Good morning, everyone!
You would think that The Apocalypse had begun since the end of the Republican National Convention if you were reading some of these op-ed pages.
Seriously. I mean, I have an occasionally dark and macabre imagination myself but...sheesh!
Anyway...the pundit round-up must go on.
Ines Pohl, Washington correspondent for Deutsche Welle, on why Donald Trump could very well win the 2020 presidential election.
It is still not possible to say who has better mastered these previously nonexistent challenges. Both parties attempted a balancing act of serving the base on the one hand, and, on the other, attempting to attract decidedly undecided voters. Both the Republicans and the Democrats need them for their candidate to win.
Even if these showy events don't indicate the winner, the loser has already been determined: The American people who live in a society that is not even able to agree on the most basic fundamental rules of living together. One such rule is that politicians' claims should stand up to scrutiny. That there are basic scientific assumptions that remain valid until the opposite is proven.
Donald Trump has ridden roughshod over all of this. Anyone who questions his lies and distortions — whether journalist or scientist — is discredited as a rabble-rouser. There are a large number of Americans who only believe what fits their world view. Negative economic figures are glossed over, conspiracy theorists turn other countries into dangerous powers that want to conquer the USA, the deadly virus is talked down.
Renée Graham of the Boston Globe asserts that nothing more than white fear and white supremacy is on the 2020 ballot.
If anything was made clear during the RNC’s four days of doom porn, it’s that the party does indeed have a platform — it’s convincing white voters that without Trump at the helm, “violent mobs” will “overrun” their suburban neighborhoods, burn and loot their homes and businesses, and rape and kill their loved ones.
Naturally, “violent mobs” mean Black people and their allies fighting to end white supremacy and systemic racism.
“Your vote will decide whether we protect law-abiding Americans, or whether we give free reign to violent anarchists, agitators, and criminals who threaten our citizens,” Trump said Thursday night during his rambling, mendacious acceptance speech. “This election will decide whether we will defend the American way of life, or whether we will allow a radical movement to completely dismantle and destroy it.”
White supremacy is so foundational that protests against pervasive racial injustice are branded as plots to overthrow America. That the needle might move ever so slightly toward progress and equity is more than Trump and his supporters can stand.
Alexander Agadjanian writes for the Washington Post that, yes, people to have a tendency to “follow the leader.”
Republican approval of trade has rebounded somewhat, but this Trump effect is evident across multiple issues. In 2015, 12 percent of Republicans held positive views of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Trump has always praised lavishly. By 2017, according to Gallup, the number had climbed to 32 percent. Hawkishness toward Russia — the heart of the onetime “evil empire” that GOP hero Ronald Reagan set himself so stoutly against — faded over the same period. In July 2018, 40 percent of Republicans said Russia was an American ally, nearly double the figure from 2014. Republicans were opposed to withdrawing troops from Syria until Trump announced he would do just that, and then their views shifted. Even on nonpolitical issues, like the National Football League, the president can change minds: About 70 percent of his voters liked the NFL — until Trump attacked players who knelt during the national anthem and approval dropped by more than half.
These trends can seem disconcerting, because they appear to reverse the idealized direction of influence in a democracy, where the views of citizens are supposed to guide their politicians. Leadership surely involves the art of persuasion, but should it really drive such mercurial shifts on core issues?
Political science research shows that this “follow the leader” dynamic is hardly limited to Trump. It occurs throughout history, on both sides of the aisle and in other countries. It happens even when party elites try to stop it. In general, the people who run our political parties — particularly the most prominent and charismatic figures — have the ability to reshape what voters in those parties think.
With an eye on the grotesque spectacle that was the 2020 Republican National Convention, Kyle Whitmire of al.com with a reminder that when a group of people follow the leader, others get left behind.
Trump’s speech was a meandering greatest-hits of the extemporized rants we’ve heard from him for the last four years, both audacious and simultaneously forgettable.
What shouldn’t be forgettable is the message that event sent the country: Everyone of those folks just showed they don’t care what anyone else in this country has forsaken to beat this disease.
The seniors in long term care centers who have been isolated from their loved ones and don’t understand why.
The grandparents denied their favorite people’s hugs and kisses.
Grieving families who’ve forgone funerals.
Couples who’ve delayed weddings.
The frontline workers in our hospitals and care centers who must isolate themselves from their loved ones to protect them at the same time they put their own lives at risk.
Teachers, administrators and support staff learning to work with mitigation measures so their schools don’t turn into hotspots.
Ido Vock of the New Statesman that there are vast difference between the United States now and the beginnings of the Nazi regime in 1933.
The reality is that right-wing extremism mutates to fit the specificities of time and place. The United States in 2020 is not the same as Germany in 1933. Trump is dangerous, racist, and unquestionably anti-democratic. His supporters draw from a legacy of brutal white supremacy that stretches back to the post-Reconstruction terror waged for close to a century on African-Americans in the Southern states. Trump himself traffics in unsubtle racism and glorifies and encourages violence. Still, he is not Hitler, and to draw parallels between the two men is not only to cheapen the memory of the victims of Nazism, but to critically misunderstand the threat Trump poses to the US and the world.
Ernst Fraenkel, the German jurist who emigrated to the US in 1939, argued that Nazi Germany comprised two distinct and parallel states: the “normative” and the “prerogative”. The normative state consisted of the legal remnants of the Weimar Republic: its constitution, the rule of law, up to a point, and the traditional civil service. The prerogative state, by contrast, consisted of the parallel institutions of the party, where the only law was the word of the Führer and the interests of the people, as interpreted by the party.
The two states were in constant struggle, a curious marriage that gave rise to what the historian of fascism Robert Paxton termed the regime’s “bizarre mixture of legalism and arbitrary violence”. The Nazi Party had its own foreign policy office, paramilitary force and party court. Early on, the normative state’s police force was put under party control; by 1938, the Foreign Office had been too. Simultaneously, party institutions such as the SS grew in power, acting mostly outside of the normative state’s legal regime.
None of this applies to Trump’s America. There are no parallel party structures competing with the normative state, even if Trump has elicited the loyalty of previously sceptical conservatives, an essential precondition of fascism taking root. There are no concentration camps for political opponents, though the internment of migrant families is a moral outrage. Some of his supporters have taken it upon themselves to act as extralegal paramilitaries, such as the suspect in the fatal shooting of two Black Lives Matter protesters this week in Kenosha, Wisconsin. They are dangerous – but they are different to the organised party militias that marauded around early 1930s Europe.
I’m also reminded of the debate sparked by Atlantic columnist Jemele Hill on Twitter last week. Remember, the 1935 Nuremburg laws were based, in part, on American Jim Crow laws. So perhaps we need to consider the idea that for some Americans, an American “fascism” actually predates Nazi Germany and all we’re seeing nowadays is a revival.
Anna North writes for Vox that in many ways, the 2020 presidential contest is also a contest for competing American masculinities.
Trump has made a certain kind of stereotypical manliness core to his campaign ever since 2016. He bragged about his penis size during one debate, physically invaded Hillary Clinton’s space during another, and repeatedly insulted his opponents’ “toughness,” “energy,” and “stamina.”
Such behavior continued through his presidency and has defined his response to the Covid-19 pandemic, during which he has claimed the virus will go away on its own, called on Americans to be “warriors” by reopening the economy, and routinely refused to wear a mask. In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention on Thursday night — delivered before a largely mask-free crowd — he again used the language of war, boasting that “we will crush the virus” and claiming that his opponent’s plan on the crisis “is not a solution to the virus, but rather a surrender.” He also, yet again, demanded that states open their economies despite hundreds of daily deaths, saying, “they have to be open, they have to get back to work.”
Trump has also long used the public health crisis as an opportunity to ramp up his xenophobic rhetoric, by using a racist name for the virus — something he did again in his convention speech. These bigoted and aggressive comments are part of his larger performance of masculinity, some say. “He has conflated his being a man with being a racist,” William Ming Liu, a professor of counseling, higher education, and special education at the University of Maryland, College Park, who studies masculinity, told Vox in an email.
Biden, at least during his 2020 campaign, has set out to show voters a different kind of masculinity — and to subtly attack Trump’s. In campaign appearances and at last week’s Democratic National Convention, he’s cast himself as “a dependable serious protector” and is “contrasting that to Trump’s brute-force, reckless approach,” Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a history professor at Calvin University who has studied white evangelicals’ views of masculinity, told Vox.
John Cassidy of the
New Yorker on the relative stability of the 2020 presidential race (even amid some tightening in some polls).
...So far, the central fact about the 2020 campaign has been its stability, at least according to the polls. In mid-March, after Joe Biden effectively wrapped up the Democratic nomination, he was leading Trump by 6.4 percentage points in the Real Clear Politics national poll average. Today, the R.C.P. poll average shows Biden ahead by 7.1 percentage points. Although individual polls have zigged up and down quite a bit, the over-all pattern has been remarkably steady.
It’s been so steady, in fact, that
The Economist’s Presidential forecasting model, which combines polling results with fundamental factors, such as the state of the economy, now puts the probability of a Biden victory at
eighty-eight per cent. FiveThirtyEights’s forecasting model, which is constructed differently and factors in more uncertainty, puts the probability of Biden winning at
sixty-nine per cent. Both models indicate that a Trump defeat is by far the most likely outcome. Still, many Democrats are nervous, and for understandable reasons, including skepticism about the polls; concerns about the Republicans’ built-in advantage in the Electoral College; and fears that Trump’s scaremongering could strengthen his position among some key voting groups, particularly seniors and suburban women.
Aaron Blake of the Washington Post speculates why there has been some loss in support for the Black Lives Matter movement.
It’s tempting to attach these numbers to the scenes of unrest that have been played up particularly by Trump and conservative media. But those scenes had faded in the weeks during which these polls were conducted. Plenty may have changed in the past week, following the police shooting of Blake.
The second is cause and effect. While people could possibly be reacting to those scenes, it’s also possible the inverse is true: that they find the scenes that actually set off the unrest to be more powerful and compelling — and that what happened in Kenosha could serve to reinforce those concerns. The ebb in White support for the movement could just as easily be explained by these issues fading from prominence as they could be by the scenes Trump and his allies have played up — which, notably, existed following the Floyd protests and were very prominent in conservative media, but at that point didn’t seem to alienate the vast majority of Americans.
Finally there’s the fact that, even with the apparent dip in White support for Black Lives Matter, it hasn’t seemed to impact the race for president much. Joe Biden’s lead has been remarkably static since he became the presumptive Democratic nominee, and even in the past few weeks, when views of the protests might have shifted, his lead in the national RealClearPolitics average remains at 7.1 points. That’s little changed from earlier this month and only slightly smaller than earlier this summer.
Richard Flory writes for The Conversation about the legacy of former Liberty University president Jerry Falwell, Jr...and the legacy of Mr. Falwell’s father.
The public scrutiny given to the alleged scandal reflects the prominent role that Falwell Jr. holds in conservative circles. He was among the first few evangelical leaders who endorsed Donald Trump in 2016. Later, he was asked to head an education reform task force under President Trump.
As a scholar who has been studying Protestant fundamentalists and evangelicals for more than 20 years, I note that Falwell Jr.’s perceived leadership role within evangelicalism – and his appeal to Donald Trump – is best understood as a product of his family legacy.
***
Political involvement was a shift for Falwell Sr., who as a fundamentalist Christian avoided political organizing as a matter of religious conviction. Fundamentalists, as distinct from evangelicals, tended toward separation not only from other Christians who didn’t share their particular brand of Christianity and its emphasis on theological, personal and social purity, but also from entanglements with the political world.
Thus, Falwell Sr.’s move into politics also entailed a shift in his theological perspective. He moved from a separatist stance that taught that God controls everything, including politics, to one that required human action to fulfill God’s intended destiny for America.
For Falwell Sr., and the mostly white, conservative fundamentalist and evangelical Christian world that his movement represented, these political battles were moral and spiritual battles intended to save America from the moral quagmire that they believed it was becoming.
At the very end of his piece, Mr. Flory makes note of something that I’ve long noted: given that Falwell Jr. is the son of a preacher, who didn’t see this coming (looking at you Mr. Franklin Graham)?
Everyone have a good morning!