Latest in a recurring theme about how Republicans not only aren’t trying to solve real problems, or even fighting the culture wars, they’re fighting *imaginary* problems to rile up their white working class base.
NYT, Paul Krugman, 18 April 2022: Republicans Say, ‘Let Them Eat Hate’
Beginning with T****’s endorsement of J.D. Vance.
Ohio’s G.O.P. primary has, after all, been a race to the bottom, with candidates seemingly competing to see who can be crasser, who can do the most to dumb down the debate.
Vance once addressed a real issue. Trump in 2016 pretended to be concerned about real issues.
Back in 2016 Trump offered a different answer: protectionist trade policies that, he claimed, would revive industrial employment. The arithmetic on this claim never worked, and in practice Trump’s trade wars appear to have reduced the number of U.S. manufacturing jobs. But back then Trump was at least pretending to address a real issue.
At this point, however, neither Trump nor any other important Republican is willing to go even that far. I’d say that G.O.P. campaigning in 2022 is all culture war, all the time, except that this would be giving Republicans too much credit. They aren’t fighting a real culture war, a conflict between rival views of what our society should look like; they’re riling up the base against phantasms, threats that don’t even exist.
Math textbooks. Disney. QAnon conspiracy theories.
But look, none of this is a mystery. Republicans are following an old playbook, one that would have been completely familiar to, say, czarist-era instigators of pogroms. When the people are suffering, you don’t try to solve their problems; instead, you distract them by giving them someone to hate.
And history tells us that this tactic often works.
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Along these lines,
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 18 April 2022: Banning math books and attacking libraries: Republicans ramp up their mission to spread ignorance, subtitled, “Florida bans 50 math books while a Republican judge in Texas argues there’s no reason ‘to provide a public library'”
Key quote:
To those who have been carefully watching the GOP as they become more openly fascistic, none of this is surprising. As I wrote in December, authoritarians have long taken a dim view of the very concept of education. Even basic literacy and math skills are viewed as a threat because they open the door to critical thinking. Above all else, Republicans do not want a population armed with critical thinking skills. While it doesn’t get much mainstream press coverage, conservatives have long been nurturing anger over federal education guidelines, often called “Common Core.” These standards aim to give kids a real understanding of math and how it works, instead of simply memorizing multiplication tables and quitting before they get to calculus. Having people understand concepts on a deeper level terrifies the right, however. They prefer a populace that’s kept ignorant because they are prone to blindly following authority.
Is Republican opposition to critical thinking at the root of their opposition to Common Core? I’ve never quite understood the antipathy toward establishing base levels of mathematical and literary understanding that every child (and adult) should aspire to. But Marcotte’s take makes sense.
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Salon, Kirk Swearingen, 19 April 2022: Rick Scott’s loony-tunes 11-point plan: Classic GOP projection, and a roadmap to theocracy, subtitled, “No wonder Mitch McConnell is unhappy: Scott’s ‘batsh*t’ plan reveals way too much about what Republicans want.”
I mentioned Rick Scott’s agenda once before (on March 3rd). The present writer describes it thusly:
At least he’s honest: The gentleman from the Sunshine State openly advocates for dismantling the federal government, undoing all federal laws and regulations and effectively transforming our democracy into a white male Christian theocracy.
OK, not in so many words, but that’s the idea. For some reason Scott dispensed with a hyphen in the title of his “11 Point Plan to Rescue America” — is punctuation “woke” now? It’s so hard to keep up — which might better be described as a Christian-right reboot of the Ten Commandments (plus one).
The writer notes that Scott is “the wealthiest person in the U.S. Senate” and that in 1997 his company was fined $1.7 billion in what was “at the time the largest health care fraud in U.S. history.”
It’s easy to snipe (the writer’s word) at Scott’s 11 points. More interesting is the writer’s own 11-point plan to save America. I will quote his 11 points without the several lines of comments about each.
- In a democracy, you should not lie or spread misinformation — or trust anyone who does.
- You should not treat people who are different from you — in race, color, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation or anything else — as second-class citizens.
- Your religious freedom is not a license to harass others with your personal beliefs.
- You likely have your hands full with your own love life.
- You should not ban books (unless you want to see them on the bestseller list).
- You should be careful in picking your populist pals.
- Your culture wars are an attempt to divide and distract Americans.
- Your freedom of speech is not under attack.
- You should not elect obvious grifters to public office.
- You should bear in mind that we need each other.
- We all need to get out more often — to walk in nature, see a play, hear some music and, most of all, stop thinking about our political disagreements.
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Noted briefly:
AlterNet, Alex Henderson, 18 April 2022: ‘Birds Aren’t Real’: How a mock conspiracy theory caught on with the far right
Some people will believe anything.
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The Atlantic, Sarah Longwell, 18 April 2022: Trump Supporters Explain Why They Believe the Big Lie
Subtitle: “For many of Trump’s voters, the belief that the election was stolen is not a fully formed thought. It’s more of an attitude, or a tribal pose.”
My comment: I would say that few if any conservative positions are the result of “fully formed thoughts.” They are the result of rote ideology, in spite of evidence, and the primacy of tribal belonging.
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Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 18 April 2022: Christian Nationalist Tony Spell Says Prophets Should Reign Over Government and the People
My comments: There are so many prophets out there, it seems, judging from stories like this one, and many others on this site and others. “Prophets” who regularly predict that T**** will be re-instated real soon now, just as “prophets” for centuries have been predicting that Jesus will return real soon now. That their “prophecies” fail, over and over, again and again, never seems to deter their followers, the believers.
And so I wonder why we should take the “prophets” of the Bible any more seriously than the current batch of “prophets.” There are *always* crazies who presume to speak for God, or to divine the future. Virtually none of their prophecies pan out, yet, over history, there are believers who try to validate those “prophets” by cherry-picked current events and selectively interpreting those “prophecies,” in crass examples of motivating thinking. (That a few do seem to pan out is the example of the broken clock.)
Thomas Paine — one of the “founding fathers” — pointed this out at length in his The Age of Reason. My post about the book here, where I wrote:
Part III is an exhaustive examination of all the citations, in the New Testament gospels, to passages from the Old Testament that are implied to be prophecies about Jesus Christ, from which Paine concludes,
The practice which the writers of those books employ is not more false than it is absurd. They state some trilling case of the person they call Jesus Christ, and then cut out a sentence from some passage of the Old Testament and call it a prophecy of that case. But when the words thus cut out are restored to the place they are taken from, and read with the words before and after them, they give the lie to the New Testament.
Believers seem not to care.
