Short post today, since as I was sitting down to write it, an hour and a half ago now, the power went out. This was around 4:20pm. I sat and read a book. Power back about 5:40. Car hit power pole, the message from PG&E said. It’s Y’s turn fixing dinner tonight, so let’s see what I can get done before it’s ready. Topics today:
- Blame the billionaires;
- Differences between MAGA and non-MAGA Republicans;
- Another way to challenge Trump: societal mobilization.
Slate, Steven Greenhouse, 23 Oct 2024: If Trump Wins, Blame the Billionaires, subtitled “Without them, this presidential race wouldn’t be close at all.”
This supports the by-now-truism that the wealthy support Republicans because Republicans given them tax breaks. (While Republicans gather votes by pretending to be concerned about conservative moral issues. Some of them are.)
As Elon Musk’s rabid pro-Trump mania makes clear, billionaires are wielding their financial might in this year’s presidential election far more than in any previous campaign—and far more openly, too. More than 60 billionaires have opened their wallets to help elect Donald Trump, with some giving $10 million, $20 million, or more, indicating that many plutocrats are far more worried about the prospect of Democrats increasing their taxes than about the threat that Trump poses to our democracy.
Of course, the wealthy tend to be conservative because they want things to stay the same since they have so much to lose should things change. Similarly is the cliche, not necessarily true, that as people older and more settled, they become conservative, for the same reason.
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NY Times, guest essay by Thomas B. Edsall, 23 Oct 2024: America Is Playing With Fire
Edsall opens his latest compilation with statements from Trump about what he’ll do when he gets elected. Set the military on the Democrats he doesn’t like, and so on. But what interests me in this piece are how “MAGA and non-MAGA Republicans are two separate species.” Based on a study conducted by four folks at UC Davis.
They found that:
MAGA Republicans were substantially more likely (30.4 percent) to agree strongly/very strongly that “in the next few years, there will be civil war in the United States,” compared to strong Republicans, 7.5 percent, and other Republicans, 10.8 percent; and to consider violence usually/always justified to advance at least 1 of 17 specific political objectives (MAGA Republicans, 58.2 percent, strong Republicans, 38.3 percent and other Republicans, 31.5 percent).
MAGA Republicans
were far more likely than others to agree strongly or very strongly that “discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination against Blacks and other minorities” (MAGA Republicans, 71.6 percent, strong Republicans, 44.1 percent, other Republicans, 33.3 percent), and that “in America, native-born white people are being replaced by immigrants” (MAGA Republicans, 51 percent, strong Republicans, 23.1 percent, other Republicans, 14.4 percent).
Wintemute and his co-authors concluded that MAGA Republicans, who make up approximately one-third (33.6 percent) of Republicans and 15 percent of the population, “are a distinct minority — more likely than other Republicans to endorse racist and delusional beliefs, sometimes by very wide margins.”
So: 15% of the population.
And then a take on why non-MAGA Republicans don’t abandon Trump, from Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford.
First: We tout the virtues of democracy over other forms of government in part because we believe that the policies it produces will reflect the interests of voters better. But when the voters are evenly divided and money is on the table, process can take a back seat to real or anticipated results.
Second: In the choice between safety and every other policy goal, safety usually wins. The original justification for government was providing security in the form of police and the military. Whatever the reality of the claims about violence and disorder, the fact that Trump incessantly talks about it likely gives him more street cred among wavering Republicans and some independent voters.
Third: In the choice between hope and fear, fear has proven in the past to be more powerful even when the basis for it is grossly exaggerated. This was true in the 1980s when there were similar debates about disorder and crime. For many Republicans, the fear of economic loss due to higher taxes and loss of safety is a powerful one-two punch.
Results over process [principle]; overriding concerns about safety; fear is more powerful than hope.
Much more interesting stuff in this article.
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One more.
NY Times, guest essay by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, 24 Oct 2024: There Are Four Anti-Trump Pathways We Failed to Take. There Is a Fifth.
The writers are authors of Tyranny of the Minority and How Democracies Die. This essay opens:
Democratic self-rule contains a paradox. It is a system premised on openness and competition. Any ambitious party or politician should have a shot at running for office and winning. But what if a major candidate seeks to dismantle that very system?
America confronts this problem today. Donald Trump poses a clear threat to American democracy. He was the first president in U.S. history to refuse to accept defeat, and he illegally attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Now, on the brink of returning to the White House, Mr. Trump is forthrightly telling Americans that if he wins, he plans to bend, if not break, our democracy.
What is the fifth one not taken?
That leaves a fifth strategy: societal mobilization. Democracy’s last bastion of defense is civil society. When the constitutional order is under threat, influential groups and societal leaders — chief executives, religious leaders, labor leaders and prominent retired public officials — must speak out, reminding citizens of the red lines that democratic societies must never cross. And when politicians cross those red lines, society’s most prominent voices must publicly and forcefully repudiate them.
This has in fact been happening — note recent stories about General John Kelly and the many officials who worked under Trump during his first administration — yet Fox News and Newsmax go out of their to discredit all of those people. Only Trump matters. What happened to conservative respect and support for the military? It all falls away before their allegiance to their cult leader. It’s happened before.
