Where are NeverTrumpers or anti-Trump conservatives headed? After helping to deny Trump a second term, many leading lights in the movement have moved from beating Trump to “saving democracy,” which basically means creating a front with Democrats to block a party that has become a threat to American democracy.
If history is any teacher, a number of these dissidents will leave the GOP to become independents or Democrats. They will follow the trajectory of moderate and liberal Republicans of a generation before. Heterodox Republicans almost never stay heterodox forever.
A number of NeverTrumpers think that for the sake of democracy they can’t simply vote for Biden for President, they have to support the Democrats totally. They talk of supporting the Biden agenda and as we saw in the Virginia governor’s race, support the Democrat Terry McCauliffe, fearing the Republican candidate, Glen Youngkin was a Trumpist. Robert Kagan, a known conservative and a fellow at the Brookings Institution also champions this method, taking such anti-Trump politicians like Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse to task for not joining Democrats in their desire to take down the fillibuster.
Political parties are by nature, essential institutions in a democratic society. They give people a choice in who they want to govern them or hold other parties accountable when the party is in opposition. Parties are the “gateway drug” into the political process, allowing citizens in a liberal democracy the opportunity to influence public policy, meet with politicians or even run for office. When a political party is functioning properly, it should be able to form people into responsible citizens who will maintain the democratic values we all hold dear.
In many ways, NeverTrumpers are trying to change the party indirectly. The long-sought dream of NeverTrumpers and moderates before them is that if enough people leave, the party will lose election after election and will finally come to its senses. But that hasn’t happened. As long as we are a 50–50 nation and as long as the Democrats don’t have their act together, you aren’t going take out Trump and Trumpism. Trump and his acolytes have gone from strength to strength forcing out those politicians that stand up against Trump. Those politicians fight a lonely fight that ends up with early retirements.
People leave believing that leaving the party will cause it to collapse and become a rump party. This has not happened and will never happen. Leaving isn’t going to change things in the party. It amounts to an “Underpants Gnome theory” approach to politics: if people leave the party then the party will change. That’s not going to happen. The Republican Party will still be “Trumpy” and increasingly opposed to liberal democracy.
NeverTrumpers are right to be concerned about the threat that Trump and many Republicans post to American democracy. The Republican Party of 2021 is not a well-functioning political party. It is incredibly dysfunctional and in many ways is working to destabilize democracy. The V-Dem Institute in Sweden said in a study last fall that the GOP is heading down a path towards illiberalism. Parties like Fidesz in Hungary or Law and Justice in Poland started out as mainstream conservative parties, but have become authoritarian. Republicans are not far behind, if they aren’t already there.
Unless people are willing to confront the dark forces in the GOP from the inside, the party will cling ever more tightly to those forces, making it hard for the one party that is interested in governing, the Democrats, from doing anything. From President Trump’s cajoling the Georgia Secretary of State to “find” extra votes, to the scores of GOP Members of Congress who won’t certify the votes of the electoral college, we see a party that has become committed to subverting democracy. An unreformed Republican Party will destabilize American democracy itself.
If relying on the Democrats doesn’t work, what will work to roll back Trump’s authoritarianism? Short of starting a third party as Jonah Goldberg and David French have suggested, the goal needs to be working from within the GOP. But it won’t be done by “being a voice within in the party. Individual action won’t suffice, collective action is needed. Borrowing a term from the tech industry, what needs to be done is to re-create the party or better yet, “fork” the party.
The goal here is not to “burn it all down,” but to build things up by creating structures within the party that could use political means for moral ends. This is where forking the party comes in. To fork something is to take the source code of a program and create a distinct program from that code. It shares the code with the mother program, but it is something wholly different from the original. The most obvious example is Google’s Android smartphone operating system. Android is open source, so a company can take the source code and then build their system off of Android.
In politics, a faction is basically forking the current GOP and making something that is similar but not the same. A forked GOP faction would have its own magazines, funders, and think tanks creating its own organism within the larger GOP.
One way to do this is by going back in time by using factionalism.
This view is shared by Steven M. Teles & Robert P. Saldin and you can read about it in the Fall2020 issue of National Affairs.
What is Factionalism? It’s the acknowledgment of heterogeneity within political parties and how they work together (or don’t) to achieve common goals.
In Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party is divided into factions that have become institutional. There are factions on the far right and factions that are more centrist. In fact, factionalism presents a more effective opposition than other political parties. This makes sense in Japan since the Liberal Democrats have been in power almost continuously from 1955 to present. The Liberal Democrats have ruled for all but 4 years since their inception.
In the United States, we bemoan the fact that there are only two major parties in the United States. However, until very recently The two major parties had within them a number of smaller “parties” that came together into one party to magnify their power. You had Southern segregationists and northern liberals in the same Democratic party. You had liberal Republicans like Jacob Javits and conservatives like Robert Taft. Our political parties were incredibly heterogeneous. The parties today are far more homogenous (somewhat), but until the 90s, both parties in some ways weren’t coherent at least in our modern minds.
But even in these times where the parties seem to enforce a dreary sameness, the old heterogeneity is still there in a nascent form. There are Democrats that are members of the Democratic Socialists of America (which isn’t a political party) that run as Democrats in order to advance a socialist agenda. In the late 80s and early 1990s, there were Democrats who were part of the Democratic Leadership Council and ran as “New Democrats.”
Some might believe it’s nice that the Democrats have some diversity, but there is no chance of that happening in the GOP. But in reality, it is there; it just hasn’t been properly expressed. Teles and Saladin see a faction that could be made up of NeverTrumpers, a liberal-conservative faction that is visible, but without much power- at this point:
The core voters for this liberal-conservative faction will be the middle class, the college-educated, business managers and owners, and more upwardly mobile members of ethnic minority groups, especially in cities and states where Democratic governance begins pinching their core interests. The faction will find significant economic support in the financial sector, which is generally less socially liberal and more suspicious of increased taxation than the technology entrepreneurs of the West Coast while sharing with them a generally internationalist orientation that makes the nationalism of the populists and socialists anathema. It may also find increasing support among some mainstream business organizations like the Chamber of Commerce, which is already being pushed to the breaking point by the economic policies of the Trump administration. This faction will still be recognizably conservative — especially on questions of social order like crime and homelessness — as well as suspicious of the regulatory agenda of both progressive Democrats and Republican populists.
The appeal and competitiveness of this faction in the bluer parts of the country can already be seen in the re-election of Republican governors in Maryland and Massachusetts, who, in a somewhat inchoate form, already embrace such an approach. These examples of GOP success in Annapolis and on Beacon Hill are of the lone-wolf variety; fueling a durable faction with something more than charisma will require these leaders and their supporters to build a broader organization and forge connections with like-minded partisans elsewhere. As of yet, Governors Larry Hogan and Charlie Baker have not achieved anything of the sort. However, their success offers hope that building a liberal-conservative faction within the Republican Party is not a fantasy.
But why would a NeverTrumper remain in the GOP even if it is a faction? Because it might provide a successful counter to Trumpism. Commentators like Jonathan V. Last believe that Trump’s hold on the party is permanent, which means there is little that anyone who is opposed to Trump can do about it. But just because Trump has a hold on the party today mean it will be that way in the future. Trumpism is only as strong as people want it to be. Teles and Saldin note that a factionalized party very well could give dissenting members of Congress an organization that could support candidates that didn’t bend the knee to the President. One of the reasons there have been so few legislators willing to stand up to Trump is because they saw what happened to people like Jeff Flake and Mark Sanford, two legislators that opposed Trump and were voted out of office. A factionalized GOP would also have some control over the nomination process as an informal primary could take place that would weed out unqualified candidates.
What makes factionalism so attractive is that one doesn’t have to “win” outright, gaining control over the whole party. A faction only needs to organize a small party of the GOP to gain influence. The goal is to make room in the party for moderates or Anti Trump people, not to win the whole party.
Nor does it need to be created from whole cloth. There are already some organizations and people in place a nascent movement could build on. Governors Larry Hogan and Charlie Baker from Maryland and Massachusetts respectively can create a base of power that can reach beyond their states. Moderate Republicans in Kansas already act like a faction and work with Democrats at times in order to thwart the conservative faction of the GOP. Organizations like Principles First and Standup Republic, which were created in response to Trump could also be the basis of a future faction within the GOP.
Again, you don’t have to win the whole party, all you have to do is gain a faction, peel off a few of the persuadable and join the Democrats to get objectives to become a reality.
But for any of this to happen, people have to want it and I’m not so sure NeverTrumpers want to win. A number of NeverTrumpers are wary of What creating a faction is that they will need to make deals with politicians that weren’t sufficiently anti-Trump. But that is what politics is about-making deals to get an objective done. For some NeverTrump has become NeverTrumpism. That’s a problem because it makes the perfect the enemy of the good. It begs the question, why don’t Republican dissidents want to fight for change from within? Why do they place hope on the Democrats sending the GOP into electoral oblivion when again and again the Dems have not delivered? Why is it so hard to build an organization of support from within?
If a moderate or NeverTrump faction is to emerge there needs to be people who are willing to see a different Republican party. They need to be able to take on the bad elements in the party directly and not through the Democrats. That is the only way American politics will change for the better. It won’t happen through a third party or do-good government scheme. The only way to paint the barn is to paint the barn.
But right now it seems like no one is interested in casting a vision for a modern party. No one is interested in steering the party away from Trumpism, it’s flirtations with authoritarianism or overt racism.
Everyone has problems with the party in its current state, but no one sees a need to steer the party in another direction. People say they want change, but their actions show their disinterest.
What people want is a party that somehow vanishes from the scene. We want wishes instead of getting involved in the work of politics. We want the GOP to be out of sight and out of mind. Anti-Trump forces want to wash their hands of the matter and move on. But a Trumpified and increasingly illiberal Republican Party will not leave the scene.
Unless people are willing to confront the dark forces in the GOP from the inside, the party will cling ever more tightly to those forces, making it hard for the one party that is interested in governing, the Democrats, from doing anything. But in a larger sense, an unreformed GOP will destabilize American democracy itself.
Originally posted on Medium
A republican party, if you can keep it.
This essay also speaks to us Democrats, in that America is now in a place where some very large number, maybe 35-40% of the electorate, supports open authoritarianism fueled by ethnic grievance. How do we convince people to support liberal democracy, the rule of law, and racial tolerance?
I don’t have any obvious or clever strategies. But what I see in reading history is that equivocation and quisling ambivalence never works, and only emboldens the authoritarians. Hierarchy and inequality is a binary proposition- You fellow citizens are either your equal or they aren’t. There is no middle ground possible.Report
Yep, centrist dem here and agreed. This essay makes some great points on factions though. Lots of great ideas in it in generalReport
I see mirrors of these problems with Team Blue, although less so now that they’re running things. The suggestions for court packing and “making” new states were problems.
Maybe push a lot of big issues down to the states so the federal gov does less cram downs? 50 solutions for “cultural” problems is pretty much the opposite of “authoritarianism”.Report
when you have 26 states that will enact essentially the same response, you no longer have a state level solution. You have a defacto federal solutionReport
28 States have gone with Florida’s Concealed Carry.Report
This essay also speaks to us Democrats, in that America is now in a place where some very large number, maybe 35-40% of the electorate, supports open authoritarianism fueled by ethnic grievance. How do we convince people to support liberal democracy, the rule of law, and racial tolerance?
By 35-40% of the electorate, do you mean left wing progressives or trumpy republicans?
You seem to be describing both groups.Report
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/09/23/trump-america-authoritarianism-420681Report
https://www.businessinsider.com/26-percent-of-americans-are-right-wing-authoritarian-new-poll-2021-6Report
https://morningconsult.com/2021/06/28/global-right-wing-authoritarian-test/Report
Philip – I’m not really sure what point you’re trying to make with these articles.
Do you really deny that a significant percentage of the left support authoritarianism, fueled by ethnic grievance or otherwise? Really?
Do you really deny that a significant percentage of the left have a problem with a liberal democracy (the kind we all grew up where free speech was assumed, media outlets being deplatformed), the rule of law (mostly peaceful protesters, open borders, defund the police), and racial tolerance (anti-racism)?
Any balanced view of the state of affairs in this country should be able to recognize that no one political party can claim being anti-authoritarian. And to claim the left is less so isn’t being honest with oneself. Look no further than the Biden DoJ’s activity the last few months.Report
Biden is no leftist. Frankly no politician who claims neoliberal economics as his path (which Biden very much does) is a leftist. Nice try. and what his DoJ has done – what little it has done, is retreat to status quo ante-Trump. Which is no leftist paradise, but its not the state trying to perpetuate itself with a coup.
As to all that arm waving you just did – I don’t buy it. Leftist politicians, and left leaning Centerists in the Democratic party – are not the ones proposing banning library book, nor are they teh ones who see CRT as a boogie man who must be defeated. Left side politicians are not the ones gerrymandering control on sate politics to dilute or destroy the vote of people of color who have made significant (and likely under reported) gains in population.
What the left does do, and will continue to do is hold people accountable for the state of affairs they create and perpetuate. Congressman Paul Gossar, as but one of many examples, tweeted a “cartoon” of himself killing a fellow Congressman. The Right’s response was that is was just like “Let’s go Brandon” – i.e. simply something to taunt the left into an overblown response. Had the shoe been on the other foot, not only would AOC have been immediately censured, but the Right would have been howling about inciting political violence. Gossar crossed many, many lines, but the left is attacked for holding him accountable.
And finally – if you really think free speech was assumed when we grew up, then how di John Lewis get his skull fractured? Why was MLK assassinated? The answer is they spoke freely to white, conservative, racist power, which STILL doesn’t want to share. The world you describe didn’t exist before.Report
No True Scotsman.
I looked up the 10 most banned books this year, 4 or 5 of them were pretty obviously offending the Left.Report
Who banned them?Report
In almost all cases, imho, it was parents. Some of them give reasons, some don’t.
Now for “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie”, “To Kill a Mockingbird”, & “Of Mice and Men”; The stated reasons are “uses n-word”, “has a white savior”, “has racist stereotypes” so when a community in NY bans it, the way to bet is it’s the left.
For some of the others we have LGBT issues, anti-cop, anti-male, child sex abuse. Those were probably banned from the Right (although it’s easy to picture Left parents getting spun up over those last two so maybe not).
Top 10 banned for 2020.
https://www.oif.ala.org/oif/?p=25384
Now the more interesting list is the top 100. That’s all over the place.
Top 100.
https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/decade2019Report
So almost all of them were banned because they offended conservatives (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie seems to be a double whammy: sexual references offend conservatives, and the author offends liberals), and some were in fact banned because they talk about racism and that upsets conservatives, but there were 2 on there that were challenged for including racial slurs, and this is what the “free speech” folks get upset about.
This is pretty consistent with my experience with free speech folks. Right now, conservatives are literally passing laws banning ideas in the classroom, and you hardly hear a peep, but a couple books are challenged for containing racial epithets, and it’s the end of the world.
And to be clear, I think people should definitely read Of Mice and Men (I don’t like To Kill a Mocking Bird, but people should read that too if that’s their thing).Report
If “being offensive” isn’t a trait worthy of banning a book, I don’t know what would be one.Report
Info-plagues.Report
To be fair, not all ideas should be in the classroom.
We shouldn’t be teaching “both sides” of the evolution debate, the vaccination debate, etc. We shouldn’t be teaching [my] God is in charge.
Na.zism was a seductive idea back in it’s day, Communism still often is.
CRT, in practice, may be teaching minority children that they can’t succeed and shouldn’t try. It’s effectively a narrative and I don’t see how it’s falsifiable.Report
Well, good to know you’re not a free speech absolutist, just someone concerned about ethics in gaming journalism, er, I mean, “critical race theory.”
By the way, you listed my politics in there. Good to know you’d ban it from schools.Report
Public school teachers, working on the clock, should not be paid to preach whatever ideology they want to an audience that’s legally required to be there. This has nothing to do with freedom of speech.
Nobody’s saying that teachers shouldn’t be free to spout whatever pseudoscientific nonsense they want off the clock, to people who are free to choose whether to listen or walk away.
Nobody would have any difficulty with this concept if National Socialism were the hot new fad sweeping educational circles.Report
The great thing about banning any talk of systemic racism in the classroom is that doing so is itself very clear evidence of the existence of systemic racism.
Also, comparing talking about systemic racism to promoting national socialism, as both you and Dark Matter have done now, reminds me why I stopped hanging out around here.Report
You can still get systemic racism on Ebay.
You can still get systemic racism in the public library.Report
IMHO teaching children to fail is a really bad idea. That preventing it from happening can be spun as “racist” says a lot.
If we’re going to talk about CRT, much less teach it, we should focus on current events/problems which means marriage rates and so on.
My strong impression is CRT focuses on events which happened generations ago and tries to either imply that nothing has changed and/or claim that history is destiny.Report
Comment in mod because I put in two links (it needed them).Report
:Face palm:
I could have put the first link, then replied to myself with the 2nd.Report
Which are the ones banned for offending the left?Report
Do we seriously not remember the Dr. Seuss thing?
This was only last year.Report
No one banned Dr. Seuss. His own publishers pulled books from further printing because they contained old, racist tropes. As you and many many others noted, those books remain on library shelves, they remain in circulation, and I think there was even a prediction of increased value on eBay – though I haven’t tracked that.
Bu that’s not what I’m talking about, nor is it what Dark hinted at. A publisher deciding on its own to take something off the shelf that is, in fact, offensive is not the same thing as elected officials declaring they want to burn books. Not by a long shot.Report
Ah, of course, of course.
Ebay ended up refusing to list the books. You could still sell Mein Kampf, of course, but they removed the listings for the Dr. Seuss. (Now, a few days later, someone mentioned that to somebody and Ebay removed the listings for Nazi paraphernalia including the corporal’s book, but you can’t get it on Ebay anymore. The comedy comes from them banning Dr Seuss before banning the monorchid megalomaniac.)
The Chicago Public Library, for example, removed those books from their shelves.
But let’s say that neither of those stories were true.
Can’t we use those justifications for removing any given book from any given school?
Hey! You can still get it on Ebay! You can still get it from the Chicago Public Library! What’s the big deal?Report
(slaps hands over ears)
wasn’t the gummint, wasn’t the gummint
(squeezes eyes shut, starts rocking back and forth)
wasn’t the GUMMINT, wasn’t the GUMMINTReport
lol
“He was not censored! He merely chose to bring his writing in line with moral guidance and rework it to reflect the philosophy of true Christianity rather than being contaminated with sinful self-centered foolishness.”
“A publisher deciding on its own to take something off the shelf…”
hey remember when YouTube started censoring LGBT search terms, was that ok? it wasn’t a government action, right?Report
So, you don’t support private actors acting privately? That’s hilarious from a libertarian/contrarian/whatever-arian you claim to be.
But yeah, again – a publisher deciding to pull offensive material from its publishing catalogue is NOT on the same planet as elected officials calling for public book burnings.Report
“you don’t support private actors acting privately? ”
I honestly would not have pegged you as a GamerGate supporter.Report
Yeah, we remember it. Do you? If you did, you wouldn’t be bringing it up. Or maybe it isn’t your memory that’s off.Report
Maybe my memory is off, maybe it ain’t.
This is why being able to provide sources for one’s intuitions is important.Report
You can pull up the thread easier than I can. If you actually dispute my “intuitions” — and you haven’t said you do, and no one would believe you if you did — you can do your own homework.Report
I have no idea who believes what.
I do know that there is at least one person who has professed to believe that the Dr Seuss books could still be bought on Ebay and that they weren’t pulled from libraries. (I’m going to guess that this latter claim will become “they weren’t pulled from *ALL* libraries” with a dash of “so every library has to keep every book on its shelves in perpetuity now?” but I know that that’s just a guess.)
Do you have any insights to offer on the topic or would you prefer to talk about me some more? (I can provide a picture and you can talk about the extent to which physiognomy is real, if you’d like.)Report
Why should I be the one to start with relevant insights? You’re the one who brought up Dr. Seuss without giving any insight into why it’s relevant.Report
In a discussion of the awfulness of bad people banning books?
Yeah, I’m going to go with “my memory is okay, I think that yours might be wearing blinders”.Report
Someone who owns the book – or in the case of Dr. Seuss its publishing rights – who chooses voluntarily to remove it from future publication is NOT banning the book. Sure, you may disagree with their reasons – hell I know you do even if you won’t cop to it – but no authority or government person or agency told them to do so.
While you may see these two things as relevant or related, they aren’t. Nice misdirection attempt though.Report
Did you see my links to Ebay pulling it? The Chicago Public Library doing so?
I mean, running with “There is a *PRINCIPLE* here!” will only get you so far with “everybody who banned it did so voluntarily”.
If the principle isn’t there, all you’ve got is “well, the *GOVERNMENT* can’t do it”.
And that will only last until you need to argue against people saying “the government ought to do something”.
Why shouldn’t the government do it? Government is just things we decide to do together. Democracy, if you will.
If you want to discuss principles, mine are boring and trite and were, until recently, fairly common.
But we’re not discussing principles, are we? Just power.Report
man, sometime you swing for the fences … and miss wildly. But good on you for trying.
We are discussing principles. One that I hold to is that free speech means you have the right to NOT speak. You have the right to remove your speech from the public sphere. Which is what the Dr. Seuss publisher did.
Another principle I hold to is government does NOT have the right to force you to remove your speech from the public square, no matter how inconvenient. The Chicago Library is treading a dangerous border though it makes a convincing argument that offensive materials can and should be reexamined. I’m guessing the paper never went back to ask what the long term decisions were, since that article is from March and its now November.
And finally I’ll say again – with as much feeling as I can in typed digital words – if you support policies that allow private actors to control their destiny’s (and you and Density seem to do so regularly) then you have to support private actors acting here. No government entity – outside the Chicago library (which didn’t actually ban the book if you read the article) – called for its removal. And no government entity or elected official called for it to be burned.Report
Can you still get the books that you are calling “banned” on Ebay?
Can you still get them from the Public Library?
If so… they aren’t banned. You just can’t get them in a handful of places.
Hey, Borders books filed for bankruptcy in 2011! OH NO! CENSORSHIP!Report
“…if you support policies that allow private actors to control their destiny’s[sic] (and you and Density seem to do so regularly) then you have to support private actors acting here.”
(but you still have to bake the cake)Report
The comparison of Dr. Seuss with something like Beloved illustrates what liberals are saying.
A book containing racial stereotypes is being compared to books which speak honestly about oppression.
Suppressing lies is the same as suppressing truth I guess.
Because in the conservative mind, the first one is harmless, while the second one is dangerous.Report
“We should be able to ban dangerous books and keep harmless ones!” is something that fewer and fewer disagree with by the day.
Good job slaying the dragon that was Dr Seuss, though.Report
Yes, a liberal society should ban speech which is false and defamatory, and protect speech with is true.Report
I’m sure this will work out exactly the way you imagine, just like everybody else who has ever attempted to institute it.
Rots of ruck, Raggy.Report
Who slew the Dr. Seuss dragon? The owners of the intellectual property that the Dr. Seuss books represents. If there was reporting that they succumbed to some sort of outside pressure, which one might legitimately deplore even if it is a market outcome, I haven’t seen it.Report
Outside pressure? What outside pressure? What does outside pressure even look like? Do you mean “free speech”?Report
You tell me. You’re the one who is congratulating, well, someone, for “slaying the dragon of Dr. Seuss.” Who? How?Report
I’m saying that the “banning books? HOW DARE THEY!” set kinda has no meaningful high ground to stand upon.
Like Chip said: “a liberal society should ban speech which is false and defamatory, and protect speech with is true.”
And we’re going to get a liberal society that starts banning false and defamatory speech left and right.
Good and hard.Report
That may be what you’re saying; it’s not what I asked. So who? And how?Report
The people who were offended by the Eskimo Fish and the Chinese boy eating with sticks.
They got those books to be pulled from being published, Ebay banned their sale, and public libraries pulled them off the shelves.
Hurray! Finally! A liberal society that understand that false and defamatory speech needs to be banned! (Hey, wait, what are those people over there doing?)Report
And you know that the owners of the Dr. Seuss properties were influenced by them how? It might have been worth mentioning back when.Report
Know? Like, is this one of those things where I’m going to link to a story from NPR talking about the NEA dropped the Dr. Seuss Company as a partner and then the Dr. Seuss Company dropping the books and the NEA talking about how they don’t partner with any one company anymore and you’re going to say “that’s not *PROOF* that they were influenced by the NEA! That’s just speculation!”?
Because here’s the NPR story.
Here’s the NEA’s FAQ page.
Here’s Seussville’s struggle session.Report
The complaint about Beloved isn’t the racial presentation, but the sexual content. As far as I know the book is still taught and freely available. It’s not a good comparison.Report
You have about 849 more books you need to discuss, including the one about Ruby Bridges.Report
Honestly Philip. Give me a break. You’re equating the assassination of MLK as an attack on free speech?
Nice attempt at a misdirection.
The point of my response was to counter the false narrative that somehow only republicans “embrace authoritarianism” – which is utter nonsense. People, regardless of political affiliation, have a high tolerance for authoritarianism as long as they agree with the policy. You may agree with blue state governors implementing strict covid restrictions under emergency authority, but it doesn’t make it less authoritarian. You may approve of the DoJ going after parents critical of school boards on CRT, but it’s still authoritarian. You may think it’s a great idea that the Biden administration is subcontracting free speech restrictions on social media platforms, but you are supporting an authoritarian idea.
Further, I conceded the Morning Consult “study” and I really shouldn’t have. If this is what you are holding up as definitive “proof” that republican voters are authoritarian and dems are not, you should really keep looking.
It’s a great example of how you can cook up any survey to confirm a bias.
Here are the questions they asked to measure authoritarian tendencies, basically defining Trump himself as the definition. If you like him, you are it. If you don’t, you’re not.
https://morningconsult.com/2021/06/28/right-wing-authoritarianism-international-study-methodology/
Appendix B
MCWA25 Please indicate the extent to which you agree or disagree with each of the following statements. [MATRIX RANDOMIZE ALL]
Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us.
Gays and lesbians are just as healthy and moral as anybody else.*
It is always better to trust the judgment of the proper authorities in government and religion than to listen to the noisy rabble-rousers in our society who are trying to create doubt in people’s minds
Atheists and others who have rebelled against the established religions are no doubt every bit as good and virtuous as those who attend church regularly.*
The only way our country can get through the crisis ahead is to get back to our traditional values, put some tough leaders in power, and silence the troublemakers spreading bad ideas.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with nudist camps.*
Our country needs free thinkers who have the courage to defy traditional ways, even if this upsets many people.*
Our country will be destroyed someday if we do not smash the perversions eating away at our moral fiber and traditional beliefs.
Everyone should have their own lifestyle, religious beliefs, and sexual preferences, even if it makes them different from everyone else.*
The “old-fashioned ways” and the “old-fashioned values” still show the best way to live.
You have to admire those who challenged the law and the majority’s view by protesting for women’s abortion rights, for animal rights, or to abolish school prayer.*
What our country really needs is a strong, determined leader who will crush evil, and take us back to our true path.
Some of the best people in our country are those who are challenging our government, criticizing religion, and ignoring the “normal way things are supposed to be done.”*
God’s laws about abortion, pornography and marriage must be strictly followed before it is too late, and those who break them must be strongly punished.
There are many radical, immoral people in our country today, who are trying to ruin it for their own godless purposes, whom the authorities should put out of action.
A “woman’s place” should be wherever she wants to be. The days when women are submissive to their husbands and social conventions belong strictly in the past.*
Our country will be great if we honor the ways of our forefathers, do what the authorities tell us to do, and get rid of the “rotten apples” who are ruining everything.
There is no “ONE right way” to live life; everybody has to create their own way.*
Homosexuals and feminists should be praised for being brave enough to defy “traditional family values.”*
This country would work a lot better if certain groups of troublemakers would just shut up and accept their group’s traditional place in society.
This is an intellectually disingenuous way to conduct research.
I imagine if you flipped the questions to ask things like “do you think the government should censor Fox News?” and “Do you think it’s right for workers to be fired for refusing to get the covid vaccine?” – the results would show democrats embrace authoritarianism and republicans do not.
Obviously, that would be disingenuous as well.Report
I don’t think the government should ban Fox News, or OAN, or Newsmax. I don’t think they should be shielded for liability for the content they produce, and I don’t think they should be free of pushback. Frankly I don’t think they should call themselves fair and balanced either.
As for workers being fired for refusing the vaccine – if that’s what a company wants to do because it impacts their bottom line, that’s their business. If the government says you can’t do business with us unless your staff is vaccinated – guess what, no one is forcing Lockheed or SAIC or anyone else to do business with the government. We require all sorts of other conditions on government contractors so this is really no different.
And you will note that unless case counts rise again most of the mandate for mask etc are being lifted. Even in DC. Liberals were never going to leave this stuff in place.Report
“If the government says you can’t do business with us unless your staff is vaccinated…”
if the government says you can’t do business with us if your company health plan provides coverage for abortions or abortifacient pharmaceuticals
if the government says you can’t do business with us unless you sign a policy statement of explicit support for the State of Israel
if the government says you can’t do business with us unless you provide records of all subcontractors’ and suppliers’ employees and their immigration/citizenship status
your “no one is forcing companies to do business with the government” is covering over quite a lot of things, sirReport
We’re not talking about the purchasing arm of the gov. Biden’s plan is OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration)
If OSHA says “you’re an unsafe workplace unless you force everyone be vaccinated” that’s the gov saying they’ll shut you down if you don’t make everyone be vaccinated.Report
The hold put on Biden’s vax mandate EO by the US appeals court was reaffirmed last week. It’s unconstitutional, and if it goes to the SC, it will be struck down as such. But that’s not the first time Biden has signed an EO that he knows isn’t legal (see the eviction moratorium). Authoritarians don’t give a crap if something is illegal.
But I digress. The point is that – not YOU specifically Philip – but a significant percentage of dem/progs have no problem with authoritarianism as long as they like the result. Not sure why it is so difficult for you to concede that point. It seems fairly self evident.Report
because there’s no polling to back that up. There is little reported evidence in the media to back that up. And just because you disagree with the Constitutionality of an EO – which hasn’t actually been litigated yet . . . . doesn’t mean your interpretation backs up your assertion.
You don’t have evidence on your side. You have wish casting.Report
Is the 5th Circuit a real circuit, like the 2nd?
Or is it a fake one, like the 9th?
Report
With tongue only partially in cheek, changes in the SCOTUS lineup mean the 5th Circuit is much more real than the 9th…Report
And your PAC funded nonsense poll is your proof? The one spoon fed to the Politcio reporter who is fresh from internships at the new ACLU and DemocracyNow! That’s your proof?
Ignore the fact that our civil liberties are under constant attack by Team Blue, it’s those pesky Republicans who insist on their their “freedoms” – they, THEY are the authoritarians!!!
C’mon man. Open your eyes.Report
75% of dems support Biden’s vax mandate:
https://fortune.com/2021/09/30/ap-norc-poll-americans-republicans-democrats-divided-on-biden-vaccine-mandate/
More Americans want U.S. government to restrict, censor online content, ‘misinformation’
https://www.stardem.com/news/national/more-americans-want-u-s-government-to-restrict-censor-online-content-misinformation/article_0910acd1-fcae-58e6-a98e-d14b5db91e6c.html
Nearly 3 in 5 Democrats support the CDC’s authority to ban evictions through Oct. 3, while just 16% of GOP voters said the same.
https://morningconsult.com/2021/08/11/cdc-eviction-ban-poll/
Am I still wishcasting, Philip?Report
“Fork” the GOP? I thought the preferred euphemism here was “fish”.Report
I appreciate the sentiment; but at the risk of belaboring discussions we’ve had here dozens of times… the primary issue is structural with a first-past-the-post duopoly.
The negative partisanship is stronger than willingness to tank the electoral prospects of a party you wish to reform.
I’ve discussed this in great depth with many reluctant Red team voters… the only thing they respond to is the prospect of voting for a candidate/faction that would not result in “throwing away” their vote or worse, actually enabling the other team to win.
RCV resonates somewhat … the idea is surprisingly novel and not something they’ve ever encountered … but once they hear about it, they are open to it — as long as they don’t see it as a way for the ‘other team’ to manipulate the electorate. But that’s just if we want to see a reform at all. Obviously, the biggest impediment to this are the parties themselves who benefit from the absence of other options.Report
RCV seems like a no-brainer in the primaries. Splitting the grown-up vote is how Trump won the Republican primary, and it almost led to a similar disaster with Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primary.Report
You would think…
Jeb! as everyone’s universal 4th choice might still be with us…Report
I think you rather grossly underestimate the difficulty of “forking” here. In the tech industry, you make a copy of the information and proceed from there. You can’t make a copy of a party. You have to line up all the of the low-level workers that make a 50-state party: contribution collecting, form filing, meeting holding workers.
Some years ago, the Colorado Republicans wound up nominating a horrible candidate for governor. A well-known state Republican than changed his affiliation to the American Constitution Party, which nominated him as the ACP candidate for governor. He won about 30% of the vote, which made the ACP a major party under Colorado law. Early the year after the election the ACP had to dissolve because they lacked the necessary structure and resources at the county level to meet their major party reporting requirements.
You have to get enough people up and down the hierarchy to leave the old party and sign on to the new. It’s a massive undertaking. Even if you had a few billionaires willing to foot the bill to try.Report
Re: CRT;
Does anyone remember the panic about Sharia Law? Like, how somewhere around 2008, conservatives suddenly discovered that Sharia Law was creeping all around us, even in YOUR CHILD”S SCHOOL, and in college classrooms?
And they got hysterically offended by it and a handful of states passed laws banning Sharia Law?
Does everyone remember that?
And how a bunch of even-the-liberal pundits and columnists wring their hands nervously and muttered about how, well, achtully, there were in fact some illiberal Muslim professors, or Islamic student groups demanding accommodation and some parts of Islam are misogynistic and anti-Semitic, and well maybe we should hear the conservatives out.
Does everyone remember what happened next?
Somewhere around 2015-2016, it all…just…went away. It just vanished! Disappeared from the national discourse!
What happened?
Did those Muslim professors disappear? Nope, they’re still teaching.
Did the student groups go away?
Not at all they are still their enjoying their accommodation.
Did Islam somehow change? Not one bit.
What happened to all those howling mobs of Tea Partiers, terrified for their country?
What happened of course, is that the political need for the panic went away, only to be replaced by a political need for some other panic.Report
If this is an apology for the left’s racist witch-hunting, I accept. Or comparing parents who criticize school boards to terrorists. A bit of an early apology, but I like your forward thinking.Report
What should we call parents who threaten to kill school board members who don’t end CRT? Are they misunderstood?Report
I made the following comment on the Rittenhouse thread:
“Reported death threats are definitely a sign of a troubled society, but I’m starting to discount them because (a) it’s an easy claim to make, and (b) they’re often used to defend the supposed recipient’s arguments. Probably neither of those apply in this case, though, but still, all this report tells us is that there are bad people in the world, which I already knew.”
As for actual violence, the only case I can think of is the father whose daughter was raped in Virginia. If there are more cases or any signs of threats being acted upon, please share them.Report
And the videos of parents screaming at school board members about knowing where they live after mask mandate meetings? What do you think those are?Report
How many, though? You quoted the one I’ve seen. “We know where you live.” That one.Report
This is why CRT is so important and needs to be taught.
Because for conservatives, racism just doesn’t exist, or at least doesn’t exist as a real problem to be addressed. The world expressed by black writers is invisible to conservatives and is deeply threatening and they feel themselves victimized when they are exposed to it.Report
Your assertions certainly match your other assertions, I’ll give you that.Report
It’s an obscure legal theory from decades ago. PhDs have trouble defining it. I’m not sure that teaching it to laypeople is even possible.Report
If it needs to be taught to children or it won’t exist for them as adults, then you’re in religion or ideology territory.
Quoting wiki: Academic critics of CRT argue that it is based on storytelling instead of evidence and reason, rejects the concepts of truth and merit, and opposes [equality before the law].
And just pointing out: No one has pushed back on my statements that this looks like it’s “teaching minority children to fail”.Report
Any of those critics here where we can talk to them?Report
Academic criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory#Academic_criticism
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “aspects of CRT have been criticized by legal scholars and jurists from across the political spectrum.” Critics say it contains a “postmodernist-inspired skepticism of objectivity and truth”, and has a tendency to interpret “any racial inequity or imbalance […] as proof of institutional racism and as grounds for directly imposing racially equitable outcomes in those realms.”
Proponents of CRT have also been accused of treating even well-meaning criticism of CRT as evidence of latent racism.[3]
In a 1997 book, law professors Daniel A. Farber and Suzanna Sherry criticized CRT for basing its claims on personal narrative and for its lack of testable hypotheses and measurable data.[17][83]
CRT scholars including Crenshaw, Delgado, and Stefancic responded that such critiques represent dominant modes within social science which tend to exclude people of color.
[17] Delgado and Stefancic wrote that “In these realms [social science and politics], truth is a social construct created to suit the purposes of the dominant group.”[17]
Farber and Sherry have also argued that anti-meritocratic tenets in critical race theory, critical feminism, and critical legal studies may unintentionally lead to antisemitic and anti-Asian implications.[84][85] They write that the success of Jews and Asians within what critical race theorists posit to be a structurally unfair system may lend itself to allegations of cheating and advantage-taking.[83]Report
I had to read those paragraphs a few times to make sure it said what I thought it did.
CRT is accused of being a narrative which isn’t supported by science (i.e. testable hypotheses and data).
The proponents of CRT respond by claiming that the truth is a social contract created to serve the dominate group.
IMHO if you need to change the definition of “truth” to make your narrative work, then the problem is with the narrative.Report
Reason#2,859 why the GOP cannot be “Forked”:
https://mobile.twitter.com/KosherSoul/status/1460813728262283269?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1460813728262283269%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.balloon-juice.com%2F
A parent is complaining that her son was taught that the Black Hills were stolen, as an example of CRT which must be banned.Report
The creation of every country is a crime.Report
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics appreciates your irony.
The Ukrainians, eh, not so much.Report
I’m not being ironic.
We stole the land from the Native American tribe, who stole it from another, who stole it from another, and so on.
The general rule is land changes countries via blood shed and/or revolution.
This is an ongoing problem with the world and we don’t have even a theoretical solution.Report
I’ve been saying, give all the stolen land back to England.Report
Why stop at England?Report
The Welsh are the real victims in all of this.Report
Pictish Irredentists was my college band name.Report
Heh I was going to make a joke about that one really bringing out the ladies but the more I think about it the more it sounds like you were ahead of your time.Report
No one is sitting pretty except Iceland.Report
Them and the Sentinelese.Report
I’m sure it would’ve worked but those darned Proclaimers came along…Report