the region climbed aboard. Los Angeles elected a Democratic sheriff (who subsequently has catered to the ALADS and fought against accountability for himself and his deputies at every turn). The Democratic Party, bamboozled last time, opposes Villanueva this time around. He will almost certainly be turned out of office this week.

Democrats, including elected officials all the way up to Joe Biden and Barack Obama, are mostly in Bass's corner in the 2022 race for mayor. (Gavin Newsom, who received Caruso's support to the tune of $60,000 to his 2018 campaign for governor and $500,000 to the governor's COVID-19 Response fund, has declined to make an endorsement.) While many voters are not be paying all that much attention, at least Caruso has distanced himself from a Republican identity, which could have sabotaged his campaign. Caruso, like Villanueva before him, is running as a loud and proud Democrat.

While most Democratic clubs oppose Caruso, there is a prominent exception. During a debate, when Bass challenged Caruso's authenticity as a Democrat, he replied: "The largest Latino Democratic club, one of the largest in the country, endorsed me." She replied, "How much did you pay for it?"

Caruso: "Oh, are you insulting Avance?" Bass: "Yeah."

Avance Democratic Club took exception to her remarks, demanding an apology. Bass complied.

The incident brought attention to clubs’ cutthroat and seemingly mysterious endorsement process, and their practice of charging for memberships, which can in turn confer the ability to participate in high-stakes endorsement votes.
Dozens of Democratic clubs in the Greater L.A. region are chartered under the L.A. County Democratic Party, with Stonewall Democratic Club and Los Angeles County Young Democrats among the better-known groups. The volunteer-run groups host events and may have hundreds of members.
Candidates can rally their allies to buy memberships or, in some cases, simply buy multiple memberships themselves ahead of an endorsement vote. They also can woo existing club members ahead of a vote.

What was the membership of Avance (cost: $25 each) before Caruso's candidacy compared to the time of the endorsement vote? When did the money come in? The president of Avance (which allows all members who have joined at least 5 days prior to vote on endorsements) said she had no internal records to show when Avance boosted its revenues through new memberships this year.

While details are murky, what we know suggests that billionaire candidates willing to dig deep can in effect buy endorsements and, hence, credibility as genuine party members.

Partisanship circa 2022 is hugely significant. A party label, and signals from affiliates of the party, can make a difference even in campaigns for nonpartisan elective offices, such as sheriff and mayor.

Second, a bought and paid for ground game

Caruso's campaign includes a $13 million investment in a field operation. While only a fraction of $100M, that's one and a half times what Bass has spent on her whole campaign. Most campaigns, at best, call on volunteers to walk door to door, to make calls, and to send text messages. Grassroots support -- from individuals and groups representing constituencies on board with the campaign -- is critical.

Caruso, with his deep pockets, has found a workaround. Just as he hasn't had to raise campaign funds (as a self-funded candidate), he hasn't had to draw on activists willing to pitch in with voluntary labor. "Caruso has spent big money on a canvassing and voter outreach operation and hired 300 to 400 door knockers across the city, at $25 to $30 an hour."

Caruso's bountiful fortune has generated the best campaign that money can buy -- from high priced political consultants to extravagant television advertising ... all the way down to paid staffers to knock on doors. Earlier this year, they identified folks committed to, or leaning toward voting for Caruso. They are now hard at work in neighborhoods across the city nudging Caruso voters to cast ballots. (They have also plastered a gazillion lawn signs in public medians, parkways, telephone and sign poles -- anyplace where visibility is good, traffic is heavy, and no homeowner or business is likely to object.)

In a close race, whether the turnout is high or low by election day, this investment in a field operation could make a difference, especially in turning out occasional voters (who are less likely to return a ballot or make it to a polling place in an off-year election).

Third, differences among racial/ethnic groups

The state of racial relations in Los Angeles has been jolted by the infamous recorded conversation with three members of the city council and the head of the Los Angeles County Labor Federation, wherein Latino power brokers were heard demeaning their Black opponents. Bass is Black. Caruso's campaign has focused on Latinos, who represent nearly half of the city's residents.

At least one Caruso supporter -- the president of the aforementioned Avance Democratic Club -- believes the attention this episode has gotten may benefit her candidate:

Nilza Serrano — president of Avance, a Latino Democratic club that has endorsed Caruso — told me “that whole controversy with the recording is being overplayed, and it’s going to upset Latinos.” She added, “I think that the president should have never gotten involved,” referring to the Biden White House’s call for the city councilors on the recording to resign.

While Black and Latino communities are often regarded as Democratic constituencies, their respective political perspectives often diverge, as illustrated in a recent article by Tim Alberta. Most Latinos voted for Biden over Trump in 2020, but the margin was smaller than in the Clinton/Trump race in 2016. And in many places in the country, such as along the border in Texas, Latinos have increasingly abandoned the Democrats in recent years.

Alberta spoke with several Democratic activists who complained that the Democratic Party has not been responsive to Latino concerns.

Danny Ortega of Arizona, a Democratic activist and civil rights attorney, who "has spent decades working in households and neighborhoods where voting is a foreign behavior, and where fear of filling out government forms runs deep, pleading with first- and second-generation Hispanics to get involved with politics," told Alberta that the younger generation is abandoning the Democratic Party and registering independent. These voters doubt Democrats' commitment to resolving the immigration issue.

In his view, the Democratic Party has a credibility crisis, and it’s not specific to immigration. Ortega said that so many adjacent Democratic causes—voting rights, LGBTQ rights, abortion rights—are viewed skeptically, particularly by younger Hispanics, who perceive Democrats as manipulative at worst and tone-deaf at best. Even if their social-justice efforts are regarded as genuine, Democrats are pushing an agenda that doesn’t resonate with a wide array of voters during this time of economic uncertainty.

María-Elena López, who left the Republican Party to become a Democrat when Obama ran for president the first time, is vice chair of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party. She regards herself as progressive across the board, but notes that most Latino voters are unmoved by such issues.

“We’re not a political party; we’re a charity. And you know what? These people don’t want charity,” López said. “These immigrants come here to make money and keep their families safe. They are not here because the sea levels are rising, or because of social justice, or anything else. We’re out there talking about racism and the Green New Deal and defunding the police, and we’re freaking them out.”

Karen Bass, longtime Democratic leader, embraces the progressive issues of the party base. Although she has never served in city government, Rick Caruso has portrayed her as an insider. Caruso's campaign has sought to attract Republicans, conservatives (regardless of party), and others who are dissatisfied with the status quo (including a City Hall replete with scandal). As a first-time candidate, and recent 'Democrat,' he has distanced himself from the Democratic powers that be in Los Angeles (though he has been a prominent donor and commissioner appointed by the mayor, not to mention a friend of the California governor).

Bass bested Caruso by 7 percentage points (43.1 to 36.0) in the June primary. The recent UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies/ Los Angeles Times poll shows Bass leading among white and Black voters and liberals, while Caruso leads among Republicans, conservatives, Latinos, and residents of the San Fernando Valley. Her diminishing lead (45% to 41% among likely voters) is within the margin of error. Turnout will be critical. Undecided voters -- mostly Latino at this late stage -- will determine the outcome.

The man whose plan to kidnap and torture Nancy Pelosi led to a vicious attack on her husband was clearly under the spell of right-wing lies and conspiracy theories – from Pizzagate, Covid vaccines, and the January 6 attack on the Capitol to the tale of a stolen 2020 presidential election. Conservatives have furiously spun made-up stories to fend off this connection. Jonathan Chait offers two reasons why.

First, because a truthful account disrupts the conservative presentation of themselves as victims, innocent of blame but persecuted by evil liberal elites. This conceit justifies in their minds trampling on democratic norms in order to defend themselves from a malevolent assault. As Chait notes, “to acknowledge even one episode of a violent maniac” would challenge this narrative of conservative victimization.

Second, Republicans closed ranks to fend off the possibility that a maniac may have been inspired by the big lie (and lesser lies) or by QAnon.  To grant this would have risked too much because so much of their base accepts these tales. Chait again: “They might be able to afford cutting DePape loose, but they could not afford to alienate those who shared his most important beliefs.”

I noted in my previous post that Republicans could not condemn violence without fear of alienating a critical voting bloc in their party. Chait includes “bigots, conspiracy theorists, and paramilitary members” as well as “QAnon, election truthers, antisemites, insurrectionists, and anti-vaxxers” as factions that the GOP cannot afford to denounce, since the party depends on their votes.

 The conservative response to a ghastly, vicious attack on the family of a political foe has been jokes, wild fabrications, and finally, after grotesque contortions, acceptance of (what both sides regarded until recently as) the unacceptable.

After review of how this dynamic has played out with Florida Governor DeSantis’s rejection of vaccines, and the Republican Party’s embrace of January 6 violence, Chait concludes:

The remorseless pattern of the Trump era is that every right-wing impulse that begins as resentment of the critics of some element of their movement ultimately evolves into direct support. The anti-anti-DePape right is clearing the way for something even more sinister.

Count on it. As I noted in my previous post, with this crew there is never a bridge too far.

On June 14, 2017, Congressman Steve Scalise, practicing baseball with other Republicans, was shot and grievously wounded by “a leftwing political activist with a record of domestic violence.”

Democrats did not joke about this incident, or deny the basic facts about the shooting, or invent a fictional narrative to compete with the basic facts. Nancy Pelosi denounced the violence unequivocally:

This morning, the U.S. Congress suffered a despicable and cowardly attack.  My thoughts and prayers are with Whip Steve Scalise and the others wounded, Capitol Police and staff, and their families.
We are profoundly grateful for the heroism of the Capitol Police, whose bravery under fire undoubtedly saved countless lives. On days like today, there are no Democrats or Republicans, only Americans united in our hopes and prayers for the wounded.

On October 28, 2022, Paul Pelosi, spouse of Speaker Pelosi, was attacked with a hammer to the skull by a man immersed in right-wing conspiracy theories “about Covid vaccines, the 2020 election and the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.”

While a few Republicans have forthrightly condemned the attack, numerous others have offered jokes about the attack, or fabricated stories about the shooting, or grasped at these stories (from sources that offer not a shred of evidence) to raise questions about the accounts presented by law enforcement. The world's richest man and the leader of the Grand Old Party have both spread falsehoods by raising questions.

The Republican reaction suggests, in Annie Karni's words, they believe

they will pay no political price for attacks on their opponents, however meanspirited, inflammatory or false.
If anything, some Republicans seem to believe they will be rewarded by their right-wing base for such coarseness — or even suffer political consequences if they do not join in and show that they are in on the joke.

It is plain as day that Republicans, who have made a fetish out of guns in campaign ads and tweets, have a tougher time condemning political violence than do Democrats. To do so would be to repudiate a critical Republican voting bloc. In the immediate aftermath of the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, when a mob tried to stop certification of the election of Joe Biden as president, Republicans denounced the violence and even their leader in the White House. But by spring 2021, when Donald Trump was impeached for a second time, the party refused to hold him accountable. By July 2021, they had manufactured a fraudulent narrative: the rioters were peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights and those in jail, awaiting trial, were “political prisoners.”  

The man with a hammer, under the spell of lies and conspiracy theories and the glorification of violence, had asked, in an echo of the January 6 insurrectionists, "Where's Nancy?" The big lie metastasized into more lies, which have led inevitably to political violence.

Ben Collins observed that in the aftermath of the attack, the pro-Trump internet manufactured a false reality. "They were writing fan fiction about the most embarrassing thing that could have happened in the Pelosi house that night in their eyes for Paul Pelosi.... Some sort of gay love-plot thing that they have invented for themselves. And then when the real narrative came out... they refused to accept it," rejecting the account of law enforcement (and the attacker's confession). This narrative, invented and spread on 4Chan and Truth Social, soon reached Fox News, as their anchors mused, Things just don't add up. They're just asking the question. And then Donald Trump joined the questioning chorus.

Collins continues:

All those things that I read on 4Chan on Saturday morning -- those are the things that are coming out of people who run the GOP right now, both through their media apparatus and through official party lines.
... People keep saying, What about Steve Scalise? And that's true. Steve Scalise was shot at a congressional softball game. Nobody created a secondary story that denied the reality of that happening. Nobody gloated about it.... Barack Obama did not laugh at this. There was none of that at the time. 
We have to be clear about what's happening here: One side is agitating for violence, the violence happens, they deny it's them, and then they say, Even if it was us, we would've been proud of it anyway.

"We have to be clear about what's happening here: One side is agitating for violence, the violence happens, they deny it's them, and then they say even if it was us, we would've been proud of it anyway" - @oneunderscore__ w/ @NicolleDWallace pic.twitter.com/yIc9rlmWuW

— Deadline White House (@DeadlineWH) November 1, 2022

Nicolle Wallace asked Charlie Sykes why he has described this episode as a turning point. His reply:

This has been a decade coming when you think about it. From Sandy Hook to Pizzagate to Covid denialism to Charlottesville to the big lie about the election. We have seen this building attack on objective truth as a political weapon.
And I do feel it is a turning point, because here you have this horrendous, vicious attack on an 82-year old man who has had his skull fractured. And rather than, you know, everybody taking a deep breath and saying, Okay, maybe we need to sober up--
What Ben is describing is absolutely our new political reality. They have invented this lulls fiction about some sort of a homosexual tryst. Why did they go there? Why did they reach into the QAnon book that there’s some sort of thing going on in Nancy Pelosi’s house?
But even when we have the confession, even now when we have the black and white statements, the recorded statements from the perpetrator, it is not making a difference. The truth cannot catch up with these lies because the lies are so deeply embedded and they are so deeply invested.
And the people that ought to be pushing back against them have once again decided they’re not going to speak up.
So when I say we’re at a turning point, we keep asking, What if there’s an assassination? What if there’s a terrible act of violence? What will happen then?
Well, it has happened. And what we are seeing is the Republican Party and members of the right-wing media are utterly unfazed and they’re prepared to go along with it….

"The truth cannot catch up with these lies because the lies are so deeply embedded and they are so deeply invested and the people that ought to be pushing back against them have once again decided they're not going to speak up" - @SykesCharlie w/ @NicolleDWallace pic.twitter.com/w5Jb07hbKq

— Deadline White House (@DeadlineWH) November 1, 2022

As I've observed repeatedly over the past two years: There is never a bridge too far for Republican leaders in their quest for political power. They may balk initially. But then they get on board with the lies and, eventually, with the violence.

That quotation, revealed at yesterday's January 6 Committee hearing, is from Cassidy Huthinson's video testimony. She and Mark Meadows had encountered President Trump after he learned that the Supreme Court had rejected a Texas suit to overturn the 2020 election. The president was "raging" at the decision, Hutchinson noted, in a "typical anger outburst." [Passage found at 00:47:02 at hyperlink below]

The president said something to the effect of, “I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark. This is embarrassing. Figure it out. We need to figure it out. I don’t want people to know that we lost.”

Donald Trump was rattled. A stubborn fact, which in his eyes cast him as a loser, threatened his self-image, an image he desperately wished the public would not glimpse. That was untenable. Of course Mark Meadows did not "figure it out." The high court's decision had been publicly announced. The source of Trump's embarrassment, a ruling (one of a long string of judicial defeats) that rejected claims of fraud and demands to throw out the election results, couldn't be hidden from view.

If this single setback embarrassed Trump, imagine how humiliating his November 2020 defeat had been.

It is hardly an original observation to note that Donald Trump's unique personality shaped his presidency in ways never before seen in the Oval Office. But it is still remarkable. Consider: the man's insecurity, his desperate need for constant affirmation, his refusal to accept an outcome that he frantically wished not to be -- this explains so many things that early on (as we were getting to know Trump) we regarded as comically baffling, but that eventually led to a crisis for our democracy.

When we watched the man assert that Hillary Clinton's popular vote total surpassed his own only because of millions of illegal votes cast, we could hardly take it seriously. When we watched him push his press secretary to insist -- against the plain evidence of our eyes -- that the crowd at his inauguration surpassed the size of the crowd at Obama's inauguration (and at every other president's in history), we laughed.

We had no inkling of what was to come. We could hardly have foreseen an insurrection four years later, not from this boastful, needy personality, who had such a sketchy understanding of government (and little apparent interest).

Yet consistent with our experience of the past seven years, the scene Hutchinson describes suggests that Trump's peculiar psychological makeup -- his craving for reassurance -- was foundational to his premeditated, multifaceted, lawless planning, begun many months before November 2020, to overturn the results of the presidential election. Donald Trump could not bear to acknowledge defeat, to be labeled in his own mind, and in the view of others, a loser.

The man, as he parries with opponents, offering justifications and defenses and throwing out lies that are convenient at the moment, often fails to consider what he will say the next day. He can't maintain a consistent, coherent story that holds together because, most often, he isn't thinking beyond whatever immediately confronts him. One day, the FBI planted the documents. The next day, the documents belong to him. The day after that, who knows what will pop into his head and out of his mouth.

Many months before Biden thumped him at the polls and in the electoral college, that prospect terrified Trump. The thought of being a loser was so agonizingly insupportable, he began setting the stage to fend off that reality by hook or by crook. His planning to dispute the election results was months in the making. He would go to any lengths to evade what was to come. Rejecting the rule of law and trampling underfoot our democratic institutions were inconsequential to him. He could not, would not accept an electoral failure. He was driven to squelch that eventuality.

He's still at it.

"This is embarrassing. Figure it out." Figure it out, he did. A way to prop up his tender psyche, to deny what is clearly the case. He has succeeded in great measure, having brought a third of the country along with him. Although he lost the election and failed to overturn this outcome, he convinced his MAGA base that he had won. This salve to the man's fragile ego has come at great cost to the country, which has watched election denial become the credo of the Republican Party that Trump leads.

What a strange, twisted path to an authoritarian threat to a great nation. Born of one man's pitiful, incessant craving for reassurance.

Tuberville: They want reparation because they think the people that do the crime are owed that! Bullshit! pic.twitter.com/W3mOP5vte7

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 9, 2022

Listen to the silence of Republican leaders across the country to Senator Tuberville’s rallying cry. Or, when they’re cornered, watch them diminish the significance of what was said without diluting the clear signal to MAGA voters that this is their party. (Since 2016, Republicans have become well practiced at shrugging off ignorant, racist, xenophobic derision from within their ranks.) And no matter what they say, it won’t make one whit of difference in their endorsements. Come what may, Republican leaders will embrace as allies public officials and candidates who articulate views that (only a short time ago) were condemned by the GOP as repugnant. If these leaders succeed in their rhetorical hustle, their words won’t discourage white supremacists and anti-Semites from voting Republican. The party can't win without these votes.

In this morning's Los Angeles Times (in a review of the research of two political scientists, Lynn Vavreck and John Sides, on the 2012, 2016, and 2020 presidential elections), David Lauter notes that both the Democratic and Republican parties are locked-in to their respective positions. The stakes are high. The country is so closely divided that either side might win. Neither party has an incentive to budge an inch.

This all or nothing conflict explains the dynamics of the Georgia Senate race. One candidate has demonstrated, again and again, his unfitness for the job or for any public office. Revelation after revelation about the candidate’s past has revealed a life destructive to the people closest to him. This candidate has made choices that are antithetical to the positions that his party espouses. Herschel Walker has run from responsibility and from the truth at every turn. Yet Republicans cling to him so tightly that he may well pound out a victory.

The research Lauter describes served to identify what actually moves partisan voters. The approach was simple: During the 2019-2020 cycle, researchers interviewed 6,000 voters each week (for a total of 500,000 interviews) on their views.

Rather than only asking voters which position they favored on major issues, the Nationscape poll gave them alternative scenarios involving a mix of different issue outcomes and asked respondents which they preferred. If they had to choose between a scenario that included a minimum wage increase to $15 an hour or one with a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, for example, which would take precedence?

The conclusions of the study were dispiriting. The researchers found that “very few issues truly matter to voters as much as the splits over race, immigration and identity that divide Americans.” That’s the bottom line dividing the two parties: Race, immigration, identity.

That’s what’s behind Tommy Tuberville’s angry, sneering remarks. That’s the glue that binds the Republican leadership to Herschel Walker and Tommy Tuberville (and what has grown into a legion of Trumpian wannabes). The two parties are divided by clashing worldviews. Democrats envisage a broad, inclusive America -- a rainbow coalition. Republicans, who take refuge in nostalgic conceptions of the past, are pushing back furiously against the Democratic vision.

In Why We're Polarized, after a discussion of how Republicans who had championed the individual mandate turned against it when it was proposed by a Democrat, Ezra Klein quotes Jonathan Haidt on the role that individual reasoning plays in political disagreements:

... Haidt told me, "once group loyalties are engaged, you can't change people's minds by utterly refuting their arguments. Thinking is mostly just rationalization, mostly just a search for supporting evidence." Psychologists have a term for this: "motivated reasoning."

Three paragraphs later, Klein writes:

I first wrote about motivated reasoning and Obamacare’s individual mandate in 2012. In response to that piece, the psychologist Paul Bloom wrote an article in the Atlantic that didn’t quarrel with anything in my argument but included this gotcha: “notice that Klein doesn’t reach for a social-psychology journal when articulating why he and his Democratic allies are so confident that Obamacare is constitutional.”
Bloom’s right, of course. But the implications are more radical than he seemed prepared to admit. The question isn’t whether I fall victim to motivated reasoning, too, or whether I’m less psychically guarded when faced with information that accords with my values and worldview. Of course I am. The question is what it means that all of us are doing this, to greater or lesser degrees, all the time.

Wait. A gotcha of Klein's description of Republicans' 180-degree reversal on the individual mandate? That's intriguing. In "The War on Reason" (the article Klein cites), Bloom writes:

We’re at our worst when it comes to politics. This helps explain why recent attacks on rationality have captured the imagination of the scientific community and the public at large. Politics forces us to confront those who disagree with us, and we’re not naturally inclined to see those on the other side of an issue as rational beings. Why, for instance, do so many Republicans think Obama’s health-care plan violates the Constitution? Writing in The New Yorker in June 2012, Ezra Klein used the research of Haidt and others to argue that Republicans despise the plan on political, not rational, grounds. Initially, he notes, they objected to what the Democrats had to offer out of a kind of tribal sense of loyalty. Only once they had established that position did they turn to reason to try to justify their views.
But notice that Klein doesn’t reach for a social-psychology journal when articulating why he and his Democratic allies are so confident that Obamacare is constitutional. He’s not inclined to understand his own perspective as the product of reflexive loyalty to the ideology of his own group. This lack of interest in the source of one’s views is typical. Because most academics are politically left of center, they generally use their theories of irrationality to explain the beliefs of the politically right of center. They like to explore how psychological biases shape the decisions people make to support Republicans, reject affirmative-action policies, and disapprove of homosexuality. But they don’t spend much time investigating how such biases might shape their own decisions to support Democrats, endorse affirmative action, and approve of gay marriage.

But Bloom doesn't place much weight on this rhetorical gotcha, because in the next two sentences he writes: "None of this is to say that Klein is mistaken. Irrational processes do exist, and they can ground political and moral decisions; sometimes the right explanation is groupthink or cognitive dissonance or prejudice."

Bloom contends in the Atlantic article that in spite of irrational cul-de-sacs in individual reasoning, humans are generally rational, while conceding that in thinking about political issues we are especially vulnerable to irrationality:

[I]f you want to see people at their worst, press them on the details of those complex political issues that correspond to political identity and that cleave the country almost perfectly in half. But if this sort of irrational dogmatism reflected how our minds generally work, we wouldn’t even make it out of bed each morning. Such scattered and selected instances of irrationality shouldn’t cloud our view of the rational foundations of our everyday life. That would be like saying the most interesting thing about medicine isn’t the discovery of antibiotics and anesthesia, or the construction of large-scale programs for the distribution of health care, but the fact that people sometimes forget to take their pills.

He elaborates on this view in a follow up piece ("The Irrational Idea That Humans Are Mostly Irrational"), while emphasizing that in everyday life, generally speaking, people act rationally:

If you want to see people at their stupidest, check out national politics, which is replete with us-vs.-them dynamics and virtue signaling, and where the cost of having silly views is harmless. Unless I’m a member of a tiny, powerful community, my beliefs about climate change or the arms deal with Iran will have no effect on the world, and so it’s not surprising that people don't work so hard to get those sorts of facts right.
It’s revelatory, then, that we do much better when the stakes are high, where being rational really matters. If I have the wrong theory of how to make scrambled eggs, they will come out too dry; if I have the wrong everyday morality, I will hurt those I love. So if you’re curious about people’s capacity for reasoning, don’t look at cases where being correct doesn’t matter and where it’s all about affiliation. Rather, look at how people cope in everyday life.

(In September 2016 it may have been easier, than it is today, to assess our political divisions as of little consequence, where "the cost of having silly views is harmless." Or perhaps Bloom is less concerned with democratic backsliding than I am. Let's set that aside.) It turns out, based on both Atlantic articles, that Bloom's gotcha is less significant than we might have suspected. In fact, Bloom doesn't actually disagree with Klein at all. Essentially, he believes with Klein that tribal politics makes us irrational.

Reaching across the divide

So, should small-d (and big-D) democrats simply throw up our hands and forget about engaging our political opponents because they are too irrational, too committed to tribal loyalty, to listen to reason? Not at all, though our first priority should be to defeat authoritarian leaders at the polls and to oppose authoritarian policies at every level of government. To succeed, we must appeal to folks not locked-in to the MAGA Republican Party and do whatever we can to turn out as many votes as possible to preserve our democratic institutions, especially free and fair elections.

But another priority should be to reach across the tribal divide and persuade (some fraction of) Americans on the red team (perhaps at the margins) that democracy is worth preserving -- for them, as well as for us. It would be wise to keep tribal allegiances and motivated reasoning in mind when constructing political strategies. But I suggest that in the give and take of politics, we focus primarily on clarifying our views about our country, our challenges, the high stakes, and our differences with our political opponents, while making rational arguments to support our points of view. We need, as much as possible, to engage our political opponents, not simply write them off.

And we need to dig deeper. Team Red has a host of grievances, some of which are legitimate concerns that deserve to be addressed and might be remedied at least in part by reasonable public policies. We desperately need to be talking about that.

More on this later.

Better for the culprit, that is.

Kevin Drum writes that he'll never understand authoritarians. He begins by quoting a report from yesterday's Washington Post:

Officials in Russian-occupied territories in eastern and southern Ukraine were forcing people to vote “under a gun barrel,” residents said on Saturday as staged referendums — intended to validate Moscow’s annexation of the territory it occupies — entered their second day.

Drum follows up:

What's the point of this? Everyone knows what's going on, and Moscow is hardly even making an attempt to pretend the referendums are real. Should we take it as good news that even a thug like Vladimir Putin feels like he has to at least symbolically carry out the norms of democracy?

What's the point of this?

I've often puzzled over this as well, though usually my puzzlement has been directed at American politicians and political operatives, not foreign powers. I've wondered: The pretext is so transparent, why bother? But pattern and practice confirm: bad actors almost always bother. There must be something to this strategy.

Sometimes an individual just doesn't have much of an excuse to offer or hasn't thought things through. It's as though they are just blurting something out that evades (no matter how unconvincingly) the truth. Sometimes a U.S. Senator, or a corporate malefactor, or any wrongdoer in the public eye can't come up with anything to say that's both exculpatory and plausible. Think of a child (no matter how imaginative) caught with a hand in the cookie jar.

In contrast, when this is not the course the offender takes -- when folks running a con blurt out the truth -- that's often regarded as especially dumb. With a politician, it's a gaffe. With anyone else, such truth-telling is an own goal, which covers the inadvertent truth-teller with ignominy.

With a political party, and a partisan media, when everyone is repeating the same bogus talking points, sheerest repetition may give even the flimsiest cover stories the sheen of believability. Sometimes this works -- with both partisan listeners, who don't think too hard about it, and with other folks who aren't paying all that much attention (which would be most of us, most of the time).

Plus the unconvincing bullet-points give partisans something to repeat to each other (and to their opponents). The folks dissembling aren't caught flat-footed with mouth agape. They have something to say, which -- if true -- would justify whatever con they're running.

Should we take it as good news that even a thug like Vladimir Putin feels like he has to at least symbolically carry out the norms of democracy?

I dunno. I don't find this reassuring. With brazen wrongdoing, whether invading a neighboring country or fabricating a big lie about a free and fair election, there are always folks who'll fall for the story-telling. So, when push comes to shove, a cover story it is.

September 26, 2022 postscript: It occurs to me that Drum's puzzlement may have stemmed from something that distinguishes Putin from most other bad actors: he is a strongman, who rules a country, commands its military, and poses an active threat to other nations across the globe.

My response? This doesn't matter. Putin, former KGB operative, is an accomplished con man who uses every trick of the trade, at every juncture. A Rand Corporation report states:

We characterize the contemporary Russian model for propaganda as “the firehose of falsehood” because of two of its distinctive features: high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions. In the words of one observer, “[N]ew Russian propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience.”
Contemporary Russian propaganda has at least two other distinctive features. It is also rapid, continuous, and repetitive, and it lacks commitment to consistency.

Fiona Hill, who wrote a book about the man ("Putin: Operative in the Kremlin" in 2013), years before serving as deputy assistant to President Trump as well as senior director for European and Russian affairs on his administration's NSA . In October 2021, she observed that Putin had selected an attractive female translator for a meeting with President Trump just to distract the president. She said:

Putin is a very wily and very savvy former KGB operative. In fact one might say he never did leave the KGB. So he's extremely skilled at manipulating people and finding people's vulnerabilities.

Putin hasn't the least reason to abandon any tool that might offer an advantage, whether distracting an easily distracted chief executive or forcing people to vote under the barrel of a gun.

One of the pleasures that sometimes comes of staking out a position in a blog is finding agreement, after the fact, with a favorite writer. This is especially true when one has taken a controversial stand. In following American politics, I often read stuff by political scientists. I’m a fan of Jonathan Bernstein, the only political scientist (though he has left the academy for Bloomberg) whom I read virtually every day. (I’m not on Twitter.)

Bernstein’s Bloomberg / the Washington Post column this morning was a treat.

He suggests that yesterday’s vote in the House on the Electoral Count Act says something

about the state of the Republican Party. As it turns out, when it comes to defending democracy, so-called mainstream Republicans may not be so different from extremist Republicans.
This difference was the topic of intense debate in the Democratic Party this year. The party supported some extreme candidates in Republican congressional primaries, on the theory that they would be easier to defeat in the general election. Critics said the practice was irresponsible and risked the possibility of putting people who would be a threat to US democracy in Congress.

I responded to those critics with an unabashed defense of the Democratic tactic. Bernstein doesn’t endorse this view, though he offers that it may be right. But his column offers support for this approach – more persuasively perhaps and certainly more authoritatively than my post did. He writes:

Wednesday’s vote doesn’t completely end that debate. But it does demonstrate that most mainstream Republicans are not interested in defending the Constitution — either because they are radicals themselves, or because they won’t stand up to those who are. The House debate of the Electoral Count Act demonstrated exactly why Democrats may have been justified in their meddling. With only a handful of exceptions, most notably Wyoming’s Liz Cheney, a cosponsor of the bill, Republicans rejected the bill. Indeed, the party whipped against it, indicating that opposing this reform — opposing a key defense against a future coup — was an official party position.

Noting that few Republicans even addressed the merits of the bill, Bernstein points to earlier reporting from Axios that Republicans voted against bill because Liz Cheney was for it.

The obvious implication is that some of those Republicans are perfectly happy with a vulnerable election process — and the rest aren’t willing to fight for one. Not against Trump; not against Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene and the other radicals who are the real leaders of the House Republicans; not against Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson and Mark Levin and the other leaders of the Republican Party.
So the problem isn’t just the extremists — it’s the rank-and-file Republican politicians. It means that there’s just not much of a difference between a House Republican conference with a few more radicals and one with a few more mainstream members.

Exactly! (As I argued in my post.) And, while still declining to endorse the conclusion I drew, Bernstein bolsters my line of reasoning:

[T]here’s a good argument that the more House Republicans are elected, the more US democracy is in danger. (And for whatever it’s worth, in all six districts where Democrats meddled and the more extreme Republican was nominated, the Democrat is likely to win.)

I didn’t know that Democrats were favored in six of six House elections that they meddled in. If Democrats win all six, I believe that offers additional confirmation of my judgment.

A final note: This is more than a matter of abstract debate. The stakes are high. The Republican Party poses an ongoing threat to American democracy. Republican leaders – “either because they are radicals themselves, or because they won’t stand up to those who are,” in Bernstein’s words – are damaging the guardrails that protect our democratic institutions.

The underlying justification for Democrats’ meddling in Republican primaries is the imperative to put a stop to this. In the context of a resolute defense of democracy (and a thoughtful, informed strategic assessment), the pragmatic choice to meddle makes sense. As I wrote, “The surest way to change the Republican Party, to limit the damage it is doing our to democracy, is to defeat Republican candidates at the polls.”

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is a master at trolling (or, as one political scientist terms it, “shitposting.”) But unlike social media trolls, he has opted to use human beings (who have legally applied for refugee status) as props in his quest to own the libs, one-up his MAGA competition, and garner celebratory coverage on Fox News Channel and lesser organs of conservative media. (As is often the case with today's Republican Party, conservative media was the source of this provocation; in this case, FNC's Tucker Carlson.)

An agent of DeSantis duped – with prefabricated lies – 50 migrants (most of whom were fleeing Venezuela, where an authoritarian regime is in place) onto a pair of chartered planes and flew them from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard. At a press conference, the governor eagerly boasted of his caper.

“We’ve worked on innovative ways to protect the state of Florida.” By scooping up migrants in Texas.

“We take what’s happening at the southern border very seriously,” DeSantis intoned, referencing illegal entry, deadly fentanyl, and criminal aliens threatening Americans. He explained that he was looking out for Florida: since “everyone wants to come to Florida,” this group was in all likelihood headed there as well.

His staff and supporters, standing behind him, gleefully laughed and grinned at the chief executive’s cleverness.

As Jonathan Chait noted, earlier in the week DeSantis had related how Texas Governor Greg Abbott has been sending busloads of immigrants to Washington, D.C. Chait writes of DeSantis, “His envy was undisguised.” And by week’s end he had managed to horn in on Abbott’s theatrics, while doing the Texas governor one better: he gave Fox News the story along with ample footage (from a videographer DeSantis bought and paid for either from Florida tax revenues or from his record-setting campaign funds) that FNC presented as the network's hosts read the governor's talking points.

This much is indisputable:

● The immigration system is broken.
● "The Cruelty Is the Point."
● "The need to be seen publicly owning libs is so profound for ambitious pols in the GOP that we're seeing an escalatory dynamic in which the ante keeps being raised - dumping migrants in blue states, performatively arresting people who were told they could vote, etc."

The need to be seen publicly owning libs is so profound for ambitious pols in the GOP that we're seeing an escalatory dynamic in which the ante keeps being raised - dumping migrants in blue states, performatively arresting people who were told they could vote, etc. https://t.co/kkQ5Dp8g1i

— Brendan Nyhan (@BrendanNyhan on 🟦☁️) (@BrendanNyhan) September 15, 2022

As I noted a year ago, "one critical strand of Republican public policy commitments has become clear: to employ the coercive power of the state to own the libs." That post focused on the power of the state within a state. With the malicious theatrics of Governors Abbott, DeSantis, and Arizona's Doug Ducey, MAGA pols have reached further, tormenting the leaders and constituents of blue states.

They have callously ignored the basic humanity of migrants who have risked their lives to travel thousands of miles to seek freedom. Not so long ago, we might have expected Christian congregations in Texas, Florida, and other red states to rise to the occasion to comfort the afflicted. That's not the story nowadays. In an earlier era, the Republican Party (led by Ronald Reagan, for instance) would have cheered on folks fleeing oppression. Not after the Trumpification of the party.

Nor is this stunt especially egregious. It is not a new low. It hardly touches as many people as does the state of Mississippi's neglect of the water system in its capital city. It hardly touches as many people as Florida's gutting of a constitutional amendment to grant felons the vote. It hardly touches as many people as the refusal of twelve states to adopt Medicaid expansion (Florida and Texas, among them). It hardly touches as many people as does the heartless rush to enact abortion bans across the country that harm women's health.

The Martha's Vineyard stupidity is cynical political theater that garners attention in the media, conservative and mainstream. It's click-bait, circa one week in September 2022. We've seen this before in a deluge of other, more far-reaching, outrages. And we can expect such shameless performance art, as Brendan Nyhan suggests, to escalate. Denying the fundamental humanity of the other has become a well-worn pattern with MAGA Republicans.

While it's sad to think of staged cruelty as a winning political strategy, DeSantis and his brethren are convinced of it. It will be up to the rest of us to prove them wrong.

Jackie Calmes notes that "Bill Barr has been on a tear lately." That's for sure. Calmes writes,

Barr’s truth-telling is welcome, especially since much of it is happening on Fox News, whose audience typically doesn’t get much of that about Trump. Yet the straight-talk would have been more welcome when Barr was in power, when it would have mattered more.

I'm certain few critics of Barr's record at the Justice Department would disagree. There has been more than a bit of head scratching about Barr's change of tune (including his recent testimony before the January 6 Committee).

What's gotten into Barr? Calmes suggests, "Three years later, Barr’s talk of Trump’s culpability just smacks of a way to salvage his legacy (and sell his book)," as a number of observers suggested after Barr's earlier committee testimony.

I think these critics are missing something. If we look at Barr's public statements throughout his tenure in the Trump administration, including his comments after the election, his resignation as A.G. in December 2020, his testimony before Congressional investigators this past spring, and his recent remarks after the purloined trove of documents showed up at Mar-a-Lago, there is a remarkable consistency.

Barr has done his best, at every step -- whether deflecting or derailing criticism of Trump, or disparaging Trump -- to serve the interests of the Republican Party. And at every juncture, Barr was in lockstep with the big daddy strategist of Washington Republicans, Mitch McConnell.

Barr and McConnell may not represent most Republicans, certainly not MAGA Republicans, but their public stances have virtually never diverged. They both have the same theory of the case. Both sought to shield Republicans from the damage then-President Trump inflicted on the party (by diminishing, deflecting, and denying), and then pivoting toward a hoped-for separation of the party from Trump after his 2020 loss -- from the time it became clear that Trump would contribute to losses in Georgia of two senate races in play, to today, when an expected red wave in the midterms appears much less likely.

Trump's determination to make his grievances and grudges the focus of political debate is not, of course, the only factor weighing down Republicans in 2022. There is also the arrogant and increasingly unpopular Supreme Court, Republican governors and senators vying to be the most Trumpian candidate of all heading into the 2024 presidential campaign, and MAGA extremists up and down the ballot across the country. But of course Trump had a heavy hand in bringing all of this about.

McConnell and Barr appear to be on the same page regarding the best strategy for overcoming the Trump baggage the party just can't shed. They couldn't be more in step if they were actively coordinating their positions, which is hardly implausible. (I don't insist that they are right in their judgments, only that they share a coherent, pragmatic strategic approach.)

While I'm sure Bill Barr would like to sell books, I doubt that he cares much about his popular image. Neither does Mitch McConnell. And both men are consummate political operators intent on serving the interests (by their lights) of the Republican Party.