Republicans are the "going going gone" Growing Old Party

A New York Times opinion perspective on how the Republican Party is circling the drain. Echo letters respond to an analysis published by Brett Stephens and David Brooks. 

"with an extremist fringe seemingly in control of the House, the G.O.P. bears little resemblance to the party that was once their home."

Republicans have lost their conscious as a consequence of a “winning at all costs” mentality.

"As a conservative who left the Republican Party after the 2020 election, I too have watched this descent with dismay," from the former federal government attorney John Schnitker, Washington.


Obviously, the Republican establishment has lost the nerve to quell the more extreme voices. After all, only a small minority of Republicans, many of whom have since retired, voted to impeach Donald Trump after (Trump incited!) the January 6, insurrection.

But another and, perhaps more important reason is the success of the anti-democratic effects of Citizens United, the outdated Electoral College system and gerrymandering, and the applause for those who question election results when they lose. These eliminated the moderating force of appealing to both sides and incentivized more extreme voices to emerge.

To return the Republican party to something more recognizable to  its members, the GOP must be willing to lose elections and learn to practice ethical leadership.

From Paul Hsiao,  New York

George Santos is a Trumpzi Frankenstein

Echo opinion published in the Seattle Times, by the New York Times columnist David Brooks:

Donald Trump's political Frankenstein:

George Santos is following the Donald Trump model - do ALL the political harm you can and the corrupt GOP will bring you back to life again. 

The Sad Tale of (Pathetic) George Santos (Maine Writer opinion- Santos is a phony!)

What would it be like to be so ashamed of your life that you felt compelled to invent a new one? (In other word "lie" about who you are and the heritage you inherited.  "Who knew?" 😏😝😡)

Most of us don’t feel compelled to do that. Most of us take the actual events of our lives, including the failures and frailties, and we gradually construct coherent narratives about who we are. Those autobiographical narratives are always being updated as time passes — and, of course, tend to be at least modestly self-flattering. 

Yet, for most of us, the life narrative we tell both the world and ourselves gives us a stable sense of identity. It helps us name what we’ve learned from experience and what meaning our life holds. It helps us make our biggest decisions. As philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once observed, you can’t know what to do unless you know what story you are a part of.

A reasonably accurate and coherent autobiographical narrative is one of the most important things a person can have. If you don’t have a real story, you don’t have a real self.

George Santos, on the other hand, is a young man who apparently felt compelled to jettison much of his actual life and replace it with fantasy. As Grace Ashford and Michael Gold of The New York Times have been reporting, in his successful run for Congress this year Santos claimed he had a college degree that he does not have. Moreover, ee claimed he held jobs that he did not hold. He claimed he owned properties he apparently does not own. He claims he never committed check fraud, though the Times unearthed court records suggesting he did. He claims he never described himself as Jewish, merely as adjacently “Jew-ish.”  A self-described gay man, he hid a years long heterosexual marriage that ended in 2019. 

George Santos is a fraud, ya' think?

All politicians — perhaps all humans — embellish. But what Santos did goes beyond that. He fabricated a new persona, that of a meritocratic superman. He claims to be a populist who hates the elites, but he wanted you to think he once worked at Goldman Sachs. Imagine how much inadequacy you’d have to feel to go to all that trouble.

I can’t feel much anger toward Santos for his deceptiveness, just a bit of sorrow. ("bit"? of sorrow?~ I don't think so...!)

Maine Writer- I disagree with David Brooks. I do NOT think Santos deserves any sympathy.

Cutting yourself off to that degree from the bedrock of the truth renders your whole life unstable. 

Santos made his own past unreliable, perpetually up for grabs. But when you do that you also eliminate any coherent vision of your future. People may wonder how Santos could have been so dumb. In political life, his fabrications were bound to be discovered. Perhaps it’s because dissemblers often have trouble anticipating the future; they’re stuck in the right now.

In a sense Santos is a sad, farcical version of where President Donald Trump has taken the Republican Party — into the land of unreality, the continent of lies. Trump’s takeover of the GOP was not primarily an ideological takeover, it was a psychological and moral one. I don’t feel sorry for Trump the way I do for Santos, because Trump is so cruel. But he did introduce, on a much larger scale, the same pathetic note into our national psychology.

In his book, “The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump,” the eminent personality psychologist Dan McAdams argues that Trump could continually lie to himself because he had no actual sense of himself. There was no real person, inner life or autobiographical narrative to betray. McAdams quotes people who had been close to Trump who reported that being with him wasn’t like being with a conventional person; it was like being with an entity who was playing the role of Donald Trump. And that role had no sense of continuity. He was fully immersed in whatever dominance battle he was fighting at that moment.

McAdams calls Trump an “episodic man,” who experiences life as a series of disjointed moments, not as a coherent narrative flow of consciousness. “He does not look to what may lie ahead, at least not very far ahead,” McAdams writes. “Trump is not introspective, retrospective or prospective. There is no depth; there is no past; there is no future.”

America has always had impostors and people who reinvented their pasts. (If he were real, Jay Gatsby might have lived — estimations of the precise locations of the fictional East and West Egg vary — in what is now Santos’ district.) This feels different. I wonder if the era of the short-attention spans and the online avatars is creating a new character type: the person who doesn’t experience life as an accumulation over decades, but just as a series of disjointed performances in the here and now, with an echo of hollowness inside.

This week Santos tried to do a bit of damage control in a series of interviews, including with WABC radio in New York. The whole conversation had an air of unreality. Santos was rambling, evasive and haphazard, readjusting his stories in a vague, fluid way. The host, John Catsimatidis, wasn’t questioning him the way a journalist might. He was practically coaching Santos on what to say. The troubling question of personal integrity was not on anybody’s radar screen. And then the conversation reached a Tom Wolfe-ian crescendo when former Rep. Anthony Weiner suddenly appeared — and turned out to be the only semi-competent interviewer in the room.

Karl Marx famously said that under the influence of capitalism, all that’s solid melts into air. I wonder if some elixir of Trumpian influence and online modernity can have the same effect on individual personalities.

David Brooks is a regular columnist for The New York Times.

Support for Ukraine motivates momentum in the war against invading Russians

Echo opinion written by David Brooks for The New York Times and published in the Las Vegas Sun a Nevada newspaper:

In the Ukraine, the war is not only a military event, it’s an intellectual event. 

Slava Ukraini! Official salute of the Armed Forces of Ukraine

Ukrainians are winning the hearts and minds of their people and the western world, not only because of the superiority of their troops, but because they are fighting for a superior idea — an idea that inspires Ukrainians to fight so doggedly, an idea that inspires people across the West to stand behind Ukraine and back it to the hilt.

That idea is actually two jammed together. The first is liberalism, which promotes democracy, individual dignity, a rule-based international order.

Second is the idea is nationalism. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a nationalist. He is fighting not just for democracy but also for Ukraine — Ukrainian culture, Ukrainian land, the Ukrainian people and tongue. The symbol of this war is the Ukrainian flag, a nationalist symbol.

There are many people who assume that liberalism and nationalism are opposites. Liberalism, in their mind, is modern and progressive. It’s about freedom of choice, diversity and individual autonomy. Nationalism, meanwhile, is primordial, xenophobic, tribal, aggressive and exclusionary.

By this thinking, modern nations should try to tamp down nationalist passions and embrace the universal brotherhood of all humankind. As John Lennon famously sang, “Imagine there’s no countries/ It isn’t hard to do/ Nothing to kill or die for/ And no religion too.”

Those people are not all wrong. Nationalism has a lot of blood on its hands. But it has become clear that there are two kinds of nationalism: the illiberal nationalism of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump,  as opposed to the (IMO - enlightened) liberal nationalism of Zelenskyy. The former nationalism is backward-looking, xenophobic and authoritarian. The latter nationalism is forward-looking, inclusive and builds a society around the rule of law, not the personal power of the maximum leader. It’s become clear that if it is to survive, liberalism needs to rest on a bed of this kind of nationalism.

Nationalism provides people with a fervent sense of belonging. Countries don’t hold together because citizens make a cold assessment that it’s in their self-interest to do so. Countries are held together by shared loves for a particular way of life, a particular culture, a particular land. These loves have to be stirred in the heart before they can be analyzed by the brain.

Nationalism provides people with a sense of meaning. Nationalists tell stories that stretch from a glorious if broken past forward to a golden future. Individuals live and die, but the nation goes on. 

People feel their life has significance because they contribute these eternal stories. “Freedom is hollow outside of a meaning-providing system,” Yael Tamir writes in her book “Why Nationalism.”

Democracies need nationalism if they are to defend themselves against their foes. Democracies also need this kind of nationalism if they are to hold together. In his book “The Great Experiment,” Yascha Mounk celebrates the growing diversity enjoyed by many Western nations. But he argues they also need the centripetal force of “cultural patriotism,” to balance the centrifugal forces that this diversity ignites.

Finally, democracies need this kind of nationalism to regenerate the nation. Liberal nationalists are not stuck with a single archaic national narrative. They are perpetually going back, reinterpreting the past, modernizing the story and reinventing the community.

Over the past decades, this kind of ardent nationalism has often been regarded as passé within the circles of the educated elites. I suspect there are many people in this country who are proud to wear the Ukrainian flag but wouldn’t be caught dead wearing an American flag because they fear it would mark them as reactionary, jingoistic, low class.

The first problem with this posture is that it opened up a cultural divide between the educated class and the millions of Americans for whom patriotism is a central part of their identity. 

Second, by associating liberalism with the cosmopolitan global elite, it made liberalism seem like a system used to preserve the privileges of that elite. The populist class backlash combined with an anti-liberal backlash, imperiling democracies across the globe. Third, it opened the door for people like Trump to seize and hijack American patriotism.

Liberal nationalism believes in what liberals believe, but it also believes that nations are moral communities and the borders that define them need to be secure. It believes that it’s sometimes OK to put Americans first — to adopt policies that give American workers an edge over workers elsewhere. It believes it’s important to celebrate diversity, but a country that doesn’t construct a shared moral culture will probably rip itself to shreds.

American nationalism has characteristically been a liberal nationalism. From Alexander Hamilton to Walt Whitman to Theodore Roosevelt, it has often been a song in praise of a liberal revolution, a liberal constitution and a diverse, liberal society. 

On the other hand, Trumpian nationalism doesn’t flow from that traditional American nationalism, but is a repudiation of it.

Ukraine’s tenacity shows how powerful liberal nationalism can be in the face of an authoritarian threat. It shows how liberal nationalism can mobilize a society and inspire it to fantastic achievements. It shows what a renewed American liberal nationalism could do, if only the center and left could get over their squeamishness about patriotic ardor and would embrace and reinvent our national tradition.

Yael Tamir makes the essential point: “Self-centered individualism must therefore be replaced with a more collectivist spirit that nationalism knows how to kindle.”

David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times. 

President Joe Biden advanced "gigantic legislation"

Echo New York Times essay by David Brooks*:

President Joe Biden came to the White House at a pivotal moment in American history. We had become a country dividing into two nations, one highly educated and affluent and the other left behind. The economic gaps further inflamed cultural and social gaps, creating an atmosphere of intense polarization, cultural hostility, alienation, bitterness and resentment.

As president, Biden had mostly economic levers to try to bridge this cold civil war. He championed three gigantic pieces of legislation to create a more equal, more just and more united society: the COVID stimulus bill, the infrastructure bill and what became Build Back Better, to invest in human infrastructure.

All of these bills were written to funnel money to the parts of the country that were less educated, less affluent, left behind. 

Adam Hersh, a visiting economist at the Economic Policy Institute, projects that more than 80 percent of the new jobs created by the infrastructure plan will not require a college degree.

These gigantic proposals were bold endeavors. Some thought them too bold. Economist Larry Summers thought the stimulus package, for example, was too big. It could overstimulate the economy and lead to inflation.

Larry is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever known and someone I really admire. If I were an economist, I might have agreed with him. But I’m a journalist with a sociological bent. For over a decade I have been covering a country that was economically, socially and morally coming apart. I figured one way to reverse that was to turbocharge the economy and create white-hot labor markets that would lift wages at the bottom. If inflation was a byproduct, so be it. The trade-off is worth it to prevent a national rupture.

The Biden $1.9 trillion stimulus package passed and has been tremendously successful. It heated the overall economy. The Conference Board projects that real G.D.P. growth will be about 5 percent this quarter. The unemployment rate is falling. 

Retail sales are surging. About two-thirds of Americans feel their household’s financial situation is good.

But the best part is that the benefits are flowing to those down the educational and income ladder. In just the first month of payments, the expanded child tax credit piece of the stimulus bill kept three million American children out of poverty. Pay for hourly workers in the leisure and hospitality sector jumped 13 percent in August compared to the previous year. By June, there were more nonfarm job openings than there had been at any other time in American history. Workers have tremendous power these days.

The infrastructure bill Biden just signed will boost American productivity for years to come. As Ellen Zentner of Morgan Stanley told The Economist recently, it’s a rule of thumb that an extra $100 billion in annual infrastructure spending could increase growth by roughly a tenth of a percentage point — which is significant in an economy the size of ours. Federal infrastructure spending will be almost as large a share of annual GDP as the average level during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

But Summers was right. The stimulus — along with all the supply chain and labor shortage disruptions that are inevitable when coming out of a pandemic — has boosted inflation. In addition, Americans are exhausted by a pandemic that seems to never end.

And they are taking it out on Democrats. A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll revealed that voters now prefer Republican congressional candidates in their own districts by 51 percent to 41 percent. That’s the largest G.O.P. lead since this poll started asking the question, 40 years ago.

If presidencies were judged by short-term popularity, the Biden effort would look pretty bad. But that’s a terrible measure. First-term presidents almost always see their party get hammered in the midterm after their inauguration. That’s especially true if the president achieved big things. Michigan State political scientist Matt Grossmann looked at House popular vote trends since 1953. 

Often when presidents succeeded in passing major legislation — Republicans as well as Democrats — voters swung against the president’s party. Look, just to take a recent example, at how Obamacare preceded a Democratic shellacking in 2010. People distrust change. Success mobilizes opposition. It’s often only in retrospect that these policies become popular and even sacred.

Presidents are judged by history, not the distraction and exhaustion of the moment. Did the person in the Oval Office address the core problem of the moment? The Biden administration passes that test. Sure, there have been failures — the shameful Afghanistan withdrawal, failing to renounce the excesses of the cultural left. 

But the President Biden administration will be judged by whether it reduced inequality, spread opportunity, created the material basis for greater national unity.

It is doing that.

My fear is not that Democrats lose the midterms — it will have totally been worth it. My fear is that Democrats in Congress will make fantastic policies like the expanded child tax credit temporary to make budget numbers look good. If they do that the coming Republican majorities will simply let these policies expire.

If that happens, then all this will have been in vain. The Democrats will have squandered what has truly been a set of historic accomplishments. Voters may judge Democrats harshly next November, but if they act with strength, history will judge them well.

48th President of the United States

*David Brooks is a conservative political and cultural commentator who writes for The New York Times.

Donald Trump is sick with coronavirus but also he's ill will immorality

"During Tuesday night’s debate, by contrast, people got to see, in real time, how Trump’s vicious behavior destroyed an American institution, the presidential debate. They got to see ... savagery.."

Thankfully published in the Oregon newspaper The Register-Guard

Excellent echo with thoughtful analysis from The New York Times pundit and columnist David Brooks.  I must say, this commentary is certainly among his best!  "Trump is immoral", and why he is so.  

The 21st century has been a century of menace and insecurity. The threats have come in rapid succession: terrorism, financial collapse, plague, climate change, the quaking of our democracy. For good reasons, a tone of heightened alarm has become the default setting across the media.

People on the right and the left see threats coming from different places. In his new book, “The Securitarian Personality,” political scientist John R. Hibbing argues that people on the right tend to react to threats coming from outside America, while people on the left see threats coming from the powerful financial and political spheres inside America.

Hibbing’s book, based on reporting, focus groups and surveys, is an attempt to understand what motivates the most enthusiastic Trump supporters. 

The most ardent ones, he notes, are not economically marginalized, not submissive, not authoritarian, not religious or conventionally conservative. They have a strong concept that there is a core America, a concept which I suppose you could summarize as white, rural, John Wayne, football and hunting.

They feel that core America is under existential threat from people they view as outsiders: immigrants, Chinese communists, cosmopolitan urbanites and people of color. They see themselves as strong and vigilant protectors, defending the sacred homeland from alien menace.

People who feel themselves under threat have a high tolerance for cruelty in their leaders: A little savagery to defend the homeland might be a good thing. But the crucial thing about Donald Trump is that he is not a nationalist who uses immoral means. 

Trump is first and foremost an immoralist, whose very being was defined by dishonesty, cruelty, betrayal and cheating long before he put on political garb.

In this presidential campaign, Trump’s nationalist platform — trade, immigration — has faded into the background while his immoral nature has taken center stage. Compared to 2016, it’s more pure Trump and less Pat Buchanan.

The key events of the campaign have been moral events: Trump reportedly calling military veterans and the war dead suckers and losers; Trump downplaying a deadly pandemic to the American people; Trump failing to pay fair taxes; Trump sidling up to white supremacists, resorting to racist and QAnon dog whistles.

The debate was an important moment. You and I can give sermons about how cruel, dishonest behavior shreds the norms of a decent society. But moral degradation is an invisible process. It happens subtly over time.

During Tuesday night’s debate, by contrast, people got to see, in real time, how Trump’s vicious behavior destroyed an American institution, the presidential debate. They got to see how his savagery made ordinary human conversation impossible. Debate watchers were confronted with a core truth: What Trump did to that debate Tuesday night is what he’ll do to America in a second term.

On Tuesday we got see that immorality isn’t just a vague thing people talk about in Sunday school. It is a Howitzer that blows through walls and leaves rubble. It is an attempt to serve yourself by breaking things and making other people suffer.

Biden should continue to talk about his economic recovery and pandemic control plans and all that stuff, but this election has devolved to certain key questions: Does America still have a moral core, a basic framework that makes this a decent place to live? Will we let Trump and his felons drag us to moral chaos?

As a temperament and philosophy, conservatism has one central premise: Humans are fallen beings, and the crust of civilization is thin. We are able to live sweetly because over centuries we have constructed a moral and social order, which is fragile and requires constant tending.

With his conduct, Trump assaults this core conservative instinct.

He is separating the nationalists from some temperamental conservatives. The nationalists relish Trump’s disruption, his savagery. Some everyday conservatives — homeowners, parents, shopkeepers — feel in their bones that some new danger is afoot.

You can see this separation in the polls. Fourteen percent of Trump’s 2016, battleground state supporters are not sure they will support him again. Only 16% of white evangelicals supported Hillary Clinton in 2016; 28% now support Joe Biden, according to an August Fox News poll.

In 2016, Trump won noncollege-educated white women in Wisconsin by 16 percentage points. Now he is losing them by 9 points. In 2016 Trump tied Clinton among college educated whites in Pennsylvania. Now they are going for Biden, 61% to 38%. In 2016 in Ohio, Trump carried union households by 13 points. Now he is losing them by 8 points.

Some Republicans see Trump’s immorality as a sideshow they will tolerate to secure other goods. But his immorality is voracious, a widening gyre that threatens the basic stability of civic life. If he undermines this election, and his Republican enablers let him, he’ll approach what comes next with appalling ferocity.

My intuition tells me, as does the polling data, that more people are paying attention, have recognized what’s before them and will make the right decision. Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward made the essential point: “There was always just enough virtue in this republic to save it; sometimes none to spare.”

David Brooks writes for The New York Times.

President Joe Biden will make political centrism great again

"...Mr. Biden is not an emblem of this coastal elite. His sensibility was nurtured by his working-class family.."- David Brooks

David Brooks: President Biden’s first day | Echo Commentary published in The Baltimore Sun

Progressive centrism! Getting things done to improve the human condition.

The first thing you’ll notice is the quiet. If Joe Biden wins this thing, there will be no disgraceful presidential tweets and no furious cable segments reacting to them on Inauguration Day.

Donald Trump himself may fume, but hated and alone. The opportunists who make up his administration will abandon him. Republicans will pretend they never heard his name. Republican politicians are not going to hang around a guy they privately hate and who publicly destroyed their majority.

But there will be a larger quiet, too. For two decades American politics has centered on a bitter culture war between the white working-class heartland and university-bred coastal elites.

Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were all emblems of this university class, and it was easy for the Republican media wing to gin up resentment against them. In 2016, Mr. Trump beat Ms. Clinton among the white working class by a crushing 28 points.

But Mr. Biden is not an emblem of this coastal elite. His sensibility was nurtured by his working-class family during the postwar industrial boom of the 1950s and 1960s. He graduated from the University of Delaware in 1965 and missed the late 1960s culture war that divided a generation.

It’s very hard for conservatives to demonize Mr. Biden because he comes from the sort of background that Trumpian conservatives celebrate. He eludes all the culture war divides. He doesn’t act superior to the “deplorables,” because his family taught him to despise status games of all sorts.

It will become immediately clear that in a Biden era, politics will shrink back down to normal size. It will be about government programs, not epic wars about why my sort of people are morally superior to your sort of people. In the Trump era a lot of people who don’t care about government got manic about politics.

It will also become immediately clear that in a highly ideological age, America will be led by a man who is not ideological.

Last a week a few of us columnist types spoke with Mr. Biden about his economic plans. His most telling sentence was, “I’ve kind of tried to shed the labels and focus on the nuts and bolts of this.”

I asked him to describe the big forces that have flattened working-class wages over the past decades. Other people would have spun grand theories about broken capitalism or the rise of the corporate oligarchy. But Mr. Biden pointed to two institutional failures — the way Republicans have decentralized power and broken Washington and the way Wall Street forces business leaders to focus obsessively on the short term.

Mr. Biden’s worldview seems to come mainly from lived experience, not a manifesto somewhere. He has lived experience of a time when there were good manufacturing jobs, when unions protected workers, when the less affluent had a ladder to climb.

His economic agenda, promoted under the slogan “Build Back Better,” is about that, not some vast effort to remake capitalism or build a Nordic-style welfare system. The agenda is more New Deal than New Left.

In the two speeches he has delivered so far there are constant references to our manufacturing base — infrastructure, steelworkers, engineers, iron workers, welders, 500,000 charging stations for electric cars. “When I think of climate change, the word I think of is jobs,” he declared.

The agenda pushes enormous resources toward two groups: first, African Americans, who have been pummeled by deindustrialization for decades; and second, white working-class Trump voters. This looks like an attempt to rebuild the New Deal coalition and win back the white working class who should be a core of the Democratic base. Mr. Biden’s populist “Buy American” messaging is just icing on that cake.

Can he pull off this manufacturing revival and this political realignment?

I’ll be curious to see if it’s possible to create millions of manufacturing jobs — or if technology means there’s only a need for relatively few workers. I’ll be curious to see if he can tamp down the Democratic media and activist wings, with their penchant for wildly unpopular moral gestures like “defund the police” and “decriminalize the border.”

I wonder if the economic crisis will obviate all this. With mass unemployment the need will be to get money out the door immediately on Day 1. Launching infrastructure projects and clean energy industries takes a lot of time.

But I do know that if he can win a chunk of the white working class (44% of the electorate, according to Ruy Teixeira), he will realign American politics. I also know that from that first day the Biden agenda will put the surviving Republicans in Congress in an awful bind. Do they cooperate and work with Mr. Biden’s infrastructure and manufacturing plans? If they oppose him they give him a clear shot to win their voters while also inviting him to end the filibuster.

Everybody says Mr. Biden is a moderate, and in intellectual and temperamental terms that is true. But he has found a way to craft an agenda that could reshape the American economy and the landscape of American politics in fundamental ways.

Joe Biden may (...will!...)turn out to be what radical centrism looks like.

Coronavirus response requires a solidarity revolution: Food for body and soul

Quotes by Dorothy Day

• "The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?"

• "Food for the body is not enough. There must be food for the soul."

Published in The Tablet, a British Jesuit journal, by Christopher White, National Correspondent 
Georgetown Panel: COVID-19 Crisis Shows Need for Solidarity, Community

NEW YORK — Addressing the world two weeks ago at the height of the global pandemic, Pope Francis paid tribute to the “forgotten people” – the grocery clerks, service industry workers, cleaners, and caregivers, the people that are frequently overlooked, yet are now keeping the world functioning.

Earlier this week, a virtual Georgetown University discussion examined how those individuals – and the tens of millions of people experiencing economic devastation from the pandemic – might best be supported by both the Church and the country in the pandemic’s aftermath.

The panel, “Life and Dignity, Justice and Solidarity: Moral Principles for Responding to the COVID-19 Economic Crisis,” was convened on Monday, by the university’s Initiative for Catholic Social Thought and Public Life and brought together a mix of policy experts, academics, and a community activist, with the aim of charting a path forward.

E.J. Dionne, who teaches at Georgetown and is a columnist for the Washington Post, kicked off the discussion by noting that while the government is rightfully calling for physical social distancing, he said that now, more than ever, is the time for social connection in order to ensure strong societal bonds to both get through the pandemic and to be united in the eventual rebuilding that will need to occur.

Similarly, New York Times columnist David Brooks highlighted the Catholic principle of solidarity as “an active virtue” that demands the participation of every single individual member of society. While Brooks is not a Catholic, he said that Catholic social teaching is the “most coherent philosophy that opposes a philosophy of rampant individualism” and should be relied on especially now.

The pandemic “exposes the fragmentation in our society,” Brooks continued, and saying that we can’t go back to way things were before.

Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute rebutted arguments made by some of his fellow conservatives in recent weeks that the cure to the pandemic “cannot be worse than the problem,” by arguing that the economy is meant to be in service of the common good.

While the decision to shutter many businesses in order to encourage social distancing is causing economic hardship, Strain said that economic loss must be tolerated in order to save human lives. Further, he said that there is good historical evidence for workers to be confident that this is not the end of the story and the economy will rebound.

Maru Bautista who works with the Center for Family Life in Brooklyn, New York promoting immigrant-led worker cooperatives said that she hopes that the crisis will lead to a reordering of our current system, including a greater opening to the possibility of Medicare for all to expand access to healthcare.

“We need to have the courage to see new possibilities that can create a different landscape for everybody,” she told the online audience.

Although most of the panelists cautiously praised the recent stimulus bill passed by Congress as a good and necessary first step at providing economic relief, they all agreed it would not be enough to provide long-term support.

Brooks said that he would have liked for a larger percentage of the money to go toward small businesses through the form of forgivable payroll loans rather than forcing businesses to layoff employees so that they can receive unemployment benefits. Bautista said that many immigrants will still have trouble accessing the funding programs, particularly highlighting that food stamps is a critical issue to many people in her community.

Dionne concurred, telling attendees that in Congress it’s hard to pass anything that helps non-citizen immigrants, but noting that if the nation is serious about wanting the economy to take off – and if it is concerned about justice – that must be remedied.

As the panel wrapped up, the discussion moved from economic concerns to communal ones, with Strain noting that even prior to the pandemic, loneliness and isolation was one the rise in America and he feared that this would only exacerbate the problem. He said that we should be particularly concerned about mental health issues, as well as that of heightened domestic abuse, in light of the pandemic.

Brooks said that the individualism that has defined the American system for the past sixty years has “had a good run,” but that he hopes that the nation is now at a turning point toward a great reliance on community.

John Carr, the director of Georgetown’s Initiative, concluded the program, which started at the beginning of Holy Week, but painfully acknowledging that “we’re doing passion and death pretty well, but I hope we can get to resurrection.”

“This is a time to go back to fundamentals,” said Carr, “as sisters and brothers made in the image of God.”
Tags: Catholic Church, Catholic Faith, Coronavirus Pandemic, Georgetown University

Commentary on "Shortest Way Home" - echo opinion

An echo opinion about Pete Buttigieg by David Brooks published in the San Diego Union-Tribune

Pete Buttigieg has some kind of magic right now. His campaign bio, “Shortest Way Home,” was the 25th-best-selling book on Amazon when I checked. That put him just a few dozen places behind Michelle Obama, and thousands or tens of thousands of places ahead of Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and the other candidates who have campaign books out.

In a recent Iowa poll Buttigieg surged to third place. 

His campaign just announced that it’s raised an impressive $7 million since January. And I can’t tell you how many Democrats in places as diverse as Nebraska, Indiana, New York and Washington have come up to me over the past few weeks, raving about the guy. 

In fact, I met a superfan in Frederick, Maryland, who says that every few hours she calls the campaign to give another $10.

This is the biggest star-is-born moment since Lady Gaga started singing “Shallow.” (with Bradley Cooper)

Why are people so in love with the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who almost nobody had heard of until his March 10 CNN town hall?

It’s important to remember that when Democrats vote next year, they’ll not only be choosing a policy alternative to Donald Trump, they’ll also be making a statement about what kind of country they want America to be.

The Trump era has been all about dissolving moral norms and waging vicious attacks. This has been an era of culture war, class warfare and identity politics. It’s been an era in which call-out culture, reality TV melodrama and tribal grandstanding have overshadowed policymaking and the challenges of actually governing.

The Buttigieg surge suggests that there are a lot of Democrats who want to say goodbye to all that. They don’t want to fight fire and divisiveness with more fire and divisiveness. They don’t want to fight white identity politics with another kind of identity politics.

They are sick of the moral melodrama altogether. They just want a person who is more about governing than virtue-signaling, more about friendliness and basic decency than media circus and rhetorical war.

Buttigieg’s secret is that he transcends many of the tensions that run through our society in a way that makes people on all sides feel comfortable.

First, he is young and represents the rising generation, but he is also an older person’s idea of what a young person should be. He’d be the first millennial president, but Buttigieg doesn’t fit any of the stereotypes that have been affixed to America’s young people.

Young people are supposed to be woke social justice warriors who are disgusted by their elders. Buttigieg is the model young man who made his way impressing his elders — Harvard, Rhodes scholar, McKinsey, the Navy.

Young hipsters are supposed to flock to coastal places like Brooklyn, New York, and Portland, Oregon, after college, Buttigieg returned to Indiana.

Young people are supposed to be anti-institutional, but Buttigieg is very institutional — his life has been defined by service to organizations not rebellion against them.

Second, he is gay and personifies the progress made by the LGBTQ movement, but he doesn’t do so in a way that feels threatening or transgressive to social conservatives. He has conservative family values; it’s just that his spouse is a husband, not a wife. He speaks comfortably about his faith and says that when he goes to church he prefers a conservative liturgy to anything experimental.

Third, he is a localist and a Washington outsider, but he carries no populist resentment and can easily speak the language of the coastal elite.

Buttigieg has spent his political career in Indiana, where pols are expected to go to county fairs and eat catfish filet and cheesecake on a stick. He wasn’t alive when the Studebaker plant shut down in South Bend, but he has the trauma of Midwestern deindustrialization in his bones. He lives in a house near his mother where the mortgage comes to about $450 a month. He was also friends with Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard, earned a first at Oxford and thrived as a corporate consultant.

Finally, he’s a progressive on policy issues but doesn’t sound like an angry revolutionary. His policy positions are not that different from the more identifiable leftist candidates. But he eschews grand ideological conflict.

“The whole point of politics is everyday life,” he said in his CNN town hall. His book is mostly about how as mayor he faced problems like snow removal and fixing potholes. His big achievements were renaming city streets, repairing the sewer system and tearing down derelict buildings. 

He says he’ll do whatever works.

I’ve only met Buttigieg once, wTrhen we were seated at a table at a dinner in Detroit, a few months ago. He was smart, modest and self-effacing, and I can’t square that impression with his assumption that, at 37, he’s qualified to be president of the United States.

But maybe Buttigieg squares a lot of circles. He deftly detaches progressive policy positions from the culture war. He offers change without Sturm und Drang. (Brooks translation- "emotional turbulence") 

Republican hypocritical war on families

by Gwendoline M. Alphonso is an Associate Professor of Politics at Fairfield University, in Connecticut. She is the author of Polarized Families, Polarized Parties: Contesting Values and Economics in American Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, July 2018).

Heart-rending images of migrant families being separated at the border generated a political maelstrom for Republicans that resulted in the capitulation of President Trump on June 20th. Trump signed an executive order that, he said, would keep migrant families together at the border. 

At the time of writing, 2000 migrant children continue to be in detention centers, separated from their families, as the Republican-dominated Congress struggles to consider an immigration reform bill. (The House voted the latest measure down; the Senate is considering an alternative.) In his statements the President characterized his predicament as a dilemma between values such as “compassion” vs. “toughness,” avowing to continue to uphold his zero tolerance policy even while signaling his acquiescence to family reunification.

Multiple protest organizers, commentators, politicians, and church leaders have approached the issue of migrant family separation as a reflection of American values. 

For example, New York Times columnist, David Brooks cited it as a policy example of an administration that “takes out” values such as affection, mercy, charity, compassion and empathy.” 

As Brooks says, this is “not who we are.” (PBS Newshour, 06/15). Trump supporters, however, such as former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, insisted that family separation is “the law” and the President is merely “enforcing it,” laying the blame repeatedly on Democrats for a failed immigration system.

Despite the continued insistence of Trump and his base that family separation is first and foremost a “law and order” issue, the majority of the American people are far more likely to see the issue in familial terms. Donald Trump's wrong minded executive order is an acknowledgement of that reality. The irony is that Trump and Republicans in Congress have only themselves to thank for the political straight jacket they now find themselves in – one that exemplifies long standing inconsistencies between morality and hard materiality in the inherited Republican family values agenda.

It just so happens that I have been studying the Republican deployment since the late 1970s of the family as the human touchstone for American greatness and moral values. It’s the subject of my new book, Polarized Families, Polarized Parties: Contesting Values and Economics in American Politics. What the record shows is that this phenomenon is quite in contrast with earlier attempts to mobilize around family economics in previous periods.

In its 1976 Platform the Republican Party asserted, “families—not government programs —are the best way to make sure . . . our cultural and spiritual heritages are perpetuated, our laws are observed and our values are preserved.”

Since then Republicans have roundly heralded families, not laws or programs, as the foremost, living and breathing, illustration of enduring American values and success. Despite Trump’s own unconventional family life, the 2016 Republican Platform once again committed to a traditional (married) family values agenda, asserting that family “is the foundation of civil society… its daily lessons — cooperation, patience, mutual respect, responsibility, self-reliance — are fundamental to the order and progress of our Republic…. That is why Republicans formulate public policy, from taxation to education, from healthcare to welfare, with attention to the needs and strengths of the family.”

From 1968 to 2016 both parties tripled the percentage of their platforms dedicated to family-specific pledges and legislators in Congress increased their sponsorship of family values bills tenfold, from a mere 4 percent of all family-related bills in the immediate decade following World War II to almost 40 percent in the last decade of the twentieth century.

Led by Republicans, “family values” became the central frame through which the parties’ increased their attention to family and in many cases organized their policy agendas. From invoking family values merely 15 or so times in their 1968 platform, Republican platforms from 1992 to 2016 on average mentioned family values roughly 90 times (Democratic platforms for the same period invoked family values about half as many times). Similarly, whereas 84 percent of family bills from 1989 to 2004 sponsored by Democratic members of Congress stressed the more typical economic aspects of family life, such as costs of housing, schooling, and food, 65 percent of Republican-sponsored family bills emphasized traditional family private values, such as self-sufficiency, family integrity and stability, in a variety of policies including taxation, welfare, education, immigration, marriage and abortion.

Since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Republicans were able to achieve vast policy and electoral success among antithetical groups by pursuing their family values agenda and closely tying family to conservative economic and moral values. Republicans in Congress successfully pursued key elements of a neoliberal economic agenda – dismantling welfare and poverty programs for poor families and scaling back redistributionist programs such as estate and other taxes on wealthy families – all while accommodating social traditionalism by opposing programmatic assistance and protections for unconventional families, such as those of LGBT parents and never married-mothers. In their campaign to protect “family values” some families – their integrity, stability, and self-determination— have thus clearly mattered more than others, some deserving the utmost protections and respect even as others were more actively regulated and coerced.

The Trump administration’s attempt to have us temper images of families forcibly separated at the border and, instead, to coldly consider them law breakers and criminals, is yet another illustration of the malleability and inevitable double-standard in the family values ideology that has infused the Republican Party ideology since the late twentieth-century. Yet this strategy may now be turning against the party.

Especially since the 2000s Democrats have steadily embraced family values as a political frame, this time bringing economic-focused family values – such as economic equity, inclusiveness and diversity – to oppose conservative policies and advocate for more liberal ones, such as equal wages for women, raising the minimum wage, and even same-sex marriage equality. 

If Trump’s executive order and Republican factional battles are any indication, it appears that Democrats may now have the upper hand in the battle over defining family and its values and their place in American public policy.

In any case much to the undoubted chagrin of our current President, the firestorm over family separation within the immigration debate demonstrates the continued powerful place of family in American politics and more crucially, in our collective consciousness of right and wrong – who we are and who we aspire to be as a people.

Alabama's Roy Moore campaign exposes a rotten GOP

"The Republican Party is doing harm to every cause it purports to serve."~ David Brooks in The New York Times 

Republicans are finding themselves to be "politically homeless"~ David Brooks

Republicans supported the wrong leader when Donald Trump captured the party's nomination and became elected as president by the Electoral College. Rather than challenge Donald Trump to be the best leader he could be, the Republicans have lowered themselves to his low moral level just because the right wing extremists are claiming political capital.  In so doing, the Republican party known as the Grand Old Party is now designating into a rotting group of Trump cult followers.

New York Times columnist David Brooks described this disenigration.

A lot of good, honorable Republicans used to believe there was a safe middle ground. You didn’t have to tie yourself hip to hip with Donald Trump, but you didn’t have to go all the way to the other extreme and commit political suicide like the dissident Jeff Flake, either. You could sort of float along in the middle, and keep your head down until this whole Trump thing passed.

Now it’s clear that middle ground doesn’t exist. That’s because Donald Trump never stops asking. 

• First, he asked the party to swallow the idea of a narcissistic sexual harasser and a routine liar as its party leader. 
• Then he asked the party to accept his comprehensive ignorance and his politics of racial division. 
• Now he asks the party to give up its reputation for fiscal conservatism. 
• At the same time he asks the party to become the party of Roy Moore, the party of bigotry, alleged sexual harassment and child assault.

There is no end to what Trump will ask of his party. He is defined by shamelessness, and so there is no bottom. And apparently there is no end to what regular Republicans are willing to give him. Trump may soon ask them to accept his firing of Robert Mueller, and yes, after some sighing, they will accept that, too.

That’s the way these corrupt bargains always work. You think you’re only giving your tormentor a little piece of yourself, but he keeps asking and asking, and before long he owns your entire soul.

The Republican Party is doing harm to every cause it purports to serve. If Republicans accept Roy Moore as a United States senator, they may, for a couple years, have one more vote for a justice or a tax cut, but they will have made their party loathsome for an entire generation. The pro-life cause will be forever associated with moral hypocrisy on an epic scale. The word “evangelical” is already being discredited for an entire generation. 

Young people and people of color look at the Trump-Moore G.O.P. and they are repulsed, maybe forever.

You don’t help your cause by wrapping your arms around an alleged sexual predator and a patriarchic bigot. 

You don’t help your cause by putting the pursuit of power above character, by worshiping at the feet of some loutish man or another, by claiming the ends justify any means. You don’t successfully rationalize your own tawdriness by claiming your opponents are satanic. You don’t save Christianity by betraying its message.

“What shall it profit a man,” Jesus asked, “if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?” The current Republican Party seems to not understand that question. Donald Trump seems to have made gaining the world at the cost of his soul his entire life’s motto.

It’s amazing that there haven’t been more Republicans like Mitt Romney who have said: “Enough is enough! I can go no further!”

The reason, I guess, is that the rot that has brought us to the brink of Senator Roy Moore began long ago. Starting with Sarah Palin and the spread of Fox News, the G.O.P. traded an ethos of excellence for an ethos of hucksterism.

The Republican Party I grew up with admired excellence. It admired intellectual excellence (Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley), moral excellence (John Paul II, Natan Sharansky) and excellent leaders (James Baker, Jeane Kirkpatrick). Populism abandoned all that — and had to by its very nature. 

Excellence is hierarchical. Excellence requires work, time, experience and talent. Populism doesn’t believe in hierarchy. Populism doesn’t demand the effort required to understand the best that has been thought and said. Populism celebrates the quick slogan, the impulsive slash, the easy ignorant assertion. 

Populism is blind to mastery and embraces mediocrity.

Compare the tax cuts of the supply-side era with the tax cuts of today. There were three big cuts in the earlier era: the 1978 capital gains tax cut, the Kemp-Roth tax cut of 1981, and the 1986 tax reform. They were passed with bipartisan support, after a lengthy legislative process. All of them responded to the dominant problem of the moment, which was the stagflation and economic sclerosis. All rested on a body of serious intellectual work.

Liberals now associate supply-side economics with the Laffer Curve, but that was peripheral. Supply-side was based on Say’s Law, that supply creates its own demand. It was based on the idea that if you rearrange incentives for small entrepreneurs you are more likely to get start-ups and more innovation. Those cuts were embraced by Nobel Prize winners and represented an entire social vision, favoring the dispersed entrepreneurs over the concentrated corporate fat cats.

Today’s tax cuts have no bipartisan support. They have no intellectual grounding, no body of supporting evidence. They do not respond to the central crisis of our time. They have no vision of the common good, except that Republican donors should get more money and Democratic donors should have less.

The rot afflicting the G.O.P. is comprehensive — moral, intellectual, political and reputational. 

More and more former Republicans wake up every day and realize: “I’m homeless. I’m politically homeless.”

Trump Republicans must live with the history they create

"We all have some responsibility to do one activity that leaps across the chasms of segmentation that afflict this country."- David Brooks

Trumponian Republicans who are right wing zealots must remember the cliche "those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it". When history reviews eras like the rise of Naziism or McCarthyism, those who support Trump might be called to account for how the responded to the rise of Trumpism.

David Brooks writes about this very important accountability moment in The New York Times.

The GOP doesn’t realize “this is a Joe McCarthy moment” — history will judge them for where they stood

Senator Joe McCathy - Republican (1908-1957)- created right wing extremist branding now vilified as McCarthyism

It's strange to think that one's position on Donald Trump is worthy of historical import, but it will be.

Reported by Scott Eric Kaufman in Salon.com

In his Friday New York Times column, economist David Brooks argued that unbeknownst to itself, the Republican Party is having “a Joe McCarthy moment” — meaning that history will judge people by “where they stood at this time,” and that those “who walked with Trump will be tainted forever after for the degradation of standards and the general election slaughter.”

He wrote that America will, after this election, need “a new national story,” because up until now, “America’s story has been some version of the rags-to-riches story, the lone individual who rises from the bottom through pluck and work.” That story doesn’t work anymore, because as the relative successes of the Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders campaigns have demonstrated, people believe that system is rigged:

David Brooks writes in The New York Times

Donald Trump now looks set to be the Republican presidential nominee. So for those of us appalled by this prospect — what are we supposed to do?

Well, not what the leaders of the Republican Party are doing. They’re going down meekly and hoping for a quiet convention. They seem blithely unaware that this is a Joe McCarthy moment. People will be judged by where they stood at this time. Those who walked with Trump will be tainted forever after for the degradation of standards and the general election slaughter.

The better course for all of us — Republican, Democrat and independent — is to step back and take the long view, and to begin building for that. This election — not only the Trump phenomenon but the rise of Bernie Sanders, also — has reminded us how much pain there is in this country. According to a Pew Research poll, 75 percent of Trump voters say that life has gotten worse for people like them over the last half century.

This declinism intertwines with other horrible social statistics. 

• The suicide rate has surged to a 30-year high — a sure sign of rampant social isolation. 
• A record number of Americans believe the American dream is out of reach. 
• And for millennials, social trust is at historic lows.

Trump’s success grew out of that pain, but he is not the right response to it. The job for the rest of us is to figure out the right response.

That means first it’s necessary to go out into the pain. I was surprised by Trump’s success because I’ve slipped into a bad pattern, spending large chunks of my life in the bourgeois strata — in professional circles with people with similar status and demographics to my own. It takes an act of will to rip yourself out of that and go where you feel least comfortable. But this column is going to try to do that over the next months and years. We all have some responsibility to do one activity that leaps across the chasms of segmentation that afflict this country.

We’ll probably need a new national story. Up until now, America’s story has been some version of the rags-to-riches story, the lone individual who rises from the bottom through pluck and work. But that story isn’t working for people anymore, especially for people who think the system is rigged.

I don’t know what the new national story will be, but maybe it will be less individualistic and more redemptive. Maybe it will be a story about communities that heal those who suffer from addiction, broken homes, trauma, prison and loss, a story of those who triumph over the isolation, social instability and dislocation so common today.

We’ll probably need a new definition of masculinity, too. There are many groups in society who have lost an empire but not yet found a role. Men are the largest of those groups. The traditional masculine ideal isn’t working anymore. It leads to high dropout rates, high incarceration rates, low labor force participation rates. This is an economy that rewards emotional connection and verbal expressiveness. Everywhere you see men imprisoned by the old reticent, stoical ideal.

We’ll also need to rebuild the sense that we’re all in this together. The author R. R. Reno has argued that what we’re really facing these days is a “crisis of solidarity.” Many people, as the writers David and Amber Lapp note, feel pervasively betrayed: by for-profit job-training outfits that left them awash in debt, by spouses and stepparents, by people who collect federal benefits but don’t work. They’ve stopped even expecting loyalty from their employers. The big flashing lights say: NO TRUST. That leads to an everyone-out-for-himself mentality and Trump’s politics of suspicion. We’ll need a communitarianism.

Maybe the task is to build a ladder of hope. People across America have been falling through the cracks. Their children are adrift. Trump, to his credit, made them visible. We can start at the personal level just by hearing them talk.

Then at the community level we can listen to those already helping. James Fallows had a story in The Atlantic recently noting that while we’re dysfunctional at the national level you see local renaissances dotted across the country. Fallows went around asking, “Who makes this town go?” and found local patriots creating radical schools, arts festivals, public-private partnerships that give, say, high school dropouts computer skills.

Then solidarity can be rekindled nationally. Over the course of American history, national projects like the railroad legislation, the W.P.A. and the NASA project have bound this diverse nation. Of course, such projects can happen again — maybe through a national service program, or something else.

Trump will have his gruesome moment. The time is best spent elsewhere, meeting the neighbors who have become strangers, and listening to what they have to say.

Unfortunately, Mr. Brooks, your dedication about listening to others does not provide for the leadership America needs to push back on the crises of solidarity. We are the United States of America and, as citizens, we are supposed to pledge to that solidarity.  As for me, I have a litany of Maine Writer blogs to support where I stand during this intolerant Trumpism era.