“Congratulations Republicans!”: On Climate Change, Republicans Are Truly Exceptional
Speaking at the climate conference in Paris today, President Obama noted a way in which America is different from all other nations. Around the world, he said, concern about climate change “spans political parties.” Said Obama:
“I mean, you travel around Europe and you talk to leaders of governments and the opposition, and they are arguing about a whole bunch of things. One thing they’re not arguing about is whether the science of climate change is real and whether or not we’re going to have to do something about it.”
Nowhere else among the world’s major nations (and maybe the minor nations, too, though I don’t claim to be familiar with all 200 of them) is there a political party representing half the electorate which is adamantly opposed to doing anything to address climate change. So congratulations, Republicans: you have made America truly exceptional.
It’s important to note, however, that there is diversity of opinion within the GOP on this issue — to a point. At one end you have the denialists, who believe that climate change is not occurring at all. The people who believe this also tend to believe that the fact that it still snows in the winter constitutes proof that climate change isn’t happening, which shows the intellectual rigor they bring to this question. This group includes not only the notorious Sen. James Inhofe and a gaggle of less prominent congressional knuckleheads, but also presidential candidates Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Rick Santorum, and Mike Huckabee.
At the other end you have a few lonely Republican voices saying that climate change is a real problem that we should do something to address. Included in their number are two of the presidential candidates, Lindsey Graham and George Pataki. But the broad majority of the party’s elected officials fall into what we might call the uncertainty caucus. When you ask them whether climate change is happening, they say, “Maybe, sure, who knows?” Is it caused by human activity? “It’s possible, could be, how can we say for sure?” What should government do about it? “Absolutely nothing.” So while they might not sound as deranged as the denialists, their policy prescription is the same.
And while their argument in the past has always been that we can’t confront climate change because moving away from fossil fuels would destroy the economy, they’ve shifted their focus in recent weeks. Now when you ask the GOP presidential candidates about the issue, the response you’ll get is more likely to be, “How can we worry about climate change when ISIS is about to kill us all!!!” This is how the candidates have responded not just to President Obama’s belief in the seriousness of climate change, but to his mere attendance at the Paris conference, as if he should have instead stayed home to spend his time filling Americans with fear of terrorism.
“This is the president once again living in his fantasy world rather than the world as it actually is,” said Chris Christie with his characteristic contempt. “He really believes that folks are worried about climate change when what they really care about now is the Islamic State and Syria and terrorism.” Marco Rubio brought his perspective: “Let me just say no matter how you feel about the issue of the environment and climate and changes to climate, there’s no way any reasonable person could conclude that the most immediate threat we face to our security is what the climate is going to look like in 25 or 30 years.”
It’s easy to believe that terrorism is a greater threat to Americans than climate change, because everyone can conjure up a vivid and terrifying image of what terrorism looks like. And though there’s always the possibility that a future terrorist attack could kill large numbers of Americans, the actual number of Americans killed here at home by jihadi terrorists since 9/11 stands at 26, which, as I keep saying, also happens to be exactly the number of Americans killed this year alone by lightning strikes.
The deaths caused by climate change, on the other hand, are complicated to estimate with precision, don’t show up in YouTube videos, and don’t have the kind of dramatic violence that gets presidential candidates thumping their lecterns. But those deaths are real nonetheless. According to a 2012 report commissioned by the governments of 20 nations, climate change kills 400,000 people a year worldwide, mostly through hunger and the spread of communicable diseases. The World Health Organization estimates: “Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year, from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress.”
You might say, well, that’s obviously terrible, but it really isn’t about national security. But the Department of Defense, not exactly a place where you find a lot of tree-hugging hippies, would beg to differ. Here’s how they described a recent report they produced on the topic:
The report reinforces the fact that global climate change will have wide-ranging implications for U.S. national security interests over the foreseeable future because it will aggravate existing problems such as poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership, and weak political institutions that threaten domestic stability in a number of countries.
The report finds that climate change is a security risk because it degrades living conditions, human security, and the ability of governments to meet the basic needs of their populations. Communities and states that are already fragile and have limited resources are significantly more vulnerable to disruption and far less likely to respond effectively and be resilient to new challenges.
In other words, climate change will produce the contexts in which threats to U.S. national security will fester and grow, which is just one of the reasons that the Republican policy position — do nothing — is so dangerous.
But here’s an interesting thing about that position: not only have they failed to persuade the American public that they’re right, they haven’t even persuaded their own voters. According to a new New York Times/CBS poll, not only does two-thirds of the public overall support the U.S. joining an international treaty to reduce carbon emissions — something that almost every Republican elected official vehemently opposes — but a healthy 42 percent of Republican voters support it as well, with 52 percent opposed. And a majority of Republicans said they’d support a policy to limit carbon emissions from power plants. That’s what President Obama’s Clean Power Plan does, and Republicans in Congress are desperately trying to kill it.
The rightward drift of the GOP during the Obama years is a complex story, with many different causes and effects. There are issues on which the party’s voters have gone right along with its leaders, producing a mass consensus that mirrors the elite consensus. But on climate change, it appears that the politicians’ ability to persuade their voters has been incomplete at best. Not that that means the politicians are going to change any time soon.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, December 1, 2015
“He Has Adopted A Retro Racism Strategy”: Donald Trump Is Running The Most Explicitly Racist Campaign Since 1968
Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy is unique and remarkable in many ways. Never before has someone with no experience in government, not even a shred of understanding of public policy, and little in the way of an organized campaign done so well. Trump has been leading the Republican race for nearly five months, and shows no sign of faltering.
And here’s one other way it’s remarkable: After decades of rhetorical evolution from Republicans on matters of race, Donald Trump is now running the most plainly, explicitly, straightforwardly racist campaign since at least George Wallace’s third-party run in 1968, and maybe even Strom Thurmond’s in 1948.
All the way back in 1981, Republican strategist Lee Atwater explained how his party’s candidates had changed the way they talked about race and government to white voters over time. “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,'” Atwater said. “By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
Atwater’s point — that you could get whites to vote on the basis of racial resentments without using explicitly racist language — formed the basis of the GOP’s “Southern Strategy,” first adopted by Richard Nixon. Though you can hear blatant race-baiting just by turning on your favorite conservative radio host (particularly during the Obama presidency), what comes from the man at the top of the ticket has for some time been more subtle. Ronald Reagan may have complained in 1976 about the “strapping young buck” buying steak with his food stamps, and four years later thundered about “welfare queens,” but a Republican candidate today wouldn’t talk in those terms. In 1988, Atwater masterminded the campaign of George Bush, which made “Willie Horton” a household name, convincing voters that Michael Dukakis was going to send murderous, hypersexualized black men to rape their women and kill their men (though not in so many words, of course). But today no GOP nominee would use that story the way the Bush campaign did, because they know they’d be immediately called out for the clear racism of their appeals.
But here comes Donald Trump, who started his campaign by ranting about how Mexican immigrants are rapists and drug dealers — in his announcement speech, no less. It was clear right then that Trump would say what others would only imply. And in the last week or so he has claimed that in Jersey City, “thousands and thousands of people were cheering” as the World Trade Center fell on 9/11. After a Black Lives Matter protester was punched and kicked at a Trump rally, Trump said “Maybe he should have been roughed up.” And he retweeted a graphic with fake statistics about black people supposedly murdering whites, which turns out to have been created by a neo-Nazi.
After innumerable media outlets confirmed that there were no mass celebrations in Jersey City on 9/11, Trump could have said, “I guess you’re right — I was probably remembering scenes I saw of people cheering in the West Bank.” But he didn’t; instead, he insists that he’s right and the facts are wrong. But the real point isn’t that Trump isn’t telling the truth; that has happened many times before and will again. What’s important is the thing Trump is trying to communicate with this story.
It isn’t an argument about the alleged threat posed by Syrian refugees, or something about ISIS (which didn’t exist in 2001). Trump is talking about Americans. He’s telling his supporters: Your Muslim friends and neighbors? They’re not the assimilated, patriotic Americans they want you to believe. They’re not regular people with jobs and families and lives like yours. They’re a threat, people to be surveilled and harassed and hated and feared.
Let’s be clear about one thing: The rest of the Republican Party’s more subtle language on race doesn’t excuse their actions. Making it as hard as possible for black people to vote and stirring up racial resentment on the part of whites are still at the core of GOP strategy. But whether out of the goodness of their hearts or simple political calculation, they’ve agreed that certain kinds of naked bigotry are simply unacceptable in the 21st century.
Donald Trump is not willing to go along with that consensus. So he has adopted a retro racism, telling primary voters in no uncertain terms that if you’re looking for the candidate who will indulge and validate your ugliest impulses, Trump is your man. And nearly as shamefully, his opponents tiptoe around the issue, unwilling to criticize him too severely. Even Chris Christie, whose own constituents are the ones being slandered by Trump’s 9/11 celebration lie, could only muster that “I do not remember that. And so, it’s not something that was part of my recollection. I think if it had happened, I would remember it. But, you know, there could be things I forget, too.” The supposedly tough guy from Jersey turns out to be a moral coward of the first order.
The reason isn’t hard to discern: Christie and the other candidates don’t want to alienate Trump’s supporters, who are greater in number than those behind any other Republican candidate. And that could be the most disheartening thing of all: not that there’s a candidate willing to make these repugnant appeals, but that so many Republican voters hear them and cheer.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, November 25, 2015
“Governor For President? No Thanks”: Challenging “Broder’s Law” That Says Governors Are Best For The Oval Office
Let me declare the end of an era: the governor-era in presidential elections. It was mostly nice while it lasted. Senators seem be in, for those who are actually politicians.
For years, pundits felt with all their hearts that governors were golden kings when it came to running for president. This political gospel was spread throughout the land, mostly because the dean of Washington opinion-makers, the late David Broder of The Washington Post, believed it devoutly. Broder’s law was repeated on Sunday talk shows until it had an aura all its own.
Let’s review the facts on the ground. Among the four front-runners in this cycle – Donald Trump (R), Ben Carson (R), Hillary Clinton (D) and Bernie Sanders (D) – the Republicans have zero political experience, and the Democrats have served as senators.
Meanwhile, the governors in the running are lagging far behind. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) thought being a model-good governor would give him a certain “je ne sais quoi.” Clearly not; he’s a distant third behind the opponents with congressional experience. The former mayor of Baltimore has yet to gain traction, though he’s followed all the signs to higher office.
John Kasich, the Republican governor of a swing state, would be the strong candidate to beat in Broder’s book. He’s in the single digits, last I looked. Three sitting Republican governors, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Rick Perry of Texas, fell out of contention. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is hanging on but looks like a loser, too. Two young Cuban-America senators, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, are outrunning Christie in this race.
The late Broder believed in governors the way my grandfather believed in building highways in the Eisenhower era. Don’t get me wrong; I liked Broder and he was kind about my wish to get into his line of work. The reasoning was simple: Those with executive authority over a state have better job training to govern the nation.
In the span of decades from Presidents Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton to George W. Bush, indeed it was true that governors often made it to the Oval Office. This paradigm crossed party lines, since Carter and Clinton were Southern Democrats and Reagan and Bush were governors of California and Texas, respectively.
The truth is, I noticed the old Broder faith beginning to break down in 2008, but I didn’t want to say anything at first. (I mentioned it in The Huffington Post.) The Democratic crop of candidates fielded more senators than you could shake a stick at: not only Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but also Chris Dodd and Joe Biden. The telegenic Republican nominee, Matt Romney, a perfectly good governor of Massachusetts, lost to a younger freshman senator whose oratory could coax the stars out of the sky.
So here’s the thing. The reason why public trust in sitting governors as candidates is not part of the 21st landscape is this. The American people were so disillusioned with George W. Bush’s presidency – marked by war-mongering in the beginning, Hurricane Katrina in the middle and an economic downturn in the end – that governors have no special favor anymore. In fact, they may have to work to overcome that label.
It’s a 2016 amendment to Broder’s law.
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, November 23, 2015
“So Much For American Exceptionalism”: Fear Of Syrian Refugees Brings Ugly Past Incidents To Mind
It didn’t take long for the stampede to start.
By Sunday, even as stunned Parisians were still placing flowers at the sites of the terrorist atrocities that claimed more than a hundred lives and injured hundreds more, a couple of American governors had announced that Syrian refugees would not be welcome on their turf.
Within a few days, more than half the nation’s governors had signed on. (Never mind that governors have no authority to control borders.) Republican presidential candidates rushed to keep up, with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz pledging a religious test that would admit only Syrian Christians. By Thursday, the House had passed a bill with such stringent vetting standards that it would be virtually impossible to admit any Syrian refugees.
How depressing. Whatever happened to political leadership?
Yes, yes, Americans are shocked and frightened — and understandably so. The savage attacks on unarmed Parisians were carried out by affiliates of the so-called Islamic State (ISIL), which has established a stronghold in Syria, and were calculated to produce horror, to instill fear, to provoke panic. The point of terrorism, after all, is to terrorize.
And since fear is such a powerful emotion — with the capacity to overwhelm reason — it’s no surprise that the American public is now exhibiting a deep reluctance to take in Syrians displaced by war, even though many of them are also targets of ISIL’s brutality. A Bloomberg survey conducted in the wake of the Paris attacks showed that 53 percent of Americans oppose granting asylum to Syrian refugees.
But the proper duty of political leaders is to, well, lead. They shouldn’t pander to our fears or inflame our basest instincts. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what many of them chose to do.
New Jersey governor Chris Christie, desperate to raise his standing in the GOP presidential race, was more shameful than his rivals: “I don’t think that orphans under 5 should be admitted to the United States at this point.” Even for a governor who prides himself on in-your-face provocations, that’s pretty despicable.
But some pols managed to sink even lower. One Tennessee legislator, Rep. Glen Casada, proposed sending the National Guard to round up any Syrian refugees who’ve been resettled in his state and ship them out. Casada has clearly refused to learn from some disgraceful episodes in the nation’s history.
In 1939, for example, the United States, along with Cuba and Canada, denied entry to more than 900 Jews aboard the MS St. Louis seeking refuge from Nazi Germany. The refugees were forced to return to Europe, where, historians estimate, about a quarter of them later perished in death camps.
As historian Peter Shulman, a professor at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University, recently pointed out, antipathy toward European Jews ran high even as the Nazis began their campaign of extermination. He cited a 1938 poll showing that 67 percent of Americans opposed bringing in “German, Austrian and other” political refugees.
The historical comparison isn’t perfect. The U.S. had not fully emerged from the Great Depression, and fear of economic competition was certainly a factor. But so was anti-Semitism — just as an anti-Muslim xenophobia is now. Among some, including President Roosevelt, there was also the suspicion that Nazi agents might be hiding among Jewish refugees. Sound familiar?
The nation’s hysteria didn’t stop with the refusal to aid the Jews aboard the St. Louis. Roosevelt also signed an executive order to round up more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent and hold them in internment camps; 62 percent of them were American citizens, some with sons serving in the U.S. armed forces. Decades later, the U.S. government officially apologized and acknowledged that the camps resulted from, among other things, “race prejudice.”
History, then, offers some powerful lessons about fear and the shameful reactions it can provoke. So let’s all keep our heads.
The Obama administration already has a thorough and painstaking vetting process for Syrian refugees that can take as long as two years. Is it perfect? No, it isn’t. But it sets a high bar for entry while also preserving our ability to assist those who most need our help.
Isn’t that what American exceptionalism is all about?
By: Cynthia Tucker Haynes, Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, November 21, 2015
“Scared Of Widows And 3-Year-Old Orphans”: Obama Offers GOP A Lesson In What ‘Tough’ Actually Means
President Obama has heard the Republican reactions to Friday’s terrorist attacks in Paris, and it seems safe to say he’s unimpressed.
“When candidates say we shouldn’t admit 3-year old-orphans, that’s political posturing,” Obama said at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit in Manila – making a veiled reference to GOP candidate and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. “When people say we should have a religious test, and only Christians, proven Christians, should be admitted, that’s offensive, and contrary to American values.”
He added, taking another jab: “These are the same folks often times that say they’re so tough that just talking to (Russian President Vladimir) Putin or staring down ISIL (ISIS) or using some additional rhetoric will solve the problem – but apparently they’re scared of widows and 3-year-old orphans.”
Obama added, “At first they were worried about the press being too tough on them in the debates. Now they’re worried about three-year-old orphans. That doesn’t sound very tough to me.”
And while these comments were no doubt emotionally satisfying for those who’ve grown tired of watching Republicans try to exploit fear and ignorance to advance their own demagogic agenda, the president’s comments were also constructive on a specific front.
“We are not well served when, in response to a terrorist attack, we descend into fear and panic. We don’t make good decisions if it’s based on hysteria or an exaggeration of risks,” Obama said. “I cannot think of a more potent recruitment tool for ISIL than some of the rhetoric coming out of here in the course of this debate. They’ve been playing on fear to score political points or to advance their campaigns and it’s irresponsible. It needs to stop because the world is watching.”
This wasn’t just empty rhetoric. The point about ISIS “recruitment tools” is of particular importance because it offers American political leaders a timely reminder: if you’re making things easier for ISIS, you’re doing it wrong.
The enemy is not some inscrutable foe with a mysterious worldview. As they’ve made clear many, many times, ISIS leaders want to be described in explicitly religious terms. They want to be characterized as a “state” and an existential threat to the West. They want to turn the West against refugees. ISIS leaders have a narrative – that Western leaders hate their faith – and they’re desperate to have their enemies reinforce that narrative as often, and as enthusiastically, as possible.
And in response, Republicans want to describe ISIS in explicitly religious terms. American conservatives keep describing ISIS as a “caliphate” and an existential threat to the West. The right has turned against refugees. Some Republicans have gone so far as to suggest Christians should explicitly be given preferential treatment over Muslims, effectively providing fodder for the very ISIS narrative the terrorists are eager to push.
Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting for a moment that Republicans are somehow deliberately trying to bolster ISIS’s agenda. That’s absurd; there are no ISIS sympathizers in mainstream American politics.
Rather, the point is that Republicans are inadvertently making things easier for ISIS when they should be doing the opposite. The Washington Post’s Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, went so far yesterday as to argue that American conservatives are “materially undermining the war against terrorism” and making a challenging situation worse.
All our efforts are undermined by declaring Islam itself to be the enemy, and by treating Muslims in the United States, or Muslims in Europe, or Muslims fleeing Islamic State oppression, as a class of suspicious potential jihadists. […]
[I]f U.S. politicians define Islam as the problem and cast aspersions on Muslim populations in the West, they are feeding the Islamic State narrative. They are materially undermining the war against terrorism and complicating the United States’ (already complicated) task in the Middle East.
Vox’s Zack Beauchamp added that turning away Syrian refugees specifically helps ISIS.
ISIS despises Syrian refugees: It sees them as traitors to the caliphate. By leaving, they turn their back on the caliphate. ISIS depicts its territory as a paradise, and fleeing refugees expose that as a lie. But if refugees do make it out, ISIS wants them to be treated badly – the more the West treats them with suspicion and fear, the more it supports ISIS’s narrative of a West that is hostile to Muslims and bolsters ISIS’s efforts to recruit from migrant communities in Europe.
The fewer refugees the West lets in, and the chillier their welcome on arrival, the better for ISIS.
I’m not blind to the complexities of national-security policy in this area, and I’m reluctant to be blithe in over-simplifying matters, but I’d ask U.S. policymakers and candidates to consider a straightforward test:
- Are you doing exactly what ISIS wants you to do?
- If the answer is “yes,” stop.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 18, 2015
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