Tuesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Tuesday, August 3, 2021
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139 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Why right to repair matters – according to a farmer, a medical worker, a computer store owner
Posted this morning in yesterday’s forum;
Thought I’d repost, slightly edited here, as the pathology of the American Right, while moronic, is nonetheless as morbidly fascinating as particularly catastrophic car-crash.
@Teve:
Hmm; I’ll come back to that. 🙂
I read bits of that reactionary drivel and sensed neurons dying in sheer despair at the a-historical idiocy of it all.
Roach thinks he’s being clever; he is mistaken.
The amusing part is he mentions the last reel of the movie, then slides on past it:
– The Revolution of 1974, and possibility, thankfully avoided of full-on civil war.
– The actual wars in Angola and Mozambique which killed around 150,000 people.
– The ironic outcome which sees modern Portugal a mainstream European liberal democracy.
The modern Republic has seen the Catholic Church disestablished.
In the election of 2019 the Socialist were the largest party with 36% of the vote; second the Social Democrats (misleading name, actually centre right) with 27%; third the Left Bloc (populist left) at 9%; the UDC (communists, basically) on 6%;
The conservative-right Peoples Party got 4%!
So, yeah sure, “conservatives”, Salazar was totally worth it in the long run. LOL.
He also mentions in passing Spain and France; curiously the little matter of the Spanish Civil War gets bypassed, as does the Vichy regime.
Roach seems unable to process that reactionary catholic conservatism destroyed itself.
The right in France was re-founded post-1945 on a “modernising” basis, with the old “ultras”, the monarchists and anti-modernist Catholics marginalised by the Republican Right and the Gaullists.
See also post-war Christian Democrats/Christian Socials in Germany.
A similar process took place in post-Franco Spain; and arguably in Italy.
Now, as you might expect, knowing me:
its quibbling time! 🙂
I’d strongly argue that the Salazar regime was of the broad category of late-18th to mid-20th century European reactionary Catholic conservatism.
An entirely different breed of cat to fascists.
Collapsing variant political traditions into two camps of “democrat” and “fascist” is a mistake. Fascism is a pathology all its own.
The Catholic reactionaries often ended up collaborating with fascists, out of sheer hatred and fear of the liberals and socialists, but thereby destroyed themselves, and it was seldom a comfortable alliance.
In both Italy and Spain the conservative monarchist eventually turned on the fascists.
Interestingly the non-Catholic right, e.g. British Conservatives, tended to avoid this fate.
IMO because not constrained by the doctrine of Pope Pius IX and the “Syllabus of Errors” of 1864.
And not trying to resurrect a dead dream of monarchical-aristocratic rule.
And were more comfortable than “Latin” Reaction, or fascists for that matter, with market/capitalist societies.
Salazar’s regime tried to clamp a society in stasis for half a century.
But though the superficial aspects were frozen, gnawed at it beneath the surface.
Like termites in the timbers of clerical-aristocratic paternal society.
Until in the end it simply fell apart when pushed.
Historical footnote:
In 1939 the Salazar government announced that the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance remained in effect; but as Britain had not asked for assistance, Portugal would remain neutral until asked.
It got a bit sticky at times, but generally both Portugal and the Allies thought neutrality the best option.
And that history was why Portugal (unlike Spain) was included in the Marshall Plan and NATO.
So, unpleasantly reactionary, yes.
Authoritarian, certainly.
Clericalist/aristocratic, sure.
A dictatorship, pretty definitely.
Fascist, no.
@JohnSF:
So now I’m going to quibble right back at you. (Because why the hell not?)
I agree that Salazar’s regime was not (contrary to fascist regimes) aimed at mass mobilization, but rather at the quiescence of public opinion in order to preserve traditional and thus harmonious social relations. (Or, in any case, that is what the supporters of the Estado Novo believed what they were doing.)
However, looking at the article (The Salazar option) Teve cited, we find, for instance, the following line:
So it’s fair to assume that the author believes that Trump was on the right path but did not do enough – perhaps wasn’t sufficiently Trumpist.
And what did Trump himself do? He (contrary to Salazar) did, in fact, try to mobilize and whip up his followers through political rallies and Twitter. Trump, in fact, did try to start a cult of personality.
Does the author of the original piece condemn Trump for it? Of course not.
So I would say that the author called his piece “The Salazar Option” because the name Salazar is less tainted than, e.g., those of Mussolini, Hitler, or Franco.*
Think about it: how would the “Salazar option” even work in nation like the US, which lacks a de facto national Church and a natural aristocracy?
So personally I think it’s probably not inaccurate at all to call the author of “The Salazar Option” a fascist.
* While Franco, I believe, was more of an authoritarian corporatist than a fascist, a main pillar of his support was the Falange – which definitely consisted of convinced fascists.
@drj: a big takeaway from the Salazar article boils down to “Dreher’s Benedict Option is for pussies, we need to get violent.”
@Teve:
That’s the gist of it, yes.
But what I found most remarkable was that there wasn’t even a feeble attempt to argue that the nation is defending itself against a tyrannical leftist minority.
These people have completely abandoned the idea that the majority has a right to govern.
It’s simply not on their mental horizon.
@drj:
Oh, I think Roach would be just fine with fascism, so long it was all nicely respectin’ of his interests. The fool.
It’s just Salazar represents an distinct line of thought in European history to fascism.
Unpleasant, yes, but as distinct from fascism as liberals from social democrats from republican modernists from communists.
Fascism tended to be semi-populist, modernistic in a warped way, militaristic, belligerent, ethno-centric, revolutionary even (plus with a fetish for uniforms).
Reactionary Catholic Conservatism was in many ways the opposite all that; but it’s essentially a dead ideology all the same, and largely by its own hand
Roach may be attempting to make a case for an American Reaction, and would be willing to align with fascism to get it.
My point is why Reaction ended up allying with fascism in Europe; in Italy, in Spain, in France.
Because they were incapable of winning on their own.
Reaction needed the “dynamic” of fascism to prevail against the overwhelming strength of the “modern” world: politically as diverse as liberalisms, Tory and republican etc variants of conservatisms, Labour movements, socialism, even communism.
And longer term, either Reaction or fascism would prevail.
IMO their ends are incommensurable.
Even if they were not crushed by the democrats or the revolutionary Left.
Interestingly, the Estado Novo was the one reactionary polity that, more or less, avoided alliance with fascism. But in the long run that still could not save it.
And was still a rather squalid and obscurantism and atavistic dictatorship.
A dead-end footnote to history.
Reaction amounted in the end to little more than a real-life Canute attempting to hold back the waves.
So even if Roach was correct that it was a viable option in America, it looks like a self-destructive dead end.
What Roach misses out is that a successful American anti-democratic regime would have to be populist in a way wholly alien to Salazar, and based on a whole mess of contradictory elements.
Trying to build a stabilised society on such a foundation is a fools errand.
At least Salazar had the structures of the church, the aristocracy, the state systems, to support his project.
All Trumpian populism has is a yawping mob of “you aint the boss of me” types.
Orban’s Hungary might be a model of modern populist authoritarianism; but only if you overlook its dependance on the financial and technical infrastructue of liberal Europe.
It can never be anything more than an irritating, but tolerated, parasite on the wider civilization; the same direction that Putin’s Russia is moving toward.
And that Salazar’s Portugal was in the post-war world.
https://gizmodo.com/colorado-flash-flood-shuts-down-highway-due-to-damage-u-1847409736
Colorado Flash Flood Shuts Down Highway Due to Damage ‘Unlike Anything’ Seen Before
@JohnSF:
Anyone remember Candace Owens saying Hitler would have been just peachy if not for his desire to expand borders and hence become a “globalist”? I’m not sure I’d read too much into those comments, which were probably just rooted in plain old ignorance. Many on the right don’t really know anything about the Nazis other than that they’re commonly thought of as comic-book supervillains, they have the word “socialist” in their name, and a lot of those like Owens’ own fans secretly or not-so-secretly admire them. So the conservatives end up playing this game where they’re half trying to say libruls are the true Nazis and the other half hinting that the Nazis weren’t as bad as people think.
Where’s my self-driving car?
Parked right next to your fusion-powered flying car, of course.
Seriously, Dr. Novella offers a concise and clear explanation as to why we still drive our cars.
@Teve: Colorado DOT says it may be closed for weeks — they haven’t cleared enough debris to evaluate the damage yet. Factoids about I-70 west of Denver:
– It wasn’t in the initial plans for the interstate system, being deemed too difficult and too expensive. The final deciding factor was the US Army’s insistence on an alternate central route across the Rockies to back up I-80.
– It is the most expensive per-mile non-urban part of the interstate system.
– Full four-lane construction wasn’t finished until the early 1990s, nearly 40 years after the original interstate authorization.
– The speed limit on that stretch is 50 mph. Speaking from personal experience, it is a rude shock to come around a sharp curve and find a pickup-sized boulder sitting in the road.
@OzarkHillbilly: The last time we visited the rural Kansas relatives, someone told our hostess that her grown son and myself were in the kitchen discussing politics. She came racing in, expecting to find blood. We were having a cheerful agreement on the right to repair.
@Michael Cain: Right-to-repair is something I’ve supported forever, and the DMCA can (shocking expleteves deleted) but i’ll have to laugh in 3 years when farmers are all giving the credit for it to Trump.
Axios has a variant tracker.
It certainly helps to clear things up.
This is absolutely insane.
From the Fear of Landing blog by Sylvia Wrigley, a report on an accident entirely due to hubris. You can read the first part if you want, there’s a link in the piece, but the real payoff is at the link above.
SPOILER ALERT
The pilot tried to lift off with only one engine.
thread
@Teve: The important thing to understand about Orban is that the country he rules is not a democracy by any reasonable definition.
@JohnSF: Serendipitously, Erik Loomis has up at LGM one of his “this day in labor history” posts on the 1959 dockworkers strike in then Portuguese Guinea. It resulted in 50 dead dockworkers and a strong independence movement.
@Kylopod: i have it on good authoritah that you’re Rong:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/
😛
@OzarkHillbilly: prior to Covid, my county was sponsoring quarterly “fix-it fairs,” where you could bring appliances and electronics and experts would repair them for you.
I attended one, bringing a microwave that worked but the turntable no longer rotated, and a standing fan that worked shakily after my dog ran into it and knocked it over.
After having them “fixed,” both items stopped working altogether in less than a week and had to be replaced.
@JohnSF: Salazar may have been a distinct from Fascism based on reactionary Catholicism but the overlap was that Hitler wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without the support of the Prussian aristocracy and the Lutheran establishment. The other key difference was that Nazism originated with the working class revolt after WWI. I don’t think Portugal had an analogous movement.
@Michael Cain:
@Teve:
All that may be true…but I-70 from the front range through Grand Junction (or Grand Dysfunction, as it’s known) is just a fantastic drive; perhaps one of the most beautiful/pleasurable stretches of Interstate in the country. And who knows the true impact of that highway on Colorado’s tourist industry? Vail, Copper, Breckenridge, would all be barely accessible without it.
@Teve: FWIW, this headline about 1000 year or 100 year flooding also appeared just 8 years ago in 2013. I had a colleague whose house was destroyed in an “unprecedented” Colorado flood.
@JohnSF: @drj: @Teve: @Kylopod: @Scott:
You may be interested in this:
morningshots.thebulwark.com/p/the-fascist-curious-right
@Daryl and his brother Darryl: i took I-80 to Washington state 5 years ago, but I took I-70 on the way back, and that may or may not have been in order to buy weed in Colorado. 😛
@CSK: I’m about to add a bookmark to The Bulwark. It’s been pretty good, hasn’t it?
If your stable of ‘Intellectuals’ includes Dennis Prager, you took a wrong turn in Albuquerque.
@Teve:
Yes, I enjoy The Bulwark. There’s almost always at least one piece in it worth the read. I was initially attracted to it by their ferocious anti-Trumpism.
@Kathy: Wow. That was insanely idiotic. That guy should never again be allowed to do so much as throw a maple seed into the air to watch it “helicopter” down to the ground.
These people (Dreher, American Greatness, Integralists, Sohrab Ahmari, etc.) are really just (a) people on the road to Nazism who are in denial and (b) people looking for their strongman.
The last one once wrote that he’d prefer the CCP to Democrats, because the CCP were anti-gay. That’s definitely a man looking for his Hitler.
The reason that they endorse various second-string guys is that they know that just flying their freak flag openly would be political suicide.
@Teve:
If your stable of intellectuals includes Seb Gorka, you took a really, REALLY wrong turn.
@Teve:
Well, there’s also Seb Gorka, who makes Prager look like a blend of Einstein and Hawking.
@CSK: You beat me by mere seconds!
@Kathy: @Mikey:
That was a jaw-dropper.
@Daryl and his brother Darryl: Yep. And Colorado argued for it, for those reasons and others, and called in every political favor they had. Still took the Army to nail it down.
@Mikey:
Ah, well, great minds and all that…
@Teve: “If your stable of ‘Intellectuals’ includes Dennis Prager, you took a wrong turn in Albuquerque.”
And the rest of them. For example, I first read VD Hanson before and during the Iraq War, and his writings taught me everything I needed to know about him.
None of the rest have the intellectual firepower of a stoned sophomore in a 4 AM road trip bull session.
@Teve: The scale was the most significant thing to me. I’ve seen roads that were washed out like that–I live where I-5 was closed for a day or two and took longer than that to completely repair because of land slides after rain fall. But I’ve not seen that much damage to that much roadway before (and those pictures are not good for detail). The San Francisco earthquake that pancaked the freeway might have been similar I guess.
@Kathy: The AI program that my local school districts use to schedule substitute teachers can’t even pronounce teachers’ names (or the phrase “physical education” which comes out “princess guylanders”) correctly. No way I’m going to let it drive my car.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: i haven’t yet seen any good photos or video showing large-scale damage, just small stuff for some reason.
@Teve: Dreher writes:
Let’s just say there’s some more serious analysis which disagrees.
I’ve been half-expecting conservatives to respond with the old “republic not democracy” chestnut like Sen. Mike Lee last year.
Many years ago I remember a Bill Kristol column in which he offhandedly pondered the plight of being a “conservative in a liberal democracy.” I found that a curious statement, since (at least at the time) American conservatives did not usually try to distinguish themselves from liberal in that sense. I just thought (and still think) Kristol was being an ignorant bubblehead, throwing around words he didn’t understand and confusing the broader, scholarly meaning of liberal with the talk-radio buzzword. Even Dreher seems to understand that the term liberal democracy doesn’t intrinsically mean left-leaning or left-of-center. After all, many conservatives and libertarians have long claimed to be the truer heirs to classical liberalism than most of the people who call themselves liberal today.
But now I wonder if attacks on “liberal democracy” have broader ramifications. The right inches into open advocacy of authoritarian government while still trying to retain the semblance of respect for the American small-d democratic tradition and its abhorrence to autocracy.
@Mikey:
@CSK:
There is precedent for the 747 to perform take off on three engines. It’s a special case, when the plane is used to transport a defective engine to a repair location. You take out one good engine on purpose, and put the inoperative one in its place. The engines are so big, they’re not easy to transport otherwise.
But 3/4 of thrust available is greater than 1/2, and the 747 is very lightly loaded.
@Kylopod:
?????!
Well, yes and the whole “lets kill all the inferior types” business. Messy, that.
But after all, every murderous totalitarian regime based on a cult of racial purity and endless war has its off days! They served such delightful strudel at the Berchtesgarten te parties, doncha know?
Maybe she thinks Springtime For Hitler was a f*ck*n historical documentary?
@JohnSF:
“Don’t be stupid, be a schmarty, come and join the Nazi Party.”
@Teve: I would guess because the ratio of the scale of the damage to the cost of aerial photography to the geographic accessibility of helicopters. (Maybe Jax will send her drone. It takes good pictures. 😉 )
@Scott:
Yes, totally agree.
Nazi/Reactionary alliance was fundamental part the rise of Hitler.
Just look at the role of Ludendorff in the Munich “Beer Hall Putsch” for starters.
There’s a recent book on that subject on my “must read” list, Nazis and Nobles: The History of a Misalliance by Stephan Malinowski.
Reactionaries were repeatedly prepared to work with fascists. Even though their objectives were so different; and even though in Germany Hitler was well known to despise the aristocracy.
I’m currently reading Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford.
Failure is much maligned these days. One thing I enjoyed about the old Mythbusters show, was how cheerfully Adam Savage would say “Failure is always an option on Mythbusters.” Related, how when they tried something in small scale, usually some kind of explosion, and failed, he’d laugh about it rather than be angry or annoyed.
On that show, they did some of what Harford advises. That is to try small things first, so failure is not the end, but rather an experience you can learn from. Curiously, Savage kind of forgot that on an episode of his next show, Savage Builds, when he attempted to recreate a working version of the Panjandrum . When he opted to forego rockets and try flywheels, he went full scale. The wheel moved a few feet and then stopped.
@Barry:
I think it is a mistake to ascribe a positive ideological position such as Nazism to these people. I more than strongly suspect they’re pretty much OK with anything that keeps the dangerous libs and lefties down.
It’s just a thought, but I suspect that the US’ foreign policy towards Latin America during the Cold War offers a decent parallel to what the contemporary Right wants: “As long as the left is made to shut up (violently, if necessary), we don’t really care about the exact ideology.”
Christian corporatism, fascism, military dictatorship, or a mix of whatever works, it’s all good. I don’t even think these people are ideologically opposed to democracy as a form of government (even if they are opposed to “democray as a value system”). As long as they get the outcomes that they want, they’re OK with that, too. Pretty much in the same way that the US was never keen to introduce right-wing dictatorships in its European sphere of influence during the Cold War.
“In the fight against socialism, we do what must be done.” “Destroy the village in order to save it.” That sort of thing.
There is no positive vision – not even to the extent that Hitler or Mussolini had one. It’s pretty much all reaction in response to the increasing threat to traditional (mainly private) hierarchies.
But if it does take a full embrace of Nazism to prevent the hippies from winning out, plenty of people will absolutely go there.
But, more generally, I would say that Red America views (e.g.) California as the US government saw Chili in 1973. Or Bolivia in 1971.
@Kylopod:
I think that might be the first time “globalist” wasn’t just a synonym for “Jew”.
She was either really not up on the meanings of her dog whistles, or trolling the Nazis in her audience while simultaneously trolling everyone else. It’s kind of a brilliant bit of trolling, when you think about it.
Someday, when the grift wears thin, I expect her to release her memoirs entitled “Fuck you white man, I’ll take your money and destroy your country: You crackers will just shovel money at a token black woman repeating your shit”
Any bets on Andrew Cuomo resigning? I’m gonna say 50/50 or maybe 60/40 against resignation.
@Kylopod:
If forced to tick a box, I’d still categorise Hungary as a democracy, on the basis of having a government elected by universal suffrage.
However, it is no longer a liberal democracy, being ruled by corrupt, authoritarian, populist-pandering bunch who are bending if not breaking the rule of law.
Freedom House are a campaigning group, and thy are definitely “good guys” but to say the EU has done nothing is exaggeration.
They can’t expel Hungary. They can’t even suspend it as long as the Poles veto that.
The only way to proceed, on a EU basis, is by talking round the Poles.
There are some signs of that taking place.
See other articles on Politico by https://www.politico.eu/author/maia-de-la-baume/ on the topic for some examples.
I’d wish they’d move faster, but then being British I no longer have any voice in the matter. 🙁
In my book, it’s another example of why, though democracy is a desirable status, it is not the most important or system-validating one.
If 49% of the people are capable of being fools or knaves in one way or another, so are 51%.
@Michael Reynolds:
Good question Last spring, when Schumer, Gillibrand, Ocasio-Cortez, and DeBlasio called on him to resign, he said no, flatly, and denied any wrongdoing.
Apparently a majority of New Yorkers think he should go.
@Gustopher:
I’m sure it wasn’t the first time. But I’m honestly not sure how much of what Owens is doing in this statement is intentional; a great deal of the persona she’s developed (and make no mistake that it’s a persona–she’s a former liberal who had an abrupt overnight conversion to conservatism) is as a black woman who spouts neo-Nazi talking points but tries to couch it within a conservative culture that still bears some at least residual aversion to open anti-Semitism, and that even views itself as very anti-anti-Semitic. In this statement she was using the word “globalist” in a very literal way to suggest that Hitler was trying to take over the globe. Like I said, she comes off sounding simply ignorant, but it also has a lot of the wink-wink effect you see with many on the right. It’s possible she knows exactly what she’s doing.
I find it boggling that there are a large number of people who apparently ready to give up on democracy because it might force them to be nice to gay people.
You know, when we had the Civil War it was because the Confederate States perceived a threat that would eliminate billions of dollars of wealth (known to them as slaves). That’s the kind of thing wars are over, and they then pulled an anti-democratic gerrymander that worked by only letting in those states that they knew how they were gonna vote ahead of time on the slave issue.
But I fail to see where the big money is on being nice to gay people. The best I can come up with for a monied interest here is Big Oil. That fits with Russia’s role. And of course, Big Oil will, ahem, run out of gas on its own. There’s only so much oil in the ground.
@drj:
I’ve seen some worrying hints of fascist-adjacent populist thought in some parts of the American Right (and some outliers of British Conservatives, for that matter).
Any time you start hearing about the “real” or “true” nation or people, with whom the leadership has a unique bond, and on whose behalf the leader can authoritatively speak.
And still more when you start speaking of political opponents as enemies, as illegitimate, and civil institutions as unwarranted obstacles.
They may not be fascist, but they’re sidling up to fascism, thinking fascism looks rather attractive, and contemplating asking fascism out on a date.
@Jay L Gischer:
I don’t think it’s money that motivates anti-gay sentiment nearly as much as it’s hatred and fear of “the other,” which is cloaked in Christianity. “Good Christians” view homosexuality as a grievous sin against God.
@Jay L Gischer:
It’s not about being nice to gay people, it’s about men losing status. Hating on gays and trans is just how insecure males establish their position in their perceived hierarchies. Make a list of jobs that were exclusively male in 1965, say, and compare it to the equivalent list today. Look at professions that were exclusively male in earlier days. Look at media that was directed at an exclusively male audience. The waning of the male is unmistakable.
I’ve said before that I started worrying about this stage like 40 years ago. I’m amazed it has taken this long for men to start panicking, but I always think things will be processed more quickly than they are. I think the single-minded focus on racism as the core pathology is overstated, and the importance of sex is understated. Before people define themselves by race they define themselves by sex.
@Michael Reynolds: is someone asking Cuomo to resign?
@Just nutha:
Well, they’ve been asking, and they’ll ask again now.
I was listening to the press conference and comparing his behavior to what used to be considered quite normal in restaurants 40 years ago when I was waiting or managing. And yes, even by the extremely loose standards of a typical restaurant where you combined late nights, alcohol and mostly young employees, this was too much. If I couldn’t get him to behave I’d have had to fire him if he was one of my waiters or cooks. So, even by the rather rougher standards of ‘my day’ Andrew’s an asshole.
@Jay L Gischer:
Plenty of people fought just so that they could continue to feel superior compared to blacks.
Plenty of people vote for politicians who espouse policies that are economically harmful to themselves.
I think we underestimate the extent to which people act (politically) out of a desire for immediate mental gratification and not much else.
@JohnSF:
Oh, sure. But I suspect that for many fascism is önly a means to an end, not an end in itself.
For them, it’s more about being able to look down on their social “inferiors” (women, gays, non-whites, etc.) without facing any consequences than about a mass mobilization of the people in order to achieve national greatness in competition with other nation states.
@drj:
Where is my edit button?
@drj:
Is that you, Sven?
@Just nutha:
Schumer, Gillibrand, Ocasio-Cortez, and DeBlasio told him to resign months ago. Today, NY state senators and assembly members on both sides are saying the same thing: resign or be impeached.
@Michael Reynolds:
You got me…
Refusing your GF a kiss on the kisscam… Definitely a cuck move.
Just a reminder; ten days until the former guy is reinstated as POTUS. lol
@Michael Reynolds:
What odds are you offering he’ll convert to trumpism?
@Michael Reynolds:
75/25 staying – the man feels entitled to the office by virtue of his name and he ain’t going nowhere unless someone can make him. In the Age of Trump, the ability to shame or scandal an official out is very limited so unless there’s a pretty big stick to threaten them with, they’re gonna sit pretty and thumb their noses.
@Daryl and his brother Darryl:
Oh, Mike Lindell now says it may be September before that glorious day arrives. His “cyber-symposium” has to present all the evidence to the Supreme Court.
@Kathy:
He already (back in March) described the accusations against him as “cancel culture.”
@Daryl and his brother Darryl:
No reinstatement without the Kraken. It’s made crustal clear in Article XII of the Constitution.
@OzarkHillbilly:
She should get a better boyfriend…maybe the guy she ended up kissing.
@KM:
Then again, there appear to be a lot of people in NY state government who can’t stand him and would probably be thrilled to see him go. And I don’t mean just Republicans.
I winder how Sandra Lee feels?
@Michael Reynolds: “Any bets on Andrew Cuomo resigning? I’m gonna say 50/50 or maybe 60/40 against resignation.”
I can’t see it. At this point I’d still go 50/50 on him running for re-election.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the legislature agreed not to impeach if he promised not to run again. But then he’d probably run anyway.
@CSK: I suspect she already has. She certainly deserves better than that pouty 3 yr old.
If Cuomo doesn’t resign, he may be impeached and removed. Carl Heastie, the Speaker of the NY Assembly, said Cuomo is “not fit for office.”
If Cuomo runs for reelection and wins the nomination, I’m less concerned about him losing to a Republican (they’re gonna run a Trumpy like Lee Zeldin for sure–I believe a Republican can still win statewide, but not a Trumpublican) than I am about depressing turnout in downballot races.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: CDOT
drone footage.
@wr: @wr:
Oh he totally would – he’s that asshat to the core. I’m betting he’s livid that after watching all the other politicians skate on scandals recently that he’s being held to the fire like this. Not that he shouldn’t be, mind you – he should have resigned ages ago. However for a man of his ego and arrogance to look at his peers across the aisle getting away with crap and then to the hounds at his heels, he’s gotta be thinking “You know what? Make me. Go on and do it since you likely won’t” and gambling he can survive another month.
@KM: I think he’s also practicing (consciously or not) the Matt Yglesias rule that the secret to surviving a sex scandal is simply to not resign. He has the model for this approach, though it wasn’t about sex or any law-breaking, with the Ralph Northam blackface controversy. There was a media pile-on and calls for resignation, and Northam just weathered it. There are also a contingent of Dems who are still smarting from the Al Franken debacle, and who think the party is shooting itself in the foot and falling into the GOP’s hands with moves like this.
@Michael Cain: very nice
@CSK: The propensity to divide the world into Us and Them is baked into every human being, quite deeply. I agree with this. But it isn’t just Christians or Catholics, it’s everybody. And we all have the ability to reframe and recategorize people and “rise above” it at times. In some situations, Catholics are quite good at doing that. But not here and now. I suppose for Catholics the abortion thing has been festering for quite a while.
@Jay L Gischer:
Well, this is veering from the subject of gay people, which I thought was the point of your comment. But a lot of Protestant fundamentalists seem even more opposed to abortion than do Roman Catholics. I suspect that’s more about controlling women than it is about saving precious little lives.
The white supremacists are fine with abortion–as long as it’s only blacks and Hispanics who are having them.
@Michael Reynolds: I definitely agree that old-school masculinity has been under assault for the 40 years you cite. Men, especially working-class men, are having a tough time of it. This is a thing. And in some respects we saw this with Trump supporters.
However, that’s not what people are saying. They are complaining about immigrants or, as is cited by other commenters above, they are grinding their gears about gay people, saying Russia is better because Putin hates gays.
So is this just some kind of displacement phenomenon? (I don’t think it’s “transference”, that’s something else). They are mad about their existential situation and so they complain about gay people.
I expected the gay thing to resolve itself quite quickly, because homosexuality shows up in every corner of America, not to mention the world, regardless of ideology, and when it is someone you know, it tends to change your mind as you see how little it matters to everyone who isn’t having, or going to have sex with the person in question.
I mean, same-sex marriage is at about 70% support in the US. So in that sense I’m right.
And yet, here we have people willing to throw over liberal democracy because they in the 30% A libertarian (and gay) friend once told me, “the difference between me and the usual conservative is that I know when I’m beat”.
The masculinity thing is going to take longer, I get that, but the gay thing? I’m not getting it.
@Jay L Gischer: If you’re heterosexual, gays are an easy group to hate. Especially since most of these people claim to be “Christian”. Having to support poor people? Nah, takes too much money. Having to be virtuous sexually and not cheat on your wife? Heck no, I want my mistress. The gays are a convenient group to chastise the behaviour of because you know damn well you’ll never have to confine yourself the same way.
And as for Dreher over at TAC? He’s got a bee in his bonnet about this because he’s got this idea that The World Should Operate According To Certain Rules and Mama Nature makes him very very cross when she shows the lie of that.
The entire NY congressional delegation has called on Cuomo to resign.
@CSK: The fact that this waited until a full-scale investigation concluded proves why this is not a repeat of the Franken episode.
@Michael Reynolds: @CSK: Thanks! Living in small town Red State Murka as I do, it’s hard for me to keep up with East Coast/Coastal Elites liberalism and its internal dramas. (Tho I do try.)
@Teve: Contemporary drones have to be a huge improvement for evaluating this sort of thing quickly. Flash flood watch up for the same area this afternoon and evening: monsoon moisture and some instability look like there will be thunderstorms this afternoon and into the evening.
@CSK: I wonder if Cynthia Nixon is sitting in a corner somewhere muttering “didn’t I tell them; didn’t I?”
@Kylopod:
I could be wrong, but I always suspected that the reason Franken resigned so quickly was that there was worse waiting in the wings.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Maybe she is.
@Michael Cain: Thanks. As I said, amazing.
@CSK: Could be. I definitely think, though, that there was pressure for him to resign quickly. It was happening right during the Roy Moore fiasco, and Dems wanted to show they were taking a consistent stand on the harassment issue so that their case against Moore didn’t come off as purely partisan.
@Jay L Gischer:
I think it is a mistake to treat the people ready to give up on democracy as a uniform monolith.
The money groups aren’t the folks who want to give up on democracy because of the gays. They want to give up on democracy because of taxes, regulations and never really being fans of democracy in the first place.
The other people… they are seeing their own status slowly decline (the middle class is being eroded, and many only think they are middle class now because they don’t like to describe themselves as poor), and are seeing other people start doing better and they are pissed.
Pissed that the gays are going up while they are going down, and pissed that people are trying to solve the problems gays have when no one is trying to solve the problems Real Americans have (the collapsing middle class).
@Gustopher: No edit, wanted to add: Democracy isn’t working for them, it’s just working for the gays, so why be so attached to democracy?
I do believe the economic anxiety theory — but that economic anxiety brings out people’s inner bigot that otherwise they wouldn’t bother with.
@Kylopod:
Oh, there was pressure on Franken, certainly. But remember that six or seven other women came forward to say that they, too, had been groped (or received unwanted sexual advances) from Franken, and I think that alarmed the Democrats sufficiently so that they wanted him out before any other really grotesque revelations might emerge.
@Gustopher:
I’ve seen you mention this quite a few times.
Is the number of homes deemed “middle class” by the Census getting smaller? Yes. But so is the number of homes deemed “lower class”. That’s because more and more households are moving into the “upper class” designation–not because everyone is getting poorer.
(emphasis added)
—Cato Institute
I know you won’t like that source, so here’s the LA Times saying the same thing with some additional metrics.
@Michael Cain: oh absolutely, police choppers cost like $500/hr. Drones are prob a tenth of that.
@CSK: I suspect that a good portion of it is tied up in a desire to restore what some see as a law of cause and effect. Growing up in the fundy community purity was demanded just as much from the young men as from the young women. (And granted 50 years later the rules have probably changed at least some.) Even then, there was a sense that forgiving the young men was an easier pull because it was low cost, but “stepping up and doing the right thing” toward the mother and the child was pretty much a given.
A few weeks ago, I glanced at an article where Paulina Porizkova was talking about her recently started first relationship after the death of Rick Ocasek. She was saying that in matters of sex, the woman always “picks up the check.” It struck me a kind of quaint because what I hear and see among the few young people who share any thoughts with me is that they don’t see any “check” to be picked up. Abortion takes care of the “check” if you will. I understand why older people find some sadness in such a situation even though I have no dog in the fight and have seen too many “shotgun” marriages fall apart. There’s no good answer and banning abortion isn’t even a bad answer, but I have some empathy for the people who see the issue as another issue of society spinning out of control. And I think it is at least part of the formula. YMMV.
@Gustopher: Many ARE considered middle class now only because WE don’t want to think of them as being poor. Jus’ sayin’…
@Gustopher:
Ooh, err missus! 🙂
@Just nutha ignint cracker: “I wonder if Cynthia Nixon is “sitting in a corner somewhere muttering “didn’t I tell them; didn’t I?”
One big reason that Cuomo is still governor is that every potential serious candidate was scared away, so that the only Democrat to run against him was an actress with no governmental experience. I’d hated Cuomo since long before I got to New York, and yet found myself unable to vote against him if it meant voting for her…
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
There’s an old, old, sardonic joke among women: “How do you get rid of a man? Tell him you love him. If that doesn’t work, tell him you’re pregnant.”
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
In the late sixties-early seventies, it was fashionable to claim a working class background, especially if the last working class person in your family was the guy who tied the painter on one of William the Conqueror’s longboats. There are few things more amusing than listening to someone named Winthrop Winslow Abbott Saltonstall Cabot Lodge XII earnestly speak of getting back to his working class roots.
THE CUSTOMER IS OFTEN WRONG
I’m about two thirds through season 1 of Batwoman on HBO max. I can’t help but think the show should be renamed Alice, as she’s driving all the action thus far (except for the crossover Crisis episode, which really feels more like a whole different show).
@Teve: I assume helicopter pilots have different standards than I do, but there are parts of that canyon where you couldn’t pay me to ride along with them below the rim. In some places the canyon is over 1,000 ft deep.
@Gustopher:
@JohnSF:
Well played to you both. Gave me a good laugh!
@Kathy:
I gave up about half-way through Season 1–for exactly that reason. It was all just a rehash of the same stuff.
@Jay L Gischer:
I think you’re closing in on the truth. Except for some second string conservative grifters there’s no real money in being against gays. Or against abortion, or for guns. But those things don’t cost them much either. They can still cater to gays in corporate recruiting, send their daughters to Paris for a scrape and shopping therapy, and hire more security. The money is in tax cuts and deregulation.
But to secure tax cuts and deregulation, they have to get GOPs elected, and culture war has been pretty effective at getting GOPs elected. Just a day or two ago Jane Mayer published a big piece at the New Yorker on how much money the Bradley Foundation is putting into pushing the Big Lie. The Tea Party was largely stood up by the Koch Bros. These people have an ideology, but it’s glibertarian freedom for billionaires, not gays or abortion. But even the GOP base won’t vote for absolute freedom for billionaires, so the pols they own run on gays, God, and guns.
Biden says that Cuomo should resign.
The NY State Assembly will begin impeachment proceedings against Cuomo, according to TPM.
As a man, especially a working class man (union carpenter) I never had a problem with it. I do however know what the problem is: 90% of working men (black, white, yellow, red… it don’t matter, are pussies.
“OH MY GAWD!!!! THERE IS A WOMAN ON THE JOBSITE!!!!”
No, I don’t understand it.
@Mu Yixiao:
The census numbers don’t lie, but they don’t match what people feel on the ground and in their own lives. It comes down to “What is middle class?” — is it a range of numbers, or is it a lifestyle?
I would go with lifestyle. To be middle class you need to:
– Be able to afford a home
– Be able to afford kids (plural, at least two, for replacing you and spouse in the population)
– Be able to afford childcare (in some manner — stay at home parent, day care, etc)
– Be able to afford healthcare
– Be able to afford transportation
– Be able to afford the kids’ education (to a level where they will have a life better than yours, if they apply themselves)
– Be able to afford communication (cell phones, these days, likely internet and a computer, and a tv)
– Be able to afford to retire
– Be able to afford an emergency
– Have enough time from work to actually see your family (max 50/hr weeks or so, stable schedule)
Toss in a modest vacation if you are feeling generous.
Guess what? Fewer and fewer people are actually able to do that, as we have cut funding for education, and as healthcare expenses have been rising. There are lots of causes, from stagnant wages, tax cuts destroying the community’s ability to fund services, divorce rates that leave a lot of single parents, etc.
An annual 2% raise doesn’t do much good if your healthcare costs rise 10%, your rent rises 7%, meat is a fortune, and you have to spend more to get your kid into college. Even if it does mean that your total income is higher than it was before.
@CSK:
And September will turn into October, which will turn into November when TFG will be re-instated and so on and so forth, lol!!!
I will say the right is trying maybe too hard to try and scare us liberals into believing that they want to fight us and will take over our country by force. The problem is that many of the people who would be the foot soldiers in this next Revolutionary/Civil war are too old or not tech savvy enough (if they have issues operating a jitterbug phone how will they fare operating a drone to try and send a hellfire missile up my ass in the East Bay, CA) to do the job, and the conservative/qanon/maga fools with guns are fairly numerous but are not legion, so enough young liberal foot soldiers could be sent at them in waves and despite the many casualties we would incur they would eventually go down and we would still outnumber them when the dust settled.
Also, since the stock market has not cratered due to the big money folks removing their hundreds of billions from the market because they need to scramble to find an alternate safe-haven for their money due to the impending Mike Lindell takeover the country, I am fairly confident that a great battle for the soul of our country may be on the horizon but it will not be fought with combat in the streets.
The right is trying too hard to kowtow to Trump, like the lady in AZ who wants to arrest Republican legislators who will not declare all the Votes in AZ are fraudulent unless Trump’s name was marked on the ballot. I think the crazy talk from GOP folks like this lady will start to wear thin on the actual powers that be in the GOP and McConnell is going to have to tell his team to throttle back on the crazy talk.
Bad tom, BAD tom. Misogyny is at the root of every male problem.
FTR, I well remember when black men first started showing up on the job site. We “white working class men” didn’t like that either. Treated them like shit too. BUT… eventually we recognized their ‘Y’ chromosome as one of our own and against our better judgement accepted them as more or less equal.
Big mistake. Now we have women and fa**ots showing up on the job site wanting to be treated as equals.
Does it never end???? Why do they have to shove their tits and their gay in our faces???
Seriously, you have no idea how many of these conversations I had.
@inhumans99:
I remember tons of scenarios played between November 2016 and the first impeachment early in 2020 for ways in which the Orange ass would be removed from office. Faithless electors, impeachment, 25th amendment, resignation, etc.
Well, there were a handful of faithless electors, but none added an EC vote for Clinton. There were two impeachments, and no convictions. I’m sure some in the cabinet discussed a 25th amendment removal, but nothing happened. We had to wait four long years for the election, and even then that gave us some agonizing days of uncertainty, and the most inept putsch in history.
Now is the time for the cultists, supporters, followers, and assorted conspiracy theorists to spend four long years fantasizing about reinstatement, and magical means by which Biden, Harris, and Pelosi can be removed. The good news, for the world, is that even if the GOP takes back the House and Senate, there remains no practical way to remove Biden, much less Harris. So the fantasy of naming the Ass speaker of the House won’t work even if the GOP House leadership takes leave of its senses and appoints trump to that position.
Don’t get me wrong. The Orange Waste of Space would be an exceptionally good GOP speaker. After all, he’d manage to get nothing done, dominate the news cycle, and maybe even get back on social media. What else could Republicans ask for in a speaker? But that would require Kevin to give up his power, or some other GOP rep to do so if Kevin is pushed aside a la John Boehner.
@Teve:
Pat Buchanan got VERY upset at having to say “police officer” instead of “policeman.” He seemed to think that police departments were like the military, where only a few are officers, and that this would cause unbearable confusion and loss of morale. Didn’t bother any cop I ever knew.
@Teve:
Good god yes, and anyone who has ever worked retail has known this for ages.
I once had a woman attempt to argue that the speeding ticket she got on the way to return towels to our store was somehow my/the store’s fault.
People are amazing, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.
I haven’t had cable in 15 years. I don’t even have a wired internet line, my phone and ipad work off cellular. I wonder how cord-cutting is going to affect FoxNews’s revenue.
@Jen: i’ll never forget the drunk lady who tried to get me fired from Home Depot 7 years ago. Her mistake was telling my boss such outrageous lies about how I’d behaved towards her that he had to suppress laughing in her face until she left. 😀
@OzarkHillbilly:
Me neither. In the 60’s my uncles would frequently proclaim, loudly and proudly, “If you ain’t a redneck, you ain’t s***” My response was guaranteed to get me a beating, when my normal response was, “Oh, so you’re a redneck, and you say you’re s***?” Yes, smart-ass children deserve a beating, and I knew it was going to happen every time, but I just couldn’t resist. BTW, they were all 3rd generation Scandahoovians. Shrug.
OTOH, their parents (maternal g & g), were of different cloth. Grandmere worked for the Asian gentlepeople who ran all the illegal gambling in the day; Grandpapa was reviled by his fellow union members (boilermaker) for making friends with the ONE black union member in town.
@CSK: I grew up in what you folks back east consider a backwater of civilization–Seattle–so I’ve never even met anyone who would be considered from an old money family. The closest we come on this coast are a few timber baron types. Most of the oldest money I’m aware of native to Seattle is probably connected to the Tongs in the International District. Luddite has good stories about those people and days as his grandmother worked for one of them. My stories are about associates of his from the home for wayward boys who assumed that because my last name had a vowel on the end and I dressed well (comparatively speaking) that I could help them get into organized crime.
@Kathy: Ding, ding, ding, ding!!!!! Everybody clear your cards; we have a winner. [Mild Spoiler Alert]
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This will feel even more true in the Second Season. But Rachel Skarsten really rocks that platinum wig (and is dead bang the most interesting character in the whole show). And the reason that the crossover Crisis stories seem like a completely separate show is because they are. (The CW presented them as such last year and the year before.)
@Mu Yixiao: I feel your frustration and might have spiked it myself except that it was one of only about 3 current television shows that I was watching last year. Of the one’s I was watching, it was the best, bad as it was.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
The whole thing about bluebloods–at least here in the northeast–affecting to be working class was very much a thing of the late sixties-early seventies, and it passed pretty quickly, because no one was buying it. If you’re going to be a poseur, at least make the pose credible.
I don’t think I ever thought of Seattle as a backwater. A backwater to me is rural Maine, which, as the late Robert B. Parker once observed, is more rural than the moon.
I’m sorry you had to a put up with Mafia jibes because of your surname.
@gVOR08: “But to secure tax cuts and deregulation, they have to get GOPs elected, and culture war has been pretty effective at getting GOPs elected.”
Certainly accurate in my perception. The story really hasn’t changed very much since Bill Moyers did his investigation of the Moral Majority 4 decades ago either. The only scam more durable and longer running is Lotto.
The real purpose of abortion.
https://www.jesusandmo.net/comic/women2/
@OzarkHillbilly: Yeah. I do. 🙁
@CSK: Yeah. I was never able to figure out what the beef was there (other than that Buchannan was running for office and needed a wedge–that part I got). “Officer” has been the title of police force members for as long as I’ve been alive. Officer Krupke (and he was actually a sergeant), Officer Dibble, Officers Reed and Molloy. Where’s the confusion? Maybe in Buchannan’s mind, but that’s another story.
@flat earth luddite: And what a coincidence that my comment to someone else should come right after your comment about your grandparents. Eerie, huh?
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Skarsten is good, but the character is more of a single-note arrogant psycho pulling strings.
From Bill Bryson’s Made in America (1994):
Apparently FDA is putting everything else on hold to process the Pfizer full approval, and it could happen ~1 month from now.
@Teve: I haven’t heard any word on Moderna approval. Wonder if they’re fast-tracking that, too? That’s all we had available when the vaccines first came out.
Two people locally claim to have been vaccinated with Pfizer and had breakthrough infections. Neither of them live here full time….but they’re all over the local yard sale pages bitching about how they got the Pfizer shot and still got COVID.
@Daryl and his brother Darryl:..a fantastic drive; perhaps one of the most beautiful/pleasurable stretches of Interstate in the country.
In the spring of 1974 I traveled from Southern Illinois to the west coast. I was relocating to San Francisco with 3 other guys. Another traveler was hitching a ride to the west coast with us on his way to Oregon. We had two vehicles. An early ’70s Ford E-150 Econoline van that belonged to my quadriplegic friend Joe and my 1960 Ford F-100. We filled the bed of the pick up with luggage, put our two cats in the cab along with food water and a litter box and towed the F-100. We could look out the back windows of the van and see Quiz and Buffy sunning themselves on the dashboard of my truck as we drove along.
One stop we made on the way was in Denver at the home of the brother and sister-in-law of one of our traveling companions. When we left the Mile High City we unhitched the pickup as it would have put an unnecessary strain on the van to tow the truck through the mountains.
We headed west on what was then an incomplete Interstate 70. What is today the westbound bore of the Eisenhower-Johnson Tunnel had just opened in March of 1973 and carried eastbound and westbound I-70 traffic on a two lane alignment. What I remember of the drive through Glenwood Canyon was the two lane US Route 6 that tracked close to the Colorado River.
In the spring of 1990 I drove east from San Francisco, took US Route 50 across Nevada and into Utah where I joined I-70. According to AA Roads website a 12 mile section of I-70 eastbound from No Name, Colorado was not complete til 1992 so I must have run US Route 6 again. Further east both bores of the Eisenhower tunnel were open.
Since then I have made the Midwest-California run on a completed I-70 through Glenwood Canyon at least once in each direction. It is quite a ride!
Much as I would like to take off tomorrow and beat down that slab of highway one more time I suspect that I-70 will be open if I ever get to make that run again.
Here’s hoping that the mud slides can be mitigated.
I am led to believe that this is a decent summary of Cuomo’s press conference this morning.
sarah miller @sarahlovescali
Well, that’s the end of it. Newsmax is defending Cuomo.
@OzarkHillbilly:..kisscam…
I wore many baseball caps when I was working outside on the telephone lines. Mostly Cubs but I know I had a San Francisco Giants cap.
I never wore them backwards. I always thought it was a dumb look.
Now I’m sure of it.