Politics & Stuff

[cosmicway 1,318]

12 minutes ago, Vesper said:

In re the West and core first world:

Smash the gobal systemic banking system (on international, national, and massive private banking levels)

Wealth inequality reduction on a massive scale

End austerity regimes for social welfare regimes

Scupper the military industrial complexes and the endless wars to preserve the petrol/dollar matrix

Remove the for-profit nature from vital human services (like heathcare)

All-out assault, on a global basis, to combat global climate change

Kick off a half century (or a full century, if need be) plan to sort out Africa

Introduce UBI

THINK BIG

 

 

Climate change is a lie.
Over several billion years yes, there will be new age of the dinosaurs and what have you.
But the Thunberg myth is a lie.

[Vesper 28,763]

47 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

Climate change is a lie.

sorry, but that is absolutely delusional

[Vesper 28,763]

I am not going to get into a debate with crackpot climate change denialism

complete waste of time over massively settled science that is an existential threat to humanity

[cosmicway 1,318]

18 minutes ago, Vesper said:

I am not going to get into a debate with crackpot climate change denialism

complete waste of time over massively settled science that is an existential threat to humanity

It is over geological ages.

[Fulham Broadway 16,825]

How climate change is driving extreme fires in Greece

 

Just as an enormous wildfire tears through the suburbs of Athens, scientists in Europe are racing to understand why "extreme" fires like this are becoming more common.

The conditions for some of these fierce blazes have become between three and 20 times more likely, according to the first research of its kind.

 

The new annual review of what is causing extreme fires, and whether we can predict them, comes off the back of a staggeringly destructive wildfire season from March 2023 to February 2024.

Record-breaking flames scorched Canada and turned skies far away in New York orange and grey. The largest recorded fires in the European Union killed 19 people in Greece, and blazes in western Amazonia brought filthy air to local towns.

Today's major study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Earth System Science Data, finds carbon emissions from wildfires in 2023-2024 were 16% above average, spewing out 8.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

 

 

And, had it not been a quiet fire season in the African savannahs, the global emission from wildfires would have been the greatest of any fire season on record since 2003, they said.

Image:Parthenon shrouded in smoke from Greek wildfires

Image:Pic: Reuters

What is an 'extreme' wildfire?

There is no single definition of what constitutes an extreme fire, because it is relative to the location, said one of the authors Dr Douglas Kelley, from the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UKCEH).

It could be measured by things like burned area, intensity, or how unusual they are, depending on the region.

 

But they used three mega blazes in Canada, Greece, and western Amazonia last year as a benchmark.

The current flames in Greece would count as an extreme fire because of its proximity to and potential damage to people, said fellow author Dr Joe McNorton from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).

At 200 square kilometres, this year's fires in Greece are still much smaller than the 900 square kilometres burned last fire season.

That's because the current flames are at the "wildland-urban interface", which brings with it "potential loss of life, destruction, economic devastation" said Dr McNorton.

Image:Pic: Reuters

Climate change raised the chances of unprecedented fires last year

Human-driven climate change made the tinderbox conditions of 2023-24 up to three times more likely in Greece, similar in Canada and 20 times more likely in western Amazonia, today's paper found.

They then looked at "how likely we are to get them in the future", said Dr Kelley.

If the world warms by up to 2C by 2100, sticking to Paris Agreement goals, they project such a fire in Canada will be two to three times more likely, but no change in Greece and western Amazonia.

But if temperatures warm by more like 3C, extreme fires like last year will be up to 11 times more likely in Canada, three in Greece and 1.3 in western Amazonia.

Other research shows the number of intense fires has been rising.

How does climate change impact extreme fires?

Climate change is "clearly increasing" fire conditions, said Dr Matthew Jones from the University of East Anglia.

Warmer temperatures dry out forests, which make a fire "more likely to spread", said Dr Kelley. It can also cause more vegetation to grow, which provides more "fuel" for the fire.

Human factors also influence fires, like starting them themselves, or breaking up the landscape, or how well they fight them.

0:59

 

 

 

 

Play Video - Drone captures damage of Greece wildfires

Drone captures damage of Greece wildfires

How do fires impact climate change?

Although the number of extreme fires is on the up, the total amount of land being burned has been decreasing.

That is a bit of a "red herring" said Dr Jones, because it's due to a fall in the less harmful savannah fires, as things like agriculture break up the grassland, often bringing better protection or irrigation.

But what scientists are really concerned about is the rise in wildfires in forests.

Forest wildfires release more carbon emissions, pose a higher risk to people, take longer to recover, and mean the loss of huge carbon storage.

Image:The total amount of land burned globally has been falling, largely due to a decrease of fires in savannah areas Pic: Jones et al (2024)

Image:CO2 emissions from fires have not changed much even though land area burned has fallen, because now more dense forests are burning Pic: Jones et al (2024)

Read more from Sky News:
New warning about 'demise' of Great Barrier Reef
Britain's smallest house 'at risk' due to climate change

That's why global fire emissions have barely budged even though land area burned has fallen - and there's a fear global emissions from fires could soon increase.

More extreme fires in Canada and western Amazonia are "quite worrying... in ecosystems which hold a lot of carbon and in some cases, don't experience much fire today, so they haven't really adapted to it," said Dr Kelley.

Image:70-year-old Sakis Morfis inspects the damage in Greece

What can be done?

Dr Clair Barnes from Imperial College London, who was not involved with the study, said she hopes the report will both "guide preparations for wildfires, and help the world understand the simple fact that fires will keep getting worse until fossil fuels are replaced with renewable energy sources".

Scientists agree that emissions need to fall in order to avoid future risk - but that will take a long time to have an impact.

In the meantime, the authors said, leaders should consider protecting forest boundaries, reducing the amount of natural fuel fire, imposing fire bans on high-risk days, and investing more in early warning prediction systems.

 

[cosmicway 1,318]

23 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

How climate change is driving extreme fires in Greece

 

Just as an enormous wildfire tears through the suburbs of Athens, scientists in Europe are racing to understand why "extreme" fires like this are becoming more common.

The conditions for some of these fierce blazes have become between three and 20 times more likely, according to the first research of its kind.

 

The new annual review of what is causing extreme fires, and whether we can predict them, comes off the back of a staggeringly destructive wildfire season from March 2023 to February 2024.

Record-breaking flames scorched Canada and turned skies far away in New York orange and grey. The largest recorded fires in the European Union killed 19 people in Greece, and blazes in western Amazonia brought filthy air to local towns.

Today's major study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Earth System Science Data, finds carbon emissions from wildfires in 2023-2024 were 16% above average, spewing out 8.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

 

 

And, had it not been a quiet fire season in the African savannahs, the global emission from wildfires would have been the greatest of any fire season on record since 2003, they said.

Image:Parthenon shrouded in smoke from Greek wildfires

Image:Pic: Reuters

What is an 'extreme' wildfire?

There is no single definition of what constitutes an extreme fire, because it is relative to the location, said one of the authors Dr Douglas Kelley, from the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UKCEH).

It could be measured by things like burned area, intensity, or how unusual they are, depending on the region.

 

But they used three mega blazes in Canada, Greece, and western Amazonia last year as a benchmark.

The current flames in Greece would count as an extreme fire because of its proximity to and potential damage to people, said fellow author Dr Joe McNorton from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).

At 200 square kilometres, this year's fires in Greece are still much smaller than the 900 square kilometres burned last fire season.

That's because the current flames are at the "wildland-urban interface", which brings with it "potential loss of life, destruction, economic devastation" said Dr McNorton.

Image:Pic: Reuters

Climate change raised the chances of unprecedented fires last year

Human-driven climate change made the tinderbox conditions of 2023-24 up to three times more likely in Greece, similar in Canada and 20 times more likely in western Amazonia, today's paper found.

They then looked at "how likely we are to get them in the future", said Dr Kelley.

If the world warms by up to 2C by 2100, sticking to Paris Agreement goals, they project such a fire in Canada will be two to three times more likely, but no change in Greece and western Amazonia.

But if temperatures warm by more like 3C, extreme fires like last year will be up to 11 times more likely in Canada, three in Greece and 1.3 in western Amazonia.

Other research shows the number of intense fires has been rising.

How does climate change impact extreme fires?

Climate change is "clearly increasing" fire conditions, said Dr Matthew Jones from the University of East Anglia.

Warmer temperatures dry out forests, which make a fire "more likely to spread", said Dr Kelley. It can also cause more vegetation to grow, which provides more "fuel" for the fire.

Human factors also influence fires, like starting them themselves, or breaking up the landscape, or how well they fight them.

0:59

 

 

 

 

Play Video - Drone captures damage of Greece wildfires

 

Drone captures damage of Greece wildfires

How do fires impact climate change?

Although the number of extreme fires is on the up, the total amount of land being burned has been decreasing.

That is a bit of a "red herring" said Dr Jones, because it's due to a fall in the less harmful savannah fires, as things like agriculture break up the grassland, often bringing better protection or irrigation.

But what scientists are really concerned about is the rise in wildfires in forests.

Forest wildfires release more carbon emissions, pose a higher risk to people, take longer to recover, and mean the loss of huge carbon storage.

Image:The total amount of land burned globally has been falling, largely due to a decrease of fires in savannah areas Pic: Jones et al (2024)

Image:CO2 emissions from fires have not changed much even though land area burned has fallen, because now more dense forests are burning Pic: Jones et al (2024)

Read more from Sky News:
New warning about 'demise' of Great Barrier Reef
Britain's smallest house 'at risk' due to climate change

That's why global fire emissions have barely budged even though land area burned has fallen - and there's a fear global emissions from fires could soon increase.

More extreme fires in Canada and western Amazonia are "quite worrying... in ecosystems which hold a lot of carbon and in some cases, don't experience much fire today, so they haven't really adapted to it," said Dr Kelley.

Image:70-year-old Sakis Morfis inspects the damage in Greece

What can be done?

Dr Clair Barnes from Imperial College London, who was not involved with the study, said she hopes the report will both "guide preparations for wildfires, and help the world understand the simple fact that fires will keep getting worse until fossil fuels are replaced with renewable energy sources".

Scientists agree that emissions need to fall in order to avoid future risk - but that will take a long time to have an impact.

In the meantime, the authors said, leaders should consider protecting forest boundaries, reducing the amount of natural fuel fire, imposing fire bans on high-risk days, and investing more in early warning prediction systems.

 

We 've been having forest fires ever since I can recall.
I remember them from the eighties as a matter of fact, when I took part in extinguishing a fire as an airman.
But must have been happening always.
It's auto-inflection in most cases but there are other causes too and a number of people have been accused for arson.
Does n't look like "climate change".
To be honest I don't remember about fires before 1980. Can it be because it was then they started for real or just because I don't remember ?
In England it does n't happen. The English rain saves the forests.

Edited September 7 by cosmicway

[Fulham Broadway 16,825]

14 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

In England it does n't happen. The English rain saves the forests

Fire services in England dealt with nearly 25,000 wildfires this summer, almost four times that recorded over the same period in 2021, figures show. Some forces tackled more than 50 wildfires a day amid droughts and record-breaking temperatures of more than 40C. More than 800 wildfires were recorded on 19 July alone.

[robsblubot 3,497]

The point is always the same: *I* remember... where *I* live... 🤷‍♂️

Disregard science for a second here and ask, who does benefit from the idea that Climate Change isn't a problem? Who does benefit from the idea that it is. The former includes (all) the oil industry.

We've been through that in a discussion recently: 

 

[Vesper 28,763]

47 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Fire services in England dealt with nearly 25,000 wildfires this summer, almost four times that recorded over the same period in 2021, figures show. Some forces tackled more than 50 wildfires a day amid droughts and record-breaking temperatures of more than 40C. More than 800 wildfires were recorded on 19 July alone.

Arguing empirical science with climate change denialists is like arguing with flat earthers or lunar landing denialists.

They are emotionally and/or ideoligically invested in pushing their false narratives (for a variety of reasons, ranging from simple stupidity, OR a profound lack of understanding (often wilful) basic science, OR their being professional shills, OR their being people who have been gaslighted into taking the denialist stance to 'own the libs' or 'freedom!', because that is how they express their programmed RW inclinations, etc etc).

[Vesper 28,763]

1 minute ago, robsblubot said:

who does benefit from the idea that Climate Change isn't a problem

Right wing politicians and pundits as well, as they use it as a wedge issue, a tribal stance to keep their followers on 'the team'. It is classic 'let's play game of YOU and THEM fight'. It is emotional identity manipulation.

[Fulham Broadway 16,825]

30 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Arguing empirical science with climate change denialists is like arguing with flat earthers or lunar landing denialists.

They are emotionally and/or ideoligically invested in pushing their false narratives (for a variety of reasons, ranging from simple stupidity, OR a profound lack of understanding (often wilful) basic science, OR their being professional shills, OR their being people who have been gaslighted into taking the denialist stance to 'own the libs' or 'freedom!', because that is how they express their programmed RW inclinations, etc etc).

Once i was in the market square at Pirraeus -it was the time of Stavros Poppadapadapadapoulis when there was a socialist uprising. On my mind was 'If a man gives you a glass of water, do you ask for bacon ?'  It is a problem for brexiters and the commies, but for me it was simple - you can lead a horse to water but you cant make it do backstroke, esprcially in a recession. The water is full of migrants that are Erdogan spies, but most are commie agitators that drink champagne and the horse vomitted. That is not climate change

[Vesper 28,763]

24 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

'If a man gives you a glass of water, do you ask for bacon ?' 

 

 

28 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Poppadapadapadapoulis

[Fulham Broadway 16,825]

Boris Johnson failed to disclose that he met a uranium lobbyist while prime minister before entering into a new business with a controversial Iranian-Canadian uranium entrepreneur, the Observer can reveal.

Johnson’s new company Better Earth Limited also employs Charlotte Owen, a junior aide with just a few years work experience whom he elevated to the House of Lords last year at the age of 29, sparking intense controversy.

Transparency campaigners say there appear to be “serious public interest questions to be answered” over the nature and timeline of Johnson’s relationship with his co-director, Amir Adnani, the founder, president and CEO of Uranium Energy Corp, a US-based mining and exploration company, championed by former Trump advisor Steve Bannon.

Amir Adnani, a Canadian citizen who is the director of a network of offshore companies based in the British Virgin Islands, incorporated Better Earth in December last year. On 1 May, Companies House filings reveal, “The Rt Hon Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson” was added as a director and co-chairman. And this summer, Charlotte Owen – now Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge – joined the company to work alongside him as its vice president.

Times

So that will be his next armpit hes sniffing, another young filly, who he will impregnate with his caffeine polluted carbohydrate heavy Etonian sperm to add to his fourteen kids from different women.....

[Vesper 28,763]

French protesters rage at ‘stolen election’ as Macron picks conservative Barnier for PM

Two months after snap parliamentary elections that threw France into political turmoil, thousands of left-wing demonstrators rallied in central Paris on Saturday in protest at French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to name conservative Michel Barnier as prime minister in what they termed a “power grab” and a “stolen election”.

https://www.france24.com/en/france/20240907-french-protesters-rage-at-stolen-election-as-macron-picks-conservative-barnier-for-pm

Two months after France's inconclusive snap elections, and just days after Michel Barnier's appointment as prime minister, the mood among demonstrators in downtown Paris on Saturday was one of rage and despair.

Amid cries of “Macron Out!, Resign Macron!” leftist demonstrators gathered in the autumn sun in their thousands to protest against French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to appoint the veteran conservative prime minister, rather than a candidate from among their ranks.

While falling short of an absolute majority, the left-wing coalition the New Popular Front (NFP) (made up of the Greens, the Socialists, the Communists and the hard-left France Unbowed) won the most votes in the July 7 snap poll.

But Macron refused to appoint their candidate, civil servant and economist Lucie Castets, 37, claiming she would not survive a confidence vote and on Thursday named Barnier, whose Les Républicains party came a distant fourth, as France’s new prime minister.

“I’m so angry,” said Rocio, 59, as demonstrators gathered at Place de la Bastille in central Paris, a focal point of protests and marches.

“The results of the elections have not been respected. The people are fed up. The people want respect," said the data entry operator, describing France’s polarising and unpopular president as a “monarchist” and a “bankers’ stooge”.

“Macron should clear off for good and show us some respect,” she added, saying that she wanted him to be impeached.

‘Power grab’

As the crowd began to swell, protesters held aloft a sea of flags and placards denouncing a “stolen election” and “Macron’s power grab”.

Families carried their children on their shoulders and the rally’s organisers led the crowd in a round of “On lâche rien” (We’re not giving up’) as the procession headed off towards Nation in eastern Paris.

“We came because we voted en masse against Macron's policies,” said Léo, 23, a student and teaching assistant.

“Usually the left fight all the time but this time they really came together and forged a union,” he said, referring to the hastily assembled leftwing coalition, the NFP.

Léo accused the president of breaking with tradition by refusing to appoint a prime minister from the party or coalition that came first in the election.

“Normally the prime minister comes from the majority party,” he explained. “But Macron didn’t give a damn, he just did what he wanted.”

Macron’s gamble backfires 

Macron announced the surprise parliamentary vote on June 9 in a call for “clarification” from the French electorate after the far right trounced his centrist party in European parliamentary elections.

Many expected the vote to go the way of the European elections, with the far right coming to power for the first time since WWII and National Rally President Jordan Bardella being named prime minister.  

So when the far right led a first round of voting on June 30, the New Popular Front and French centrists employed massive tactical voting to block them from taking the reins.

The protesters in Paris were incensed that Macron had repeatedly presented himself as the only barrier against the far right since 2017, when they felt he had simply handed them the keys to power.

“We voted for Macron to block Le Pen – but actually we had a choice between Le Pen and Le Pen,” said Léo, accusing Macron of pandering to the far right on immigration. 

The second round of the high-stakes vote on July 7 saw the highest turnout in decades – with votes split between three main blocs but no clear majority, handing the country a hung parliament and throwing France into political turmoil.

The NFP won the most seats while Macron’s Ensemble coalition came in second place – losing 72 seats and its relative majority in the National Assembly.

Despite its third-place finish, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally won a record number of seats – 143 – to become the single largest party in a fragmented parliament. 

Macron’s dangerous gamble had backfired: the French electorate had voted for change, the far right made huge gains and the left declared victory.

At first Macron declared that “no-one had won the election”, in a letter that sparked a furore among the left – and asked then prime minister Gabriel Attal to stay on in a caretaker role “to ensure the stability of the country”.

Then he called for a “political truce” during the Olympic Games over the summer. Only in late August did he begin a stream of “consultations” with a series of potential candidates.

Barnier’s policies are ‘incredibly patriarchal’

Macron grappled to find a prime minister who would not undo his highly contested pension reform, which saw the retirement age raised from 62 to 64, and who would not immediately be voted down by rivals.

He sought reassurance in particular from the far-right National Rally on who they might accept, effectively casting Marine Le Pen in the role of kingmaker.

Le Pen vetoed two other contenders for the PM job, former Socialist Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve and former Conservative minister Xavier Bertrand, the head of the northern Hauts de France region. But she gave tacit approval to Barnier, saying she would wait for him to outline his policies in parliament to decide whether or not to back him.

The appointment sees France switch from its youngest-ever prime minister – Attal – to the oldest yet.

“Now we've got a guy who's 73 years old,” said Léo at the rally in Paris. “How can he understand the youth?” he said, looking incredulous.” “His policies are incredibly patriarchal. And he doesn't like minorities and he’s against homosexuals,” he said, referring to the fact that Barnier has twice voted against gay rights.

The incoming PM vowed in a primetime TV interview on Friday night that he had "not much, in common with the theories or ideology of the National Rally" but that he "respected it”, adding that he would take a stronger stance on immigration.

He also said that his government would be open to members of the left and made political overtures towards the NFP by suggesting "more tax justice" while calling for faster growth powered by business.

But this did little to assuage protesters’ anger. Afasaneh, 63, an Iranian who had lived in France for the past 41 years,  viewed Barnier “as an extreme right-winger in disguise".  

“He’s just a pawn that Macron chose so he could continue governing,” she said.

But the protesters’ greatest wrath was reserved for the wildly unpopular Macron, with many of them calling for him to be impeached.

“Macron knew from the offset that he was going to appoint Barnier,” claimed Pierre, 62, a graphic designer and supporter of the hard-left France Unbowed party.

“He's so manipulative. Macron talks about the values of the Republic, but he doesn't even know what the Republic is,” he said. “The whole process was just a sham.”

Edited September 7 by Vesper

[Vesper 28,763]

9 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Boris Johnson failed to disclose that he met a uranium lobbyist while prime minister before entering into a new business with a controversial Iranian-Canadian uranium entrepreneur, the Observer can reveal.

Johnson’s new company Better Earth Limited also employs Charlotte Owen, a junior aide with just a few years work experience whom he elevated to the House of Lords last year at the age of 29, sparking intense controversy.

Transparency campaigners say there appear to be “serious public interest questions to be answered” over the nature and timeline of Johnson’s relationship with his co-director, Amir Adnani, the founder, president and CEO of Uranium Energy Corp, a US-based mining and exploration company, championed by former Trump advisor Steve Bannon.

Amir Adnani, a Canadian citizen who is the director of a network of offshore companies based in the British Virgin Islands, incorporated Better Earth in December last year. On 1 May, Companies House filings reveal, “The Rt Hon Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson” was added as a director and co-chairman. And this summer, Charlotte Owen – now Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge – joined the company to work alongside him as its vice president.

Times

So that will be his next armpit hes sniffing, another young filly, who he will impregnate with his caffeine polluted carbohydrate heavy Etonian sperm to add to his fourteen kids from different women.....

Charlotte Owen becomes youngest life peer in British history

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/charlotte-owen-boris-johnson-peer-job-b2608283.html

 

[Vesper 28,763]

https://archive.ph/AToB8

With just 60 days to go in what is shaping up to be the most bonkers presidential election since, well, the last one, the person I most wanted to talk to for my Impolitic podcast was Dan Pfeiffer. Dan, of course, was one of the wunderkind-ish Obama guys who worked on the 2008 campaign, then followed his boss into the White House, where he served as communications director and then senior advisor for strategy and communications. Since departing the swamp, Dan has written New York Times bestselling books (most recently Battling the Big Lie), co-hosts Pod Save America (alongside former Obama aides Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor), and has a must-read Substack (The Message Box). In our conversation, Dan and I chopped up the post-Labor Day state of the presidential race, talked strategy for next week’s ABC debate, and looked at Donald Trump’s efforts to get right with America’s women. Herewith, a lightly edited and condensed version of our full conversation.

---

“Everything’s a Coin-Flip”

John Heilemann: For much of this campaign, Trump’s favorability rating hovered in the high 30s, low 40s. But in the battleground states, Trump is now regularly seeing favorability ratings in the mid-40s, his highest ever. How do you explain that?

 

Dan Pfeiffer: It’s similar to the difference between the 2016 and 2024 Republican conventions. In 2016, you had a bunch of people who didn’t love Trump, but were going to vote for him. But now this is Trump’s party, and so it’s primarily his numbers with Republicans that have gone up. And he’s doing better with independents in 2024 than he was in 2020. He’s won over some groups of mostly young men, some Black and Latino. The other thing that’s important is that he represents change more than Kamala Harris does, and you can see this in the polls. Obviously, Harris represents change much more than Joe Biden did—exponentially more. But in a global anti-incumbent environment, and when people are unhappy with the economy, the candidate who represents change is going to be more popular. 

 

It’s two days after the traditional start of the fall campaign, and The New York Times has Harris at 49 and Trump at 46; Nate Silver has Harris at 49 and Trump at 45; 538 has Harris at 47 and Trump at 44. The most recent high-quality national poll, the ABC News/Ipsos poll, has Harris at 50 percent—the first time I’ve seen 50 for Kamala Harris—and Trump sitting at 46 percent among registered voters. Among likely voters, they have Harris at 52 and Trump at 46. That’s a pretty consistent picture nationally, and obviously much tighter in every battleground state. Give me your sense of just where things are today, understanding the election is held 60-some-odd days from now. 

 

If you polled the press corps and most Democrats who are not working for the Harris-Walz campaign, 85 percent would say that Kamala Harris would win if the election were held today. If you ask the people who are actually deep in the numbers and paying really close attention to what’s happening in the battleground states, it’s closer to 50-50. And I think it’s very possible that if the election were held today, Trump would win. 

 

Is the disparity because the reporters who are out covering the race, and Democrats more broadly, overstate the love, the enthusiasm, the vibe, and the momentum so much that it outweighs the national polling? 

 

Dramatically. When you dig into the battleground state poll numbers, they’re all toss-ups, every single one of them. There’s not a single battleground state poll where one of the candidates is up or down by more than two points, and most of them are tied, or at one point. And when you start doing the math of what happens if one of the candidates does not win Pennsylvania, it all gets very complicated, very quickly.

 

What number, in your judgment, would make you comfortable? What would Harris’s lead need to be—nationally and in battleground states—that would allow you to sleep the night before the election?

 

There is no number like that. We hit that number in 2020, and we sweated that thing out until the Friday after the election. The polling industry has made adjustments to try to solve for the problem of underrepresenting Trump voters. But no one knows. We haven’t had an election since 2020 with Trump on the ballot to actually test these new methodologies. Now, there’s better battleground state public polling today, whereas there was very little in 2016, a bit more in 2020, and we don’t have Covid this time, which I think did affect things on the margins. But I’m always struck by the fact that the American Association for Public Opinion Research had a conference—they got together to try to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it—and they just lifted up their hands and said, We can’t figure it out, because all the polls were all wrong for different reasons. 

---

The Pennsylvania Question

Okay, so I understand why Georgia is hard for Democrats to win. It’s a Republican state, trending a little bit purple, but it’s tough. I also understand why Pennsylvania is tough. Are there particular challenges there for Harris? Why is Pennsylvania so much harder than Wisconsin and Michigan, for instance?

 

The fact that Pennsylvania is harder than Wisconsin just speaks to the change in politics since 2020. Remember, Biden won Michigan by almost three points, Pennsylvania by one and a half, and he won Wisconsin by 0.6 percent. Wisconsin is the one that people keep waiting to tip over into Ohio land, because Trump has made gains with Black voters, younger men, and continues to hold his margin with white non-college-educated voters. Pennsylvania doesn’t have a particularly elastic electorate. We can’t go get a bunch of new voters, whereas Georgia has huge swaths of unregistered, very likely Democratic voters, Black voters, younger voters. There’s migration into Georgia from the rest of the South, from younger voters who profile as Democrats. And so Georgia has this growth pot, it’s growing in the right direction. But Pennsylvania is static. Harris is still struggling to reach Biden’s 2020 numbers with Black voters, both in terms of support and turnout—in Philly, in particular. Is Harris going to bleed some non-college-educated white voters, and can she make that up with non-college-educated white women because of abortion? This is the problem with these races. There’s no one simple thing you need: You need a little bit from every single pot, and all the pots are in Pennsylvania. 

 

Whenever anybody says that Harris is going to be able to drive turnout through the ceiling in Philly and parts of Pittsburgh, I recall what Biden did in 2020—and Kamala’s numbers with Black voters are not as good as Biden’s, though they’re getting there. And you’ve got that giant part of the state that James Carville used to say is like Alabama. Even for a candidate like Barack Obama, Pennsylvania was tricky because of those weird dynamics.

 

It’s hard, and it gets harder with a candidate like Trump, who is maxing out turnout in rural areas in Pennsylvania in ways Mitt Romney and John McCain certainly did not. Trump is netting more voters from that part of the state than any other Republican going back to basically Reagan.

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The Debate Debate

So we had the long-awaited and much-anticipated—at least by the political class—Kamala interview with Dana Bash. It’s a little bit old news, but since everybody basically took off the week after the convention, I want to ask you, as a consummate communications professional, how did Kamala do?

 

This was a test that was set up by the press, for the press, and she had to pass it. There’s no great, amazing answer to the question of, Why did you have all these positions in 2019 and why do you have different ones now? But she didn’t do herself any damage, she did herself some good, and she passed. Now she has to get back to the actual business of winning votes, because this was not about that. The number of undecided voters who are watching a Thursday-before-Labor Day interview on CNN at 9 o’clock at night is quite small. 

 

Even though I know that many people in my business are egomaniacal, and even though the press does all kinds of shit that I think is ridiculous and not in the country’s interest, I still believe in the notion that voters should be able to get a look at candidates in unscripted settings, and not just get by on scripted speeches and from digital video shorts made for TikTok or whatever platform. Voters have a right to expect more, to see the candidates challenged and have to think on their feet. 

 

She should do interviews that are in her interest, and some of those interviews will be with traditional, mainstream press organizations. I hope she is going to sit down and do an hour of satellite TV interviews once a week for the rest of this campaign. That is absolutely the right thing to do. And we have to broaden the definition of what people do. Trump did a podcast interview with Lex Fridman. He did Theo Von’s podcast the other day. He’s doing a ton of things with very targeted media that’s reaching his core target. She has not done those things yet, for the same reason she hadn’t done the CNN interview, but she’s going to have to, to win the election. Yes, voters have a right to expect it, but I’m not sure their expectation about who should be asking the questions is the same as it used to be.

 

Let’s pivot to the upcoming Tuesday night debate. 

 

In whatever sort of fake debate prep, Trump has probably been forced to watch the infamous Kamala Harris-Brett Kavanaugh exchange, or the Harris-Bill Barr exchange from those hearings. And my guess is, he’s scared, and he’s been working through some pre-debate anxiety in public lately, as he handles most of his anxiety, which is on his sleeve.

If you were working for the Harris campaign, what would you say is her primary strategic objective?

 

This is so trite, but the debate is probably the most important moment of this campaign—full stop. We’ve seen in recent debates how important they can be. Thirty million people watched her convention speech, which is a huge number. That’s a very partisan number. I suspect this debate will be at least two times that. What happened with the Biden-Trump debate was that people who had not been paying attention to the campaign tuned in. People don’t want to pay a ton of attention to politics. But we live in an event culture, where the only time people will tune into linear television is when there’s a giant event—a live sports event, an awards show, or a debate. And I expect there will be a massive audience to see her. Most people do not know a ton about her, so this is her chance to introduce herself again, for people to take a measure of her. I think her primary strategic objective is to seem calm, steady, and strong, and make Trump seem old and erratic. It’s hard, being a candidate of color, because she can’t yell at him or tell him to stop speaking, the way Biden did in 2020—that is not available to her. That would be treated by the press and the public in a way that’s deeply unfair. And he’ll be able to get away with a thousand things she can’t get away with. But if she can have the discipline to not respond to him, or respond to him on her terms, it could be a huge, game-changing moment for this campaign.

[Vesper 28,763]

 

The far right actually hates America: Its dark ideology has foreign roots

Why do conservatives wrap themselves in the flag so desperately? Maybe because their ideas are un-American

https://www.salon.com/2024/09/07/the-far-right-actually-hates-america-its-dark-ideology-has-foreign-roots/

If there is one thing Republicans want you to know, it’s how much they bleed red, white and blue for America. None of their gatherings is complete without dozens if not hundreds of American flags, attendees sporting flag-themed costumes (some veering close to obscene mockery), Uncle Sam suits or Lady Liberty getups. Jimmy Cagney’s old schmaltz vehicle "Yankee Doodle Dandy" looks restrained by comparison.

Democrats, on the other hand, have borne the stigma ever since the Joe McCarthy era, if not the New Deal, of hankering after alien creeds — a suffocating European “socialism” (meaning anything to the left of Calvin Coolidge) or maybe outright Marxist-Leninism. Conservatives with intellectual pretensions have blamed progressives for following French deconstructionist philosophers. The cabal around Paul Weyrich, an early leader of the Heritage Foundation who left it because it was insufficiently conservative, held that every supposed evil in modern America was a consequence of the left employing the "cultural Marxist" ideas of the Frankfurt School (one of the right’s many antisemitic conspiracy theories) as a blueprint to conquer the culture.

These two contrasting identifications have embedded themselves in the national subconscious to the point that the media instinctively reflects them. Hence the anthropological expeditions to the “real America” (somewhere away from the coasts, where Bass Pro Shops outnumber Starbucks) to find a diner where genuine Americans congregate. By contrast, the press happily played along with the efforts of Vietnam-avoider George W. Bush's campaign to portray John Kerry, an actual Vietnam combat veteran, as decadently French. One half-expected Kerry to be taking along the works of Michel Foucault as beach reading to Martha’s Vineyard.

Related

There's no such thing as a conservative intellectual — only apologists for right-wing power

 

To the extent there is any truth to this caricature, it serves as a superficial explanation of the GOP’s xenophobia (remember “freedom fries?”) and near-pathological parochialism. It also dovetails with an aggressive anti-intellectualism: One would no more expect a Republican politician to speak a foreign language than to play the cello. 

What, then, accounts for the GOP’s adulation of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán? As one observer puts it: “The American right’s love affair with Hungary seemingly knows no bounds.” That country’s wannabe dictator is now a regular feature at the annual CPAC convention (think of that event as the Burning Man festival, except for wingnuts), and luminaries of the American right regularly troop to Budapest to confer with Orbán and his cronies. American conservatives’ enthusiasm for foreign-based authoritarianism, and their readiness to cooperate with grandees like Orbán or Vladimir Putin, is now well established, a phenomenon I witnessed in its embryonic stage as early as 2016. 

Nearly every historically conscious person is able to trace at least some aspects of contemporary conservatism to their roots in early America. Present-day Republican hostility to the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act has a straightforward genealogy: back to Nixon’s "Southern strategy," then to the Southern agrarians of the 1930s, to the post-Civil War Lost Cause movement, then the 1861-1865 secession itself and finally back to John C. Calhoun and his own ideological predecessor, John Randolph of Roanoke, who still receives sympathetic treatment from the conservative propaganda mill.

From Randolph’s dyspeptic political rants to the agrarians’ nostalgia-drenched manifestos, all the reflexes of the present-day American reactionary are prefigured: hatred of industry, cities, public education and internal improvements (the old term for infrastructure); distrust of cosmopolitanism, sophistication and the new;  a worship of “tradition” that amounted to stultification; an equation of democratic principles with mob rule. Above all, a fundamental distaste for human equality, especially racial equality, but including political and social distinctions of gender and class.

Joseph de Maistre, though less well-known than Edmund Burke, embodies the essential points of the 21st-century American conservative mind at a deeper level than taxes, spending or size of government.

Curiously, the agrarians, your-Americans of Southern Protestant extraction, were influenced by the leading figure of the French Counter-Enlightenment, the arch-reactionary ultramontane Catholic Joseph de Maistre. Even in the present day, a Southern apologist for slavery has written a screed for something called the Abbeville Foundation extolling Maistre’s hatred of republics. Evidently, despising the very governmental foundation of the United States has become fashionable for a certain type of reactionary conservative.

Those are hardly the intellectual roots of American conservative philosophy that post-World War II salesmen of conservatism like William F. Buckley Jr., Russell Kirk or George F. Will chose to peddle. They professed to find the source of their ideology with Edmund Burke, the 18th-century Anglo-Irish philosopher and politician.

Among Burke’s epigrams are such unexceptionable Rotary Club maxims as “All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter,” and “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Very uplifting, but hardly in the spirit of present-day conservatives, for whom compromise is betrayal.

Maistre, on the other hand, fits the dogmatic spirit of their creed. He considered the executioner to be the indispensable backstop of civilization, the better to save wayward souls: "Man cannot be wicked without being evil, nor evil without being degraded, nor degraded without being punished, nor punished without being guilty. In short ... there is nothing so intrinsically plausible as the theory of original sin.”

Émile Faguet, a French author and critic, called Maistre “a fierce absolutist, a furious theocrat, an intransigent legitimist, apostle of a monstrous trinity composed of pope, king and hangman, always and everywhere the champion of the hardest, narrowest and most inflexible dogmatism, a dark figure out of the Middle Ages, part learned doctor, part inquisitor, part executioner.”

Maistre, though less well-known than Burke, embodies the essential points of the American conservative mind at a deeper level than taxes, spending or size of government. His Catholic zealotry prefigures present-day Catholic ideologues like Patrick Deneen and Leonard Leo, not to mention their political marionettes Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. Isaiah Berlin, the great historian of Western ideas, considered Maistre the true father of reactionary Western conservatism, and, indeed, a precursor to the past century's fascist movements.  

Although worldly enough to have served as the Kingdom of Savoy’s ambassador to Russia, Maistre detested science and secular learning. And he positively wallowed in violence, in near-pornographic fashion: “The whole earth, continually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be sacrificed without end, without restraint, without respite until the consummation of the world, the extinction of evil, the death of death.” 

That orgasmic vision is pretty strong meat for a tradition that claims to defend ordered liberty. But running through American conservatism like a red thread is a creepy fascination with violence, not to mention a habit of apocalyptic thinking and a longed-for showdown with satanic forces. Amid the invasion of Iraq, when self-righteous stupidity was en vogue, neoconservatives Richard Perle and David Frum wrote "An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror," a paean to redemptive violence as a cure for violence.

Maistre hits many of the key themes of American conservatism: religious dogmatism, belief over evidence, anti-scientism, the imperative of obedience to hierarchy and a habitual brooding over violence. But those themes do not satisfy certain paradoxical values that also make up the conservative mindset: a rather irreligious appetite for worldly possessions, and the desire for a pseudo-empirical justification for greed.  

Here one might be tempted to believe that conservative economic theory rests on solid domestic foundations: rugged American individualism, the Horatio Alger fable and the (entirely spurious) quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich."

America was largely founded on greed, exemplified by land-grabs, gold rushes and real estate flimflams, not to mention the institution of slavery. But before Hayek and Mises, greed lacked a sophisticated theoretical foundation.

To be sure, America was largely founded on greed, exemplified by land-grabs, gold rushes and real estate flimflams, not to mention the institution of slavery — the theft of others’ labor. But it lacked a sophisticated theoretical foundation, and its justification was sorely wanting in the wake of the Great Depression and the New Deal’s widely popular efforts to combat the ill effects of greed through fiscal stimulus and the creation a social safety net. 

Ironically, then, just as 20th-century socialism rested on German thought of the previous century, post-World War II conservative economic thinking in America was largely based on the groundwork of German-speaking intellectuals. 

Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises are generally considered to be among the principal founders of radical free-market doctrine in the postwar era. Hayek, the more famous of the two, described himself as a pragmatist and empiricist, but, as is common in the transmission of ideas, his followers dogmatized his theories to the point where they became a materialist religion, a mirror image of Marxist-Leninism. Hayek is frequently invoked in the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, the Pravda of the American overclass.

Hayek, like other founders of neoliberal economic theory such as Wilhelm Roepke, claimed that their championing of laissez-faire was a remedy for the horrific wars and state oppression that plagued Europe between 1914 and 1945. But in later life, he appeared to develop a soft spot for authoritarianism. In the 1970s and 1980s, Hayek was feted by Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean military dictator who seized power (with help from the CIA) in 1973. In the course of several visits, Hayek claimed he had “not been able to find a single person, even in much-maligned Chile, who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than under Allende” (the elected social democrat overthrown in the 1973 coup). Doubtless Hayek did not have many encounters with the relatives of the roughly 3.000 people murdered by the Pinochet regime.

Mises, an economist who in the early 1930s had advised the Austrofascist chancellor of Austria, Engelbert Dollfuss, settled in the U.S. in 1940. His laissez-faire views were so uncompromising that even Milton Friedman, most people’s idea of a hardcore libertarian, considered his thinking overly inflexible. Mises became the namesake of a tax-exempt foundation in Auburn, Alabama, that's so far out on the libertarian fringe it makes the Cato Institute look like the Ford Foundation. Its bullpen of “scholars” have included neo-Confederate apologists, crackpots out to disprove Einstein’s relativity theory and — wait for it! — crusaders for the legalization of drunk driving.

Perhaps the most influential European of all — at least to Americans in permanently arrested adolescence — was the Russian immigrant, Hollywood screenwriter, novelist and cult leader Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum, better known as her Promethean alter ego, Ayn Rand. Her works achieve the difficult feat of synthesizing a coma-inducing dullness with piercingly shrill extended diatribes to create reverse masterpieces worthy of the most risible North Korean propaganda. To an even greater extent than the neoliberal economists, she fashioned an ideology that is simply the worst of the Marxist-Leninism she escaped stood on its head, with a heroic Übermensch substituting for the proletarian masses. It is a pity the film version of "Atlas Shrugged" hasn’t featured on "Mystery Science Theater 3000."

---

Such is Rand’s cult following that former Republican congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul, a senior fellow of the Mises Institute, saw fit to name his spawn Rand, who is now the junior senator from Kentucky. Former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan was an enthusiastic fan of Ayn Rand, supposedly requiring his office interns to read "Atlas Shrugged," a clear example of unfair labor practices. Oddly, Ryan claimed to be an observant Catholic, yet idolized an author who contemptuously called Christianity a “slave religion.” Such is the syncretic nature of contemporary conservatism that blatantly contradictory elements can be fused into the monstrous ideological confection we see all around us.

Functional adults can dismiss Ayn Rand and her petty tyrannizing over acolytes, her psychodramatic love affair with cult deputy Nathaniel Branden, and her continuing ability to inspire teenagers with a Nietzsche complex. But how can we account for the fact that Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve for 20 years, was an early member of her circle, and that her writings have sold 37 million copies? Unreadable doorstops her books may be, but they would seem to reveal something about the psychology of a significant slice of Americans.

Perhaps the most influential European of all — at least to Americans in permanently arrested adolescence — was the Russian immigrant, Hollywood screenwriter, novelist and cult leader Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum, better known as Ayn Rand.

Other sources of modern conservative ideas have a somewhat less direct influence on the current right-wing American zeitgeist. Carl Schmitt, the 20th-century German jurist, political theorist and Nazi official, never set foot on U.S. soil, and remains mostly unknown here. He believed that the fundamental concept in the political realm from which all else flowed was the distinction between friends and enemies, and that to be a sovereign meant being completely unrestrained by law. 

Schmitt employed his judicial and political theories to defend the early Nazi-era Enabling Act (which suspended the Weimar Republic's constitution), to justify Hitler’s assumption of dictatorial rule and to support Joseph Goebbels’ campaign to burn “decadent” books. After the war, Schmitt refused to submit to denazification, and remained completely unrepentant of his prewar beliefs.

Just before the Nazi seizure of power, Schmitt had a Jewish follower and protégé, Leo Strauss, who was able to emigrate from Germany for employment by the Rockefeller Foundation thanks, ironically enough, to a supportive letter from Schmitt. According to surviving correspondence, Strauss and Schmitt had previously carried on a political dialogue in which Strauss agreed with the jurist on most points, sharing a distaste for liberal democracy, a belief in authoritarian rule and a contempt for the masses. It seems he bought into the rising tide of European fascism on all issues except antisemitism.

Strauss arrived in the U.S. in 1938, and taught philosophy, most notably at the University of Chicago, for the rest of his life. He focused mainly on the works of Plato and Aristotle and their application to politics. His method was ambiguous and esoteric — using rhetorical concealment, with a surface meaning for general readers and a hidden truth for the wise — and usually avoided any direct statement of the immediate political relevance of Greek philosophy.

Living in a liberal democracy that had given him refuge from the Holocaust, Strauss soft-pedaled his earlier enthusiasm for fascism, but consistently emphasized the authoritarian implications of Greek philosophy while praising the American constitutional system with faint damns. He also highlighted to his students Plato’s belief in the necessity of “the noble lie,” the veneer of comforting falsehoods with which wise rulers must placate the untutored masses while going about the serious business of exercising power.

A large number of Strauss' students and followers became prominent neoconservatives, including Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Francis Fukuyama, Harvey Mansfield, Gary Schmitt, Walter Berns and Abram Shulsky, who all later achieved notoriety either as political operatives or publicists advocating for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq based on false claims of hidden weapons of mass destruction.

A large number of Leo Strauss' students and followers became prominent neoconservatives, who later achieved notoriety either as political operatives or publicists advocating for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Once the wheels began to fall off the Iraq crusade, critics, pivoting off the earlier work of political theorist Shadia Drury, began to notice the sheer number of Straussians in high places who had been among the war's most vociferous proponents. Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh related that Straussians filled the Pentagon’s ad hoc Office of Special Plans, and  had bulldozed the government’s intelligence agencies in order to cherry-pick dubious evidence to fit their preconceived notions. They even called themselves the “cabal,” in what seemed a parodic tribute to Strauss’ clique of wise men.

In March 2003, on the eve of war, I staffed a House Budget Committee hearing in which Wolfowitz, at the time the second-ranking official in the Pentagon, predicted that total U.S. casualties from the invasion and occupation of Iraq might amount to fewer than those suffered in the recent U.S. military intervention in the Balkans. (In other words, nearly none at all.) Did a man with access to the most extensive intelligence apparatus in the world actually believe what he told us, or was this a textbook example of Plato’s noble lie?

Considering that Strauss was a relatively obscure academic who had been dead for many years, it was surprising that revelations of his influence on the neocons produced such a well-organized and extensive pushback. The New York Times, which had vigorously supported the Iraq invasion published four op-eds defending  Strauss, polemics that employed ridicule and condescension against the unsophisticated critics who supposedly didn’t “get” the philosopher’s subtle arguments. Ever since, there has been a cottage industry of conservative academics writing books and essays supporting Strauss, which almost invariably receive laudatory notices in right-wing vehicles like National Review or the Claremont Institute.

Strauss apologists never directly engage the points raised by critics. They are mostly mute on Strauss’ early dalliance with fascism, such as in a 1933 letter where he endorses  “the principles of the Right — fascist, authoritarian imperial and not the pathetic and laughable imprescriptible rights of man.” He never repudiated any of those early statements, and Straussians went to some lengths to conceal from critical scholars the more controversial writings in his collected papers.

If Strauss, an unworldly academic lecturer, had no conceivable link with the neoconservative project to unleash redemptive war and exalt untrammeled executive power, why did two of his followers, neocon operatives Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt — who had both held government positions in foreign intelligence — write a 1999 essay crediting Strauss with having helped them conceptualize intelligence matters? Apparently the Platonic method of ferreting out hidden meanings was key to the neocons' certainty that Iraqi WMDs existed. Whatever Strauss intended, his followers applied what they held to be his teachings to justify a disastrous war of aggression based on imaginary evidence.

The neocons were always a small fraction of the conservative movement, and their sheer, agonizing incompetence in engineering the Iraq debacle all but finished them as a driving influence by the end of George W. Bush’s presidency. As the conservative movement became cruder and more extreme, it no longer cared to perform analyses of Plato to guide its ideology. And as the culture wars became a right-wing obsession, the locus of coercion and violence was transferred from foreign crusades to domestic soil. But it still found a foreign model to help guide it.

A moment’s reflection suggests the reason behind conservatives' tendency to lavish praise on foreign regimes and their theoreticians: The right does not much care for America, as its leading voices have been telling us for years.

As everyone knows, Donald Trump admires Vladimir Putin, and so a large portion of the Republican Party admires Putin in an imitative and slavish manner. But even before Trump became a candidate, the most regressive elements of conservatism — the paleoconservatives who developed around former Nixon and Reagan staffer (and Hitler apologist) Pat Buchanan, Christian nationalists and reconstructionists inspired by Francis Schaeffer, and the tech-obsessed neoreactionary movement fueled by Silicon Valley money, which has produced JD Vance — discovered how much there was to love about Putin’s Russia.

This New Right also seems to have an easy familiarity with the theorists of totalitarianism. In an interview this June with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, Vance invoked the legal architect of Nazi rule, Carl Schmitt — in an effort to blame liberals, the very people Schmitt despised, for wanting to carry out his precept of power over justice. As most people in the reality-based community have noticed by now, operatives of the right habitually project every desire they dare not express onto their opponents. One also wonders where Vance gained his expertise on Schmitt; I doubt the Nazi jurist was a subject in the Yale Law School curriculum.

A moment’s reflection suggests the reason behind the right’s tendency to lavish praise on foreign regimes and their theoreticians: The right does not much care for America, as its leading voices have been telling us over and over for years. Donald Trump, the exalted leader of the gang, habitually refers to his native land as a “third-world country” or a "laughing stock,” and has called fallen U.S. service personnel “suckers” and “losers;” According to one of his social media posts, “WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION!” Vance, his running mate, makes similar disparaging remarks about the country he wants to run.

All of this is logical enough, in that it necessarily flows from their views. The right has told us for some time that it has no use for non-subservient women, minorities, college students (excepting Turning Point USA’s storm troopers), non-Christians, bureaucrats, public school teachers or any other group it wants to target. A Venn diagram of all these groups certainly adds up to more than half the population. The right scorns America as it is, and, contrary to conservatives’ anti-historical nostalgia, as it always has been.

The logical weakness of reactionary movements has actually been their political strength. The seemingly contradictory elements of their platform do not bother their adherents; as we have seen countless times with the GOP, a new party line that flatly negates supposedly timeless Republican principles elicits barely a murmur among the true believers. If the leaders of the party know this fact, they are certainly not going to wise up their foot soldiers.

Perhaps the biggest contradiction of all is that the so-called thought leaders of the GOP — a party that wraps itself in the flag and feels called upon to judge the patriotism of others — are profoundly alienated from the real America as it exists today, the America in which normal people quietly live their lives, work and raise families, and dream their own private dreams. Unable to find solace in such petit-bourgeois domesticity, the socially estranged scholars of Claremont or Hillsdale or some mother’s basement have no problem ransacking the intellectual underworld of Europe during its most blood-soaked eras to find voices that can articulate their grievance, and their rage, more eloquently than they themselves.

As Austrian writer Robert Musil observed, “A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage."

Read more

from Mike Lofgren on history, politics and power

• Why America is going backward: Being the richest nation in history isn't enough
• Right-wing fake history is making a big comeback — but it never went away
• What a fool believes: Donald Trump and America's bogus respect for "faith"

 

By Mike Lofgren

Mike Lofgren is a historian and writer, and a former national security staff member for the House and Senate. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller "The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted."

[robsblubot 3,497]

3 hours ago, Vesper said:

Right wing politicians and pundits as well, as they use it as a wedge issue, a tribal stance to keep their followers on 'the team'. It is classic 'let's play game of YOU and THEM fight'. It is emotional identity manipulation.

Right and imagine the money pressure coming from the oil industry. I mean there is a huge momentary incentive *for* the identity manipulation.
I was inevitable for the "smart moneys" to find their way into politics... low-hanging fruit.