New analysis of 2022 midterm elections: implications for Democrats

When you work on an election, pretty much everything you do is determined by the data. The data used to be called "the voter lists" despite living in a computer file, but perhaps became envisioned as the data when we moved away from paper and onto smart phones. The data is used to send campaigners to interact with a selection of voters. Which voters the campaign expends resources to interact with is the most fundamental choice made in designing a strategy. From the point of view of the canvasser or phoner, the reasons for any particular list can be opaque, though good campaigns teach their workers as much as is known about their target voters.

(Reuters published a nice visual about political data flow if you want a picture.)

The data is compiled from public sources and past campaigns by list brokers -- at the top end, TargetSmart for the Democrats and Data Trust for Republicans. Various organizations further massage the data, attaching additional information and speculation about individual voters. Think of this part of the process as marketing for politics; like all the businesses that create profiles of us to sell stuff to us, political actors use public information to decide who to pitch with what message and how to reach them.

On the Democratic side, the best of these enhanced data files come through a nonprofit outfit called Catalist. Here's how that entity describes itself:

Catalist compiles, enhances, stores, and dynamically updates data on over 256 million unique voting-age individuals across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. ... Our commitment is to strengthen the progressive community year after year by growing and maturing this community asset and related technology and services.

When an election cycle is over, Catalist refines its data, using it now, not for targeting, but to discern what trends and changes are happening among the voters. Every two years, Catalists publishes a What Happened. Findings about the midterm elections of 2022 are encouraging :

Gen Z and Millennials played a remarkable role in the 2022 election, voting heavily for Democratic candidates and exceeding their turnout from 2018. That makes this the second midterm cycle in a row where young voters have not only defied conventional wisdom about their willingness to turn out, but delivered decisive victories for Democrats....

From the late 1970s to the early 2000s, young Democratic support was routinely between 50% and 60% and even dropped below 50% in some cycles, according to exit polls. While support rose dramatically in the 2006 midterms amidst opposition to the Iraq War and in 2008 during President Obama’s first election, the midterm years of 2010 and 2014 saw a substantial drop in support among young voters, in part due to young Democrats sitting out those elections but also due to across-the-board declines in support for Democrats in a Republican wave year.

Support has remained incredibly strong since 2016, however, notably including the past two midterms: peaking at 68% in the wave year of 2018, and remaining high in 2022. This marks the first time that young people's Democratic support has been greater than 60% for two consecutive midterm elections, and now includes a midterm with a Democratic incumbent president.

Democratic support among young voters is partly due to the diversity of this group, as America becomes more diverse over time. But that is not the whole story. Democratic support was higher among young voters of color, both nationally (78%) and in highly contested races (also 78%). But support among young white voters rose between 2018 (53% national, 52% highly contested races) and 2022 (58% nationally, 57% highly contested races). This 5-6 point support change is notable, indicating a broad base of Democratic support among young voters across the country.

What Does This Mean for Turnout in 2024? For practitioners, high turnout cycles mean that more voters have registered, cast ballots and engaged with campaigns, meaning there is more opportunity to re-engage these voters over time because they are visible to voter files and campaigns. Voting itself is also habitual and people who vote once are more likely to vote again than people who have never voted at all. We may remain in a high turnout era, but voters’ perceptions of how competitive and salient an election is can change dramatically. Higher turnout does not automatically confer advantages to Democrats and parties have been able to fight to near-parity in the past several general elections.

Campaigns are about winning the immediate election -- and also about encouraging habits of participation among your target population. That's what we do out there. It's called citizenship and underlies functioning democracy.

Here's an historical artifact from the days when we used paper to teach about voter files. In Nevada, by the way.

A mixed hope, but what we've got

From a contemporary perspective, the history of the Democratic Party in the United States is too often the story of a political organization that was on the wrong side of inclusive human freedom and also, though perhaps not so morally culpably, on the "wrong side" of history. Michael Kazin has done the job in What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party. I found the book interesting, sometimes a little off-kilter, and informative.

Here's my slightly idiosyncratic take on this history: before and during the Civil War, the Dems were the slavery-affirming empire builders who invaded Mexico to expand potential unfree territory. Their governing philosophy of "states rights" was the mantra of the enslavers. By comparison, the emerging Republican Party stood against slavery, if not broadly for the equal rights of Black people. But Republicans did produce Abraham Lincoln, probably the best president we ever had, who navigated the contradictions of his own coalition to military victory over the secessionist traitors, understood that slaves must be freed, and was assassinated for his pains.

For the next 80 years or so, both parties look pretty awful. The Dems were the party of white rule in the South and of anachronistic rural populism elsewhere. The Republicans were the party of kleptocratic railroad barons and industrialists. The GOP was "on the side of history" but that era looks simply corrupt and cruel in modern perspective. Early 20th century Progressivism, a sometimes bipartisan current, reined in some abuses of human dignity and of "free" white labor in an emerging capitalist world superpower.

It took the Great Depression of the 1930s for Democrats to become the party that decisively turned to using the power of the state to increase the well-being of the majority of the people. And yet, in order to keep a legislative majority in the national government, Democrats remained dependent on the white supremacists of the old Confederacy. Contradictions abounded.

These contradictions were heightened and partially resolved after the Vietnam war and the Civil Rights movement made straddling opposites impossible. The ensuing Democratic collapse in the 1970s led to Ronald Reagan and to thirty or maybe more years, mostly Republican-dominated, when Dems were dimly scrabbling toward a majority vision which includes all of us -- people of color, women, newcomers, queers, and young people staring down climate catastrophe. (Jesse Jackson knew by 1988, but that's another story.) 

Is the Party there yet? I'd say closer. In this regard I think I agree with Democratic pundit and organizer Simon Rosenberg in the Hopium Chronicles:

Republicans have given us a big opportunity. We need to seize it, together. Friends this is a good time to be a Democrat.

• • •

The skeletal, less-than-celebratory, survey of the Democratic Party trajectory I've just written above is not Michael Kazin's fault or his story. His book covers the same ground in the mode of respectable history. Most of it is solid stuff, though I could argue with some emphases. I found it a useful survey, absolutely worth reading.

Given all the campaigns I've worked, I especially appreciated Kazin's attention to the mechanics of campaigns in different eras. Here's how the New York State Democratic Central Committee in 1842 laid out its midterm strategy:

William L. Marcy and his fellow leaders instructed town and district committees to correct their voter lists, "procure speakers to address the people," and check off the names of good Democrats "as they arrive and vote." Activists were urged to bring such voters "to the polls in the early part of the day," knowing the Whigs were doing the same. The committee emphasized that, while the prospects for victory were "cheering," vigilance was mandatory. "Let us not, we beseech you, in a contest on which so much depends, be caught napping," it concluded.

By the 1890s, Democratic urban bosses had developed a formula for delivering the vote. They had won a competition for mass loyalty with both the political idealists who adhered to Henry George's single tax notion and fledgling labor unions which exacerbated rather than managed class conflict. New York City's Tammany Hall ran a system of clubhouses which "mixed politics with wholesome pleasure" and served to tie families to the machine.

... Tammany commanded a white working class army of modest size that helped itself to the spoils of the city and passed some along to the civilians who harbored them. The machine operated as a welfare state in embryo, albeit one dependent on the protean political calculations of its leaders and the men they lifted into office and limited to efforts that aided individuals one by one instead of a class in need. ...

It was only in the mid-1930s that a Democratic Party, based in a fighting labor movement, turned toward mass social improvement.

Under Samuel Gompers the old AFL ... had donated little money to ... campaigns and never undertook a major effort to convince unionists to vote Democratic.

In contrast, the [CIO unions, through the confusingly named Non-Partisan League] embarked on an ambitious campaign of publicity and fundraising. The league produced dozens of radio speeches that framed the election in starkly class-conscious terms. ... The League held thousands of rallies -- including 344 in Ohio alone -- and contributed 10 percent of the funds the Democrats collected during the entire campaign.

Kazin concludes with a rapturous description of the Democratic victory in Nevada in 2018 being celebrated by members of the Culinary Union in Las Vegas chanting, "We Vote! We Win!" In his telling, organized labor is still central to Democratic Party successes -- and I agree (naturally, having been part of that one.)

Can Democrats extend their trajectory toward solidifying a majority in 2024? Once again, it's hard not to feel we must -- or too many hopes perish.

Lives not saved

Those of us who sit in safe Democratic states that protect abortion access may have a hard time feeling, as opposed to understanding, what Republican bans mean to women who have to live with them.

The Nebraska State Senator, with both emotion and poise, conveys the horror of what the state ban, since enacted, will do to women, their partners, and their children.

Friday cat blogging

The E.P. may be out of town, but it is not as if I don't have proper supervision. At least when Janeway is sitting on my desk, it's easier to type than it is when she is asleep on my lap.

The Donald is out of touch ...

At The New Republic, editor Michael Tomasky offers a barnburner of an exploration of why Donald Trump in 2023 is even more of a danger to this country than he was in 2016. Simply put, Trump has become the pure incarnation of white cultural despair. Defeat has scrubbed away any vestige of his carnival performer's charm, however phony it might always have been. 

Concurrently, Tomasky explores succinctly the demographic realities that are pulling the foundation from under Trump and his MAGA Republicans, leaving them so angry and confused. We no longer live in the America I was born into or even the world of my midlife in Reagan's time. Nor do a great many of us live in MAGA world. Another country is possible ... and largely already here. And therein lies the hope that should buoy a refashioned Democratic, pro-democracy, political party.

Yes, times have changed. Not in every way for the better. But in terms of broad cultural attitudes, Americans are far more open-minded today than they were in Reagan’s time. Gallup started asking people about same-sex marriage in 1996 (it didn’t even register as an issue in the ’80s). In 1996, respondents were opposed by 68 to 27 percent. By 2022, that had flipped almost precisely on its head, with 71 percent in favor and 28 percent opposed. The turning point came in 2011, and the number has basically climbed ever since. ...

The country is dramatically different. In 1985, the United States was 78 percent white (non-Hispanic white, that is, according to the Census Bureau), 12 percent Black, 7 percent Hispanic, and just under 3 percent Other (Asian Americans were still just “Others” then). In 2020, the country was 58 percent non-Hispanic white, 19 percent Hispanic, still 12 percent Black, 6 percent Asian, and about 3 percent Native American.

In 1985, 19 percent of Americans had completed four or more years of college. In 2021, that number was doubled—23.5 percent had four-year degrees and 14.4 percent had graduate degrees, for a total of nearly 38 percent.

In 1984, 76 percent of Americans lived in metropolitan areas; the share of those living in urban areas had nudged up to 80 percent in 2020.

In 1980, the share of the U.S. population that was foreign-born was around 6 percent; in 2021, it was 13.6 percent. Finally, in 1990, households headed by married couples made up 55 percent of all households; in 2022, that was down to 47 percent.

Now let’s turn to religion. According to Pew, throughout the 1980s, about 90 percent of Americans were Christian. The 1990s saw a fairly steep decline down to around 80 percent. This century, the erosion has been less sharp, but it’s been steady—the number who said they were Christian dropped to 63 percent in 2021. The number who said they were religious but named another religion has increased slightly from 1972, from 5 to 7 percent. And the number saying they were religiously unaffiliated has zoomed from 5 percent to 29 percent. Young people are abandoning religious belief at high rates. ...

I like this country better.  From where I sit, there are somewhat less people who want to erase my existence. And a lot more people who are exploring what it all means. We can confidently assert that Trump is out of touch with who most of us are.

Tomasky translates, very concretely, what all this happy change means to our politics. We can feel it; this essay gives words and structure to intuitions. Highly recommended.

Subverting the machinery of death -- then and now

On May 17, 1968, nine Catholic activists appropriated 378 files about young, male, potential draftees from the Catonsville, Maryland draft board. They burned them in the parking lot and stood by until arrested. From jail, the group sent an apologetic letter and a basket of flowers to the clerk on duty at the office during the event. Found guilty of destruction of U.S. property, Mary Moylan, Philip Berrigan, Daniel Berrigan and George Mische failed to report for the beginning of their sentences. The men were eventually captured and served time; Moylan escaped the Feds until 1979 and then served one year. (Perhaps they had a hard time finding the girl?)

The Catonsville actions touched off many additional religiously rooted demonstrations of resistance to war among white dissidents, many involving property destruction and non-cooperation with authorities. At first these responded to the Vietnam War, later to nuclear weapons development and nuclear stockpiles. White, activist, Catholic religious witness for peace acquired a new foothold in the American religious miscellany.

At the time, the property destruction and non-cooperation were extremely controversial among more traditional peace activists. Catholic pacifist groups did not universally applaud the Catonsville actions. Dorothy Day at the Catholic Worker deplored property destruction and especially the resisters' failing to show up for imprisonment -- though of course she delightedly hosted Fr. Daniel Berrigan saying mass when he emerged from Danbury Federal Prison a couple of years later.

Quite properly, people who engage in serious nonviolent actions still ponder whether their tactics accord with their vision of a more peaceful world.

In the publication Waging Nonviolence, Phil Berrigan's daughter Frida, an activist in her own right, offers a fascinating review/discussion of a film dealing with these issues in our contemporary setting. The depredations of the fossil fuel industry attract activists who are willing to put their bodies on the line to interrupt the carnage being let loose on our one and only planet. Is there a way, both ethical and effective, to protest our own destruction?

“How to Blow Up a Pipeline” is a different kind of climate catastrophe movie. There is no zombie horde, no nuclear-infused, super-sized gorilla, no metaphorical asteroid standing in for the end of the world. ... In this film (and in our lives) the wasteland is here and now. It is killing some people and making life uncomfortable or unlivable for the protagonists and their families. One character, Theo, has a cancer that leaves her gaunt and coughing up blood. She can’t afford the medicine. In a telling moment, a few of the team are at Dwayne’s West Texas home looking over maps. His wife offers beer. Shawn asks for water instead, but she replies: “We’re out of water,” without sentiment or apology. “Beer it is, then.” It is just a fact. Like the exposure to chemical plants and constant truck exhaust responsible for the bloom of rare cancer in Theo, or the heat wave that killed Xochitl’s mother.             

These young people have had enough. They find one another and try to do something they hope will have an immediate and lasting impact on the companies that profit from polluting the planet. They are careful and methodical in their planning and take pains to avoid violence to human beings or more pollution to the Earth. The young people repeatedly put themselves in danger rather than risk others getting hurt. And they have all the discussions you’d expect a group of thoughtful, impassioned, young climate activists ...

... For my parents and their community of Plowshares activists, faith and friendship answered the questions and soothed the doubts. And I felt the absence of those two saving elements in this film. 

You want the recipe for risky property-damaging actions? In my experience, it is faith that your actions are a few stitches in a larger tapestry of change-making, as well as friendships that fill your commissary and mailbox and protect you from the kinds of nasty deals the FBI tries to exact. 

The closest to a real-life pipeline blower-upper I know is Jessica Reznicek, and she was sentenced to eight years in prison in June 2021. Once she’s done with that sentence, she will have to navigate three more years of probation and will owe more than $3 million in restitution to Energy Transfer LLC. She needs a lot of support to get through this next decade of prison and probation, and there is nothing in the film on how to do that. 

... I am going to take all the activist energy stirred up in me by “How To Blow Up A Pipeline” and put it toward writing [and supporting] to Jessica Reznicek.

I can't see myself searching out the movie. Not my idea of fun. But I do support Reznicek. More about her offense here. 

I am always stirred by encountering communities of resistance whose members question themselves as they search for ways to act for more justice and more peace.

Not much love at present in the city of Saint Francis

If you are into that sort of thing, there are multiple options for watching video of Banko Brown being shot by a Walgreens rent-a-cop after a shoplifting episode on San Francisco's Market Street. There followed an altercation in which Michael Earl-Wayne Anthony pummels and chokes the young man, then fires on him after Brown goes out the door. Our D.A. thinks there's no provable crime in that execution. Here's a succinct report:

It has come out that the Walgreen's security contractor, Kingdom Group Protective Services which employed the guard, had recently changed its policy: 

Guards were instructed “to engage in ‘hands-on’ recovery of merchandise,” according to the report. “The guards … were to actively work to retrieve or recover any stolen items once it was clear that the individual who concealed the items intended to leave the store without paying.”

Anthony told the police officer interrogating him after the shooting that “we can ask for receipts if we suspect if somebody’s steals or something. I was in my right to ask that individual … um, if they paid for those items. In fact, I seen ’em stealing, so …”

So this was more than an untrained cosplay cop jacked up from a scuffle, turning his gun on a mouthy perp. Anthony had been ordered to play the badass. There's one heck of a wrongful death civil suit coming here. Brown's family has hired attorney John Burris who has spent a career fighting these cases.

In the Guardian, we learn who was lost when Banko Brown was killed: 

In a statement released through the Young Women’s Freedom Center, a local non-profit group where Brown was a volunteer organizer, they argued: “In a city like San Francisco, where so many have to make tough decisions to meet their basic needs, arming stores with the pass to use armed force will result in much more tragedy.

Julia Arroyo, co-executive director of the group, which has demanded an end to armed guards at retail stores and increased investments in housing and resources for trans and queer youth, said in a statement on Monday: “We do not need to see the video to know that Banko Brown’s killing was unjustified. Armed force is not a justified response to poverty. Young people, especially Black and trans youth who experience poverty, deserve love, care and the resources they need to survive and thrive. Banko deserved to live. He deserved to be protected and cherished. He deserved housing and to have his basic needs met.”

This city can do better. Better than responding in frustration about a Downtown economic cycle in the doldrums, increased misery on the streets, assertive young transfolks, and an incompetent political D.A. who excuses a vigilante death sentence for shoplifting.

The algorithm creates racist results

The Internal Revenue Service has up and admitted that it has been auditing Black taxpayers at a much higher rate than others. 

... Commissioner Daniel Werfel told lawmakers Monday, confirming earlier findings by researchers at leading universities and the Treasury Department.

... Tax examiners do not know the race of the people they are auditing, but the algorithms the IRS uses to monitor fraud around the earned income tax credit — one of the U.S.'s largest social safety net programs — target filers that make errors on their returns and do not report business income. The result, the researchers found, is that the algorithms are more likely to identify Black taxpayers for audits.

There is no evidence that Black taxpayers perpetrate fraud at a higher rate than any other demographic.

... “While there is a need for further research, our initial findings support the conclusion that Black taxpayers may be audited at higher rates than would be expected given their share of the population,” Werfel wrote. Washington Post

This insight has been around for years, first highlighted by the journal Tax Notes and later amplified by ProPublica in 2019.

The study estimates that Humphreys [Miss.], with a median annual household income of just $26,000, is audited at a rate 51 percent higher than Loudoun County, Virginia, which boasts a median income of $130,000, the highest in the country.

Click to enlarge. Darker is more audits.

Yes, there is such a things as systemic racism. We practice it in the tax system.

And note that the GOP wants to claw back the funds appropriated in the Inflation Reduction Act to staff up and modernize the I.R.S. After years of budget cuts instigated by Republicans, no wonder the agency turned to computer prompts to choose which tax payers to audit.  Rich people are so much better at hiding any deviation from the tax rules. But rich people are where the money is.

Joe Biden at Howard University graduation ceremony

He does not look depleted to me.

We’re living through one of the most consequential moments in our history with fundamental questions at stake for our nation.  Who are we?  What do we stand for?  What do we believe?  Who will we be?  You’re going to help answer those questions.

... I don’t have to tell you that fearless progress towards justice often meets ferocious pushback from the oldest and most sinister of forces.  That’s because hate never goes away. 

... The sacred proposition rooted in Scripture and enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that we’re all created equal in the image of God and deserve to be treated equally throughout our lives.  While we’ve never fully lived up to that promise, we never before fully walked away from it.
 
We know that American history has not always been a fairytale.  From the start, it’s been a constant push and pull for more than 240 years between the best of us, the American ideal that we’re all create equal — and the worst of us, the harsh reality that racism has long torn us apart.  It’s a battle that’s never really over.

But on the best days, enough of us have the guts and the hearts to stand up for the best in us.  To choose love over hate, unity over disunion, progress over retreat.  To stand up against the poison of white supremacy, as I did in my Inaugural Address — to single it out as the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy. 

... To stand up for truth over lies — lies told for power and profit. 
 
To confront the ongoing assault to subvert our elections and suppress our right to vote.  That assault came just as you cast your first ballots in ‘20 and ‘22.  Record turnouts.  You delivered historic progress.
 
I made it clear that America — Americans of all backgrounds have an obligation to call out political violence that has been unleashed and emboldened.  As was mentioned already, bomb threats to this very university and HBCUs across the country.
 
To put democracy on the ballot.  To reject political extremism and reject political violence. ...

... We can finally resolve those ongoing questions about who we are as a nation.  That puts strength of our diversity at the center of American life.  A future that celebrates and learns from history.  A future for all Americans.  A future I see you leading.  And I’m not, again, exaggerating.  You are going to be leading it.  ...

Text excerpted from Whitehouse transcript. They do a very honorable job; it's all there. They even preserve the very brief stumbles when his stutter forced him to pause slightly. 

I don't look to presidents for salvation. Presidents are as good as the movements of people who push them around. But this one is a good one and worth pushing, which is all we get in this life. Let's keep him.

My mother at age 18

1926

In other photos from that year, Martha looks more self-assured, perhaps a little flirtatious.  But not here, in what I think was a formal portrait taken before she launched off to college, wearing her most serious coat and her prized fox neck wrap. 

Mother never quite knew how to dress to present herself as she might have wished to be seen.

She was quite beautiful actually, tall, and moved with confidence. But there was a diffidence too -- you can see it in her expression here. She already shows a little wistfulness -- why, I don't know.

She was smart and curious. College looked to her like heaven; she could read constantly. Physical culture (gym classes) were not required, though she happily walked and swam. She might have become an academic, except that the economic collapse of 1929 meant she had to come home and help with the family.

She meant always to do her duty and to be responsible. Whatever that meant.

One of the things responsibility meant was that she and my father didn't bring a child (me) into the world until after 15 years of marriage during the Depression and World War II. 

She was an excellent, loving, conscientious mother. I'm glad the photos of the younger Martha exist to show me a little of the earnest girl-woman she was before my happy incursion into their life.

Celebrate Mothers' Day

This Mother’s Day, National Bail Out will be freeing as many Black Mamas and caregivers as possible so that they can come home to their families and communities. Why not help out?

The toll

Click to enlarge.

I look at this informative map of COVID death densities from the New York Times and I see our US history of inequity and dispossession. Those very dark chunks in Arizona, New Mexico and Montana are traditional native lands, still largely the home of indigenous peoples. That dark smudge in Georgia is the old Black belt where formerly enslaved people still exist in rural poverty. The dark bits in South Texas are the home of impoverished Hispanics who found themselves on the Anglo side of a border imposed in the 1840s. 

It's still a better deal to be white non-Hispanic, in this country, even though, since most of us are white, we have had the largest raw number of deaths:

Find more statistics at Statista

Friday cat blogging

Janeway has a suspicion that the presence of this bag on the bed might mean that someone is going away again. Smart cat. Erudite Partner is off on an adventure next week; despite Janeway's intrusion into the luggage, she'll have to stay home with me. We'll be alright. As her friend Allen says, she's so cute ...

Put to the test

Apparently last night CNN enabled Donald Trump and his ghoulish admirers to project his "World Class Demogogue" act. Scary. And the pants-on-fire emergency Trump constitutes to any half-decent American democracy continues.

So I suggest attending to Fintan O'Toole who uses commentary on porn star Stormy Daniels' memoir to scratch at the demogogue's tawdry underbelly. Remember Stormy? She's the woman who Trump was so eager to erase that he fudged his books and rendered himself subject to prosecution by the Manhattan D.A.

Part of Trump’s political persona is that of a very rich man with the same tastes as his much less wealthy followers. He connects to many of his voters through a shared love for things that liberal sophisticates disdain: fat-rich fast food, pro wrestling, trash TV, NASCAR, and, as it turned out, porn stars. Daniels is a product of that universe. She is a Republican who insists that “Part of the American dream is making money. I am a firm believer in capitalism.”

More importantly, as she is acutely aware, her fans and Trump’s came from the same constituency. Presumably, most of them have since protested her betrayal by deciding to spill their seed before some other goddess. But in 2006 Trump was right to sense that she and he were in the same business. She recalled in her memoir,

As my fan base grew over two decades of work in film and feature dancing, my demographic was usually middle-aged white men. Forty-five- to sixty-five-year-old white dudes—Republicans, basically.

Perhaps they saw the same thing in him as they did in her. A middle-aged man at a Trump rally could experience the same ritual reassurance about the security of his status as a white dude that he might get from having Daniels strip and dance before him. In addition, just as Trump’s live appearances were his TV image made flesh, the god coming out of the machine, Daniels was paid a premium for her live act because the clubs knew that their customers already felt connected to her filmed image from her porn movies.

Very close to the surface of her amply displayed skin, Daniels had the same raw nerve that Trump became so good at touching: the resentment of those who fear that uniquely American term of contempt, white trash. ...

O'Toole's conclusion is an indictment of our culture.

... Trump himself understood that to the fans he shared with Daniels, having sex with her was not a negative. As he told Cohen about the Daniels story, “If it comes out, I’m not sure how it would play with my supporters. But I’d bet they think it’s cool that I slept with a porn star.” For her part, Daniels was ever more certain that “Me saying I slept with him would just be another consensual notch on his belt that his fans could pat him on the back about.”

This is the ironic twist in the tale—there was no scandal to hush up. In Trumpworld, scandal no longer exists. The shameless cannot be shamed. ... Making a drama out of Trump’s sex life is turning politics back into another freak show, the very genre in which he thrives.

The guy's a ghoul and he brings out the worst in his fans. Despite the bravery of E. Jean Carroll, and a Manhattan prosecutor, and most likely many more legal guardians, we're stuck with fighting this foul monster so long as he has breath.

Democracy?

I'm a sucker for maps. Here are two that seem worth pondering:

Click to enlarge.

Not looking good for democracy outside of Europe (though the sheer extent of Canada and Australia make things look better than they might.) I have my doubts about Chile's ranking here (a progressive elected president was immediately challenged from the right) and I'm pretty sure that Modi's Hindustan makes India more than flawed. But still worth thinking about.

Danny Quah from Singapore provides another way to look at this, a salutary reminder of where most of humankind lives. For those of us who think democracy matters, we are reminded that the truly large states are not democracies. Whether that's what their people want may be invisible from where we sit.

On the debt ceiling: a modest exercise in simplification

The "debt ceiling" thing which Republicans are planning to use to crash a season of strong economy and thus hurt Joe Biden is one of those nonsense accretions in which our creaky government structure abounds. More directly, this is bullshit. And beyond stupid.

The U.S. Constitution of 1787 gave the country lots of structures, but not much of a blueprint for funding a significant size, active federal government. Such a thing wasn't on the Founders menu. Maybe the government could be funded by tariff receipts?

Vast steps toward a developed finance capital system were forced by the demands of funding the Union army and federal state during the Civil War. Out of that necessity, we got paper money and lots and lots of government bonds sold to investors.

But each of those Treasury bond sales required an act of Congress. Another war -- the Great War of 1917 -- convinced Congress to make it easier for the government to borrow: why not just set a high ceiling so federal bond sales didn't take up Congressional time? The debt ceiling was invented to make federal financing easier!

And so it remained until modern conservatism transformed the Republic Party from a recalcitrant participant in (bad) government into a random wrecking ball.

Under the Constitution, the national House of Representatives proposes a budget; that House and the Senate and the President haggle and eventually compromise over that budget and a law gets passed; and the executive branch spends money based on that legally authorized budget. The Treasury collects taxes and sells bonds to enable the government to do what its lawful institutions have ordered in the budget process.

Where does the "debt ceiling" come in? Nowhere in a sane universe. Congress has told the government to make various expenditures -- like more aircraft carriers, veterans benefits, and Social Security payments -- and thereby take on debts to creditors small and large. And the budget authorizes the feds to pay its bills.  Over time, the United States has been highly reliable about paying its bills, so the country has a lot of credit and uses that earned trust to grease the financial wheels by selling bonds. Yes, those bonds create a "debt," but so does your credit card bill and your mortgage. Most of us most of the time just keep paying off past debt and taking on future debt, and so does the U.S. government.

So the strange requirement that Congress periodically enact a "debt ceiling" is a ridiculous artifact of an obsolete funding process that ended a century ago. It serves no purpose except to enable Republican obstructionism. GOPers know this; they voted happily three times during the Trump years to raise the limit.

There are all sorts of permutations and possible work-arounds through which the administration might get through this Republicans tantrum. I'm offended that we are supposed to waste brain cells on these bypasses and I am not going to go into them here. One of the truly offensive realities of the Republican debt ceiling clown show is that, but because the whole thing is bullshit, there's very little space for citizen activism to engage with it, aside from calling out Republican Congresscritters as assholes. But we already knew that. And perhaps bucking up Biden and Dems who show spines.

Here's how from Brian Beutler:

... we need Democrats who will stop treating the Republicans' serial default threat as a prompt to outmaneuver them, and instead simply overturn the game board; who will say it doesn’t matter if they pass an extortionate debt-limit bill or not, because there’s nothing to negotiate. They are the minority, trying to impose their will on the whole country by threat of mass harm, and that isn’t compatible with freedom or self-government. It isn’t hard bargaining, it’s terrorism. ...

The country can’t survive in the long run if one shameless faction wields power in a consequence-free realm, while the other quietly acclimates itself to the mounting extremism. Eventually the trespasses will be incompatible with self-rule, and it will bring the whole republic down.

Most of us are not willing to acquiesce in the Republican attempt to trash the country. How many times do we have to prove this?

Great Lakes bomb-in-waiting

I was going to take a day off from the blog, but instead I'll offer this from the Sierra Club.

I grew up swimming in the Niagara River which runs between the Great Lakes of Erie and Ontario. It was not a particularly pleasant environment. Paying attention to what else was in the river was a necessity. If you didn't keep your head up, you could find yourself stuck in great floating masses of dead river grasses and bumping against corpse after fish corpse floating down river belly up. All this death was the evidence of Lake Erie "dying" upstream, poisoned by industrial pollution and fertilizer run off.

The lake is apparently less subject to these dead zones after some clean up in the 1970s.

But I carry in my body the awareness that we can kill these vast bodies of water. The video explores the struggle to save the more inland lakes of Huron and Michigan from further contamination by a 70 year old, vulnerable pipeline. A spill here could contaminate 20 percent of the earth's fresh water. We have to get off our addiction to gas and oil. And we are well on the way to technology that can replace fossil fuels.

The progressive Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan has revoked the easement for the pipeline through the Straits of Mackinac and ordered it decommissioned. The oil companies hope they can get Joe Biden to overturn her order. The people of Michigan's Upper Peninsula struggle for their water and their way of life.

A civilizational test

 

Displayed this way, the rise in civilian mass murders looks like some kind of all-devouring snake monster that is ingesting more and more of us. A bloated python perhaps?

If we are to survive as a country, we will have to find a way to get rid of the guns. It's that simple.

There's no forgetting the death of Banko Brown

Our cop-endorsed D.A. Brooke Jenkins tried to shove the killing of the young unhoused trans man down the forgetery, but the ploy is not working.

Apparently there's still plenty of resistance in San Francisco to the notion that shoplifting should be a capital crime.

• Under questioning by the Police Commission, Chief Bill Scott affirmed that Banko Brown did not have any weapon when he was shot outside Walgreens on Market Street on April 27. 48 Hills

• According to a witness, the rent-a-cop killer had ejected Banko Brown from the store -- and only then followed the young man outside and shot him. The security guard was about 6'2"; Brown was 5'4" and weighed some 155 pounds.  Mission Local

• It emerged that Banko Brown had made off with $14 worth of candy when he was shot. SF Chronicle

• Banko Brown was not utterly alone living on the streets. The Young Women’s Freedom Center was his community. They did what we do in this city -- they organized to pressure the system.

• Banko Brown had blood family. They have hired John Burris, a Northern California attorney famous for winning judgements in wrongful death suits against cops. 

• The LGBTQ community is unusually unified in pursuing justice for Banko Brown -- and the D.A. is antsy enough about the case that she's giving defensive interviews to gay media. Bay Area Reporter

• Local pols are swinging into line seeking better for Banko Brown, despite having done so little for people like him in life. Supervisor Aaron Peskin is fronting a Board resolution demanding that the D.A. release the video record around his death. 48 Hills

This city feels becalmed in a sad post-pandemic doldrums, but we can still be aroused  to demand justice. 

Friday cat blogging

We're back to our normal home habits, so today I've added Janeway's morning posture to the blog header. Yes, that's how we start the day -- I read the news, she naps.

Most cats seem to have a thing about computers. Are the machines a source of warmth or competition for our attention? Perhaps both. Here are a couple of cats gone but not forgotten:

Frisker knew whose needs deserved regard. It wasn't that hunk of plastic.

Morty was more the napping sort.

Giants for whom nonviolence was no game

I skim a daily email of headlines from the Los Angeles Times (a surprisingly good newspaper which I would recommend to anyone interested in California doings.) Today this picture and squib occupied the section that publication calls "From the archives."

James Peck of New York who was on one of the two Freedom Rider buses is attacked at the bus station in Birmingham, Ala. ...The other bus was burned in Anniston, Ala., en route to Birmingham. (Underwood Archives / Getty Images)

On May 4, 1961, the first Freedom Ride—a political protest against the segregation of interstate bus travel in the South—began as a group of white and Black Americans departed Washington, D.C., on buses bound for New Orleans.

Along the way, the Freedom Riders encountered violence, most severely in Alabama. On May 14, upon stopping outside Anniston to change a slashed tire, one bus was firebombed and the Freedom Riders were beaten.

After arriving in Birmingham, the second bus was similarly attacked and the passengers were beaten. In both cases, law enforcement was suspiciously late in responding.

Jim Peck never entirely recovered from that beating, though his cracked skull and smashed face never stopped him. I knew him a little in New York City in the early 1970s when he was a fixture at the War Resisters League office, around the corner from the Catholic Worker where I was part of the community. He seemed a quiet man who labored doggedly in a corner, mostly on encouraging resistance to paying taxes for war.

Yet the unassuming Peck was a giant in the broad struggle for justice. In the 1930s, Peck agitated for labor rights; during World War II he was imprisoned for refusing the draft; in the 1950s he campaigned against the Cold War nuclear arms build-up; in the 1960s, he opposed America's Vietnam incursion as well as struggling for civil rights; in the 1970s, he joined campaigns against nuclear energy and militarism in all its forms. Reading his Wikipedia entry is exhausting, but I highly recommend it. His was a life well lived. It is a catalogue of costly witness -- assaults, beatings, jailings and unfailing commitment. The entry says he was arrested some 60 times for acting on his convictions -- I suspect that may be an undercount.

What stands out about Jim and the other giants of the 20th century American nonviolent left who he worked alongside -- AJ Muste, Bayard Rustin, Barbara Deming, Dave Dellinger, Grace Paley, Joan Nestle, David McReynolds -- was that their agitation was not performative. This was no game. Splashy, yes! Theatrical, yes! Aggressive, yes! But above all rooted in a willingness to risk and experience personal material and physical sacrifice to embody principles greater than themselves. They were at odds with their society and country. They could not live any other way.

Colin Allred takes it to Ted Cruz

Want to feel good about an upcoming election contest? Maybe it will take a former NFL linebacker to break through for Democrats in Texas.

"We don't have to be embarrassed by our Senator. We can get a new one. Someone like me was never supposed to get this far. I've taken down a lot tougher guys than Ted Cruz. ..."

Allred will be as viable a challenger as anyone who could run. Texas is a tease but let's hope for Texans' sake, this is the time the state makes a change of direction.

No justice for Banko Brown

And I thought that "stand your ground laws" were a thing in gun-crazed Republican states like Florida. Broad legal permission to kill in "self-defense" was how George Zimmerman got away with the murder of Travon Martin. But apparently under San Francisco D.A. Brooke Jenkins' regime, we may have such a rule in San Francisco.

Michael Earl-Wayne Anthony, the Walgreens security guard who shot Banko Brown at the store last week, was released without charges. The Chronicle reports:

On Monday, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said in a statement that “the evidence clearly shows that the suspect believed he was in mortal danger and acted in self-defense.” ....

“We reviewed witness statements, statements from the suspect, and video footage of the incident and it does not meet the People’s burden to be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury that the suspect is guilty of a crime. We cannot bring forward charges when there is credible evidence of reasonable self-defense,” Jenkins said in a statement. “Doing so would be unethical and create false hope for a successful prosecution.”

In the incident that led to Brown’s killing, “both threats of force and physical force were used,” she told The Chronicle, declining to divulge further details including whether Brown was allegedly armed. ...

Without further explanation, it sure seems that an armed security guard has a license to shoot an accused shoplifter. The cops seem to endorse that conclusion:

San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott said Friday that the shooting was “a shoplift that went bad. The person that was shot was allegedly shoplifting and it was a confrontation and the shooting happened from there.”

The Brown family and Banko's friends deserve more answers from the city. This homeless transgender youth was not anonymous in his world. He had friends, a lot of friends. A crowd held a vigil in his memory on Monday outside the Market Street store.

They recalled Brown as a kind and dedicated member of San Francisco’s transgender community, who’d worked extensively with the Young Women’s Freedom Center, which works to reduce the incarceration of young women and transgender youth.

Brown “was a connector,” said Julia Arroyo, the center’s executive director.

“He was constantly doing outreach, bringing people into YWFC,” she said. Brown struggled with housing, often feeling unsafe in city shelters or other programs, she said, and often said he wanted to be housed with other transgender San Franciscans.

There wasn't enough sanctuary in this famously liberal city for this unhoused youth ...

Happy May Day! Happy International Workers Day!

My neighbors at Arizmendi Bakery get the day off.

And so do many of my friends who are under contract with the union UniteHERE.

Enjoy. You earn it.

The return of the capital punishment game

After a generation of decreasing use, the death penalty seems poised to return to presidential campaign battles, and this could lead to more executions — and not just because of Trump.

Republican presidential hopefuls are running around shouting "Off with their heads!" Trump has called for firing squads and guillotines. Not to be outdone, and unfortunately a more effectual Red Queen impersonator, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, has engineered the passage of a state death penalty bill, effective immediately, that lowers the standard for a criminal penalty finding for execution from 12-0 to 8-4 jurors.

Apart from political posturing, actual capital punishment has, fortunately, been in decline for several decades.

... the death penalty has become more of an abstraction in the past two decades. In 2020, for example, just 18 people were sentenced to death in the United States, despite years of Republican dominance of state-level politics. That’s down from 114 in 2010 and 223 in 2000.

Washington Post columnist Jason Willick shares the thoughts of a New York University sociologist, David Garland, who argues that "the purpose of the death penalty in Western societies has changed over time." Essentially, for a certain sort of politician, killing someone is a political chess move that provides a boost.

... “The system of capital punishment that exists in America today is primarily a communication system,” Garland argued. “It is about mounting campaigns, taking polls, passing laws, bringing charges, bargaining pleas, imposing sentences, and rehearing cases. It is about threats rather than deeds, anticipated deaths rather than actual executions. What gets performed, for the most part, is discourse and debate.” ...

The purpose of the death penalty, in other words, is no longer protecting the state or the public as such. It’s to be a source of material for politicians, activists, journalists, filmmakers and others....But the GOP’s death-penalty hype doesn’t break with the “late-modern mode” of capital punishment. Instead, it’s a perfect illustration of it. As the death penalty fades, calls for executions may become an increasingly valuable commodity for political entrepreneurs. ...

If we don't want Joe Biden pulling a Bill Clinton and furthering the execution of some unpleasant, but still human, offender to prop up his cred with "moderates," we need to let Democrats know loud and clear there will be penalties for playing in the judicial killing contest. The Death Penalty Information Center  and local ACLUs are a good place to start.

H/t to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for raising up this eruption of performative blood lust, once again.

A juxtaposition to ponder

Click to enlarge.

Not quite sure where this leads my thoughts. Somewhere far away.

H/t Adam Tooze.

REI: doing the right thing

It was heartening to encounter this affirming sign in the co-op this morning. I wonder if REI is so demonstrably welcoming to all people in all locations? Corporate press releases say the answer is "yes".

Progressive folks are probably well represented in its market; REI doesn't sell guns or ammunition and urges other outdoor equipment sellers to engage with a national discussion of gun safety. This stance probably helps define who chooses to shop with REI.

It was especially good to encounter this sign right after reading Brynn Tannehill's terrifying description of how Republicans in red states are working to outlaw what they call "transgenderism" -- which amounts to outlawing transgender people. No kidding.

There is more than a hint of the attitude that “we have tolerated these people for too long, even as they destroy our nation from within and pollute our culture.” There’s incitement to violence to protect women and children, even as party-affiliated militias (whether the Sturmabteilung or the Proud Boys) engage in campaigns of intimidation. Such sentiments and statements would not seem out of place uttered by Goebbels in 1933 or Tucker Carlson today.

There’s a pattern to how states target disfavored minorities with the intention of driving them out, or underground. It starts with rhetoric demonizing a minority, designed to start a moral panic, and with laws meant to “encourage” the targeted minority to leave by making life as dangerous, unpleasant, and untenable for them as possible.

Over time, as the situation deteriorates, many choose to leave no matter what the personal cost because anything is better than this: whether it was Blacks fleeing the American South during the Great Migration or the 60 percent of German Jews who left the country between 1933 and 1939. Modern-day Republicans are not even hiding the fact that the goal of their anti-LGBTQ policies is to encourage them to flee. When a poll found that over half of Florida’s LGBTQ parents were considering leaving Florida because of Governor Ron DeSantis’s policies, his press secretary, Christina Pushaw, responded on Twitter with an emoji of a hand waving “Bye!”

The MAGA mob is serious about remaking the country in their demented image. In their warped vision, some people will have to go. Tannehill fears the GOP will try to categorize non-conforming gender identities as mental illnesses, requiring enforced "rehabilitation."

Most companies aren't going to have the guts to stand up for a minority. They are warily watching Ron DeSantis take on Disney. (Probably not the smartest target for MAGA; I'd still bet on the Mouse.) Even relatively small companies that do show courage are important to building the broadest coalition possible that stands for freedom and dignity for all. Thanks REI.

Friday cat blogging

We're home and we are all getting back to our old habits.

 

Janeway cast an attentive stare at this old familiar human lap.

Then she settled in ...

On the road again ...

 ...on our way back home.

Posting from aboard this ferry which is the second leg of four today. We've taken a taxi to the landing, about 40 minutes from up-island. 

The boat ride to Woods Hole is another forty-fie minutes.

After that we'll take a two hour bus ride to Logan Airport, Boston.

And then the usual cross country flight home to SFO. The journey makes a long day.

It's Election Day!

Here in Chilmark, Mass. the town voters are choosing a new member of the Select Board (roughly the Town Council in New Englandese). I suspect it may be a thankless position.

 

The two candidates have each put up a goodly quantity of lawn signs along the roads.

 

Folks who work in elections know better than to try to predict outcomes based on the quantity of signs ... but there sure aren't a lot of ways to get your name out to the voters around here. I did meet this guy at the town dump one day, looking to meet voters. Couldn't help him. So it goes.

Have to say, this might be one of the more unusual election announcements I've ever seen. Perhaps the Commonwealth of Massachusetts requires this typeface?

Update: Ms. Larsen won, roughly 2 to 1. May her tenure be peaceful and positive.

My experience of Holocaust education

Dara Horn's critique Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse? got me wondering: how did I learn about the Holocaust? (Previous summary post here.)

And I realized that I actually had encountered Holocaust education in high school in 1963. This, among many other influences, probably helped set my trajectory for the rest of my life. The powers-that-be brought in a woman who was billed, accurately, as "a local author" to speak to a small group -- probably "the current events club." (We had such a thing. Odd to remember.)

This was Gerda Weissmann (later Klein) who lived in Buffalo. Her memoir, All But My Life, is the saga of how she landed in upstate New York.

Gerda Weissmann (later Klein) was born in Bielsko, Poland, on May 8, 1924. Growing up into a middle-class Jewish family, Gerda Weissmann’s life was shattered when she was 15 years old in September 1939. German forces invaded Poland and within a month her brother Artur was taken away by the Nazis never to return. Gerda and her parents were forced into the basement of their family home as it was stripped. Then along with other Jewish residents, they were imprisoned in the Bielsko Ghetto, and some were sent into slave labor. Gerda was eventually separated from her parents, who later died in the concentration camps, while she was sent into a series of slave labor camps at Marzdorf, Landshut and Gruenberg. After barely surviving these, Gerda was forced onto a Death March ending in Volary, Czechoslovakia on May 7, 1945. (Jewish Buffalo History Center)

Ms. Klein had married Kurt Klein, an American soldier who helped liberate this contingent of slave laborers. She committed her life to educating young people about her experience of Nazi genocide and much more, writing nine books "on themes of courage, friendship and love."

Ms. Klein's talk gifted me with a burning desire to know more about the inhumanity we are capable of visiting on each other. I borrowed her book from the local library -- and followed up with additional Holocaust reading, as well as another genre much available at the time, accounts of Stalin's gulag and even the Holodomor in Ukraine. (Note, somehow neither the story of European settlers' genocidal war on native Americans nor the story of American slavery were so available in the public library.) I was a curious young person.

Holocaust education had a profound effect on me. But I need to grant that Horn's article points to conditions that made Holocaust education viable for me. I had great advantages. Jewish people were part of my world.

• Unlike so many US kids now subjected to these course units, there were Jews in my daily life. There had been Jewish kids in my classes since 5th grade. There were a significant number of Jewish kids in my private high school.

• My mother had close Jewish women friends, people she'd worked with on community projects including during World War II.

• The adults I was exposed to were Holocaust-aware, both Jews and also my Protestant co-religionists.

However I should not leave the impression that this environment was devoid of anti-Semitism. In fact, it reeked of socially accepted prejudice against Jews.

• By the time I escaped high school, I had come to recognize that the institution was probably operating with a Jewish quota: there were Jewish students ... but not too many.

• While I was in high school, the large Reform synagogue nearby suffered anti-Semitic vandalism. The attack felt incomprehensible. Classmates felt threatened. I had been taken to tour that building along with classmates, a tour very like the one we sponsored of our Episcopal church. The two didn't feel that different: both were buildings used for slightly exotic purposes that advertised the comfortable class status of their adherents.

• And that goes to the nub of how I encountered Jews in that place and time: most all the families in that school, Christian and Jewish (there was nobody more exotic that I knew of), were performing culturally what was expected from the post-WWII professional American upper middle class. For example, I don't remember anyone being raised by a single mom. The Jewish kids seemed not to want to be seen as "too Jewish." I didn't meet Jews who willingly advertised difference from Christian Americans until I got out of there. The conformist Fifties persisted well into the Sixties in Buffalo.

If overcoming Christian solipsism and anti-Semitism were that challenging for me -- with all those corrective influences -- no wonder Holocaust education is as problematic as Dara Horn portrays it.

Gerda Klein's All But My Life remains available. I'm going to re-read it and may post an update.