Republicans: continued

[Tero]

OK, then money: they will just fund Biden a bit but not past 2022 election. All the spending will be done then.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/1 ... ent-494410

[L'Emmerdeur]

Tell simplistic lies about a complex topic--WIN! It's a standard right wing approach, and a current example follows the pattern unerringly.

'Why the panic over "critical race theory" is the perfect right-wing troll'

The American right is currently in an utter panic over "critical race theory" being taught in public schools.

On Fox News, there's been an explosion of hysterical coverage, complete with contradictory segments where hosts claim they "don't see people for skin color" before whining that "the United States of America elected an African-American as president of the United States" and "the biggest entertainers, the biggest sports stars are African-Americans." Republicans who otherwise claim to be defenders of free speech are busy trying to pass laws canceling any kind of talk they deem "critical race theory," which, in practice, amounts to bans on talking about historical facts. Across the nation, white parents are crowding school board meetings, melting down over this "critical race theory" thing they've heard so much about.

Yet with so many white people across the country in a total freak out over "critical race theory," it appears few, if any, of them could even explain what it actually is. That's because, despite what Fox News is telling them, critical race theory — the actual academic framework that was developed in law schools to understand the historical reasons our legal system perpetuates racial inequalities — is not, in fact, being taught to 3rd graders or even 11th graders. Claims otherwise are a complete lie, ginned up by right-wing propagandists who are desperate to keep the GOP base whipped into a racist frenzy.

But even though the whole panic is built on a foundation of sand, it would be unwise of liberals to shrug and dismiss this particular bit of agitprop.

It is important to note that the fabricated fury over "critical race theory" is a cleverly constructed right-wing troll. Liberals who want to respond with a quick, easily digested rebuttal are instead boxed into a frustrating corner. Because pointing out that critical race theory is not being taught in public schools is a trap, as it could be construed to imply that there's something wrong with critical race theory. And any straightforward defense of critical race theory implies that schoolchildren are somehow expected to understand graduate school-level academic theories. But in fact, the real issue at hand is that conservatives don't want white kids to learn even the most basic truths about American history.

To understand what's really going on under all the scare-mongering, it's important to know that when conservatives talk about "critical race theory," they aren't talking about the actual academic framework developed by law professors. Instead, as Sean Illing at Vox explains, "conservatives have appropriated critical race theory as a convenient catchall to describe basically any serious attempt to teach the history of race and racism."

Of course, telling people that you oppose teaching the truth about American history sounds bad. So instead, conservative pundits and Republican politicians use the term "critical race theory," using the thin justification that the facts teachers are sharing have often been unearthed by people doing academic research within this framework. The word "theory," in particular, has a long history of setting off poorly educated conservative voters who think it just means "not facts" and don't know that, in academia, it is used to mean an analytical framework for developing factual information. Think of the hysterics around evolutionary theory, for instance, which many conservatives would dismiss as "just a theory," not grasping that it was empirically sound. ...

[Brian Peacock]

It's basically the most recent in a litany of barely concealed Republican and conservative dog whistles.

[Sean Hayden]

Have they tried just talking to teachers? What do they imagine is happening?

[Seabass]

It's basically the most recent in a litany of barely concealed Republican and conservative dog whistles.

This isn't a dog whistle. They're passing laws. They're white washing history. It's part of their full on attack on objective truth.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Have they tried just talking to teachers? What do they imagine is happening?

In a nutshell--white children are being taught to hate themselves and despise the white race. Won't somebody please think of the children?!!?

The reality of what takes place in classrooms doesn't matter because this is a convenient front to open in the 'they're taking away OUR country!!' culture wars.

[Seabass]

Call it authoritarianism

The Republican Party has embraced an agenda that rigs the rules in their favor. There’s a name for that behavior.

American democracy is in a bad way, and the Republican Party is the reason why.

Blocking an inquiry into the January 6 attack on the Capitol, embracing Trump’s “Big Lie” that the election was stolen, making it easier for partisans to tamper with the process of counting votes: These are not the actions of a party committed to the basic idea of open, representative government.

It’s common to call this GOP behavior “anti-democratic,” but the description can only go so far. It tells us what they’re moving America away from, but not where they want to take it. The term “minority rule” is closer, but euphemistic; it puts the Republican actions in the same category as a Supreme Court ruling, countermajoritarian moves inside a democratic framework rather than something fundamentally opposed to it.

It’s worth being clear about this: The GOP has become an authoritarian party pushing an authoritarian policy agenda.

There are many kinds of authoritarian systems, and many ways to become one of them. In the United States, the threat that looms is a slide into what scholars call “competitive authoritarianism”: a system that still holds elections, but under profoundly unfair conditions that systematically favor one side. That process, of one party stacking the deck in its favor over the course of years, isn’t unique — we’ve seen it in countries across the world in recent years, in places as diverse as Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela.

Understanding what’s happening in the US as something fundamentally similar to what’s happened elsewhere — using the a-word, unflinchingly — helps us not only diagnose the most dangerous policy steps the GOP is taking, but also truly appreciate the gravity of the situation in which America has found itself.

We are suffering from the same rot that has brought down democracy in other countries: a party that has decided it no longer wants to play by the rules and that would instead prefer to rule as authoritarians rather than share power with its opponents.

“All of us, as citizens, have to recognize that the path towards an undemocratic America is not going to happen in just one bang. It happens in a series of steps,” former President Barack Obama said in a CNN interview last Monday.

We’re not where Hungary is, thankfully. Democrats can and still do win power, as they did in 2020.

But the playing field is indisputably tilted against them — and only growing more so. The escalation in authoritarian behavior since January 6, from both national and state Republicans, shows that things are worse than even some pessimistic observers have feared.

It’s happened elsewhere. It can happen here, too.

When people think of authoritarian governments, they typically think of police states and 20th-century totalitarianism. But “authoritarianism” is actually a broad term, encompassing very different governments united mostly by the fact that they do not transfer power through free and fair elections. Some of these governments, like modern China, are violently and nakedly repressive; others control their population through subtler means.

Competitive authoritarian governments fall into the latter category — so closely resembling a democracy on paper that many of their own citizens believe they’re still living in one.

The concept was first developed in a 2002 paper by Harvard’s Steven Levitsky and the University of Toronto’s Lucan Way, two leading scholars of democracy. They identified competitive authoritarian systems as ones that hold elections but ensure that they’re fundamentally unfair — stacked in the incumbent party’s favor so heavily that the people don’t have real agency over who rules them.

“Incumbents routinely abuse state resources, deny the opposition adequate media coverage, harass opposition candidates and their supporters, and in some cases manipulate electoral results,” Levitsky and Way write. “Regimes characterized by such abuses cannot be called democratic.”

Yet competitive authoritarian systems survive in part by convincing citizens that they are living in a democracy. That’s how they maintain their legitimacy and prevent popular uprisings. As such, they do not conduct the kind of obvious sham elections held in places like Bashar al-Assad’s Syria (he won the 2021 contest with 95 percent of the “vote”).

In competitive authoritarianism, the opposition does have some ability to win a bit of power through, well, competition — even if the scope of their possible victories are limited.

It’s a tricky balance for the regime to pull off: rigging elections enough to maintain power indefinitely while still permitting enough democracy that citizens don’t rise up in outrage. Many competitive authoritarian regimes have collapsed under the stress, either transitioning to democracy (like Taiwan) or forcefully repressing the opposition and becoming a more traditional autocracy (like Belarus).

But many systems manage to survive. In a 2020 paper revisiting their work, Levitsky and Way found that 10 out of 35 competitive authoritarian regimes they identified in 2002 remained in place nearly two decades later. And new ones had emerged in countries that had previously been seen as solidly democratic — most notably Hungary, which is today one of the most effective competitive authoritarian systems in the world.

Hungary is, as it happens, one of the foreign countries most admired by American conservative intellectuals. In the 2020 paper, Levitsky and Way observe that features of its system are starting to show up in America.

“Competitive authoritarianism is not only thriving but inching westward. No democracy can be taken for granted,” they write. “Similar tendencies have even reached the United States, where the Trump administration borrowed the ‘deep state’ discourse that autocrats in Hungary and Turkey used to justify purges and the packing of the courts and other key state institutions.“

After the events of January 6 and subsequent Republican pushes to steal the election, I reached out to Levitsky to see how his thinking had evolved.

“I’m terrified,” he told me in a phone call. “I think Republicans are going to steal the next election.”

Happily, the United States still passes the most basic test of whether a system is democratic: whether the public can vote out its leaders. But it is hard to deny that the Republican Party has begun chipping away at that baseline principle, using the flaws in our political system to entrench their power.

Republicans already have unfair structural advantages, due to our outmoded Constitution. The nature of the Electoral College means that the key battlegrounds, like Pennsylvania, are considerably redder than the country as a whole. The Senate is so biased against dense urban states that under half of Americans control 82 percent of Senate seats. The combination of anti-urban bias and intentional gerrymandering means that, by one measure, the GOP has had a leg up in House elections since 1968.

The current Republican campaign builds on these inherent tendencies of the US constitutional system toward minority rule to push us toward something more properly termed authoritarian. It combines intentional state-level election rigging with the abuse of countermajoritarian institutions at the federal level to ensure GOP control of the nationwide levers of power, all the while working to delegitimize the press and other non-state institutions that could challenge it.

Some of these developments, like extreme gerrymandering and efforts to keep their supporters in a propaganda bubble insulated from nonpartisan media, are long-running. But many of the most concerning developments, ones that directly echo the approach of competitive authoritarian regimes abroad, are new.

In Hungary, one of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s key power-consolidating moves was stacking the country’s election administration agency with cronies from his Fidesz party, allowing the party to more easily rig the game in its favor.

In 2021, the GOP has started subverting election agencies in earnest; a new report from three pro-democracy groups found that 14 Republican-controlled states have passed a total of 24 bills this year interfering with election administration. Georgia’s SB 202 is perhaps the most egregious, allowing the Republican-dominated state legislature to take over the vote-counting process from county officials.

Another important Orbán tactic has been abusing regulatory policy to punish businesses that threaten the party’s hold on political power.

In 2021, the GOP embraced this idea at both the state and federal level. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a leading 2024 presidential contender, recently signed a flagrantly unconstitutional bill that levies heavy fines on platforms that ban politicians like Donald Trump. In April, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned that “corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs.” Three GOP senators proposed a bill stripping Major League Baseball of its antitrust exemption as an explicit punishment for its decision to pull the All-Star Game out of Atlanta to protest SB 202.

And then, of course, there’s the January 6 uprising and the Republican embrace of its fundamental premise: that the 2020 election was somehow illegitimate.

All competitive authoritarian regimes need some kind of ideological justification for anti-democratic politics, something to rally its supporters against their enemies. In Hungary, it’s a combination of nationalism, xenophobia, and a defense of traditional gender norms. The GOP has long employed elements of all of these but now has united around a more straightforward cause: American elections are corrupt, and Republican efforts to make elections unfair are actually efforts to fix them.

The point here is not that the GOP’s anti-democratic inclinations are completely new: In fact, they’ve evolved over decades. But the crucible of the Trump presidency and the January 6 election have forged these inchoate notions into an actual competitive authoritarian agenda.

Authoritarianism is as American as apple pie
Of course, the United States is different in many important respects from a place like Hungary. One important difference: our decentralized electoral system.

The US Constitution devolved election administration to the states, giving local legislatures control over the rules around elections and the process of actually tallying up the votes. State governments are what political scientist Phil Rocco calls “the infrastructure of democracy” — the place where the terms of political competition at the national level are set.

In theory, this should serve as a bulwark against the emergence of competitive authoritarianism, preventing one faction from rewriting the rules in their favor in one fell swoop. Historically, Rocco points out, it’s often worked the opposite way: The decentralized system enabled the creation of Jim Crow, which turned Southern states into authoritarian enclaves marked by one-party Democratic rule for decades.

“Racial apartheid in the South constructed a ‘Jim Crow Congress’; insulated from electoral competition, Southern committee chairs became the fulcrum of national policymaking — foreclosing the New Deal’s social democratic aspirations,” he writes in a 2020 essay. “Episodes of democratic collapse at the state level have had profound reverberations for national politics.”

The threat in the United States is the reemergence of this sort of bottom-up, state-level authoritarianism that has national electoral repercussions. It’s a subtle threat, one that comes into being quietly and incrementally — as is often the case when a democracy devolves into competitive authoritarianism.

“If people think that there is one day that you wake up and you’re in a competitive authoritarian system, that’s not the case,” says Hadas Aron, a political scientist at New York University who studies weak and failing democracies. “It’s actually complicated and a very, very long process.”

Experts disagree on how close we are to crossing the line. Levitsky, for example, thinks that Republicans could fatally undermine the democratic system as soon as 2024, using a combination of state-level interference with vote counts and congressional action to illegitimately block a Democratic victory.

Aron, by contrast, thinks we’re still quite far from the point of no return — that American democratic institutions are far more vibrant than their Hungarian peers were just before their collapse.

But even Aron, a longtime skeptic of the idea that America is on the path to authoritarianism, is rethinking her views in light of the GOP’s increased commitment to anti-democratic politics since January 6.

“I can’t say anything good” about Republican behavior, she tells me. “They want to stay in power and they want to change the system so it will benefit them as much as possible.”

This view is approaching a consensus among experts. A recent letter by 100 leading scholars of democracy warned that “Republican-led state legislatures across the country have in recent months proposed or implemented what we consider radical changes to core electoral procedures. ... Collectively, these initiatives are transforming several states into political systems that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections. Hence, our entire democracy is now at risk.”

Yet many of our elected officials — including key Democrats — do not recognize the urgency of the crisis.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) told Forbes last week that “if democracy were in jeopardy, I would want to protect it. [But] I don’t see it being in jeopardy right now.” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), in an op-ed justifying his decision to vote against the democracy reform bill HR 1, equated the bill with Republican efforts to undermine democracy.

“Today’s debate about how to best protect our right to vote and to hold elections, however, is not about finding common ground, but seeking partisan advantage,” Manchin writes. “Whether it is state laws that seek to needlessly restrict voting or politicians who ignore the need to secure our elections, partisan policymaking won’t instill confidence in our democracy — it will destroy it.”

This is why it’s vital to be open about what’s happening — to raise the specter of authoritarianism. Because the slide toward competitive authoritarianism is incremental, it’s easy to fall into complacency, to overlook what’s happening in front of our eyes.

When I visited Hungary three years ago, I met with Zsuzsanna Szelényi, a former member of the Hungarian parliament from Fidesz who left out of disgust with Orbán’s authoritarian instincts. She told me that the European Union, which has immense financial and diplomatic leverage over the Hungarian government, largely ignored the country’s authoritarian drift after it started in 2010.

“Five years later, they understood who this person was,” she told me. “But by that time, Hungary was completely changed.”

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... ompetitive

[Seabass]

Spoiler: he has no idea what it is.

https://www.al.com/news/2021/06/whitmir ... it-is.html

Whitmire: Alabama lawmaker wants to ban critical race theory, so I asked him what it is


There’s been a lot of talk about critical race theory lately, and I’ve felt at a loss. I’ve heard so many conflicting things about critical race theory, I’ve gotten more and more confused.

So I did what middle-aged white men are prone to do — I asked another middle-aged white man. But not just any. I called an Alabama lawmaker, state Rep. Chris Pringle, R-Mobile, who wants to make it illegal to teach critical race theory in Alabama.

The 2021 Alabama legislative session ended last month, but Pringle is already primed for the next one. He recently pre-filed a bill — almost eight months before the next session is scheduled to start — and he’s been talking it up on the radio.

So what does his bill say?

“It’s pretty simple,” Pringle said. “All it says is you can’t teach critical race theory in K-12 or higher education in the state of Alabama.”

That is a short bill, if not a simple one. But it didn’t answer my question: What is this critical race theory educators would be forbidden to teach? Pringle has seen enough legislation to understand the law requires specificity. Many bills begin by laying out their legal definitions. How would his bill define critical race theory?

“It basically teaches that certain children are inherently bad people because of the color of their skin, period,” Pringle said.

That sounded very serious, indeed. Nazi-like, even. So I asked Pringle if there were any critical race theorists he could point to who have been spreading such toxic garbage?

“Yeah, uh, well — I can assure you — I’ll have to read a lot more,” he said.

I began to get the feeling that Pringle didn’t know as much about critical race theory as I had hoped. Were there other examples he could give me where critical race theory was being put into practice?

“These people, when they were doing the training programs — and the government — if you didn’t buy into what they taught you a hundred percent, they sent you away to a reeducation camp,” Pringle said.

Pringle was a little difficult to follow but this sounded serious. These people — whoever they were— sounded terrifying, and if there were reeducation camps operating in America, that would be big news someone like me should get to the bottom of. I asked Pringle, who were these people?

Pringle is a Realtor, a homebuilder and general contractor and he dug through what he called his “executive suite” (the cab of his pickup truck) looking for an article he’d read. After a few moments of silence, he began to speak again, this time a bit haltingly.

“Here’s an — it doesn’t say who it was, it just says a government that held these — these training sessions …”

Pringle trailed off and I told him that, if he liked, he could send me a link to the article, but then he began to speak again.

“The white male executives are sent to a three-day re-education camp, where they were told that their white male culture wasn’t their —” he trailed off again.

I was worried that we’d lost our connection. These sorts of conversations sometimes end abruptly, but Pringle was still on the line and after a little more hemming and hawing he retreated to a common safe-space of politicians who’ve crawled too far out on a limb: He just wanted to start a conversation, he said.

“I introduced a very brief version of the bill to start the conversation, but it’s very difficult in this cancel society to have a frank discussion about racism in this country and this country’s history,” he said. “I mean, history is being rewritten and I’m not exactly sure of the accuracy of what’s there now and what they’re trying to change it into.”

This was news to me, as I’d seen lots of lawmakers try to talk about race and history in the Alabama State House, but for whatever reason, they were always the Black lawmakers. It was the white lawmakers who usually tried to change the subject. I wanted to ask Pringle about this, but suddenly he was no longer at a loss for words and I didn’t want to interrupt.

“This is still the greatest country that’s ever, ever been in the history of the world,” he said. “And the radical left is trying to destroy that and tear us apart and divide this country based on race and class, which is exactly what they do in communist countries.”

After bragging to me how he had BS-ed his way through his college political science classes by parroting the liberal bilge his professors wanted to hear, Pringle then said he had to get back to his day job and that he had employees waiting on him at a job site. So I let him go.

(I texted Pringle later to ask if he could share it with me. “Sorry but I can’t find it again,” he said. “Must have deleted the link.”)

I had been on the phone for about 15 minutes with someone who should know what they’re talking about before making laws against things, but I was still confused about this supposed radical leftist plot. When I couldn’t get an answer from a middle-aged white man, I took the logical next step. I asked a middle-aged Black man, Alabama Democratic Party chairman and state Rep. Chris England.

England was cordial enough, but I got the impression I was interrupting what had been, until then, a nice vacation at the beach.

According to England, he hadn’t been familiar with critical race theory, either, until his colleagues across the aisle began making so much noise about it. That’s when he began to research it.

“Critical race theory has been around since the ’70s and it’s never been taught in K-12,” England said. “It’s post-secondary education theory that is only discussed in masters level classes.”

If that’s so, I asked, what’s really going on here?

“It’s just politicians trying to manipulate people to garner campaign contributions and votes, whipping them up with something that has no basis in merit or fact,” he said.

But England wasn’t just talking about critical race theory. He was talking about all the political straw men that get dragged out every election cycle. (Remember Common Core?) And there always seems to be a new one.

“All anybody really wants to be taught in their schools is the accurate and true representation of American and world history, and that includes America’s sordid history with race,” England said.

That sounded reasonable, if altogether different from what Pringle seemed so agitated about. It was almost as if they were talking about two different things. Perhaps there had been some sort of mix-up.

Pringle had said he wanted to have a conversation. Would England be OK with sitting down to talk about it with Pringle and his party?

England said he would, but he sounded more eager to get back to his beach vacation.

“These conversations should start where people are, rather than where you want them to be,” he said. “And the last place educational policy should be made — where you decide what teachers should be teaching in the classroom — is in the Legislature.”

[Seabass]

Texas governor signs bill restricting teachers' discussions of racism in the classroom

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed into law on Monday a bill that restricts how teachers can discuss racism in both current events and throughout U.S. history, the Texas Tribune reports.

https://www.axios.com/texas-governor-cr ... 70c64.html

[pErvinalia]

When the fuck is sane America going to secede from insane America?

[JimC]

This will not end well...

[L'Emmerdeur]

The Trumpist lickspittle Republican US Representative Andrew Clyde (Georgia) who in a congressional debate described the attack on the US Capitol as normal tourism (what with the 'walking between the ropes' and all) encountered DC policeman Michael Fanone recently. Officer Fanone, who was beaten and zapped with tasers multiple times by the 'tourists'--inducing a concussion and heart attack--addressed Representative Clyde, identified himself as 'someone who fought to defend the Capitol' and offered his hand to Clyde. Representative Clyde declined to shake hands. No doubt he was just observing anti-Covid protocols. (Source)

[Seabass]

(Source)

[JimC]

Whited sepulchres indeed...

[Brian Peacock]

It's basically the most recent in a litany of barely concealed Republican and conservative dog whistles.

This isn't a dog whistle. They're passing laws. They're white washing history. It's part of their full on attack on objective truth.

Can't it be both? Their justifications strike me as a being a dog whistle - racist, with a thin veneer of reasonableness and concern, appealling to a primed and triggered sense of white fragility, and offered to bolster particular political, capital, and class interests.