monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

America and the Virus: ‘A Colossal Failure of Leadership’

In its destruction of American lives, treasure and well-being, this pandemic marks the greatest failure of U.S. governance since Vietnam.

One of the most lethal leadership failures in modern times unfolded in South Africa in the early 2000s as AIDS spread there under President Thabo Mbeki.

Mbeki scorned science, embraced conspiracy theories, dithered as the disease spread and rejected lifesaving treatments. His denialism cost about 330,000 lives, a Harvard study found.

None of us who wrote scathingly about that debacle ever dreamed that something similar might unfold in the United States. But today, health experts regularly cite President Trump as an American Mbeki.

“We’re unfortunately in the same place,” said Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at U.C.L.A. “Mbeki surrounded himself with sycophants and cost his country hundreds of thousands of lives by ignoring science, and we’re suffering the same fate.”

The Republican party has become dramatically more illiberal in the past two decades and now more closely resembles ruling parties in autocratic societies than its former centre-right equivalents in Europe, according to a new international study.

In a significant shift since 2000, the GOP has taken to demonising and encouraging violence against its opponents, adopting attitudes and tactics comparable to ruling nationalist parties in Hungary, India, Poland and Turkey.

The shift has both led to and been driven by the rise of Donald Trump.

By contrast the Democratic party has changed little in its attachment to democratic norms, and in that regard has remained similar to centre-right and centre-left parties in western Europe. Their principal difference is the approach to the economy.

The new study, the largest ever of its kind, was carried out by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, using newly developed methods to measure and quantify the health of the world’s democracies at a time when authoritarianism is on the rise.

Anna Lührmann, V-Dem’s deputy director, said the Republican transformation had been “certainly the most dramatic shift in an established democracy”.
[...]
he Republican party has remained relatively committed to pluralism, but it has gone a long way towards abandoning other democratic norms, becoming much more prone to disrespecting opponents and encouraging violence.

“We’ve seen similar shifts in parties in other countries where the quality of democracy has declined in recent years, where democracy has been eroding,” Lührmann said. “It fits very well into the pattern of parties that erode democracy once they’re in power.”

“The demonisation of opponents – that’s clearly a factor that has shifted a lot when it comes to the Republican party, as well as the encouragement of political violence,” she said, adding that the change has been driven in large part from the top.

“We have several quotes from Trump, that show how he has encouraged supporters to use violence against either journalists or political opponents.”

In western Europe, centre-right parties like Germany’s Christian Democratic Union and Spain’s People’s Party have stuck to their commitment to democratic norms. By the same measure, Britain’s Conservative party has moved some way along the liberal-illiberal spectrum but not to the Republicans’ extremes.

“The data shows that the Republican party in 2018 was far more illiberal than almost all other governing parties in democracies,” the V-Dem study found. “Only very few governing parties in democracies in this millennium (15%) were considered more illiberal than the Republican party in the US.”

The institute has found the decline in democratic traits has accelerated around the world and that for the first time this century, autocracies are in the majority – holding power in 92 countries, home to 54% of the global population.

According to V-Dem’s benchmark, almost 35% of the world’s population, 2.6 billion people, live in nations that are becoming more autocratic.

Other countries have managed to bring their numbers of infection and death downward, but the White House plan seems to be simply to let the disease take its course. South Korea, with 55 million people, got the disease at the same time we did. It has had fewer than 500 deaths. With our population of about six times theirs-- 331 million— we have almost 225,000.

But Trump is trying to demonstrate that all is well by rejecting mask use, holding rallies, and telling people, “It is going away.” He has held nearly three dozen rallies since August, usually at airport hangars, appearing to revel in speaking before crowds. In an investigation, USA Today discovered that, in at least five counties, Covid-19 cases rose after Trump’s rallies. “We are coming around, we’re rounding the turn, we have the vaccines, we have everything,” Trump said in New Hampshire on Sunday. “Even without the vaccines, we’re rounding the turn. It’s going to be over.”

McConnell, just after the Senate votes to limit debate on Amy Coney Barrett:

Quote:

"A lot of what we’ve done over the last four years will be undone sooner or later by the next election. They won’t be able to do much about this for a long time to come."

Exactly. And thus, anyone who argues that the Dems ought not to act immediately after January to rebalance the courts in America will fall prey to delusion or cowardice.

Quote:

And the packing of the court proves it is them who want a one party country.

Um...wake up, Trump's still president and the "court packing" is taking place right now. And if you recall:

Quote:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell boasted about blocking former president Barack Obama's judicial appointments, a two-year effort that allowed Donald Trump and a Republican-controlled congress to stack courts with conservative judges and create a conservative majority on the nation's high court.

Fox host Sean Hannity told the Kentucky senator that he was shocked that the Obama administration "left so many vacancies and didn't try to fill those positions".

"I'll tell you why," Mr McConnell said, laughing. "I was in charge of what we did the last two years of the Obama administration."

Mr Hannity said: "I will give you full credit for that, and by the way, take a bow."

When he took office, the president inherited more than 100 vacancies, many of them lifetime appointments. More than a quarter of all active judges sitting on appeals courts were nominated by Mr Trump.

independent
Tell us about those Bakersfield doctors again! And trot out that crap about the pandemic being "over" because of the miracle drug, hydroxychloroquine!

My initial thoughts about increasing the number of Justices was very negative. I have since modified by feelings about that. Perhaps 11 Justices is a better number.
Biden says he will appoint a bi-partisan study commission. I think the commission will come up with a recommendation to increase...and I think it will get done.

Frank Apisa wrote:

My initial thoughts about increasing the number of Justices was very negative. I have since modified by feelings about that. Perhaps 11 Justices is a better number.
Biden says he will appoint a bi-partisan study commission. I think the commission will come up with a recommendation to increase...and I think it will get done.

If the Democrats try it then the next time the Republicans are in power the entire Republican Party will be appointed to the Supreme Court.

We'll see.