Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

Are you in a position to consider yourself a better judge than those family members?

Lash wrote:

I’m watching the genocide every day and Germany supports it.

Not complicated.

The US, the UK, France & Germany have voiced support for Israel’s extermination of Palestinians.

Might as well not try to equivocate or mince words around this holocaust.

You wouldn't understand, of course, but Glitter has friends.

Today a report from the Bureau of Economic Analysis showed strong economic growth of 3.3% in the U.S. in the fourth quarter of 2023, setting growth for the year at 3.1% (by comparison, in the first three years of Trump’s term, before the pandemic, growth was 2.5%). A year ago, economists projected that the U.S. would have a recession in 2023, and forecast growth of 0.2%.

Meanwhile, unemployment remains low, wages are high, and inflation is receding. As Gabriel T. Rubin put it in the Wall Street Journal today, “The final three months of the year looked a lot like the soft landing Fed officials are seeking to achieve.”

There is a major political story behind this impressive economic one. Since 1981, lawmakers have insisted that cutting taxes, regulation, and the social safety net would create much faster and more efficient growth than was possible under the system in place between 1933 and 1981.

In the earlier era, lawmakers regulated business, imposed progressive taxes, and supported workers to make sure that ordinary Americans had the resources to fuel the economy through their desire for homes, consumer goods, and so on. But with the election of Republican president Ronald Reagan, lawmakers claimed that concentrating wealth on the “supply side” of the economy would enable wealthy investors and businessmen to manage the economy more efficiently than was possible when the government meddled, and the resulting economic growth would make the entire country more prosperous.

The problem was that this system never produced the economic boom it promised. Instead, it moved money dramatically upward and hollowed out the American middle class while leaving poorer Americans significantly worse off.

When they took office, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris rejected “supply side” economics and vowed to restore buying power to the demand side of the economy: ordinary Americans. They invested in manufacturing, infrastructure, small businesses, and workers’ rights. And now, after years in which pundits said their policies would never work, the numbers are in. The U.S. economy is very strong indeed, and at least some voters who have backed Republicans for a generation are noticing, as United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain made clear yesterday when the union made a strong and early endorsement of President Biden.

So here is the political story: Republicans cannot run for office in 2024 by attacking the economy, although Trump has tested that message by saying the economy is “so fragile” and “running off the fumes” of his administration and that it will soon crash. He has promised to cut taxes again, which is not likely to impress many voters these days. Media stories are beginning to reflect the reality of the economy, and people are starting to realize that it is strong.

At the same time, the Republicans are in huge trouble over their overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion. A poll taken in June 2023, a year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe, showed that 69% of Americans want to see Roe reinstated. But, to appeal to their base, Republican leaders are backing more, rather than less, extreme measures: a federal prohibition of abortion.

So the MAGA Republicans, who back Trump, need an election issue. They are trying to turn the migration influx at the southern border into an issue that can win for them in November. In December 2023, extremist House Republicans refused to pass a supplementary funding bill that is crucial to Ukraine’s effort to resist Russia’s 2022 invasion, insisting that the “border crisis” must be attended to first, although they refused to participate in the negotiations that Biden and senators promptly began.

Then, after news hit that the negotiators were close to a deal, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Fox News Channel personality Laura Ingraham told the television audience that they had both spoken to Trump and he opposed a deal. Negotiations continued, and last night, journalists reported that Trump was pressuring Republican lawmakers to reject any deal because he wants to run on the issue of immigration and “doesn’t want Biden to have a victory.”

Today, Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) told CNN’s Manu Raju that “the fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is really appalling.” Attacking Romney on social media, Trump said: "[W]e need a Strong, Powerful, and essentially 'PERFECT' Border and, unless we get that, we are better off not making a Deal, even if that pushes our Country to temporarily 'close up' for a while, because it will end up closing anyway with the unsustainable Invasion that is currently taking place,” which he called “A DEATH WISH for the U.S.A.!...”

Now, after insisting the border issue must be addressed and riling up their base to believe it is the biggest crisis the U.S. faces, MAGA Republicans are in the position of having to refuse to address the problem. So they are escalating their rhetoric, claiming that the bipartisan deal to address the border is not good enough.

That dilemma is especially clear in Texas, where voters are very angry over reproductive rights in the face of Texas’s draconian laws, which have produced high-profile cases in which white suburban women—a key voting demographic—have been forced to leave the state to obtain abortions to protect their health. Texas governor Greg Abbott is also searching for a viable political issue since his signature policy, school vouchers, failed late last year. According to Patrick Svitek of the Texas Tribune, money has been pouring into the Texas primaries as Abbott and Texas attorney general Ken Paxton try “to unseat House Republicans who crossed them.”

When the Supreme Court on Monday permitted the federal government to cut razor wire that was blocking federal agents from reaching parts of the border, including the crossing where three migrants died last week, MAGA Republicans urged Texas to “ignore” the ruling (although it came from a right-wing court), and Abbott launched a war of words against the federal government over management of the border.

In a construction that appeared to echo Civil War–era declarations of secession, Abbott asserted Texas’s “constitutional authority to defend and protect itself.”

Twenty-five Republican governors have issued a joint statement supporting “Texas’ constitutional right to self-defense.” Their statement accuses Biden of attacking Texas, using the right-wing talking points that the administration is "refusing to enforce immigration laws already on the books" and leaving the country "completely vulnerable to unprecedented illegal immigration pouring across the Southern border."

House speaker Johnson has also posted: “I stand with Governor Abbott. The House will do everything in its power to back him up. The next step: holding Secretary Mayorkas accountable.” (Johnson refers here to the impeachment effort against Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in which the Republicans wrote articles of impeachment before holding any hearings.) Trump called for “all willing States to deploy their [national] guards to Texas.”

But Paxton (whose trial on charges of securities fraud is set to start in April), asserted this right in court last September, and Abbott suggested today that his moves are part of an attempt to create a record for a court case challenging the long-standing precedent that the federal government, not the states, has jurisdiction over border issues.

Observers worry that Texas’s stance is a modern version of the secession of the American South from the Union in the months before the Civil War, and perhaps in one way, it is. In the 1850s, elite southerners’ management of the South’s economy had thrown huge numbers of poor white southerners off their land and enabled a few men to amass huge wealth and power. As dispossessed white men became restive against the economic policies of human enslavement, southern lawmakers shored up their own slipping popularity by warning of the dangers of federal government meddling in their business.

Here’s another way in which that era might inform our own. In the 1860s, southern leaders’ posturing took on a momentum of its own, propelling fire-eating southerners into a war. As MAGA Republicans are talking tonight about fighting the federal government and as Trump calls for “all willing States to deploy their guards to Texas,” I think of those elite southerners in 1861 for whom threatening war was all a rhetorical game.

Meanwhile, Ukraine is running out of ammunition.

Also, it has been my personal practice to un-capitalize the word holocaust when I refer to something that I consider a holocaust that is not the horrible systematic extermination of Jewish people and others by Nazi Germany.

He’s cruising towards clinching the nomination—as we all knew he would. The dreaded Trump-Biden rematch appears to be squarely in the sights.

And there are many, many theories being floated about Trump’s resurgence. Did he ever really go away, though? Still, it’s worth examining them for a moment. Trumpism’s a form of racial power, in a society divided. Trump’s power’s amplified by technology and society’s dependence on social media. Trump might win, but the coalition’s going to be so unstable he won’t accomplish much. It’s the last gasp of a nation facing demographic change. And so on.

I think that all these carry water. But I also think…there’s a truer truth at work here. Perhaps, in a sense, Trumpism’s America’s destiny. I know that’s a provocative thing to say, but I don’t mean it that way. I just can’t help thinking it lately, because…

What’s the most salient fact about America? Americans? Even—especially—Trumpists? The vast majority of Americans want a very, very different society. A more…can I say it? Liberal one. Even Trumpists don’t agree with most of Trump’s policies—they just support Trump, the Father Figure, come hell or high water. But when we ask Americans what kind of society they want, invariably, the vast, vast majority will plead for things like healthcare, childcare, retirement, stability, security. In short, Americans want eudaemonia—genuinely good lives.

But a kind of Stockholm Syndrome’s set in. They won’t…choose that form of sociopolitical economy. Even when it’s offered to them time and time again, whether in the way of a Bernie, or a Liz, and so forth.

Why is that? What explains that? This isn’t just “voting against your own interests”—it’s something stranger, deeper, weirder: remember, even Trumpists don’t agree with much of Trump’s agenda. So what can explain this pattern persisting over decades?

Let’s look at America objectively for a moment. What do you see? We’re going to speak factually, empirically—this isn’t about politics at all, really.

America’s a nation which failed to modernize, as I often say. It didn’t invest in itself. Europe and Canada’s investment rate is about 50%—while America’s is just 20% or so. Hence, Europeans and Canadians have cutting edge social contracts—made of the very things Americans desperately lack, like universal healthcare, childcare, high-speed rail, retirement, and so on. It’s true that in recent years, for example, in Europe, investment hasn’t kept pace—and hence, pessimism has grown there, too.

But America’s a special case. Its flatly refused to build a functioning social contract for…the entire modern era. Decade after decade, America’s rejected basic public goods. And so the result of course is that Americans pay eye-watering rates for everything that’s free in most other rich nations—education, healthcare, etc. My favorite example is universities. Harvard will set you back north of $60K a year—the Sorbonne in Paris is free. That’s the difference a functional social contract makes.

America’s social contract, sadly, is more pre-modern, Darwinian, Victorian: the strong survive, the weak fall and or perish, and that’s what’s not just right and just, but “efficient” and “productive.” Life is dog-eat-dog, and brutal competition defines every aspect of life. But how has that worked out?

Before we get there, another question needs to be asked. Why did—do—Americans fail to choose a modern social contract, time and again? There are many reasons, each one like the layer of an onion. It wasn’t offered to them. They were offered a lukewarm choice between Reaganomics, and then Clintonomics—etcetera. All of these, while they differed in the details, were variants of the same form of economy: nobody should have anything much as a basic right, everything should be financialized and capitalized, profit-maximization in “free” markets would unleash prosperity for all, and the wealth would trickle down.

But the very opposite happened. The wealth trickled up. We recently discussed how billionaires have gotten so much richer just during the pandemic that every American household would be $40,000 better off. That’s more than the median income—an astonishing statistic. And that comes after yet another wealth transfer upwards, during the last few decades—$50 trillion to the very richest. That’s half of the entire world’s GDP. Another startling statistic.

America, in other words, was the subject of Grand Social Experiment. Call it what you like—hypercapitalism, free markets, neoliberalism. We’re at the point where labels don’t matter much anymore—just the point does. The experiment failed. I’m not saying that American life is all bad, but I am saying that the results are self-evident: democracy’s on the brink, there’s a feeling of hopelessness on every side, among every social group, generation after generation’s experiencing rapid, sharp downward mobility, and young people say they “can’t function anymore”—just a smattering of statistics of social collapse.

So. America was a nation that failed to invest in itself—the Grand Social Experiment. We can put it in yet another way, a more philosophical one: all the old guff about “standing on your own two feet” and “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” and whatnot. The results have been catastrophic: now democracy itself faces an existential challenge from a figure who’s already tried to unseat it once.

How are those two things linked? I think they’re connected in many, many ways. You see, when people experience what Americans have, especially those in the former working and lower middle class—a profound sense of dread, hopelessness, even trauma, shaped by downward mobility, and the disappearance of a future, community, social bonds, security, stability—they seek just strength and succor in the arms of demagogues. Those wounds open the door for an omnipotent Father Figure—they practically invoke the need for one.

These are shades of Weimar Germany, of course. The demagogue arrives, and scapegoats long-hated groups in society, blaming them for the woes of the pure and true. Isn’t that more or less what Trumpism’s appeal is based on? And doesn’t it begin to explain just why plenty of those who support Trump as demagogue even when they want a very, very different society from the one he’s going to deliver? They’re not thinking straight, as we all say. But there’s a reason why. The wounds go deep, right into existential territory itself. And then there’s an existential backlash, too. It’s me or you. I’m the master, you’re the slave. I deserve to live, you deserve to…

All Grand Social Experiments need…maybe not propaganda, but a certain ideological hardening to take place. They can’t happen otherwise. And this, too, is what happened in America. People were fed the myths of “free markets” and “trickle down economics” and so on for decades. So much so that even to this day to challenge them is to be labelled a “socialist.”

This was a process of ideological politicization. That is, these were all theories. Politics trucks in theories. But when those theories come true—or not—then we’re in the realm of empiricism, facts, reality. Americans were told that these theories had to come true. So much so that both parties offered slightly different versions of them. Sadly, that’s still true today—the Democrats are there for democracy’s sake, true, but they’re hardly offering much in the way of a modern social contract. Yes, on issues like abortion, the Democrats offer something better than theocracy. Still, their notion of progress falls well short of a truly modern social contract. Both parties agree, basically, that a modern social contract isn’t something Americans enjoy. That’s how deep this ideological hardening goes.

“Conditioning” might be too strong a word—but certainly, Americans were told to believe in the Grand Social Experiment for decades, to the point that any other alternative was considered “radical,” or even “communist” and so on—even while Europe and Canada proceeded to forge a different, socially democratic path. And of course it’s eminently true that there was a racial component to all this: Americans were told to reject “paying for those people’s schools” or educations or what have you, the clear implication being that “they” were different, lazy, foolish, liabilities. No clear aspiration to universalism was had, and in no sense were Americans bonded together as equals—the strong were to survive, and the weak perish, and that was what was moral, just, true, and theoretically sound, the key, somehow, to prosperity. Lead was to turn to gold. And to question it was taboo.

America still lives in the residue of this process of ideological hardening. This conditioning, though like I said, I think that’s too strong a word. I think that’s what explains this strange Stockholm Syndrome: Americans want a modern social contract, by and large, and yet here they are, unable to bring themselves to back one. In that vacuum, in that gap, what choice is left? The insecurity and instability, the fear and trauma—they turn people towards demagoguery. They reopen old wounds of hate and spite, instead of healing them with prosperity and trust and progress. They reduce people to their animal selves, seeking what stability and security they can find in older hierarchies of power and dominance, in which there appears to be some nostalgic certainty.

That’s a lot to chew on. I’m not saying I’m right. But I am saying that this may be where a society that fails to forge a modern social contract ends up. Haven’t we seen just this in plenty of “third world” countries? This oscillation between democracy and authoritarianism? I’m not saying America’s a “third world” country—don’t kid yourself, it’s not exactly Bangladesh. But I am saying that this place isn’t a stable equilibrium. The place the Grand Social Experiment—everyone’s a competitor, rival, adversary, in a brutal game called only the strong survive—ends? It might be right here. Destiny.

Destiny, of course, isn’t fate. It can be made and remade. But will America understand that before it’s too late?

Notice I referred to this extermination of Palestinian people as ‘this holocaust.’

Also, it has been my personal practice to un-capitalize the word holocaust when I refer to something that I consider a holocaust that is not the horrible systematic extermination of Jewish people and others by Nazi Germany. The capitalized word is a proper noun for that specific event.

Notice I referred to this extermination of Palestinian people as ‘this holocaust.’

Those Jewish citizens and others who languished and suffered and died in extermination camps are not diminished, but honored, by our refusal to look the other way as it is happening again.

“In ‘Will & Harper,’ the comedian drives across America with Harper Steele, his friend of 30 years who’s recently transitioned. It got the biggest standing ovation of the festival and is rumored to have sparked a major bidding war.

Will Ferrell remembers the email well, with the subject line, “Here’s a Weird One.” It came from his dear friend, Harper Steele, who had been hired as a writer on “Saturday Night Live” the same week that Ferrell had been named to the cast, and who collaborated on some of Ferrell’s most famous sketches. And now Steele was writing to say that it was time, at 61, to stop hiding and begin living as a woman. Steele would be using she/her pronouns but hadn’t yet settled on a name, and was hoping for understanding from family and friends on what would surely be a slow and awkward and terrifying and joyous journey.

in the new documentary “Will & Harper” — which premiered Monday at the Sundance Film Festival to multiple, explosive standing ovations. If rumors are true, Apple TV Plus has been circling and could make it the biggest documentary sale in Sundance history, even bigger than “Boys State,” which sold to Apple and A24 in 2020 for a record $12 million.

Steele has always loved a road trip, showing up to small towns in the middle of nowhere America, and it was Ferrell’s idea that they embark on one together, on film. It would give the comedian a chance to reacquaint himself with his friend of 30 years and to ask all the impertinent questions he wanted to ask, such as what made her transition, and does she still like terrible beer? (Old Milwaukee is Harper’s champagne of brews.) And it was also a way to provide support for Harper as she reentered places she once loved to go, like dive bars and Midwest dirt-racing tracks, in a new body, with excitement and insecurity about how she had be seen, and a deep sadness for how long she had taken to come out, and concern for her physical safety in parts of the country where she never had to think about such things before. “I know I love America,” Steele says in the documentary. “I don’t know if it loves me.”

What follows is a movie that’s so sweet and funny, so generous and gentle about explaining trans-ness to older generations, that it feels like it should be shown in schools and toured around the country as a vital, lifesaving tool.

When the two friends first met, no one on SNL quite knew what to do with Ferrell’s weird energy. “They thought Will Ferrell was a dud,” Steele says in the film. But the two of them had an immediate kinship. In the film, they meet up with their SNL family along the way, such as Tina Fey, Seth Meyers, Tim Meadows, Will Forte and Molly Shannon. Calling up Kristen Wiig to check in on the theme song they asked her to write for them becomes a running gag. (“Harper and Will go West / Just a couple old friends and a couple of brand new breasts …”)

But that doesn’t stop him from making plenty of crass jokes (that Steele finds very funny), such as, “Do you think you’re a worse driver now that you’re a female driver?” or “Did you go to Nordstrom Rack more when you got your new rack?”

And somehow within all this is a heartening portrait of America. There are bad moments, such as when they unknowingly take a picture with a politician who had just signed an anti-trans bill, or a time when Ferrell’s celebrity and instinct to be a ham puts Steele dangerously on display (Ferrell cries in the car the next day, feeling like he’s failed his friend). But there are also many more moments that give you hope in humanity, like when Steele makes a trepidatious first solo trip into a dive bar in Oklahoma with a “F--- Biden” sign on the wall and gets welcomed by a tableful of new friends.

During filming, director Josh Greenbaum said, they had decided to just let the two friends riff off one another; the only real plan was when Steele mapped out the places they would go. They wound up with 215 hours of footage, but gags such as Ferrell eating from “puddle bunny,” a chocolate bunny that melted on their dash, only made the end credits.

What did make it into the film was a moment when Steele gets into a hotel pool in a bathing suit, and Ferrell, as a show of support, breaks out a Speedo from his extensive collection to support her. “I thought, ‘Well, Harper’s taking a big risk of swimming in a bikini here for the first time,’” Ferrell said. “But when I watched it on film, I took a bigger risk. She looks elegant and sporty, and I look like an endangered sea mammal.”

At the forefront of their minds, though, was always the kind of impact a film like this could have. It took Steele two to three months to say yes, but she felt galvanized watching anti-trans bills get passed all over the country. “It is still quite awful. It’s ramping up. And I have this friend who has made movies that appeal very broadly to a lot of people. That was the deciding factor, like, ‘Oh, I can abuse this relationship for the good!’” Steele said, laughing.”

That's a valid point. As when we warn of a "nuclear holocaust". But even using the uncapitalized term in connection with Israel's siege of Gaza just seems a bit edgy, a little "off", and tends to indicate bias. Which, I suppose, is exactly why it's being used.