R.I.P GOP The End Of A Republican Party

[seemslikeadream]

The GOP’s Age of Authoritarianism Has Only Just Begun
And it will not end with a Clinton presidency.


By Jonathan Chait
Image
Photograph by Mark Peterson
October 30, 2016
9:00 p.m.

There is a fusty old school of thought called the Great Man Theory, which attributes the tides of history to the decisions and character of a handful of fateful men. While it lives on in the popular ­Father’s Day – gift/doorstop-biography genre, the theory fell out of favor more than a century ago, and historians now understand that larger social forces — movements, ideas, institutions, economic interests, power — are usually more responsible for shaping our destiny. Yet Donald Trump’s horrifyingly unique combination of personal traits, together with rather fluid beliefs about policy, has reoriented American politics as a psychology seminar. Never before in our history has a major presidential character stood apart as so great (in the Great Fire of London sense) or so opposite-of-great. We have been consumed with wonder at just what it would mean to have this flamboyant sociopath pacing the Oval Office. Trump has made Great Man theorists of us all.

But something important is happening that has been obscured by the captivating spectacle. Forget about Donald Trump for a moment. Or — given how famously difficult it is to not think of a pink elephant, not to mention an orange one — consider Trump’s rise not in terms of his uniquely dangerous personality but instead as the interplay of broader trends.

Approaching the 2016 election from this historical perspective, in which Trump’s every boast, tweet, and threat disappears into the ether, may at first blush sound like a relief. It is the opposite. Trump is an extreme event, but Trumpism is no fluke. Its weaknesses are fleeting, and its strengths likely to endure. Far from an organization that is “probably headed toward a civil war” — as the Washington Post recently put it, summing up a rapidly congealing consensus — the Republican Party is instead more unified than one might imagine, as well as more dangerous. The accommodations its leaders have made to their erratic and delirious nominee underscore a capacity to go further and lower to maintain their grip on power than anybody understood. More consequentially, the horrors Trump has unleashed are the product of tectonic forces in American politics. Trump has revealed the convergence of two movements more extreme than anything in the free world that may yet threaten the democratic character most Americans take as their birthright.

During the Republican primaries, Marco Rubio frequently said, “I will not allow the conservative movement to be taken over by a con artist.” What would have struck a Republican from four or six decades ago about that line (other than the fact that Rubio endorsed the con artist months later) is that Rubio assumed that the term “conservative movement” was synonymous with “the Republican Party.” The two were not always the same. Like right-of-center parties in industrialized democracies across the world, the GOP throughout most of the 20th century understood there to be a role for government in daily life. During the years immediately following World War II, the Republican Party, led by figures like Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, accepted the broad contours of the New Deal and governed much like, say, David Cameron or Stephen Harper recently did in Britain and Canada. The party did not attack government intervention as an impingement on freedom or as inherently immoral.

The modern conservative movement was a revolt against the Republican Party’s leaders. When it began in the 1950s, it amounted to a minority faction operating only loosely within the party, somewhat like the relationship between today’s Democratic Party and the Bernie Sanders movement. Conservatives regarded the party’s leaders as traitors, and the leaders regarded the conservatives as kooks. Phyllis Schlafly’s popular conservative treatise from 1964, A Choice Not an Echo, posited that “secret kingmakers” employed “brainwashing and propaganda blitzes” to maintain their nefarious control of the GOP, in part to serve their own self-interest.

Conservatives, not yet in possession of much political power, rejected the expanded role of government in modern life on philosophical grounds. Whether any government program “worked” in any practical sense was immaterial. For the federal government to intervene in the economy and social welfare was by its nature “violence to the Constitution,” as Barry Goldwater put it. In supporting Goldwater’s 1964 candidacy for president, a young Ronald Reagan asked, “Have we the courage and the will to face up to the immorality and discrimination of the progressive surtax, and demand a return to traditional proportionate taxation?” It is this moral opposition to government that set them apart from the pragmatic skeptics of bigger government who then controlled the Republican Party.

From the very beginning, however, the conservatives faced a predicament: Their belief that government is evil irrespective of whether its programs function as intended only had traction with a minority of voters. Americans may have opposed big government as an abstract notion, but they did not want to do away with their Social Security, Medicare, farm subsidies, ­minimum-wage laws, and progressive taxation. This misalignment between the conservative movement and the American people has, in fact, bred among conservatives a fundamental distrust of the American people. The welfare state, in the eyes of conservatives, was merely a government-sponsored mechanism by which the masses of voters could steal from the minority. (Russell Kirk, the influential mid-20th-century conservative, lamented that “taxation of the prosperous for the benefit of the less wealthy, through the votes of the benefiting crowd,” was “first cousin to theft.”) Since conservatives define liberty as the preservation of property rights, democracy — and its potential for legalizing theft via redistribution — poses a constant threat.

And yet American democracy was where the conservatives lived, and so a movement built on distrust of the majority set out to find a constituency. It found one in the segment of the country where conservative anti-government theory had deep resonance: the white South. Since the 18th century, most white Southerners had feared that a powerful federal government would override their system of slavery and white supremacy, and they opposed any expansion of federal power, from canals to colleges, as unconstitutional. Conservatives discovered they could attach their rhetoric to the appeal of white identity politics, as well as ally themselves with the religious right, which formed a powerful bulwark against all variety of social change. “We must go hunting where the ducks are,” Goldwater declared in a 1962 debate with his liberal Republican rival Nelson Rockefeller.

Eventually, Goldwater won the debate, but it took decades for the relatively moderate Republican Party to go extinct—­literally, until its voters died and its operatives and advisers in Washington retired. As recently as the mid-1970s, conservatives debated whether to work within the GOP or form a new party. Some mainline Republicans continued to exert themselves through the Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush presidencies, all of which had a mix of movement conservatives and traditional Republicans in positions of advisory power. (In 1990, President Bush’s moderate advisers pushed him to accept a small tax increase as part of a deficit-reducing deal, which provoked a right-wing revolt by House Republicans.) Over that half-century, a thriving ecosystem of think tanks, media, magazines, talk radio, newspapers, and pressure groups arose — first to influence the party and ultimately to define its thinking completely.

There is no longer any such thing as a Republican who is not conservative. The collapse of the George W. Bush administration was greeted among his party not as an indictment of its fanatical tax-­cutting, deregulatory agenda and failed effort to privatize Social Security, but as evidence that Bush was not conservative enough. During the Obama administration, a spate of right-wing primary challenges eradicated what was left of the party’s vestigial moderate wing and cowed its remaining mainstream members into submission.

That the contemporary Republican Party shares a name with the Republican Party of the 1970s — or even of the ’80s or ’90s — has created massive confusion over just how distinct its worldview is. According to one measure of ideology used widely by political scientists, the most conservative Republican in the House 25 years ago, when the House attacked a Republican president for the heresy of increasing taxes, would be among the most liberal House Republicans today. “I’m a conservative from the conservative wing of the conservative movement,” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said earlier this year, marveling at how he has become a mainstream figure among his peers. “I was always kind of a bomb-thrower from the right … it just shows you that we have shifted the center far to the right, in a good way.”

Still, as the conservative movement has completed its conquest of the Republican Party, it has never resolved the dilemma that haunted it from the beginning. Conservative opposition to policies like business regulation, social insurance, and progressive taxation has never taken hold among anything resembling a majority of the public. The party has grown increasingly reliant upon white identity politics to supply its votes, which has left an indelible imprint on not only the Republican Party’s function but also its form.

Right-wing populism has had the same character for decades — in 1950, Theodor Adorno described the fear of outsiders, and the veneration of law and order, as “the authoritarian personality”; in 1964, Richard Hofstadter described a similar tendency as “the paranoid style” — but until recently, those movements lived outside both political parties. The political scientists Jonathan Weiler and Marc Hetherington found that, as recently as 1992, the Republican and Democratic parties had an equal proportion of voters with an authoritarian personality. By Obama’s first term, authoritarian personalities identified overwhelmingly with the GOP. In its preference for simplicity over complexity, and its disdain for experts and facts, the party has steadily ratcheted down its standard of intellectually acceptable discourse: from a doddering Ronald Reagan to Dan Quayle to George W. Bush to Sarah Palin. From this standpoint, Trump is less a freakish occurrence than something close to an inevitability.


One reason is obvious: fear of the party’s voting base, which has fallen in line with its bullying presidential candidate and turned sharply against most Republican dissenters, who saw their approval ratings among their own base plummet. Another consideration, which has received far less media coverage, is something of the opposite of fear: lust. Republicans have had good reason to believe that a Trump-led government would grant them a degree of control over American government unprecedented in this nation’s history. To imagine the entire Republican leadership as nothing but a gaggle of sad-sack cowards is to create a personality-based explanation for a phenomenon that has a deeper, structural explanation. They support Trump not only out of character weakness but because his election would grant them transformational power.

Because Trump’s record of loyalty to the conservative cause is so haphazard, and his grasp of policy detail so scant, the small core of anti-Trump intellectuals on the right have insisted a President Trump would betray them—a charge that, having been echoed by jeering Democrats, has settled into conventional wisdom. But on the vast majority of issues, Trump has aligned himself with standard conservative dogma. The Wall Street Journal editorial page probably got it right when it reasoned that “precisely because [Trump] is such a tabula rasa, he would be more dependent than any other President on Congress.” In September, Trump appointed a former lobbyist and aide to Vice-President Dick Cheney to his transition team, which would staff his administration, and the Heritage Foundation has taken an active role in supplying ideas and candidates for his prospective administration. As Ryan gushed after Trump’s first debate, “I see emerging in front of us the potential for what a unified Republican government can get you.” The conservative movement would have full control of a party that had full control of the Legislative, Executive, and (after filling the Supreme Court vacancy Republicans left open for him) Judicial branches. Not to mention full control of half of all state governments.

President Trump’s domestic policy, in other words, would look a lot like President Cruz’s. Or President Ryan’s. Ryan has rolled out a suite of right-wing policy changes that has attracted little attention for anything other than the fact that its name, “A Better Way,” subtly implies some distance from the presidential candidate he has endorsed. Tonally, Ryan has struck a calculated contrast, promoting his plan as an antidote to “anger” and “division,” but in substance his and Trump’s overlap almost completely. Trump has proposed a $6.2 trillion tax cut, about half of which would accrue to the richest one percent; House Republicans propose a $3.1 trillion tax cut, of which 99.6 percent would go to the richest one percent. Trump has promised to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, a decision that would cause the treaty to unravel, and has appointed as the leader of his Environmental Protection Agency transition team Myron Ebell, a ­climate-science skeptic who has called the Paris agreement “unconstitutional.” Ryan has called it “disastrous for the American economy” and claimed it was entered “unlawfully.” His plan would repeal all climate-change regulations related to global warming. Trump and Ryan would also both repeal Obama’s health-care reforms and regulations on Wall Street.

Democrats would be powerless to stop them. Trump could renounce the Paris climate accord immediately after his election, reversing international momentum toward green energy, and then quickly dismantle Obama’s regulations that enabled the pact to be negotiated in the first place. Democrats in the Senate may threaten to filibuster legislative action, but if Republicans continue to control the Senate (as they surely would after a Trump victory), they could abolish the filibuster with a simple majority vote (as they surely would if it were all that stood in their way).

Even if Republicans uncharacteristically were to shy away from such an aggressive approach, Congress could, under existing rules, pass a budget bill that is exempt from the filibuster as long as it contains only tax-and-spending-related matters. That means a single law ripping up the subsidies required for Obamacare’s insurance expansion, instituting gigantic regressive tax cuts and deep reductions in anti-poverty spending, and bringing about the largest shift in resources to the rich from the poor in American history could be whisked to Trump’s desk within weeks of his taking office. Asked if such a bill would be a good vehicle for Trump’s policies, Lawrence Kudlow, who has advised Republicans for decades and currently advises Trump, replied, “Not good, fabulous.” Ryan himself explained his intention to pack his agenda into such a bill.

Ryan’s belief that his differences with Trump over trade and immigration can be papered over, for all the mockery it has received, is probably correct. After all, Republicans already gave up on immigration reform in the face of a blistering grassroots revolt when they tried to work with Obama in 2013. New trade agreements are an ancillary part of their domestic agenda. In any case, they have good reason to doubt that Trump has any unbending principles on either subject. As recently as 2012, he disavowed mass deportation (“Now we’re supposed to send them out of the country? I don’t believe in that”). He continues to call himself a “free trader” who will somehow negotiate more beautiful agreements through force of will. Nor do his promises to maintain spending on retirement programs present a frontal conflict with conventional Republicans, who also insist they will not touch benefits for anybody at or near retirement. Nothing Trump has done or said constitutes apostasy against a core tenet of conservative doctrine. He has not advocated tax increases, or defended Obamacare or Wall Street regulations such as Dodd-Frank.

It is the tantalizing prospect of crippling the welfare state that has lured Republicans into endorsing a president who has threatened to jail his opponent, go after the business interests of news outlets critical of him, and praised dictators in North Korea, Russia, and China for crushing their opposition. They are willing to give Trump control of the military, the Department of Justice, and the domestic-security apparatus as long as Ryan controls the legislative agenda.

That congressional Republicans would submit to Trump even at the risk of compromising the basic security of the American government is not merely a hypothesis. It already happened. U.S. intelligence agencies have reportedly grown concerned about links between the Trump campaign and the Russian campaign strategy of using cyberattacks to help elect him. Republicans in Congress conceded to Daily Beast reporter Shane Harris that they shared these concerns but nonetheless refused requests by their Democratic colleagues to launch an investigation, which would have had subpoena power to force witnesses to testify.

The episode is telling because Republicans have no ideological motive to oppose an investigation — indeed, as the generally hawkish party on Russia, they might have been especially concerned by the prospect of Putin’s subverting the American political process. As Harris reported, they simply “have no appetite to launch inquiries into their party’s presidential nominee.” Their willingness to turn a blind eye to what even Republicans acknowledge as a security threat is a display of the absolute logic of party unity that would prevail under a Trump presidency.

The likelihood that Hillary Clinton will win on November 8 reduces the possibility of total conservative control within the next four years. But Trump has revealed — and hastened — the Republican Party’s transformation. In June, Ed Conard, a former business partner of Mitt Romney’s and a visiting scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told a gathering of wealthy Republicans that they needed to find a way to appease Trump’s blue-collar supporters while still maintaining their grip on the party’s agenda, especially its fixation with reducing the top tax rate. “So the question is, how do we build a coalition with displaced workers like we did with the religious right after Roe v. Wade and which we used to lower the marginal tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent … and that leaves us in control, us being advocates of free enterprise, in control of the coalition?” he asked. Conard explained, “The answer, I believe, is tough, and perhaps even odious, compromises.”

Conard was expressing in unusually blunt terms the strategic calculation that has preoccupied his party’s elite, which understands that its small-government message still does not attract a natural majority on its own. Trump has propelled the party onto a course that may sometimes be discomfiting but could satisfy every faction: libertarian ends achieved through authoritarian means.

Four years ago, conservatives repeatedly argued that defeating Barack Obama gave them their only chance to preserve the America they knew. They believed, as the pollster Stan Greenberg found in extensive interviews, that “big government is meant to create rights and dependency and electoral support from mostly minorities who will reward the Democratic Party with their votes.” That coalition would soon overwhelm “real America” at the polls, turning democracy into a rigged contest, and so the 2012 election would be conservatives’ “now or never” chance to outvote Obama’s coalition. There was some truth to that analysis: The white-nationalist politics that is the conservative movement’s lifeline to power from the 1960s through the ’90s has become a demographic death trap. And so the Republican Party has turned to post–“now or never” tactics.

Consider the following statements that have been made as this campaign comes to a close. “The election is rigged,” Mississippi’s Republican governor Phil Bryant has declared, arguing that since blue states have more people, “all you have to do is win those particularly large states. You can forget about flyover country. That doesn’t seem fair to me at all.” Pat Buchanan has gone further, noting that, since politicians “rig the system through mass immigration and a mammoth welfare state so that Middle America is never again able to elect one of its own,” it was only natural and fair that “it is the ­populist-nationalist right that is moving beyond the niceties of liberal democracy to save the America they love.” Maine’s Republican governor Paul LePage has brought this line of thinking to its logical conclusion. “Sometimes I wonder that our Constitution is not only broken,” he said, “but we need a Donald Trump to show some authoritarian power in our country and bring back the rule of law.”

Here is a sitting governor in the United States, not some post-Soviet kleptocrat, actually calling for “authoritarian power.” To be sure, LePage lies along the edge of his party rather than at its center. But the nature of party coalitions is that they cluster around common principles, and the mainstream of Republican thought is closer to LePage than anybody could have imagined possible a few decades ago. In a September National Review cover story, co-authors Yuval Levin and Ramesh Ponnuru, two of the right’s most erudite intellectuals, acknowledged that Trump has made some questionable statements that “certainly do not sound like the views of a person with a deep esteem for the constitutionally limited role of the president or for the delicate balance of our system of government.” But, they quickly insisted, Hillary Clinton’s support for executive actions, laws that create more bureaucracy, and liberal judges poses “a more concrete and specific threat than Trump.” Indeed, “mainstream liberalism now subverts and threatens our democracy,” and so they concluded that the safer choice, from the standpoint of the republic’s stability, would be to hand control of the Executive branch to Trump. This is how a party consensus forms. The more strident wing openly endorses authoritarianism, and the “moderate” wing refrains while agreeing that authoritarianism is still preferable to liberalism.

Trump has propelled the party onto a course that may sometimes be discomfiting but could satisfy every faction: libertarian ends achieved through authoritarian means.
A crucial component to this line of thinking is the delegitimization of the Democratic Party. “We’ve had eight years of a president — he’s an autocrat — he just does it on his own, he ignores Congress, and every single day we’re slipping into anarchy,” LePage continued. Denouncing an “autocrat” while calling for authoritarian power may sound contradictory, but ­LePage is merely making explicit beliefs that the conservative movement has held implicitly for decades. After the GOP’s 1994 midterm-elections sweep, which conservatives proclaimed was a “Republican revolution,” the party proceeded to shut down the government, an act reflecting their fury that President Bill Clinton had dared to veto their fiscal policies. The entire Republican Party treated the passage of Obamacare — with a House majority, and a Senate supermajority, following months of deliberation — as a crime. Under Obama, they shut down the government again, threatened to default on the national debt, and have taken the unprecedented step of opposing the president’s right to appoint any nominee at all to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. And leading Republican figures like Representative Mo Brooks, National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, talk-show host Steve Deace, Sean Hannity, and others have already called for Hillary Clinton’s impeachment. The vast majority of the Republican base finds Trump’s fascistic language normal because it has been conditioned over a generation to think about politics in similar terms.

Trump’s hysterical warnings that fraudulent voting by black people will steal the election have likewise gone beyond the Republican norm. But only a bit beyond. Republicans have spent years murmuring darkly of legions of fraudulent votes cast in cities swarming with minorities. “Democrats in the city of St. Louis are trying to steal this election!” screamed Republican senator Kit Bond in 2000. “We are, in some parts of the country, I’m afraid to say, beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are colonels in mirrored sunglasses,” said Karl Rove in 2006. George W. Bush’s Justice Department pressured U.S. Attorneys to prosecute the widespread vote fraud they insisted must be happening and fired two of them when they reported none could be found. John ­McCain in 2008 accused ACORN, without credible evidence, of “maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”

Studies have found that Republican-controlled states have enacted voting restrictions in response to higher levels of minority turnout. In North Carolina, Republican lawmakers and staffers requested racial breakdowns of different voting methods, then crafted a bill that would “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision,” a federal judge wrote. North Carolina stood out from other states only because its Republican officials made the mistake of putting their motives in writing. The other elements — the belief, against all evidence, that Democrats benefit from pervasive fraud; the support for measures designed to suppress minority voting — are points of party consensus. Mike Roman, the figure Trump has tapped to direct his “election security” operation, once whipped conservatives into a frenzy by promoting a misleading but scary video of New Black Panthers at a polling station in Philadelphia, then ran the Koch brothers’ intelligence agency. Trump’s policy of fomenting white panic and suppressing the nonwhite vote is best-practice behavior within his party.

This behavior will last beyond Trump. His birther ravings about Obama are of a piece with Rubio’s declaration that “Barack Obama has deliberately weakened America.” For all the fascination Trump has drawn with his ­performance-art display of incoherent rage, and the angst it has created among high-profile defectors, little of substance separates the nominee from the party elite, who object mostly to his flamboyant lack of discipline. “If Trump loses in November,” said the libertarian Grover Norquist, who has defended Trump as a loyal servant of the anti-tax, pro-business cause, “it will be the result of self-inflicted wounds of a decidedly personal nature.” Both the party’s libertarian business elite and its base fear the ballot box as a mechanism to enable the theft of resources from the few to the many. The elite see this many-versus-few struggle in economic terms, and the base sees it in racial terms. But since the wealth gap in the United States is also in large part a racial gap, the differences can be reconciled.

Trump’s campaign chairman, the Breitbart media chieftain Stephen Bannon, apparently has plans to build a cross-border movement of right-wing nationalist parties. (The editor of Breitbart UK is running to lead the UK Independence Party, under the slogan “Make UKIP Great Again.”) A recent Bloomberg Businessweek feature on these plans predicts Trump’s organization could evolve into “an American UK Independence Party that will wage war on the Republican Party.” But there is a crucial difference in design between the British political system, in which third parties win representation, and the American one. Trumpism (or Breitbartism) cannot win power without the Republican Party, just as the Republican Party can no longer win power without the extremists that define it. The overwhelming gravitational force of the American two-party system delivered to Trump an endorsement from a former rival he had once called “Liddle Marco,” taking care to spell out the insult to his jeering supporters. (“L-I-D-D-L-E. Liddle, Liddle, Liddle Marco.”) And it brought the endorsement of another whose wife he labeled ugly and whose father he insinuated may have conspired to assassinate JFK. A party that can contain, on the one hand, a presidential nominee who denounces shadowy global financiers and media elites and, on the other, Sheldon Adelson (who has donated millions toward his election) can withstand enormous internal tension.

Trump will probably lose. That loss will provide little more than a temporary reprieve. The Republican-controlled House will be as conservative as ever, perhaps even more so. All the nice-­sounding legislative programs Clinton offered up to soothe her restless base on the left — affordable child care and college, improvements to Obamacare, ­infrastructure — will be dead on arrival, making Clinton appear ineffectual. Or worse than ineffectual: Republicans will crank up the investigative machinery and produce endless media coverage of ­scandals, real or trumped up. (In fact, as the FBI melds its investigations into Clinton’s emails and Anthony Weiner’s sexting, we may be in for another Clinton administration defined by years of congressional sex investigations.) And then there is the likelihood that the current economic expansion, already one of the longest in American history, collapses into recession sometime during her term.

Just because the conservative movement will face long odds attracting a plurality of American voters doesn’t mean that those odds are zero. This year, Clinton has had the luxury of competing against a candidate who does not hide his grossness. In 2020, she will probably encounter a candidate who uses dog whistles rather than air horns and is trying to build a majority rather than a brand. Republicans won’t necessarily need to moderate their plans to beat her in 2020. To compete, they may only need Trumpism with a human face (and, perhaps, human hair as well).

And meanwhile, the version of the party that survives the likely wreckage of November will be a rage machine no less angry or united than the one that sustained eight years of unrelenting opposition to Obama. That rage will again shake the creaky scaffolding of the Madisonian system of government. Trumpism is the long historical denouement of a party that has come to see American democracy as rigged. And what one does to a rigged system is destroy it.

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[seemslikeadream]

The GOP Is Now the White Nationalist Party, and That Isn’t Changing Anytime Soon

ADELE M. STAN OCTOBER 11, 2017
Collective denial over the depth of America’s racism amounts to a passive form of racism in and of itself.


(AP Photo/Steve Helber)
White nationalist demonstrators walk in Charlottesville, Virginia, August 12, 2017.

At several events at this year’s New Yorker Festival, a sense of wooziness predominated among audience members, who appeared to be grasping for a wisp of hope that the nightmare known as President Trump would soon be over. Alas, experts who graced the stages at three separate events had a common message: Expect Trump to serve out his first term, and perhaps even his second.

The liberals of New York City struggled to comprehend how this could be possible. These are the same people who were certain that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 presidential race. These are people who knew Donald Trump as the tabloid clown who had plagued them for decades, his smug mug sneering from the newsstand. They never dreamed that America would go for putting the clown prince from Queens in the White House. Having failed to consider the lessons of Reconstruction, they couldn’t believe that America would follow the presidency of Barack Obama with that of a white supremacist, a rank misogynist, a hater. They couldn’t believe that such a thing, with its threatening overtones and echoes of the fascist movements that rose in 1930s Europe, could happen here.

At the Directors Guild Theater near Carnegie Hall, in an October 8 panel discussion event titled “It Happened Here,” Republican strategist Mindy Finn stated baldly: “The Republican party is becoming the white nationalist party.” Finn led the digital strategy team for Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election. In 2016, she served as running-mate to third-party protest candidate Evan McMullin, a conservative who opposed Trump.

One needn’t look far for the evidence. Just take a peek at what Steve Bannon is up to.
One needn’t look far for the evidence. Just take a peek at what Steve Bannon is up to. Even as he explained his ideology to my boss and colleague, Robert Kuttner, as “economic nationalism,” what Bannon is really doing, Kuttner observes, is combining economic nationalism with white nationalism. And he plans to do much of that by funding and advancing primary challenges to more than a dozen Republican senatorial candidates, a trick that will likely further mutate the DNA of the GOP. In a binary system such as ours, this is a particularly effective tactic, since once the general election comes around, most voters will select their favored candidate from one of the two major parties, often without much more knowledge than the candidate’s party affiliation. These days, most people who consider themselves Republican would recoil at the thought of checking the box next to a Democrat’s name.

“Republican primaries have become very dangerous for incumbents,” observed Rick Wilson, a Republican strategist who took part in the Sunday morning panel discussion in New York. Speaking of the motivated electorate in primary races, Wilson said, “That 30 percent of the Republican Party hates their incumbent candidate more than they hate Democrats.”

And Trump has been served notice by Bannon that he dare not stray too far from the white nationalists whom Bannon has courted in his once and present guise of chief executive of the Breitbart.com hate site. In Alabama’s special Senate election, Trump endorsed the incumbent Luther Strange in the GOP primary, only to have Bannon back a primary challenge to Strange from Roy Moore, the theocratic, Constitution-flouting former chief justice of the state Supreme Court. Moore stomped Trump’s candidate to bits. Trump promptly deleted all of his tweets endorsing Strange. Trump hates to lose. He won’t make that mistake again.

“We are a divided country,” said Carl Bernstein to an audience gathered on October 6 at a theater in Chelsea for a panel titled “All the President’s Reporters.”

“We are in the state of a cold civil war in this country,” Bernstein explained. “It is absolutely unprecedented to have a president of the United States who lies about damn near everything as this president does. And, yet, that does not disturb a big part of the citizenry.”

During the Watergate scandal, which Bernstein, with Bob Woodward, exposed in the pages of The Washington Post, people on both sides of the aisle were interested in learning the truth, Bernstein, now an analyst for CNN, explained. That’s not the case today.

“During this last campaign you could tell there was a difference,” said Jane Mayer, the New Yorker reporter who did a deep dive into the Koch brothers’ network in her book Dark Money. “There was a lot of good reporting about Trump, and it wouldn’t break through. … The country is divided because of where it’s getting information.”

On the right, one of the most-trafficked websites is Breitbart.com, which acted as an arm of the Trump campaign during the presidential contest, and continues to advance Trumpian ideals, including the notion that stories about the administration generated by mainstream media outlets are “fake news.” Republicans also get their news from the toxic airwaves of right-wing radio and Fox News Channel.

Among the fantasies peddled by such outlets is that of the unworthy black or immigrant or Muslim or woman of any color advancing at the expense of “hardworking” white men. Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of Strangers in Their Own Land, calls this the myth of the “line-cutters.”

“There’s been this displacement of blame,” Hochschild said. “That’s what we need to counter.”

Hochschild, the eminent sociologist who spoke on the “It Happened Here” panel, spent years among the white working-class voters whose economic difficulties have drawn a lot of ink since the election. But she seemed to miss a crucial point when she claimed that many of these were good people, not racists. To vote for a candidate who boasts of his racist views and not be deemed a racist seems a neat trick to me. It’s a form of denial and projection that allows America as a whole off the hook for the election of Trump. To say that Trump is racist but his voters are not is the moral equivalent of saying, “The devil made me do it.” Satan was never more than a device for the externalization of evil that lives in the human heart.

The truth is that the United States is a deeply racist country, and that racism lives among liberals, where it takes more genteel forms, as it does in more naked forms among those who call themselves conservatives. Liberal astonishment at the ascendance of Trump speaks to this. Collective denial over the depth of America’s racism amounts to a passive form of racism in and of itself. Because if the white majority in the liberal establishment listened to what black people tell us of their lives and experience, we wouldn’t be in denial.

“It’s not surprising that this is happening,” said New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb to moderator Dorothy Wickenden, the magazine’s executive editor. “It’s unsettling, but it’s not surprising. On June 16 of 2015, Dylann Roof … shot nine people, and one person who had shot who had not yet died asked him why he was doing this, and he said, ‘Your people are raping our women.’ On June 17, 2015, Donald Trump declared his candidacy, saying in part, the country was besieged by Mexican rapists. I don’t think there’s a causal relationship between those two things, but I think they are both responding to a similar zeitgeist … the idea of the frenzy you can drive people to with the idea of white women being imperiled particularly by men of color.”

It is natural, when staving off despair, to look for a quick and easy end to peril.
It is natural, when staving off despair, to look for a quick and easy end to peril. At the panel about reporting on the president, an audience member asked about the likelihood that Trump would be pushed from office via the 25th Amendment, which allows for the removal a president deemed unfit for duty by a majority of the cabinet. Bernstein said he didn’t see it happening.

Neither did Jeffrey Toobin, the CNN legal analyst and New Yorker writer who interviewed former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara on the stage of the New York Society for Ethical Culture on October 7. “I don’t think it’s going to happen,” Toobin said in answer to a question from his audience. Bharara was no more soothing.

“People should get used to the idea that Donald Trump is going to be president of the United States through his first term most likely,” said Bharara, who was fired by Trump after refusing to return the president’s phone call because he saw such interaction as an ethical problem.

“I think it would be more useful for people to focus … on ways to counteract the policies they disagree with, assuming he's going to be in office,” Bharara added, “rather than this wishful thinking that something's going to drop from the heavens to remove him.”

In meantime, though, there’s no doubt that white supremacists have been emboldened by the Trump presidency, and the president’s rhetoric—such as his contention that some “very fine people” took part in the August 11 torch-lit “white nationalist” march to the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The next day, violence exploded in that town when those who carried the torches were joined by neo-Confederate and neo-Nazi forces to engage in acts of collective and individual thuggery.

On Tuesday, an arrest warrant was issued for a black man who was brutally beaten by white supremacists on that day, in apparent retaliation for the fact that charges have been pressed against some of his attackers, thanks to internet sleuthing led by activist Shaun King.

One of those alleged attackers, caught on video assaulting DeAndre Harris, is now blaming Harris for injuries he appears to have sustained in skirmish with another white supremacist, according to Harris’s attorney, S. Lee Merritt, who has been tweeting out video that appears to back up his claim. Harris was attacked in front of the Charlottesville Police headquarters, and that attack was caught on video, as well. Merritt told The Washington Post that the arrest warrant for Harris resulted from charges pressed by the white supremacist Harold Ray Crews, whose case, Merritt added, is being driven by the neo-Confederate group, League of the South.

At the panel on reporting, Jane Mayer offered a glimmer of hope for the nation’s future, saying that ultimately Trump will be seen for what he is, for all that he is.

“I feel the truth will win,” she said. “I have enough faith in the American public that they will see who’s really telling the truth.”

But until that happens, the question remains of how many lives will be harmed or destroyed in the interim. What’s to be done? Resist with all of our might.
http://prospect.org/article/gop-now-whi ... ty-and-isn’t-changing-anytime-soon

[seemslikeadream]

another one bites the dust

Bob Corker and now Jeff Flake

the rest of you republicans hang in there with the traitor who now has people throwing Russian flags at his feet ..yelling traitor in the halls of our government

The following is the text of Sen. Jeff Flake's remarks from the floor of the U.S. Senate on Oct. 24, 2017, as prepared for delivery.

Mr. President, I rise today to address a matter that has been much on my mind, at a moment when it seems that our democracy is more defined by our discord and our dysfunction than it is by our values and our principles. Let me begin by noting a somewhat obvious point that these offices that we hold are not ours to hold indefinitely. We are not here simply to mark time. Sustained incumbency is certainly not the point of seeking office. And there are times when we must risk our careers in favor of our principles.

Now is such a time.

It must also be said that I rise today with no small measure of regret. Regret, because of the state of our disunion, regret because of the disrepair and destructiveness of our politics, regret because of the indecency of our discourse, regret because of the coarseness of our leadership, regret for the compromise of our moral authority, and by our – all of our – complicity in this alarming and dangerous state of affairs. It is time for our complicity and our accommodation of the unacceptable to end.

In this century, a new phrase has entered the language to describe the accommodation of a new and undesirable order – that phrase being “the new normal.” But we must never adjust to the present coarseness of our national dialogue – with the tone set at the top.

We must never regard as “normal” the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals. We must never meekly accept the daily sundering of our country - the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedoms, and institutions, the flagrant disregard for truth or decency, the reckless provocations, most often for the pettiest and most personal reasons, reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with the fortunes of the people that we have all been elected to serve.

None of these appalling features of our current politics should ever be regarded as normal. We must never allow ourselves to lapse into thinking that this is just the way things are now. If we simply become inured to this condition, thinking that this is just politics as usual, then heaven help us. Without fear of the consequences, and without consideration of the rules of what is politically safe or palatable, we must stop pretending that the degradation of our politics and the conduct of some in our executive branch are normal. They are not normal.

Reckless, outrageous, and undignified behavior has become excused and countenanced as “telling it like it is,” when it is actually just reckless, outrageous, and undignified.

And when such behavior emanates from the top of our government, it is something else: It is dangerous to a democracy. Such behavior does not project strength – because our strength comes from our values. It instead projects a corruption of the spirit, and weakness.

It is often said that children are watching. Well, they are. And what are we going to do about that? When the next generation asks us, Why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you speak up? -- what are we going to say?

Mr. President, I rise today to say: Enough. We must dedicate ourselves to making sure that the anomalous never becomes normal. With respect and humility, I must say that we have fooled ourselves for long enough that a pivot to governing is right around the corner, a return to civility and stability right behind it. We know better than that. By now, we all know better than that.

Here, today, I stand to say that we would better serve the country and better fulfill our obligations under the constitution by adhering to our Article 1 “old normal” – Mr. Madison’s doctrine of the separation of powers. This genius innovation which affirms Madison’s status as a true visionary and for which Madison argued in Federalist 51 – held that the equal branches of our government would balance and counteract each other when necessary. “Ambition counteracts ambition,” he wrote.

But what happens if ambition fails to counteract ambition? What happens if stability fails to assert itself in the face of chaos and instability? If decency fails to call out indecency? Were the shoe on the other foot, would we Republicans meekly accept such behavior on display from dominant Democrats? Of course not, and we would be wrong if we did.

When we remain silent and fail to act when we know that that silence and inaction is the wrong thing to do – because of political considerations, because we might make enemies, because we might alienate the base, because we might provoke a primary challenge, because ad infinitum, ad nauseum – when we succumb to those considerations in spite of what should be greater considerations and imperatives in defense of the institutions of our liberty, then we dishonor our principles and forsake our obligations. Those things are far more important than politics.

Now, I am aware that more politically savvy people than I caution against such talk. I am aware that a segment of my party believes that anything short of complete and unquestioning loyalty to a president who belongs to my party is unacceptable and suspect.

If I have been critical, it not because I relish criticizing the behavior of the president of the United States. If I have been critical, it is because I believe that it is my obligation to do so, as a matter of duty and conscience. The notion that one should stay silent as the norms and values that keep America strong are undermined and as the alliances and agreements that ensure the stability of the entire world are routinely threatened by the level of thought that goes into 140 characters - the notion that one should say and do nothing in the face of such mercurial behavior is ahistoric and, I believe, profoundly misguided.

A Republican president named Roosevelt had this to say about the president and a citizen’s relationship to the office:

“The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the nation as a whole. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly as necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile.” President Roosevelt continued. “To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”

Acting on conscience and principle is the manner in which we express our moral selves, and as such, loyalty to conscience and principle should supersede loyalty to any man or party. We can all be forgiven for failing in that measure from time to time. I certainly put myself at the top of the list of those who fall short in that regard. I am holier-than-none. But too often, we rush not to salvage principle but to forgive and excuse our failures so that we might accommodate them and go right on failing—until the accommodation itself becomes our principle.

In that way and over time, we can justify almost any behavior and sacrifice almost any principle. I’m afraid that is where we now find ourselves.

When a leader correctly identifies real hurt and insecurity in our country and instead of addressing it goes looking for somebody to blame, there is perhaps nothing more devastating to a pluralistic society. Leadership knows that most often a good place to start in assigning blame is to first look somewhat closer to home. Leadership knows where the buck stops. Humility helps. Character counts. Leadership does not knowingly encourage or feed ugly and debased appetites in us.

Leadership lives by the American creed: E Pluribus Unum. From many, one. American leadership looks to the world, and just as Lincoln did, sees the family of man. Humanity is not a zero-sum game. When we have been at our most prosperous, we have also been at our most principled. And when we do well, the rest of the world also does well.

These articles of civic faith have been central to the American identity for as long as we have all been alive. They are our birthright and our obligation. We must guard them jealously, and pass them on for as long as the calendar has days. To betray them, or to be unserious in their defense is a betrayal of the fundamental obligations of American leadership. And to behave as if they don’t matter is simply not who we are.

Now, the efficacy of American leadership around the globe has come into question. When the United States emerged from World War II we contributed about half of the world’s economic activity. It would have been easy to secure our dominance, keeping the countries that had been defeated or greatly weakened during the war in their place. We didn’t do that. It would have been easy to focus inward. We resisted those impulses. Instead, we financed reconstruction of shattered countries and created international organizations and institutions that have helped provide security and foster prosperity around the world for more than 70 years.

Now, it seems that we, the architects of this visionary rules-based world order that has brought so much freedom and prosperity, are the ones most eager to abandon it.

The implications of this abandonment are profound. And the beneficiaries of this rather radical departure in the American approach to the world are the ideological enemies of our values. Despotism loves a vacuum. And our allies are now looking elsewhere for leadership. Why are they doing this? None of this is normal. And what do we as United States Senators have to say about it?

The principles that underlie our politics, the values of our founding, are too vital to our identity and to our survival to allow them to be compromised by the requirements of politics. Because politics can make us silent when we should speak, and silence can equal complicity.

I have children and grandchildren to answer to, and so, Mr. President, I will not be complicit.

I have decided that I will be better able to represent the people of Arizona and to better serve my country and my conscience by freeing myself from the political considerations that consume far too much bandwidth and would cause me to compromise far too many principles.

To that end, I am announcing today that my service in the Senate will conclude at the end of my term in early January 2019.

It is clear at this moment that a traditional conservative who believes in limited government and free markets, who is devoted to free trade, and who is pro-immigration, has a narrower and narrower path to nomination in the Republican party – the party that for so long has defined itself by belief in those things. It is also clear to me for the moment we have given in or given up on those core principles in favor of the more viscerally satisfying anger and resentment. To be clear, the anger and resentment that the people feel at the royal mess we have created are justified. But anger and resentment are not a governing philosophy.

There is an undeniable potency to a populist appeal – but mischaracterizing or misunderstanding our problems and giving in to the impulse to scapegoat and belittle threatens to turn us into a fearful, backward-looking people. In the case of the Republican party, those things also threaten to turn us into a fearful, backward-looking minority party.

We were not made great as a country by indulging or even exalting our worst impulses, turning against ourselves, glorying in the things which divide us, and calling fake things true and true things fake. And we did not become the beacon of freedom in the darkest corners of the world by flouting our institutions and failing to understand just how hard-won and vulnerable they are.

This spell will eventually break. That is my belief. We will return to ourselves once more, and I say the sooner the better. Because to have a heathy government we must have healthy and functioning parties. We must respect each other again in an atmosphere of shared facts and shared values, comity and good faith. We must argue our positions fervently, and never be afraid to compromise. We must assume the best of our fellow man, and always look for the good. Until that days comes, we must be unafraid to stand up and speak out as if our country depends on it. Because it does.

I plan to spend the remaining fourteen months of my senate term doing just that.

Mr. President, the graveyard is full of indispensable men and women -- none of us here is indispensable. Nor were even the great figures from history who toiled at these very desks in this very chamber to shape this country that we have inherited. What is indispensable are the values that they consecrated in Philadelphia and in this place, values which have endured and will endure for so long as men and women wish to remain free. What is indispensable is what we do here in defense of those values. A political career doesn’t mean much if we are complicit in undermining those values.

I thank my colleagues for indulging me here today, and will close by borrowing the words of President Lincoln, who knew more about healing enmity and preserving our founding values than any other American who has ever lived. His words from his first inaugural were a prayer in his time, and are no less so in ours:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor.

Bannon may run for president
http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/ ... -president

Republican Senator Jeff Flake announces he won’t seek reelection, openly declares war on Donald Trump
Bill Palmer
Updated: 4:20 pm EDT Tue Oct 24, 2017
Home » Politics

As Donald Trump was heading into lunchtime on Tuesday, he only had to worry about two prominent Republican Senators who have had enough of his crap. But by late Tuesday afternoon, a third GOP Senate voice had begun publicly calling Trump out on his unsuitability and dangerous antics. Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona announced that he won’t seek reelection in 2018 – and then he immediately took to the Senate floor and delivered a blistering attack on Trump.



Jeff Flake declared “I have children and grandchildren to answer to, and so, Mr. President, I will not be complicit or silent.” He explained “It must also be said that I rise today with no small measure of regret. Regret because of the state of our disunion. Regret because of the disrepair and destructiveness of our politics. Regret because of the indecency of our discourse. Regret because of the core regret because of the coarseness of our leadership. Regret for the compromise of our moral authority. And by our, I mean all of our complicity in this alarming and dangerous state of affairs. It is time for our complicity and our accommodation of the unacceptable to end.”



This came just hours after another retiring Republican Senator, Bob Corker, launched his third public attack on Donald Trump this month. Trump responded by tweeting juvenile nonsense about Corker. Thus far Trump hasn’t yet lashed out at Flake. And of course GOP Senator John McCain has been publicly condemning Trump from a number of angles over the past week. But Flake’s retirement may be the most pivotal development to date.



Although Donald Trump has supported a Republican primary challenge against Jeff Flake, and the Democrats have momentum heading into the midterms, Flake would still have had a strong chance of reelection. He’s essentially forfeiting the remainder of what could have been a long Senate career, so he can use this next year to try to oust an out-of-control Trump from within
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/go ... rump/5684/

[seemslikeadream]

The Republican Party Is a Threat to the Constitutional Order

If conservatives want to save the GOP from itself, they need to vote mindlessly and mechanically against its nominees.

Jonathan Rauch and Benjamin WittesMarch 2018 Issue

A few days after the Democratic electoral sweep this past November in Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere, The Washington Post asked a random Virginia man to explain his vote. The man, a marketing executive named Toren Beasley, replied that his calculus was simply to refuse to calculate. “It could have been Dr. Seuss or the Berenstain Bears on the ballot and I would have voted for them if they were a Democrat,” he said. “I might do more analyses in other years. But in this case, no. No one else gets any consideration because what’s going on with the Republicans—I’m talking about Trump and his cast of characters—is stupid, stupid, stupid. I can’t say stupid enough times.”

Count us in, Mr. Beasley. We’re with you, though we tend to go with dangerous rather than stupid. And no one could be more surprised that we’re saying this than we are.

We have both spent our professional careers strenuously avoiding partisanship in our writing and thinking. We have both done work that is, in different ways, ideologically eclectic, and that has—over a long period of time—cast us as not merely nonpartisans but antipartisans. Temperamentally, we agree with the late Christopher Hitchens: Partisanship makes you stupid. We are the kind of voters who political scientists say barely exist—true independents who scour candidates’ records in order to base our votes on individual merit, not party brand.

This, then, is the article we thought we would never write: a frank statement that a certain form of partisanship is now a moral necessity. The Republican Party, as an institution, has become a danger to the rule of law and the integrity of our democracy. The problem is not just Donald Trump; it’s the larger political apparatus that made a conscious decision to enable him. In a two-party system, nonpartisanship works only if both parties are consistent democratic actors. If one of them is not predictably so, the space for nonpartisans evaporates. We’re thus driven to believe that the best hope of defending the country from Trump’s Republican enablers, and of saving the Republican Party from itself, is to do as Toren Beasley did: vote mindlessly and mechanically against Republicans at every opportunity, until the party either rights itself or implodes (very preferably the former).

Of course, lots of people vote a straight ticket. Some do so because they are partisan. Others do so because of a particular policy position: Many pro-lifers, for example, will not vote for Democrats, even pro-life Democrats, because they see the Democratic Party as institutionally committed to the slaughter of babies.

We’re proposing something different. We’re suggesting that in today’s situation, people should vote a straight Democratic ticket even if they are not partisan, and despite their policy views. They should vote against Republicans in a spirit that is, if you will, prepartisan and prepolitical. Their attitude should be: The rule of law is a threshold value in American politics, and a party that endangers this value disqualifies itself, period. In other words, under certain peculiar and deeply regrettable circumstances, sophisticated, independent-minded voters need to act as if they were dumb-ass partisans.

For us, this represents a counsel of desperation. So allow us to step back and explain what drove us to what we call oppositional partisanship.

To avoid misunderstanding, here are some things we are not saying. First, although we worry about extremism in the GOP, that is not a reason to boycott the party. We agree with political analysts who say that the Republicans veered off-center earlier and more sharply than the Democrats—but recently the Democrats have made up for lost time by moving rapidly leftward. In any case, under normal circumstances our response to radicalization within a party would be to support sane people within that party.

Nor is our oppositional partisanship motivated by the belief that Republican policies are wrongheaded. Republicans are a variegated bunch, and we agree with many traditional GOP positions. One of us has spent the past several years arguing that counterterrorism authorities should be granted robust powers, defending detentions at Guantánamo Bay, and supporting the confirmations of any number of conservative judges and justices whose nominations enraged liberals. The other is a Burkean conservative with libertarian tendencies and a long history of activism against left-wing intolerance. And even if we did consistently reject Republican policy positions, that would not be sufficient basis to boycott the entire party—just to oppose the bad ideas advanced by it.

One more nonreason for our stance: that we are horrified by the president. To be sure, we are horrified by much that Trump has said and done. But many members of his party are likewise horrified. Republicans such as Senators John McCain and Bob Corker and Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse, as well as former Governors Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush, have spoken out and conducted themselves with integrity. Abandoning an entire party means abandoning many brave and honorable people. We would not do that based simply on rot at the top.

So why have we come to regard the GOP as an institutional danger? In a nutshell, it has proved unable or unwilling (mostly unwilling) to block assaults by Trump and his base on the rule of law. Those assaults, were they to be normalized, would pose existential, not incidental, threats to American democracy.

Future generations of scholars will scrutinize the many weird ways that Trump has twisted the GOP. For present purposes, however, let’s focus on the party’s failure to restrain the president from two unforgivable sins. The first is his attempt to erode the independence of the justice system. This includes Trump’s sinister interactions with his law-enforcement apparatus: his demands for criminal investigations of his political opponents, his pressuring of law-enforcement leaders on investigative matters, his frank efforts to interfere with investigations that implicate his personal interests, and his threats against the individuals who run the Justice Department. It also includes his attacks on federal judges, his pardon of a sheriff convicted of defying a court’s order to enforce constitutional rights, his belief that he gets to decide on Twitter who is guilty of what crimes, and his view that the justice system exists to effectuate his will. Some Republicans have clucked disapprovingly at various of Trump’s acts. But in each case, many other Republicans have cheered, and the party, as a party, has quickly moved on. A party that behaves this way is not functioning as a democratic actor.

The second unforgivable sin is Trump’s encouragement of a foreign adversary’s interference in U.S. electoral processes. Leave aside the question of whether Trump’s cooperation with the Russians violated the law. He at least tacitly collaborated with a foreign-intelligence operation against his country—sometimes in full public view. This started during the campaign, when he called upon the Russians to steal and release his opponent’s emails, and has continued during his presidency, as he equivocates on whether foreign intervention occurred and smears intelligence professionals who stand by the facts. Meanwhile, the Republican Party has confirmed his nominees, doggedly pursued its agenda on tax reform and health care, and attacked—of course—Hillary Clinton.

We don’t mean to deny credit where it is due: Some congressional Republicans pushed back. Last year, pressure from individual Republicans seemed to discourage Trump from firing Attorney General Jeff Sessions and probably prevented action against Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Moreover, Republicans as a group have constrained Trump on occasion. Congress imposed tough sanctions on Russia over the president’s objections. The Senate Intelligence Committee conducted a serious Russia investigation under the leadership of Richard Burr. But the broader response to Trump’s behavior has been tolerant and, often, enabling.

The reason is that Trump and his forces have taken command of the party. Anti-Trump Republicans can muster only rearguard actions, which we doubt can hold the line against a multiyear, multifront assault from Trump and his allies.

It is tempting to assume that this assault will fail. After all, Trump is unpopular, the Republican Party’s prospects in this year’s midterm elections are dim, and the president is under aggressive investigation. What’s more, democratic institutions held up pretty well in the first year of the Trump administration. Won’t they get us through the rest?

Perhaps. But we should not count on the past year to provide the template for the next three. Under the pressure of persistent attacks, many of them seemingly minor, democratic institutions can erode gradually until they suddenly fail. That the structures hold up for a while does not mean they will hold up indefinitely—and if they do, they may not hold up well.


Edmon de Haro
Even now, erosion is visible. Republican partisans and policy makers routinely accept insults to constitutional norms that, under Barack Obama, they would have condemned as outrageous. When Trump tweeted about taking “NBC and the Networks” off the air (“Network news has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked”), congressional Republicans were quick to repudiate … left-wing media bias. In a poll by the Cato Institute, almost two-thirds of Republican respondents agreed with the president that journalists are “an enemy of the American people.” How much damage can Trump do in the next three years? We don’t know, but we see no grounds to be complacent.

The optimistic outcome depends to some degree on precisely the sort of oppositional partisanship we are prescribing. For Trump to be restrained going forward, key congressional enablers will need to lose their seats in the midterm elections to people who will use legislation and oversight to push back against the administration. Without such electoral losses, the picture looks decidedly grimmer.

Finally, we might not be talking about just three more years. Trump could get reelected; incumbent presidents usually do. In any event, he is likely, at a minimum, to be renominated for the presidency.

That’s because Trump has won the heart of the Republican base. He may be unpopular with the public at large, but among Republicans, nothing he and his supporters said or did during his first year in office drove his Gallup approval ratings significantly below 80 percent. Forced to choose between their support for Trump and their suspicion of Russia, conservatives went with Trump. Forced to choose between their support for Trump and their insistence that character matters, evangelicals went with Trump.

It’s Trump’s party now; or, perhaps more to the point, it’s Trumpism’s party, because a portion of the base seems eager to out-Trump Trump. In last year’s special election to fill a vacant U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, Republican primary voters defied the president himself by nominating a candidate who was openly contemptuous of the rule of law—and many stuck with him when he was credibly alleged to have been a child molester. After initially balking, the Republican Party threw its institutional support behind him too. In Virginia, pressure from the base drove a previously sensible Republican gubernatorial candidate into the fever swamps. Faced with the choice between soul-killing accommodation and futile resistance, many Republican politicians who renounce Trumpism are fleeing the party or exiting politics altogether. Of those who remain, many are fighting for their political lives against a nihilistic insurgency.

So we arrive at a syllogism:

(1) The GOP has become the party of Trumpism.
(2) Trumpism is a threat to democratic values and the rule of law.
(3) The Republican Party is a threat to democratic values and the rule of law.
If the syllogism holds, then the most-important tasks in U.S. politics right now are to change the Republicans’ trajectory and to deprive them of power in the meantime. In our two-party system, the surest way to accomplish these things is to support the other party, in every race from president to dogcatcher. The goal is to make the Republican Party answerable at every level, exacting a political price so stinging as to force the party back into the democratic fold.

The off-year elections in November showed that this is possible. Democrats flooded polling places, desperate to “resist.” Independents added their voice. Even some Republicans abandoned their party. One Virginia Republican, explaining why he had just voted for Democrats in every race, told The Washington Post, “I’ve been with the Republicans my whole life, but what the party has been doing is appalling.” Trump’s base stayed loyal but was overwhelmed by other voters. A few more spankings like that will give anti-Trump Republicans a fighting chance to regain influence within their party.

We understand why Republicans, even moderate ones, are reluctant to cross party lines. Party, today, is identity. But in the through-the-looking-glass era of Donald Trump, the best thing Republicans can do for their party is vote against it.

We understand, too, the many imperfections of the Democratic Party. Its left is extreme, its center is confused, and it has its share of bad apples. But the Democratic Party is not a threat to our democratic order. That is why we are rising above our independent predilections and behaving like dumb-ass partisans. It’s why we hope many smart people will do the same.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... op/550907/

[seemslikeadream]

wow somebody wrote a book about what I posted 3 years ago!

Is This the End of the Republican Party?
RIP GOP, Stanley B. Greenberg

RIP GOP: How the New America Is Dooming the Republicans by Stanley B. Greenberg. Photo credit: Greenberg Research and Thomas Dunne Books
Reading Time: 16 minutes

In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, renowned pollster and political consultant Stanley Greenberg, the man who helped get Bill Clinton elected in 1992, predicts the end of the Republican Party as we know it.

Further, he argues that the US is about to enter a progressive era where the pent-up demand for government action will be reflected in deep civic engagement that will continue well after the 2020 election.

Working with focus groups and demographic and polling data, Greenberg sees a fundamental shift in public consciousness.

He argues that, while the Democrats can still screw it up, 2020 could be a once-in-a-lifetime realignment in which the Republican battle against demographic change, inevitable multiracialism, and social modernity is finally lost for good. Greenberg’s most recent book is R.I.P. G.O.P: How the New America is Dooming the Republicans.

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Full Text Transcript:

As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to time constraints, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like. Should you spot any errors, we’d be grateful if you would notify us.

Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. There’s an old Danish proverb, that has been over the years attributed to many, that says that it’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. Nowhere is this more true than in the realm of politics.

Jeff Schechtman: Back in 2004, 15 years ago, distinguished journalists and political scientists, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, wrote a book called The Emerging Democratic Majority. Since then, we’ve had eight years of George W. Bush, the Tea Party, the election of Donald Trump, and 8 million Americans who voted twice for Barack Obama and then voted for Trump. Now, distinguished pollster and political advisor, Stanley Greenberg adds to his previous body of work in arguing that demography is destiny and that the death of the currently constituted Republican party is inevitable.

Jeff Schechtman: Stanley Greenberg is the coauthor of the New York times bestseller It’s the Middle Class, Stupid! He’s been a polling advisor to presidents, prime ministers and CEOs around the world. It is my pleasure to welcome Stanley Greenberg to the WhoWhatWhy podcast to talk about his new book, looking at the end of the Republican Party, as well as some of the demographic and polling trends leading up to the 2020 election. Stan, thanks so much for joining me once again.

Stanley Greenberg: Indeed. Thanks for having me back and I’m delighted to talk about my dangerous and brave predictions about what will happen in 2020. I will push back just on demographics being destiny because it pained me and in fact, if I want to understand what motivated me to wake up every day to write, you know, what am I doing today to contribute to changing, ending this awful period. Part of it was, I think it was guilt over the fact that the Hillary Clinton campaign believed that theory, even though I didn’t believe that theory, they did. And acted as if the demographics was destiny and also that his offending group after group would produce a democratic engagement. And it was obviously very tragic that that happened. But, what is different though is the mobilization, the engagement, the public consciousness that has been mobilized, escalated by Trump’s victory. And that really changes the dynamic tremendously.

Stanley Greenberg: I mean the demographic trends are accelerating. The percent foreign born in America keeps going up and up to historic levels. The country is more diverse, more metropolitan, more millennial and young. More immigrants, you know, more unmarried, more secular. All the trends that push back against conservative and Republican governance, but that’s not what makes the difference. What makes a difference is that the day after the Women’s March, people organized and they turned out in the off year elections in the biggest turnout probably in the history of the country. Certainly the biggest increase in turnout in the midterm election. Huge turnout and it’s increased since.

Stanley Greenberg: In every election I’ve ever polled in after it happens, after you get the results in, interest in politics drops and then goes up month by month as you enter the next election. Interest today is 10 points higher than it was in November ’18. People just have not disengaged. They’ve engaged further and further. And also there’s been a shift of public consciousness, above all, and immigration. The country has become more multicultural, more pro-immigration every day that Trump pushes his agenda. The country is embracing the opposite. So anyway, that’s what makes me confident.

Jeff Schechtman: To what extent though, is that happening to the degree that it could make a political difference in 32 red states out there that will still probably have Republican senators and even though they will still represent a minority of the country, they’ll represent a majority in the Senate, arguably, and the Electoral College, which very much goes hand in hand with that.

Stanley Greenberg: Look, I’m less worried about the Electoral College because I believe the country, you know, realigned in 2018 and it continued to move, you know, since then. Rural voters, working class voters, let’s focus on working class voters. Light working class voters, you know, women and men, shifted 13 points toward the Democrats from ’16 to ’18 so there was a white working class shift and that’s the reason why you get such a big swing to Democrats congressionally, you know, from Maine, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and Kansas. And that was a working class shift and when you look at the data, the swing of white working class women has continued.

Stanley Greenberg: The men are pulling back toward Trump, but not the white working class women. They’re headed towards just single digit win for Republicans. And the majority of the white working class are women. And so there was a realigning election that happened and the trends have increased after the election. History doesn’t stop. And so I’m really not that worried about the [inaudible 00:05:57 battleground states?].

Stanley Greenberg: Now, I never want to have a presidential campaign that takes those voters for granted either as a tactic or in terms of respect. And I think the democratic candidates are running very forcefully to win those voters. And so yes, you’re right to worry about it. I think you’re on the mark when it comes to the Senate because obviously we have a system that is rigged in favor of rural areas and that’s not going to change. And so that even if we have a wave election, we’re going to be just on the edge, you know, winning control in the Senate. I think it can break for us and will break for us in a big wave election, but that’s the role we require. But it does mean that you have these like once in a lifetime, once in a generation chance to move forward and bring the kind of reforms the country is desperate to have.

Jeff Schechtman: To what extent, I mean, it certainly makes sense when you lay out the numbers in a theoretical case, but in a situation where it’s Trump running against a specific person, to what degree is that going to have a profound impact on how this plays out?

Stanley Greenberg: Part of what’s happening is that we focus on what Trump is doing and how much he’s building his base. But we miss how much of what he’s doing is driving the anti-Trump voter to the polls and to cast a vote almost regardless of candidate. I mean, right now, if you look at our polls, we have Bernie Sanders ahead head by five, Trump ahead by seven. Biden ahead by nine. The other polls have bigger margin, but all of those margins are greater or right there or above what Barack Obama had in 2008 when we had a near landslide election with the financial crisis and when he took office with democrats in control of all offices.

Stanley Greenberg: So, almost all our candidates are polling Obama level or better. And the reason is that you have the anti-Trump feeling, you know, let’s start with who’s voting in the Democratic primaries and Republicans. Right now it’s 47% are voting in Democratic primaries, 37% are voting in Republican. So, in terms of who’s following politics, there’s like a 10 point gap in favor of Democrats and people engaging with who the Democratic leader should be.

Stanley Greenberg: The Democrats won the off-year elections with an 8.6% margin, nine point margin. So you’re looking at it like a nine point margin from ’18. Right now the level of engagement with politics has a 10 point edge for Democrats. When you ask Republicans whether they strongly approve of Trump, it’s 65% but if you ask Democrats, their strongly disapprove is 20 points stronger, it’s 85%. Democrats are so anti-Trump and consolidated and engaged that they are giving Democratic candidates regardless of the candidate, regardless of candidate. Trump’s at 41%, only 3% of the Democrats are voting for Trump.

Stanley Greenberg: And certainly it’s the anti-Trump reaction that is driving things. When we show focus groups, so we’ve now done this, when we show Trump his own tweets, we show him at his rallies, we show them at his press conferences, we show it to our unregistered voters, it motivates to them. The best thing we can do for our own voters is simply show Trump. And so Trump is in their face every day and the consequence of that is our people are more engaged. But we also did it with white working-class women in non-metropolitan, mostly rural areas. You know, in Maine, Wisconsin and Nevada. And when the women watch him on TV, they shake their head, they think he’s being a bully, they think he’s divisive. It means he can’t get anything done. And I mean most of them are still voting for him, but they’re pulling back and there is evidence of their pulling back. But, his being in their face every day is making them less likely to vote, less supportive, and so they’ve kind of lost control of their ability to affect events.

Jeff Schechtman: To what extent though, has the number of anti-Trump voters increased in those places that matter? Certainly there’s more anti-Trump voters in states that Hillary Clinton carried but are there enough additional anti-Trump voters in places like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Michigan and Ohio?

Stanley Greenberg: As you know, in 2016 a lot of our voters disengaged. They were not motivated by Hillary Clinton’s campaign nor did they… She reached out to them in a way that proved motivating. I mean, to be honest, her message was built on the progress, third term of Obama at the same time that Trump was promising to disrupt things and identifying with their lost American jobs and they’re struggling, you know, how much they were struggling financially.

Stanley Greenberg: So, Democrats did not motivate our voters. And I want to be honest, we didn’t motivate our voters for eight decades. I mean, my book is pretty critical of President Obama’s presidency and the failure to understand how much tarp the bailout of the banks was seen as a corrupt bailout, irresponsible, you know, while working people lost our homes, nothing was done about foreclosure. He tried to sell the country on build on the progress. We’re moving in the right economic direction. We know he lost white working class voters very quickly, but he actually lost or saw the disengagement of working class voters across race. So, we had a huge drop in turnout in 2010 and even more in ’14 and so the reason the Republicans had control of so many states was the Democrats seemed to be simply buying out the banks rather than building an economy that works for the middle class and just did not enact the kinds of policies that would benefit the broad middle class. And they paid a very big price for it.

Jeff Schechtman: Talk a little bit about the demographic shift and that is something that has been going on for a while. Have we seen an impact from that in our electoral politics nationally? And is that something we’re going to continue to see particularly as we go into 2020?

Stanley Greenberg: I mean, look, it should be. One is the fact that Democrats are battling for white working class voters in ways that we haven’t done in a while, during the Obama presidency, during the Hillary. Hillary Clinton closed down the campaign in those areas, didn’t do advertising and paid a very high price for it.

Stanley Greenberg: The Democratic party as a whole is so focused on winning as voters, watch all the presidential candidates that are doing that. But we’re also dealing with a country that accepts its multiculturalism, accepts that it’s diverse, believes that it should be engaged in the world, believes in equality and opportunity, believes we have an unfinished agenda to deal with racial and gender inequalities. Above all, believe we need to address the corrupt politics, but it’s built in a growing base that is younger, more diverse, more foreign born and immigrant, and more metropolitan than secular and that has not stopped. That’s accelerated. And so it’s made an available base, the Democrats, that’s clearly a majority of the country.

Stanley Greenberg: And what I think what Trump has done is made Democrats run as self confident about our values, about the fact that we’re diverse and multicultural country. We were an immigrant country and we will welcome immigrants in the future. It enriches us as a country. And if you look at the 2018 election, yes, we lost the governor’s race in Georgia. We lost the governor’s race in Florida. Both were stolen from us, they should’ve been won. But Democrats ran an election where the president was running as an anti-Republican, as an anti-immigrant party against I was fighting that diversity, and the Republicans in those states doing everything possible, visibly to keep blacks from voting. And yet Democrats had a landslide election, came within a few thousand votes of winning Georgia and Florida with African American candidates.

Stanley Greenberg: I just think we should recognize what’s happening. It’s not just the demographic changes. It’s recognize those changes, define our values and our worldview. And now we’re contesting a Republican party that believes immigration, the demographic problem is the central problem facing the country and it will face a shattering defeat in ’20 and that will have huge implications for what kind of country we are.

Jeff Schechtman: Will Rogers once said that he wasn’t a member of any organized political party, he was a Democrat. To what extent can the Democrats mess this up? To what extent can they make mistakes that will in fact play against all of the things you’re talking about, Stan?

Stanley Greenberg: Well, we could do it. I was pretty critical of the Hillary Clinton campaign because above all, for not dealing with the economic pain people were facing, not dealing with the rigged political and economic system or business, where business and politicians have corrupted the system and made it very hard for government to work for the average person.

Stanley Greenberg: I believe that needs to drive our messages and I believe most of the candidates are doing that. But I don’t believe identity policies is motivating for our base of voters. You know, I tried to convince the Hilary Clinton campaign when she was running on ladders of opportunity, which was her theme and also Barack Obama’s theme. And that notion was that inequality was based on the blockages that each group in America face and what we needed to do was create opportunity and block those barriers at the top. But in fact that wasn’t motivating for African Americans in ’16 election and I know it isn’t now. They are most motivated by wanting to get a politician elected who will change the economy, change our politics, and make it work for the average person. They believe they will benefit by electing someone who is going to think big in terms of large investments, creating jobs, addressing inequality, addressing poverty, and then in the process finishing the unfinished job of discrimination that African Americans, Hispanics and women face.

Stanley Greenberg: And I think the Democrats are moving towards that kind of messaging but when I watched it with Hillary Clinton, she was very cautious about a strong economic message. But I’m not sure I see that with any of the candidates. I think all the candidates I look at have a strong economic message. Even Vice President Biden who is running more on continuity is still talking about what’s happened to the middle class. And that’s also part of his message.

Jeff Schechtman: Isn’t there a bit of a booby trap built into the argument for radical change right now among some progressive Democrats in that after four years of Trump, there’s a certain exhaustion, a certain fatigue and arguably a certain desire for some kind of stability without radical change at the moment, even if it’s a sense of continuity as Biden is arguing.

Stanley Greenberg: I don’t see any evidence for that. We need to understand the period we’ve come out of and it’s why I’m confident that the Republicans are going to crash. We’ve had a decade of Tea Party, GOP governance, which has tried to stop government in its tracks. From the moment they took office after the Tea Party wave in 2010, they produced budget austerity in the states, they cut taxes for the rich, cut public spending, cut education, fired teachers. They reduced the federal budget. This rate of spending in the federal budget focused on the deficit. There was nothing that the government can do for a decade to address inequality, wage stagnation, health care costs, prescription drugs, climate change, gun violence. For over a decade we’ve had this building, desperate desire for the country, Democrats in particular but it’s also in the country as a whole, there’s been a surge in the percentage of people saying that government ought to have a bigger role rather than business and individuals. And if you look at almost any question about a government policy, about 75 to 85% of Democrats want it to happen.

Stanley Greenberg: So, after this decade of government being suffocated, there is this pent up demand to attack these issues. And that’s what I believe the public is looking for and I think that’s what you’ll see. And I think that’s what you’ve seen from the various candidates that have been running. Not just in Warren’s plans versus Biden. Look across the Democratic field in terms of what they’re proposing on healthcare, what they’re proposing on climate change, what they’re proposing on guns and the huge hunger for government activism. And I think they’re responding to it.

Jeff Schechtman: Would you talk about the potential demise of the Republican party? Are you talking about it in terms of the national Republican party or how do you see that playing out on our state and local level?

Stanley Greenberg: Republican party had a deep base, first in the deep south and in the south as a whole. You know, they expanded it into the Appalachian Valley and more rural parts of the country where evangelicals and the religiously observant were dominant. And so it was a party of faith that supported it and allowed it to win huge numbers of Senate seats and hold a high proportion of the states particularly because these are smaller states. But that’s been eroded. I mean, the fact that Georgia, Florida, Texas are going to be contested states this year and I think forever as this trend accelerates.

Stanley Greenberg: I think the numbers of states that are red states with total control will be dramatically reduced from where it was. The question is what happens after the election? Once you lose power in this way, I think we’re talking about a party more like the Whigs couldn’t address slavery. Here we have a Republican party, key party and evangelical dominated running against abortion, sexual revolution, running against immigration as it’s overriding purpose in a country that is secular or unmarried, very pluralistic on family ties, totally changing country where women, three quarters of working women, two thirds of women work and I think two thirds are either the sole breadwinner or shared bread breadwinner. So, you have this dramatic change of the family, a Republican party that, to this day, is fighting contraception. That was its suit against the Affordable Care Act. They’re fighting abortion in every state where they have control and run the Supreme Court and back to Constitutional Amendment on abortion. I mean they are in the last throes of a battle against social modernity and immigration in which they are going to lose as this country is more immigrant foreign born, more diverse.

Stanley Greenberg: And so, what’s their relevance? What is their purpose after they lose this election? And every trend I’m talking about is accelerating, accelerating demographic trends, accelerating mobilization, accelerating consciousness, accelerated Tea Party Evangelical control their own party. They’ve driven out 10% of the Republicans who McCain and moderates have pushed out in the last year. So, they are very marginalized and have a purpose. It just doesn’t fit the times.

Jeff Schechtman: Does some kind of party realignment bode for the future in which some new Republican party emerges that is more socially progressive but in keeping some of its traditional constitutional conservatism?

Stanley Greenberg: Yeah. I mean, there has to be something. I mean we’re a two party system. There’s going to be other parties. They will have control in some states as you pointed out, but it took four elections. If you look at what happened with the Democrats from Ronald Reagan in the ‘80s to the Mondale nationwide, landslide election. I mean, it took four elections for Democrats who fought it out internally to finally change in a way that made them sustainable nationally. And it’ll take many elections for them to come back because the Tea Party Evangelical block is not going to go away and Trump may not go away. You know, he may fight for the future of the party as well. And so, I don’t know what happens afterwards. I just know that they’re on an accelerated trajectory, steeper and steeper on embracing issues that are just lost and rejected by the country. They will be illegitimate after this election.

Stanley Greenberg: It’ll be tough to be a Republican, and you know, be a Millennial and be a Republican given where they are on climate change, where they are on gay marriage and immigration and DACA. And so, we’re going to have a period of conflict and renewal within the Republican party but there has to be, I just don’t know where they go. In the book I proposed that the Democrats deal with comprehensive immigration reform to kind of get it off the table in the same way welfare reform changed the party’s position.

Jeff Schechtman: Do you see a situation where people are more or less politically engaged if the Democrats are successful in 2020 and what is the level of political participation you see at that point?
Stanley Greenberg: I projected his trail towards the 2020 but I think I’m very uncertain about how the Republican party then becomes renewed after this election. And I’m uncertain what happens in the period afterwards. But, what I believe is that we are entering a period of progressive reform that I assume will lead to increased engagement. Look, you can’t match the 2018 off your election. Everything I’m looking at from 2020 is we’re going to see millions and millions of new voters have a turnout level of anything we’ve seen in our history, so this election is going to be a one- time huge event. I think it’s one that will leave the Republican party shattered and trying to figure out what is their relevance, what is their new purpose in this?

Stanley Greenberg: But I also think it’s a big period where the government is getting liberated to address a whole range of problems. And it begins with the corruption and roll of big money in government that Democrats are determined to stop as a precondition for doing everything else. But, it’s also going to move to deal with universal healthcare. It’ll move to climate change and violence. And also, inequalities and entrenched poverty. And there’s so many policies that are able to address that. And so I think there’s going to be a burst of public policy in the next couple of years after the election and mobilization around the issues that a Democratic president is trying to push through the Congress. And so it’s a new kind of engagement if we believe that we are entering a new period of reform.

Jeff Schechtman: Stanley Greenberg, his book is RIP GOP: How the New America Is Dooming the Republicans. Stan, always a pleasure. I thank you so much for spending time with us.
Stanley Greenberg: Thank you. I love doing it.

Jeff Schechtman: Thank you.
And thank you for listening and for joining us here on radio WhoWhatWhy. I hope you join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman.

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