GOP, Politics

The Politics of Lying …

Posted on by mjohnson

Should you wonder what happens to a political movement that bases its entire existence on dissembling and disinformation you could consider the modern Republican Party.

The leader of the party is a serial liar, a pattern of behavior so well documented that to discount the reality is, for his followers at least, simply a lie they tell themselves. 

The lies are ubiquitous, defined as “everywhere” and “all over.” One of the greatest and most persistent is that the party cares about fiscal responsibility. The nation’s troubling level of debt is primarily a function of three things: tax cuts advocated by Republican presidents dating back to Ronald Reagan, continuing with George W. Bush and climaxing with Donald Trump, unpaid for wars and a Pentagon budget that neither party is willing to even talk about scaling back to a level of sustainable reality.

Bush the Younger’s Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill reportedly tried to warn then-Vice President Dick Cheney in 2004 that growing budget deficits posed a threat to the economy, and that Bush’s tax cuts wouldn’t pay for themselves. Cheney cut him off, saying, “You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”

Yet, the GOP now, with the White House in Democratic hands, has – again – discovered that it must slash spending to control the deficit. They are threatening to allow the country to default on its debt – this is money that has already been approved by Congress to be spent – but cannot come up with a plan to do so. Congressional Republicans reportedly won’t touch the Pentagon budget, are afraid to rile up the country with cuts to Social Security and Medicare and they can’t possibly reverse course and tax the wealthiest Americans.

So, they are left with a lie – that they care about the deficit but have no realistic plan to deal with it.

Just one example of the lies and deflection that define the Grand Old Party comes from an Idaho Republican, Mike Simpson, a senior member of the House who has spent his career in Washington appropriating our tax money. On the one hand it’s entirely understandable that Simpson has been crowing about the millions he’s secured for projects in his eastern Idaho district – $5.8 million to widen a street in Ammon; $600,000 for a courthouse annex in Custer County; $5.7 million for an underpass in Pocatello; $2 million for a waste water project in Roberts; and $2.5 million for a water system upgrade in Grace.

The conservative congressman dribbled out the announcements of his fiscal largesse over several days thereby getting a maximum play for the millions that he assures us don’t contribute to the deficit. And a bridge is for sale in Brooklyn, I hear.

In announcing the water system upgrade, no doubt a needed project, Simpson performed some Dick Cheney worthy political jujitsu. “Congress undoubtedly has a spending problem,” Simpson said, “and as chairman of the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, I will continue to fight against excessive government spending.”

But look what I got for you!

Simpson goes on to explain that the money he secured is not really very much, and besides if he hadn’t secured the cash for his voters bad ol’ Joe Biden and DC bureaucrats would have spent it somewhere else. This is, of course, contrary to everything you should have learned in high school government class. Congress – Simpson’s branch – appropriates the money and decides how to spend it.

But here’s the very best part: Simpson voted against the legislation that contained all these worthy Idaho projects. Read that sentence again.

Just like all but nine of his Republican colleagues, Simpson voted NO and took the dough, preserving, at least in his own mind, the fiction that he really cares about runaway government spending. Next to hypocrisy in the dictionary you’ll find a photo of a House Republican.

Or you’ll find the photo of the acknowledged leader of the party, the same guy who invoked the Fifth Amendment 400 times during a deposition seeking information about his clearly fraudulent business dealings.

We’ll always have the lies

We’ll always have the lies, including the “Russia hoax,” the “lie,” counter to vast evidence and more all the time, that Russia used its influence over Donald Trump to help him reach the White House in 2016. The latest shoe to drop, the indictment in New York of FBI agent Charles McGonigal, “the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI in New York, who ended up working for billionaire oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a major target in the Trump Russia investigation.”

The indicted agent has been charged with money laundering and violating the sanctions imposed on Russia, as well as other allegations involving the Russian oligarch. This same Russian also employed Paul Manafort, the guy who once managed Trump’s campaign, shared sensitive campaign intelligence with Russian agents and was pardoned for his crimes.

As the historian Timothy Snyder, an expert in Putin style disinformation and control, put it recently, “Russian soft control of Trump did not require endless personal meetings between the two principals. It just required mutual understanding, which was abundantly on display during the Trump presidency: think of the meeting between Putin and Trump in Helsinki in 2018, when the American president said that he trusted the Russian one and the Russian president said that he had supported the American one as a candidate. The acknowledgement of mutual debts was obvious already in 2016: Russian media talked up Trump, and Trump talked up Putin.” 

Snyder calls the indictment of the FBI’s New York counter terrorism head, a “spy scandal with major implications for how we understand the Trump administration, our national security, and ourselves.”

If you believe the entire Trump-Russia matter is a hoax it’s because Republicans have lied to you – think former attorney general William Barr – about what happened and why it is so troubling.

We’ll always have the lies – about stolen elections, a phony border wall, a congressman’s made up life, lies about teaching history, that vaccines are bad.

Lies about Trump’s role on January 6 and lies that the attack on the Capitol was a false flag operation. The lies are so blatant, the dishonesty so deep that the lying continues even as a federal judge this week sentenced 51-year old Daniel Caldwell to 68 months in prison for spraying a chemical irritant on 15 police officers during that horrible day. The sentencing judge stated simply: “You were an insurrectionist.”

So many lies repeated so often that lying has become the party’s brand.

The party’s rehabilitation can begin – and lord knows we need an honest conservative party – with the words Barry Goldwater uttered at the end of the lie fest that was Watergate more than 50 years ago. “He’s has lied to me for the last time,” Goldwater said of Richard Nixon, another serial Republican prevaricator, just as Nixon’s own party ushered him out of American politics.

Unfortunately, this Republican Party is different. The party’s leaders have been lying to their followers so often and for so long that the truth can’t suddenly or easily become a cleansing revelation. Honesty now amounts to an existential threat to the GOP, and democracy is the collateral damage. 

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

Watergate: A New History

I absolutely could not put down Garrett M. Graff’s book, a new history of the Watergate (and related) capers. Even knowing how the story ends did not spoil a perfectly balanced, carefully documented history of the great Richard Nixon scandal.

I guarantee you’ll learn something new

As Douglas Brinkley wrote in his review in the New York Times: “A lively writer, Graff explores the dramatic scope of the Watergate saga through its participants — politicians, investigators, journalists, whistle-blowers and, at center stage, Nixon himself: power broker extraordinaire, five-time fixture on Republican presidential tickets between 1952 and 1972, and holder of the record for most appearances on the cover of Time magazine, at 55 issues. For all his accomplishments, the 37th president was a man of deep contradictions: a law-and-order candidate who flouted the law, an insecure man with a deep reservoir of hubris, a traditional-values president who drank to excess and cursed like a sailor.”

If you enjoy history, particularly political history and some of the backstory about the mess that is American conservatism, you need to read this book.

Off His Royal Tits

Read Andrew O’Hagan’s review of Prince Harry’s book and you won’t need to read the bloody thing.

“There has never been a book like this, with its parcelling out of epic, one-sided truths. Most royal biographies, even the lively ones – his mother’s, his father’s, poor old Crawfie’s – were made airless by vapid writing, spurious genuflections before royal protocol, cringing vanity masquerading as public service. Harry does much less of that. He goes in for a Las Vegas-style treatment of the royal problem, with multiple sets, many costumes and guest appearances by everybody from Carl Jung to Elton John.”

Come for the writing, stay for the put downs. Brutal.

‘A tale of decay’: the Houses of Parliament are falling down

And you think our government is a mess. Study the UK with its third vapid PM in just months, a cratering economy and still life for Boris. On top of that Parliament is a mess – literally.

You won’t know it, but the place is falling down

“Away from the grand chambers of the House of Commons and House of Lords, away from the lofty corridors, away from the imposing committee rooms with their carved doors, the palace is tatty, dirty and infested with vermin. Its lavatories stink, its drains leak. Some of the external stonework has not been cleaned since it was built in the 1840s, and is encrusted with a thick coat of tarry black that is eating away at the masonry. Inside the building, intricate fan vaulting is flaking off, damaged by seeping rainwater and leaking pipes. Its Gothic-revival artworks are decaying: in the Lords chamber, the once-golden sculptures of the barons who signed the Magna Carta are now dull grey, pitted and corroded.”

What the bloody hell?

Dorothy Parker gets fired from Vanity Fair

“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”

I’ll leave on a high note, sort of.

Stay well. Read books. Study history. Leave good tips. Thanks.



History

Uses and Abuses …

Posted on by mjohnson

The distinguished Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan – she’s most famous for a marvelous book Paris 1919 that deals with the aftermath of World War I – has written that “history is something we all do … we want to make sense of our own lives … so we tell ourselves stories, not always true ones, and we ask questions about ourselves.”

MacMillan wrote that in 2007 in a smart little book entitled Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History.”It might as well be the handbook for our times.

Many Americans, including many on the far right of American conservatism are embracing something like “the end of history.” The very teaching of history with all its manifest contradictions and confusion is under a broad and sustained assault from the far right, which, in some cases seeks to eliminate rather than elevate historical understanding. The evidence is plain and troubling: a systematic deemphasis of teaching history at every level, blatant misrepresentations of historical events and a willful embrace of historically fraudulent characters in our national life (read George Santos).

One of the most Orwellian examples, not surprisingly, involves the crackpots now running the U.S. House of Representatives. As Kevin McCarthy sacrificed what little was left of his soul in order to become speaker of the House earlier this month he made a historically bad deal with many of the same people who helped create the narrative of a stolen election and empower the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capital. Among his many bad bargains, McCarthy agreeing to create a Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. The radicals immediately christened this partisan witch hunt a “new Church Committee.”

What unmitigated rubbish.

The original Church Committee, chaired by Idaho senator Frank Church, a profoundly decent, honorable and intelligent public servant, conducted one of the most important and remarkable investigations in congressional history, uncovering and documenting various abuses by the country’s intelligence agencies. The probe began after the investigative reporting of a New York Times reporter, Seymour Hersh, who revealed a CIA domestic spying program, a clear violations of the agency’s charter.

The Church investigation resulted in serious legislation and a permanent commitment to congressional oversight of the CIA. We wouldn’t know a tenth of what we know today about what the intelligence community does in our name had not Church been serious, meticulous and committed to democracy.

That’s the history, that’s the fair and balanced interpretation of what Church’s committee did. To warp that history by equating the seditious Jim Jordan, the hyper partisan, Trump protecting show pony congressman from Ohio, with Frank Church is analogous to comparing a four year old’s finger painting to a Monet masterpiece, with apologies to four year old’s everywhere. Or as Loch Johnson, who worked for Church on that investigation in the late 1970s told the Washington Post, comparing Jordan’s partisan act of performance with one of the most significant congressional investigations in history “is really an absurd comparison.”

Jordan’s real aim, aided and abetted by McCarthy, is to, as Greg Sargent wrote, “harass and undermine criminal investigations of Trump and even prosecutions of rioters” who attacked the Capitol looking to harm Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi.

Not a serious person, but a dangerous one …

Where this “new Church Committee” application of historical analogy really goes off the rails is to remember that for years conservatives smeared Church and his investigation for allegedly doing vast damage to the CIA. But the true damage done was to the country and its ideals when administrations of both parties tolerated or encouraged assassination plots against foreign leaders, domestic surveillance of political activists like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and even opening the mail of Church and fellow committee member Howard Baker, the Republican senator from Tennessee who served on Church’s committee.

The Idaho senator, in other words, was a conservative pariah before he became a role model, historically appropriated by a collection of clowns and fakers whose intent is not to legislate, but to lacerate political opponents.

The radical right’s efforts to downplay the Capitol insurrection by discrediting the history of that awful, unprecedented day is, of course, about protecting Trump and people like Jordan, but it’s also propaganda and about power. They want you to forget or at least be confused about what happened. I mean, who you gonna believe, Jim Jordan or you’re lyin’ eyes?

The radical right’s mindless fixation on “woke” history, Critical Race Theory and books that “offend” delicate snowflakes is also part of the “end of history.” As anti-Semitism spikes they resist education about the Holocaust. As conservative voter suppression efforts in places like Milwaukee, a city with a large Black population, drive down minority participation in elections they demand an end to history that informs about the country’s original sin of slavery, the bitter historical legacy of America that haunts our country.

History, as one scholar put it, “is not facts, but interpretation of the record of the past,” and the interpretation must be honest. It must be fair. And it must not be abused.

Do yourself a favor. Read some good history by Margaret MacMillan, by World War II historians Max Hastings or Richard Evans or Rick Atkinson. Read political biographies of the Roosevelts, Churchill, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman and Reagan. Read about the Great Depression. Read about Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Subscribe to the widely available work of scrupulous historians like Heather Cox Richardson, the Boston College scholar whose voluminous daily output puts people like Jordan and Trump in context.

Be skeptical. Consider the sources. Read separate accounts of the same events and weigh the evidence. But don’t, for goodness sakes, act like none of it matters unless it confirms comfortably with your own bias.

Historian MacMillan quotes the journalist and historian David Halberstam from the last piece he wrote before his untimely death. “It is a story from the past that we must read again and again, that the most dangerous time for any nation may be that moment in history when things are going unusually well, because it’s leaders become carried away with hubris and a sense of entitlement cloaked as rectitude.”

“The past can be used for almost anything you want to do in the present,” MacMillan has written, but that isn’t history. It’s propaganda meant to control and conform.

A great commentator on the present state of America, Jon Stewart, said it well. “We cannot mistake absurdity for lack of danger because it takes people with no shame to do shameful things.”

Now, that is a lesson from history.

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

My carefully curated list of weekend reading …

Montana, just say when …

My friend Darryl Erlick edits a terrific Montana news site – The Daily Montanan. He is also a fine writer with a keen eye for political nonsense.

Darryl recently skewered some of the state’s Republicans for stuff that once upon a time no self-respecting Montanan would have tolerated for a Butte second.

“We’re becoming a caricature of some low-budget western film where we wear big hats on television, talk real tough in speeches, fight against American Indians, regard ourselves as the authority, and fight with our neighbors about what they may be doing in their home.”

It’s good. Read the whole thing:

Bernard Kalb, longtime foreign affairs newsman, dies at 100

I grew up consuming the journalism of Marvin and Bernard Kalb, brothers who had both the experience and style to make foreign affairs reporting really important.

Bernard Kalb

“Bernard Kalb worked as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, CBS and NBC, wrote two books with his more famous younger brother, and served as founding anchor and panelist for the CNN media analysis show ‘Reliable Sources.'”

What a career. Story here:

The Great Forgetting

Fascinating and frightening piece.

“In 2022, double heat waves hit the Arctic and Antarctic, temperatures soaring close to 40 degrees Celsius higher than usual. The Conger ice shelf in East Antarctica said its final farewell following this heat wave. West Antarctica has long been considered the more vulnerable to near-term ice shelf loss, but now, even the East is starting to show its fray. Heat makes easy work of forgetting.”

Read the whole thing:

Legendary Paris Restaurants That Live Up to the Hype

I’ve been fortunate to visit a couple of these places. After reading this I want to go back. From Food and Wine.

“We’ve put together a list of the most iconic places to eat in the City of Lights. Don’t worry if you can’t hit all of these Paris restaurants in one visit; keep this gallery handy for upcoming jaunts over the pond. Because as Audrey Hepburn famously said: Paris is always a good idea.”

Good to read with a early evening cocktail in hand.

Have a good weekend. Thanks for following along. All the best.

House of Representatives, Mansfield, U.S. Senate

Character? Nah …

Posted on by mjohnson

There are many things missing from American politics these days – comity, civility, common sense among them.

But the critical missing ingredient in our politics is the most basic ingredient – a commitment to character. One definition in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary describes character as “moral excellence and firmness.” Another describes character as “the complex of mental and ethical traits marking and often individualizing a person.”

As House Republicans were engaged in a circular firing squad this week while attempting to elect a speaker, the party’s leader in Congress, third in line for the presidency, they were forced to postpone swearing in a new GOP member who appears to have entirely fabulized his life. It was the perfect confluence of the lack of moral excellence and firmness. It was characterless chaos.

Speaker hopeful Kevin McCarthy has spent the week with the same constantly dazed expression

Kevin McCarthy, the California chameleon who suffered humiliating defeat after humiliating defeat in the speaker contest this week, suffered this special kind of hell because some of the most radical members of his own party simply don’t trust him. McCarthy is, in other words, without character. He’s not alone.

Imagine having your character tested by the likes of a Paul Gosar or Matt Gaetz.

The most damning assessment of McCarthy comes, ironically, from his political mentor, former California Republican congressman Bill Thomas, a tough, brainy former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Thomas, 81-years old, retired and living in Bakersfield, McCarthy’s hometown, told The New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer, “Kevin basically is whatever you want him to be. He lies. He’ll change the lie if necessary. How can anyone trust his word?” 

Meanwhile, George Santos, the greatest resume padder in congressional history who has already burned through his 15 minutes of infamy, will eventually join the House Republican caucus as the most openly dishonest congressman in decades – and that’s saying something. By now most political junkies know that the 34-year old Santos manufactured pretty much his entire life.

He didn’t work for Goldman Sachs or Citigroup. He didn’t go to Baruch College or New York University. He doesn’t own the real estate he claimed to own. He’s wanted for a crime in Brazil. The lies – Santos calls it “resume embellishment” – tumbled out, while the party of whataboutism reminded everyone that Elizabeth Warren once claimed Native American heritage.

Here’s the trouble with whataboutism when it comes to character. There is no rationalizing moral excellence. There are no degrees of being a good and honest person.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the U.S. Capitol Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell – McConnell’s political biographer entitled his book about the senator The Cynic – claimed the title for longest senator in party leadership. McConnell, a gravedigger of American democracy, had the gall to invoke the leadership of Montana Democrat Mike Mansfield while claiming his self-proclaimed landmark.

For the record, Mansfield served as Senate majority leader – not just in leadership, but leadership of the majority – for sixteen years from 1961 to 1977. Mansfield lead the Senate in admittedly a different time. The parties were much less polarized and partisan. Each party had conservatives, moderates and liberals. Bipartisanship wasn’t a dirty word. And Mansfield worked seamlessly and unselfishly with his Republican counterpart Everett Dirksen of Illinois.

Mike Mansfield with Everett Dirksen

If anything, Mansfield had a tougher job with a much more diverse caucus that McConnell has ever had, yet the Mansfield Senate – with much help from Republican Dirksen – ratified a nuclear test ban treaty, passed historic civil and voting rights acts and created Medicare. Every single issue had bipartisan support.

If there has ever been a golden age in the Senate it was when Mansfield sat quietly at the majority leader’s desk and, as one contemporary said, accumulated power by giving it away. Quite a contrast in leadership styles with the senator from Kentucky, an extreme partisan whose sole accomplishment in office has been to dramatically politicize the Supreme Court. Oh, and McConnell’s survived for a long, long time, survived to the point of being hated by many members of his own party not to mention the aging reality TV host holed up at Mar a Lago.

McConnell’s reference to Mansfield, the former Butte copper miner and college history teacher, was the second time in a week the great Montanan’s name was invoked on the Senate floor.

Retiring Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy, the last senator who actually served with Mansfield, remembered the longest tenured majority leader in his farewell address.

“It feels like yesterday that I walked into my first meeting with the person who would become my first Majority Leader – ‘Iron Mike’ Mansfield,” Leahy said. The Majority Leader put a fundamental question to every new Senator: Why do you want to be here? For the title? Or to make a difference to make lives better?

“And though he was a soft-spoken man who listened more than he spoke, and rarely gave speeches on the Senate Floor, Leader Mansfield dispensed one piece of advice that made as enduring an impression as the question he left to each Senator to answer for themselves.

“Senators should always keep their word.

“It struck me that across all those weighty debates, navigating the complicated and contradictory politics of a Senate and a caucus that included everything from social conservatives and segregationists to civil rights icons and prairie populists, Mansfield succeeded because he understood the currency of the institution was actually trust, not ideology.

“Senators should always keep their word.”

Ideology has come to dominate our characterless politics. Too many of us clutch the illusion that the rules and procedures of a democracy protect us from chaos. But characterless politicians don’t follow the rules, they fudge them or ignore them. As Mansfield knew, trust is the gold standard of democracy.

While Kevin McCarthy twisted this week, tied in knots of distrust of his own making, The Talented Mr. Santos was wandering Capitol Hill, a man without a past, avoiding questions that would embarrass and disqualify most anyone, but still secure that he’ll have a place in the party where character is nothing more an afterthought.

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

When All Is Said by Anne Griffin review – a confident, compassionate debut

I really enjoyed this novel – very Irish, very engaging story.

“Griffin’s novel was apparently inspired by a chance encounter in a hotel bar with an elderly man who confided that he worked in the building as a boy and that he expected the night to be his last. As a novel whose central themes are grief, separation and mental illness it would be very easy for the writing to become bogged down in self-pity. Yet Maurice Hannigan emerges as an engaging, compassionate creation who seems fully aware that he conforms to a stereotype: ‘As for Irish men, I’ve news for you. It’s worse as you get older. It’s like we tunnel ourselves deeper into our aloneness. Solving our problems on our own. Men, sitting alone at bars going over and over the same old territory in their heads.'”

Read the full review.

Moderate Democrats Are the Future of the Party

This is a good piece, perhaps because I agree with the premise, and the GOP chaos in Washington this week give Democrats one more big chance to define themselves in the middle of American politics.

Oh, and Jill Lawrence is really smart.

“As a strategic matter, it’s no secret why moderates are crucial. The Pew Research Center classifies only 6 percent of Americans and 12 percent of Democrats as ‘progressive left.’ ‘Democratic mainstays,’ the largest group in the party and the country, are older loyalists with “a moderate tilt on some issues,” in Pew’s phrase. The fact is that Democrats across the spectrum share many goals, among them equitable justice; police accountability; more immigration and a more humane, practical system; voting and abortion rights; and respect for people’s identities, whatever they may be.”

Read all of Ms. Lawrence’s piece here.

See you soon. Happy New Year.

Education, GOP

No Coincidence …

Posted on by mjohnson

For two generations the unshakable base of the Republican Party has been white voters without a college degree.

In 2019, the Gallup Poll found that “54% of whites without college degrees identified as Republicans or were Republican-leaning independents, compared with 34% who were Democrats or Democratic leaners.”

Turns out that Donald Trump and those politicians who follow him didn’t need to attract these voters as much as mobilize them. Little wonder Trump actually said in 2016 that he “loved the poorly educated,” who he called smart and loyal.

A recent Brookings analysis of the 2022 midterm election noted that “In addition to the outsized Democratic support among young people, white women with a college degree increased their Democratic support in 2022 compared to the 2020 presidential election. At the same time, white men without college degrees showed increased Republican support, even more so than in the 2020 election.” This block of GOP voters, Brookings says, “anchored Republican support in several Senate and gubernatorial elections.”

For a long time, I wondered why a political party would base a great deal of strategy on an appeal to people who either hadn’t been interested or able to access more education. Was the approach crassly cynical, strategically calculating or just stupid, or some combination of all three?

Protests against critical race theory at a Texas school board meeting. (Juan Figueroa/The Dallas Morning News)

Then I remember the rule of no coincidence.

If you observe politics closely for long enough you realize there really are no coincidences. This old rule explains much of why Republicans from Ron DeSantis in Florida to the Kootenai County central committee in northern Idaho are engaged in a war on education. Republicans, at least many of them, are feeding the rightwing base. It’s a cynical, calculating and one hopes ultimately stupid strategy, but in many places attacking teachers, undermining schools and diminishing education in a variety of ways is a core belief system of the GOP.

Public school advocates in Idaho are bracing for another huge legislative assault on public education. A very conservative legislature seems sure during the coming legislative session to try and take money from already underfunded public schools and re-direct those resources to private and religious schools. Their talking point is that stripping resources from your neighborhood school improves student performance. It doesn’t.

There is vast evidence from many states, including Wisconsin, Indiana and Louisiana who have headed down this “school choice” path that student outcomes not only don’t improve when vouchers and similar schemes are introduced, but actually decline.

The school wars involve nonsense about how American history is taught and which books ought to be allowed in school libraries. The battlefield commanders in these wars decry student “indoctrination,” but welcome using public money to allow a religiously affiliated school to practice the very “indoctrination” they say they oppose.

The right’s unrelenting assault on education also targets the teaching profession. Poor pay for teachers and crushing workloads resulting from a widespread teacher shortages are driving educators from the classroom even as conservative politicians bemoan poor student outcomes.

A concerted national strategy to ideologically transform local school boards is moving ahead full steam, and is nowhere better illustrated than in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho where a radical right majority on the local community college board, with the support of radical local party leaders, have brought the school to the brink of losing its accreditation.

The lovely campus on North Idaho College in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho

For decades North Idaho College was considered an educational gem in a community that lived for every positive development as their local community college grew and prospered. Republican and Democratic legislators from northern Idaho jockeyed to see who could do the most for NIC and its now 6,500 students. Local property taxpayers have long supported the school, displaying both community pride in the college and its obvious importance to the local economy. A 2020 analysis by the University of Idaho, to cite just one data point, calculated a $4.5 billion annual economic impact from higher education in Idaho and support for nearly 75,000 jobs.

A school like North Idaho College is simply the goose that keeps laying golden eggs, yet the radicals now running the school have suspended the well-regarded president who is suing in response. The board engaged in widespread violations of public meeting law and hired an unqualified right wing real estate lawyer and failed attorney general candidate as the board legal counsel (the prior counsel resigned amid the chaos after 23 years on the job). The radicals have meddled profusely in academic affairs, engendered a no confidence vote from the faculty and students and the board now faces a potentially extreme sanction from the regional higher education accreditation body. All this has happened since the radicals fired the previous president who left with a $250,000 settlement.

If the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities now yanks the school’s accreditation the fallout will be stunning – student credits won’t count, transfers will be impossible, the economic fallout will be massive, including private contributions disappearing. The school’s former legal counsel warns of “cataclysmic damage to the institution.”

You have to wonder: what’s the end game for these anti-education radicals? Do they hope to create such chaos that they can force privatization of the public college? Is the aim to stock the faculty and administration with fellow right wing zealots? Or is chaos empowered by incompetence the only real goal?

Here’s a possible clue. The local Republican establishment, arguably as extreme a local party as you’ll find anywhere in the Pacific Northwest, is noticeably mum, evidencing no interest in redirecting this runaway train of cataclysmic damage. Republican governor Brad Little has called the situation “unfortunate,” but he’s busying himself with the coming legislative session, undoubtedly plotting a way to not get splattered by the crap that will hit the political fan when his party tries to defund public schools by instituting vouchers. Imagine being a student or the parent of a student in the middle of this senseless storm of right wing chaos.

If Governor Little were treating northern Idaho’s four alarm educational fire with seriousness, he’d be pushing his own state board of education to intervene. The board could invoke the state law that spells out its duties, which reads in part that the state board shall “have general supervision, through its executive departments and offices, of all entities of public education supported in whole or in part by state funds …”

They should declare an emergency, which this is and take over management of the college. Let the kooks sue, while sanity saves the college.

But real intervention to prevent a catastrophic of loss of certification would require genuine leadership. And since there is no such thing as a coincidence, that would require a very public commitment to public education, and that is not in keeping with the Republican appeal to the poorly educated.

Standing by while chaos occurs is the most unconservative thing imaginable.

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

A few other items worth your time …

Farewell Address Of Senator Patrick Leahy

Even though the institution of the United States Senate has been a major focus on my research and writing for the past ten years, I wouldn’t normal pay much attention to the often set piece farewell speech of a long term senator.

But Pat Leahy’s recent speech strikes me as important and unusual.

The very senior senator from Vermont – in the Senate since 1975 – invokes the great Montana majority leader Mike Mansfield in talking about what the Senate once was and isn’t any more.

Vermont senator Pat Leahy delivers his final Senate speech

Here’s a portion of the speech. The whole thing is worth your time.

“It feels like yesterday that I walked into my first meeting with the person who would become my first Majority Leader – ‘Iron Mike’ Mansfield. The Majority Leader put a fundamental question to every new Senator:  Why do you want to be here?  For the title?  Or to make a difference to make lives better? 

“And though he was a soft-spoken man who listened more than he spoke, and rarely gave speeches on the Senate Floor, Leader Mansfield dispensed one piece of advice that made as enduring an impression as the question he left to each Senator to answer for themselves.

“Senators should always keep their word.”

“It struck me that across all those weighty debates, navigating the complicated and contradictory politics of a Senate and a caucus that included everything from social conservatives and segregationists to civil rights icons and prairie populists, Mansfield succeeded because he understood the currency of the institution was actually trust, not ideology.

“Senators should always keep their word.”

Link to the full Leahy speech. And, yes, my next book (coming in September 2023) is about the Senate of Mansfield and Everett Dirksen in the 1960s.

The Varieties of Historical Genres

A fellow author at the University of Oklahoma Press, environmental historian Adam Sowards, has a good newsletter that I commend to your attention.

Adam writes recently, “I’ve been thinking about the different ways history is written (and read) and wanted to explore that. Then, I saw a few newsletters and dozens of magazines and websites offering end-of-year book recommendations, and I thought I might be able to pull off a hybrid newsletter. Let’s see how it goes. Read on!”

Read on here.

The Brilliant Hackwork of P.G. Wodehouse

As a fan of Jeeves and Wooster, I really enjoyed this piece by writer Dan Brooks.

P.G. Wodehouse

“The image of Wodehouse as some sort of manic literary beaver is one of the singular pleasures of reading his work. His professional career began in 1902 with the publication of his first novel and ended with the release of his 70th in 1974, less than a year before he died. The man fit in 25 years of full-time work before the first talkie hit theaters, back when the dominant media for comedy were stage shows and print.”

This may make you want to pick up one of the Wodehouse classics. Link here.

The Silver Palate Cookbook Changed Home Cooking (and Pesto Consumption) As We Know It

We have a very well thumbed copy of the Silver Palate. I’ve used the book many times, but never knew the backstory.

“The cookbook was a product of its time and place: New York’s Upper West Side in the late 1970s and early ’80s. A world synonymous (at least in the mind of the average moviegoer) with Woody Allen and then Nora Ephron. You can bet that before they were forced to play Pictionary at that dinner party, Harry and Sally were fed salmon mousse and chicken Marbella or maybe osso bucco.”

Happy holiday eating.

Here’s to a joyful and happy Christmas and bright 2023. Thanks a million for reading.

2022 Election, GOP

Nutjobbery Reaches Its Expiry Date …

Posted on by mjohnson

Six weeks ago, Jim Risch, Idaho’s longest-lived political survivor was going back to the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The state’s other senator, Mike Crapo, one of the most senior members of the Senate whose lifetime in political office is entirely defined by his devotion to massive tax cuts that benefit his donors in the insurance and financial services industries, was a lead pipe cinch to become chairman of the Finance Committee. From that august perch Crapo could fulfill his re-election pledge to bash the IRS, which, of course, is coming for his constituent’s guns, er, tax returns.

Six weeks ago, Washington senator Patty Murray was headed for retirement, ushered out of office atop a “red tsunami” that would also swamp Democrats in Nevada, Pennsylvania, Arizona, New Hampshire and Georgia.

Amazon is still selling these for $21.99

No less a beltway gasbag than former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on November 4 that Republicans would pick up at least three and likely five Senate seats, that Murray’s opponent was closing fast and could win, that the GOP candidate “will almost certainly carry New Hampshire” and football star Herschel Walker would win the Georgia Senate seat “without a runoff.”

Gingrich, whose opinion you might want to avoid the next time you head to the parimutuel window, told Hannity that polls were undercounting Republican voters heading into the midterm election. Newt said the GOP could easily pick up 50 House seats, but Gingrich, the man who contributed as much as any living pol to the toxicity of our politics, said he was more certain of a pick-up of precisely 44 seats.

Turns out Gingrich is as good at predicting election outcomes as he is at dumping ex-wives, once talking over divorce while one spouse was hospitalized with cancer. But that is a digression, because this column is about the GOP clown factor. And Gingrich is no, well, wait.

But back to the “red tsunami.” It turned into a one seat pickup in the Senate for Democrats, and while Republicans narrowly reclaimed control of the House of Representatives the GOP majority is so tenuous and the party so fractured that would-be House Speaker Kevin McCarthy should be employing a food taster.

Even if “my Kevin,” as the would-be Mar a Lago felon calls him, avoids the long knives his fellow Republicans have drawn for him and ends up with the gavel he will still wake every morning wondering which one of several nutjobs in his conference will trip him up before lunch.

Any way you slice it, Democrats defied nearly every prediction, including Newt’s, and now have an actual majority in the Senate and a ringside seat to cheer on the House Follies. House Democrats, with an attractive new leader and no responsibility, can hardly lose, while the nation focuses on the antics of the most radical group of House Republicans since, well maybe ever.

Even Gingrich back in 1994 had a plan to try and govern. And by contrast, when Republicans won the House in 1946, ending 14 years of Democratic rule, they actually had a legislative agenda, including a Constitutional amendment to limit any future president to two terms and limitations on the power of trade unions. Those Republicans also approved of the Marshall Plan and reorganized the US military, all stuff that clearly pales in comparison to Hunter Biden’s laptop.

By all rights, Republicans should have owned the Congress after the November election. That they didn’t isn’t really a complex story as the Georgia Senate race illustrates as well as any recent contest.

The Georgia election, decided earlier this week in favor of an eloquent Baptist preacher, Raphael Warnock, who immediately became a national figure by preaching bipartisanship, strangely combined poisonous partisanship, the violence of NFL football and the malicious influence of vast money in our politics. Think of that, if you can, as American exceptionalism.

Who in their right mind could think that Hershel Walker was in anyway qualified, let alone competent to represent Georgia in the United State Senate? Anyone with the experience of a 7th grade student council election would have said Walker was barely qualified to participate in a Capitol tour let alone sit in the world’s greatest deliberative body.

Walker was, after all, credibly charged with sexual abuse, threatening women with firearms or knives, abandoning his children, at least those he knew about, and fabulizing much of his background. Walker’s closing argument to Georgia voters involved a crazy story about werewolves defeating zombies. Look it up. 

As David Von Drehle put it in the Washington Post: “It’s one thing for a deeply flawed person to accept admiration for his former athletic magnificence, but it’s quite another for him to seek a role in leading the country. The dirty laundry that Walker kept stuffed into the vault behind his trophy case was hauled into the glare of television lights and packaged into millions of dollars of negative advertising. One of Walker’s sons summed up his famous father this way: He ‘left us to bang a bunch of women, threatened to kill us, and had us move over 6 times in 6 months’ to escape the mayhem of his own making.”

Doesn’t that sound like Robert Taft or Howard Baker?

Walker, with all his athletic talent, didn’t graduate from college, then denied that he had repeatedly said he had, even while having claimed he graduated in the top one percent of his class. He was a modestly successful professional player and seems a case study for why the NFL concussion scandal remains a scandal.

That the Republican Party, an unserious collection of loons, conspiracy theorists, shameless opportunists and personality cultists (but I repeat myself) would advance this deeply troubled man as a serious political candidate – not to mention similar cranks in several other states – says pretty much all you need to know about the party that once celebrated Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt and General Eisenhower.

And consider the money. One Atlanta TV station, WBS, pulled in at least $86 million from political ads during 2022. Republicans poured millions upon millions into Georgia to prop up a guy who campaigned on a werewolf versus vampire platform, and it damn near worked. Still, it turns out that all the money in the world can’t overcome too many football hits to the noggin.

An actual US Senate campaign …

Donald Trump promoted Walker, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham debased themselves acting like Herschel was a serious person, Republicans counted on him to secure a chairmanship for Jim Risch and Mike Crapo and send Patty Murray to oblivion, or in their better world back home. In January, by the way, Murray will chair the Appropriations Committee and become Senate president pro tem, third in line to the presidency. 

The Gingrich prophesy flopped for one big reason: maybe, just maybe nutjobbery as a political approach has reached its expiry date.

Walker did get one thing right: Werewolves do defeat vampires — see “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.” At the closing of that 1948 film “classic,” the wolfman (Lon Chaney Jr.) spares Bud Abbott and Lou Costello from the clutches of Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi).

When you think about it, you wonder how we kept such intellectual heft out of the U.S. Senate.

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

A few other items you may find of interest …

Wilma Mankiller, first female principal chief of Cherokee Nation

A pathbreaking Native leader now has a place on our coinage

“During her time as chief, Mankiller provided a foundation for the continued growth of the Cherokee Nation. Enrollment in Cherokee Nation doubled under her leadership. She championed education and secured a US$9 million vocational center. A 1991 Parade Magazine profile described her leadership style as quiet but strong.”

Link here to a good piece of American history.

Gen. Grant’s pending promotion sheds new light on his fight for equal rights after the Civil War

There is a proposal in Congress to promote the Civil War general to an exalted rank – General of the Armies of the US. Only George Washington and John J. Pershing have had such rank.

General Grant

“Grant served as president from 1869 to 1877 during a time when white Southerners proved hostile toward federal Reconstruction measures that sought equal rights for recently freed enslaved people.

“Grant saw his role of enforcing these policies as an extension of his wartime duty and necessary to protect the gains of the Union victory, especially the newly established rights for African Americans.

“He used the resources of the federal government to crush the Ku Klux Klan, established the Department of Justice to investigate civil rights abuses and signed the Civil Rights Act of 1875.”

Link to more background.

Arkansas city elects 18-year-old as youngest Black mayor in US

The young folks are gonna save us, young folks like Jaylen Smith the new mayor of Earle, Arkansas.

“Among his first orders of business after he is sworn in next month, Smith said, would be to move the city’s police department to 24-hour operation. Other policy goals include ridding Earle of abandoned homes, creating jobs for city youth and providing transportation for elderly or infirm residents to grocery stores.”

Link to the full story.

The Great Canadian Baking Show Is a Pile of Wet Dough

I didn’t know there was a Canadian version of the Brit baking show. Now I know.

And this is a pretty good takedown of why the north-of-the-border knock off isn’t quite so good.

“While the contestants are generally likeable and diverse (although not geographically—50 percent of the contestants have been from Ontario for the past two seasons), many seem, like the country as a whole, as though the thing that unites them most strongly is the happenstance of being in the same place. Rather than showing us what Canada is and what it could become, it reveals profound insecurities about what sticks us together besides maple syrup.”

I love Canada. Read the whole thing.

That’s all I got for you this week. Stay warm. Do a good turn. Read books. Have an eggnog. All the best.

Film, GOP, Trump

Some Agreement …

Posted on by mjohnson

When celebrated Hollywood producer Darryl F. Zanuck made his 1947 Academy Award winning film Gentleman’s Agreement, the United States – and the world – was only beginning to reckon with the horror of the Holocaust. 

Zanuck, a Nebraska boy who served in France during World War I before becoming a movie industry powerhouse, may have been the only Tinseltown big wheel who could have made a feature film about American anti-Semitism. Zanuck wasn’t Jewish.

Anti-Semitism was a potentially explosive issue, even given all that had become known about systematic genocide against European Jews during a horrible war that had ended just two years before the film premiered. With the exception of Zanuck, all the big studios – Warner Brothers and Metro Goldwyn Mayer, for example – were headed by Jewish movie bosses, the same people who had been attacked prior to US entry into World War II for disseminating anti-Nazi, pro-British propaganda.

Nazi Germany had been defeated on the battlefield and the Aryan nationalism – and anti-Semitism – at the core of Nazi ideology seemed to have been forcefully and finally repudiated. But Zanuck knew better. The particularly virulent strain of American anti-Semitism had not been repudiated. It wasn’t even underground, but existing in plain sight, tolerated and perpetuated by “good Americans” who couldn’t conceive that “those people” were really the subjects of widespread discrimination, or worse.

In many places American Jews couldn’t be a member of a country club, attend some colleges or own a home in certain neighborhoods. The US State Department, a Waspish collection of mostly-Ivy League Gentiles, was notoriously anti-Semitic. The radical right in the America of the 1930s and 40s trafficked the fiction that Franklin Roosevelt – a lifelong Episcopalian – was really a secret Jew, the mastermind not of the New Deal, but the Jew Deal.  

Deeply embedded in the American DNA is the old trope that Jews control the media, entertainment and high finance and are foisting a “globalist” agenda on us. The old slurs and hatreds are back with a vengeance, often accompanied by violence. As journalist Alexander Nazaryan noted recently, “Jews are targets of about 60 % of all religious-driven hate crimes across the United States, a fact that is especially surprising since Jews make up only 2.4% of the American population.”

In Gentleman’s Agreement the supremely talented Gregory Peck plays a hot-shot magazine writer, Phil Green, who is commissioned by a big national publication to write a piece on anti-Semitism. Peck’s character, a widower with a young son, struggles to develop an angle for his story. He could cite numbers and official reports, but such an approach would hardly be compelling. Finally, he settles on an approach – he will pretend to all but his immediate family to be Jewish in order to investigate the slurs, discrimination and hatred firsthand.

Predictably reporter Green begins immediately experiencing the sting of discrimination. His son is taunted as a “dirty kike.” His fiancé is one of the “good people” who abhors anti-Semitism, but nevertheless refuses to do much of anything about it. Green’s pal, an Army veteran and a Jew, is assaulted in a bar and struggles to find a home for his family. The hotel where the journalist and his wife plan to honeymoon is “restricted,” no Jews allowed due to an unspoken “gentlemen’s agreement.”

There is much to ponder in this old and important film and much that sadly remains all too relevant, particularly as a once and potentially future American president welcomes to his dinner table the pathetic rapper Kanye West and one Nick Fuentes, perhaps the most loathsome anti-Semitic white supremacist (which is saying something) in today’s radical right.

There is no real point, given all he has done, to further condemn Donald Trump for enabling and encouraging the racist, anti-Semitic right. Trump is what he is. Always has been.

A bigot, a white nationalist and an anti-Semite – certain titles interchangeable

Rather, this moment of anti-Semitic reckoning is about the “good people” who are smart enough to see this hate in technicolor, but still flinch from action, rather like the actress Dorothy McGuire in Zanuck’s film. In her heart McGuire’s character condemns discrimination, but by her inaction she acquiesces to evil.

This old movie story is little different than a host of Republican officeholders who have either remained silent – again – or condemned discrimination without denouncing the perpetrators of such hatred.

An exception is the most prominent Mormon in Congress, Utah Senator Mitt Romney.

“There is no bottom to the degree to which he’s willing to degrade himself, and the country for that matter. Having dinner with those people was disgusting,” Romney said of Trump’s dining companions. “Anybody else” would be a better party leader, Romney said.

“I don’t think he should be president of the United States. I don’t think he should be the nominee of our party in 2024,” he said. “And I certainly don’t want him hanging over our party like a gargoyle.”

But hang he does. In the same way that hate hovers over the radical right stretching from Idaho’s lieutenant governor who appeared at a Fuentes sponsored event earlier this year to Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green who appeared at the same forum. Both used Trump’s lie – I don’t know this person – to excuse associating with Fuentes.

For the record, Fuentes, a big presence on social media, has called for a dictatorship in America with Trump president for life. He wants to prohibit women from voting, and even end elections. He’s the worst of the worst of the racist core of the radical right. Fuentes, says the Anti-Defamation League, “seeks to forge a white nationalist alternative to the mainstream GOP.”

How difficult is that to condemn? How hard is that to ignore? Ask your Republican congressman or your conservative state legislator, your governor. Good luck getting them to respond.

A remarkable feature of Darryl Zanuck’s 1947 film about anti-Semitism was the ease with which the script called out well-known racists of that time. Zanuck sought legal advice as to whether he risked libel by condemning by name notorious Mississippi racists Theodore Bilbo and John Rankin, as well as Gerald L.K. Smith, a white nationalist media star of his day not unlike Fuentes today. In the end Zanuck said, to hell with it.

“Let them sue us,” Zanuck said. “They won’t dare, and if they do, nothing would make me more happy than to appear personally as a witness or defendant at the trial.”

Smith did sue over the film – and lost, a fitting reminder that bigots confronted can be bigots defeated.

For far too long from Georgia to Idaho, from Arizona to Iowa those who make nice with the racist, radical right have gotten a nearly unlimited free pass from “good people” who know better. Their compliancy only begets more hate.

As one reviewer has noted, “Gentleman’s Agreement reaped high rewards for its bravery, intelligence, and entertainment value” and carried away awards for its director, Elia Kazan. Would it be that a bit more bravery and intelligence presented itself now when hatred once again so desperately needs unequivocal condemnation from conservatives.

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

A few other items that may be of interest …

Stewart Rhodes’ son: ‘How I escaped my father’s militia’

The Oath Keepers leader, Stewart Rhodes, was convicted this week of seditious conspiracy, a huge development for legal and law enforcement authorities pushing back against the collection of radicals who stormed the Capitol on January 6. This story about Rhodes’ family is, well, something else.

Militia leader and convicted felon Stewart Rhodes

“Family life became Oath Keepers life. Tasha would welcome members into their home; Dakota would answer militia emails and, when he was older, drive his father to and from Oath Keepers events.

“But during long stretches when Rhodes was on the road, the rest of his family felt like life was closing in on them. ‘We were so insular and isolated that the date and time and what day of the week it was, or what year it was, had very little bearing on our internal lives,’ Dakota said.

“Today, Dakota lives in a one-room apartment down a country road outside a small Montana town, not far from the family home he escaped.”

Read the whole thing – from the BBC.

Elon Musk’s Twist On Tech Libertarianism Is Blowing Up On Twitter

You may have heard entirely too much already about about this guy, but this piece by Derek Robertson delves into the libertarian mindset of Musk and his ilk in Silicon Valley.

“Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter is a window into a distinct mindset, common to Silicon Valley but not exclusively of it, that glorifies individual dynamism over group consensus-building.”

I have some other thought, but I’ll leave it at that. Read the piece here.

How Virginia Woolf Shunned—and Then Embraced—T.S. Eliot

Tom and Virginia

“To be taken on by Virginia Woolf was a triumph for Eliot … It meant acceptance by London’s literary elite.”

From LitHub.

The Northwoods Baseball Radio Network Is On The Air

Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio is a full-length fake baseball game. There is no yelling, no loud commercials, no weird volume spikes. Fans call it “baseball radio ASMR”.

It is the perfect podcast for sleeping or relaxing, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Available wherever you get your podcasts.

Very clever and very funny.

See you next week. Be careful out there. Thanks for reading.

2024 Election, Trump

Send in the Loser …

Posted on by mjohnson

One of the most iconic moments in the history of baseball took place on October 8, 1956, the fifth game of that year’s World Series between the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The moment was captured on film when Yankee catcher Yogi Berra, a 5-foot, 8-inch fire plug, leapt into the arms of his battery mate, 6-foot, 4-inch Don Larsen. They were celebrating Larsen’s moment of perfection – a perfect game in the World Series, something never done before or since.

October 8, 1956, Yankees catcher Yogi Berra leaps into the arms of pitcher Don Larsen after Larsen struck out the last Brooklyn Dodgers batter to complete his perfect game.

Larsen, a 14-year Major League veteran and, with all respect, a player with a genuinely mediocre career save for that perfect game, never did anything on the field even remotely as memorable as that Game Five in 1956.

Big Don, who lived his post-playing life in Hayden Lake, Idaho and was a very affable guy, ended up with an overall losing record as a pitcher – 81 wins, 91 loses. During his career Larsen won more games than he lost in only six seasons. Maybe the second most memorable thing he did was get traded to the Athletics in 1959 for an up-and-coming right fielder named Roger Maris.

I thought of Don Larsen this week as I read a biting takedown of another mediocre, fluky one-time winner by Utah Republican Senator Mitt Romney. “It’s like the aging pitcher who keeps losing games,” Romney said of a proven political loser who wants the ball again. “If we want to win, we need a different pitcher on the mound.”

Don’t count on it.

Reports of the demise of the most corrupt, incompetent, sedition-inspiring president in American history are likely premature. There remains 40 percent of the GOP electorate willing to join him in burning his party to the ground as he warms up to complete a historic losing streak.

Still, it’s almost an insult to a mediocre ballplayer to compare Don Larsen’s losing record to The Former Guy, but there are some parallels, and some differences.

Donald Trump’s one moment of triumph came against arguably the one person in American politics he could have beaten. At least Don Larsen created his one moment in the sun by no hitting a line-up that included Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges, Pee Wee Reese and Duke Snider, all Hall of Famers.

Trump, on the other hand, prevailed over a remarkably lackluster Republican primary line-up – remember Lyin’ Ted, Little Marco and Low Energy Jeb – and then lost the popular vote to the hardly “likeable enough” Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t a feat of strength of real ability, it was a testament to being in the right place at the right time and having lightening strike.

Now having lost a second presidential election, after being impeached twice, after inciting an insurrectionist attack on the Capitol, after grifting through his oath of office, and now facing more legal jeopardy than a Gambino family crime boss, he wants another chance. There is no fast ball, but the sucker pitch is still in his repertoire.

Larsen began his 1956 season with what the New York Times called “an early dawn escapade” during spring training when the lanky pitcher “wrapped his automobile around a telephone poll.” Larsen said he had fallen asleep at the wheel, an explanation about as believable as Trump’s claim that he declassified hundreds of documents, many top secret that he pilfered from the White House.

The Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post placed news of Trump’s announcement on Page 26

When the failed real estate developer announced for president again this week not a single Republican member of Congress bothered to attend his low energy rollout of grievance and lies. Rupert Murdoch’s conservative propaganda empire has written him off. Billionaire donors are saying they’ve had enough.

Wyoming Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis, no liberal squish, bristled when asked if she’d be backing Trump again. “I don’t think that’s the right question,” Lummis said, “I think the question is who is the current leader of the Republican Party. Oh, I know who it is: Ron DeSantis.”

Such displays are “completely cynical,” in the words of Peter J. Wehner, a top aide to the second George Bush. “They’re now breaking with him not because he’s done anything unethical or immoral — he’s been doing that for decades. It’s simply because they are now making the judgment that he is no longer the path to power.”

If you recall, it was just a few weeks ago that Lummis and most fellow Wyoming Republicans united behind a Trump backed election denier in order – and on Trump’s orders – to defeat Liz Cheney, the anti-Trump scourge who has vowed to make sure the GOPs permanent seditionist never again gets close to the Oval Office.

Two weeks is a lifetime in politics and the last two have shown how fleeting influence and power can be. The one thing every politician understands in self-preservation. They don’t like to lose, and while most Republican’s aren’t saying it out loud they know The Former Guy is a loser.

Yet, hold on. Don’t count him out. In the coming GOP primary insult-a-fest where policy counts for nothing and bombast will rule again, it’s entirely possible an indicted, seditious former president will prevail. Which is to say if you’re betting on DeSantis, you might like some of the swamp land for sale in Florida.

Trump won’t go away. Period. He can only be defeated – again. If you think he cares about the Republican Party or its prospects you haven’t been paying attention to that fragile ego and profoundly unbalanced personality. He’ll gladly point to the smoking ruins of the modern GOP and blame the wreckage on anyone and everything but himself. 

Trump, for one, brief and altogether tragic moment caught his lightning in a bottle. He was and remains a political fluke, not unlike a mediocre journeyman pitcher hurling a perfect game in the World Series.

However, Don Larsen was man enough to admit he wasn’t happy with his won-loss record, and he knew, as Richard Goldstein wrote at the time of his death in 2020, that he had been damn lucky on that long ago October afternoon.

In the fourth inning of that historic game at old Yankee Stadium, “Duke Snider missed a home run to right by a few inches. In the fifth, Gil Hodges’s drive to left center was run down by [Mickey] Mantle, and Sandy Amoros missed a home run to right by a hair.” Any of that would have ruined Larsen’s one big moment.

 “Goofy things happen,” Larsen once said. And surely they do.

Goofy things like Donald Trump projecting off Mitt Romney in 2016, “He was a failed candidate … He failed miserably and it was an embarrassment to everybody. I guess obviously he wants to be relevant, he wants to be back in the game.”

The sucker pitch is all he’s got. He’ll keep throwing it.

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

A few more items I found interesting this week …

It wasn’t just “the economy stupid”—it was abortion

Why did Democrats do so much better than most of us thought they would?

“If you put together the sheer size of the women’s vote, the intensity of the issue and the fact that, unlike inflation or the economy, the two parties have stark differences on the issue, you get a powerful driver of the vote. There were five states with abortion referenda on the ballot and in every single one—including the deep red state of Kentucky—the pro-choice position won.”

A good think piece from Brookings.

What Joe Biden and LBJ Have in Common

A good piece from Washington Monthly.

“When Joe Biden took office days after insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol, many with Confederate flags, he drew comparisons to Abraham Lincoln. After passing significant economic and social spending packages, Biden welcomed references to Franklin D. Roosevelt. As inflation and gas prices rose, observers noted the similarities to Jimmy Carter.

“Perhaps the most unappreciated presidential parallel is between Biden and Lyndon Johnson. Both became unexpected civil rights presidents and promised sweeping legislation if voters and activists delivered crucial support.”

I’ve been deep into Lyndon Johnson’s presidency for my next book on the Senate in the 1960s, and I think this comparison is apt.

Why Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ goal is priceless – and unforgettable

I never played much attention to soccer until a trip to Argentina some years ago. The game is a national obsession there and this story offers part of the explanation for why.

“ … a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God.” 

“Such is its legacy, that some 36 years after bouncing into the back of the net, the soccer ball involved was set to be sold at auction on Nov. 16, 2022, at an expected price of up to US$3.3 million.

“So why does this goal, which should not even have been a goal, carry so much significance? As an economist who studies sport, I’ve long believed that you have to grasp the cultural significance to understand the financial dimension of sports. This goal was one of soccer’s most iconic events for a number of reasons.”

Getting you ready for the World Cup.

How to move a country: Fiji’s radical plan to escape rising sea levels

Still wonder if climate issues are being overplayed?

“What Fiji is attempting to do is unprecedented. For years, politicians and scientists have been talking about the prospect of climate migration. In Fiji, and in much of the Pacific, this migration has already begun. Here, the question is no longer if communities will be forced to move, but how exactly to do it. At present, 42 Fijian villages have been earmarked for potential relocation in the next five to 10 years, owing to the impacts of climate crisis. Six have already been moved. Every new cyclone or disaster brings with it the risk of yet more villages being added to the list.”

From The Guardian.

That’s it for me. Have a good weekend … and thanks for reading.

2022 Election, Andrus, Democracy

The Takeaways …

Posted on by mjohnson

It wasn’t a “red wave,” more like, as conservative writer Mona Charen put it, “a small toxic spill” where “voters of Pennsylvania, Virginia, New Hampshire, and Michigan, among other places, apparently weighed more than inflation in their calculations, and that gives a fighting chance to those who hope to right this listing ship.”

Democrats have little to crow about, particularly in some of the reddest of the red states – Idaho, Montana, South Dakota among others, but they didn’t get swamped nationally, which typically happens to the party in the White House in a midterm election.

The “red wave” that wasn’t …

Many, but certainly not all, election deniers lost, ensuring that the “big lie” will continue to float at the top of our national political septic tank. Idaho, to cite just one example, hasn’t yet copped, but soon enough will, to having elected a professional agitator (and election denier) as attorney general, a political opportunist who will cause a wholesale exodus from the state’s largest law firm. You heard it here: Raul Labrador, a Tea Partier who left a lot of wreckage in his wake while in Congress, wanted a new job in order to play politics with the law and then use that ruse to run for governor.

Montana voters looked past the scandals and carpetbagging of Ryan Zinke, their former congressman and our ethically challenged former Interior Secretary, to send Zinke back to Congress. He’ll fill a seat once occupied by the likes of Jeannette Rankin, Mike Mansfield, Lee Metcalf and Pat Williams. This is politically trading down on an epic scale, rather like swapping your new Bentley for a rusted out Edsel you can’t get started.

My old South Dakota stomping ground once had a Democratic Party. It doesn’t anymore. There a very Trumpy, made for TV governor, Kristi Noem, used her position of public trust to pressure a state agency to provide preferential treatment for her daughter, and spent most of her term flying around the country to raise her national profile. Noem won with 62% of the vote, proving that many – maybe most – red state conservatives are willing to tolerate a little garden variety corruption as long as their side wins.

There will more than enough time – too much time – for the extended postmortems and the already endless speculation about 2024, but this much seems fairly clear.

The ol’ US of A is profoundly divided, a country riven by one side’s willingness to embrace grievance, demonstrable lies and entertain authoritarianism, while the other side thrashes about to barely compete in a majority of states, often failing to supply a compelling narrative about the economy or the future.

Democrats in places like Idaho and South Dakota must make a choice. Continue the old practice of working from the top down, failing miserably in doing so – the Idaho gubernatorial candidate had the worst Democratic showing since Calvin Coolidge was in the White House – or embrace a bottom up strategy that begins with an all-out appeal to younger voters, many of whom haven’t been alive long enough to see how a two party system once worked.

The party must go both extremely local and determinedly old school, with a relentless focus on engaging voters where they are. It won’t be quick or immediately satisfying, but doing the same old thing isn’t either.

Where abortion was an issue, Democrats – again with the help of younger voters – prevailed. Pro-choice provisions succeeded in nominally Democratic Michigan and solidly Republican Kentucky.

Where abortion rights were on the ballot they prevailed

As University of Montana political scientist Rob Saldin and I observed immediately after May’s stunning Supreme Court decision overturning abortion protections, Idaho’s 1990 experience with the issue offers a big tell. That election, Cecil Andrus’s fourth term, marks the modern high water mark for Idaho Democrats, in no small part because the then-governor framed the anti-choice issue as one of vast Republican overreach.

“If the issue is framed correctly,” Saldin and I wrote for the Washington Post, “the sense of grievance surrounding abortion that has long propelled the right will shift, energizing voters looking to preserve access to abortion and catalyzing their support.” And it is happening.

One outcome of this wild midterm election would have passed without comment before 2020 – there was no rigged outcome. Elections from Pennsylvania to Arizona were run professionally and fairly. To believe otherwise is to live in a Trumpian la la land where a rigged election is the only way to explain why a twice impeached failed real estate developer who only won against the weakest Democratic candidate since Michael Dukakis, lost in 2020.

Both parties are due a reckoning, as should happen after every election. Democrats need to commit to a kitchen table agenda and the kind of blunt language Harry Truman used so effectively. The party needs to compete aggressively in rural America, just as it does on the left coast. Democrats need more of Jon Tester, the blue collar farmer from Montana, and more like new senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a tattooed exponent of no nonsense politics who beat a slick, quack TV doctor like a drum, and Fetterman won after suffering a stroke during the campaign.

The Republican reckoning will be vastly more unpleasant, as well as more important to the future of the country. Republicans seem sure to have a wafer-thin margin in the House of Representatives and the most radical right wingers in the party seem determined to display immediately why they shouldn’t be anywhere near political power. The crazy caucus already has the knives out for would-be speaker Kevin McCarthy, and like John Boehner and Paul Ryan before him McCarthy will likely be no match for fellow Republicans wielding pitchforks.

And Republicans will eventually have to deal – or not – with the insurrectionist wing of their party, a genuine problem in Idaho where militia leader Ammon Bundy pulled 17 percent of the vote.

And, of course, there is the ghost of Mar a Lago. What to do with the cancer growing on the Grand Old Party, what the Wall Street Journal – yes, that Wall Street Journal – termed “the Republican Party’s biggest loser?”

Sane and sober Republicans surely know Donald Trump would gladly burn the party to the ground if it served his malicious purposes. Better get the fire extinguishers ready.

The recent election wasn’t a diabolic mess for democracy, thank the lord, but rather a choice for more of the same. The party that does some soul-searching and recalibrating to find a new and better path forward for the country is the party to favor the next time we whip ourselves into a frenzy over an election.

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

You may find something here of interest …

“Don’t Join the Book Burners”

In June of 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower delivered the commencement speech at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. That old speech is strangely relevant again. This piece from a student who was there.

“I was not thinking of Sen. Joseph McCarthy as I watched Eisenhower rise to deliver what were expected to be his brief remarks. But Eisenhower decided to add something more substantive.

“‘Don’t join the book burners,” Ike said.'”

Here’s the link:

Is this the end of Britishness?

Ian Jack was a terrific British journalist and editor. Jack died recently and a lot of folks in the Mother Country are remembering his enormous body of work, including this piece written at the time Scotland was considering independence.

The pull of Scottish independence remains strong

The writing is superb. The history lesson valuable. The storytelling marvelous.

“Is it, as VS Naipaul once remarked of British culture, all over?

“During the past dozen years, the Scottish National party has worked an astonishing transformation, turning the tables so that unionism now looks sentimental – the home of exhausted tradition – while independence stands for energetic progress. Over that time, the death of Britishness has been predicted as often as the death of the novel, but it has managed to survive and even to grow.”

It’s a long and lovely read.

When bipartisanship really happened

I wrote a piece recently for a wonderful online publication – The Daily Montanan.

For the essay, I drew on the research I’ve done for a new book – coming in 2023. The book is the story of the political and personal relationship between Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield of Montana and minority leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois.

Everett Dirksen and Mike Mansfield: Giants in the Senate

The two men worked together, in a beautiful bipartisan way, to pass civil rights and voting rights legislation, create Medicare and ratify the first major nuclear arms control treaty, and they supported the president during a tense showdown over missiles in Cuba.

“When President John Kennedy had to confront the Kremlin’s nuclear threat in 1962, he enjoyed, indeed solicited, bipartisan congressional support for his strategy, even to the point of insisting that the Republican leader of the United States Senate suspend his re-election campaign in order to participate in urgent consultations at the White House. In our times of fractured partisanship when Republican and Democratic congressional leaders seem barely able to talk to one another let alone offer words of encouragement and support while reasoning through a crisis together with a president, the domestic political lessons of that long ago nuclear showdown bear remembering – and emulating.”

The book was great fun to work on. Here’s a sneak preview.

For those who are thinking democracy dodged a bullet this week – you’re right. There is much work to do. Be about it, friends. All the best.

2022 Election, GOP, Idaho Politics

It Wasn’t Inevitable …

Posted on by mjohnson

The moral collapse of the American conservative movement has taken place with remarkable speed.

The movement that advanced a measured, careful, temple worthy LDS Church bishop, Mitt Romney, as its presidential candidate just a decade ago has morphed at warp speed into an election denying, white-centric party of grievance and bat crazy conspiracy.

The Republican Party that put forward Romney and then-Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan as its candidates in 2012 was, measured in the long arc of conservative politics, pretty standard issue: tax cuts and controlling the size of government with a conservative commitment to national security and foreign policy. Romney’s characterization of Vladimir Putin as the world’s greatest geopolitical threat was widely dismissed a decade ago. Now with many in his party openly embracing the Butcher of Ukraine, Romney seems a genuine prophet. 

Mitt was criticized for carrying his dog on top of his car not for wanting to be an authoritarian

Romney was hardly a great presidential candidate. His private equity career was easily demonized, particularly after his campaign was roiled by a tin ear remark claiming that “47 percent” of the country were effectively deadbeats. Even then few of his partisan detractors could reasonably claim that Romney was going to take his party over an authoritarian cliff.   

Mitt didn’t traffic in hate. Didn’t demean his opponent. He didn’t accuse Barack Obama of being a dangerous Muslim and didn’t surround himself with a bottom feeding collection of conspiracists, grifters, law breakers and people most of us would cross the street to avoid.

Unlike the current leader of his party, Romney hasn’t spread lies about the recent attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband and he didn’t refuse to concede an election he clearly lost.

So, what happened to the Grand Old Party? Well, start with the fact that the nutjob fringe has long been lurking in the dark corners of a party that once celebrated Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and The Gipper. Goldwater gave the Birchers and the Klan a dog whistle in 1964, while opposing civil rights legislation and claiming “extremism” as a conservative virtue. Nixon went all “law and order” in 1968, while stoking fear and loathing among his “silent majority.” And Ronald Reagan was smart enough to know that cementing a solid, deeply race conscious American South for the GOP long-term was essential to winning the White House. Ronnie was also savvy, as Democrats were not, about courting middle class, blue collar white voters who had seen their small towns and factories wither and die.

But this represents only a partial answer to what happened. The rest of the story is the near total capitulation of elected Republican “elites” who have hunkered in office while many of their followers celebrate political violence and rally to Putin.

Only since Romney’s run has his party come to resemble – and emulate – the full-on authoritarianism of would-be rightwing dictators in places like Brazil and Hungary. The current leader of the party of Reagan doesn’t praise the western democratic alliance. He likes the “strength” of the new Chinese Mao or the “brilliance” of a 21st Century Stalin. And who counters him?

This is a party of moral rot and character perversion, a danger to the very idea of democratic pluralism.

Idaho is as good a petri dish as any to assess the wholesale abandonment of conservative principle in pursuit of political power, no matter the cost to democracy.

Next week Idaho’s very conservative Republican governor, Brad Little, will win re-election against a no-name Democratic challenger and the widely acknowledged leader of a West-wide militia movement, a law breaking radical named Ammon Bundy, who is running as an independent.

This race is a political weathervane indicating how far, far right the unhinged Idaho white nationalists are willing to go – people I respect worry that Bundy will win 20 percent of what would  normally be the GOP vote – as well as a missed opportunity for Little and other officeholding elites who might have used the contest to assert control of a party they have largely lost.

Ammon Bundy gets a free pass from Idaho’s GOP “elites”

Imagine had Little, knowing he could coast to re-election, made the election a referendum on a more sober, sane and serious type of conservatism. What if he had made Bundy and his violent ways an explicit example of what is wrong with the radical right? Yet, near as I can tell Little hasn’t uttered a word about Bundy, his antics or lawless past. And no debate and not much of a campaign.

I’ll just remind you that Bundy organized demonstrations outside elected officials homes aiming to intimidate during the worst of Covid times. He and some of his followers broke down a door in the state capitol building, a stunt ultimately earning Bundy and his big hat a jail term. The judge who sentenced Bundy after he blew off a requirement for community service told the radical had made a “mockery of the sentence you received.”

Bundy threatened state police officers with a promise that, “I’ll come after you, each one of you personally.” He is still embroiled in a lawsuit with a Boise hospital where he forced a shutdown. Bundy’s ridiculous 2016 takeover of a wildlife refuge in eastern Oregon where a protester died should have marked the end of his rise, but radical politicians in Idaho and elsewhere embraced him with little or no pushback from people like Brad Little. Now he’s on the ballot.

Bundy has been endorsed by the PAC connected to the radical Idaho Freedom Foundation (IFF), an anti-education, anti-government, anti-science lobby group that is no friend of Governor Little. Bundy also “enjoys” the endorsement of Roger Stone, the corrupt Trump advisor, Ron Paul, the crackpot former Texas congressman and Louisiana Klan leader David Duke.

If it’s true in politics that you are defined by your enemies these jokers would be worthy enemies.

Had Little the intestinal fortitude to cast the decency spotlight on this collection of radical right misfits he might have begun the process of leading the Idaho GOP back to sanity. That he has stayed quiet while Bundy peddled nonsense about schools, the state budget, the courts, Covid vaccines and more explains the ultimate moral rot that has eroded the foundations of legitimate conservative politics.

Little and other Republican elites know that Bundy – you could substitute the name Trump, as well – represents a real danger, long ago proving what he’s capable of doing. Rather than making him an example of what is wrong with the conspiracy mangled radical right, Little has ignored him hoping he’ll go away. He won’t.

At so many points in the remarkably swift descent of the modern GOP into a fun house arcade of conspiracy, mendacity and hate the Brad Little’s of the party could have – but did not – make an explicit stand for truth, decency, personal character and a better way. 

It’s really too bad history doesn’t offer us examples of what can happen when hate peddling demagogues given to violence are left unchecked by people who should know better.

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

Some things I’ve found that you may find of interest …

Was Nixon’s Reelection Ted Kennedy’s Fault?

There is, for good reason, great anticipation about John A. Farrell’s new biography of Edward Kennedy. Farrell’s book about Richard Nixon is one of the great political biographies in recent memory. His Ted Kennedy book looks to be just as good.

John Farrell and the cover of his new book

This piece by Farrell appeared recently in Politico.

“Kennedy’s career has many might-have-beens. The most widely known occurred in 1991, when one of his investigators, Ricki Seidman, was the first Senate aide to speak to Anita Hill and hear her allegation that Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her in the years before his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

The piece goes on to explore Kennedy’s role in not investigating Watergate in 1972. Here is the link:

Reading Langston Hughes’s Wartime Reporting From the Spanish Civil War

Black Americans were some of the most powerful voices warning about the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, including Langston Hughes’s warnings about Franco’s Spain.

“Hughes was not a bombastic speaker, but rather spoke in an even, assured tone. He could sometimes appear bored while reading his older poems for audiences, but when discussing contemporary events, his understated and direct speaking style conveyed passion and urgency. ‘Yes, we Negroes in America do not have to be told what Fascism is in action,’ he said. ‘We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.'”

A fine piece by historian Matthew F. Delmont in Literary Hub.

Russians Used a US Firm to Funnel Funds to GOP in 2018

This story has flown under the political radar in the run up to the midterm election. It should be getting more play.

The story illustrates two huge problems: the toothless tiger of the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) and the fact that vast sums of foreign money continue to pollute our politics.

“Anyone who follows campaign finance knows that the FEC has been toothless for years due to GOP commissioners’ opposition to any enforcement of laws designed to oversee money in politics. But Weintraub and Broussard suggest the agency hit a new low by letting the US firm, American Ethane, off with a deal in which it agreed to pay only a small civil fine.”

The FEC was created in the post-Watergate world and it’s never been particularly effective in policing money in federal politics. It’s a scandal. One of many, I fear. Here’s the story from Mother Jones.

That’s it. Vote for democracy.

Economy

When Monopoly Was More Than a Board Game …

Posted on by mjohnson

In 1933, during the darkest days of the Great Depression, a Kansas City businessman, Charles Lyon, made a driving tour of the Midwest. Lyon would later write to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and offer his observations. He didn’t like what he saw.

“Every good town had the same stores,” Lyon wrote. “The downtown of one city was a replica of the next one, and for every chain store that reared its head, three individually owned stores laid down and died.”

Lyon’s discourse on the predatory nature of chain stores and their impact on small town America is recounted in a 2008 article by historian Daniel Scroop in the scholarly journal “American Studies.”

“Chain stores pay very little toward the upkeep of a town,” Lyon wrote in the 1930s. “They gradually kill it.”

Woolworth’s, one of the first of the giant chain stores in the 1920s and 1930s

Remember that line as you contemplate the history of what didn’t happen to slow or eliminate the monopolization of most of American retailing in the last half of the 20th Century. And reflect what it means for your grocery bill when Kroger combines with Albertsons, and together this grocery behemoth – the largest and second largest grocery chains in America – will have more than 6,000 grocery stores spread across the country.

Political and social pushback against the chain store – and branch banking – in the 1920s and 1930s is a mostly a forgotten chapter in 20th Century American history. It is a chapter, nonetheless, that illustrates some of what has happened to small town, rural America, the struggling American middle class, as well as notions about what a healthy, vibrant economy actually includes.

The anti-chain store movement gained traction in the West, Midwest and South during the seemingly prosperous Roaring 20s. The Missouri legislature considered measures to limit chain stores in 1923 and by the end of the decade several states had put various restrictions – mostly tax-related – into effect. The Depression accelerated the movement and by 1937 nearly 30 states had anti-chain store laws on the books.

Woolworth’s, the drug store chain, became a target of many of the anti-chain efforts, fueled not only by the vast number of stores the chain developed in the 1930s, but also because of the firm’s brutal efforts to beat back union organizing efforts. Workers in some stores resorted to “sit down strikes” that served to paralyze business and frustrate customers and managers. While the strikes made headlines, they ultimately did little to hinder the constantly expanding development of chain stores.

By the 1940s, the leader of the anti-bigness, pro-consumer, anti-monopoly forces was a crusading congressman from Texas named Wright Patman, a politician who, as his biographer has said, combined two political traditions: populism and liberalism.

Patman pushed legislation to create a national chain store tax where, as historian Scroop wrote, “chains would be taxed from $50 to $1,000 per store depending upon their number and location. Because this figure would then be multiplied by the number of states in which a chain had stores, there was a chance that the tax might in some cases exceed annual profits. If this scale had been applied in 1938, for example, the biggest chain store company, the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A&P), would have been taxed $524 million on its $882 million in sales.”

This simple idea – taxing bigness – failed, and the anti-chain store crusade, as well as state and local laws to control the monopolies, eventually faded away.

You can see the legacy of this hollowing out and embrace of monopoly bigness in today’s Walmart, Amazon, Costco, Home Depot, CVS, Walgreens and Dollar General, the ubiquitous discounter with nearly 19,000 stores and minimum wage jobs. You’ll almost always find Dollar General stores at the far edge of rural communities that have lost the kinds of home grown retailers that once existed in America’s small towns. The bigness movement also involves newspaper and broadcast consolidation, cable TV systems, hotel chains, even the not so local Taco Bell.

Back to the Kroger-Albertsons mash up which hit a speed bump – maybe – this week when a bipartisan group of state attorney generals called on Albertson’s to back off a planned $4 billion dividend to its shareholder while the $24.6 billion merger deal is evaluated for its anti-trust implications.

Number one wants to combine with number two …

Thanks to the AGs for looking out for competition, but you don’t need to be a Harvard-trained economist to know what the merger implications will be – less competition, fewer employees in retail jobs and surely higher prices at the checkout aisle. The dividend payout, the AGs suggest, could hamper Albertson’s ability to compete, weakening Kroger’s merger partner before the merger, which may be the real reason behind handing shareholders an extremely handsome payday just before the deal closes.

“Anticompetitive mergers have real impacts on everyday people,” said District of Columbia attorney general Karl Racine, who organized the AG’s letter. Washington AG Bob Ferguson, a Democrat, and Idaho AG Lawrence Wasden, a Republican, signed the letter directed to the CEO’s of Kroger and Albertsons.

“We’re deeply concerned about the level of concentration in essential industries,” Racine said, “such as grocery stores. And we’re asking Albertsons to not proceed with the payout while we thoroughly assess whether this merger is anti-competitive, anti-consumer or anti-worker. While we trust that Albertsons will adhere to our request, we are actively exploring other options to achieve our objectives, including litigation.”

Here is one of the ironies of these massive mergers: the rationale behind the big getting bigger is that stores like Albertsons need to compete against other huge retailers like Whole Foods or Walmart. Yet advocates of supersizing grocery stores in to fewer and fewer companies, while letting these stores sell gas and virtually everything else, ignores that a largely unconstrained system that demands a capitalism of bigness represents a circular argument – we must get bigger because everyone else is getting bigger.

The ignored parties here are consumer and workers. A growing, robust American capitalism won’t be built around a few CEOs or institutional shareholders getting fabulously wealthy, while much of the rest of society barely scrapes by. Those Woolworth and A&P stories in the 1930s that grew too big in their day have become today’s Kroger and CVS, while the American middle class, the families that buy the groceries, the washing machines, the bedroom sets and the coffee makers struggle to meet a mortgage and send the kids to college.

The big get bigger, the rich get richer, and the engine that really drives the economy – the consumer – is less and less a part of the American economic calculation.

The politicians and social activists in the 1930s who recognized the dangers inherent in concentrated bigness weren’t wrong. We had a chance to build a different kind of capitalism, that we didn’t helps explain a lot about your grocery bill, not to mention the depressed state of much of small town America.

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

A few other items that are worth your time …

The Portland Van Abductions

A deep dive into the Portland street protests in 2020, including the still mysterious “van abductions” by unidentified law enforcement officials.

“The video of Evelyn’s arrest went viral on social media; the account of Mark’s arrest first broke on Oregon Public Broadcasting and was re-reported in the national news. 

“The men who took Mark and Evelyn did not identify themselves as federal law enforcement. There are no publicly known records of their arrest or detention. To this day, it’s unclear who took them — what agency they were from, let alone what their names were.”

From The Verge.

How World War I Crushed the American Left

I am a huge fan of the historian Adam Hochschild who has a new book American Midnight about how World War I dramatically changed American politics. It looks like a fascinating study.

“The crushing of socialism—and a new bugbear, communism—was total. The treatment of Eugene Debs was a stark illustration of the crackdown. Debs had won 6 percent of the popular vote in 1912, as the Socialists were making gains at the local and state level, threatening both Republicans and Democrats. By 1917, Hochschild notes, there were 23 Socialist mayors in office across the country, leading cities including Toledo, Pasadena, and Milwaukee. Debs opposed the war steadfastly, but he was so widely respected that the government feared directly attacking him. Instead, a disinformation campaign was launched—by whom, historians are still unsure—which implied that he had changed his position.”

Debs went to jail, the very idea of socialism became a third rail of American politics.

A review from The New Republic.

‘A zombie party’: the deepening crisis of conservatism

This piece about conservatism in the United Kingdom is a couple of years old, but it does highlight many issues that dominate modern conservative politics in the UK and in the United States.

“In Britain and the US, once the movement’s most fertile sources of ideas, voters, leaders and governments, a deep crisis of conservatism has been building since the end of the Reagan and Thatcher governments. It is a crisis of competence, of intellectual energy and coherence, of electoral effectiveness, and – perhaps most serious of all – of social relevance.

“This crisis has often been obscured. The collapse of Soviet communism in the 80s, the apparent triumph of capitalism during the 90s, the western left’s own splits, dilemmas and failures, and the ongoing surge of rightwing populism have all helped maintain conservatism’s surface confidence.”

Good piece from The Guardian.

The grand old man and the ingénue queen

I’m admittedly an Anglophile, as fascinated by the mess that is British politics these days as I am appalled by US politics. So … Winston Churchill and the late Queen.

The Queen and Winston

“Winston churchill was besotted with Queen Elizabeth II: the word is precise. He worshipped and adored her. His relations with some other members of the royal family were, on occasion, complicated — not least when King Edward VII was sleeping with his mother. But for the late Queen he had nothing but an almost puppy-dog love.”

Fun story.

That’s all I got. Be safe. Vote like democracy depended upon it – and it does. Thanks for reading.