Linky Friday: Nothing New Under The Sun Edition

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[LF1] Chaos Theory Is the Future of American Politics by Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark

If you haven’t seen the full, “official” John Eastman memo yet, you should. The pdf version is here.

I don’t think it’s too strong to say that Professor Eastman was explicitly advocating, in writing, for the executive branch to overthrow the democratically elected government of the United States.

But who’s the real villain? Work with me for a minute, because I’d argue that it’s not Eastman. Here’s CNN:

Peril, which will be released Tuesday, details how Eastman’s memo was sent to GOP Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and how Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani tried to convince fellow Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina of election fraud. But both Lee and Graham scoffed at the arguments and found they had no merit.

So two United States senators saw this thing and didn’t make it public.

And as far as I can tell, John Eastman seems to still be a member of the Federalist Society.

The real danger doesn’t come from the authoritarians. It comes from the elites who willingly cooperate with them.

Aspirational strongmen are always with us. But what has changed in America over the last several years is that the elite members of the conservative movement and the Republican party decided to work with them, to abet them, to cover for them even to the point of insurrection.

The anti-anti-Trump caucus is more sinister—and ultimately more dangerous—than even the authoritarian himself. They are the difference between a figure like Donald Trump being a third-party sideshow and being chief executive of the United States.

For a democracy to fail, it must be sick on many levels. You need the charismatic figure himself. You need a critical mass of the public to be so mobilized against their neighbors that they crave a strongman, and another segment of the public to be so decadent that they can’t muster the will to resist. And you need an elite class so craven that it talks itself into going along with the slide into authoritarianism.

This class can make a number of excuses: The threat isn’t really serious. Someone will stop society from going over the cliff. The strongman doesn’t mean what he says. The other side is worse.

These elites are the circuit breaker, the failsafe that is supposed prevent a popular movement from being able to push an aspirational authoritarian into power.

We have now seen in America that the conservative establishment and the Republican party have failed at this job.

The reaction of the movement to the Eastman memo should have been stark horror and an attempt to sound the alarm for America.

Instead, the anti-anti caucus stayed quiet.

This is how catastrophe happens.

[LF2] In Which I Go to the Spa BY ROSE WOODHOUSE

Written under her pseudonym, our friend Elizabeth Picciuto wrote about the not worrying about the debt limit back in 2013.

For my upcoming birthday of an age greater than which cannot be conceived, I received a spa day as a gift. This was nice! I haven’t been to a spa in years. I went today.

The spa in question is an institution that has been a spa since before the dawn of time. Going to a spa today in the Washington DC area, while the nation was at the brink of credit default, felt a little like being Nero fiddling as Rome burned. Except I’m not in charge of things. And a deal was reached. Other than that, though, the analogy is firm.

I arrived, and was offered water. When I assented, I was offered a further choice of cucumber or lemon water. Cucumber, please. I was given a bathrobe and ushered into a room for my first activity of the day, which was a salt scrub. I had never received a salt scrub before. Monica (names have been changed in this anecdote to protect the innocent), a young woman with a long French braid and an eerily calm manner, ushered me into a dim room with pan flute music playing and a table in the middle. She asked if I’d like water. Yes. Cucumber or lemon? Cucumber. She got the water, and explained I was to get under the blanket. She mentioned as she was leaving that there was disposable underwear on the table. This…was unexpected. What is disposable underwear and why? I was still wearing my regular underwear. Was there some fear the salt scrub would damage my regular underwear? Just how extensive was this scrub anyway? The disposable underwear was a thong that looked basically like an X-rated surgeon’s mask. So. On went disposable underwear.

So then the salt scrub happened. Here’s what this involves: there is a mixture of what seems to be kosher salt and olive oil. Someone rubs it all over you. (Not very close to the disposable underwear, after all.) And that’s it. Afterward, Monica gently and serenely took me to a shower and told me to wash off the salt before the massage. She asked if I’d like some water. I said yes. Cucumber or lemon?

I was given a new robe after my shower, but no new disposable underwear, so I guessed it was back on with the regular underwear. And then Monica gave a massage, which was, of course, nice. I was feeling bad, though, because my mind kept wandering and I was not sufficiently appreciating what was happening. It is not often I get to go to spas. I should have been focusing on the experience, but I couldn’t. After all, I have so much trouble with mindfulness that I once ordered a book on how to attain it called Mindfulness. I discovered soon after its arrival that I had already ordered the book several months before and forgotten about it.

[LF3] After the Tall Man: Afghanistan, a war of illusions by Benjamin Lieberman in Arc Digital

On February 4, 2002, near Khost in southeastern Afghanistan, U.S. forces killed a “tall man” in a case of mistaken identity that revealed core illusions of United States intervention in Afghanistan: a mistaken confidence in modern weapons, excessive faith in intelligence, and the illusion that something was true just because we wanted it to be.

What actually happened: Three men, Daraz Khan (about 31), Jehangir Khan (about 28), and Mir Ahmed (about 30), went to collect scrap metal. As they stood at a site in the mountains at about 10,000 feet, they encountered sudden death from above—a Hellfire missile fired from a predator drone.

What was supposed to have happened? Daraz Khan was tall, and Osama bin Laden, then on the run, was tall (actually taller), so U.S. forces on the hunt for bin Laden apparently killed Khan and the two men with him because drone operators possibly mistook Khan for bin Laden or thought there was a good enough chance he was bin Laden, and the two others had the misfortune to be standing near him.

The killing exposed three illusions that persisted throughout nearly 20 years of U.S. intervention. First, modern weapons, no matter how accurate, might not yield desired outcomes. The drone strike accomplished nothing in this case other than killing three innocent men. Second, modern surveillance, no matter how detailed, does not guarantee that personnel understand what they see. If drone operators thought Daraz Khan was bin Laden, he was not.

The third illusion was perhaps the most powerful: rather than admit failure, the U.S. often attempted to manufacture a more convenient reality. Locals scoffed at the notion that bin Laden was dead, and as it became evident the United States shot someone else, Pentagon officials still defended the strike, suggesting the men had been up to no good. “There are no initial indications that these were innocent locals,” Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Stufflebeam declared. “The indicators were there that there was something untoward that we needed to make go away.” Pentagon Spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said: “We’re convinced that it was an appropriate target,” even though she conceded, “we do not know yet exactly who it was.”

These early killings faded from public memory, at least in the United States, but the early illusions never disappeared.

[LF4] Is There a Better Way to Tell the Story of Non-Human Life? By Rachel Vorona Cote

Thalia Field’s Personhood challenges us to examine how human language has made it harder to care for the natural world.

Writer Thalia Field might agree that human emotions, in all their basic solipsism, muddy our comprehension of nonhuman life. And in her new book, Personhood, she examines how this misunderstanding, whether willful or unintended, distorts the stories we tell about the natural world, warping them into human-centric, hierarchical narratives. Personhood, it seems, bestows protagonistic relevance in a feral world of lesser beasts. But this self-aggrandizement, which Field presents as almost pathological in its tenacity, gravely impacts human ability to engage with flora and fauna—and, more specifically, to behave compassionately toward them. (Here Ruskin would likely nod his head, at least where nonhuman animals are concerned. He considered them our betters, and protested the gruesome Victorian practice of vivisection when it was introduced at Oxford in 1885.)

But as Field suggests in Personhood, traits that distinguish humankind from non-humankind do not—and should not—consecrate us as sole members of the titular category. In fact, she stoutly resists our species’s singular claim upon this term: After all, over the course of American history, most people, excluding straight white cisgender males, have at some point been legally denied the status of personhood. Despite the teasing gesture of Field’s title, Personhood is a book about humanity only insofar as it impugns our frailties and failures, expressing with mournful and unmerciful clarity their material impacts on the rest of the living world. And the greatest failure of all may be the enduring category of personhood, a rickety taxonomy propped up by humanity’s pompous, prejudiced hubris, and recklessly withheld from any entity whose sovereignty is inconvenient.

Personhood might aptly be characterized as experimental literature, bucking genre just as it denounces more existential categories. It is stubbornly promiscuous and distinctly theatrical: Each chapter, scaffolded by its own logic, borrows from dramatic dialogue, essay, and poetry. Field’s language is brash, biting, and by turns elegiac and accusatory. She indicts readers for our collective abuse of the natural world; she charges us with the urgent responsibility of mitigating the damage; and simultaneously, she mourns the mounting and inevitable losses.

[LF5] The mad ramblings of people America and globalization have failed, desperately searching for meaning in all the wrong places by Erik Kain

My criticism is generally aimed at the left because I consider myself part of the left (though who knows these days what “left” or “right” even means) and I think it’s more valuable to critique your own “team” and its excesses than it is to take cheap shots at the other team. As my team has changed over the past decade into a more censorious, cancel-happy, judgy and authoritarian bunch, my critique has intensified. I love the left, the fuck you left that mistrusts all institutions and politicians—the state, the media, the corporations, the easy answers, the censors, the warmongers, the bigots. That left seems much-diminished, too eager to “prevent harm” and too quick to make everything about identity politics.

But sometimes you have to take cheap shots at the other team, or at least at its most unhinged members. Like the people in this video whose children, I suspect, will not be helped much by the public school system if this is what they’re returning home to after hours. Behold:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone with dreadlocks this angry before. Like dude, go for a jog and maybe try meditation or something. I hear the Wim Hoff method chills you out.

Sigh.

Look, I’m sick of the pandemic. I’m sick of the doom-and-gloom from the media. I’m sick of it. I’m angry at the ways it’s affected my life and my family’s life and I’m so tired of it all but let’s be realistic here. Yes, we need to be worried at ever-expanding state power. I doubt many of these people were protesting the Patriot Act, however. I’m deeply concerned by expanding state and corporate power, especially with the rise of Big Tech and social media.

But this shit is crazy. Y’all sound like absolute nut jobs, and that includes you Mr. Clean Cut Rep. Madison Cawthorn, scoring your political points like a true politician.

[LF6] Hand count in audit affirms Biden beat Trump, as Maricopa County said in November by Jen Fifield and Robert Anglen for The Arizona Republic

A monthslong hand recount of Maricopa County’s 2020 vote confirmed that President Joe Biden won and the election was not “stolen” from former President Donald Trump, according to early versions of a report prepared for the Arizona Senate.

The three-volume report by the Cyber Ninjas, the Senate’s lead contractor, includes results that show Trump lost by a wider margin than the county’s official election results. The data in the report also confirms that U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly won in the county.

The official results are set to be presented to the Senate at 1 p.m. Friday. Several versions of the draft report, titled “Maricopa County Forensic Audit” by Cyber Ninjas, circulated prematurely on Wednesday and Thursday. Multiple versions were obtained by The Arizona Republic.

The Cyber Ninjas and their subcontractors were paid millions to research and write the report by nonprofits set up by prominent figures in the “Stop the Steal” movement and allies of Donald Trump, but Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan said that would not influence their work.

The draft reports reviewed by The Republic minimize the ballot counts and election results and instead focus on issues that raise questions about the election process and voter integrity.

Election analysts say those findings are misleading and built on faulty data.

The draft report shows there was less than a 1,000-vote difference between the county’s certified ballot count and the Cyber Ninjas’ hand count.

The hand count shows Trump received 45,469 fewer votes than Biden. The county results showed he lost by 45,109.

The draft audit report says, however, the election results are inconclusive.

Maricopa County Board Chairman Jack Sellers said the overall results in the draft report confirm “the tabulation equipment counted the ballots as they were designed to do, and the results reflect the will of the voters.”

[LF7] Joe Manchin, captain of the Senate By Andrew Donaldson for Washington Examiner Magazine

Just how did Joseph Manchin III of West Virginia end up here? The answer is far less exciting than it sounds, but it is this: Joe Manchin has a process.

The appeal to “process” is a theme with Manchin, in everything from political philosophy to his stance on the filibuster to voting on appointees by presidents of the opposing party. There’s no denying that the process has served him well: As West Virginia went from blue to deep red, Manchin remained a Democrat and increased his political fortunes. The senator essentially had to run up the down escalator to stay ahead of the shifting political landscape, and he made it to the top.

The West Virginia that Joe from Farmington grew up in had a sextet of congressional districts, until the elimination of the 6th in 1960. When freshman Joseph Manchin III enrolled at West Virginia University as an undergraduate in 1965, the Mountain State had five congressional districts. By the time he graduated in 1970, West Virginia was down to four. In 1983, during his first term in the West Virginia House of Delegates, he saw redistricting change the shape of the 3rd and 4th Districts and was a state senator when the 4th was eliminated completely in 1990. By the end of his current U.S. Senate term in 2024, West Virginia will be down to two congressional districts.

The 2020 census that delivered the long-expected death blow to West Virginia’s 3rd Congressional District revealed the extent of the state’s population hemorrhaging. West Virginia’s population peaked in the 1950s and, other than during a brief blip in the 1970s, has been on a declining glide path ever since. From 2010 to 2020, West Virginia had the highest percentage of population loss of any state in America. “This is a problem, a real problem,” current West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice said in response to the census data. “We have a lot of elderly people in West Virginia. If we don’t replace and we don’t find a way to start growing, this situation will get worse. By less and less people, that means less and less revenue.”

All that decline in revenue and people also meant a changing political landscape for politicians who need the votes of the latter and the promise of the former to thrive. For a state that had been cobalt blue for nearly a century outside of the occasional Republican governor, the shift came gradually, then suddenly. Most political observers were shocked when Al Gore lost the state to George W. Bush in the 2000 election when the state’s usually paltry five electoral votes would’ve made Gore president had he triumphed in West Virginia. It was the start of a trend. Having voted against George H.W. Bush twice, West Virginia voted for George W. again in 2004, and a Democratic presidential candidate hasn’t been competitive in the state since.

This coincided with the start of another trend: that of Joe Manchin performing well against the tides of electoral change. While Bush shocked by winning West Virginia in 2000, Manchin bounced back from his 1996 losing bid for governor by winning his election for secretary of state, the office once held by his flamboyant and controversial uncle, A. James Manchin. While John Kerry was busy losing the state to George W. Bush in 2004 by double digits, Joe Manchin took advantage of then-Gov. Bob Wise’s affair scandal to secure the governorship with a healthy 30-point general election win.

The state’s shift away from any Democrat not named Joe Manchin was on. Shelley Moore Capito became the first Republican to win a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives from West Virginia in 17 years during the 2000 cycle, and won reelection each term until 2014, when she ran for, and won, the open U.S. Senate seat of the retiring Jay Rockefeller. Donald Trump’s eye-popping 42-point win in West Virginia, a state Hillary Clinton’s husband had won comfortably 20 years prior, capped off the reddening. With now-Sen. Capito as the other half of West Virginia’s delegation, and all three congressional districts securely in the Republican column, Joe Manchin found himself the lone Democratic Party member of the state’s elected national offices.