Category Archives: Republican

Curtis also wants to chart a Republican path to a green future one that doesnt include the Green New Deal or demonize fossil fuels. The GOP has long been saddled with a reputation for being indifferent to environmental issues, fed by the presence of notable deniers of the idea of climate change within the party.

If we follow the Republican path, we don't need to kill U.S. jobs, we don't need to export our jobs overseas and subject ourselves to our enemies, Curtis told host Margaret Brennan. We have ideas that improve the U.S. economy, that rely on U.S. technology and U.S. innovation, such as new nuclear.

The Utah Republican is a proponent of nuclear energy as an alternative to fossil fuels. On concerns about constituents not wanting nuclear plants in their backyards, Curtis said, U.S. innovation and technology can lead us past the concerns that we have with nuclear, whether it be safety or whatever those concerns are.

We don't have to accept old-generation nuclear, he said.

But Curtis ambitions investments that could take years to come to fruition face a major hurdle: meeting the urgency of the climate crisis. Curtis said, however, he has full confidence in the free marketplace to move quickly enough to address the issue even without the help of tax credits or government subsidies.

That's not to say that as a government, we don't have a role that we shouldn't be looking for those areas to incentivize and help and poke and prod along the way, Curtis said. But we need all hands on deck, you know, and we need to talk about this in a bipartisan way and not just the extreme ideas, which, by the way, have let us in a terrible direction.

Continued here:

What Utah Republican John Curtis is bringing to the U.N. climate summit - POLITICO

The Republican candidates in New Yorks competitive races differ from one another in tone, experience and the local issues that reflect their distinctive districts.

But all of those contests, party officials and strategists say, are shaped by the continued salience of public safety in the minds of voters, discussion of education matters like the gifted and talented program that Mayor Bill de Blasio wants to phase out, and intense feelings over vaccine mandates. Some Republicans even argue that the challenging national environment that Democrats appear to be facing may be evident in a handful of city races, too.

This has a lot of likenesses to 2009, when Obama came in on hope and change and then fell flat, said Nick Langworthy, the chairman of the New York Republican State Committee. In 2009 we had great gains at the local level, and then had a cataclysm in 2010. Are we facing that, or is there going to be flatness all the way around?

Whatever the turnout, Republicans are virtually certain to be shut out of citywide offices. Indeed, by nearly every metric, the Republican Party has been decimated in the nations largest city. They are vastly outnumbered in voter registration and have struggled to field credible candidates for major offices.

At the City Council level, Republican hopes boil down to a matter of margins.

The most optimistic Republican assessment, barring extraordinary developments, is that they could increase their presence to five from three on the 51-seat City Council, as they did in 2009. But even that would require a surprise outcome in a sleeper race and it is possible they retain only one seat (setting aside the candidates who are running on multiple party lines).

Officials on both sides of the aisle believe a more realistic target for the Republicans is three or four seats, a number that could still affect the brewing City Council speakers race and may indicate pockets of discontent with the direction of the city.

The most high-profile of those contests is the last Republican-held seat in Queens.

Ms. Singh, a teacher who is endorsed by the left-wing Working Families Party, is running against Joann Ariola, the chairwoman of the Queens Republican Party. The race has stirred considerable interest from the left and the right and attracted spending from outside groups.

See more here:

The Places in New York City Where Republicans Still Stand a Chance - The New York Times

Back in July, Kay Ivey, governor of Alabama, had some strong and sensible things to say about Covid-19 vaccines. I want folks to get vaccinated, she declared. Thats the cure. That prevents everything. She went on to say that the unvaccinated are letting us down.

Three months later Ivey directed state agencies not to cooperate with federal Covid-19 vaccination mandates.

Iveys swift journey from common sense and respect for science to destructive partisan nonsense nonsense that is killing tens of thousands of Americans wasnt unique. On the contrary, it was a recapitulation of the journey the whole Republican Party has taken on issue after issue, from tax cuts to the Big Lie about the 2020 election.

When we talk about the G.O.P.s moral descent, we tend to focus on the obvious extremists, like the conspiracy theorists who claim that climate change is a hoax and Jan. 6 was a false flag operation. But the crazies wouldnt be driving the Republican agenda so completely if it werent for the cowards, Republicans who clearly know better but reliably swallow their misgivings and go along with the party line. And at this point crazies and cowards essentially make up the partys entire elected wing.

Consider, for example, the claim that tax cuts pay for themselves. In 1980 George H.W. Bush, running against Ronald Reagan for the Republican presidential nomination, called that assertion voodoo economic policy. Everything weve seen since then says that he was right. But Bush soon climbed down, and by 2017 even supposed moderates like Susan Collins accepted claims that the Trump tax cut would reduce, not increase, the budget deficit. (It increased the deficit.)

Or consider climate change. As recently as 2008 John McCain campaigned for president in part on a proposal to put a cap on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. But at this point Republicans in Congress are united in their opposition to any substantive action to limit global warming, with 30 G.O.P. senators outright denying the overwhelming scientific evidence that human activities are causing climate change.

The falsehoods that are poisoning Americas politics tend to share similar life histories. They begin in cynicism, spread through disinformation and culminate in capitulation, as Republicans who know the truth decide to acquiesce in lies.

Take the claim of a stolen election. Donald Trump never had any evidence on his side, but he didnt care he just wanted to hold on to power or, failing that, promulgate a lie that would help him retain his hold on the G.O.P. Despite the lack of evidence and the failure of every attempt to produce or create a case, however, a steady drumbeat of propaganda has persuaded an overwhelming majority of Republicans that Joe Bidens victory was illegitimate.

And establishment Republicans, who at first pushed back against the Big Lie, have gone quiet or even begun to promote the falsehood. Thus on Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal published, without corrections or fact checks, a letter to the editor from Trump that was full of demonstrable lies and in so doing gave those lies a new, prominent platform.

The G.O.P.s journey toward what it is now with respect to Covid-19 an anti-vaccine, objectively pro-pandemic party followed the same trajectory.

Although Republicans like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott claim that their opposition to vaccine requirements is about freedom, the fact that both governors have tried to stop private businesses from requiring customers or staff to be vaccinated shows this is a smoke screen. Pretty clearly, the anti-vaccine push began as an act of politically motivated sabotage. After all, a successful vaccination campaign that ended the pandemic would have been good political news for Biden.

We should note, by the way, that this sabotage has, so far at least, paid off. While there are multiple reasons many Americans remain unvaccinated, theres a strong correlation between a countys political lean and both its vaccination rate and its death rate in recent months. And the persistence of Covid, which has in turn been a drag on the economy, has been an important factor dragging down Bidens approval rating.

More important for the internal dynamics of the G.O.P., however, is that many in the partys base have bought into assertions that requiring vaccination against Covid-19 is somehow a tyrannical intrusion of the state into personal decisions. In fact, many Republican voters appear to have turned against longstanding requirements that parents have their children vaccinated against other contagious diseases.

And true to form, elected Republicans like Governor Ivey who initially spoke in favor of vaccines have folded and surrendered to the extremists, even though they must know that in so doing they will cause many deaths.

Im not sure exactly why cowardice has become the norm among elected Republicans who arent dedicated extremists. But if you want to understand how the G.O.P. became such a threat to everything America should stand for, the cowards are at least as important a factor as the crazies.

Original post:

Opinion | On Vaccines and More, Republican Cowardice Harms America - The New York Times

Running for governor of Virginia as the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin appears to have a split personality sometimes the generic former corporate executive in a fleece vest, the suburban dad surrounded by his sun-lit children and tail-wagging dogs, and sometimes the fierce kulturkampf warrior and racial dog-whistler. His seemingly dual personality has been filtered through a cascade of Republican consultants campaign images. His latest TV commercial attempts to resolve the tension by showing him as a concerned father who shares the worries of the ordinary Trumpster. In the closing hours of the campaign, he has exposed that his political identity cant be separated from Republican identity politics in the decadent stage of Trumpism.

The Republican party has long specialized in fabricating esoteric threats, from the basements of Pizzagate to the stratosphere of Jewish space lasers. Youngkins campaign, though, has contrived a brand-new enemy within, a specter of doom to stir voters anxieties that only he can dispel: the Black Nobel prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison and her novel Beloved.

His turn to a literary reference might seem an obscure if not a bizarre non sequitur, at odds with his pacifying image, but the ploy to suppress the greatest work by the most acclaimed Black writer has an organic past in rightwing local politics and an even deeper resonance in Virginia history.

In his first TV ad, introducing himself as a newcomer who had never before run for political office, Youngkin warned voters not to misperceive him as yet another nasty Republican and to dismiss not-yet-stated lies about me. They should ignore whatever negative material they might hear about how he left dirty dishes in the sink. Whats next, that I hate dogs? Big smile. Cue: cute kids and puppies. Soundtrack: bark, bark.

For a while the nice guy Youngkin tried to walk his thin line, lest he lose the partys angry base voters. He attempted to use the soft image to cover the hard line. He is vaccinated, but against vaccine mandates. He is inspired by Donald Trump, has proclaimed his belief in the need for audits and election integrity; opposed to abortion, but was careful not to appear with Trump at his Take Back Virginia rally. He appeared on Tucker Carlsons Fox News in a ritual cleansing to profess that his motive is pure.

You know, Tucker, this is why I quit my job last summer, Youngkin said. I actually could not recognize my home state of Virginia. He had, he explained, left the corporate world to take up the sword for the Republican culture war.

Actually, according to Bloomberg News, he flamed out as co-CEO of the Carlyle Group, with a checkered record, losing billions on bad bets, and retired after a power struggle. In May, just before leaving the firm and speaking to Carlson, after the murder of George Floyd, Youngkin signed a statement affirming that contributions to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Equal Justice Initiative and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund would receive matching grants from Carlyle. When asked about this later, however, a campaign spokesperson fired back, Glenn has never donated to the SPLC and does not agree with them. He is a Christian and a conservative who is pro-life and served in his church for years.

Youngkins seeming confusion around controversial racial issues highlighted his conflicting roles. In Washington, while at Carlyle, he was the responsible corporate citizen practicing worthy philanthropy. In the Republican party, where that sort of non-partisan moderation is not only suspect but mocked as a source of evil, he has had to demonstrate that he is not tainted.

Soon enough, Youngkin waded into the murky waters of racial politics. He offered himself as the defender of schoolchildren from the menace of critical race theory, even though the abstruse legal doctrine is not taught in any Virginia public school. Yet he suggested that his opponent, former governor Terry McAuliffe, would impose its creed on innocent minds, depriving parents of control. On day one, I will ban critical race theory in our schools, Youngkin has pledged.

But his brandishing of critical race theory, nonexistent in the schools curriculum, has been apparently insufficiently frightening to finish the job. Perhaps not enough people know what the theory is at all. He needed one more push, searched for one more issue and produced one more ad.

So, Youngkin seized upon a novel racial symbol, in fact a novel. The danger, he claimed, comes from Beloved by Toni Morrison the Pulitzer prize-winning novel by the Nobel prize-winning author, about the psychological toll and loss of slavery, especially its sexual abuse, and considered one of the most important American literary works.

While no other Republican has ever before run against Beloved as a big closing statement, there is a history to the issue in Virginia.

When my son showed me his reading material, my heart sunk, Laura Murphy, identified as Fairfax County Mother, said in the Youngkin ad. It was some of the most explicit reading material you can imagine. She claimed that her son had nightmares from reading the assignment in his advanced placement literature class. It was disgusting and gross, her son, Blake, said. It was hard for me to handle. I gave up on it. As it happens, in 2016 Murphy had lobbied a Republican-majority general assembly to pass a bill enabling students to exempt themselves from class if they felt the material was sexually explicit. Governor McAuliffe vetoed what became known as the Beloved bill.

This Mom knows she lived through it. Its a powerful story, tweeted Youngkin. Ms Murphy, the Mom, is in fact a longtime rightwing Republican activist. Her husband, Daniel Murphy, is a lawyer-lobbyist in Washington and a large contributor to Republican candidates and organizations. Their delicate son, Blake Murphy, who complained of night terrors, was a Trump White House aide and is now associate general counsel for the National Republican Congressional Committee, which sends out fundraising emails reading: Alert. Youre a traitor. You abandoned Trump

The offending novel is a fictional treatment of a true story with a Virginia background, a history that ought to be taught in Virginia schools along with the reading of Beloved. In 1850, Senator James M Mason, of Virginia, sponsored the Fugitive Slave Act. The safety and integrity of the Southern States (to say nothing of their dignity and honor) are indissolubly bound up with domestic slavery, he wrote. In 1856, Margaret Garner escaped from her Kentucky plantation into the free state of Ohio. She was the daughter of her owner and had been repeatedly raped by his brother, her uncle, and gave birth to four children. When she was cornered by slave hunters operating under the Fugitive Slave Act, she killed her two-year-old and attempted to kill her other children to spare them their fate. Garner was returned to slavery, where she died from typhus.

In the aftermath of her capture, Senator Charles Sumner, the abolitionist from Massachusetts, denounced Mason on the floor of the Senate for his authorship of the bill, a special act of inhumanity and tyranny. He also cited the case of a pious matron who teaches little children to relieve their bondage, sentenced to a dungeon. He was referring to Margaret Douglass, a southern white woman who established a school for Black children in Norfolk, Virginia. She was arrested and sent to prison for a month as an example, according to the judge. When she was released, she wrote a book on the cause of Black education and the culture of southern rape. How important, then, she wrote, for these Southern sultans, that the objects of their criminal passions should be kept in utter ignorance and degradation.

Virginias racial caste system existed for a century after the civil war. In 1956, after the supreme courts decision in Brown v Brown of Education ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional, Virginias general assembly, with Confederate flags flying in the gallery, declared a policy of massive resistance that shut down all public schools for two years. The growth of all-white Christian academies and new patterns of segregation date from that period. Only in 1971 did Virginia revise its state constitution to include a strong provision for public education.

Youngkins demonizing of Toni Morrisons Beloved may seem unusual and even abstract, but it is the oldest tactic in the playbook. It was old when Lee Atwater, a political operative for Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, explained, You start out in 1954 by saying, Nigger, nigger, nigger. By 1968 you cant say nigger that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states rights, and all that stuff, and youre getting so abstract.

Youngkin well understands the inflammatory atmosphere in Virginia in which he is dousing gasoline and lighting matches. The violence and murder at Charlottesville are still a burning issue. The trials of racist neo-Nazis have just begun there. Prominent Lost Cause statues of Robert E Lee have been removed within the past few months. Branding Beloved as sexually obscene was always an abstracted effort to avoid coming to terms with slavery, especially its sexual coercion. Parental control is Youngkins abstract slogan for his racial divisiveness. Beloved is his signifier to the Trump base that he is a safe member of the cult, no longer an untrustworthy corporate type.

Youngkins reflexive dependence on the strategy reveals more than the harsh imperatives of being a candidate in the current Republican party. It places him, whether he knows or not, cares or not, objects or not, in a long tradition in the history of Virginia that the Commonwealth has spent decades seeking to overcome.

See the original post here:

The Republicans racial culture war is reaching new heights in Virginia - The Guardian

On Nov. 2, voters will take to the polls and choose among candidates for county, city, and town seats.

While COVID-19 precautions will be in place in accordance with guidance created by New York's Board of Elections, voters can still cast a ballot early or in person. According to the Ontario County Board of Elections, early voting runs from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday at Victor Town Hall, 85 East Main St., and the county Board of Elections office, 74 Ontario St., Canandaigua.

Prospective voters who would like an absentee ballot for early voting must fill out anapplicationno later than the day before Nov. 2. For the actual ballot, the Board of Elections recommends delivering it no later than the close of polls on Election Day or postmarked by the post office no later than the day before the election. It must be received no later than the seventh day after the election.

Below is a list of candidates running for many of the public offices in Ontario County. All names and offices come from the county's Board of Elections candidate list.

Incumbent District Attorney James Ritts and incumbent Surrogate Court Judge Frederick Reed are running unopposed. Both are running on the Republican and Conservative party lines.

For mayor, incumbent Bob Palumbo is running on the Republican and Save the Lake party lines against current City Councilmember Dan Unrath, who is running on the Democratic and Chosen Spot party lines. For at-large seats on City Council, incumbents Thomas Lyon,Rene Sutton and Stephen Uebbing and newcomer Sim Covington Jr. are running on the Democratic and Chosen Spot party lines against Republicans Sean Buck and Donna Besler, who also are running on the Save the Lake line.

For supervisor, Robert Green is running unopposed on the Republican Party line while Karen Maczynsk is running for the town clerk/tax collector seat on the Democratic and Republican party lines. For Town Council,Lauren Bolonda is running on the Democratic and Republican party lines.Gail Schneider-Korn is also running for town council on the Democratic party line while Frederick Stresing is running for town council on the Republican party line. For the superintendent of highways position, Ronald Wilson Jr. is running unopposed on Democratic and Republican party lines.

For supervisor, Christopher Vastola is running unopposed on the Republican Party line whileEileen Schaefer is also running unopposed for town clerk and tax collector on the Republican Party line. For town justice, Russel Coon is running unopposed on the Republican Party line. For Town Board, three candidates are running, including Kathryn Crowley, Teryl Gronwall and Mark Statt. All three candidates are running on the Republican Party line although Crowley was put in to fill a vacancy, according to the Board of Elections' candidate list.

For supervisor, Councilman Jared Simpson is running on the Republican and Chosen Spot lines against former Supervisor Sam Casella, who is running on the Demcoratic and independent No Bull party lines. For Town Board, Incumbent Terry Fennelly and newcomer Adeline Rudolph are running on the Republican, Conservative and Chosen Spot lines against Ryan Staychock, who is running on the independent Canandaigua Forward line. For town justice, Republican incumbent David Prull is running unopposed. For town clerk, Republican incumbent Jean Christman is running unopposed. For highway superintendent, Republican incumbent James Fletcher is running unopposed.

For supervisor, Stephen Lester is running on the Democratic and Best Bloomfield party lines against Frederick Wille, who is running on the Republican and Conservative party lines. For Town Clerk,Margaret Gochenaur is running unopposed on both the Democratic and Republican party lines. For Town Council, three candidates are in the running, including Erin Crowley Tavernia, Frank Fessner andKathleen Conradt. Tavernia is running on the Democratic and Best Bloomfield party lines while Fessner and Conradt are running on the Republican party lines. For superintendent of highways, C. Scott Kimball is running unopposed on the Democratic and Republican party lines while Kathleen Cooper is running unopposed on the Democratic and Republican party lines for tax collector.

For town justice, Tonia Ettinger is running on the Democratic Party line and incumbent John Gligora is running on the Republican and Conservative lines. For Town Board, incumbents Michael Casale and Steven Holtz are running on the Republican and Conservative party lines. For supervisor, Republican incumbent Peter Ingalsbe is running unopposed. For town clerk/receiver of taxes, incumbent Michelle Finley is running unopposed. For highway superintendent, incumbent Donald Giroux is running unopposed.

For supervisor, Republican incumbent Fred Lightfoote is running unopposed. For town clerk, Darby Perrotte is running unopposed. For town justice, Christine Ayers is running unopposed. For Town Board, Philip Curtis and Brian Lazarus are running on the Republican Party line. Lazarus also is running on the Conservative line. For highway superintendent, Zachary Eddinger is running unopposed. For tax collector, Adrienne Smith is running unopposed.

For supervisor, William Namestnik is running on the Republican and Conservative party lines. For town clerk, Denise Hood is running unopposed. For Town Board, Jeffrey Trickey and Andrew Faust are running on the Republican Party lines. For highway superintendent, Matthew Curran is running unopposed.

For supervisor, David Phillips is running unopposed on the Republican Party line. For Town Council,Kevin Blazey andMatthew Shannon are running on the Republican Party lines.

For supervisor, incumbent Tamara Hicks is running unopposed. For town clerk,Morgan Riesenberger is running unopposed. For town justice, Matthew Green is running unopposed. For Town Board, Mary Mueller and Edward Northrop are running on the Republican Party line. For highway superintendent, David Voss is running unopposed. For tax collector, Joanne Schenk is running unopposed.

For supervisor, Ryan Davis is running on the Democratic and Phelps Progress party lines againstNorman Teed, who is running on the Republican and Conservativeparty lines. For town clerk and tax collector, Lauren Schrader is running on the Democratic and A Fresh Start party lines against Linda Nieskes, who is running on the Republican, Conservative and Phelps Progress party lines. For town justice,Robert Gosper is running unopposed on the Republican Party line. For Town Council, David Lord is running on the Democratic Party line while William Wellman is running on the Democratic, Conservative, Republican and Phelps Progress party lines. Ronald Allen is also running for town council on the Republican and Citizens Party lines, while Troy Vanhout is the final candidate running for town council on the Community party line. For superintendent of highways, Terry Featherly is running on the Democratic, Republican and Road of Right Choice party lines againstPhilip Frere Jr., who is running on the Pave the Way party line.

For supervisor, Daryl Marshall is running unopposed on the Responsible Richmond party line whileAmy Sharp is running unopposed for the town clerk and tax collector position on the Republican and Responsible Richmond party lines. For town justice,Elizabeth Yockel andJohn Chrisman Jr. are both running. Yockel is running on the Democratic Party line while Chrisman is running on both the Republican and Responsible Richmond party lines. For Town Council, Andrea McIntosh,Leonard Wildman, Linda Grace andDevan Cornish are all running. McIntosh and Wildman are both running on the Democratic Party lines while Grace is running on the Responsible Richmond and Republican party lines. Cornish is also running on the Responsible Richmond and Republican lines in addition to the Conservative Party line. For superintendent of highways,Thomas Fleig is running unopposed on the Republican and Responsible Richmond party lines.

For supervisor,Andrew Wickham is running unopposed on the Republican Party line whileHaley Eagley is also running on the Republican Party line unopposed for town clerk. For Town Council,James Malyj and Howard Keeney are both running on the Republican Party line whileJames Lawson is also running on the Republican Party line for superintendent of highways.

For supervisor, Daniel Marshall is running unopposed. For Town Board, James Strickland is running on the Democratic Party line and Scott Wohlschlegel is running on the Republican Party line.

For town clerk, Karen Bodine is running unopposed on both the Republican and Conservative party lines. For Town Council, David Condon and Michael Guinan are both running on the Republican Party line and Condon is also on the Conservative Party line. For the Superintendent of Highways, Mark Years is running unopposed on the Republican party line.

For supervisor, incumbent Todd Campbell is running unopposed. For Town Board, Kevin Carey and William Travis are running on the Republican Party lines. For highway superintendent, Jeffrey Ball is running unopposed.

Includes reporting by Daily Messenger assistant editor Mike Murphy.

Read the original:

Ontario County town and county elections: What you need to know - Democrat & Chronicle

RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) As Virginia is experiencing a very close election at the local and state level, political experts are weighing in on how early voting will impact each partys vote.

According to the Virginia Department of Elections, 5.9 million people are registered to vote in the state. WFXRs sister stations political analyst Rich Meagher says many have chosen to vote early.

Now we have almost a million early votes and if the turnout is anything like it was in 2017, it may not be half the votes but its close to it, Meagher said.

Keith Balmer, who is currently the City of Richmonds Voter Registrar, says the city has 157,000 registered voters and 20,000 residents have cast their ballots in-person and by mail.

On the last day of early voting Saturday, Oct. 30, polling locations were open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

In the meantime, Meagher says more Republicans are voting early this year.

At the same time, Republicans have been raising questions about election integrity for the past couple of years and I think their voters are still wary of voting early, Meagher said.

According to Meagher, early voting has always been skewed towards the Democratic party, but this year we might see a slight change. Last year, an overwhelming majority of early voters were Democrats.

This year itll probably be closer to an even split, Meagher said.

He says races are very close this year, not just at the state level, but in a couple of districts.

I encourage people to be patient. We may not have results immediately and we might even be waiting until Wednesday to see the results of some of these races, Meagher said. Here in Virginia we always call election night waiting for Fairfax. Its the biggest county and it just takes a while for them to report their votes so were always waiting around to see what the votes are like. Like we saw last year, we might end up waiting around for a while.

Although the mail-in ballot request deadline and the early voting period has passed, registered voters can still visit a polling location between 6 a.m. and 7 p.m. on Election Day Tuesday, Nov. 2 to vote, as long as you bring photo identification.

For more information about where and how to cast a ballot on Election Day in Virginia, click here.

Get breaking news, weather, and sports delivered to your smartphone with the WFXR News app available on Apple and Android.

See more here:

Increase in Republican early voting turnout at polls, still expected to skew Democratic in Virginia - WFXRtv.com

The culture war in the U.S. has been raging for more than 50 years, ever since the 1960s when divisions over values (civil rights, diversity, sexual liberation) began to emerge. Those divisions have intensified to the point where today, the defining issues of American politics involve race, sex, religion and education more than economics.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, the question that best defined partisanship was, Which side do you favor more business or labor? Today, the defining questions at least for white voters would be, Do you have a college degree? and How often do you go to church?

Liberals dominate American culture. According to statistics recently cited by Elisabeth Zerofsky in the New York Times, Conservatives compose a minimal percentage of Silicon Valley; their influence is declining in the corporate world; and they are all but absent from mainstream media, academia and Hollywood. All institutions dominated by educated elites.

Conservatives are using their political power to challenge liberal domination of the culture. Left-wing populism has always been economic, driven by resentment of the rich. Populist hero and three-time Democratic nominee for president William Jennings Bryan once called Republicans the party representing nothing but an organized appetite. Right-wing populism is cultural, driven by resentment of educated elites and their cosmopolitan values especially educated elites who tell them what to do, like get vaccinated or mask their children, or obey quarantines and lockdowns.

Liberals sometimes feed this resentment by showing condescension. Barack ObamaBarack Hussein ObamaObama honors Jay-Z as 'the embodiment of the American Dream' 2022 and 'the passion gap' why Republicans are more fired up Virginia set to elect first woman of color for lieutenant governor MORE criticized small-town voters who cling to guns and religion. Hillary ClintonHillary Diane Rodham ClintonFranken rules out challenge against Gillibrand for Senate seat Abedin says anger over Weiner 'almost killed me' 2022 and 'the passion gap' why Republicans are more fired up MORE called Trump supporters a basket of deplorables.

Conservative political power is based on two things: structural advantages and intensity of opinion.

A lot of Democratic House votes are wasted because Democrats are more likely to live in densely populated urban areas. In the 2020 election, the average margin of victory for House Democrats was 31.5 percent and for House Republicans, 26.0 percent.

The fact that every state elects two senators creates a disadvantage for large urban Democratic states like New York, California and Illinois. Article V of the Constitution provides that No state, without its consent, shall be deprived of equal suffrage in the Senate. It is the only provision of the Constitution that can never be amended (something insisted upon by southern slave states, which feared becoming outnumbered by northern free states).

Following the 2000 and 2016 presidential elections, when the popular vote winners lost the electoral vote, Democrats protested the undemocratic nature of the electoral college. But no move was taken to change the system.

Right now, gerrymandering is aiming to ensure Republican control of the U.S. House and most state legislatures. Republicans control the redistricting process in 20 states, with 187 U.S. House seats. Democrats control redistricting in eight states with 75 House seats. (The remaining House seats are in states with one at-large seat or divided party control, or independent redistricting commissions.)

Conservatives usually have another advantage intensity. Polling has a dirty little secret: Polls don't measure intensity of opinion very well. Typically, polls can tell you how many people are on each side of an issue, but not whether they feel so strongly about the issue that it's likely to drive their vote. And that's what really matters to politicians.

Let's say you take a poll and show a politician that his constituents divide 75 to 25 percent in favor of gun control. The politician knows what will happen if he votes for a gun control law: Maybe 5 percent of the 75 percent majority care enough about the issue to vote for him for that reason alone, but he may lose 20 out of the 25 percent on the other side. Gun owners may be a minority, but many of them see gun control as a threat to their Second Amendment rights. It drives their votes. And they make sure politicians know it.

On a lot of social issues, the right is more intensely committed than the left. Call it the passion gap. That's why conservatives have often won battles over gun rights and abortion and immigration. They are more watchful, better funded, better organized and angry. They let politicians know that if they dare to take the wrong position, a posse of voters will come after them.

Why are gun owners so politically powerful? a pro-choice activist once said to me in an interview. There are more uterus owners than gun owners. And when uterus owners begin to vote this issue, we will win.

The left typically gets passionate over anti-war issues. That's when the passion gap tilts in their favor and Democrats win (2006, 2008). But when there is no Vietnam or Iraq war controversy, the right is typically more angry and intense. That's what sustains the talk radio industry.

Right now, conservatives feel like a persecuted minority because of the cultural dominance of the left. It has radicalized the right. Donald TrumpDonald TrumpStunning survey gives grim view of flourishing anti-democratic opinions Southwest investigating report pilot said 'Let's go Brandon' on flight Texas police refused requests to escort Biden bus surrounded by Trump supporters: report MORE did something that has never been done before: He brought the radical right to power and gave them (temporary) ascension over the cultural left. Neither he nor his supporters have any intention of giving that up without a fight.

Bill Schneider is an emeritus professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and author of "Standoff: How America Became Ungovernable"(Simon & Schuster).

Link:

2022 and 'the passion gap' why Republicans are more fired up | TheHill - The Hill

BOSTON (CBS) Jennifer Nassour, the former Mass GOP chair, said it would be the end of the Republican party in Massachusetts if Geoff Diehl defeats Gov. Charlie Baker in a potential primary election.

Nassour joined WBZ-TV political analyst Jon Keller to discuss the state of the Republican party in Massachusetts and other topics.

Nassour was critical of current Mass GOP chair Jim Lyons.

You are all one family and you support your family. You see that over and over again with the Democratic party in Massachusetts. Even though they might battle it out and fight, they do support their own, she said. Currently, the Lyons Mass GOP is not doing that, is not supporting all of our candidates. There is no reason to fight with the most popular governor in the country.

Baker has not yet announced if he plans to run for another term.

Keller @ Large: Part 2

Originally posted here:

Former Mass. GOP Chair: Diehl Defeating Baker In Potential Primary Would Be End Of The Republican Party In Massachusetts - CBS Boston

ezra klein

Hi, Im Ezra Klein, and this is The Ezra Klein Show.

Hey, its Ezra. While Im on paternity leave, weve got an all-star team of guest hosts. This week my Times Opinion colleague Ross Douthat takes the helm for shows exploring chronic illness and the divisions within conservatism. Ive known and admired Ross since I began in journalism. So Im really looking forward to these. Enjoy.

The last 15 years have been radicalizing for many American conservatives. The collapse of George W. Bushs presidency undercut conservative faith in the wisdom and capabilities of the Republican Party and its leaders. The Great Recession and its long opioid-haunted aftermath sowed doubts about the direction of American society and American capitalism. The rise of a youthful and militant progressivism has created a sense that Americas cultural institutions, and maybe the entire American future, have been captured by the left.

My guest today is one of those on the right who has been radicalized in recent years. Just five years ago, Sohrab Ahmari was a self-described mainstream conservative working for The Wall Street Journal opinion page. But since then his views have changed dramatically. Hes become a fierce critic of the Republican Party as it existed prior to the rise of Donald Trump, a champion of right-wing populist leaders like Trump himself and Hungarys Viktor Orban, and one of the smartest minds trying to forge a coherent alternative to the late modern liberal order.

I have my points of disagreement with Ahmari. Like him, Im a social and religious conservative. Like him, I think the pre-Trump Republican Party needed to be radically overhauled. But compared to him Im much more skeptical of the political forms that populist conservatism has taken since.

But understanding his intellectual journey and his current worldview is deeply important for understanding what animates the modern right. Its a fascinating and then at times contentious discussion. So my conversation with Sohrab after the break.

Sohrab, thank you so much for being with me today.

Thanks for having me, Ross.

Before we dive into the fate of the late modern West and the future of conservatism, I want to talk a little bit about your personal background and biography, which is, in fact, the subject of an earlier book that you wrote, a spiritual memoir called From Fire By Water. So could you talk a little bit about where you grew up?

Happily. So I was born and raised in Tehran, Iran six years to the day that the Ayatollah Khomeini returned from his Parisian exile to herald the Islamic Republic and oust the Shah. I grew up in a very westernized and westernizing, almost bohemian milieu. My mother was an abstract expressionist painter. My father described himself as a postmodernist architect. They had supported the Iranian revolution more out of 1968 type energies than Ayatollah Khomeini type energies or inspirations, and almost instantly came to regret it.

So that was the kind of world that I grew up in a world in which at home I was the regime as we called it the regime was constantly denounced. And alcohol flowed freely. Usually kind of a horrendous moonshine that occasionally was made using isopropyl alcohol. But, nevertheless, fun was had. And a world outside in which was the Islamic Republic.

And so how long did you live in Iran?

I lived in Iran until I was about to turn 14. We knew that there was a green card on the way, because my uncle, who had settled in the United States right at the time of the revolution, like many students sent abroad did once they realized what was happening, they chose to stay where they were studying he had applied for my mother and I to join him via the family preference visa program, a.k.a. chain migration, and came to Utah, of all places.

And so before you came to Utah, what did America mean to you? 8-year-old Sohrab or 12-year-old Sohrab.

You know, America meant individualism. I have this passage that Im really fond of in my memoir where and I was into Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones as protagonist. And they are protagonists who are valued for their individuality. Theyre valued as individuals. Thats a really profound cultural difference. And I bandied about these words that I didnt understand like secularity or rationalism and logic. And those things were Western. Whereas my homeland was superstitious and backward, and backward because superstitious and religious.

You were happy to come to America.

Oh 100 percent. 100 percent. It was my promised land.

And so you came to America, and it was Utah. And what was that like?

First of all, physically, really beautiful. I mean, the natural landscape. But it was not secular. In fact, alcohol was capped at 3 percent under secular law, but it was enacted seemingly by Mormons, who dominated the state. It was communitarian in a way that I found saccharine and oppressive with like the Mormons home church. All this stuff. I mean, I found it repulsive.

And so you sort of had a double escape. You escaped from Shiite Iran and then you left Utah and basically entered the modern meritocracy and became a secular person.

Thats right. I became a college Trotskyist. Then undergrad ended. I didnt have much to do. So I did Teach for America for a couple of years in South Texas on the U.S.-Mexico border. Then taught for two more years at this charter school in Massachusetts. Anyway, to speed things along, I went to law school. Never practiced. Was hired by The Wall Street Journal opinion page as a buy-then ex-leftist secular neo-con or secular mainstream conservative.

And you werent happy.

Personally, I mean, sure. I was happy. I mean, I was

You were happy.

Career-wise I was going from strength to strength. Right? I mean I was like in my mid-20s and Im an editor at The Wall Street Journal opinion pages then Im shipped off to London to help run the European edition. So from the point of view of the boy who grew up in Iran and initially when we first moved to the United States for a time we lived in a mobile home park because we had just arrived and currency exchange was brutal to then youre being flown around the world by the Journal is youre happy in that sense. But in a deeper, kind of spiritual sense, yes I was unhappy. There were questions that worldview didnt answer. I mean, all along, I should say, I had begun to read certain books. I had peeked into the Bible.

The forbidden texts.

The forbidden texts! I sat down to seriously read by this point. Id read the Torah in the beautiful translation by Robert Alter, Pope Benedicts books. Thats the intellectual side of things. Theres also a dimension of this, which is harder to talk about in a secular podcast, if you will, which is the action of the mass moved me profoundly. The idea of divine condescension. The idea that God himself would become man and descend to mans kind of lower depths and redeem him there, and to allow himself to be mocked, humiliated, whipped and then ultimately killed by his own creation. There was something so beautiful about that, just even aesthetically speaking. As C.S. Lewis says, if you set out to create a religion, it would not be Christianity. It is so odd in that sense and so romantic, frankly. I mean, Im OK using that word.

So I initially kind of flirted just very briefly with Anglicanism. Specifically evangelical Anglicanism. But then walked into a mass at the famous Brompton Oratory, which is a church thats very famous for traditional liturgy. And this particular mass, it all clicked. Both the romance and beauty of what happens on the altar of the sacrifice, but also the tradition, the continuity, the authority of the Roman church. So that by the time that mass was over I almost ran to the oratory house, which is just where the priests live and knocked on the door and told the first priest that opened the door that I want to become a Catholic.

And so in just four years after sort of swimming the Tiber, as we Roman Catholics say, entering the Catholic Church, you find yourself writing a book to your very young son that is in effect a warning against the kind of life and world that you had embraced and succeeded in in the 10 years prior to your conversion to Catholicism.

Yes. Yes. Thats a good way to describe it.

The book starts with a very arresting vision, a fearful vision that you have for your sons future as, like you, a member of the successful secular meritocracy. What haunts you about your sons potential future as a success?

Yeah, so I should briefly say the impetus for the book was the immediate impetus was there was a OkCupid campaign in 2018. And like the more recent one thats been the subject of some controversy on Twitter least, it was incredibly vulgar. It was, like, polyamory like openly advertised. And Ive lived most of my life in big cities. I really dont think Im a prude. Nevertheless, I couldnt help but imagine my son asking, you know, what is some of this stuff? Its kind of BDSM even. And I thought, why do I find myself in a civilization in which my child has to ask me what BDSM might be?

So that was kind of an initial anxiety that set me on the path to writing this book. The cheapening. The cheapening of this dimension of life that across most of human history, across most civilization, has been held as kind of sacred, somewhat hidden. And the sort of corporate vulgarization of it bothered me. Not even so much the vulgarity itself. And then I started to imagine my son growing up to be a global meritocrat, much like his parents, and I see him not necessarily I mean God forbid I dont think hes going to succumb to an opioid addiction. Chances are, the way our economy works, hell probably inherit his parents upper middle class status. Hell probably go to elite schools.

But my fear that I describe as a kind of nightmare is that hell come back and just sort of be a person of no moral purpose. He is hobnobbing with sons of senators, maybe. Or one of his friends has gotten a Davos type award for environmental engineering, but all they really care about is rising through the ranks obsessed with the idea of keeping their options open, which paradoxically means that they dont really exercise their freedom, their true freedom, because they never irrevocably bind themselves to anything. So they sort of just float through life.

The book then that comes out of this experience, this fear, this anxiety, is not really a political book. Its not a brief for a particular cultural program. Its a series of, in effect, introductions to ancient and pre-modern ideas that offer alternative ways of thinking about your obligations as a human being, how to think about your relationship to your family, how to think about your potential relationship to God and so on. And I want to ask you to talk about a couple of those examples one, an issue thats somewhat remote from the current culture wars and the other an issue thats close to the current culture wars but where you choose sort of a surprising figure as the embodiment of traditional wisdom.

So in the first case you have a chapter entitled, Why Would God Want You To Take A Day Off? And I should say that the book is structured around these questions. Each chapter offers a question that people might reasonably ask about in thinking their way towards a more traditional mind-set. So talk about that chapter, which is obviously about the Sabbath and the figure that you choose to sort of represent the idea of the Sabbath.

So Im not a theologian. Im not a philosopher. So the way I structured the book is through biography, through storytelling, through a kind of intellectual journalism, and, frankly, popularization. And the chapter of the Sabbath is reflecting on the fact that in the United States, until relatively recently, we had a tradition of what were called blue laws or Sabbatarian laws. The idea being that the law should enshrine one day as a day of rest, of contemplation, and its a very old tradition. Its loss is relatively recent, but it came so gradually that now its become imperceptible to us, or invisible.

And it comes against the backdrop of the fact that, as you know, the share of people who identify with no religion, the so-called nones is large and growing. And so in that context, what meaning does Sabbath hold for us? And of course, to answer those sets of questions, I turn to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, great Hasidic intellectual.

So he wrote a book called The Sabbath, which is just one of the most beautiful pieces of biblical commentary that Ive ever come across. And its a case for the Sabbath. And the way he argues is by dividing human life into roughly two domains. One is the domain of space or the realm of space. And thats what we do most days of the week. Its about conquest. Its about competition. Its about economic inquisitiveness and rivalry. And thats fine. I mean, its good to strive after those things.

But there is this other realm, Heschel says, thats called the realm of time. And thats really the realm of the divine. Its the realm of contemplation. It points us to infinity and kind of reminds us that those things we do the other days of the week only can find meaning in relation to this other realm of time, and should be somehow limited by them. Otherwise life is kind out of balance.

Yeah, thats more or less the Heschelian argument that I present. And then I apply it to our current conditions where the loss of the Sabbath has not meant an expansion of freedom for the ordinary worker or the ordinary family. Its really been freedom for the likes of Jeff Bezos. Amazon uses whats called algorithmic human resources scheduling. The goal is obviously be ultra efficient in the use of labor. And what that means is that a lot of his workers have no sense of regularity in their schedule. And thats on the lower end of the economic ladder.

On the upper end, people like you and I are constantly by this kind of ghostly blue glow of the smartphone. The line between work and rest has been completely erased, and were just more harried. And so this is a type of argument that in almost every chapter of The Unbroken Thread gets recapitulated one way or another. And thats that a lot of promises of liberal modernity are about freedom and about demolishing various barriers, either traditional barriers or natural ones that seem to hinder us. And its only with the loss of those barriers that we see that they were somehow guaranteeing our freedom. That a life without limits is actually paradoxically less free. The loss of limits leave us, in this case, kind of restless and harried. And it also perpetuates the exploitation of workers by large employers.

And so well pick up on the question of capitalism in a minute but now to move to the second example from your book. By the standards of traditionalist books, this book pays relatively little attention to sex and sexuality. Not that those arent obviously big issues, and as you say it starts with the OkCupid ads. But you really zero in on sexual questions in a chapter whose title question is Is Sex A Private Matter? And the figure you use is who to illuminate this question?

The famous traditionalist Andrea Dworkin.

The noted reactionary traditionalist Andrea Dworkin. Yes. So for listeners who dont know who Andrea Dworkin is, please explain the irony of that description.

Yeah, sure. So Andrea Dworkin was a radical feminist prominent beginning, really, in the 1970s and into the 80s. She died in the early 2000s, but by the late 90s or by the time she had died, she was kind of a forgotten figure, and a defeated figure because her brand of feminism was anti-porn, anti-prostitution, feminism. And out of the struggles within the feminist movement in which she was a notable combatant, it was the quote unquote sex-positive feminists who, in many ways, won out. And those sex-positive feminists defined themselves, again, in many ways over against Andrea Dworkin. I mean Dworkin was their antagonist.

So, yeah. I use her for the proposition that sex is inherently public. And Dworkin is a figure obviously also broadly associated with the radical left in this country. But if you read her work closely, I think you will find in it mostly a critique of the sexual revolution, of what the sexual revolution of the 1960s had wrought that in practice meant empowering or freeing a lot of caddish men.

The Hugh Hefner, Roman Polanski era, shall we say, of male liberation.

Beautifully put. Yeah.

So dig a little deeper into that. What does it mean to say that sex is a public issue? A public matter? Beyond just the idea that men behave badly; Harvey Weinstein exists.

Yeah, I mean what Dworkin insisted on and I somewhat provocatively argue that in so doing shes an inheritor or maybe an unconscious heir to someone like Saint Augustine. Saint Augustine thought that what was wrong with Rome, with the Roman Empire, was that all of its lofty aspirations of spreading law and rationality in this kind of large imperium to the whole globe really rested on a base of domination, of lustful domination.

Fast forward to the late 20th century and Andrea Dworkin says much the same thing. That you cannot have a society that claims to, for example, value the equal dignity of men and women or put so much emphasis on equality as an ideal where at the same time 100 million men daily switched their browsers to incognito mode and look at exploitative imagery of women and young women being slapped and so forth. So that what happens in the realm of the private whether thats porn, pornography, but also I mean, for Andrea Dworkin even in just the sort of ordinary American bedroom had public ramifications. Because it undermined a lot of our claims to being a just society.

But also theres an argument here thats sort of implied or explicit, that capitalism plays some role here. That one of the provocative ways of reading the history of the last 50 years is that what gets called neoliberalism, right, the sort of triumph of a certain vision of globalized capitalism in the late 20th century, has a financial and a sexual side. That financial deregulation and sexual deregulation are seen as one is right wing and one is left wing. But in fact, in both cases, its sort of the transformation of either customary arrangements and traditions or customs of intimate life into this kind of free marketplace in which greater exploitation becomes kind of inevitable.

Unless and here Im recapitulating the neoliberal argument that well, its all undergirded by consent. We have consent. The porn actress signed 15 different forms saying that whats about to happen to her is OK. So there you go. So its very just impoverishment of men and womens moral capacities, whether you look at it from a traditional kind of Christian and Judeo-Christian point of view. Or whether you stand in that tradition of the left that saw that, for example, labor contracts that are exploitative are not made less so, or are not morally ratified just because the worker signed a piece of paper saying, yes, I contractually enter into this. Across both realms you see the sort of narrowing of a moral horizon of what you should expect of society.

But then in very contemporary feminism, right? Post #MeToo feminism theres been at least some partial rediscovery of Dworkin. A certain amount of skepticism about what you described as sex-positive feminism. And theres an attempt to sort of say essentially a version of what youre saying. Which is that consent is not enough and you need a larger and more holistic picture. And on the feminist left right now that takes the form of analysis of power dynamics, a range of things beyond just the bare reality of consent. But that attempt to sort of not just be neoliberals, I guess you could say, does exist, I think, in #MeToo feminism right now.

Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah.

So as you can probably tell, Im sort of setting up this question, which is, you, Sohrab Ahmari are, rather famously for anyone who follows your career, a man of the right. And not just the right, but what is considered maybe especially by readers of The New York Times to be the extreme right. But the analysis that youre offering, its compatible in certain ways with a lot of left-wing arguments about our present discontents.

So why are you a man of the right and not a man of the left?

I dont know if Im properly called a conservative anymore. What I detest, and what Ive kind of devoted my career to, is critiquing a certain conservatism and, Ross, youre familiar with it as well, and youve criticized it in various places but a conservatism that says marriage rates are down so bad. People arent having kids, so sad. Oh, church attendance rates plummeting, terrible. But in the very same breath promotes economic arrangements that are bound to corrode things like family, things like community, things like family formation, because it makes it so much more difficult. People are as we said about the Sabbath but theres so many other examples of this. People are harried. Theres a kind of precariousness baked into American life. We are told to be an entrepreneur of the self and be a gig worker, but also health insurance only follows you through regular employment. So what if you get sick? That kind of conservatism that pays lip service to the things that we care about but pays no attention to how to live that kind of virtuous life that conservatives celebrate. It has some material substrate. Its not just about ideas. Its not just about banging a drum and saying tradition is good. Get married, have kids.

But people need a kind of a substrate of material safety from which to launch these things. Like launch into a marriage or launch into having a larger family. So Im very interested in taking down that aspect of the right. I may not be able to achieve much else, but if I can seriously critique and point out that the economic libertarian type of conservatism undermines the very goods it claims to cherish, like family and community and church and so forth. If I just show that, that suffices.

But, so, again for a liberal or left wing listener to this interview, Ive asked you why youre on the right. And youve told me everything that you think is wrong with the right. And I think their response might be, well, why are you interested in right-wing political alternatives and well talk a little bit about those specific alternatives in a minute when Bernie Sanders is right here for you, Sohrab, with concrete and tangible proposals to, for instance, spend more money to help working class families, to sort of boost that material substrate, to regulate those Amazon warehouses or encourage unionization in them. So what prevents you, then, from being on the left?

Yeah, so I do think that theres a big problem with the existing left, as well. I think a lot of its energies that appear revolutionary, if you scratch a little bit youll just find the neoliberalism there in a way that I think is not good for working-class people. And so I oppose that as well.

So Ill give you an example. I think the idea of abolishing the police. I see that as just one more type of neoliberal privatization. The processes that began in the late 1960s and 70s and have continued to this day.

So where the end game of police abolition is rich people have private police and poor people dont have protection. Thats what you mean, right?

Right. I mean, thats just one example. But I could go down the list. You look at so much of the existing left and what you see is behind the seemingly very revolutionary rhetoric and I know Im not the first to point this out you find policies that would make it easier, for example, for HR departments to fire workers for saying the slightly wrong thing. And so this kind of language policing of the left, I think is a gift to HR.

I have arguments with conservatives all the time where I say, please dont say critical race theory is the new communism. Please dont say this is Marxism under a new guise. If these kinds of ideologies presented any kind of serious threat to the material interests of the Nike corporation, of Apple, of lots and lots of elements of the American establishment, the trustees of Ivy League universities, and so on if they represented a real threat they would snap it out like that. They would sort of suffocate it so quickly.

Elaborate a little bit on that idea of a progressive establishment. Because this is an idea that is just a commonplace for conservatives like you and I that progressivism has this unprecedented dominance in American life through networks of elite institutions. And liberals tend to say this is not actual political power. Obviously political power has been in the hands of the Republican Party until recently. It may be soon again, and conservatives are just sort of paranoid in effect about the alleged power of Hollywood plus Harvard plus HR departments. Make the case that there is actually a progressive power structure in this country along the lines that you describe.

The case that I would make is its a very pinched and narrow account of power to think that power only resides in, lets say, the Congress. Thats not where real policymaking happens in our society. Power is a lot more complicated than that, and it takes place in boardrooms where decisions get made about questions of labor arbitrage and how that affects either through migration or through offshoring how that affects people on the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder. Power takes place certainly in universities because they train and form the new generation of elites.

We have, for example, this enormous apparatus of unaccountable censorship taking place at big tech companies. The people who do that are engineers, in a broad sense. Not just tech engineers. But you know what they call kind of political or safety engineers at firms like Facebook and Twitter. These people wield power, and what Im calling for is a recognition that they wield power.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So just to stay with this class of Google engineers, high-powered lawyers, the professional managerial class, right? I want to propose this to you as a reason why you are on the right rather than the left. I would say that from the perspective of the politics that youre envisioning, this sort of more thoroughgoing critique of where liberal society has ended up, there is more resistance to social and moral conservatism among this class than there is resistance to some kind of economic populism among conservatives.

That seems to me to be sort of maybe an organizing theory of why you think its more important to oppose elite liberalism than actual existing conservatism in certain ways. Like in the case of your own book, I can imagine a sort of secular person whos interested in religion and feels unhappy with certain aspects of our society agreeing with many things that you say in your book right up to the point when you say, and we shouldnt just respect the Sabbath; we should have blue laws. We shouldnt just think marriage is important; we should make it hard to get a divorce.

I feel like there is this just profound resistance among, in a way, our fellow elite meritocratic of anything that takes that kind of traditionalist critique and tries to turn it into policy. And Im both curious if you think that is right, and also then if you think that theres less resistance on the right to saying, the way Jeff Bezos runs his warehouses should summon up a political response.

So to answer the first half first, about the degree to which meritocratics and professional managerial classes resist, broadly speaking, cultural regulation, I mean, I think thats absolutely true. And I would increasingly say that their resistance to cultural regulation is aligned with their class interests, as well. The people who push cultural deregulation for the most part are bourgeois elites. And it somehow works out well for them. It does not work out so well for working class people.

In other words, if you look at divorce rates between low income families and those in the upper stratosphere, theres wide divergence on family structure and stability. So the elites push these kind of deregulatory measures, and its working class families and middle class families that are wracked by the consequences.

Or you can talk about drug deregulation. Now we have big weed almost as big as big tobacco. And, yes, there are upper class kids who dabble in drugs, but somehow for the most part they have these resources where if they mess up too bad, there is therapy, there is family support, and they kind of move on. But its not the case for much of the underclass where, depending on whether youre talking about an urban or a regional area, you have opioid or other drugs wracking the community.

Im not posing a conspiracy account. And I cant easily reconcile why it is that elites push deregulation and they just so happen to not suffer the consequences nearly as much as people toward the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.

Yeah. I mean I once wrote a piece for The Times called social liberalism as class warfare that made an ineffective version of this argument. But the thing to recognize, right, is that there is no conscious sense that we are culturally deregulating and we will be the beneficiaries. Instead, the assumption of elite liberalism is that cultural regulation is inherently, I think, crueler than economic regulation and more liable to abuse. And so the costs of more stringent laws regulating divorce are too many people stuck in unhappy and abusive marriages. The costs of regulations on pornography are too many restrictions on artists and a sort of punitive and censorious state.

And I mean, to be frank, whether its the Handmaids Tale scenario or your own childhood experience, the automatic fear of elite liberalism is that theres no stopping point between some kind of cultural regulation and a kind of theocratic police state.

Yeah. I mean, I think this is the liberal paradox that is sown through every chapter of The Unbroken Thread, to kind of use the books title as a secondary metaphor or whatever. That what is promised as liberation ends up working out as a kind of new and worse tyranny than the authoritative structures that it replaced. So it was possible to say maybe in the 1950s and 60s, that cultural deregulation would lead to a neutral society in which no cultural account of what it means to be human or sort of comprehensive account of the good is enshrined and occasionally coercively enforced against individuals.

I dont think you can say that now, 50, 60, 70 years later, when you see how the project of liberation itself has come to become quite coercive and censorious. So theres no escaping some account of the good being enshrined and forcibly enforced in society. You cannot say that after a kind of wave of university cancellations of the degree to which speech is regulated. Again, you have to agree with me that private regulation can be just this coercive as governmental authorities doing it. That the formal distinction between them is a tissue, and its not that thick of a tissue.

And if thats the case, then this concern about regulation just becomes liberals saying, we want our norms to be coercively enforced, to which a more traditionalist person would say, yes, and yours are new and radical and you can see how they do harm, especially to the weak people in society. So, no, I disagree. And I will politically oppose that.

OK, so what is Ahmarism? Youre making a case, basically, that some vision of the good will dominate in a society. There will be some kind of coercion, be it private or public. There will be some form of cultural and economic regulation. You, tomorrow, are graced with the opportunity to write a party platform, or otherwise sort of make your ideas embodied in a political movement. What does that movement want? What is its 10 point plan for its first 10 years in power?

The platform that would emerge would be shockingly familiar to anyone familiar, for example, with the Christian Democratic tradition in Europe. And the goal would be, look, it should be possible for a family to live an ordinary life of virtue, for cultural normality to reign once again. And, by the way, a big component, a huge component of being able to live an ordinary life of virtue means that it should be enough and possible to raise a family on one income in this country. Health care should not be so freaking precarious, that there should be a basic right to health care, some sort of kind of minimal public care. And if it sounds radical, its only because neoliberalism has drifted so far from ordinary expectations of ordinary people.

Like, the watchwords are ordinariness, normality.

Fine. Good. So I think I can see the economic agenda that youre imagining, and it is, lets say, a slightly more socially conservative and bourgeois family-centric version of Bernie Sanders-ism. And I think the question of political resistance is about whether people are actually interested in paying the higher taxes and/or accepting the disruptions in their existing programs and services that this would require.

But, again, youre on the right, not the left. So theres a cultural component of this, right, whether its laws about pornography and divorce. You are pro-life, as I am, so presumably your Ahmari party would ban or significantly restrict abortion. What is the sort of social agenda?

The one weve discussed. I think its one around which you can build a pretty broad even an elite consensus, possibly, is porn. First of all because to regulate obscenity is not at all an aberration in the American tradition. And you see it now with post sex-positive feminism or with your former colleague Nick Kristofs work on Pornhub that you can build a consensus to say that, no, this is not speech. The idea of women and often children, we now know, and underage people being exploited by traffickers, and then having the videos shared by millions of people. Thats not a proper account of freedom. Left and right can come together on that. Thats a really important one.

I think on abortion, thats the one where we will kind of radically disagree. I mean, thats a profoundly, squarely political question. And it would be part of the agenda, but there I dont expect to win over many liberals as I might on the porn question.

So, yeah, I mean it would be a socially conservative agenda. The economic component is the one where it would cause a lot of tears at the Heritage Foundation and the WSJ editorial board and so on.

But let me make the case that this is a fantasy. Because I think youre absolutely right that progressivism in power now seeks to impose its own set of rules and regulations on speech, on sex, on what gets put up and shared on Facebook, all of these things. But in response, the right, in the age of Donald Trump, this is the first time I think Ive mentioned him in this interview were getting around to him at the end in the age of Donald Trump the right is increasingly the party of, screw you Ill say what I want. The party of free speech against the progressive censors.

Our mutual friend and fellow Catholic Matthew Walther wrote a great piece about bar stool conservatives basically defined as its a reference to Barstool Sports and its sort of pugnacious founder David Portnoy. And basically its a conservatism of leave me alone. Let me be a guy hanging out with the guys and say what I want. And that, it seems to me, is where a lot of the energy on the right is right now. And Im not denying that there is a lot of discomfort with pornography in our society. There is this sort of general feeling on left and right, alike, that maybe it would be nice to turn off your phones on Sunday. But the day that you as the embodiment of a political coalition say, were going to actually have laws that enforce this, to say nothing of questions about divorce or something like that, is the day that you reap an immense political backlash, I think, in politics as I see it in my limited pundits way right now.

Like Donald Trump did not run as the candidate of restricting pornography. Im curious how you get over that hurdle in making this kind of socially conservative, economically populist fusion a reality. And if you cant, then the second question would be, well why not just do the economic stuff? Why not just do the Sanders agenda and see if that stabilizes things, and wait for the religious revival to do social policy?

So for what its worth Ive come to the conclusion that traditional kind of social conservatism as its been pursued since Roe v. Wade has failed. We got to face up to it. I think its failed in part as my friend Adrian Vermeule of Harvard Law School says because of a weak and ultimately incorrect judicial philosophy, but I dont want to get into that kind of intricate legal debate. But the bottom line is that its failed.

And I think that serious social conservatives should attend to the material base of society. In other words, we should take seriously the Marxist insight that the cultural phenomena that we decry have an important material component to them not to be vulgar Marxists and say that all culture is reducible to economics, but that there is an economic underlying component to culture, and to take that seriously. And so I would absolutely lead with the economic. So Im granting your point.

OK. But Im just going to push you on that without getting too deep into the weeds. Part of the argument from your friend Adrian Vermeule that you referenced is that on the cultural side conservative elites have more power to sort of direct and redirect culture than a lot of sort of free market libertarian Republicans assume. So the argument is that whether in the form of bureaucratic edicts or in the form of judicial rulings, a more conservative elite could, in effect, solve the problem Im describing. The problem that most Americans dont seem to want cultural regulation by effectively, not always dramatically, but sort of imposing that regulation from above.

Theres an expectation that you take over the government and you can use it as liberals have done with liberal policy to move the country to a place, whether its through a Supreme Court ruling not just overturning Roe but saying that actually unborn human beings have a right to life under the Constitution or whether its through administrative work that maybe brings back blue laws or something like that. Do you agree with that? Do you agree with that argument?

Absolutely Adrian is right about that. And all hes drawing on, honestly, is as it just goes back to Aristotle. It goes back to the Cicero, to Saint Thomas, where they say that the law is a teacher. And you dont inculcate virtue in a population as a statesman in the classical frame is called to do. You dont do it merely by exhortations to virtue, you know, oh, please, behave better, so forth. You have to use the law because it has efficacious power to coerce and discipline. So hes right about that.

I think to try to bridge the gap between the two what I will tell you is there was a point where you said, well you get to power. And what I would suggest is that the material economic program is in part to help ordinary people live easier lives, and thats part of the program. But its also first you get the power. Well that was part of your premise, one way to do that is to address the material inequalities, the overweening power of corporations in American life. And so thats the part that Im focusing on. And I dont see that as intention with the idea that, yes, the law can change culture. Ive seen that in the Islamic Republic of my youth, but also in the United States of my adulthood where a shift in law changes peoples perceptions, almost, in such a way that they dont even remember that they formerly held the contrary position. Because the law is a teacher.

Read the original:

Opinion | Why This Conservative Wants a More Radical Republican Party - The New York Times

President Donald Trump speaks during the first day of the Republican National Convention on Aug. 24, 2020, in Charlotte, N.C. Utah Republicans are bidding to bring the convention to the Beehive State in 2024. (Chris Carlson, Associated Press)

Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes

SALT LAKE CITY The Utah Republican Party wants to bring the GOP's biggest event to the Beehive State in 2024.

State Republicans, along with Visit Salt Lake, are seeking to bring the Republican National Convention to Utah in 2024, according to Utah Republican Party Chairman Carson Jorgensen.

"The party supports this and the state would really love to see it here," Jorgensen said Friday. "I think Utah has an extremely good shot at making this happen."

Visit Salt Lake, which promotes Salt Lake County as a convention and travel destination, made an initial informal pitch to the Republican National Committee this week, and the group will prepare a formal bid for the convention in December, Jorgensen said. The committee would then do some site visits to other contending cities and make a final decision early next year, he said.

With new hotels going up in downtown Salt Lake City, as well as a major renovation to the airport, Salt Lake now has the tourism infrastructure to support a major event like the RNC, Jorgensen added.

The economic activity brought in from such an event would be a boon to Utah, Jorgensen said. He estimated that hosting the convention could generate as much as $200 million for the state's economy.

"The economic value behind this is pretty unprecedented," he said.

Additionally, if Salt Lake were able to host the RNC in 2024, it would set the precedent that Utah is able to host similar large events moving forward, such as the Olympics, Jorgensen said. Salt Lake City hosted the Winter Olympics in 2002, and will likely bid to host the games again in either 2030 or 2034.

Hosting the RNC would be "a show of power" to prove that Salt Lake can handle the Olympics again, Jorgensen added.

On the other hand, the Utah Democratic Party's criticism of state Republicans bidding for the 2024 convention was simple.

"I am so tired," the party tweeted Thursday.

Jorgensen said he believes hosting the convention would be a good opportunity to showcase Utah and highlight what Republicans have been able to achieve in the state.

"I think it's just good to showcase what Republican leadership has done for the state of Utah over the past several years," Jorgensen said. "I think it's a good place to showcase it."

Follow this link:

Utah GOP bidding to host Republican National Convention in 2024 - KSL.com