Chris Hayes: ‘America Nearly Failed the Trump Stress Test for Democracy’

Rebecca Solnit: ‘On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway’

Cartoon by Tom Tomorrow

 

From Literary Hub:

When Trump won the 2016 election — while losing the popular vote — the New York Times seemed obsessed with running features about what Trump voters were feeling and thinking. These pieces treated them as both an exotic species and people it was our job to understand, understand being that word that means both to comprehend and to grant some sort of indulgence to. Now that Trump has lost the 2020 election, the Los Angeles Times has given their editorial page over to letters from Trump voters, who had exactly the sort of predictable things to say we have been hearing for far more than four years, thanks to the New York Times and what came to seem like about 11,000 other news outlets hanging on the every word of every white supremacist they could convince to go on the record.

The letters editor headed this section with, “In my decade editing this page, there has never been a period when quarreling readers have seemed so implacably at odds with each other, as if they get their facts and values from different universes. As one small attempt to bridge the divide, we are providing today a page full of letters from Trump supporters.” The implication is the usual one: we — urban multiethnic liberal-to-radical only-partly-Christian America — need to spend more time understanding MAGA America. 

The demands do not go the other way. 

Fox and Ted Cruz and the Federalist have not chastised their audiences, I feel pretty confident, with urgings to enter into discourse with, say, Black Lives Matter activists, rabbis, imams, abortion providers, undocumented valedictorians, or tenured lesbians. When only half the divide is being tasked with making the peace, there is no peace to be made, but there is a unilateral surrender on offer. We are told to consider this bipartisanship, but the very word means both sides abandon their partisanship, and Mitch McConnell and company have absolutely no interest in doing that.

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Fareed Zakaria: ‘The conspiracy theory of the 2020 election is here to stay’

 

Ezra Klein: ‘The crisis isn’t too much polarization. It’s too little democracy.’

 

From Vox:

To reliably win the Electoral College, Democrats need to win the popular vote by 3 or 4 percentage points. To reliably win the Senate, they need to run 6 to 7 points ahead of Republicans. To reliably win the House, they need to win the vote by 3 or 4 points. As such, Democrats need to consciously strategize to appeal to voters who do not naturally agree with them. That’s how they ended up with Joe Biden as their nominee. Biden was not the choice of the party’s more ideological base. He was not the choice of those who wanted to see Democrats reflect the young, multiethnic, majority-female voters driving their electoral victories. 

Biden was the choice of Democrats who favored electability above all. Electability is a weird idea: It asks not that you vote for who you find most electable, but for who you think a voter who is not like you would find most electable.... 

For Republicans, the incentives are exactly the reverse. They can win the presidency despite getting fewer votes. They can win the Senate despite getting fewer votes. They can win the House despite getting fewer votes. They can control the balance of state legislatures despite getting fewer votes.

And so they do. Their base, like the Democratic base, would prefer to run more uncompromising candidates, and their donors would prefer a more uncompromising agenda. A party that needed to win a majority of the popular vote couldn’t indulge itself by nominating Trump and backing his erratic, outrageous, and incompetent style of governance to the hilt. A party that needed a majority of the popular vote to win the Senate and the House couldn’t keep trying to rip health care away from tens of millions of people while cutting taxes on the richest Americans.

 

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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.”

Vox: ‘What Joe Biden Won — and What He Didn’t’

It Shouldn’t Be This Close

 

Jay Michaelson: ‘While You’ve Been Watching the Election, the Supreme Court Is Set to Transform “Religious Freedom” and America’

 

From The Daily Beast:

The Supreme Court is not accountable to public opinion. But to give you a sense of how out of step this conservative-packed, minority-party-packed, and religious-extremist-packed institution really is, consider this week’s major case, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, about whether taxpayer-funded adoption and foster care agencies should be able to discriminate against would-be parents.

A poll released last week says 70 percent of Americans say no. Of course, taxpayer money shouldn’t be given to organizations that discriminate, regardless of those organizations’ religious affiliations. If you take government money, you should play by the same rules as everyone else.

And yet I’ll eat a bug if the Supreme Court agrees.

Why? Because a majority of the court’s members have now been vetted by religious fundamentalists with a pipeline to the White House. And while the public’s focus is understandably on abortion rights, that battle is just one skirmish in a much larger Kulturkampf (culture war, a 19th century German term invoked by Justice Scalia back in 1996) about the relationship between church and state.

Here’s how Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Alito, Thomas and Barrett (and sometimes Chief Justice Roberts) see the Fulton case, based on their past votes and writings: this is about religious freedom. Never mind the prospective parents — Catholic, gay, Jewish, interracially married — turned away by an agency for religious reasons. The real victim is the agency.

 

Read the full article.

 

Tom Nichols: ‘A Large Portion of the Electorate Chose the Sociopath’

 

From The Atlantic:

[N]o matter how this election concludes, America is now a different country. Nearly half of the voters have seen Trump in all of his splendor — his infantile tirades, his disastrous and lethal policies, his contempt for democracy in all its forms — and they decided that they wanted more of it. His voters can no longer hide behind excuses about the corruption of Hillary Clinton or their willingness to take a chance on an unproven political novice. They cannot feign ignorance about how Trump would rule. They know, and they have embraced him.

Sadly, the voters who said in 2016 that they chose Trump because they thought he was “just like them” turned out to be right. Now, by picking him again, those voters are showing that they are just like him: angry, spoiled, racially resentful, aggrieved, and willing to die rather than ever admit that they were wrong.

To be clear, I never expected a Biden landslide in a country as polarized as the United States. I was a wet blanket even among my Never Trump comrades, holding out only the modest hope that Biden would recapture the states Clinton lost in 2016, and possibly flip Arizona. But I expected the margins in all of those states — and especially in Biden’s birth state of Pennsylvania — to be higher. I suspected that Biden had no real chance in places such as Texas or Georgia or even North Carolina, all states in the Trumpist grip.

Nor was I among the progressives who believed America would repudiate Trump’s policies. For one thing, I am a conservative — and I know my former tribe. Trump voters don’t care about policy. They didn’t care about it in 2016, and they don’t care about it now. The party of national security, fiscal austerity, and personal responsibility supports a president who is in the pocket of the Russians, has exploded the national deficit, and refuses to take responsibility for anything. I had hoped, at the least, that people who once insisted on the importance of presidential character would vote for basic decency after living under the most indecent president in American history.

 

 

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Nicholas Goldberg: ‘Even If He Loses, Trump Has Won’

 

Cartoon by Shadi Gahnim for The National

From the Los Angeles Times:

Even if Joe Biden ultimately becomes president — and he appears, as I write this, to have a pretty strong path to 270 electoral votes — millions and millions of people will have again pulled the lever for Trump.

For the United States to have elected Donald Trump once can perhaps be written off as an aberration, a dreadful mistake. Maybe voters in 2016 — a more innocent time! — thought he wouldn’t really follow through with his irresponsible campaign promises, or that he’d be sobered by the awesome responsibilities of the office or held in check by others.

But for tens of millions of people to double down and vote for him again in 2020 is entirely different. It is an assertion by those voters that, yes, this is who we really are — and that what the United States has become over the last four years is really what we want it to be. Their votes send a message to the world that this bizarre and untrustworthy man didn’t weasel his way into the most powerful job in the world by fooling the great American people. Rather, he was — and remains — the conscious choice of too many.

That does not bode well for the months and years ahead. Even if Trump is gone, Trumpism, I’m afraid, is not going away.

Read the full article.