Stromata Blog

GOP Turbulence, Then and Now

Hakeem Jeffries, an anti-democracy leader of the Democratic Party, has already spammed my e-inbox with half a dozen messages gloating about the inability of the Republican House majority to elect a Speaker and get started with legislative business. (As I had not known until today, Representatives cannot take their oaths of office until a Speaker is in place to swear them in. The most powerful member of the House is elected by men and women who have not yet made or renewed their oaths to uphold the Constitution of the United States.)

Every news story about this stasis mentions that nothing like it has occurred for the past one hundred years, not since 1923, when nine ballots were taken before Frederick Huntington Gillett was elected Speaker of the House for the third time.

The current contretemps echoes the previous one in some ways. Speaker Gillett, like Speaker-aspirant Kevin McCarthy, did not stand out. First elected to Congress in 1892, he was a conventional Republican of his time and rose to the Speakership mostly through longevity. He followed a succession of domineering Speakers – “Czar” Reed, Joe Cannon, Champ Clark. He was chosen, in part, because he was not expected to be like them, and he wasn’t. He was a “go along, get along” type, more prominent on the Washington social scene than in the Capitol building.

When he first became Speaker, in 1919, the GOP had just reversed the eight years of Democratic control that had flowed from the Republican-Progressive split. In 1920, running under Warren Harding’s banner of “Return to Normalcy”, the Republican majority ballooned from 240-195 to 302-133. In the off-year election of 1922, though, Republicans, weighed down by scandals, lost a net of 77 seats, retaining 225 versus 210 held by Democrats and left-wing splinter parties.

The narrow majority included two dissident groups: “drys”, who demanded strict enforcement of the recently enacted Eighteenth Amendment, and a small cadre of progressives loyal to Wisconsin Senator Robert LaFollette (who would run for President as a third party candidate in 1924). Near the close of the previous Congress (the 67th, which, under the system then in place, adjourned sine die in March 1923), the drys had floated the idea of putting up a candidate against Gillett, who was reputed to be skeptical of Prohibition. That effort died out fairly quickly.

The progressives waited until the 68th Congress convened on December 3, 1923, to make their move. Then 22 Republicans voted for candidates for Speaker other than Gillett. Their object wasn’t to elect someone else. As the Boston Globe observed at the time:

The insurgents neither tried to elect nor to defeat a speaker today. They were aiming over his head at the machine behind him. Their object in blocking the election was to bring the Old Guard to terms in making up the Rules Committee and other powerful committees and in modifying the custom of railroading bills through the House without permitting amendments to be offered from the floor. [Boston Globe, p. 12 (Dec. 4, 1923)

After a day of negotiations, the factions reached a compromise, and Rep. Gillett was reelected on December 5th after nine ballots.

In some respects, the progressives’ complaint in 1923 resembles that of the present-day holdouts.

But what exactly do the these Republican holdouts want?

Texas’s Chip Roy, one of the original 19 rebels, offered this answer on the House floor yesterday: “I want the tools or I want the leadership to stop the swamp from running over the average American every single day.”

The statement is somewhat vague – the “leadership” Roy wants would be a speaker such as Jim Jordan of Ohio, but it’s not clear what “the tools” are that Roy could be given in exchange for a “yes” vote for McCarthy.

Roy elaborated somewhat in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Tuesday. “I need to make sure that the Rules Committee is structured in such a way that those of us who are what I would call fiscal conservatives” are able “to stop the sort of train of the swamp,” Roy said.

The great difference between the two sets of rebels is that the 1923 progressives were ideologically distant from the rest of the Republican Party. Their not-so-covert hope (which would be largely disappointed) was that, if the House rules were reformed, an alliance of progressives and Democrats would wield a majority that could block President Coolidge’s legislative agenda.

The 2023 malcontents have hardly any notable policy disagreements with the rest of their party. Perhaps Jim Geraghty is correct to say, “Right now, in the House, the GOP is a nominal or technical majority party with a large faction which has no interest in acting like a majority. They may well be happier being in the minority.” He quotes a recent (pay-walled) essay in the Financial Times, which argues that an irrepressible thirst for drama, rather than any incompetence in governing, “is what stops populists holding power for long”.

Put another way, fascism is about winning and doing. Populism is about losing and cocking a snook at the winners. As a movement, it is at its happiest as a large minority of the electorate: enough to sustain its own media ecosystem, provide earning opportunities for grifters and perhaps sway the official policy of the day.

The most vociferous of the GOP populists insist that Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell and their ilk don’t really want to win. But who is trying hard not to win this time? To quote Jim Geraghty again:

Every now and then, the hashtag “#DemsInDisarray” spreads on Twitter, and oftentimes it is fair. But a certain amount of internal friction and squabbling is more or less baked into the cake of being a majority party. You’ve got more members and more factions, all pushing for their priorities to be atop the to-do list. It’s not that, say, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Abigail Spanberger agree on everything. It’s just that they’re rarely willing to let those differences become such an issue that the party can’t get things done. Both the progressives and centrists – eh, let’s face it, hardline progressives and slightly less hardline progressives – believe they have a vested interest in a functioning legislative majority. Based on what we’re seeing on Capitol Hill this week, a small but pivotal number of House Republicans just don’t feel any obligation to help their party get things done.

Why are Democrats more frequently in the majority in legislative chambers? Well, it probably helps that all their members want to be in the majority.

Red Shift, Blue Shift

In the post immediately below, I expressed puzzlement at the Republican Party’s underperformance in this year’s House elections. The conventional wisdom has long been that Democrats are concentrated in urban centers, where they rack up Soviet-like majorities. Republicans, on the other hand, are spread out. They win seats by smaller margins but win more of them. That wasn’t the case in 2022: GOP candidates got more votes in toto, but the resulting minuscule majority of Congresscritters was in many ways the product of good luck, such as the New York Court of Appeals’ unanticipated rejection of a Democratic gerrymander (turning a likely five seat loss into a three seat gain), rather than good demographics.

Michael Barone, whose knowledge of the American electorate is unsurpassed, suggests that the demographics are shifting beneath the parties’ feet. He contrasts 2022 with 2012, when Republicans won 234 seats in the House while narrowly losing the overall popular vote. This year, a popular vote lead of about four percentage points yielded somewhere between 220 and 222 seats, just over the majority threshold of 218.

The most important reason for the Republicans’ reduced harvest of House seats has been a reduction in clustering. Previously, heavily Democratic voters – Blacks, Hispanics and gentry liberals – have been clustered geographically in central cities, sympathetic suburbs and university towns, while Republican voters have been spread more evenly around the rest of the country.

The effect of clustering can be seen in the number of House districts carried by different presidents. Both Bush and Obama were reelected with 51% of the popular vote. That enabled Bush in 2004 to carry 255 of the 435 House districts. But Obama in 2012 carried only 209. Biden, with 51% in 2020, raised that number to 226. . . .

You can see the evidence [of reduced clustering] from which party won seats with supermajorities. In 2012, 71 Democrats and only 32 Republicans were elected to the House with 70% or more of the vote. Twenty-eight Democrats got 80% or more, whereas only three Republicans did.

This year, by my preliminary count, the 70-plus percent districts moved closer to parity – 58 Democrats and 39 Republicans. Only 18 Democrats and five Republicans won with 80% or more.

Why has Democratic clustering diminished? For reasons that aren’t hard to fathom. People who can are leaving the misgoverned central cities, and those who remain are less likely to see any reason to vote, when their choices are criminal-friendly Democrats or demonized Republicans.

Central city turnout was way down, as compared to the last off-year election in 2018 – down 19% in New York City but up 0.3% in the suburbs and upstate; down 13% in Philadelphia, but up 8% elsewhere in Pennsylvania; down 15% in Detroit’s Wayne County, but up 6% elsewhere in Michigan; down 12% in Milwaukee County, but up 1% elsewhere in Wisconsin; down 24% in Chicago’s Cook County, down only 8% in Chicago’s collar counties and downstate.

Where do people who leave failed cities like Chicago and Detroit go? Moving to another central city is hardly likely to be attractive. What’s the point of trading Chicago for Philadelphia? The realistic alternatives are either purplish suburbs around the big cities or red areas like Florida, Texas and Tennessee. Mr. Barone notes that blacks have been moving in large numbers to the Atlanta suburbs, a big reason why the Democratic Party is more viable in Georgia than anywhere else in the Deep South.

What the voting data suggest is unsurprising: Conservatives emigrate to areas where conservatism is already strong. Liberals have few well-governed liberal bastions to choose from, so they go to politically marginal jurisdictions, where most of them retain their voting habits and help Democrats win swing districts.

While it appears that the era during which the GOP could leverage small overall vote advantages into large House majorities is over, Mr. Barone sees a bright silver lining:

Thus, the Republicans’ 51% of the total House vote produced a disappointing number of House seats.

However, it also signaled a residual Republican strength. Republican House candidates had a hard time dislodging Democrats in marginal districts. But relatively few were weighted down by highly publicized endorsements of Donald Trump’s backward-looking insistence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen; the few identified with that view ran significantly behind the many who didn’t.

Instead, Republican House candidates ran ahead of their party’s Senate candidates in such states as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. They also ran strongly in tandem with landslide winners Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio in Florida.

Republican House candidates won 58% of the popular vote in the South and 53% in the Midwest, two regions that together account for 298 of the 538 electoral votes. Duplicating that support is one way an unproblematic Republican nominee could top 270 electoral votes in 2024.

A Republican President with a closely divided Congress wouldn’t be Paradise, but there are plenty of less attractive scenarios.

A Week After the Day After

We now know that the Republican Party has emerged from the 2022 midterm elections with what may be the narrowest House majority in history and that the party’s best hope in the Senate is a continuation of the 50-50 de facto minority of the past two years. The Internet is naturally awash in analysis and recriminations sparked by this unexpected outcome. Far it be from me to add to the clutter, but I do have some observations.

First, although we don’t yet have final vote totals (California will, it seems, be counting until Christmas), it is clear that Democrats targeted their votes much more “efficiently” than Republicans. GOP House candidates drew three or four million more votes than Democrats yet won only a scintilla over half the seats. That is a reversal from 2020, when a Democratic edge of nearly five million votes yielded a similarly bare majority. (House election statistics for 1920 through 2020 are available here.) The explanation of that result is intuitively obvious: Democrats congregate disproportionately in a small number of urban area and “waste” votes on candidates who face no serious opposition.

Explaining the 2022 result is more difficult. Republican voters didn’t suddenly become more concentrated. The map still colors the vast majority of the land area of the United States red. Somehow, though, this year saw Republican candidates in close contests consistently stumble inches short of victory. This is a conundrum for which I have no solution. 

Second, there is general agreement that Democratic candidates benefited markedly from the vast expansion of mail-in voting, a “temporary” Covid-motivated expedient that now shows signs of becoming permanent, perhaps all but universal. Mail-in balloting is an abomination. It turns secrecy into a figment (anyone who bribes or intimidates a voter can watch him fill out his ballot) and offers tempting opportunities for fraud. A small experiment by a Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist illustrates how easy it is to cast a ballot in someone else’s name:

For the past two elections, Nevada sent mail ballots to all registered voters, unless they opted out. That means around 1.8 million ballots went out. Well more than 1 million won’t be returned. Previously, a voter could request an absentee ballot for any reason. That’s more secure because ballots went only to those wanting to vote by mail.

With that many ballots floating around, there are obvious security concerns – it’s much easier to get ahold of someone else’s ballot. Someone could vote for their spouse or child who doesn’t care about politics, but was automatically registered at the DMV. In apartment complexes, ballots of previous residents have ended up in the trash. A postal worker could pocket ballots. There’s not exactly an airtight chain of custody.

Election officials, however, claim there is no need to worry. They have asserted signature verification helps prevent someone from successfully casting a ballot that doesn’t belong to them.

As I did two years ago, I tested that theory this election. I had 11 people send me a picture of their ballot envelope. I then wrote their name in my handwriting. Each voter than copied my version of their signature onto their ballot return envelope. They sent me a picture to ensure it wasn’t their normal handwriting. This simulated signing someone else’s ballot.

It’s also legal because each voter signed his or her own ballot.

If signature verification worked, all 11 of those ballots should have been set aside for mismatched signatures. Instead, six were accepted. That’s a greater than 50 percent chance of being accepted. When I did this experiment in 2020 with nine voters, eight had their ballots accepted. That was an almost 90 percent acceptance rate.

The writer suggests a fix: “To verify absentee ballots, Georgia requires a unique identifier, such as the last four digits of a driver’s license number.” That would be an improvement, though it offers no protection against bribery and intimidation – or against computer hackers or corrupt officeholders who are able to gain access to the DMV database.

The only real cure for the infirmities of vote-by-mail is to limit the practice to circumstances in which there is no feasible alternative, such as military personnel stationed abroad and individuals who cannot get to the polls for medical reasons. It’s obvious, though, that, so long as mail voting is perceived by one of the major parties as a trump (or perhaps I should say “anti-trump”) card, reform will be impossible.

Therefore, the Republican Party should work vigorously to change that perception. There’s no reason why GOP candidates can’t encourage their supporters to vote by mail, go from door to door in “red” neighborhoods “harvesting” ballots (where legal) and publicize the locations of ballot drop boxes. Once the playing field is less tilted, people who still pay attention to good government may be able to spur a consensus in favor of the real, physical ballot box.

Third, the evidence that Donald Trump is a dead weight on the political party of which he claims to be the leader continues to grow. Dan McLaughlin has delved into exit poll data, which has limitations but strongly supports Trump-skeptical conclusions:

[Trump] is viewed unfavorably by a solid majority of the midterm voters nationally (by a 19-point margin of 58 percent to 39 percent), and in every state polled, even places such as Texas (52 percent disapproval to 45 percent approval), Ohio (53 percent to 44 percent), and North Carolina (53 percent to 43 percent) that he won two years ago. . . . And across the board, the voters who viewed Trump unfavorably voted in vast margins for the Democratic candidates. Outside of Florida and New Hampshire, Mike DeWine in Ohio was the only one of these candidates to get more than 20 percent of the vote from people with an unfavorable view of Trump (DeWine still lost those voters 69 percent to 31 percent). . . .

Twenty-eight percent of voters said they were casting their ballots to oppose Trump, while only 16 percent said they were casting votes to support Trump. Thus, the anti-Trump voters outnumbered the pro-Trump voters by 75 percent. If you run the numbers, Democrats won 59.3 percent of the combined vote of the two groups. If both groups had stayed home, by contrast, the remaining 58 percent of voters who said that Trump was not a factor in their vote broke 58 percent to 40 percent for Republicans – a whopping 18-point win that would have satisfied even the wildest fantasies of the Big Red Tsunami.

The same story appears in race after race. In 16 of the 19 races polled, voters who cast their ballots without reference to Trump made up a majority, between 51 and 56 percent of the vote. In the other three (the North Carolina Senate race and the two Arizona races), they were just under half. In 18 out of 19 races, those voters supported the Republican candidate, frequently by wide margins. Among voters who didn’t cast a ballot with Trump in mind, Kari Lake won by 36 points, Blake Masters by 28, Adam Laxalt by 22, Don Bolduc by 19, Tim Michels by 17, Tudor Dixon and Dr. Oz by seven apiece, and Herschel Walker by six. Only Doug Mastriano was a bad enough candidate to lose on his own merits. But in each of those races, the anti-Trump voters swamped the pro-Trump voters by a wide enough margin to cancel that out.

The moral? So long as Donald Trump is a figure whom voters care about, Republicans will be running steeply uphill.

Fourth and finally, much of the doom and gloom currently circulating is wildly exaggerated. Pace Senator Hawley, a party that holds half of each house of Congress isn’t ready for a funeral shroud. A disappointment is not a debacle.

Addendum: Sean Trende, who knows as much about matters psephological as anyone, offers some answers (albeit not complete) to the riddle of why the GOP gained far fewer House seats than would have been predicted on the basis of its share of the popular vote.

A Progressive’s Constitution

Briahna Joy Gray, who was the press secretary of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 Presidential campaign, contends that Joe Biden’s “loan forgiveness” plan was never intended to take effect. In her opinion –

They used the promise of student debt cancellation to induce young voter turn out -- knowing it wasn't going anywhere bc they relied on faulty legal authority.

Hard to convince me the Biden admin didn't do this intentionally.

As you probably know, last Thursday a federal judge ruled, in Brown v. U.S. Department of Education, that the President has no authority to forgive student loans without Congressional approval. The Administration has defended its action against a barrage of lawsuits not by arguing that Congressional authorization isn’t needed but that no one has the right to take the question to court.

The Brown plaintiffs found an ingenious way around the Administration’s theory (as summarized in the court’s opinion) “that no one has standing to challenge the Program because where the government is providing a benefit, nobody is harmed by the existence of that benefit” (which implies that the President has unlimited power to provide benefits to anyone and to any extent that he wishes). The plaintiffs’ counterargument was that they are student borrowers whose loans the Administration had not purported to forgive and that the Department of Education’s failure to allow the public to comment on the action before putting it into effect, as required by the Administrative Procedure Act, deprived them of their opportunity to make the case for more favorable treatment of their own indebtedness. The court held that these facts resulted in a concrete injury that can be redressed by a favorable court decision. Those are the elements needed to establish standing to bring a lawsuit.

Standing is a complex and contentious subject. Discussing the merits of the court’s opinion in Brown goes beyond the scope of this post. What interests me at the moment is Miss Gray’s reasoning. Back in December, she declared, “Biden absolutely does have the power to cancel all student debut by executive order. No congressional involvement required.” After Brown, she elaborated, saying that the President “could’ve immediately canceled student debt instead of making it a means tested program, in which case there wouldn’t have been these opportunities for people to obstruct”. The Brown plaintiffs, for instance, would have lacked standing, because their loans would have been “forgiven”.

Note that her analysis doesn’t rest on the Constitution but only on the idea that the Constitutional mandate “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law” can, through clever maneuvering, be rendered unenforceable, in which case, she evidently believes, a progressive President has no duty to abide by it.

Briahna Joy Gray is just one progressive, but does anyone imagine that she is an outlier? We’ve heard a lot this year about how “democracy is in danger”. Doesn’t the enthusiasm of a large political movement for arbitrary, unconstitutional executive action carry a whiff of dictatorship?

Keep Despair Alive!

Matt Labash, whose journalistic career was set back by his refusal to jump onto the Trump Train, has, one might think, every reason to rejoice when conservatives repudiate Donald Trump. (The latest is Virginia’s lieutenant governor, Winsome Sears, who two years ago chaired Black Americans to Re-elect President Trump.) But Mr. Labash is not at all a happy man, and it doesn’t sound like he wants to be.

What you’re probably already reading elsewhere is a lot of dopey analysis (no hyperlinks, sorry – I don’t wish to single anyone out for foolish wishful thinking after our long national nightmare) that holds that Ron DeSantis is about to wrest control of the party from Donald J. Trump, on account of the predicted Red Wave being more like a modest red eddy. As if Trump will suffer for this setback. After he already hasn’t suffered for losing two popular votes, the electoral college (in 2020), and helping lose the House and the Senate when they were on his presidential watch. Not to mention encouraging his own Capitol to be sacked, and his vice president hanged. So good luck with that theory. I don’t share it.

It’s true, of course, that pixel pushers’ opinions don’t necessarily reflect or influence the ballots of flesh-and-blood voters. We don’t yet have any post-election polls pitting Trump against DeSantis (or Pence or Abbott or Youngkin or Haley or Noem or anyone else on the GOP’s extraordinarily strong bench). It’s conceivable that Mr. Labash is correct when he writes, “DeSantis, if he is to win, ultimately has to break off adherents to a personality cult, when the cultist-in-chief is still alive and kicking, and is already pillorying Ron DeSantis to his sheeple.”

On the other hand, the “personality cult” originated in The Donald’s self-portrayal as an almost mythical “winner”, a title that his victory (over the most hapless Democratic candidate since John W. Davis) seemingly confirmed. The subsequent losses that Mr. Labash cites could be overlooked or excused or explained away. Nobody except progressive advocates of plebiscitary government pays much attention to popular vote totals in Presidential elections. Midterm Republican losses in 2018 followed a well-established historical pattern. It was possible to believe that defeat in 2020 was the product of a “steal”. The Democrats’ Senate victories in Georgia in December 2020 were supposedly Brian Kemp’s fault. And so on. Although the excuses and explanations were decreasingly convincing, no single failure was enough to start a preference cascade; Trump endorsements could still propel candidates with dubious political skills to victory in Republican primaries. But the load on the camel’s back was getting heavier and heavier.

Three factors, I believe, turned the “Red Trickle” into an anti-Trump torrent. First, the expectation of a Red Tide, even a Red Tsunami, was universal. Second, its non-appearance conspicuously resulted from the defeats of candidates who owed their places on the ballot to Trump (and, to be fair, to not-so-covert Democratic campaigning for “Mega-MAGA” candidates in the primaries). Third, Trump instantly reacted like a loser. Contrary to widespread Internet opinion, Trump voters are human beings rather than zombies. They have struggled against adversity or have witnessed the struggles of family members and friends. They have to deal with people who won’t take responsibility for mistakes, bully anyone who crosses them, brag of their own prowess, expect others to do their bidding and, in general, believe that the world owes them unearned loyalty. Not many of them hold a high opinion of people like that.

The latest Trump tantrum came this afternoon: a syntactically confusing and eccentrically capitalized e-mail to supporters. As John Hinderaker comments, “This would be an embarrassment coming from a twelve-year-old. Time to get Trump off the stage before he does further damage to our party and our country.”

A Preference Avalanche Buries The Donald

Approximately 36 hours ago, Donald Trump was the single most powerful figure in the Republican Party. He boasted about his poll numbers compared to other GOP heavyweights. “There it is, Trump at 71. Ron De-Sanctimonious at 10 percent. Mike Pence at 7; oh, Mike Pence [is] doing better than I thought.”

Even among Republicans who weren’t huge fans of the former President, there was barely concealed resignation, a feeling that a Trump try at emulating Grover Cleveland would sweep aside any competitors. Even commentators who were eager to see Governor DeSantis head a “Stop the Donald” movement seemed to have little confidence that it could succeed.

What a difference a night of disappointments makes. Perhaps there is some Internet haven where Trump loyalists are blaming Republican defeats on Mitch McConnell and nodding along with Trump’s own pre-election analysis: “Well, I think if they win, I should get all the credit. If they lose, I should not be blamed at all.” If there is such a place, it is well hidden. Jim Geraghty has singled out a statement that encapsulates what has suddenly become the prevailing mood. Tim Anderson is one of members of the Virginia House of Delegates who was elected along with Governor Youngkin. He had a reputation as “an outspoken Trump Republican”. There’s nary a of RINO on his campaign website. Here is the statement that he issued this morning:

While it appears likely Trump will announce he is running for President – I will not be supporting him.

While Trump was President, we lost a supermajority in the House of Delegates, a majority in the Senate and in 2019 Democrats controlled all state government for 2 years – radically changing Virginia. After Trump lost, the GOP gained Delegate seats back and won all 3 statewide offices. I call this the Trump effect. One thing Trump does very well in Virginia is mobilizing the left to vote against him and anyone who supports him.

I care about Virginia more than anything. Trump running for President is the absolute worst thing that can happen to Virginia state politics. We must take a different direction and the Virginia GOP and Republicans must divorce from Trump – for the sake of Virginia and for the sake of the nation.

I am going to take the first step and say these things publicly that I know many of my colleagues think. It’s a new day. It’s time to move on.

Democrats held seats in the 7th and 10th this year because voters would rather the country be on fire than vote for Trump’s party. Never again.

Like Trump, Love Trump or Hate Trump – if you care about Virginia and conservative values – we must all move in a different direction.

It would be easy to consume millions of pixels quoting similar sentiments from people who thought well of The Donald until the electoral audit made it clear that he has flung away all the good will earned by (most of) his policies as President. John Hinderaker of PowerLine, who has mixed praise for Trump’s accomplishments with worries about his temperament, put it this way:

The Democrats played Trump like a violin, and he joined in enthusiastically because his megalomania blinded him to political reality. He is a loser. . . .

Trump is toast. He has a few fanatical followers, most of whom were never reliable Republicans or even consistent voters. They can go down with his ship if they want to. But the rest of us need to look ahead and begin the process of choosing a vastly better candidate in 2024. That will be a low bar.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Donald Trump himself is oblivious to the avalanche.

I await an addition to the Downfall parodies: “Hitler is informed that Ron De-Sanctimonious is now the favorite of the 2024 Presidential betting market”.

Random Election Notes

Collected here are interesting items that I happen to notice during the evening. I promise no penetrating insights. For those, I recommend Henry Olsen’s highly well-informed twitter feed. For a combination of insight and entertainment value, there’s always Vodkapundit. The material below is in reverse chronological order. Times are Pacific Standard Time.

• And now it is time for bed. It’s sad to see such bright prospects shattered, but the cause is not lost, only postponed.
• 9:30 p.m.: In my home state of Washington, there is no good news. Patty Murray, a useless barnacle on the Senate, has been unsurprisingly reelected to one of the seats that Republicans might have won in a Red Tsunami, and there is a serious risk that the Dems will gain a House seat. A Trump-endorsed candidate ousted Jaime Herrera Beutler, IMHO an excellent Congressman, after she voted in favor of the second Trump impeachment. With 65 percent of the vote in, the Democrat, a soi-disant moderate (no doubt as phony as the rest of that ilk), is leading 53%–47%.
• 8:40 p.m.: At this point, pessimistic observers doubt that the GOP can gain a Senate majority. Dr. Oz is running behind Trump’s 2020 numbers in several Republican-leaning counties: a likely Republican loss, and there are as yet no pick-ups anywhere. The silver lining is that control of the House (not in serious doubt at this point) will limit Joe Biden’s ability to damage the country and will dampen the hopes of Democrats who want to retire him before 2024. The results also reflect badly on Donald Trump’s political judgment. He can’t deny that his handpicked candidates performed miserably in what ought to have been a spectacular Republican year.
• 7:45 p.m.: So far, it doesn’t look like the Democrats are getting annihilated. They held two or the three possible GOP pickups in Virginia, kept a seat that they seemed likely to lose in Rhode Island (but still finished ten points behind Biden’s 2020 result in the same district), prevailed without much of a fight in the New Hampshire Senate race and allegedly have won the Colorado race, though almost no votes have been counted there. There’s a pretty good chance that control of the Senate will turn on a runoff in Georgia (though this time Donald Trump won’t be trying to sink the GOP). Nonetheless, the huge splits between mail-in votes and election day votes makes it hard to be certain what has really happened. Well, with one exception: Florida has flipped from purple to bright red. Both DeSantis and Rubio won by landslide margins (currently 59.5% DeSantis, 57.8% Rubio). The margins were similar in all other statewide races. Republicans won 20 of 28 Congressional seats, up from 16 of 27 in 2020.
• 6:55 p.m.: Another tidbit from Henry Olsen: “Meanwhile, in NV with 15 minutes to go registered Republicans are massively outvoting registered Dems - UNLESS Dems are disproportionately dropping off ballots at drop boxes today, which don't get collected until the polls close. This is an example of why tonight is SOO HARD.” And why we may not know how far the red tide has come in until sometime tomorrow, if then.
• 6:15 p.m.: The crowd at Ron DeSantis’s victory celebration is reportedly shouting, “Two more years!”
• 6:10 p.m.: From the Babylon Bee, America’s only reliable news source: “Record Numbers Of Voters Show Up To End Democracy”.
• 6:00 p.m.: Mercer County, New Jersey, is a Democratic stronghold. All of its voting machines are currently out of order. Incompetence does as much to bollix elections as conspiracies. It would be nice if we took voting seriously enough to do it right.
• 5:45 p.m.: Henry Olsen notes that reading tea leaves is harder than usual this year: “I'm not tweeting as much tonight because the massive bifurcation between D-heavy mail and R-heavy ED makes it much harder to extrapolate from partial returns. Will keep following and let you know as races start to take shape when plenty of both types of votes are in.”
• 5:05 p.m.: With none of the GOP-voting Panhandle results yet reported, Ron DeSantis is 15 points ahead of Chameleon Charlie Crist.
• 5:00 p.m.: The New York Times twitter feed has posted “5 ways to soothe election stress”. I hope that it helps their readers.
• 4:55 p.m.: The first House seat to change hands this evening was Florida’s 7th District, where the Democratic candidate was ahead by six percent with 71 percent of the vote counted. Then came the ballots cast on election day. With 93 percent counted, the Republican leads by six.
• 4:45 p.m.: A real Donald Trump quote (see and hear it here) about how credit should be allocated for Republican victories and defeats: “Well, I think if they win, I should get all the credit. If they lose, I should not be blamed at all.” I await claims that this is one of those “deep fakes” we keep hearing about.
• 4:30 p.m.: Henry Olsen reports that the DeSantis and Rubio are leading in the early voting returns from the most strongly Democratic parts of Florida, including Dade County. It’s going to be a short election night in the Sunshine State.
• The very first race to be decided comes from Guam, which has elected a Republican delegate to Congress for only the second time in its history. Don’t tsunamis start in the Pacific?

The Joy of Mail-In Voting

In my home state of Washington, where all votes must be cast by mail (with no assurance of secrecy), ballots began arriving in mailboxes yesterday. Well, not always in mailboxes. Here are a couple of new posts on my neighborhood’s NextDoor site:

There are a bunch of ballots on the ground wet off 152nd and 9th Ave Ct E right when your turn the corner. Not sure why or what happened?

Someone broke into our mailboxes and stole mail. I lost 3 ballots among other stuff.

To the Democratic Party, such events are simply part of “our democracy”.

A Scandal in Minnesota

Power Line has been covering a massive diversion of federal funds intended for Covid-19 relief into the hungry maw of an outfit called “Feeding Our Future”. The story has gotten little notice outside of Minnesota, but, even in this jaded era of trillion dollar spending programs, the numbers deserve attention. A preçis:

Briefly, Feeding Our Future (“FOF”) was a fraudulent nonprofit that accessed an astonishing $240 million in federal money, ostensibly to feed needy children in Minnesota. Under the supervision of Minnesota’s Department of Education, FOF distributed that money to a network of Minnesota nonprofits who allegedly delivered the actual meals to children. But it turns out that the money mostly went to luxury purchases, fancy cars, overseas vacations, gold and jewels, new houses, and property in places like Kenya and Turkey. FOF kept a slice of the $240 million and added to it by charging kickbacks. The entire fraud has now unraveled in a series of 48 or more indictments announced last week by the U.S. Attorney in Minnesota. [Link added]

The latest development changes this from another tale of graft into something worse.

Throughout, the public officials on whose watch this massive fraud occurred have relied mostly on a single defense: in 2021, the Department of Education, having become suspicious, tried to cut off funding to some of FOF’s clients. But a state court judge rejected MDE’s arguments and ordered the Department to resume funding what turned out to be one of the biggest frauds on record. That was the story.

Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, up for reelection this year, cited that decision after the FOF indictments were announced.

“I would hope there would be an investigation into that,” Walz told reporters Thursday. “I was speechless, unbelievable that this ruling could come down. (I) did not really know what to say. Obviously, we had to honor it but at that point I said, we have got to continue to push the federal government and the FBI to do the investigation.”

Today the Minnesota Judicial Branch took the unusual step of releasing an official statement about the case. After recounting the history of the litigation, the statement concludes:

On February 26, 2022, the Star Tribune reported on a federal investigation of FOF. The article included the following false statement: “In April 2021, Ramsey County District Judge John Guthmann told the department it didn't have the authority to stop payments and ordered the department to resume payments.” Since February, that Star Tribune quote has been repeated or paraphrased on many occasions by many other media outlets. The same media sources reported that, in her April 4, 2022, testimony to the Minnesota Senate, the Commissioner of the Education stated that the MN Department of Education tried to stop payments to FOF, only to be ordered by Judge Guthmann to resume payments. That is false. Then, when federal indictments were announced this week, many new reports were published. On September 22, 2022, Governor Tim Walz told the media that the Minnesota Department of Education attempted to end payments to FOF because of possible fraud, but that Judge Guthmann ordered payments to continue in April 2021. That is also false.

As the public court record and Judge Guthmann’s orders make plain, Judge Guthmann never issued an order requiring the MN Department of Education to resume food reimbursement payments to FOF. The Department of Education voluntarily resumed payments and informed the court that FOF resolved the “serious deficiencies” that prompted it to suspend payments temporarily. All of the MN Department of Education food reimbursement payments to FOF were made voluntarily, without any court order.

It should be noted that the local news report quoted above (by a FOX affiliate, no less) disputes the Judiciary’s account, asserting that the judge “ruled that Minnesota education officials lacked the legal authority to stop payments” and “held the Education Department in contempt of court for failing to process 143 applications from Feeding Our Future for new meal sites”. I imagine that we’ll soon learn soon enough where the truth lies. I doubt that the judges misrepresented the record.

One clear point is that the state’s Department of Education did sniff something rotten in FOF’s activities as early as two years ago. Another is that the DOE didn’t regard stopping the fraud as very urgent. Its excuses for forgoing an appeal of the judge’s purported decision, recited in the FOX article, are feeble: An appeal would have run up more legal fees. If the DOE had lost on appeal, more sanctions might have been imposed. Those are good reasons only if the department had little confidence in its position. It is obvious now that FOF’s activities were highly suspicious. The failure to appeal gave a massive benefit of the doubt to the organization, a benefit that it patently didn’t deserve and one that diligent protectors of the public purse would never have entertained.

The Times’ Anti-Democratic “Democracy”

This morning, the executive editor of the New York Times declares, “Representative government faces its most serious threats in decades.” You won’t be surprised to learn that, in the paper’s view, all threats come from the Right. You also won’t be surprised to learn that the Times’s definition of “representative government” doesn’t bear much resemblance to James Madison’s.

Identified as “the two biggest threats to American democracy” are “first, a movement within the Republican Party that refuses to accept election defeat; and, second, a growing disconnect between public opinion and government power”.

Claims that the 2020 Presidential election was “stolen” aren’t based on any large body of evidence – no more than were the same Democratic claims about the elections of 2016, 2004 and 2000 (i. e., every Presidential election that Democrats have recently lost). The Times hypothesizes that GOP office holders who “falsely claim that the 2020 election was rigged . . . may be willing to overturn a future election”. How they would or could do that is left obscure, nor is it obvious that people who decry what they perceive as election rigging are merely disappointed that they couldn’t do the rigging themselves.

There is, in fact, an easy way to shut up “election deniers”: Conduct elections under transparent rules that (i) ensure that only eligible voters will cast ballots, (ii) guarantee ballot secrecy and (iii) are not subject to partisan change at the last minute. The 2020 election satisfied none of those criteria. It was our country’s good luck that the Electoral College vote wasn’t close enough to sow much wider suspicion that the wrong candidate was declared the winner.

The Biden Administration’s ideas for election reform go in the opposite direction: toward forcing every state to make elections less secure. The proposed “For the People Act” and “John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act” would, among other assaults on election integrity, mandate universal voting by mail and forbid requiring would-be voters to prove that they are whom they claim to be. Elections would be conducted entirely on the honor system. American history suggests that honor isn’t the leading characteristic of those who oversee the polls.

The adoption of the Biden proposals would cast a pall of suspicion over every election that wasn’t a landslide, even if politicians forswore opportunities for fraud and the effective repeal of the secret ballot didn’t alter any outcomes. That is a graver peril to democracy than Donald Trump’s or Stacey Abrams’s sore-loser tweets. Republican efforts to reform slovenly state election procedures buttress democracy rather than undermine it.

The second “threat to democracy” perceived by the Times is a defining feature of the American Constitution: It is very, very hard to enact fundamental changes to the nation’s laws without first obtaining a wide consensus in their favor. That is what the Times calls “a chronic threat: The power to set government policy is becoming increasingly disconnected from public opinion.”

Naturally the Times does not mean that laws are increasingly made by an unelected, rarely accountable Administrative State. Rather –

Two of the past four presidents have taken office despite losing the popular vote. Senators representing a majority of Americans are often unable to pass bills, partly because of the increasing use of the filibuster. And the Supreme Court is dominated by an ambitious Republican-appointed bloc even though Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections – an unprecedented run of popular-vote success in U.S. history.

If one measures “popular vote success” purely by Presidential elections, that sounds superficially plausible. What it overlooks is that one can’t infer a great deal about public opinion “across the fruited plain” from the results of an election held every four years in which two atypical and not seriously contested states (California and New York) account for the Democratic Presidential majority. As a further, contemporary complication, Joe Biden didn’t run on the agenda that he is now trying to enact, and there isn’t much evidence that public opinion is thrilled with it. One might ask why, if Biden policies are overwhelmingly popular, he and his appointees are so zealous to stifle criticism.

One item in the Times’s litany of laments deserves special attention: “Senators representing a majority of Americans are often unable to pass bills.” Equal state representation in the Senate has that effect. It is one of the ways in which the Constitution hinders sweeping, non-consensus upheavals. Eliminating it through Constitutional means would be extraordinarily difficult, requiring not just an amendment but the unanimous consent of the states: “no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.” As a practical matter, “democratizing” the Senate is possible only by overthrowing the Constitution. That doesn’t sound like the most democratic of ideas, but it is the only road ahead if the Times regards the Senate as a genuine menace to democracy.

Taken all in all, the Times harbors a concept of democracy that is seriously at odds with our present form of government. Could its professed fear of “insurrection” be an instance of projection?

Democrat Hidalgos and the Hispanic Working Class

Last week, the Wall Street Journal ran an interesting piece titled, “Latino Voters, Once Solidly Democratic, Split Along Economic Lines”. Once upon a time, “X Split Along Economic Lines” would have meant, “Affluent X’s are voting Republican, and working class X’s remain Democrats”. Today, you won’t be surprised to learn that the WSJ reporters – most likely liberals; the paper’s news pages, unlike its editorials, tilt strongly to port – found the opposite:

A few miles from the Las Vegas Strip, in a working-class neighborhood of one-story homes and scattered palm trees, Vania Oronoz is pushing her husband to give up his habit of voting for Democrats.

Mrs. Oronoz and many of her neighbors are shifting toward the Republican Party, a pattern that’s being replicated across the country. The move has been especially pronounced among working-class Latinos, whose votes have the potential to reshape the political parties in the same way that the movement of white, working-class voters has made them a pillar of the Republican Party.

Mrs. Oronoz, a 44-year-old immigrant from Mexico, runs a taco business with her husband and backed President Joe Biden in 2020 when she cast her first vote as a U.S. citizen. She said she has become disenchanted with Democrats over the state of inflation and school quality, as well as the party’s failure to approve a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Instead she is putting her support behind GOP candidates in this fall’s election, including the Republican trying to defeat Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, the only Latina ever elected to the Senate.

The article makes it clear that the trend away from an overwhelming Democratic advantage among Hispanic voters is a working class trend and that it is impelled by issues like border security, rising crime rates, woke public schools, abortion and Democratic politicians’ indifference to the real economic needs of working Americans, as exemplified by Covid-19 lockdowns. A taco store can’t do a lot of business over the Internet. In the WSJ’s generic Congressional preference poll, Hispanics with four year college degrees prefer Democrats over Republicans by 26 percentage points. Among other Hispanics, the Democrats’ margin is only six points. Overall, the Democrats’ 34 point lead in 2018 has fallen to 11 points.

The WSJ notes that Senator Masto, whose mother was Italian and whose husband is Syrian, “has been reminding voters she is the granddaughter of a Mexican immigrant”. For unknown reasons, I receive more-than-daily emails from the Masto campaign. Hardly a one omits mention of the Senator’s Mexican forebear, but almost the only political issue ever mentioned is abortion. Today, for instance, she tells people who she hopes will give money to her campaign:

Right now, I’m in the most important fight of my life, and our country’s future is at stake. If we lose this race, Republicans will retake the Senate, and they’ll pass a national ban on abortion. They’ll make it a CRIME from coast to coast.

Does she have any objection to Biden Administration regulations that would force K-12 schools to admit males into females’ gym classes and share the same showers? If so, she’s been very quiet about it.

Does she see anything wrong with closing down the economy for over a year, during which the hidalgos could work from home with hardly any inconvenience, while many of their fellow citizens saw their standard of living collapse or had to rely on government handouts (doled out by a hand that had to borrow the funds)? Not a word.

Will she care when the “greening” of the economy skyrockets energy prices and makes air conditioning (somewhat important to Nevadans) unaffordable to all but the wealthy? Not very likely.

Senator Masto and her financial backers can afford their “luxury beliefs”. Ordinary Americans can’t. It should be no surprise that the Hispanic subset of ordinary Americans is coming to realize that they can’t afford them either.

A Straightforward Answer to What May Be a Sincere Question

The Morning Dispatch, a conservative, vehemently anti-Trump web site, asks, at the end of its account of Joe Biden’s Riefenstahl-style oration at Independence Hall:

Do Republicans blasting Biden’s speech last night as overly partisan have a point? Was there any way the president might have drawn attention to concerns about Republicans’ democratic backsliding without being accused of being divisive?

Rarely does anyone ask a question with such a simple, straightforward answer: A President who was genuinely concerned about “democratic backsliding” would take note of both parties’ trajectories. Denunciations of “MAGA Republicans” would have more credibility if the President also denounced backsliding by his own party, over whose conduct he presumably has some influence.

• Many Democrats insist that their candidates were the real winners of elections (Stacy Adams in Georgia in 2018, John Kerry in Ohio in 2004) that weren’t nearly as close as the Presidential tallies in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and several other states in 2020. Moreover, it is practically an article of Democratic faith that George W. Bush and Donald Trump were illegitimately elected, the former allegedly installed by the Supreme Court, the latter by Vladimir Putin. None of these claims rests on any more evidence than does Trump’s fantasy that he won reelection by millions of votes.
• Riots broke out when Donald Trump was nominated for President and again when he was inaugurated. Like the January 6th riot at the Capitol, they weren’t especially bloody, but they showed similar disrespect for the outcome of democratic processes.
• Definitely bloody and destructive were the riots in the summer of 2020. The unanimous Democrat response was that they were “mostly peaceful” and were motivated by a virtuous desire to call attention to injustices. Fine, but what was democratic about refusing to prosecute the unpeaceful protesters who burned police stations, vandalized businesses, terrorized innocent citizens and, in cities like Portland and Seattle, established enclaves that rejected the authority of the local, state and federal governments?
• The victories of “MAGA Republicans” in GOP primaries owe much to the support that they have received from Democratic campaign organizations. Boosting anti-democratic forces in one of the two major political parties is a strange way to promote democracy.
• Documents have come to light showing that numerous federal agencies have been working with social media companies to censor opinions that the government regards as false or dangerous. Unless one believes that freedom of speech is an expendable luxury, that is an ominous development for the future of democracy.

The case that large elements of the Democratic Party will accept democracy only so long as it produces their preferred results is at least as strong as the case against “MAGA Republicans”. Friends of democratic rule need to rebuke the authoritarians on both sides. It is safe, though sad, to say that Joe Biden has revealed himself as not one of those friends.

That is, I believe, the answer to the Dispatch’s question.

 

An Angry, Flailing, Failed Mediocrity

There is no reason to read grave portents into President Biden’s Mussolini-like rant against the “MAGA Republicans” who are supposedly attacking democracy. If he were a real Mussolini, his next step would be to mobilize the National Guard to round up the enemies of the state. But he won’t do that. The worst that will occur will be continuing collusion between federal bureaucrats and social media companies to keep critical voices off the latter’s platforms, which would mean something only if Twitter and Facebook were the real world. While the Administration’s soft censorship is despicable, it isn’t likely to have much effect.

No, the Biden harangue, set against a blood-red background and backed up by Marine guards, should be seen for what it truly is: the flailing of a man far out of his depth (which isn’t very deep) who at some level realizes that his policies are comprehensively failing but refuses to consider any alternatives and imagines that shouting into the night sky will exorcize the phantasms with which his feverish brain surrounds him.

He is a pitiful figure, no more to be feared than a lunatic ranting on a street corner. We should pray for his recovery, which will be hastened by speedy retirement from public life.

Above all, let us look to the example of Abraham Lincoln, who, entering the fourth year of a genuine insurrection, had the greatness of spirit to counsel “malice toward none, charity for all”.

The “Gray Lady” Would Like to Eviscerate Ron DeSantis, But. . . .

The New York Times devotes today’s “Morning” newsletter to “Ron DeSantis’s Florida”. The writer and the Miami-based Times reporter who responds to his questions want to portray Florida as the fascist dystopia of Charlie Crist’s fantasies, but they have trouble finding much negative to say. The reporter’s first comment has a strange echo:

He [DeSantis] was elected by just 32,000 votes or so but has governed as if he had a mandate to reshape the state into a laboratory for right-wing policies.

Hmm, can you think of someone else, someone in the good graces of the Times, who was elected by a small margin but thought that he had a mandate for sweeping change? There is one difference between that guy and Ron DeSantis: That guy’s party had historically narrow legislative majorities. In the election that brought DeSantis to the governorship, Republicans won the State Senate and House by margins of 25-15 and 73-47, respectively. In any case, the reporter contradicts her own thesis by later stating, “But he governed his first year by trying to lie low.” According to her account, the “laboratory for right-wing policies” was created by circumstances, not some pre-plotted rightist agenda:

Then came the pandemic. He tried to keep the state open, and he seemed to take criticisms of his looser pandemic policies personally. He started to score political points by portraying himself as a foe of the “corporate media” that conveyed virus restrictions endorsed by public health experts.

You can talk to independents, even Democrats, who may not necessarily vote for him, but they remember the lasting impact DeSantis’s policies had on their children, that they could go to school. They are happy they were able to keep their businesses open. [emphasis added]

Faced with a major crisis, a governor chooses the course that minimizes painful consequences for his constituents. What an insidious ultra-MAGA plot! Virtuous chief executives like Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer and Jay Inslee and Kathy Hochul showed their citizens the path to redemptive suffering. The villainous DeSantis just made it possible for them to live normal lives.

Conclusive Proof That the Democrats Are Desperate to the Point of Despair

Notwithstanding Glenn Reynolds’s reiterated admonition, an e-mail that I received today from the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee leads me to believe that the Dems themselves see their 2022 election prospects as nil and declining. Shrieking about the Supreme Court’s supposedly impending rejection of same-sex marriage, interracial marriage and contraception evidently is not enough to nudge the polls in the right (i. e., left) direction, so the DSCC wails this screed (all italics and boldface in the original):

ALERT: Experts warn that Social Security could be on the Supreme Court's chopping block

Team, by overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court just proved that NOTHING is safe from the conservative justices’ right-wing rampage.

In fact, experts warn that Social Security could be in danger, too. During her confirmation hearings, Amy Coney Barrett famously REFUSED to say if Social Security was constitutional – and if the Court strikes it down, 65 million Americans will LOSE the benefits they earned.

We can’t risk losing this bedrock of Americans' retirement, so we’ve launched an urgent Live Poll to PROVE that the American people support upholding Social Security – but we’re still short 37 responses in your area!

The “experts” consulted by the DSCC, whoever they may be, seem to believe that Social Security, like the right to abortion in Roe v. Wade, was created by the Supreme Court out of “emanations and penumbras” rather than by an act of Congress that was held, in the ordinary course of litigation, to fall within the enumerated powers of the legislative branch.

Next comes, I suppose, the warning that the Court is on the verge of deifying Donald Trump and commanding all citizens to sacrifice doves on his altar.

From the Pen of the Disinformation Tsarina

If the information that we receive is going to be “curated” by the federal government, we should pay attention to the views of the curator. With that in mind, I expended ten bucks for the Kindle version of Nina Jankowicz’s book How to Lose the Information War. It’s easy to see why Biden minions wanted its author on their information control team. For the past several years, she has engaged in research on Russian disinformation campaigns. Her book includes chapters on the responses of the United States, Estonia, Georgia, Poland, Ukraine and the Czech Republic, responses that she judges to have been sadly inadequate. So she brings a plausible aura of expertise to her new post as executive director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board (a name that could have been coined only by some bureaucrat who privately loathes it).

She has a second qualification that comes through as one browses through the book. She is a one-dimensional political partisan: There is a “near-complete lack of evidence” for “alleged anti-conservative bias on the [social media] platforms.” [p. 130] It is a “falsehood” to say “that the Biden family engaged in corrupt activity in Ukraine”. [p.149] In what is clearly a sub silentio allusion to the New York Post’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell”, she commends Twitter for “no longer allow[ing] the distribution of hacked materials” (the ex post facto excuse for blocking the Post reporting). [p. 130] The Trump Administration enacted a “travel ban on people from predominantly Muslim countries”. [p. 22] The Mueller Report is mentioned but not its most dramatic disinformation-related finding, that the “Steele Dossier”, the bludgeon that Democrats wielded for three years against Donald Trump, was a work of fiction. [pp. 23 and 31] And so on.

So what prescription does Tsarina Nina have for disinformation? After six chapters of case studies, Chapter 7 deals with remedies. She quotes testimony that she delivered before a Senate committee in 2018 regarding what will not suffice:

Even if the United States Government were to acknowledge the threat posed by Russian influence campaigns today in no uncertain terms, and we were to walk out of the hearing room and secure beyond a shadow of a doubt the country’s election infrastructure; even if we hermetically sealed our information environment from inauthentic users and false or misleading information, and if social media companies finally put forth a good faith effort to put users and the security of our democracy first; even then, we would still not successfully dispel the threat our democracy faces from malign actors’ political influence operations. [p. 137]

She goes on to say –

These short-term solutions do not address the underlying societal fissures that left us vulnerable to information operations in the first place. As Estonia, Georgia, Poland, Ukraine, and the Czech Republic have learned, it’s past time to begin a generational investment to build resilience within populations and target the root causes of our weaknesses. [p. 139]

She has already observed that –

many of the countries I’ve profiled here still believe that good communications or the establishment of a compelling narrative is the key to winning the information war. They’re not alone. This sentiment is popular in the West as well. It is misguided, but persistent. [p. 134]

The “generational investment” is not, then, to go toward expounding truth and countering falsehood. The Tsarina and I almost agree here. Government investment in “narratives” generally has a low ROI, particularly where citizens are left free to dispute the narrative. That is as far as our agreement goes.

The first, near-term element of the Tsarina’s program is –

to set the guardrails of the internet and the social media platforms on which we share so much of our lives.

That begins with setting clear and unified definitions of not only the rules of the road, but the vehicles on them. . . . Imagine how difficult driving would become if neighboring states or countries defined simple concepts like right of way or speed limits differently. This is essentially how social media platforms operate today. Each has its own definition of disinformation, of hate speech, and of targeted abuse, among other concepts, and each deals with each of those concepts differently. [p. 139]

While conceding that “we are hesitant to allow government bodies jurisdiction over our right to free speech”, she justifies the intrusion by the fact that “social media platforms are highly curated, highly addictive content farms that have total control over what we see and how we communicate; it’s time they do it in a way that promotes the greater democratic good and not just their bottom line”. [pp. 139-40] The same phenomenon – “control over what we see and how we communicate” – is often cited by right-wing critics of social media. The difference is that the latter argue, rightly or wrongly, for limiting the ability of the platforms to block content that they don’t like. The Tsarina wants to expand social media censorship and give the government control over how the censors operate.

Phase two of the Tsarina’s plan is a great expansion of government-funded media.

I hope to one day see an America that invests more in journalism as a public good, not only through the variety of philanthropic initiatives to support the industry that have proliferated since 2016, but through further government investment in public broadcasters. In 2018, the US government allocated $447 million to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds the Public Broadcasting Station and National Public Radio, as well as their local affiliates. In comparison, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s budget for the same year was over $6 billion, despite the fact that Britain’s GDP is about a fifth of the size of the United States’. [p. 141]

She laments that the BBC didn’t save Britain from Brexit but happily notes that 57 percent of the British public regards it as the country’s most trustworthy news source (at least according to the BBC survey that she cites). She continues –

Investments in journalism as a public good are critical to maintaining a healthy information environment in which disinformation can more easily be dispelled, and in which a trusted voice is readily accessible in times of chaos and turmoil. [p. 142]

Put slightly differently, the U.S. government needs a propaganda arm and has been remiss about funding it. That need is all the more acute, because –

In New Jersey [where the Tsarina grew up], no one is ever very far from several bustling metropolitan areas, and the coverage afforded by any one of those cities’ newspapers or radio and television stations is applicable and useful for daily life. But imagine a similar situation in the nation’s heartland, and you begin to understand why so many people are flocking to dubious websites that replicate their worldview; the connective tissue between the local and the national or international has been lost. [p. 141]

Still, social media “rules of the road” and tax-funded subventions to friendly newspapers and TV stations aren’t enough.

Even with greater investments in quality journalism, people will still need help navigating the unending flow of information that characterizes the modern media environment, as I found in every country I visited over the course of researching this book. In Estonia, education and outreach form the backbone of the government’s renewed efforts to build an inclusive Estonian identity that is resilient to outside influence. As Irene Käossar, the head of Estonia’s Integration Foundation, told me, the government is no longer trying to express “why” ethnic Russians should pursue citizenship or learn Estonian language; instead, the onus is on the government to figure out how to “change thinking.” [p. 142]

Estonia is a tiny country threatened by a huge, hostile neighbor that conquered it once and shows many signs of seeking to absorb it again. An unassimilated Russian minority is a threat to its very existence. I will wager a good deal, though, that Nina Jankowicz would find Estonia’s policy abhorrent if pursued by a country with which she didn’t sympathize. Note that she has taken an initiative to persuade resident aliens to “pursue citizenship or learn Estonian language” as a template for a government program to furnish “help navigating the unending flow of information that characterizes the modern media environment”. These things are not quite like one another.

The nature of the “help” that the government is to provide and how it is to be inculcated are the vaguest parts of the Tsarina’s plan. She complains that the social media platforms have made only perfunctory attempts to educate their users:

So far, efforts to raise awareness of media and digital literacy best practices on the platforms have been lackluster; in its “Tips to Spot False News,” which is available online in the “Help Center” and has run in several of the world's major newspapers (arguably not the audience that most needs assistance spotting “false news”), Facebook even writes “reliance on unnamed experts may indicate a false news story,” a tip that might cause readers to discount reporting that uses anonymous or background sources, as many whistleblowing investigations do. More worryingly, the Trump administration has used this tactic to question critical reporting from a variety of outlets. [Did I mention that the Tsarina is a Thoroughly Progressive Tsarina?]

Overall, platforms’ efforts to promote media literacy awareness have been surface-level distractions, not deep-rooted attempts to change user behavior. They should be developed in broad consultation with experts in the field and be integrated into the user interface of the platform – not buried in a help section or in a print newspaper advertisement – at the platform’s expense. Like reminders to grab an umbrella or do your civic duty, social media platforms can empower users to be more discerning consumers of information. It is not a question of ability; it’s a question of volition. [p. 145, footnote omitted; emphasis added]

What the tools “integrated into the user interface” would look like is hard to discern, but it certainly sounds like a mechanism not simply to warn users about trollish Internet tricks but to make it impossible, or nearly so, to get access to government-disapproved content. That the Tsarina favors limiting choices rather than relying on users’ judgment is suggested by the scenario with which she closes the chapter, a hypothetical happy ending six years hence.

It’s Election Day, November 2028. The latest polls are close; it will probably be another nail-biter. But unlike eight or twelve years ago, this campaign hasn’t been characterized by the rancor of the past. After the scandalous foreign hack-and-leak operations that marked the 2016 and 2020 elections, affecting first the Democratic and later the Republican Party, a remarkable thing happened. Party leaders, editors-in-chief of the country’s newspapers, major broadcasters, and even the social media platforms convened to sign a Declaration on Truth and Integrity: they would not discuss, cover, or amplify content for which a legitimate source could not be established. This bipartisan effort did not eliminate all attempts at foreign interference, but rather than boosting the bogus claims, repeating them on the airwaves, printing them on front pages, and retweeting and sharing them online, it relegated them to the fringes of the internet, where they never gained much traction. The publicity surrounding the declaration served as a primer and awareness campaign for millions of Americans who believed for years that foreign interference was a specter politicians unleashed for personal gain.

In the months after the declaration, while the new administration settled into office, Congress took stock of what the document had achieved. It engendered cooperation between politicians and the fourth estate, across social media platforms, and between all these groups and law enforcement, which was notified as suspicious posts were encountered. They worked to build on the informal structure they created, creating an independent government hub to serve as coordinator, watchdog, and educator. The new body worked with civil society to write a curriculum for schools and professional development programs, doled out educational grants, and advocated for users’ rights in the development of new technologies on social media platforms. It also acted as a neutral researcher, employing an apolitical group of experts to act as a watchdog on questions of hate speech, political bias, disinformation, and “fake news,” among others. The government allocated greater funding to American public broadcasters, encouraging a more balanced news landscape.

In 2028, the information war is still not won. There were and continue to be challenges. It is not utopia; the project of democracy will never be. Online abuse, while on a downturn, is still a problem. But people are beginning to have more inquisitive, respectful conversations, based on responsible, level reporting. They are recognizing the humanity in their fellow avatars. Americans regularly have heated debates about how to protect free speech in the age of the internet. But unlike during the height of the information war, that speech is not being manipulated to drive division and chaos from without and within.

This may only be a dream for the future, but it is one that feels possible to achieve. [pp. 146-47]

The dream of the totalitarian utopians, from Rousseau and Robespierre to Marx and Lenin: All will be peace and harmony when the wise and the virtuous shape how everyone else is permitted to think.

Further Reading: Jonathan Turley, “Biden’s ‘Mary Poppins of Disinformation’ the perfect nanny to tidy up mess of free speech?”

Put Not Your Trust in Princes

The Psalmist advises us, “Put not your trust in princes, in sons of men, in whom there is no salvation.” (Ps. 146:3) The author was thinking of eternal salvation, but the sentiment is true for political salvation, too.

Adherence to a particular public figure can be rational. For reasons that others have expounded at length, expending the time and energy needed to become a fully informed voter is often (usually) not worth the benefit. Just as one’s financial budget doesn’t have to honed to the penny, an approximate “political budget” can be good enough. There are better uses for most people’s time than attaining expertise in all of the areas with which they ideally should be conversant before casting their votes, particularly when votes almost always come down to a choice between two candidates, each with a menu of positions on tens, if not scores, of questions.

One method of approximation is to select a political party that seems, in general, to hold principles similar to one’s own and to stick to its candidates unless some strong reason exists to choose someone else. But parties aren’t homogenous. Even the narrowest includes differing strains of opinion. When those strains clash, many party members follow a leader in whom they put their trust.

With that introduction, let us turn to Donald Trump. There’s no doubt that he is currently the most influential figure in the Republican Party. Many Republicans feel an emotional attachment to him, strengthened, it may be, by the relentless venom of his foes. (“We love him for the enemies that he has made.”) Another large segment of the party thinks that he is rather repulsive personally but on the whole pursued excellent policies as President. Between those two groups, the former President possesses a large capital of good will. But does he deserve to retain it in perpetuity?

One reason for doubt is that the Republican Party’s affection for The Donald is only thinly reciprocated. He worked very hard (whether or not that was his conscious intention) to suppress GOP turnout in the two Georgia Senate runoffs last January, thus costing Republicans control of the Senate. His attacks on the Republican governor of Arizona have devastated the latter’s approval rating and turned his reelection from a cake walk to a struggle. He conditions his support of candidates on their enthusiasm for questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election, a stance that has no appeal to anyone who isn’t already a solid Trump Republican. In short, he makes the path to victory in 2022 and beyond longer and bumpier.

Another unfortunate side of his character was highlighted this weekend, when Israeli newspapers and television reported portions of interviews that he gave to the author of a forthcoming book titled (in Hebrew) Trump’s Peace.

While he was in office, Trump gave the appearance of supporting Israel’s right to a peaceful existence more firmly than any previous U.S. President, as epitomized by his decision to move our embassy to Israel’s capital, Jerusalem. It appears, however, that his pro-Israeli stance was more whim than conviction. In the interviews, he denounced former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the offense of congratulating Joe Biden after the election, then followed up by declaring that Netanyahu had never wanted Arab-Israeli peace (which would be odd for the man who signed the Abraham Accords). That Netanyahu wasn’t “loyal” to Donald Trump was enough to overturn, in Trump’s mind, the premises on which his own policy toward Israel had seemingly rested.

As centrist Israeli journalist David Horovitz summarizes, the interviews “confirm how thoroughly the former US president led from the gut, how readily he could be won over and, equally, how swiftly he could turn from ally to adversary”. America was very lucky that, during his first term, those traits pushed President Trump in the direction of sound decisions. In a second term, we may not be so fortunate.

Trump’s newfound loathing for a large segment of the Republican Party and his tendency to be led by his “gut” instead of principle could combine disastrously. He may well want to punish “disloyal” Republicans by adopting the opposite of their positions, and he will doubtless be wooed by fast-talking charlatans who will feed him half-baked reasons to repudiate in his second term what he accomplished in his first.

Donald Trump did much good as President. It’s a pity that he is on the road to casting his legacy aside.

Further reading: Paul Mirengoff, “Trump Praises Abbas, Rips Netanyahu for Congratulating Biden”

Is the Trump Train Headed Off the Rails?

Donald J. Trump is a study in multiple political personality disorder. One DJT is a slightly unconventional conservative Republican with a degree of charisma that far exceeds what his mostly humdrum agenda could be expected to generate. His orthodox conservative side – deregulation, tax cuts, originalist Supreme Court Justices, scorn for “wokeness” – and his deviations – skepticism about free trade, a pacifist foreign policy, strict immigration enforcement, indifference to excessive federal spending – all fall within the “Overton window” of American politics. The enthusiasm of his most ardent fans (an appropriate term for them) seems almost independent of his policy prescriptions. So far as I can see, it carries over from his pre-political career, when he was a full-time celebrity who ran some businesses on the side.

DJT-1 became visible only after he became President. Many conservatives who vehemently opposed his nomination in 2016 advocated his re-election four years later. While the inveterate core of Never Trumpers call them opportunists and sellouts, most have, I think, merely come to see a different Trump personality.

DJT-2 is a braggart and bully who has no real interest in public policy, knows little about it, doesn’t care to learn more, places his highest priority on personal victories, and quickly sours on advisors who pester him with substantive advice.

When Trump emerged as a plausible Presidential candidate in early 2016, National Review took aim at DJT-2. Its February 15, 2016, issue blared “Against Trump” on the cover. Inside was a symposium of 22 conservatives representing a wide range of right-of-center opinion. The editors added their own appraisal. The bottom line:

Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.

Most Never Trumpers still see only DJT-2. Nothing that Trump did in office altered their perception, except that some came to hold their negative opinion yet more firmly, a few – Bill Kristol, Max Boot and Jen Rubin, to take conspicuous instances – to the point of abandoning conservatism altogether.

DJT-1 and DJT-2 are Trump personalities whose existence seems to me clearly supportable by objective evidence. The other two are more subjective. In fact, I’d call them delusions, but those who see them believe them.

DJT-3 is a “fighter” against the “elites” who, whether ostensibly Republican or Democrat, are joined in a united enterprise of running the country for their own benefit. The elite hostility that he attracts is taken as proof that they fear him, which is all the more reason to give him unconditional support.

I know people for whom DJT-3 is the “real Donald Trump”. I confess to not being able to see what they see. The widespread assumption, particularly among those for whom DJT-2 is the real thing, is that this group comprises the majority of the people who voted for Donald Trump last November. It certainly includes a lot of them.

Finally, DJT-4 aims at becoming a dictator and inspired an insurrection last January 6th with that end in mind. Those who see this Trump see another Mussolini and the January riot as the equivalent of the March on Rome. That strikes me as fantastical, but we can leave that argument for another day.

Whether Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee in 2024 depends on which of the competing DJT’s looks most real to the most voters. Last Wednesday, Trump himself gave the country something new to look at. He released this brief statement:

If we don’t solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020 (which we have thoroughly and conclusively documented), Republicans will not be voting in ’22 and ’24. It is the single most important thing for Republicans to do.

Parsed sympathetically with one’s eyes closed, that could just be a prediction, uttered with no intent to persuade anybody to stay home on election day. Even on that view, it’s startling. A massive boycott of the polls by Republican voters would guarantee a progressive Congressional majority able to enact whatever program appeals to “woke” fanatics in 2023. Just finishing whatever parts of this year’s Biden agenda fall by the wayside would be bad enough. DJT-1 would surely have made a very different statement, one urging his supporters to leave 2020 to the historians and work to Make America Great Again in 2022.

Coming from DJT-3, the statement is only slightly less inconceivable. Declining to vote isn’t a very effective way to “fight”. It amounts to surrender to the “elites”. It certainly isn’t a threat that will terrify the people who, in DJT-3’s view, control the United States.

Maybe it’s evidence for the reality of DJT-4, a sign that Trump has given up on democratic politics and will next urge a MAGA putsch. That’s quite a leap of logic. Whether it’s accurate doesn’t matter a great deal. January 6th showed that Trump “insurrectionists” are few in number and irresolute of purpose.

That brings us to DJT-2. The not-too-covert threat to sink the GOP unless his personal desire for vindication is satisfied is exactly what that Trump would do. It’s also consistent with his conduct during the Georgia Senatorial elections, where his denunciations of the state Republican Party are universally cited as a major cause of the loss of two Senate seats, handing control, tenuous though it is, to the Democrats.

Does DJT-2 have any base anywhere? Voters who admire DJT-3 may not have drawn a sharp distinction in the past between him and DJT-2, because much of the former’s “fighting” consists of the insult-laden, juvenile rhetoric of the latter. Now he is asking them, for practical purposes, to subordinate the overthrow of “elite” dominance to his personal King Charles’s Head. Will a great many of them fall in line with doing nothing in response to Joe Biden’s record, already disastrous and on a downward trajectory? Is that how fighters behave? So far, the ground isn’t swelling with positive vibrations.

John Hinderaker, who thinks that “Donald Trump was a very good president, our best since Ronald Reagan in my opinion” (yeah, not the highest of bars), titled his post on the Trump statement “Bad Donald” and summarized thus:

So Trump’s solution is to say that “Republicans will not be voting in ’22 or ’24.” This is a profoundly stupid threat. In fact, the Democrats’ response would be, as we used to say on the playground, Is that a threat or a promise? From the Democrats’ perspective, the answer is obvious.

Trump’s worst fault is his tendency to put his own interests – or worse, his own ego – over the interests of his party and his country. I don’t know how many Republicans he could induce to stay home next year, or in 2024, if he isn’t satisfied with progress on election integrity. But the dumbest possible response to the existence of voter fraud – something that has been with us since the beginning of our democracy – is to refrain from voting yourself. If Trump were to persuade even a small number of Republicans to abstain from voting next year, or in 2024, it could well swing close elections to the Democrats. Trump should be enough of a patriot to consider that the worst of all possible outcomes.

Sure, he should be, but don’t bet on it.

Desperate? Incompetent? Grifting? Dick Tuck Redux?

During last year’s election campaign, I began receiving a trickle of e-mails from (purported) Democratic organizations, all filled with hyperbolic rhetoric obviously aimed at separating partisans from their money. Since I’ve never given a nickel (so far as I can recall) to any Democrat anytime anywhere, that was curious. I paid attention to the messages only long enough to delete them.

Post-November, the trickle dwindled to barely a drip, drip, drip. Then, a couple of months ago, the flood gates swung open. Here are the subject headings of those that landed in my inbox today (some more than once):

TRUMP OFF THE HOOK??
Joe Biden just HUMILIATED Mitch McConnell...
Sonia Sotoymayor’s EMPHATIC dissent
we’re about the throw in the towel
Trump’s Jan 6 phone records
Biden’s agenda RUINED!?
Your rating for Dr. Fauci

The content is just as unlikely to persuade the unconverted as that of the election year emails. Here is my transcription (missing the grade school graphics and the links to pleas for cash of “Trump’s Jan 6 phone records”:

BREAKING NEWS: EXPERTS PREDICT DONALD TRUMP’S JAN 6TH PHONE RECORDS COULD SEAL HIS FATE & SEND HIM TO PRISON
YES! YES! YES!
Trump’s phone records are the critical evidence we need to PROVE he incited the horrific Jan 6. Insurrection.
And Merrick Garland is our BEST HOPE for releasing them. But it’ll take a WAVE of pressure to get him to act.
PLEASE, Edward: We need 50,000 signatures by 10 AM TOMORROW. So add your name to demand Garland release Trump’s January 6th phone records! >>
CLICK HERE TO SIGN THE PETITION >>
Edward -- We all know that Trump is LYING about what really happened on Jan 6.
We still have NO hard evidence.
But if Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice releases his phone records, we’d have STONE-COLD proof of his awful crimes. He’d HAVE to pay for EVERYTHING he’s done.
So we’re circulating a nationwide petition to convince Merrick Garland to do the right thing and RELEASE TRUMP’S JAN 6. PHONE RECORD.
But Edward, we’re sending our petition at 10 AM tomorrow. If you care about bringing Trump to justice, SIGN NOW! >>
DEMAND GARLAND RELEASE TRUMP’S JAN. 6TH PHONE RECORDS >>
Stand up for what is right,
National Democratic Training Committee

Whoever composed this faith-based screed apparently expects his target audience to believe that the U.S. government has recordings of private phone conversations – and not to be appalled.

This is one of a cascade of bizarre appeals. The Greg Abbott emails inform the recipient that “You can TANK Greg Abbott’s approval rating by responding to this poll immediately.” “TRUMP OFF THE HOOK??” moans that “Pressure Mounts for Attorney General Merrick Garland to Stop Investigating Trump”, to that “we need 5,000 responses from local Democrats to convince Merrick Garland to do the right thing”. What humiliated Mitch McConnell? “Edward: We’re JUMPING with JOY!!! Joe Biden is ALL IN to pass H.R. 1!!” The Biden agenda will be RUINED! without “[14] more local donations” to abolish the Senate filibuster. And “Dr. Anthony Fauci has been helping us through the worst pandemic in a hundred years and never ONCE minced words with us.” (What, never? Well, hardly ever.)

I’d like to assume that these messages signify Democratic desperation or incompetence or that they are just a less adept than usual political grift. I get plenty of appeals for money from ostensibly conservative organizations that are pretty obviously just seeking lucre, but they are mostly less strident and less wildly implausible.

My current working theory is that some prankster has gotten hold of a right-of-center mailing list and is deluging it with this offal in the hope of making the Democratic Party look even more unbalanced and hysterical than one would infer from straight news reports. If so, his heart is in the right (in one sense of the word) place, but I really wish he would cease and desist. The universe’s supply of pixels isn’t inexhaustible. They should be saved for better and higher uses.

One last fact that may be indicative of something: GMail’s spam filter catches almost none of these messages. The only one that I found there today was a second sending of “TRUMP OFF THE HOOK??”. The proportion of partisan conservative email that goes straight to spam is far higher. If I didn’t know that Google maintains strict standards of impartiality, I would wonder why.