{"id":21681,"date":"2024-04-24T18:00:58","date_gmt":"2024-04-25T01:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=21681"},"modified":"2024-04-24T18:09:35","modified_gmt":"2024-04-25T01:09:35","slug":"how-rugged-individualists-cannot-solve-global-problems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2024\/04\/24\/how-rugged-individualists-cannot-solve-global-problems\/","title":{"rendered":"How Rugged Individualists Cannot Solve Global Problems"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li> A note about my trip tomorrow to Austin;\n<li> How Mike Johnson characterizes Republicans as &#8220;rugged individualists,&#8221; yet who can still not get along to solve actual problems;\n<li> How Trump&#8217;s policies would increase inflation, and his fans haven&#8217;t noticed;\n<li> More about Republicans&#8217; avocation of violence;\n<li> Short takes: David Barton and how myth becomes history; are rural voters more progressive than we think?; immigrants, democracy, dying young, and facists.\n<\/ul>\n<p>I could have mentioned yesterday that I am, in fact, headed to Austin TX tomorrow, Thursday, for the first time since Larry died, to go through his house. There was some complication about getting his actual Death Certificate (the Justice of the Peace in Hays County, which provides coroner services, somehow didn&#8217;t connect with the mortuary that took care of his body) so I am not as far along with &#8220;settling his affairs&#8221; like bank accounts as I&#8217;d hoped. But it&#8217;s in progress.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, for today, another batch of two or three days&#8217; worth of posts about what the MAGA crazies are up to. After today, probably no posts for the next four days.<\/p>\n<p>This is the most curious.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.joemygod.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/hewjon-660x330.png\" width=\"300\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>Joe.My.God, 24 Apr 2024<\/strong>: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.joemygod.com\/2024\/04\/johnson-democrats-are-collectivists-and-socialists-but-republicans-are-principled-rugged-individualists\/\">Johnson: Democrats Are \u201cCollectivists And Socialists\u201d But Republicans Are \u201cPrincipled Rugged Individualists\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<p><!--more-->This aggregate site is capturing what Speaker Mike Johnson said on the Hugh Hewitt Show.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cThe Democrats think and act like a union. They\u2019re collectivists. You know, they move in a herd. Many of them are not deeply principled or philosophical folks and so you can command them, and they\u2019ll move as social animals. They\u2019re socialists, right?<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe, on the other hand, are rugged individualists, and we\u2019re deeply principled and philosophical. And it\u2019s difficult to get us to move in tandem sometimes.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Sounds great, right? Democrats move in a herd but Republicans think for themselves.<\/p>\n<p>Nonsense. Words matter. He&#8217;s playing to the American myth that &#8220;rugged individualists&#8221; built the nation by&#8230; living all alone on the frontier? When you live together with other people, in a town or city or an entire planet, you have to cooperate with others to get things done. We&#8217;re not living in isolated tribes, or on the frontier, any more. This was a central theme of the book I just read, Joshua Greene&#8217;s <b>Moral Tribes<\/b> (review <a href=\"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2024\/04\/18\/joshua-greene-moral-tribes-post-2\/\">here<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>And Johnson plays on the fact that he can use words like &#8220;collectivists&#8221; and &#8220;socialists&#8221; and count on his followers to automatically assign such people as evil, without in the slightest understanding what those words actually mean.<\/p>\n<p>\\\\<\/p>\n<p>Thus, these far-right rugged individualists cannot cooperate to get anything done.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/compote.slate.com\/images\/2c5799b3-24e4-4419-9c65-1c4883de4bdd.jpeg?crop=1560%2C1040%2Cx0%2Cy0&amp;width=1280\" width=\"300\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>Slate, Jim Newell, 24 Apr 2024<\/strong>: <a href=\"https:\/\/slate.com\/news-and-politics\/2024\/04\/congress-johnson-ukraine-immigration-impeachment-greene.html\">They Came. They Squawked. They Squandered Their Leverage.<\/a>, subtitled &#8220;Far-right Republicans in Congress have sabotaged every possible policy win for their party.&#8221;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In November, a characteristically impassioned Texas Rep. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.c-span.org\/video\/?c5093452\/user-clip-rep-chip-roy-tx-thing\">Chip Roy unloaded<\/a> in a House floor speech about how lousy a job House Republicans were doing.<\/p>\n<p class=\"slate-paragraph slate-graf\" data-word-count=\"56\" data-uri=\"slate.com\/_components\/slate-paragraph\/instances\/clvcu8azo000r3b6xq09bd9pd@published\">\u201cOne thing. I want my Republican colleagues to give me <em>one thing<\/em>\u2014<em>one!<\/em>\u2014that I can go campaign on and say we did. One!\u201d he shouted, inviting anybody hanging around listening to \u201ccome explain to me one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done besides \u2018Well, I guess it\u2019s not as bad as the Democrats.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>\\<\/p>\n<p>There have been analogous articles about how this Congress has accomplished less than virtually any other. E.g., <a href=\"https:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/least-productive-congress-since-great-013501789.html\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>\\\\<\/p>\n<p>I haven&#8217;t been following exactly how Trump&#8217;s policies would increase inflation, but here are these.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.vox-cdn.com\/thumbor\/hc0b4IPpg1vlTg9J8zO4ChDb75I=\/0x0:5320x3547\/920x613\/filters:focal(2235x1349:3085x2199):format(webp)\/cdn.vox-cdn.com\/uploads\/chorus_image\/image\/73301036\/2147786862.0.jpg\" width=\"300\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>Vox, Eric Levitz, 24 Apr 2024<\/strong>: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vox.com\/2024-elections\/24137666\/trump-agenda-inflation-prices-dollar-devaluation-tariffs\">Trump\u2019s team keeps promising to increase inflation<\/a>, subtitled &#8220;Voters trust Trump to lower prices, even as his advisers put forward plans for increasing Americans\u2019 cost of living.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>And<\/p>\n<p><strong>Media Matters, Zachary Pleat, 23 Apr 2024<\/strong>: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mediamatters.org\/new-york-times\/top-5-newspapers-continue-mostly-ignore-presumptive-republican-presidential-nominee\">Top 5 newspapers continue to mostly ignore presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump\u2019s inflationary policies<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Subtitled: &#8220;Newspaper coverage following the release of the February CPI report, which included the period after Trump clinched the GOP nomination, only mentioned his inflationary policies in 2 of 71 articles that discussed inflation&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Are voters paying any attention at all?<\/p>\n<p>Well, probably not. I heard something &#8212; this morning on NPR I think &#8212; that claimed that people who follow the news closely are partisan and have made their minds up about who to vote for, and it&#8217;s only the uncommitted waffly middle that might be influenced by this or that news article. Is this how to run a democracy? With no accounting of policy to evidence and facts? Apparently so.<\/p>\n<p>\\\\<\/p>\n<p>More about Republicans who advocate violence to solve every problem. In particular, Tom Cotton. And Josh Hawley.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.theatlantic.com\/thumbor\/6pbYfpr1fProXLHP4H-oSyGlsXs=\/0x0:3000x1688\/976x549\/media\/img\/mt\/2024\/04\/GettyImages_1243896282\/original.jpg\" width=\"300\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>The Atlantic, Adam Serwer, 24 Apr 2024<\/strong>: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/ideas\/archive\/2024\/04\/columbia-national-guard-tom-cotton\/678163\/\">The Republicans Who Want American Carnage<\/a>, subtitled &#8220;Calls for the National Guard to stop campus protests are not about safety.&#8221;<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW\" data-flatplan-paragraph=\"true\">Tom Cotton has never seen a left-wing protest he didn\u2019t want crushed at gunpoint.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW\" data-flatplan-paragraph=\"true\">On Monday, the Arkansas senator <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/SenTomCotton\/status\/1782421237517496770\" data-event-element=\"inline link\">demanded that President Joe Biden<\/a> send in the National Guard to clear out the student protests at Columbia University against the Israel-Hamas war, which he described as \u201cthe nascent pogroms at Columbia.\u201d Last week, Cotton <a href=\"https:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/story\/news\/politics\/2024\/04\/16\/tom-cotton-gaza-israel-protesters\/73342700007\/\" data-event-element=\"inline link\">posted on X<\/a>,\u00a0 \u201cI encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands. It\u2019s time to put an end to this nonsense.\u201d He later deleted the post and reworded it so that it did not sound quite so explicitly like a demand for aspiring vigilantes to lynch protesters.<\/p>\n<p>This is a long-standing pattern for Cotton, who enjoys issuing calls for violence that linger on the edge of plausible deniability when it comes to which groups, exactly, are appropriate targets for lethal force. During the George Floyd protests of 2020, Cotton <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/TomCottonAR\/status\/1267459561675468800?s=20&amp;t=Axke51YEuPp_ekCMs5TI2g\" data-event-element=\"inline link\">demanded that the U.S. military<\/a> be sent in with orders to give \u201cno quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/theracket.news\/p\/fire-water\" data-event-element=\"inline link\">insisting unconvincingly<\/a> in a later <em>New York Times<\/em> op-ed that he was not conflating peaceful protesters with rioters. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who had <a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.com\/news\/magazine\/2024\/01\/06\/jan-6-josh-hawley-photo-q-a-00134017\" data-event-element=\"inline link\">raised a fist<\/a> in apparent solidarity with the mob that assaulted the Capitol on January 6 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nbcnews.com\/politics\/congress\/josh-hawley-seen-fleeing-trump-mob-riled-newly-released-jan-6-footage-rcna39490\" data-event-element=\"inline link\">before fleeing through the halls<\/a> to avoid them once the riot began, echoed Cotton\u2019s call for deploying the National Guard to Columbia. (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.kansascity.com\/news\/politics-government\/article286871930.html\" data-event-element=\"inline link\">Both men<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/rollcall.com\/2024\/04\/15\/cotton-among-gop-lawmakers-who-back-defendants-in-jan-6-case\/\" data-event-element=\"inline link\">as it turns out<\/a>, are in favor of <em>some<\/em> quarter for \u201cinsurrectionists\u201d who happen to be on the right side.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>\\\\<\/p>\n<p>Mythology becomes history, to some. This has likely always happened.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/rwwbarton.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/rwwbarton-300x168.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"168\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 22 Apr 2024<\/strong>: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rightwingwatch.org\/post\/gop-members-of-congress-gush-over-christian-nationalist-pseudo-historian-david-barton\/\">GOP Members Of Congress Gush Over Christian Nationalist Pseudo-Historian David Barton<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\\\\<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2024\/04\/23\/multimedia\/23opinion-thepoint-stockman-rural-zwvf\/23opinion-thepoint-stockman-rural-zwvf-superJumbo.jpg?quality=75&amp;auto=webp\" width=\"300\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>NY Times, Farah Stockman, 23 Apr 2024<\/strong>: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/live\/2024\/04\/16\/opinion\/thepoint#rural-voters-progresive-survey\">Rural Voters Are More Progressive Than the Democratic Party Thinks<\/a><\/p>\n<p>How do we tell? By surveys. I think it&#8217;s a deep truth that we oversimplify reality by classifying red states and blue states, whereas in reality very few areas are completely one-sided. A flaw in our election process, perhaps. (Ranked voting! Eliminate the two party system!)<\/p>\n<p>\\\\<\/p>\n<p>Running out of time. Just headlines:<\/p>\n<p><strong>Washington Post, Catherine Rampell, 23 Apr 2024<\/strong>: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/opinions\/2024\/04\/23\/immigration-jobs-economy\/\">Opinion | You don\u2019t want immigrants? Then tell grandma she can never retire.<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>LA Times, LZ Granderson, 23 Apr 2024<\/strong>: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/opinion\/story\/2024-04-23\/republican-election-integrity-bill-vote-fraud-democracy\">Column: Republicans aren\u2019t protecting elections. They don\u2019t want democracy<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>AlterNet, Thom Hartmann, 20 Apr 2024<\/strong>: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.alternet.org\/alternet-exclusives\/die-young-vote-republican\/\">Opinion | Want to die young? Bathe yourself in right-wing media and vote Republican<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>Salon, Paul Rosenberg, 20 Apr 2024<\/strong>: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.salon.com\/2024\/04\/20\/a-prehistory-of-maga-mainstream-conservatives-never-really-purged-the-fascists\/\">A prehistory of MAGA: &#8220;Mainstream&#8221; conservatives never really purged the fascists<\/a>, subtitled &#8220;Author David Austin Walsh says &#8216;respectable&#8217; conservatives have tolerated racists and neo-Nazis all along&#8221; (Comment: isn&#8217;t this obvious?)<\/p>\n<p>\\\\<\/p>\n<p>Every day I reread and copy-edit my post from the evening before. If this comment is still here, I have not yet done so for this post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A note about my trip tomorrow to Austin; How Mike Johnson characterizes Republicans as &#8220;rugged individualists,&#8221; yet who can still not get along to solve actual problems; How Trump&#8217;s policies would increase inflation, and his fans haven&#8217;t noticed; More about &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2024\/04\/24\/how-rugged-individualists-cannot-solve-global-problems\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,14,54,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-morality","category-personal-history","category-politics","category-psychology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21681"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21681\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21688,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21681\/revisions\/21688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}