A chilling laboratory of authoritarianism I thought this piece by Don Moynihan was one of the best analyses I’ve seen of the attack on democracy we’re seeing in Wisconsin. It’s long but if you have time, read the whole thing. You’ll understand what’s happening in Wisconsin but also where the Republicans are headed nationally. This is who they are now: “DEMOCRACY IS A SYSTEM IN WHICH parties lose elections,” according to the political scientist Adam Przeworski. By that measure Wisconsin is not really a democracy. Sure, the Republican Party of Wisconsin routinely is defeated in statewide elections. Indeed, since 2018, they have lost fourteen of seventeen such races. But can they be said to really lose when they refuse to accept their defeat and instead use power accrued by undemocratic means to minimize or even reverse those losses? In this, Wisconsin was the pre-Trump canary in the coal mine, alerting us to the undemocratic depths to which the GOP would descend. The state’s Republicans then became bolder following Trump’s Big Lie example.
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Good to know According to the DC Circuit, congressional reps can foment coups and there’s nothing anyone can do about it: A top House conservative’s conversations with allies in Congress and the Trump White House about overturning the 2020 election are off-limits to special counsel Jack Smith, an appeals court ruled in a newly unsealed court opinion. A three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that prosecutors’ effort to access the cellphone communications of Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) with colleagues and executive branch officials violated his immunity under the Constitution’s Speech or Debate clause, which shields members of Congress from legal proceedings connected to their official duties. “While elections are political events, a Member’s deliberation about whether to certify a presidential election or how to assess information relevant to legislation about federal election procedures are textbook legislative acts,” Judge Neomi Rao wrote in the opinion issued last week. The decision breaks new ground in a decadeslong tug-of-war between Congress and the executive branch.
My interview with @RepMattGaetz last night. On not having the votes but threatening countless attempts to oust McCarthy anyway "I’m going to do it over and over again until it works" pic.twitter.com/BJeOtgvHDG — Abby D. Phillip (@abbydphillip) September 13, 2023 That was a good interview by Phillips. Gaetz thinks he’s going to best McCarthy. And he will make his life miserable. But who does he think will take MyKevin’s place?
In the Romney excerpt @mckaycoppins Paul Ryan, already out as speaker, calls Romney and lobbies him not to vote to convict Trump in 1st impeachment trial — for all the self serving cynical reasons that you might imagine. https://t.co/Kl8qwjpbTX — Susan Glasser (@sbg1) September 13, 2023 Yep: Shortly before 2 p.m. on the day of the vote, Romney left his office and walked to the Capitol, where he waited in his hideaway for his turn to speak. Minutes before going on the floor, he received an unexpected call on his cellphone. It was Paul Ryan. Romney and his team had kept a tight lid on how he planned to vote, but somehow his former running mate had gotten word that he was about to detonate his political career. Romney had been less judgmental of Ryan’s acquiescence to Trump than he’d been of most other Republicans’. He believed Ryan was a sincere guy who’d simply misjudged Trump. And yet, here was Ryan on the phone, making the same arguments Romney had heard from some of his more calculating colleagues.
The dominance of micro-founded macroeconomic models—models derived directly from the microeconomic concepts of utility-maximizing individuals and profit-maximizing firms, and based on the Ramsey Neoclassical growth model (Ramsey 1928)—did not go unchallenged prior to the Global Financial Crisis. But the critics were treated in the time-honoured Neoclassical way, of being both ignored and disparaged—if they were, … Continue reading "Soul-searching by a soulless discipline"
Designed-in countermajoritarian features contribute to minority rule Michelle Goldberg speaks with Harvard government professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. The authors of “How Democracies Die” (2018) released “Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point” this morning. What shocked them since 2018 was how swiflty the GOP slid sown the behavioral sink into insurrection. They did not consider the Republican Party an authoritarian party in 2018, and “did not expect it to transform so quickly and so thoroughly.” Goldberg writes: “Tyranny of the Minority” is their attempt to make sense of how American democracy eroded so fast. “Societal diversity, cultural backlash and extreme-right parties are ubiquitous across established Western democracies,” they write. But in recent years, only in America has a defeated leader attempted a coup. And only in America is the coup leader likely to once again be the nominee of a major party. “Why did America, alone among rich established democracies, come to the brink?” they ask.
But he did it anyway McCarthy doesn’t take questions. He told Breitbart 11 days ago he wouldn’t launch an impeachment inquiry without a House vote. Opening one now unilaterally is a major reversal for the speaker. It comes as he doesn’t appear to have the votes to proceed. pic.twitter.com/H0rSVvqLlt — Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) September 12, 2023 McCarthy pulled the trigger as we knew he would. He didn’t have the votes for a real inquiry, however, which means that the new rules they say they need will have to be litigated because a full vote of the House is required. So, this may end up being yet another performance art project which the extremists hope will make voters assume there must be something to it and write off Trump’s corruptions and criminality because “both sides do it.” It’s ridiculous but we expected nothing less. Now let’s see if McCarthy bought himself at least an extension to get the government funded. I won’t be surprised if they say, “that’s nice, but we also need to have the DOJ and the “woke” Pentagon de-funded.
In his newsletter today, Dan Pfeiffer looks at the bizarre phenomenon of a presidential candidate getting much more popular after he’s indicted four times: A number of theories surfaced to explain this unexpected and deeply concerning outcome — Republicans are a cult, Ron DeSantis sucks, etc. Elections are dynamic enterprises. There are a lot of interrelated factors that lead to an outcome. It’s not as simple as “Ron DeSantis sucks,” even if he is one of the most maladroit candidates in modern political history. Here are X findings from recent polls that help explain why Republican voters are flocking to Trump as his likelihood of spending the rest of his life in prison skyrockets: 1. Republicans Trust Trump Over Everyone Else Donald Trump is one of the most prolific and obvious liars the world has ever known. Here’s how the Washington Post fact checker summarized Trump’s presidency: Trump’s dishonesty is so blatant that most Americans find it disqualifying, but Trump’s voters see only qualifications. They do not believe he is dishonest. They think he is the only honest man in public life.
Krugman discusses why people people believe things that just aren’t true: Remember “American carnage?” Donald Trump’s 2017 inaugural address was peculiar in many ways, but one of the most striking oddities was his obsession with a problem — urban crime — that had greatly diminished over the past generation. For reasons we still don’t fully understand, violent crime in America fell rapidly from around 1990 to the mid-2010s: True, there was a crime surge after the pandemic, which now seems to be ebbing. But that lay in the future. Trump talked as if crime was running rampant as he spoke. Yet if Trump had false beliefs about trends in crime, he had plenty of company. Gallup polls Americans about crime every year, and all through the great decline in violent crime a majority of Americans said that crime was increasing: Were the crime statistics misleading? Homicide numbers are pretty solid. And people behaved as if crime were falling; notably, there was a wave of gentrification as affluent Americans moved into newly safe central cities. But all the same, people told pollsters that they believed crime was rising.
You’ve probably already heard about the Ukraine/Russia controversy surrounding Walter Isaacson’s new book about Elon Musk. (If not, you can click this link.) But there’s a lot more in the book apparently, which is discussed here in this piece by Matt Pearce in the LA Times: Musk is already one of the most well-known and extensively covered leaders in American corporate life (and one of its most unavoidable figures on the service he has renamed X). Isaacson’s biography is a Musk agonistes: a portrait of a (largely) self-made, emotionally volatile entrepreneur from South Africa who has a tortured relationship with his father and an addiction to crises of the self-inflicted variety.