democratic impasse.com

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.

Jonathan Bernstein draws attention to Senate Republicans using every parliamentary mechanism available to gum up the confirmation process for judges and executive branch officials. There is a huge backlog of appointees requiring confirmation, resulting in scores of vacant positions. The number of hours the Senate is in session is finite and Republicans are running out the clock to limit what gets done.

Bernstein, who describes the bundle of delaying tactics employed to bog down the Senate as a "blanket filibuster," offers this description:

It used to be the case that the Senate would quickly confirm all remaining non-controversial nominations before beginning an extended recess. That meant that when the Senate returned from its August recess in 2002, during President George W. Bush’s second year in the White House, there were fewer than five full pages of nominations (with about five to eight nominations per page) ready for a floor vote on the Senate executive calendar, even with a slim Democratic majority in the Senate. But when the Senate returned this week, there were 18 pages of nominations.
Since it’s up to the majority party to schedule the order in which business is conducted, the most urgent positions, such as circuit court judges or cabinet nominations, get approved. It’s the second, third and fourth-tier positions that remain in limbo. It’s very hard to see what this accomplishes for Republicans, given that no one is going to vote against Democratic senators or a Democratic president because Republicans successfully filibustered a bunch of no-name assistant secretaries of obscure agencies. But they’re doing it nonetheless, and it’s damaging, because collectively all those empty desks add up.

"It’s very hard to see what this accomplishes for Republicans ...," except it gums up the works for Senate Democrats and their ally in the White House. Which makes legislating more difficult, makes running executive agencies more difficult, and limits the number of judicial confirmations.

Democrats are the party of government -- intent on implementing public policies to address social problems for their constituents. Washington Republicans' primary agenda is to reduce taxes on their rich donors (and pare down their regulatory burden).  Public programs to address social problems cost money, requiring tax revenue (while rulemaking and enforcement require both well-functioning executive agencies and judges not committed to the GOP agenda). In the contemporary United States, the rich have the lion's share of wealth and rich Republicans don't wish to part with it. Gumming up the works in the Senate makes perfect sense.

A dysfunctional Senate can't be responsive to the American public. Paralysis creates frustration, anger, and cynicism. Trust in government diminishes, as does trust in the party of government. The message to the voting public is, Don't look to government to solve public problems. Don't expect policy choices made in Washington to benefit you in any tangible way.

This message is designed to discourage Democratic constituencies because Democratic candidates, who pledged to make their lives better, haven't kept their promises. This message seeks to deter Democratic-leaning voters (especially occasional voters), who expect government to improve their lives and their communities, from voting at all. The takeaway, which benefits Republicans, is, Don't bother voting. It's a waste of time.

The same message -- government can't solve problems for Americans -- aims to keep GOP middle and working class voters focused on culture wars, not to have their heads turned toward possible policies that could change their life circumstances for the better. The GOP base, instead, is directed to view voting primarily as an angry rebuke of political opponents. Voting is symbolic, a reaffirmation of the red team. Voting isn't a means to endorse changes that improve one's life. It is a way to smite liberals.

Mitch McConnell and his caucus are sticking it to the blue team every day.

P.S. A possible silver lining: one reason for McConnell's "candidate quality" problem is almost certainly because reasonable Republicans, committed to governing rather than obstruction, are uninterested in joining the broken chamber fashioned by the Republican leader, which may result in a larger Democratic majority.

 

 

“You can’t overestimate how much damage the capitulation of conservative and GOP elites has done. Trump succeeding was bad. The GOP and conservative establishment legitimating & rationalizing & enabling Trump created the very dangerous situation we’re in.” https://t.co/TLxHyM5hNy

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) September 6, 2022

Bill Kristol ascribes responsibility to the leadership of the Republican Party for endangering American democracy.

Kristol's observations track a critical theme of Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in How Democracies Die, "Put simply, political parties are democracy's gatekeepers." The GOP, even before the rise of Trump, has been failing in the gatekeeping role. Since Trump, the damage has been compounded many times over.

Instead of standing up to Trump, rejecting his authoritarian lies, and opposing his efforts to overthrow democratic rule, the party has gone along with Trump.

Kristol, who reveals in the interview that he hasn't cast a vote for a Republican since Trump's election, is chairing the Republican Accountability Project, which has an affiliated PAC 'spending money to try to defeat more than a dozen of the Trumpiest GOP candidates, those who support the “big lie” such as Doug Mastriano and Kari Lake, who are running for governor in Pennsylvania and Arizona.'

The organization is targeting a slice of the Republican base not enamored of Trump that might be persuaded to reject authoritarian extremists. Kristol suggests that moving 3 to 5 percent of the party's voters is a realistic possibility. The message? "A lot of what we do is simply publicize what they say. Convey the extremism of MAGA Republicans — and therefore the extremism of the Republican Party."

Featured quote of the day courtesy of Michael Gerson ("Trump should fill Christians with Rage. How come he doesn't?," Washington Post, September 1, 2022):

Anxious evangelicals have taken to voting for right-wing authoritarians who promise to fight their fights — not only Donald Trump, but increasingly, his many imitators. It has been said that when you choose your community, you choose your character. Strangely, evangelicals have broadly chosen the company of Trump supporters who deny any role for character in politics and define any useful villainy as virtue. In the place of integrity, the Trump movement has elevated a warped kind of authenticity — the authenticity of unfiltered abuse, imperious ignorance, untamed egotism and reflexive bigotry.

This is inconsistent with Christianity by any orthodox measure. Yet the discontent, prejudices and delusions of religious conservatives helped swell the populist wave that lapped up on the steps of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. During that assault, Christian banners mixed with the iconography of white supremacy, in a manner that should have choked Christian participants with rage. But it didn’t.

Conservative Christians’ beliefs on the nature of politics, and the content of their cultural nightmares, are directly relevant to the future of our whole society, for a simple reason: The destinies of rural and urban America are inextricably connected. It matters greatly if evangelicals in the wide, scarlet spaces are desensitized to extremism, diminished in decency and badly distorting the meaning of Christianity itself — as I believe many are.