Category: Conservatives
Manchin and Sinema are playing a new game under old rules

Manchin and Sinema are playing a new game under old rules

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Republican stupidity pours forth like a torrent from a mountain cataract. My readers are hardly likely to be surprised by any idiocy that comes from that quarter.

But Democrats too can be ignorant, though they are not as stupid as Republicans. (Remember that the technical term stupid means not just “ignorant” but “arrogantly and abusively ignorant.”) They incline toward ignorance the more they try to be “moderate”—that is the more they pretend to be “conservative.”

No two Democrats exhibit this tendency more right now than Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.

Both of them are preventing Senate passage of absolutely necessary voting rights legislation because they want to placate Republicans. They insist that the filibuster—the anti-democratic Senate rule that allows the minority to thwart majority rule—cannot be changed. It is too important, they say, that the minority have a say in legislation.

The problem with this argument is that the minority always has a say in legislation, with or without the filibuster. The difference that keeping the filibuster makes is this: with the filibuster, the minority’s say can exercise a veto over the majority; without it, the minority’s say is registered, but the majority’s will rules.

And majority rule is the fundamental principle of democratic government. As Rousseau explained centuries ago, the will of the majority is the will of the people. The filibuster, when used to thwart majority rule, is anti-democratic.

That, of course, is why Republicans love it. Their entire raison d’etre is to thwart majority rule. But why do Manchin  and Sinema, not being Republicans, present themselves as loving it?

The simple explanation is political expediency. They come from red states, so they have to placate their Republican voters.

This may have been true in the past. Maybe the two of them have managed to keep their jobs up till now by posing as “Republican-light” politicians. But Republicans are in the process of exploiting the Supreme Court’s gutting of voting rights in ways that will exterminate “Republican-light” Democrats.

Do Manchin and Sinema really think that they will be able to stay in office once the Republican-controlled legislatures in their states have given themselves the ability to overturn any election within their states? Why would a Republican legislature with the ability to overrule any state election official allow any Democrat to win an election when they could simply replace the actual winner with a Republican by “casting doubt” on the local election results and disallowing them?

If Manchin and Sinema continue to pretend that the filibuster is absolutely essential in the Senate, if they keep wearing the fig leaf of “moderation” and “bipartisanship” to appeal to Republicans who are determined to suppress or nullify the will of the voters, they will be directly responsible for losing their own positions of power.

This is ignorant. This is self-destructive. And what is worse, it plays right into the hands of the Republican party’s mania to replace American democracy with American autocracy.

Right now, this instant, the fate of America’s democracy is dancing on the knife-edge of Manchin’s and Sinema’s ignorance. If they can’t see that Republicans have changed the game they used to play, if they can’t see that they can only survive politically by altering the filibuster, then they will bring us all down with them.

Somebody has to get through to them in the next few days. If they keep playing the new game under the old rules, America is finished.
The banality of Republican evil

The banality of Republican evil

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Thursday on Meet the Press Daily, Republican Rep. Tom Reed of New York tried to explain his nonsensical positions (1) on absolving Donald Trump of responsibility for the insurrection of January 6, 2021, (2) on absolving the most Republicans of responsibility for supporting the execrable former president, and (3) on supporting the current Republican efforts across the nation to ensure that elections go their way in the future.

The first two positions don’t pass the laugh test. My readers, being more than able to recognize what is right before their eyes, know full well that the insurrection would never happened without the month-long stoking of Trump and his minions; he is completely responsible for it. They also know that all reputable polls show that the vast majority of Republicans—over 80%—continue to approve of Trump, so they are completely responsible for supporting him.

But the third position is illuminating. It shows the fundamental bad will of Republicans, a character trait that infects their entire world view. Let’s get into this step by step.

When asked whether the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, Reed was very careful to say that the election was legitimate, by which he meant that the rules were followed. But he was nevertheless upset about the election.

Why? Because, he said, the rules were changed in many places to make voting less onerous in the midst of the COVID pandemic. In his opinion, this advantaged Democrats. So although the election was legitimate under the rules, Reed blamed Democrats for changing the rules in their favor.

Now how exactly did Democrats do this? No doubt Reed thinks that the expansion of mail-in voting, drop-off voting, and other adjustments that lessened the threat of contracting COVID from voting was Democrats exerting bare-knuckle political power to increase their vote totals.

The problem with this position is that it isn’t true. While Democrats did make much more use of alternative voting methods than Republicans, it didn’t give Democrats any outsized advantage over all the Republicans who preferred same-day voting. How do we know this? Because Republicans did extremely well in the down-ballot elections. It was Trump who couldn’t muster enough support—and the reasons for that should be obvious.

Of course Reed, and Republicans in general, never let falsity prevent them from holding a position. It just seems to them that alternative voting methods disadvantage them. It just seems to them that alternative methods are ways for Democrats to cheat.

This too is false. There was much more alternative voting in 2020 than ever before, yet nowhere in the nation has any evidence been found of fraud. Even all the Republican-backed “recounts” that intended to find Democrats cheating discovered nothing at all that would change the results of the election. 

But Reed is still upset by the legitimate expansion of voting options in response to the threat of COVID. Why? Because, he said, Democrats were “better” at using power to push the election in their direction.

If you watch the interview, you will see that Reed says this in the most matter-of-fact way, as though he imagines everyone agrees that politics is about power and that the whole point is to use power to get ahead.

He takes that as such a given that he followed up by saying that Republicans have to get “better” at using power to win elections. By this, I take it, he means he is 100% behind the current renewal of Jim-Crow-like voter suppression laws and new-fangled voter nullification laws that are now all the rage in the red states.

Reed’s attitude drips with bad will garnished with childish spite. 

Despite the fact that providing alternate voting options was intended to—and actually did—help people, and despite the fact that the increase in alternative voting produced no advantage for Democrats and no fraud—despite all that, Reed and Republicans like him can’t help but believe that Democrats must always be up to no good. This is pure prejudice, pure hatred—all without any evidence of hostility or malice on the part of others. You couldn’t ask for a more perfect example of bad faith.

And on top of that, Reed’s reaction to his own irrational prejudice is to promise vengeance for the non-existent offense. Republicans will act even more wickedly. They will use whatever power they can muster to concoct new rules that help no one but will hurt their enemies. They will try to stop Democrats from voting. And if that fails, they will insert Republican lackeys into the electoral process and give them the power to overturn the vote if Democrats win. They will be “better” at doing evil than Democrats. That will show them. You couldn’t ask for a more perfect example of childish spite.

Now we get to why this little example of the Republican mindset is so illuminating.

The bad faith and spite of Reed’s performance strikes decent people as utterly banal. They seem like mere personal character flaws—uncritical self-centeredness and lack of empathy. 

This appearance of banality covers the depth of the evil that fuels Republicans and so-called “conservatives.”

As Reed’s response shows, Republicans take it as given that politics is about power. They want power (which is what they really mean by “freedom”). They fear—more than anything else—people they dislike having power.

It never even occurs to them that politics might be about something else. It might be about justice. They can’t conceive of this because justice has to be a sharing of power. It places limits on power. It forces power to bend to equality and decency. That is why the Republican party cannot tolerate Black Lives Matter, taxing the wealthy, voting rights reform, and now even democracy itself. Where Decent America sees simple demands for justice, Republicans see only demands for power.

When President Biden said on Thursday that Trump “values power over principle,” he went directly to the core of Trump’s hold on the Republican party. Republicans continue to idolize him because his obsession with power matches theirs, because he is willing to come out from behind the shield of banality and call out to the pure evil that seethes at the core of Republicanism and “conservatism.”

On January 6, 2021, Trump whipped up a mob and convinced them to leave the shield of banality behind. Decent America saw on television what lies beneath the banality. It is ugly, violent, power-hungry, and wicked.

It was so apparent that even masters of the banal appearance felt compelled to denounce the evil that Trump released. McConnell, McCarthy, Graham and others blamed Trump publicly and tried to dissociate themselves with the mob.

But within weeks they saw that their base wanted to withdraw behind the shield of banality. So they made up with Trump and patched up the excuses used now by Reed and others to pretend that Republicans are merely full and bad faith and spite. This indecent front is their defense.

Decent America is finally waking up to the fact that the banality of bad character is just a protective front for the negativity that seethes within Republicans. Obsession with power is not just a character flaw, not just an ideological preference. It is pure evil. And the only corrective is to oppose it with a massive push for justice.

Biden’s speech on Thursday spoke to the pure good that animates those who cry out for justice. Now we must wait to see whether Decent America will erupt with a demand for justice in time to prevent Republican evil from destroying us all.
January 6: the outbreak of Republican mass psychosis

January 6: the outbreak of Republican mass psychosis

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The ancient Greeks, going back at least to Plato and Aristotle, thought of the inner life of humans as a composite of three distinguishable parts—reason, spirit (the drive to fight and protect), and appetite.

In the Republic, Plato pictures these three parts inside us as a little human (reason), a lion (spirit), and a many-headed hydra (appetite).

Plato says that we are healthy when the three parts operate together in the proper hierarchy, when the parts that are not designed to govern allow themselves to be ruled by the part that is designed to govern.

The appetite is not designed to govern. It simply goes after whatever excites it.

The spirit is not designed to govern. It will fight for anything that strikes it as needing protection, regardless of whether that thing deserves protection.

Reason is the part of us that is designed to rule. It alone can distinguish what is true from what is false, what is good from what is bad, what deserves to be fought for and protected from what should be ignored and allowed to vanish.

The proper ordering of our inner life, therefore, is for reason to decide what is true and good, for spirit to listen to reason and defend the true and the good, and for appetite to be squashed by spirit when what it wants is wrong and encouraged by spirit when what it wants is right.

If we apply this analysis to contemporary Republicans, it could not be more obvious that their inner world is utterly deranged.

One fact above all shows this—their intransigent refusal to recognize the truth about the 2020 election.

They insist on believing that Trump won the election and that he was defrauded of a second term.

They insist on believing this despite a total lack of evidence of fraud, despite the fact that Republicans on the same ballots with Trump did very well, despite the fact that every claim about fraud brought by Trump’s shill lawyers was laughed out of court both by judges appointed by Republicans and Democrats, and despite the fact that a year of Republican-financed “recounts” have turned up no fraud anywhere.

Rejecting evidence of the truth is the infallible sign of a deranged inner life. It is proof that appetite has convinced spirit to fight for and protect what it wants instead of what reason determines is true and good. The two parts that are not designed to rule have usurped control from the part that is designed to rule.

Republicans want what they want, which is power and control. They have deranged their inner lives to serve their appetites. They have done it so much that their reason has atrophied. And what it worse, it has been corrupted into a slave of their appetites. When appetite rules spirit and turns on reason, reason becomes wicked. It turns into a kind of shrewdness that devises sham rationales for the tyranny of appetite.

In ancient Greek, the word for the inner life was psyche, which is usually translated as “soul.” In the nineteenth century, the medical profession coined a term for a deranged inner life from Greek roots—psychosis, meaning “soul disease.”

The deranged inner life of Republicans is certainly a psychosis. Because nearly 70 million people fall into this category, it qualifies as a mass psychosis.

When so many people have a soul disease that puts what they want above what is true and what is good, society is in trouble.

They reinforce one another’s illness. They convince one another that their appetite is good when it is bad. They convince one another that their spirit is right to fight for and protect appetite instead of listening to reason.

There is nothing that such people will not do. Since their reason is vestigial and corrupt, they will “rationalize” any desire they have.

Is it all right to install flunkies whose sole purpose is to delegitimize Democratic votes in the next election? Sure it is, after all Democrats stole the 2020 election—even though that belief is utterly false.

Is it all right to storm the Capitol trying to prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 election for Biden. Sure its, after all Democrats stole the 2020 election—even though that belief is utterly false.

Is it all right to use violence if an election goes against a Republican? Sure it is, say around 40% of Republicans. After all, Democrats have been stealing elections from Republicans forever—even though that belief is utterly false.

Many people have become concerned about the mental health of individuals, who seem to be suffering at an increasing rate in these times of pandemic and political upheaval.

What seems to have been overlooked is that the increase in mental-health problems may just be a result of the mass psychosis of Republicans. With so many people denying reality, is it any wonder that more people are confused and beset by serious doubts about what is true and what is false?

On this anniversary of the Republican assault on American democracy, we must see clearly what is right before us.

The Republican party is not just threatening to destroy our politics, it is threatening to destroy our very souls.
Republicans think government is primarily about freedom. As usual, they are wrong.

Republicans think government is primarily about freedom. As usual, they are wrong.

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Republicans are absolutely sure that the reason for government is to promote and protect personal freedom.

You see it on the websites of Republican congressmen like Mike Johnson, who lists “Individual Freedom” as the first of seven “principles” of conservatism.

You see it in the creed of the Federalist Society, the indoctrination factory that turns out “conservative” lawyers and judges. On its website, the first principle it espouses is that “the state exists to preserve freedom.”

They couldn’t be more wrong. No government exists for the purpose of establishing or preserving freedom.

You don’t need any government whatsoever if all you want is freedom. Anarchy provides the maximum of freedom: everyone can do whatever they want if they can avoid being killed by someone else who is doing what they want.

On the contrary, government exists for the purpose of establishing and preserving justice.

Madison made this clear in  Federalist 51: “Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been, and ever will be pursued, until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.”

Justice, not freedom, is why we have government. It just so happens that you cannot have justice without some measure of freedom.

But if you want the benefits of government, you have to give up some of your freedoms or your “rights.”

Again, Federalist 2 is clear about this. As Hamilton, Madison, and Jay wrote, “Nothing is more certain than the indispensable necessity of government, and it is equally undeniable, that whenever and however it is instituted, the people must cede to it some of their natural rights in order to vest it with requisite powers.”

But Republicans seem to think—in their usual self-contradictory way—that government is not only compatible with individual freedom, but the main promoter of it. By insisting on unlimited personal freedom and doing everything they can to undercut requisite powers of government that curb that freedom, they are actually promoting anarchy. Of course, their abysmal stupidity prevents them from seeing it.

The entire Republican party is devoted to anarchic “freedom.” The Democratic party is devoted to justice. And Republicans hate justice in any form precisely because it limits “freedom.” After all, if you start having to care about young black men just as much as white people, how can you exercise your “freedom” to be a racist?

Liberals and Decent America care about justice, which is the proper reason for having government.

Conservatives and Republicans care about “freedom,” which is to say, about their own selfish designs, justice be damned.

I leave it to the reader to draw the conclusion about which party represents Madisonian democracy and which party is out to destroy it.
Technology, Republican stupidity, and the end of democracy

Technology, Republican stupidity, and the end of democracy

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Technology has made Americans more fearful than ever—and that is why Republicans are on the verge of destroying democracy.

A recent study has shown that easy access to technology is responsible for increasing intolerance of uncertainty and ambiguity. Why? Because people can now get an answer to any question with a few flicks of a thumb on their phones. If they missed the big game, they can find out who won in an instant. Likewise with stock prices, a celebrity’s newest outrageous Tweet, or a demagogue’s most recent brutal speech.

Repeated successful attempts to get the answer they want, like repeated successful attempts at anything, trains people. In this case, it trains them to believe that the answers are there just waiting for them.

Once trained, any deviation from the expected outcome causes distress. In this case, people get agitated when their requests are not answered immediately, or worse, when the answers they get are inconclusive.

The pandemic has demonstrated the truth of this beyond any doubt. Because authorities do not have all the answers to COVID, questions launched into the internet receive partial or conflicting or ambiguous answers. As a result, two generations used to simple answers are highly agitated and don’t know what to do or where to turn.

Their response shows that they have no tolerance for ambiguity. They whine and complain that no one is telling them what to do fast enough. They blame medical authorities, school officials, even the president for not giving them comfortable certainty when no certainty exists.

Yes, it’s true. There are times in life when you cannot get any certainty. Yet millions of people are now trained to act as if uncertainty doesn’t exist. It doesn’t take a genius to see that things are going to turn out bad for them.

If you’ve been trained to behave like certainty is always just a click away, you need to get yourself educated enough to embrace what Aristotle called practical wisdom. Practical wisdom is the ability to size up knowns and unknowns, estimate the risks of uncertainty, and then make intelligent and prudent choices about how to proceed.

But getting educated to practical wisdom requires a skill that few people seem to have any longer: the ability to do hard things, things that push you out of your comfort zone, things that feel uncomfortable and even painful. 

People who never pushed themselves in any way, either physically or mentally, have no conception of the joy that comes from doing something truly difficult—and then succeeding. They live lives that are inexplicable, both to themselves and to others, going along the lines of least resistance, which feels comfortable to them, and reacting angrily when the unknowns of life knock them out of their ruts.

Technology is like honey for stupid people, who will go to any length to avoid coming up against something that contradicts their beliefs. They will do anything to avoid a challenge like discovering they are wrong and having to rethink their beliefs. They don’t know that challenge is the exercise that keeps you growing. Or that if you’re not growing, you’re dying. So they just press a few keys and voila! up comes the answer they want, reflected back at them by others who are just as stupid as they are.

I trust that my readers anticipate where I’m going with this. Honey for stupid people is heroin for Republicans.

Republicans go on social media and find plenty of people espousing views they already believe, regardless of the evidence against those view or the truth about those views. So they never have to confront uncertainty or ambiguity—and that suits them just fine, since they don’t want the discomfort that comes from having to face the reality uncertainty in the face of evidence that contradicts their views.

This character flaw in the stupid is precisely what all authoritarians rely upon to seize and hold power. Hitler knew that mass media were the key to Nazism. Leni Riefenstah and her ilk were commissioned to tell stupid, mean, selfish, and racist Germans that they were right to be stupid, mean, selfish, and racist. The Nazis drummed up the support of the worst people by appealing to their lazy stupidity and their refusal to see that their beliefs were repellent.

Hardly anyone will compare Trump to Hitler. It’s not politically correct. But hasn’t Trmp used today’s mass media to do exactly what Hitler did? Are not today’s Republicans the worst people—Scum America—whose beliefs are stupid, mean, selfish, and racist? And hasn’t he drummed up their support precisely by appealing to their lazy stupidity?

So the attack on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and other tech for letting misinformation and Republican propaganda thrive is a bit misdirected. What is worse is that not that Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or any other tech is letting misinformation thrive. What is worse is that they have already made made two generations of Americans too stupid and lazy to have any practical wisdom.

And then they dumb down even those people to the max, so that their worst character traits dominate them and link them to others whose character is also debased. This easy, comfortable stupidity is holding together Scum America right now. Decent America must find a way to disrupt this confederation of dunces or intelligent government will be extinguished. 

Where are the “kings of disruption” when we need them? They need to start applying their skills to disrupting Republican mass stupidity before November, or the neo-Confederate Republicans will finally achieve their Civil War-era goal of snuffing out the last best hope of earth.
Happy New Year! (Not)

Happy New Year! (Not)

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I wish it were possible to imagine that 2022 will be a high point among recent years. But the signs do not portend well.

In contrast to a year ago, when we were able to look forward to the end of Trump, the arrival of a rational strategy to battle COVID, and the possible end of the era of hate-politics, the state of the nation now is more perilous than ever.

The only comparable period of danger for the United States was the time leading up to the Civil War, when a minority of the country was determined to keep slavery as a way of life—so determined that they would destroy the Union to get their way.

No objective observer can fail to see that we are suffering in a period that rhymes with that terrible time in our history. A minority is once again so determined to have their way that they want to destroy the Union. 

Yesterday, the abysmally stupid and venal Marjorie Taylor Greene (I hope I spelled that incorrectly—she doesn’t deserve accuracy) apparently called for a “divorce” between the liberal and conservative states. Sounds like the precursor to secession to me.

These tragically ignorant and self-destructive scum “conservatives” are too stupid to understand, as the arch-conservative Justice Anthony Scalia once remarked, that the Civil War proved there is no right to secession.

They are also too stupid to understand the suffering they would bring upon themselves if they could effect such a divorce. Intelligent people know that the red states are mostly “taker” states—they receive more money, in some cases much more, from the Federal government than they pay in taxes. Where does that money come from? The blue states, which pay more in taxes than they receive.

So this impossible “divorce” would plunge the red states into helpless poverty. How will Mississippi or Arkansas, for example, help themselves after the next hurricane or tornado when they don’t have the assistance of the federal government? They are highly dependent on the feds for everything (see this article), so a disaster without federal assistance will cripple them.

This is just one scenario. But Democrats have been bewildered for decades by the enormous ignorance of “conservatives.” They have been voting against their own interests, which depend on federal largesse, ever since Reagan. Why?

Because they care more about a stupid idea of “freedom” than about anything else. It is an idea rooted in arrested development, an adolescent notion that they should be able to think and do anything they want, no matter how dangerous their thoughts and actions are to their country, their state, their families, and themselves.

That is not “freedom.” That is anarchy. (I’m working on a piece right now that distinguishes between actual freedom and the stupid freedom of “conservatives.” Suffice it to say, their idea of freedom is utterly incompatible with any sort of government.)

They care more about forcing other people not to have any opinions that contradict their own—no matter how self-contradictory and idiotic those opinions are—than about having a safe, prosperous, and resilient country to live in.

And now these people, incensed by Trump, are openly attacking the critical switches of democracy—the election apparatus, the judicial and prosecutorial offices in the states that up till now have ensured that federal law was followed, and now even the military forces within the states. (See this article.)

None of this is good. And the only force capable of acting against it is the Democratic Party, which holds a tenuous majority in Congress at the moment. But Democrats, who have passed some really beneficial legislation in the past twelve months, have nevertheless wasted a year fighting among themselves instead of launching a frontal attack on the secessionist and Trumpist right.

So I’m sorry to publish such a downer on the eve of 2022, but the signs are bad for democracy in America.

Unless Decent America starts fighting like its survival is at stake—because it is—2022 could well mark the beginning of the end of the American experiment.
Scum grows on the Supreme Court

Scum grows on the Supreme Court

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The travesty of legal debate displayed by the “conservatives” on the Supreme Court this week is just what decent people would expect.

I pass over without remark the ridiculous sophistry that attends all arguments marshaled by “justices” who owe their fealty to the Federalist Society—the fake legal society that exists solely to create bullshit smokescreens for “conservatives” to throw up around them.

Instead, I want to draw attention to Amy Coney Barrett’s astoundingly heartless suggestion that the torment of a state-enforced pregnancy could be expunged simply by taking the child off the mother’s hands though easily arranged adoptions.

No decent person could even let such a idea escape their lips. Behind it is blackness, thoughtless superiority, judgmental disdain for others. Perhaps a person like Amy Coney Barrett could carry a pregnancy to term and then let the baby go to who knows whom, to be raised who knows how, never giving a thought to the welfare of the child she brought into the world. But no decent person could. The thousands of decent women who will be forced do just that will suffer thousands of tragedies at the hands of Amy Coney Barrett and her fanatical religious colleagues on the the court.

And so will all the women and children impregnated by rape and incest, for which there is no exception in these vile “conservative” anti-abortion laws. Amy Coney Barrett and her co-conspirators on the court didn’t even think their tragedies worth a single mention during the arguments last Wednesday.

These “justices” are as intelligent as weasels and as empathetic as wolves.

And they are salivating with glee at the thought of finally being able to impose their minority opinions on the majority.

Only villains are so vicious. And “conservatives.”
Why Wokeness Rankles the Benighted Right

Why Wokeness Rankles the Benighted Right

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Republicans detest wokeness. It has far eclipsed political correctness in the ever-changing list of things conservatives revile.

They detest it, of course, because they are self-centered, mean-spirited, ungenerous, stupid assholes. But that goes without saying.

It is worthwhile, however, to look more closely at every vice of conservatism. It is one thing to categorize conservatives. That helps to deal quickly with their day-to-day viciousness. But it is another thing to understand what makes them so vicious. Knowledge of what makes them tick may help us to cut them off at the knees—which is absolutely necessary at this moment of crisis in the history of democratic governments.

So let’s begin our attempt to understand with a brief concession about wokeness. Even many liberals are annoyed with wokeness.

Wokeness has an air of righteous indignation mixed with more than a dollop of over-the-top zeal. This is because it arises from the sensitive sensibilities of young people, whose response to unfairness is visceral and indignant. It is shared also by some older people who have never lost the single-eyed idealism of their youth.

For those who have been seasoned by life to see shades of gray as well as black and white, the idealistic unconcern with practicalities exhibited by the woke movement is irritating. The rhetorical strategy of pointing out that one’s opponents ought to be ashamed of themselves seldom works. So more experienced liberals can get exasperated by the woke movement’s insistent demand for immediate results.

Nevertheless, there is a time for moderation and a time for expeditious action.

It is difficult to know in the moment where we are in history. For instance, when white southern ministers were telling Martin Luther King to “go slow,” they probably thought they were counseling wisdom. Perhaps they thought that pushing too hard on the southern white supremacists and racists would make the humanitarian goals of the civil rights movement almost impossible to attain. Perhaps they thought that raising the hackles of these people would cause a backlash that would make reform take even longer than it was taking.

But they were wrong. The hostility of the scum needed to be aroused, brought out into the open, so all decent Americans could see how evil they were. Once they revealed their willingness to use violence against their fellow Americans, they could be punished by Federal law. And this caused decent America to turn against them. They had to change their beliefs to decent beliefs or go into hiding.

The worst of them went into hiding. It took fifty years for them to resurface, incited by Trump to believe they can once again express their scumminess openly.

Benighted conservatives don’t even bother now to pretend they are decent. They say racist things in pubic, even in congressional hearings. They champion people who commit violence in the public square, even murder. Scum Republican Congressmen have suggested that Kyle Rittenhouse, the right-wing, gun-nut murderer who recently beat the rap in Wisconsin, should be hired as a Congressional aide.

They do this kind of thing partly because they know such anti-woke behavior enrages liberals. But they also do it partly because they are pure evil. Satan hates goodness just because it is good.

Why do conservatives hate wokenss so much?

Because no one likes to be told that they are wrong. This is a common human reaction, and it is annoying—until you examine the charge and find out whether it is correct. If it is correct, you simply are wrong. Then you just need to fess up to it and readjust your choices in life. If the charge isn’t correct, then you just need to make your argument stronger and rebut the critic. This is the only rational way to deal with criticism.

But conservatives don’t act rationally. They really hate being told they are wrong because they are wrong so often and so completely that even they must know deep down that they cannot defend their beliefs. Yet they are too stiff-necked to admit it, even to themselves. This arrogance and intransigence is just another of the many conservative vices.

Arrogant ignorance, however, is not the only source of their indignation. Wokeness does not just tell them they are wrong. It attacks their vestigial consciences. The concern shown by woke advocates for the dispossessed and downtrodden is more than a criticism; it’s a denunciation. It says, “No decent person would hold the beliefs you profess.”

Liberalism, even in the guise of wokeness, is a movement of conscience. It is the historical engine of the Enlightenment belief that we can apply reason to human action, we can determine where our actions and motivations are wrong, and we can correct them to make ourselves a better species. It is simply right to love our neighbors as ourselves and to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. (Who said those things? Oh, yes. Christ, you hypocritical scum Republicans!)

Conservatives know in their bones that they are essentially and fundamentally wrong about human nature, about social institutions, about interpersonal relationships, about power and liberty—about everything that matters to decent society.

But they so much want power that they don’t want to hear they are wrong, especially from those who are right. Liberals have a functioning conscience. They recognize that power is immoral and that decency is moral. Conservatives have no such conscientious scruples.

That’s why conservatives ridicule the wokeness of the left. They don’t want to hear the criticism of their antisocial, reckless, and hateful selfishness. They don’t want to have their vestigial consciences reactivated.

There is nothing more important that liberals can do right now than abandon their posture that there are people of conscience on the right. The number of them is tiny, and they have no voice. 

Liberals must, like the abolitionists of the nineteenth century, don the mantle of conscience. They must find the language and the attitude that makes conservatives not just irritated and angry, but ashamed of their fearfulness, cowardice, and selfishness.

Will it cause them to become violent? Of course. They are violent now, when they are merely irritated by wokeness. Imagine how violent they will get when their vestigial consciences actually start to bother them.

But the fear of their violence cannot stop us from calling out their evil. To fear their reaction is cowardice, and it will only encourage them to be more evil.

Conservatives will bring this to violence one way or another, sooner or later. Indeed, on January 6 they did, and they are threatening to get worse.

Since all they understand is power, they only thing that will stop them is punishment, the exertion of external controls over their actions. There have been no consequences yet of the sort that make them recalibrate their willingness to promote, champion, and commit evil.

Consequences must be forthcoming soon, or democracy—that historical movement of conscience—will go under. 

And all that will be left is tyranny—which has no conscience and worships only power.
What is lower than scum? Republicans.

What is lower than scum? Republicans.

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Even though I’ve been railing about Scum America for years now, I still get mail about how harsh I am on Republicans. I stopped caring about such mail long ago. The people who write it are out of touch with reality, or Scum America sympathizers, or pie-in-the-sky optimists who still think Republicans are just normal people with strong opinions.

I can’t be bothered with criticism from such people, especially when the fate of our democracy is balanced on a knife’s edge.

I’m not the only one. Yesterday, Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald explained, in much politer language than I tend to use, why he has had it with Republicans.

Pitts had earlier referred to “Mike Pence and others who have apparently sworn an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Florida taco bowl connoisseur who used to be president” as “you people.” A number of his readers took umbrage. One of them said, “‘You people?’ How dare you lump all Trump voters like that.”

Now I’ve been saying for a long time that anyone who still supports Trump is objectively scum—for the simple reason that if you stand together with assholes, justify their assholery, revel in their asshole antics, and imitate their asshole attitudes, you are yourself an asshole.

But Pitt puts it more elegantly.

I venerate the ideals on which this country was founded. . . . Unalienable rights. Life and liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Freedom of speech. Of faith. Of conscience. Government by consent of the governed. Equality before the law. Because of those ideals, America already was a revolution even before it won independence from England. Despite themselves, a band of slaveholding white men somehow founded a nation based on an aspirational, transformational declaration of fundamental human rights.

And then came the taco bowl connoisseur and his acolytes. Their values — more accurately, their lack of values — have coarsened the country, impoverished its spirit, debased what once was revered. Like something out of “It Can’t Happen Here,” Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel of a fascist takeover, our foundational ideals suddenly seem flimsy and insubstantial, thin tissues of fidelity in a hurricane of contempt.

Lack of values, coarsening, debasing, and mocking what is best in the American idea. That’s what I call scum. These people are not Americans except in the sense that they happen to live within the nation’s geographic boundaries. They understand nothing of America’s true greatness or its world-historical experiment in rational self-governance. They do not deserve to be citizens since they know nothing of the responsibilities of citizens.

Those of us who have seen this coming from a distance are not surprised. We realized long ago that these people form a nation of apostates within America, people who have functionally abandoned their loyalties to the living heart of America.

It’s a realization that forces a choice: Shall we embrace fidelity or surrender to the storm? For some of us, that’s no choice at all. Hence, “you people” — less a call for division than a belated recognition that division has already come, that some of us have seceded from common cause, common ideals, common hope — and that the rest of us must recognize that, if only so that we can be clear-eyed about saving ourselves.

To be clear-eyed about these scummers, we should know exactly where they differ from real Americans. And Pitts ends his piece with a powerful summary of those differences:

You people don’t believe in freedom of speech. My people do.

You people don’t cherish the rule of law. My people do.

You people don’t support democratic ideals. My people do.

You people don’t value facts and reason. My people do.

You people don’t honor the aspirational and transformational ideas that made this country great. My people do.

For those reasons and more, you people are not my people.

My people are Americans.

We decent Americans now must choose. It is no longer a conscientious stance to pretend that Republicans are not rebellious anti-Americans in our midst. No decent American—whether politican or average citizen—should any longer treat them with courtesy or respect.

They are scum.

We need to sweep them away before they destroy everything that America once was and could be again.

Being the scum that they are, they are intent on civil war If they can’t get their way. We may just have to give them that war—and make sure it ends the same way as the last one.
Well, well. So “conservatism” is all about racism after all.

Well, well. So “conservatism” is all about racism after all.

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Who would have thought it?

Only all my readers. As I showed in chapter 3 of my book Asshole Nation: Trump and the Rise of Scum America, modern conservatism is nothing but a con perpetrated by asshole capitalists manipulating asshole racists to hate everything admirable about America.

Now Larry Sabato, one of America’s foremost researchers in the field of political science, has demonstrated that Republicans are undeniably racist, undeniably selfish, and undeniably scum.

In a post delicately titled “Can Democrats Win Back the White Working Class?” Sabato’s Center for Politics at the University of Virginia has unveiled the research that proves Republicans are all about racism. I urge everyone to read this groundbreaking piece. But here I just want to quote the conclusions drawn from a great deal of regression analysis. Here we go:

Racial resentment and party identification are by far the strongest predictors of conservative ideology. Evangelical identification has a significant impact as well, but its effect is not nearly as strong as the effects of racial resentment and party ID. Family income has almost no effect on ideology and economic insecurity has a negative effect, which means that greater insecurity is associated with less conservative policy preferences.

These findings indicate that while ideology was by far the most important predictor of candidate preference among white voters in 2020, ideology was itself largely explained by feelings of racial resentment. Conservative policy preferences among white working class voters on a wide range of issues were closely connected to their racial attitudes and specifically to their belief that white people have been losing ground in American society because of unfair advantages enjoyed by Blacks and other nonwhite groups.

So all the self-humiliating Democratic hand-wringing after Hillary Clinton’s loss was pure BS. Scum America did not vote for Trump out of economic despair over the failure of their shot at the American dream. They did not turn against Democrats because they felt justifiable anger over their permanent position in the bottom 99%. They voted for Trump because he expressed their deep-seated racism and promised to make it ascendant in America.

In a new post out today, the same researchers come to another conclusion that is backed up by statistical analysis, which you can peruse at your leisure. Here is the conclusion:

Whereas Biden voters are animated by racial and social justice concerns, Trump voters fear they will suffer personally, socially, culturally, and economically from the effects of immigration. 

In other words, we are now two different nations. Democrats belong to Decent America, a land in which decent people are decently concerned about the difficulties of their fellow citizens. Republicans belong to Scum America, a land in which hateful racism fuels resentment, selfishness, unpatriotic separatism, and bullying insistence that scummers will get their way or else they will burn down everything.

Conservatism has always been about nothing but making America safe for racism in order to protect ruthless capitalism from suffering again the defeat that almost killed it during the first half of the twentieth century.

If we don’t stop “conservatives” from passing “laws” that will allow their plants inside state government to count the vote in upcoming elections, Scum America will get its way.

And the world will lose its last best hope.