The Republican lane problem

In political analyses of political races in the US, the kids in the media these days like to use the metaphor of ‘lanes’ to signify where candidates stand with respect to their rivals. Traditionally, the lanes had labels such as progressive, liberal, centrist, moderate, and conservative that, while hardly precisely defined, gave one a vague sense of whether that person was aligned with ones own values or not. One could make the distinctions more fine-grained by separating them on economic/fiscal and social polices, so that one could describe someone as a fiscal conservative who is socially liberal and so on. So in principle one could identify many different ideological lanes that people could be pigeonholed into. (Warning: This post is going to overwork the lane metaphor to death.)

But when it comes to current Republican politics, all that has to be thrown out of the window because since Donald Trump, the lanes are no longer defined by ideology. What we have is the Trump lane and the non-Trump lanes. The Trump lane is defined by whatever Trump thinks serves his own interests and will enable him to win and that ideologically amorphous structure makes it harder for his competitors to find their own lanes, since the Trump lane can weave erratically across ideological lines, as he opportunistically seizes on any issue to attack his opponents, even if it involves flat-out lying about them and himself. For example, his stance against cuts to Social Security and Medicare makes those who are on record as favoring privatizing or cuts (such as Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Mike Pence) vulnerable to attacks from him. He has already started doing so.
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‘Anti-wokism’ as a distraction from the lack of any positive policy proposals

In the latest episode of his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver examines Ron DeSantis’s record as governor of Florida and shows that his schtick is entirely based on fighting what he calls ‘wokism’, a word that is undefined but seems to mean anything that he dislikes and can be used to rile up the party base on culture war issues. He does not seem to have done anything that materially improves the lives of Floridians but instead feeds their grievances.

The Republican contradictions on diversity

The Republican party, in terms of its policies and rhetoric, seems to have gone all in on appealing to white, older, xenophobic, and conservative voters. And yet, at the same time, it seems to be able to put forward, and get elected, people of color for various offices, and also attract some people of color as supporters. This article looks at what is going on with that seemingly contradictory dynamic.

Does [the Republican party] continue to move rightward, exciting its base by stoking white racial grievance?

Or does it pursue a multiracial strategy that can expand the party’s reach?

Recent trends in the GOP suggest that it wants to do both – and that indeed the two strategies are not so much at odds as it might appear.

In a striking development, Michigan Republicans selected in February 2023 a Christian nationalist and election denier as chair of the state party.

This rightward shift of the party is not itself surprising.

What’s striking is that Kristina Karamo, a Black woman, was elected over a white male candidate who also had Trump’s endorsement.

The same voters who elevated Karamo also cheered Trump’s supercharged racist rhetoric against Black people, immigrants, Mexicans, Muslims and nonwhite countries more generally during his campaigns and presidency.

And yet Karamo is hardly an anomaly.

While the party has made no substantive changes or moderation to its politics or policies around long-standing racial justice issues, it is slowly but steadily growing more racially diverse in its grassroots base, elected officials and opinion leaders.

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Biden outmaneuvers Republicans on Social Security and Medicare – for now

Joe Biden sometimes surprises me. I never had a high opinion of him, seeing him as epitomizing the neoliberal centrism of the political establishment, a caretaker of the status quo and an appeaser of the right wing. My support of him during the last election was driven by my horror at the thought of the lying, grifting, narcissist Donald Trump getting to be president for another four years. But I must admit that Biden has done better than I expected. True, he is no Bernie Sanders when it comes to advancing progressive policies but he has managed to push through some important pieces of legislation in his first two years that have made real improvements in the lives of ordinary people.

A big test is the one that will occur this June or so when failure to raise the debt ceiling will reach a crisis point. Republicans were clearly planning to use that issue as a hostage to obtain cuts in spending. What cuts? They refuse to specify but their target has always been programs that benefit those who are in need. (For a list of the programs that they are likely targeting, see here.) But their main target has always been the Big Three: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. These programs are expensive but extremely popular and cutting them will cause a backlash. Republicans know this and thus they seek to create a crisis so that cuts to them will be seen as inevitable and have Democrats share at least part of the blame.
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Frauds hiding behind religion

The US government gives religious institutions all manner of tax breaks and also tends to not scrutinize their workings too closely. Crooked people have been exploiting the extra freedoms given to ostensibly religious institutions, such as so-called pastors living the high life on their tax free incomes and perks.

ProPublica exposes the workings of yet another religion-based fraud that left a lot of people, who trusted the institution would do right by them because they were Christian, in the lurch. They describe the case of Bonnie Marin who purchased insurance through a Christian health insurance company. When she developed a cancerous tumor, she thought that she would be spared the huge cost of treatment. To her shock, after a while, they stopped paying out.
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The golden age of grifting

During his week guest hosting The Daily Show, Hasan Minhaj discussed how social media enable even not-so-smart grifters to scam people.

This was in a new recurring segment on the show called Long Story Short where the host tackles one issue in depth. Seth Meyers has long been doing that on his show in a segment that is called A Closer Look. Both of them seem to be inspired by John Oliver’s success with Last Week Tonight where almost the entire show is devoted to a single topic.

It looks like many viewers are like me in wanting to see more in-depth examinations of important topics laced with humor.

Teens and social media

There has been considerable discussion recently about the damaging effects of social media on young people, giving many feelings of inadequacy as they compare themselves unfavorably with their alleged peers, even though some of those peers may be presenting a false image of themselves as having it all together and living the good life. This is especially the case with so-called ‘influencers’, those who go to great lengths to market themselves in the best possible light, almost making it a full-time job. The people who have something positive to say about their lives will usually talk more about it than those who are not having it so good, and so it would be easy to fall into the trap of feeling that everyone is having a better time that you

Kevin Drum has an thought-provoking post about the role of the internet in creating this problem. At least, it provoked my thinking enough to feel the need to comment on it.
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Book review: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022)

This novel by Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka won the prestigious Booker Prize for 2022. He is the second Sri Lankan to win the prize, after Michael Ondaatje. The story is set in 1990 and deals with the carnage that engulfed that country in the decades leading up to that time, with thousands of people, mostly ordinary civilians, dying in the conflicts with suicide-bomb explosions in crowded places, people disappearing, mysterious death squads operating with impunity (‘mysterious’ only in the sense that people were fearful of publicly and openly saying what everyone knew, that these were plain-clothes government forces in unmarked vehicles carrying out extrajudicial kidnappings and executions), and dead and mutilated bodies found floating in rivers, lakes, and canals. As far as I am aware, to this day no one among the senior police, military, and political figures who ordered and executed these atrocities has been held accountable for their actions.

The story begins with narrator Maali Almeida waking up in a waiting room in the afterlife where he is told that he has seven days (‘moons’) to try and figure out how and why he died before he moves on to the next realm. This book falls into the category of magic realism so we are in a world where the spirits of dead people are the main characters as they move around not sensed by the living and are able to go anywhere and listen and watch, though they cannot communicate with the living, except for a very few spirits and that too in very limited ways.
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Wanda Sykes on the abuse of speeding tickets

Sykes is one of the rotating hosts of The Daily Show and she had a good segment about how some local communities use speeding tickets as a source of revenue, by adding all manner of other fees to the fine itself. They even put poor people in jail for inability to pay the fines, and then add on more costs to pay for their incarceration.

She says that these fines are hardly a deterrent for rich people and recommends the model of some countries like Finland where the penalty is proportional to a person’s income, and where a Nokia executive got hit with a $103,000 speeding ticket.