“Crime, Fear, And The Republicans”: Moving Toward The Traditional Toxic Brew Of Race, Ethnicity And White Middle Class Insecurity
From Nixon to Reagan to the first President Bush, Republican campaigns were run like campaigns for sheriff. Nixon ran against unprecedented lawlessness and promised law and order to the silent majority. Reagan remained consistent in his view that “the jungle is waiting to take over. The man with the badge holds it back.” And George H.W. Bush rode the menacing image of Willie Horton, the furloughed rapist, to victory over Michael Dukakis. Then, in 1992, Bill Clinton took time out from his chaotic comeback in New Hampshire to preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally disabled man who had shot out most of his frontal lobe.
Clinton not only took the crime monkey off the back of the Democratic party, he also enacted draconian legislation that has been a key driver in making the United States by far the most heavily incarcerated society in the world: 2.2 million men and women behind bars, disproportionately African-American, Latino, addicted and mentally ill, at an estimated annual cost of $73 billion. Yet over the last quarter century, violent crime rates have been falling, dramatically.
Of course, it can be argued that the decline is the product of mass incarceration, but a recent study by the Brennan Center shows that the effect of increased incarceration on crime rates since 1990 has been limited, and has been non-existent since 2000. Although the Times recently reported “a startling rise in murders after years of declines,” Bruce Frederick, analyzing the statistics for the Marshall Project, found that only 3 of 20 cities have a “statistically reliable increase” in homicide rates.
In an age of hemorrhaging costs and declining crime, fiscally responsible Republicans have begun to make common cause with Democrats to start to shrink the prison-industrial complex. The Brennan Center recently published a collection of essays entitled “Solutions: American Leaders Speak Out on Criminal Justice Reform.” In his contribution, Rand Paul called for investigation of racial disparities in sentencing and argued against imprisonment for non-violent drug offenders, who make up the largest single group behind bars. Ted Cruz decried mandatory minimum sentences, which vests too much power in prosecutors. Marco Rubio declared there were too many federal crimes that were too poorly defined, and too poorly disclosed. Chris Christie, Rick Perry, Scott Walker and Mike Huckabee all called for compassion for drug offenders and showed interest in drug treatment as an alternative to incarceration.
Then along came Trump, blowing the old Republican dog whistle on race and crime. Ronald Reagan’s “jungle” was encroaching again, this time from the south. Mexicans are “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Doubling down when the statistics showed otherwise, Trump said “I don’t have a racist bone in my body,” but reiterated that Mexicans coming here “are, in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.” His website section on issues does not address crime, or indeed any other issue, except one — immigration.
The conservative National Review sees the potential here for a Republican renaissance on fear of crime. In a recent paean to Nixonian nostalgia, “Revive Law and Order Conservatism,” Stephen Eide writes, “So long as the New York Times and anti-cop activist groups continue with their provocations, we can be reasonably confident that more violent unrest is to come. The spectacle of chaos descending on cities long dominated by Democrats obviously plays to the GOP’s advantage.”
He decries conservative attitudes on crime as “notably softer now than they have been in many decades.” Acknowledging that “New York City’s murders hit a 50-year low,” he observes, “there were still more than three times as many as in London, which has about the same population.” Surely that could have nothing to do with robust Second Amendment rights, another cornerstone of the Republican platform. Eide counsels Republicans that a key to victory in 2016 is to “emphasize that we still have a serious crime problem.”
Republican candidates are taking note. On Hot Air, a conservative web site, Scott Walker properly lamented a recent spate of tragic police shootings but blamed them on President Obama. “In the last six years under President Obama, we’ve seen a rise in anti-police rhetoric. Instead of hope and change, we’ve seen racial tensions worsen and a tendency to use law enforcement as a scapegoat.” And Chris Christie threw Bill de Blasio under the bus as well, “It’s the liberal policies in [New York] that have led to the lawlessness that’s been encouraged by the president of the United States,” he said. “And I’m telling you, people in this country are getting more and more fed up.”
Republicans are increasingly positioning the issue as a rift between Black Lives Matter and police unions, between Sanctuary Cities and thousand mile anti-rapist walls. The constructive discourse in recent months about the crushing costs of incarceration, the waste of mandatory minimum sentences, the twin crises of mental health and addiction in prison, the endless cost and delay in enforcing the death penalty has all but ended. In its place, Republicans are moving toward the traditional toxic brew of race, ethnicity, white middle class insecurity and panic about crime.
Get ready for the return of Willie Horton.
By: Eric Lewis, Chairman of Reprieve US, a Human Rights Organization; The Marshall Project, Brennan Center for Justice, September 15, 2015
“How The ‘Party Of Stupid’ Birthed Trump And Carson”: Leveraging Racism Plus Pandering To The Dumb And Incoherently Angry
At the start of the cycle, conservative soothsayers boasted of the “deep bench” on the right; governors of purple states, with proven records, were the headliners. Worries that a handful of first-term senators in the mix might suggest a lack of seriousness about the real work of governance were brushed off by pointing to Barack Obama as precedent.
Now the party’s rising stars are two men who have exactly as much experience in government as they do interest in making government work. Their fealty to the Republican Party is almost as recent as their decision to run for president. Carson was a registered independent until 2014, and Trump flaunts his pan-ideological predilections to this very day.
Conservatives like to paint liberals as slaves to sentiment. The “bleeding hearts” sobriquet also connotes eyes too misty with tears to see the hard truths: We legislate based on immigrant sob stories and vote for presidential candidates to salve our own guilty consciences. Trump’s politically incorrect shtick is just another way of calling out this supposed divide: “We’re tired of the nice people,” he says, and by saying it creates a truth if it didn’t exist before.
For his part, Carson has been eager to prove his soothing bedside manner is an interface, not a core value. His youthful Democratic sympathies were Kool-Aid-induced; Reagan “reprogram[med]” him: “He sounded like a logical person and my mind changed.”
Since the neocons first uncracked themselves from the Ivy League, the conservative movement has masqueraded as the “think, not feel” wing of American politics. But their courtship of nativists, segregationists, and other grievance-seekers has led to this Trump/Carson moment. Not the party of ideas, but the party of stupid, where even smart, successful people have to pander to the dumb and incoherently angry.
According to CNN, 75 percent of those supporting candidates with no previous electoral experience are attracted to “their views on the issues.” I suspect that respondents selected that answer because they couldn’t just grunt.
Trump’s distaste for policy specifics could fill dozens of white papers that he’d never read. The fact that Carson justified his damning of Obamacare as “worse than 9/11” because the 9/11 attack was “an isolated event” speaks to his ignorance about terrorism as much as it does about the effects of the Affordable Care Act.
Here’s the thing: Trump and Carson are winning a huge slice of the GOP base because of that prideful ignorance, which to voters signifies not just a rejection of the establishment or elites but a release from the hard work of having to think.
Let me be clear: To say Carson and Trump are anti-intellectual doesn’t mean they are dumb. Far from it.
Trump, especially, has shown a genius—a high-level forethought, not some native street smarts—in how he communicates his… oh, let’s call it his “vision.” Carson, too, has crafted his brand to appeal to those tired of ideas and arguing and philosophical debates. Given Carson’s smooth affect, his marketing handiwork is, ironically, a less subtle product than Trump’s; it shows the seams from where Carson has had to forcibly rip out the parts of his intellectual history that evince a deviation from the full-throated anti-establishmentarianism the Republican base now demands. (Forget his much-discussed turnaround on abortion: what about endorsing death panels, affirmative action, and eliminating for-profit insurance companies?)
Both Trump and Carson are brilliant in leveraging their extraordinary professional success as bait to voters whose principal complaint hinges on a nagging sense of failure. Audiences aren’t flocking to these brutalist polymaths for their ideas. Indeed, in a party already thirsty for innovative policy approaches, Trump and Carson stand out for the pride they take in their xeriscape platforms: empty places, where occasional quasi-insights drift by like tumbleweeds, unmoored from experience or data.
Trump’s screechingly casual approach to information is especially appalling. An anecdote in a recent Rolling Stone profile charts the route from Trump’s complete ignorance on the heroin epidemic in the Northeast (“You know New Hampshire has a huge problem with heroin? Why do ya s’pose that is?”), to his query of the reporter for information (“I tell him that it probably has to do with OxyContin and school kids raiding their parents’ medicine chests”), to his airy reference in a speech minutes later: “It starts probably with OxyContin, from what I’m hearing.” The conclusion implies, among other things, that this is a subject he may have discussed more than once.
From the embroidered, hearsay nature of Trump’s answers to concrete questions, I would say he treats facts like gossip—except I’m sure he takes gossip more seriously than facts. Trump knows he is expected to have some command of issues beyond “deals,” and so he clings to one or two more-or-less certain applause lines like a sticky-fingered child. Witness these excruciating exchanges with a slumming Hugh Hewitt, in which Trump dismisses questions about the intricacies of Middle East foreign policy with a koan-like recitation, “The Kurds, by the way, have been horribly mistreated.” He says this even when the question is about Hezbollah, or al-Baghdadi—or, points for trying, the “Quds.”
Such rote memorized factlets have all the substance of cotton candy, and when he stretches them to apply to topics outside his limited scope of knowledge, they tatter and fall apart embarrassingly. Or, what would be embarrassing, if it were not for the fact that Trump has been able to rely on the underlying distrust his supporters have for experts.
Carson is not much better. If Trump’s shameless doubletalk (to evangelical voters, especially) suggests he thinks his supporters are suckers, Carson thinks his are rubes. His compulsory campaign tome is punctuated with what should be hackle-raising condescension, or at least revealingly faulty logic: “If you know all 26 letters of the alphabet, you are on your way to reading.” Perhaps he thought he was writing an audiobook script.
In a saner or at least more deliberative world, Carson’s debate-ending “zinger” about being the only person on stage to have separated Siamese twins would be treated as a howler of a gaffe, along the lines of Admiral Stockdale’s retrospectively winsome admission, “Who am I? Why am I here?” One thing (neurosurgery) has nothing to do with the other (the presidency), and to pretend the skills are transferable is an insult—mostly to neurosurgeons.
Carson has a predictable defense to his nonchalant naiveté: “There’s nobody who knows everything,” after all. He’ll delegate, just like how when he “runs into a kidney problem… will call in a renal specialist!” But he’s giving comfort to the patient by only taking the analogy halfway. The real parallel wouldn’t be a surgeon calling in for help on a single complication, it would be having a really smart diplomat trying to figure out how to run an ER.
There’s a difference between being anti-intellectual and being dumb; there’s also a difference between having a governing philosophy and being smart. Scott Walker, for instance, has a more-or-less coherent approach to governing (do less and less of it). But he appears to be impersonating an honest-to-goodness dumbass, incapable of answering the simplest questions without sinking into the rhetorical version of Zeno’s paradox. He gets halfway to a definitive opinion, then halfway again, forever splitting the distance between himself and, it seems, the nomination.
Walker, like all the other Republican politicians with a résumé that matches the job opening, has been reduced to playing dumb. Is it an accident that the first major candidate to drop out was also the one with the longest gubernatorial résumé?
How did we get here?
You can’t spend 40 years tacitly making racists feel welcome in your party and expect the intellectual atmosphere not to suffer, or for that anti-intellectualism to stay bounded with race.
Not only does the GOP’s history of leveraging racism, if not explicitly endorsing it, explain Trump’s success (as numerous commentators have pointed out), it also explains Carson’s rise—and not just as embedded in the sideways condescension of considering Carson “not like the others.” Carson appeals to the same anti-intellectual, anti-government, anti-idea, anti-democratic set of biases the GOP establishment has been cultivating for decades.
Bigotry entered into the conservative movement’s DNA like a virus, altering the intellectual inheritance of the party of Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol. Where once it meant something to declare certain attitudes or policies too ugly or hateful to take seriously, much less include in debate, there is now a movement that can’t afford to call out bald ignorance and gross sexism for fear the most ardent banner-carriers might get offended. They say it’s the left that is governed by political correctness, but the deference paid to the sensitivity of Trump’s followers is as oppressive as any campus trigger warning.
“There is just something about him,” one fan of Carson’s said early on, as if he was “appointed by some higher power to do this.” Anti-democratic sentiments don’t come much more clearly expressed than that.
By: Ana Marie Cox, The Daily Beast, September 14, 2015
“After Six Full Years Of Being Wrong About Everything”: Crash-Test Dummies As Republican Candidates For President
Will China’s stock crash trigger another global financial crisis? Probably not. Still, the big market swings of the past week have been a reminder that the next president may well have to deal with some of the same problems that faced George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Financial instability abides.
So this is a test: How would the men and women who would be president respond if crisis struck on their watch?
And the answer, on the Republican side at least, seems to be: with bluster and China-bashing. Nowhere is there a hint that any of the G.O.P. candidates understand the problem, or the steps that might be needed if the world economy hits another pothole.
Take, for example, Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin. Mr. Walker was supposed to be a formidable contender, part of his party’s “deep bench” of current or former governors who know how to get things done. So what was his suggestion to President Obama? Why, cancel the planned visit to America by Xi Jinping, China’s leader. That would fix things!
Then there’s Donald Trump, who likes to take an occasional break from his anti-immigrant diatribes to complain that China is taking advantage of America’s weak leadership. You might think that a swooning Chinese economy would fit awkwardly into that worldview. But no, he simply declared that U.S. markets seem troubled because Mr. Obama has let China “dictate the agenda.” What does that mean? I haven’t a clue — but neither does he.
By the way, five years ago there were real reasons to complain about China’s undervalued currency. But Chinese inflation and the rise of new competitors have largely eliminated that problem.
Back to the deep bench: Chris Christie, another governor who not long ago was touted as the next big thing, was more comprehensible. According to Mr. Christie, the reason U.S. markets were roiled by events in China was U.S. budget deficits, which he claims have put us in debt to the Chinese and hence made us vulnerable to their troubles. That almost rises to the level of a coherent economic story.
Did the U.S. market plunge because Chinese investors were cutting off credit? Well, no. If our debt to China were the problem, we would have seen U.S. interest rates spiking as China crashed. Instead, interest rates fell.
But there’s a slight excuse for Mr. Christie’s embrace of this particular fantasy: scare stories involving Chinese ownership of U.S. debt have been a Republican staple for years. They were, in particular, a favorite of Mitt Romney’s campaign in 2012.
And you can see why. “Obama is endangering America by borrowing from China” is a perfect political line, playing into deficit fetishism, xenophobia and the perennial claim that Democrats don’t stand up for America! America! America! It’s also complete nonsense, but that doesn’t seem to matter.
In fact, talking nonsense about economic crises is essentially a job requirement for anyone hoping to get the Republican presidential nomination.
To understand why, you need to go back to the politics of 2009, when the new Obama administration was trying to cope with the most terrifying crisis since the 1930s. The outgoing Bush administration had already engineered a bank bailout, but the Obama team reinforced this effort with a temporary program of deficit spending, while the Federal Reserve sought to bolster the economy by buying lots of assets.
And Republicans, across the board, predicted disaster. Deficit spending, they insisted, would cause soaring interest rates and bankruptcy; the Fed’s efforts would “debase the dollar” and produce runaway inflation.
None of it happened. Interest rates stayed very low, as did inflation. But the G.O.P. never acknowledged, after six full years of being wrong about everything, that the bad things it predicted failed to take place, or showed any willingness to rethink the doctrines that led to those bad predictions. Instead, the party’s leading figures kept talking, year after year, as if the disasters they had predicted were actually happening.
Now we’ve had a reminder that something like that last crisis could happen again — which means that we might need a repeat of the policies that helped limit the damage last time. But no Republican dares suggest such a thing.
Instead, even the supposedly sensible candidates call for destructive policies. Thus John Kasich is being portrayed as a different kind of Republican because as governor he approved Medicaid expansion in Ohio, but his signature initiative is a call for a balanced-budget amendment, which would cripple policy in a crisis.
The point is that one side of the political aisle has been utterly determined to learn nothing from the economic experiences of recent years. If one of these candidates ends up in the hot seat the next time crisis strikes, we should be very, very afraid.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, August 28, 2015
“Who We Are As A Nation”: 11 Million People, But Just Three Choices
Whether or not it can be said that Donald Trump is pushing the Republican presidential field “to the right” on immigration policy, there’s zero question he is making it much harder for them to play games with it, as Greg Sargent points out at the Plum Line after watching Scott Walker and Carly Fiorina squirm through questioning on the Sunday shows.
When the GOP candidates are pressed on what they would do about the 11 million, the results tend not to be pretty. For instance, on Meet the Press, Chuck Todd asked Carly Fiorina about Trump’s call for ending birthright citizenship -which Fiorina rejected far more forcefully than Walker did. But then Todd sensibly followed up with this:
TODD: What do you do with the 11 million?
FIORINA: My own view is, if you have come here illegally and stayed here illegally, you do not have an opportunity to earn a pathway to citizenship. To legal status, perhaps. But I think there must be consequence.
Fiorina says that “perhaps” undocumented immigrants should have a path to legal status — provided it precludes any chance at citizenship. Okay, if you’re not willing to support legal status, then what should be done instead? Walker, for his part, has declined to endorse mass deportations, but doesn’t think we should even talk about legalization until the border is secured.
There are really just three legitimate answers to Todd’s question: deportation, self-deportation, or legalization (though it’s possible to have a combination of the three). “I don’t want to talk about it until the border is secured” is a non-answer. Arguments over the remote possibility of repealing “birthright citizenship” are non-responsive, too. And if deportation–which presumably is what “just enforcing the law” would involve–is in the cards, we need frank talk about how to defray the incredibly high costs and whether the police state atmosphere it would involve could have some collateral effects on little matters like who we are as a nation.
Until Trump started talking about deportation, there was a tacit agreement within the GOP to keep it all vague so as to satisfy the people who really would like to see children herded onto cattle cars and sent to the border without alarming everyone else–you know, kind of like the tacit agreement not to discuss Carly Fiorina’s qualifications to be president, which Trump also broke. But journalists really need to stop letting these birds avoid the key questions or have it every which way or change the subject.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, August 24, 2015
“Donald Trump At The Wheel”: He’s Driving The GOP Over A Cliff, And The Establishment Can’t Stop Him
After a week’s worth of soundbites from presidential candidates about “anchor babies” and repealing birthright citizenship, it is now clear, if it wasn’t already, that Donald Trump has the steering wheel of the Republican Party firmly in his grasp.
So despite the Republican National Committee’s infamous “autopsy” of the 2012 election — which found that the party could not compete unless it fixed its increasingly toxic image among the Latino electorate — the GOP’s presidential primary has devolved into a contest to see who can demonize and dehumanize immigrants the most. If a sensible, pragmatic Republican Party “establishment” actually existed, now is right about when it would step in. But it doesn’t, of course; so it won’t.
Which is not to say that what passes for the GOP establishment nowadays has gone silent. As recent pieces from elite conservative pundits in Slate and Politico Magazine show, something approximating an establishment is still in the mix. The problem, though, is that this establishment is completely incapable of controlling Trump, much less the party’s overall message. And whether they opt for conflict or cooptation, their attempts to manipulate Trump will inevitably fail.
Because the establishment, unlike Trump, cannot bring itself to see the Republican Party — and the conservative movement, in general — for the clumsy vehicle of politicized resentment and white identity politics that it really is.
True, conservative elites have been playing some version of this game for a while now; using extreme reactionaries to win elections but pretending the GOP is run by urbane, center-right moderates. But those forces used to be disorganized enough that long-shot protest candidacies (like the Pat Buchanan’s in the 1990s) were the best they could do. And that made maintaining the lie — that the conservative movement’s inmates did not run the asylum — a whole lot easier. At this point, however, that’s no longer the case.
Nevertheless, they’re still trying. And thus do we get pieces like this one in Slate, by National Review’s Reihan Salam, which operates from the absurd premise that conservative, iconoclastic minority voters can be brought into the GOP coalition without tearing the whole thing apart. “There appears to be a nontrivial share of black voters who are open to a center-right message,” Salam writes near the end of his piece. “Winning them over,” he continues, “will mean decontaminating a GOP brand.”
If the GOP coalition was the pluralist, cosmopolitan entity of his imagination, Salam would have a decent point. But such a GOP wouldn’t have a xenophobic, populist figure like Trump, whose mantra is that “we” must “take our country back,” as its biggest star, would it? If the Republican Party was comprised of voters who signed-up because they held “conservative positions on issues,” which is what Salam seems to think, then how could an ideological grab-bag like Trump be in the position he’s in?
As Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul complained earlier this summer, Trump is anything but a consistent conservative. But as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who hopes to be the second-choice of Trump’s supporters, seems to understand, the kind of voters who now control the GOP primary don’t see politics through that prism. They don’t love Trump because of any long-held views on taxes or abortion or Social Security; they love Trump because they see him as “one of [them].”
Obviously, Salam is not the only serious right-wing pundit to misunderstand the GOP coalition. He’s not even the only one from National Review to do it as of late. Editor-in-chief Rich Lowry recently wrote a piece for Politico Magazine that celebrated Trump’s influence. Yet he littered his praise with caveats about how Trump’s “bar-stool bombast” and “excesses” obscured his larger, more intellectually defensible views. But for the Republicans flocking to Trump, the rhetoric isn’t an afterthought; it’s what Trumpism is.
Lowry’s attempt to rush to the front of the pro-Trump mob and then try to lead it is relatively feeble. But even if his column was as powerful as it would need to be to get these people’s attention, it would still fail. Because Lowry, like Salam, doesn’t know how to talk to these people, which is due in no small part to his spending so much of his career responding to liberal criticism by pretending these folks don’t even exist. In that sense, speaking to them in their own language, as Trump does, would be a defeat.
Then again, what would Lowry or Salam actually say to these people, hypothetically, to get them to stop making the GOP look so viciously nativist? While the differences between the two groups are in a sense aesthetic, this is a case where style and substance and one and the same. Trump’s backers adore him because he’s willing to say the things they believe, but are told they shouldn’t. For them, a strategy that required no more public talk of “anchor babies” would be missing the point.
And that’s why the GOP finds itself in its current predicament, and why no one should expect a pragmatic, sober-minded establishment to ultimately step in. Until the Trump phenomenon collapses due to the public’s fatigue or Trump’s individual boredom, this is how the GOP primary will remain. The only candidates who’ll survive will be the ones willing to kick dirt on illegal immigrants. They’ll be the ones who stopped campaigning in the GOP of the pundits’ imaginations, opting instead to win over voters who actually exist.
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, August 22, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 