Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

We should all be terrified of Trump’s Project 2025

The presumptive Republican nominee has promised to give rightwing evangelical Christians what they want – and more

Robert Reich wrote:

(snip)

Trump says he “knows nothing” about Project 2025. And he says he “disagrees” with it.

As the former chairman of the Republican party, Michael Steele put it, “Ok, let’s all play with Stupid for minute … so exactly how do you ‘disagree’ with something you ‘know nothing about’ or ‘have no idea’ who is behind, saying or doing the thing you disagree with?”

Steele is boss!

Great sense of humor...and brings it to complicated issues.

GOP lost a keeper in him when they went nuts.

I have spent the weekend struggling mightily with a new manuscript and have had little time to study the news.

The most notable event from the day is that in a stunning upset, French voters have rejected members of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party in legislative elections. After the first round of votes, National Rally candidates appeared to be comfortably ahead, but left-wing and centrist candidates combined forces to prevent splitting the vote, and voters then flooded the polls to elect the candidates that coalition fielded.

Le Pen has said her policies are the same ones advanced by Russian president Vladimir Putin and former president Trump.

On Thursday, elections in the United Kingdom saw a landslide victory for the center-left Labour Party for the first time in 14 years. Lauren Frayer and Fatima Al-Kassab of NPR noted that it was the worst defeat for the Conservatives in their almost 200-year history.

There are always many factors that go into any election, but these results at least raise the question of whether western politicians are finding effective ways to counter the techniques of Russian disinformation. France has been flooded with Russian disinformation trying to create divisions in society as Putin seeks to break European support for Ukraine. Russia openly supports Le Pen.

The U.K. also has been similarly flooded with Russian disinformation for years now. Russian trolls lie on social media websites and populate the comments sections of popular websites both to end support for Ukraine and to exploit wedge issues to split people apart.

These efforts were part of what Russian political theorists called “political technology”: the construction of a virtual political reality through modern media. Political theorists developed several techniques in this approach to politics: blackmailing opponents, abusing state power to help favored candidates, sponsoring “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to confuse voters on the other side and thus open the way for their own candidates, creating false parties to split the opposition, and, finally, creating a false narrative around an election or other event in order to control public debate.

These techniques perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.

This system made sense in former Soviet republics, where it enabled leaders to avoid the censorship that voters would recoil from by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out. But those techniques dovetailed with the rhetoric of homegrown far-right figures as well.

It has always been a question what people who have embraced a virtual world will do when they figure out that the narrative on which they have based their government is fake. It seems possible that they create centrist coalitions and turn out to vote in huge numbers to reassert control over their politics and their country.

The United States has had a similarly contentious relationship with political technology, Russian disinformation, and far-right leaders echoing that disinformation as they seek to take power by dividing the American people.

And long before anyone had begun to call disinformation political technology, the United States had a small group of elite enslavers seeking to take control of the nation by hammering on their narrative that the only true basis for society was racial slavery and using racism to divide their opponents.

When they managed to get Congress and the Supreme Court to give them the right to move slavery into the American West, where new slave states could work with southern slave states to make slavery national, voters woke up. Disagreeing about immigration, internal improvements, public education, tariffs, and finance—all hot-button issues in the 1850s—they nonetheless built a centrist coalition to stop elite enslavers from replacing democracy with an oligarchy.

Indeed, their coalition was so effective that Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas, who had sponsored the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act that permitted enslavement to move west, objected that it was unseemly for abolitionists who opposed human enslavement in principle to work with those like Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln, who focused on the Constitution and argued that it protected enslavement in the slave states.

In 1854, Lincoln answered Douglas: “Our Senator…objects that those who oppose him in this measure do not entirely agree with one another…. [H]e…says it is not quite fair to oppose him in this variety of ways. He should remember that he took us by surprise—astounded us—by this measure. We were thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher's cleaver. We struck in the direction of the sound; and we are rapidly closing in upon him. He must not think to divert us from our purpose, by showing us that our drill, our dress, and our weapons, are not entirely perfect and uniform. When the storm shall be past, he shall find us still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”

Six years later, that coalition of voters elected Lincoln to the White House.

The French elections left no party in an absolute majority, so governance will be messy. Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez nonetheless cheered tonight’s results: “This week, two of the largest countries in Europe have chosen the same path that Spain chose a year ago: rejection of the extreme right and a decisive commitment to a social left that addresses people’s problems with serious and brave policies,” Sánchez posted on social media.

“The United Kingdom and France have said YES to progress and social advancement and NO to the regression in rights and freedoms. There is no agreement or government with the extreme right.”

A society which aimed at making the acquisition of wealth contingent upon the discharge of social obligations, which sought to proportion remuneration to service and denied it to those by whom no service was performed, which inquired first not what men possess but what they can make or create or achieve, might be called a Functional Society, because in such a society the main subject of social emphasis would be the performance of functions. But such a society does not exist, even as a remote ideal, in the modern world, though something like it has hung, an unrealized theory, before men's minds in the past. Modern societies aim at protecting economic rights, while leaving economic functions, except in moments of abnormal emergency, to fulfil themselves. The motive which gives color and quality to their public institutions, to their policy and political thought, is not the attempt to secure the fulfilment of tasks undertaken for the public service, but to increase the opportunities open to individuals of attaining the objects which they conceive to be advantageous to themselves. If asked the end or criterion of social organization, they would give an answer reminiscent of the formula the greatest happiness of the greatest number. But to say that the end of social institutions is happiness, is to say that they have no common end at all. For happiness is individual, and to make happiness the object of society is to resolve society itself into the ambitions of numberless individuals, each directed towards the attainment of some personal purpose.

Such societies may be called Acquisitive Societies, because their whole tendency and interest and preoccupation is to promote the acquisition of wealth. The appeal of this conception must be powerful, for it has laid the whole modern world under its spell. Since England first revealed the possibilities of industrialism, it has gone from strength to strength, and as industrial civilization invades countries hitherto remote from it, as Russia and Japan and India and China are drawn into its orbit, each decade sees a fresh extension of its influence. The secret of its triumph is obvious. It is an invitation to men to use the powers with which they have been endowed by nature or society, by skill or energy or relentless egotism or mere good fortune, without inquiring whether there is any principle by which their exercise should be limited. It assumes the social organization which determines the opportunities which different classes shall in fact possess, and concentrates attention upon the right of those who possess or can acquire power to make the fullest use of it for their own self-advancement. By fixing men's minds, not upon the discharge of social obligations, which restricts their energy, because it defines the goal to which it should be directed, but upon the exercise of the right to pursue their own self-interest, it offers unlimited scope for the acquisition of riches, and therefore gives free play to one of the most powerful of human instincts. To the strong it promises unfettered freedom for the exercise of their strength; to the weak the hope that they too one day may be strong. Before the eyes of both it suspends a golden prize, which not all can attain, but for which each may strive, the enchanting vision of infinite expansion. It assures men that there are no ends other than their ends, no law other than their desires, no limit other than that which they think advisable. Thus it makes the individual the center of his own universe, and dissolves moral principles into a choice of expediences. And it immensely simplifies the problems of social life in complex communities. For it relieves them of the necessity of discriminating between different types of economic activity and different sources of wealth, between enterprise and avarice, energy and unscrupulous greed, property which is legitimate and property which is theft, the just enjoyment of the fruits of labor and the idle parasitism of birth or fortune, because it treats all economic activities as standing upon the same level, and suggests that excess or defect, waste or superfluity, require no conscious effort of the social will to avert them, but are corrected almost automatically by the mechanical play of economic forces.

Under the impulse of such ideas men do not become religious or wise or artistic; for religion and wisdom and art imply the acceptance of limitations. But they become powerful and rich. They inherit the earth and change the face of nature, if they do not possess their own souls; and they have that appearance of freedom which consists in the absence of obstacles between opportunities for self-advancement and those whom birth or wealth or talent or good fortune has placed in a position to seize them. It is not difficult either for individuals or for societies to achieve their object, if that object be sufficiently limited and immediate, and if they are not distracted from its pursuit by other considerations. The temper which dedicates itself to the cultivation of opportunities, and leaves obligations to take care of themselves, is set upon an object which is at once simple and practicable. The eighteenth century defined it. The twentieth century has very largely attained it. Or, if it has not attained it, it has at least grasped the possibilities of its attainment. The national output of wealth per head of population is estimated to have been approximately $200 in 1914. Unless mankind chooses to continue the sacrifice of prosperity to the ambitions and terrors of nationalism, it is possible that by the year 2000 it may be doubled.

Senility is part of the human condition, but dignity is usually a choice. I pity Joe Biden for having to make what may be the most humiliating decision in presidential history. The questions Are you senile yet? Are you sure? have no dignified answer—which is why Biden should consider an option midway between resignation and denial, and persist in a way that is not, to my knowledge, being considered.

Having harvested enough delegates for the nomination, he now has sole authority to release them and let them choose another nominee at or before the Democratic National Convention in August. To release them and glide toward retirement would invite speculation about whether being unfit to run for president means he is also unfit to serve as president for the rest of his term. Failure to release them would feel a lot like Biden is holding the party hostage, and forcing its members to defend his debility with such preposterous vigor that no one will believe anything they say ever again.

The dignity-preserving option is to release the delegates and run in an open convention. Asking the country to trust him is no longer a credible option. But inviting delegates to witness his continued vigor and competence, and his superiority to other candidates, is a possible path forward—indeed, the likeliest one to end in another Biden term. He would have to give a speech to explain this choice. It might go something like this: You saw me looking old. For the next month you’ll see much younger Democrats and Republicans eating my dust. And if in August, my party thinks this old man is ready for retirement, I’ll be thrilled to finish my term, support the nominee, and work on my golf handicap come January.

Only one cognitive test really matters, and that is the test administered by voters over the course of a campaign, and scored by them in the booth after seeing a candidate dominate or falter. Biden’s decline seems either to have been hidden from the public or to have come relatively quickly, too fast for the primary season to reveal it in full. (This second possibility is, incidentally, why I consider him unqualified for a second term: We all age slowly, and in some ways get better at decision making as we age slowly. But sudden fast-aging is a sign of impending catastrophe, so whenever there is any evidence of it, an old president should resign.) Biden would be offering them, through their party proxies, a second chance to stress-test his frontal lobes.

The alleged downside of this option, or any option that leads to an open convention, is that the Democrats would waste time and money fighting one another when they could be fighting Donald Trump. This argument reminds me of a cornball line I heard from Tom Harkin, then the Democratic senator from Iowa, when his party was watching with concern as Barack Obama vigorously contested Hillary Clinton’s sovereign right to the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. “When I was a boy,” Harkin said, “I heard cats yowling underneath the porch.” They sounded like they might be killing each other, so he reported his concern to his mother. “Don’t worry,” she told him. “It just means that there are going to be more cats.” Competition is healthy, and what sounds to naive ears like a death match is an essential step in the propagation and survival of the party.


I’m not sure what to say to someone who thinks the Democratic Party’s problem is that it has been too open to debate, internal competition, and challenges from outsiders. Maybe they are confusing themselves with members of the politburo. More likely, I think, the party that is poised to nominate an 81-year-old career politician would benefit from a season of intense open auditions—to figure out which junior talent deserves promotion, which senior talent deserves retirement, which policies animate the party’s supporters, and which policies should go. The candidates who emerge with the most support from this compressed process—which would be the most-watched gladiatorial match in American political history—will be the party’s future.

The Republicans underwent this process in 2016, when Trump dispatched candidate after candidate and showed beyond denying that theirs was the party of immigration restriction and protectionism. I fully expect the Democrats to reveal themselves enthusiastic about policies worse than Biden’s in a number of ways. But if they do, they were that party all along.

And Biden will either continue or conclude his career with a fight. I predict he will lose it, and badly. In some ways that would be the ideal outcome for him, too: to lose by invigorating his party; to lose by picking a fight instead of dodging one; to avoid the fate of winning and then spending the next few years being publicly monitored for drooling and signs of disorientation. Dignity is a choice, but not a choice that remains available forever.

The left bloc that won in France is the extreme left, includes 4 parties - one of which is "Unconquered France"

Finding an alternative candidate won't be easy. I've seen quite a few different commentaries on this and I've posted lots of them. The only way it can work is with Biden's cooperation. (The really big hitch is, if I'm correct, that all the campaign money raised for Biden/Harris can't be transferred to another candidate, other than Harris.) But, if the the party is shown to be enthusiastic about finding an alternative and if the delegates and the DNC work together instead of splintering, they might be able to accomplish a leadership change at this late date – which would be unprecedented. One thing for sure – it would certainly upset the Republican election playbook as it now stands.

We have seen Dr Fauchi's funding ((through known intermediaries) of a Chinese Laboratory for gain-of-function research on dangerous viruses, which was the likely (probably accidental) source of a world-wide epidemic - done without the consent or even review of any of our elected officials.

We have also seen multiple instances of seasonal puddles in low lying areas of farmer's fields declared by EPA to fall under legislation applicable to "the navigable Waters of the United States", and declared as wetlands under the agencies' exclusive jurisdiction.