It's Not Just The Gun

...but yeah - it's the gun.

The Post’s investigative series on the AR-15’s dominant place in the United States’ marketplace and psyche sat atop the Post website on Monday, the day of its release — until, hours later, breaking news replaced it. Three adults and three children had been killed in a Nashville school shooting by a 28-year-old assailant with three guns, including at least one AR-15-style rifle.

These attacks are always heart-wrenching. But they’re not surprising anymore — neither the massacres themselves nor the weapons used to carry them out. Ten of the 17 deadliest mass killings in the United States since 2012 involved AR-15s. The names of the towns and cities where these tragedies took place have become familiar: Newtown, San Bernardino, Las Vegas, Parkland, Uvalde and beyond. The Post chronicles the journey this now-iconic rifle took from military-issued firearm to off-the-shelf bestseller, and underscores the danger in the public’s embrace of a weapon the Defense Department once lauded for its “phenomenal lethality.”

“I don’t know why anyone needs an AR-15,” President Donald Trump reportedly told aides in August 2019 after back-to-back mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso. There’s no good answer. The AR-15 was designed for soldiers, yet its associations with warfare eventually became a selling point for everyday buyers. “Use what they use,” exhorted one ad displaying professionals wielding tactical rifles. Now, about 1 in 20 U.S. adults own at least one AR-15. That’s roughly 16 million people, storing roughly 20 million guns designed to mow down enemies on the battlefield with brutal efficiency. Two-thirds of these were crafted in the past decade — and when more people die, popularity doesn’t fall. Instead, it rises.

The AR-15, The Post explains, is materially different from traditional handguns. The rifle fires very small bullets at very fast speeds. The projectiles don’t move straight and smooth through human targets like those from a traditional handgun. Their velocity turns them unstable upon penetration, so that they tumble through flesh and vital organs. This so-called blast effect literally tears people apart. A trauma surgeon notes, “you don’t see the muscle … just bone and skin and missing parts.” Another mentions tissue that “crumbled into your hands.”
A Texas Ranger speaks of bullets that “disintegrated” a toddler’s skull.

This explains the lead poisoning that plagues survivors of the shooting in Sutherland Springs, Tex.; David Colbath, 61, can scarcely stand or use his hands without pain, and 25-year-old Morgan Workman probably can’t have a baby. It explains the evisceration of small bodies such as that of Noah Pozner, 6, murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary, and Peter Wang, 15, killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High. The Post examined the way bullets broke inside of them — obliterating Noah’s jaw and Peter’s skull, filling their chests with blood and leaving behind gaping exit wounds.

Even thinking about these injuries is horrifying, so much so that crime scene photos are often kept confidential. But the gruesome reality of what an AR-15 can wreak poses an argument in itself: There is no excuse for the widespread availability of these weapons of war.

No single action will stop mass shootings, much less gun violence more generally. The Post’s reporting is only more evidence of the need for a ban on assault rifles. It’s evidence, too, of the need for a ban on high-capacity magazines. Rules restricting how many rounds a gun can fire before a shooter has to reload are more difficult to skirt than flat-out assault rifle bans, which sometimes prompt manufacturers to make cosmetic changes that will reclassify their products. A number is a number. These prohibitions might face legal challenges, but lawmakers in four states have recently added caps. More should follow.

Think of Sutherland Springs, where the shooter, armed with a Ruger AR-556, got off 450 military-grade bullets within minutes, killing 25 people including a pregnant woman. Think of Dayton, where the gunman needed only 32 seconds to hit more than two dozen people with 41 bullets. That’s because he was equipped with a 100-round drum magazine. Even a 30-round magazine — the industry standard these days — would have forced him to reload at least once. A 15-round magazine would have forced him to reload twice. The Post’s analysis of the time this would have taken reveals the lives it could have saved: potentially six of the nine who were killed, in the case of a 15-round magazine.

Think, in contrast, of Poway, Calif., where a gunman killed one person at a synagogue and injured three others with a 10-round magazine before running out of bullets. Members of the congregation moved to confront him as he fumbled with another magazine, and he fled. Children who survived Sandy Hook told their parents they ran away while the assailant was “playing with his gun.” What they’d seen was plain enough. The shooter had stopped to reload.

The AR-15 has become a cultural symbol. But what kind of culture tolerates death after death after 10 murders — or after 27, or 49, or 60? Respect for the Second Amendment doesn’t require standing by while 6-year-olds are torn to shreds. The nation needs to act on guns. The AR-15 and weapons like it are a good place to start.

And of course, the Asshole Chorus goes immediately for the smoke screen, trying to make it about anything other than our fucked up American Gun Fetish.

People can be disgusting.

Woke Is As Woke Does, Sir

I dunno what you thought should happen, George - or what you think needs to happen - but when things get as shitty as they are right now, people will rebel.

Ain't nobody happy to hear "leaders" bullying and abusing their neighbors, family, and friends.

And when it seems like everything is outa whack, then we're going to get lots of people trying to rectify the situation in a variety of ways.

60 years ago, using the n-word was common, and "normal", and acceptable. 40 years ago, we started to realize that was a really shitty way to talk.

Likewise with "faggot" and calling somebody "woman" in an attempt to drag them down.

So we began to make changes in the way we think, and talk, and act - because society has to evolve, and society's use of the language has to evolve too.

That doesn't mean you should be afraid to push back and try to make your stand - no matter what an atavistic dumbass fool you make of yourself while you're doing it. (I am quite familiar with this particular aspect)

Just know this: Yes, you get to speak your mind, but you don't get to demand never to suffer the blowback.

Opinion

Woke word-policing is now beyond satire - George Will

Sometimes in politics, which currently saturates everything, worse is better. When a political craze based on a bad idea achieves a critical mass, one wants it to be undone by ridiculous excess. Consider the movement to scrub from the English language and the rest of life everything that anyone might consider harmful or otherwise retrograde.

Worse really is better in today’s America (if you will pardon that noun; some at Stanford University will not; read on) as the fever of foolishness denoted by the word “woke” now defies satire. At Stanford, a full-service, broad-spectrum educational institution, an “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative” several months ago listed words to avoid lest they make someone feel sad, unsafe, disrespected or something. Problematic words include “American,” which suggests that America (this column enjoys being transgressive) is the most important country in North and South America. The list was quickly drenched by an acid rain of derision, and Stanford distanced itself from itself: The university’s chief information officer said the list was not a mandate. The list warns against using the “culturally appropriative” word “chief” about any “non-indigenous person.”

The University of Southern California’s school of social work banned the word “field” because it connotes slavery. So, Joe DiMaggio did not roam Yankee Stadium’s center field. Heaven forfend. Perhaps centerpasture. DiMaggio was a centerpasturer? An awkward locution, but it appeases the sensitivity police. The Chicago Cubs should henceforth play in Wrigley Meadow.

Such is the New York Times’s astonishment, last week the newspaper treated as front-page news the fact that few people like the term “Latinx.” The Times describes this as “an inclusive, gender-neutral term to describe people of Latino descent.” With “Latinx,” advanced thinkers, probably including hyper-progressive non-Latino readers of the Times, have exhausted the public’s tolerance of linguistic progressivism. Progressives’ bewildering new pronoun protocols ignited the laughter that “Latinx” intensified.

Back at Stanford, more than 75 professors are opposing the university’s snitching apparatus. The “Protected Identity Harm” system enables — actually, by its existence, it encourages — students to anonymously report allegations against other students, from whom they have experienced what the system calls “harm because of who they are and how they show up in the world.”

The PIH website breathlessly greets visitors: “If you are on this website, we recognize that you might have experienced something traumatic. Take a sip of water. Take a deep breath.” PIH recently made national news when someone reported the trauma of seeing a student reading Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”

The professors urge Stanford to avoid “a formal process that students could construe as some sort of investigation into protected speech, or that effectively requires them to admit their protected expression was problematic. Instead, Stanford can support students who are sensitive to speech without involving the speaker.” Perhaps by gently shipping those who are “sensitive to speech” to a Trappist monastery.

Early in the Cold War, some colleges and universities were pressured to require faculty to sign loyalty oaths pledging they were not members of the Communist Party. Liberals honorably led the fight against such government-enforced orthodoxy. Today, liberals are orthodoxy enforcers at the many schools that require applicants for faculty positions to write their own oaths of loyalty to today’s DEI obsession.

They must express enthusiasm for whatever policies are deemed necessary to promote “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Fortunately, the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina recently joined a growing movement to ban requiring DEI statements in hiring and promotion processes, a recoil against aggressive wokeness.

Being dead, Roald Dahl is spared watching woke editors inflict on his children’s books what Meghan Cox Gurdon, writing in the Wall Street Journal, calls “social-justice blandification.” To make them “inclusive,” Dahl’s edited characters are no longer “fat” or “ugly” or anything else that might harm readers. The derisive laughter you hear is from parents who know how unwoke their children are in their enjoyment of vividly, sometimes insultingly, presented fictional characters.

A story is told of a revolutionary socialist who was strolling with a friend when they encountered a beggar. The friend began to hand a few coins to the mendicant, but the revolutionary stopped him, exclaiming: “Don’t delay the revolution!” The socialist thought worse would be better. More social misery would mean more social upheaval. “Arise ye prisoners of starvation” and all that.

In America (take that, Stanford), the worse wokeness becomes, the better. Wokeness is being shrunk by the solvent of the laughter it provokes.

And c'mon, George - what is it about being awake, and aware, and alert, that you're having a problem with?

The Big Flub

Gov DeSantis is in the process of declaring defeat in his stupid little tiff with Disney BTW.

Opinion - Jennifer Rubin

DeSantis’s flop on foreign affairs comes as no surprise

The idea of Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis running for president has sounded swell to many Republicans desperate to find an alternative to defeated former president Donald Trump. The reality, as they are discovering, might be sobering and deflating.

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In the space of just a few days, DeSantis demonstrated his limitations when his state record comes under scrutiny and when he is compelled to opine on foreign policy.

This week, he began a national tour in New York City, presumably to tout his record on crime. In the minds of MAGA Republicans, crime is about not just public safety but also elites’ irresponsibility and the culture wars. DeSantis blamed New York’s bail laws “on Democrats trying to ‘out-woke’ each other,” as the New York Daily News reported. It’s far from clear what he means in this context by “out-woke” — a slur usually deployed to intimate that Democrats are catering to minorities and ignoring Whites’ legitimate concerns.

Regardless, any comparison between Florida and New York does not serve DeSantis well. In 2020, the homicide rate in Florida was 5.9 murders per 100,000 people, and the violent crime rate was 384 per 100,000, according to the Daily Beast, citing the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. New York, meanwhile, had 4.2 homicides per 100,000 people and a violent crime rate of 364 per 100,000 people. New York City itself had a homicide rate of 5.6 per 100,000, slightly below the national average of 6.5 and half Miami’s rate of 12.8.

Meanwhile, DeSantis has wasted police resources on his election-crimes unit, whose cases have led to three dismissals and serious questions about whether other cases will ever come to trial.

Predictably, Eric Adams, New York’s law-and-order mayor, blasted DeSantis. “Welcome to NYC, @GovRonDeSantis, a place where we don’t ban books, discriminate against our LGBTQ+ neighbors, use asylum seekers as props, or let the government stand between a woman and health care,” he tweeted.

DeSantis’s crime foray, however, was not his worst moment on tour. At the moment President Biden was getting plaudits for venturing into a war-torn country to stand with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, DeSantis pandered to pro-Russian apologists.

“The fear of Russia going into NATO countries and all that and steamrolling, you know, that has not even come close to happening,” he said in an interview, neglecting to mention that it hasn’t happened because of the heroic efforts of Ukrainians and the alliance Biden stitched together. DeSantis went on, saying of Russia: “I think they’ve shown themselves to be a third-rate military power.” The third-rate power nevertheless has committed countless atrocities and devastated the economy and landscape of Ukraine.

DeSantis then reverted to an America First talking point about Biden: “He’s very concerned about those borders halfway around the world. He’s not done anything to secure our own border here at home.” In over his head, he muddled along: “And I don’t think it’s in our interest to be getting into proxy war with China, getting involved over things like the borderlands or over Crimea.”

Next he declared, “I think it would behoove them to identify what is the strategic objective that they’re trying to achieve, but just saying it’s an open-ended blank check, that is not acceptable.” The objective is a free and independent Ukraine without Russian troops, obviously.

Perhaps Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — who told the Munich Security Conference that “Republican leaders are committed to a strong transatlantic alliance” and that “America’s own core national interests are at stake” — could help the governor understand.

DeSantis might be utterly uninformed on foreign policy, or he might be pandering to the MAGA base. Regardless, his tone-deaf, reflexive know-nothingism should set off alarms for Republicans. If they want to restore the party’s image as tough on national security and find someone to make Biden look feeble, they might want to look elsewhere.

A Press Poodle Opines

...or maybe: Today's Pearl-Clutching-While-Ignoring-The-Obvious.

Here's a semi-famous and very capable academic, Danielle Allen, lamenting the problems of polarization, and while she kinda proposes some general things we could do to fix those problems, she passively asserts a Both Sides argument as to what might be causing this "Great Pulling-Apart", preferring instead to emphasize points that are not unimportant, but are also more effect rather than cause.

• There's too many of us going in different directions
• We've lost the bonds of love
• Government has a very low approval rating
• blah blah blah

Ms Allen does manage to start with one very solid observation: "...the fact that our house wasn't originally built for everyone."

But then she seems to go to great lengths not to acknowledge the fact that we've never really fully corrected for that little oops.

Division was built-in

It's never gone away

Periodically, forces arise that work hard to tear down our house...

... and right now, they're called Republicans

So while I have one very sharp criticism, I have to say she's got the right idea, but fake lord have mercy anyway.

Opinion
America is in a ‘Great Pulling Apart.’ Can we pull together?

Our nation is in desperate need of democracy renovation. We need to bring this old house we all share up to date and fit for purpose in the 21st century.

To some extent, our challenges are simply that our family is bigger now. Systems are straining under the scale and complexity of our family’s needs.

But there’s also the fact that our house wasn’t originally built for everyone. Some took light-filled rooms with beautiful views. Others were consigned to basements. We’ve got to renovate so that there are good rooms for all — so that power is broadly shared.

Finally, there’s the challenge that social media has blasted one of the original pillars of our Constitution out from under us. Geographic dispersal of the citizenry was supposed to mean that people had to go through elected representatives to get their views into the public sphere. This was supposed to slow the spread of dangerous factions and extreme views. In the design of our Constitution, geographic dispersal was essential to making representation work. But the internet — and social media especially — has shrunk the nation down to one crowded neighborhood. In a country made so “small,” we need to reimagine the very institutions of representative government.

So, let’s do that now, together.

All of us could look around and name forms of the deterioration that afflict our house. We experience the stresses from these pain points via polarization, divisiveness, toxicity, misinformation, distrust of each other and our political institutions, and government dysfunction. These are the symptoms we report. The root causes are those named above.

There’s plenty to be said about what we can do to tackle all these problems. First, I want to share why I care.

Bonds of love

When I was born in 1971, I inherited an original love of democracy from my family. My great-grandparents on my mom’s side fought for women’s right to vote and my great-grandmother was president of the League of Women Voters in Michigan in the 1930s. On my dad’s side, my grandfather helped found one of the first NAACP chapters in northern Florida in the 1940s, an exceptionally dangerous undertaking. We were a family that fought impossible fights and won.

As I grew up, civic engagement was all around me. My father had 11 brothers and sisters. Six family members, including my dad, migrated to California in the late 1950s and early ’60s, fleeing the Jim Crow South and seeking new opportunities and true freedoms. I grew up in a huge network of aunts, uncles and cousins, where participation was the rule. And they engaged across the political spectrum. In one glorious year in my youth, my aunt was on the ballot for Congress in the San Francisco Bay Area for the Peace and Freedom Party while my dad was running for the U.S. Senate from Southern California as a Reagan Republican.

Family gatherings were amazing forums for debate. My dad and aunt would go at it. He tall and skinny, bald, with a wreath of pipe-smoke curling around his head; she gay, built like a Mack truck, and with an incredible belly laugh. They agreed on what they were after: empowerment for themselves, their families and their communities. But they disagreed mightily on how to get there. My dad argued for market freedoms and civic virtues; my aunt for public-sector investment across society and experiments in living.

But they never broke the bonds of love. They debated the ideas, but they never fought the people. It was always clear that they would be there for one another, come what may. And both were empowered. They shaped their own fates and contributed to shaping the fates of their communities. That empowerment visibly nourished them. I could see it in their bearing, their energy and their success. This is where I learned my ideal of what democracy is, and why it matters.

Then our democracy became personal to me — for both its value and its failures.

This occurred as I watched my own generation come into adulthood. My parents’ generation moved up, from working class or lower-middle class to solidly middle class. Such has not been the case with my generation.

Over the half century of my lifetime, our nation has experienced a “Great Pulling Apart”, as I call it. My lifetime has coincided with the huge rise of income and wealth inequality in the country, with the rise of mass incarceration, and with the stunning rise of polarization. The life of my family, too, has been marked by the Great Pulling Apart. Some of us have reached new heights on elevators of opportunity; I hold a tenured professorship at Harvard; my brother is a corporate executive; cousins have found success as doctors or accountants.

But I also have dead cousins — from substance-use disorder and homicide. And cousins whose lives have been painfully impacted by incarceration, homelessness, mental illness and struggles to access health care. What the country has experienced, so too has my family.

Red alert on our democracy

Personally, the worst moment for me was in 2009 when I lost my youngest cousin, Michael, to homicide — after his long incarceration from a first arrest in 1995 for an attempted carjacking. His death was devastating. I began a journey to change the dynamics that led to it.

I dug into justice reform work. That taught me that even where there was bipartisan agreement about things we should change, we could rarely get changes through. The Great Pulling Apart, it turns out, has left us in a place where we can no longer govern ourselves so as to steer toward solutions to some of our worst problems.

My red alert on democracy came in 2013. That year the American people gave Congress an approval rating of 9 percent. This was very bad. Congress was supposed to be the people’s house. It was supposed to be the instrument through which we the people give voice to the directions we would like our society to pursue. For so few of us to approve of our own voice is a profound indictment of the health of our governance mechanisms.

In the years since, many people have experienced their own red alerts about the health of our democracy, but mine came at that moment.

Democracy, then, is the work before us. But seeing that is just the first step. I was desperate to answer the question of what innovations in governance would position us to address the Great Pulling Apart and to steer toward a “Great Pulling Together.” I wanted to know what renovations to democracy might help us govern more effectively to solve our shared problems.

In 2017, I had the opportunity to co-chair a national commission mounted by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The academy is older than the country. It was founded by the same people who drove the Revolution — John Hancock and John Adams, among others. George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were members. Its charge then was to supply the new country with the knowledge resources it would need for success. The commission I was invited to chair was aimed at answering the same questions I was asking, so I leaped at the chance. In 2020, we released “Our Common Purpose” — a report on reinventing U.S. democracy for the 21st century.

That’s how I got here. Many others are here with me — with us — and with their own American origin stories. We have much to talk about.

This year, I am dedicating my Washington Post column to this project of democracy renovation. In the essays that will follow, I will share what appears to be the most important democracy renovations for tackling the Great Pulling Apart. I will draw on the 31 recommendations from the “Our Common Purpose” report, but also go beyond to outline what I believe is the path to securing for ourselves a capacity to govern inclusively and effectively in a fashion fit for the 21st century.

My overarching goal is a Great Pulling Together that gives us the civic strength needed to tackle the challenges that stem from the remarkable scaling up and complexifying of our society. Those challenges include stalled mobility and dysfunctional immigration policies; the climate crisis; social alienation, disempowerment and violence. These are our most difficult problems. We need governance up to the job of tackling them.

That requires democracy renovation.

I still believe that constitutional democracy offers the world’s best hope for human flourishing, and that’s why I do this work. I invite you to join me in it.

The Six Strategies and Thirty-One Recommendations

Strategy 1 - Achieve Equality of Voice and Representation

Strategy 2 - Empower Voters

Strategy 3 - Ensure the Responsiveness of Political Institutions

Strategy 4 - Dramatically Expand Civic Bridging Capacity

Strategy 5 - Build Civic Information Architecture that Supports Common Purpose

Strategy 6 - Inspire a Culture of Commitment to American Constitutional Democracy and to One Another

Plutocracy

Opinion

A judge exposes DeSantis’s contempt for the First Amendment

Andrew Warren, the state prosecutor for Hillsborough County, Fla., spoke out against Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s forced-birth abortion plan and his persecution of LGBTQ youth. In August, DeSantis suspended him -- and falsely claimed it was because Warren had made a blanket promise not to prosecute certain cases. Warren sued. On Friday, a judge sided with him on the facts but did not give him the relief he sought.

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Robert L. Hinkle called DeSantis’s allegation against Warren “false.” “Mr. Warren’s well-established policy, followed in every case by every prosecutor in the office,” Hinkle wrote, "was to exercise prosecutorial discretion at every stage of every case. Any reasonable investigation would have confirmed this.”

Hinkle underscored that Warren had been carrying out his duties without a fault. “The record includes not a hint of misconduct by Mr. Warren. So far as this record reflects, he was diligently and competently performing the job he was elected to perform, very much in the way he told voters he would perform it.” Contrary to DeSantis’s claim, Warren “had no blanket nonprosecution policies.” The judge added, “Any minimally competent inquiry would have confirmed this. The assertion that Mr. Warren neglected his duty or was incompetent is incorrect. This factual issue is not close.”

In fact, the court determined based on uncontroverted evidence, “There it was, stripped of pretext: a motivating factor in Mr. Warren’s suspension was that he was a ‘progressive prosecutor,’” and “of all things,” supported by billionaire George Soros, who is also a contributor to the Democratic Party.

In the first 57 pages of the 59-page opinion, the court makes crystal clear that DeSantis went after Warren for his political affiliation and views, including his outspoken defense of his record as a reform prosecutor. However, the kicker lies in the last two pages: Warren still couldn’t obtain reinstatement.

Unfortunately for Warren, the court ruled that even if he was protected from being fired over his stated beliefs, DeSantis would still have suspended Warren for nonprotected reasons (e.g., his record as a reformer and his disinclination to prosecute people in their first encounter with the police for bicycle and pedestrian violations). In addition, Hinkle held that Warren could not obtain the relief under the Florida constitution because the 11th Amendment prohibits a federal court from ordering a state official to take action for a violation of state law.

Had Warren brought the case in state court, there would have been no 11th Amendment barrier. But Warren no doubt chose to bring the case in federal court on a First Amendment theory to sidestep right-wing state judges. He might still pursue that avenue for relief.

Warren told me on Monday, “The reaction has been overwhelming. People are excited that we won on the merits and proved DeSantis broke the law in suspending me, and they are eagerly awaiting my reinstatement.” He added, “We are still weighing our legal options going forward.”

Still, the end result is unsatisfying. When, as the judge indicated, someone breaks both federal and state law and gets away with it, the sense of injustice is palpable. But while Warren did not prevail in getting reinstated, he certainly pulled back the curtain on the authoritarian mind-set of a governor who crushes dissent to score political points. As Warren said in public remarks after the ruling, DeSantis’s conduct should send “shivers down the spine of anyone who cares about free speech, the integrity of elections and the rule of law.”

Put differently, Warren served as a canary in the coal mine with regard to a governor who remains a top presidential prospect for 2024, exposing DeSantis’s abuse of power and his contempt for the First Amendment. There have been other warnings about DeSantis, as well — from his retaliation against Disney for opposing the “don’t say gay” bill to his inhumane and deceptive practice of shipping asylum seekers from Texas to Massachusetts. Norm Eisen, former co-counsel for House impeachment managers, tells me: “The Eleventh Amendment obstacle should not detract from that truth and the danger it represents. Like [former president Donald] Trump, DeSantis is a serial violator of the rule of law with a shrewd (perhaps even shrewder) ability to dodge consequences.”

Let no one be confused: DeSantis is not a break with the MAGA anti-democratic movement. He is only a less buffoonish version of the defeated former president. And that makes him all the more dangerous.

Party? What Party?

I worry that I've self-bubbled - that I'm hell-bent on feeding my confirmation bias, insisting that all these Press Poodles are deliberately overlooking the 800-pound gorilla jumping up and down on the sofa.

I refer (as always) to Nancy MacLean's theory of radical libertarians working to tear down the institutions of democratic self government in order to replace it with a corporate plutocracy.

I'm not saying that's the only possible explanation for the kind of Republican fuckery that makes them look like idiots - smart people can do some really stoopid things. But it bugs the fuck outa me when I know in my bones that the pundits are aware of what I'm talking about, and still they dance around it.

The point of the exercise is to kill our confidence in government, and the standard play is Divide & Conquer. So it makes perfect sense to blow up the GOP once it's regained some power, just to demonstrate the generic premise that "government doesn't work".

The implication being: "This form of government doesn't work. We need to throw it over and let someone who's strong enough to make the tough decisions really take it all in hand and get everything back on track - then we can do that good ol' democracy thing again when we're really ready for it." 

So here's Ezra Klein, explaining (IMO) GOP problems 2, 3, and 4, while completely ignoring the #1 problem with the GOP.

Three Reasons the Republican Party Keeps Coming Apart at the Seams

For decades, the cliché in politics was that “Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line.” The Democratic Party was thought to be a loosely connected cluster of fractious interest groups often at war with itself. “I don’t belong to an organized political party,” Will Rogers famously said. “I’m a Democrat.” Republicans were considered the more cohesive political force.

If that was ever true, it’s not now. These days, Democrats fall in line and Republicans fall apart.

It’s not just the 14 votes Kevin McCarthy lost before promising away enough of his power and prestige to finally be named speaker. It’s his predecessors, Paul Ryan and John Boehner, who both quit the job McCarthy now holds. It’s the Tea Party repeatedly knocking off Republican incumbents. It’s Ted Cruz and the Freedom Caucus forcing government shutdowns their colleagues never wanted. It’s Donald Trump humiliating virtually the entire Republican Party establishment and becoming the erratic axis around which all Republican Party politics revolves. It’s House Republicans ousting and isolating Liz Cheney because she insisted on investigating an armed assault on the chamber they inhabit. Today, a gaggle of Republicans isn’t a party. It’s closer to a riot.

Perhaps the rise of small-donor money and social media and nationalized politics corroded party cohesion. But Democrats have been buffeted by all that, too, and responded very differently. Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton for the presidential nomination in 2008, but rather than exiling the Clintons to the political wilderness, he named Hillary secretary of state, and then supported her as his successor. In 2020, the party establishment coalesced behind Joe Biden. When Harry Reid retired from the Senate, he was replaced as leader by his deputy, Chuck Schumer. When Bernie Sanders lost in 2016, he became part of Schumer’s Senate leadership team, and when he lost in 2020, he blessed a unity task force with Biden. Nancy Pelosi led House Democrats from 2003 to 2022, and the handoff to Hakeem Jeffries and Katherine Clark was drama free.

So why has the Republican Party repeatedly turned on itself in a way the Democratic Party hasn’t? There’s no one explanation, so here are three.

Republicans are caught between money and media.

For decades, the Republican Party has been an awkward alliance between a donor class that wants deregulation and corporate tax breaks and entitlement cuts and guest workers and an ethnonationalist grass roots that resents the way the country is diversifying, urbanizing, liberalizing and secularizing. The Republican Party, as an organization, mediates between these two wings, choosing candidates and policies and messages that keep the coalition from blowing apart.

At least, it did. “One way I’ve been thinking about the Republican Party is that it’s outsourced most of its traditional party functions,” Nicole Hemmer, author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s,” told me. “It outsourced funding to PACS. It outsourced media to the right-wing media.”

Let’s take funding first. Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez have documented the way money has flowed out of the Republican Party’s official organizations and into an “extra-party consortia of conservative donors” centered around the Koch network (which, importantly, is and long has been far bigger than the Kochs themselves). Between 2002 and 2014, for example, the share of resources controlled by the Republican Party campaign committees went from 53 percent of the money Skocpol and her colleagues could track to 30 percent.

What rose in their place were groups like Americans for Prosperity and the Heritage Action network and the American Legislative Exchange Council — sophisticated, well-financed organizations that began to act as a shadow Republican Party and dragged the G.O.P.’s agenda further toward the wishes of its corporate class.

What were the hallmark Republican economic policies in this era? Social Security privatization. Repeated tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. Free trade deals. Repealing Obamacare. Cutting Medicaid. Privatizing Medicare. TARP. Deep spending cuts. “Elected Republicans were following agendas that just weren’t popular, not even with their own voters,” Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard, told me.

But what really eroded the party’s legitimacy with its own voters was that the attention to the corporate agenda was paired with inattention, and sometimes opposition, to the ethnonationalist agenda. This was particularly true on immigration, where the George W. Bush administration tried, and failed, to pass a major reform bill in 2007. In 2013, a key group of Senate Republicans joined with Democrats to make another run at it only to see their bill killed by Republicans in the House. There’s a reason immigration was Trump’s driving issue in 2016: It was the point of maximum divergence between the Republican Party’s elite and its grass roots.

The failure of Bush’s 2007 immigration bill is worth revisiting, because it reveals the pincer the Republican Party was caught in even before the Tea Party’s rise. The bill itself was a priority for the Chamber of Commerce wing of the party. The revolt against that bill was centered in talk radio, which was able to channel the fury of grass-roots conservatives into a force capable of turning Republican officeholders against a Republican president.

It wouldn’t be the last time. As the Republican Party’s corporate class was building the organizations it needed to tighten its control over policy, the party’s grass-roots base was building the media ecosystem it needed to control Republican politicians. First came Rush Limbaugh and his imitators on talk radio, then Fox News (and eventually its imitators and competitors, like OANN), and then the blogs, and then digitally native outlets like Breitbart and the Daily Wire. The oft-missed secret of the right-wing media ecosystem is that it is ruthlessly competitive. If you lose touch with what the audience actually cares about, you lose them to another show, another station, another site.

Conservative media became, on one hand, the place that grass-roots discontent with the Republican Party’s leadership or agenda could be turned against the party’s elite, and on the other hand, the place where the party’s elite could learn about what the grass roots really wanted. It also — with the rise of online fund-raising — became a place rebellious Republicans candidates could find money even after they alienated their colleagues and repelled the Koch class. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was one of the 10 top fund-raisers in the House in the 2022 election cycle.

So that’s one explanation for what happened to the Republican Party: It’s caught between a powerful business wing that drives its agenda and an antagonistic media that speaks for its ethnonationalist base, and it can’t reconcile the two.

But notice a problem lurking in the language here. Talking about “the Republican Party” makes it sound like the Republican Party is, in each era, the same thing, composed of the same people. It’s not.

Same party, different voters.

A few decades ago, the anti-institutional strain in American politics was more mixed between the parties. Democrats generally trusted government and universities and scientists and social workers, Republicans had more faith in corporations and the military and churches. But now you’ll find Fox News attacking the “extremely woke” military and the American Conservative Union insisting that any Republican seeking a congressional leadership post sign onto “a new shared strategy to reprimand corporations that have gone woke.”

“The reason the Democrats are much more supportive of the institutions is because they are the institutions,” Matt Continetti, author of “The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism,” told me. “Republicans are increasingly the non-college party. When Mitt Romney got the nomination in 2012, the G.O.P. was basically split between college and non-college whites. That’s gone. The Republicans have just lost a huge chunk of professional, college-educated voters — what you would have thought of as the spine of the Republican Party 40 years ago has just been sloughed off.”

The problem for the Republican Party as an institution is that it is, in fact, an institution. And so the logic of anti-institutional politics inevitably consumes it, too, particularly when it is in the majority. This was almost comically explicit during the speaker’s fight. “BREAK THE ESTABLISHMENT ONCE AND FOR ALL,” wrote Representative Andy Biggs, an Arizona Republican, in a fund-raising appeal tied to his opposition to McCarthy. Representative Chip Roy told reporters the aim was “empowering us to stop the machine in this town from doing what it does.”

The more that the anti-establishment wing of the Republican Party expresses itself, the more the party loses once-loyal voters inclined toward institutions and gains new voters who mistrust them. You can see this, to some degree, in the so-called Woo-Anon pipeline, where anti-establishment hippies found themselves, particularly during the pandemic, drifting into the furthest reaches of the right — in one case, going from teaching yoga classes in Southern California to joining the Jan. 6 insurrection.

“Democrats are increasingly the party, when they’re in the majority, of the suburbs,” Continetti told me. “And to me, the American suburbs are the ballast of this country — they’re more small-c conservative than movement conservatives. The suburbs don’t want to rock the boat. So the Republican Party, as it’s become more rural and more non-college educated, they don’t have as much investment in the system. By that very reason, they become much more inclined to rock the boat.”

Suburban voters provided Joe Biden his crucial margin of victory in 2020 and saved the Senate for the Democrats in 2022. Depending on how you look at it, they’re a check on the Democratic Party’s radicalism or an impediment against its much-needed populism. Either way, the parties are pushing each other to become more distilled versions of themselves. The closer the Democrats come to the major institutions in American life, the more Republicans turn against them, and vice versa.

Republicans need an enemy.

When I asked Michael Brendan Dougherty, a senior writer at National Review, what the modern Republican Party was, he replied, “it’s not the Democratic Party.” His point was that not much unites the various factions of the Republican coalition, save opposition to the Democratic Party.

“The anchor of Democratic Party politics is an orientation toward certain public policy goals,” Sam Rosenfeld, author of “The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era,” told me. “The conservative movement is oriented more around anti-liberalism than positive goals, and so the issues and fights they choose to pursue are more plastic. What that ends up doing is it gives them permission to open their movement to extremist influences and makes it very difficult to police boundaries.”

It wasn’t always thus. The defining consensus of the midcentury Republican Party was its opposition to the Soviet Union. “The Cold War was the engine driving the mainstream Republican Party to the left,” Gary Gerstle writes in “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order.” “Its imperatives forced a political party that loathed a large centralized state and the extensive management of private enterprise in the public interest to accept these very policies as the governing principles of American life.”

Gerstle’s point here is subtle. Anti-Communism made Republicans more than a purely anti-government party. Liberals sometimes frame this as hypocrisy on the part of Ronald Reagan and other self-styled conservatives — how can you hate government but love the military? — but in Gerstle’s view, fighting Communism kept Republicans committed to a positive vision of the role of government in modern life. It turned tax cuts and deregulation into questions of freedom. It turned highway construction into a question of national defense.

And so it’s no surprise that you first see today’s Republican Party — complete with government shutdowns, doomed impeachment efforts, bizarre investigations and vicious congressional infighting — in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union had fallen. Then came George W. Bush, and his initially listless administration, which was revived by Al Qaeda — another external enemy that lent focus and coherence to the Republican agenda. But that faded, too. And as that faded, the trends of the Gingrich era took hold. The enemies, again, became Democrats, the government and other Republicans.

There is an irresolvable contradiction between being a party organized around opposition to government and Democrats and being a party that has to run the government in cooperation with Democrats.

You can see this dynamic even now. The easiest route to bipartisan cooperation is to frame a bill as anti-China, like the CHIPS and Science Act. McCarthy’s first act with any bipartisan support was to create a new committee to focus on competition with China. But China isn’t our outright enemy in the way the Soviet Union or Al Qaeda was. It’s certainly not enough of a force to organize Republican Party politics around a positive agenda.

All of this suggests that McCarthy has won himself a miserable prize. To become speaker, he traded away many of the powers he would have had as speaker. He reportedly promised to give those who would destroy him plum committee assignments that will, in turn, give them more control over what comes to the House floor. He apparently agreed to spending caps and budgetary guarantees that will commit House Republicans to the kinds of brutal cuts and dangerous showdowns that make them look like a party of arsonists, not legislators. He made it possible for any member of his caucus to call a vote on him at any time. And most important, he was proved weak before he ever held the gavel.

“All McCarthy has is the title on the door above his office,” Skocpol told me. He’s a hollow speaker for a hollow party.

REMEMBER:

It didn't suddenly get all fucked up yesterday.

And we won't get it all un-fucked by tomorrow.

Well Now

It's pretty left-handed, but when even a slug like Marc Thiessen can sing the other guy's praises, you know there's some kind of change in the air.

10. He acted to prevent a crippling national rail strike

It wasn’t exactly Ronald Reagan firing striking air traffic controllers, but Biden did get Congress to pass bipartisan legislation forcing rail worker unions to accept the overly generous contract his administration had negotiated, avoiding a strike that could have crippled our economy and exacerbated inflation.

9. He is sending B-52s to Australia to counter China

Building on last year’s historic trilateral security agreement with Australia and Britain — known as AUKUS — to help Canberra build nuclear-capable submarines, Biden announced plans to deploy up to six nuclear-capable B-52 bombers to a dedicated air base in northern Australia to help counter Chinese hegemony.

8. He launched a “full-court press” against China’s domestic semiconductor industry

Biden blocked U.S. companies from selling chips or semiconductor equipment to China. He also cracked down on China’s “Thousand Talents” program to recruit U.S. science and technology experts, issuing export control rules that prohibit U.S. citizens from supporting China’s advanced chip development — cutting off the flow of Silicon Valley expertise. This will severely curtail China’s ambitions to develop its own cutting-edge semiconductor industry.

7. He signed the first bipartisan gun legislation in decades

Following the school shooting in Uvalde, Tex., Biden signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, co-sponsored by Sens. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), that protects the rights of lawful gun owners while cracking down on criminal misuse of firearms — including incentives for states to implement “red-flag” laws; increased funding for mental health and school safety; added scrutiny of gun buyers who are under 21 or domestic abusers; and stronger penalties for straw buyers and gun traffickers.

6. He secured extradition of the terrorist charged with bombing Pan Am Flight 103, which killed 190 Americans

Libyan intelligence operative Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud — suspected of building the explosive device used in the 1988 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland —is the first terrorist linked to the attack to face justice in the United States.

5. He kept Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations

President Donald Trump listed the IRGC in 2019 as part of his “maximum pressure” campaign after he withdrew from President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal. Iran demanded that Biden delist the IRGC before it considered returning to compliance with the deal. Despite his misguided efforts to revive that agreement, Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in April that the IRGC would remain on the list and that the decision was “absolutely final.”

4. He won support for Finland and Sweden to join NATO

While he must still manage Turkish intransigence, Biden got both NATO allies and a 95-1 bipartisan majority (*) in the Senate to support the admission of the two Nordic nations to the Atlantic alliance — a major blow to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who opposes any NATO expansion.

3. He killed al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri

Of course, Zawahiri was living openly in downtown Kabul thanks to Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. But 11 years after opposing the mission that killed Osama bin Laden, Biden ordered the drone strike that took out bin Laden’s right-hand man and successor. He also took out Islamic State leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi in northwest Syria and resumed full ground operations alongside our Kurdish partners, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which has kept a check on the Islamic State in the region.

2. He declared the United States will defend Taiwan

Not once, not twice, but four times since taking office (most recently in September), Biden has vowed that the U.S. military would defend Taiwan if Communist China attacked. Beijing is on notice: The policy of “strategic ambiguity” is dead (notwithstanding White House aides who tried to walk back Biden’s comments each time). It is U.S. policy to defend Taiwan against unjust aggression.

1. He saved Ukraine

Biden’s handling of Ukraine tops both my best and worst lists this year. Here is the best: After Russia invaded, Biden rallied our allies to support Ukraine’s self-defense — providing arms, money, intelligence and diplomatic support that stopped Putin from seizing Kyiv. At the start of the conflict, no one thought Ukraine could survive; today, Ukraine’s courageous armed forces are on the offensive, retaking territory Russia unlawfully seized. For all the flaws in his Ukraine strategy, Biden deserves credit for saving a free and independent Ukraine.

(*) Josh (Running Man) Hawley was the sole dissenting vote. Because of course he was, because of course he wants whatever Putin wants.

Here We Go

 

ATTENTION

ATTENTION

ATTENTION

ALL HANDS REPORT IMMEDIATELY

TO YOUR

LIFEBOAT INCINERATION STATIONS

THIS IS NOT A DRILL

REPEAT

THIS IS NOT A DRILL

Josh Hawley's running for president (I'm pretty sure), and as much as I'm loath even to appear as if I'm carrying water, or a message, or anything other than a burning dislike for Mr Hawley, I had to post his Op/Ed because this is a Burn The Lifeboats moment if ever there was one.

Also - you're all over the fuckin' map here, Joshie.

eg: you say you wanna boost American wage-earners, and save people money, but then you're against lifting tariffs - which are nothing more than a "value added" tax (ie: pass every penny of the cost along to the consumer), and it falls hardest on middle- working- and lower class Americans. You know - the ones you say you wanna help, and should be listening to, while China feels practically no pain at all.

(pay wall)

Opinion by Josh Hawley

The GOP is dead. A new GOP must listen to working people.

The old Republican Party is dead. It has been wasting away for years now, and this month’s midterm results are the finishing blow. If Republicans learn nothing else from this election, they must learn that much.

As frustrating as the election outcomes are, the death of the old GOP is no reason to mourn. It just means that it’s time for Republicans to forge something new — a party that truly represents the cultural backbone of this nation: America’s working people.

Many Republicans are primed to learn all the wrong lessons from this cycle. Over the past week, we’ve heard this election is about nothing more than “candidate quality” or turnout operations.

Wrong. The problem isn’t principally the tactics; the problem is the substance. For the past two years, the Republican establishment in Washington has capitulated on issue after issue, caving to Democrats on the Second Amendment and on the left’s radical climate agenda (“infrastructure”). These Republican politicians sided with Big Pharma on insulin and advocated lowering tariffs on our competitors overseas.

Then they wonder why working-class independents have little enthusiasm about voting Republican.

For decades, Republican politicians have sung a familiar tune. On economics, they have cut taxes on the big corporations and talked about changing Social Security and Medicare — George W. Bush even tried to partially privatize Social Security back in 2005. In the name of “growth,” these same Republicans have supported ruinous trade policies — such as admitting China to the World Trade Organization — that have collapsed American industry and driven down American wages.

This tax-and-trade agenda has hollowed out too many American towns by shipping jobs overseas. It has made it almost impossible to raise a family on one income and to find a good-paying job that doesn’t require a college degree. Our trade deficit with China has cost this country 3.7 million good jobs, while a crisis of drug overdose deaths — particularly among working Americans — has ravaged many of the same communities that have suffered most from deindustrialization. It has all made it harder to stay rooted in your hometown or region. That’s not a record of success.

Republican politicians have frequently advocated higher immigration levels and four years ago went all in for soft-on-crime “sentencing reform.” They have done nothing on Big Tech. This record doesn’t appeal to working people. Just the opposite: It repels them. If Republicans want to be a majority party, now is the time to change course.

Republicans will only secure the generational victories they crave when they come to terms with this reality: They must persuade a critical mass of working class voters that the GOP truly represents their interests and protects their culture. The red wave didn’t land in part because voters who cast a ballot for Barack Obama and later supported Donald Trump — voters who likely disapprove of Joe Biden and the Democrats’ agenda — chose to stay home.

Republicans must win these voters. We will not be a majority without them. That means waking up to what they care about. Work, family and culture are the touchstones of meaning for working people across the country. They must form the bedrock of a new party agenda.

We can start by stopping the bleeding. No more talk of grand bargains that turbocharge illegal immigration. No more liberalizing the United States’ trade agenda, making us more dependent on foreign adversaries. No more fiddling with Social Security in the guise of “entitlement reform.” All that should be clear enough.

But beyond this, it’s time for proactive policymaking. No nation ever got strong by consuming stuff other people make. We need an economy that produces critical goods here, in this country, and creates good-paying jobs for working people. That means tariffs to foster American industry, local content requirements to reshore manufacturing, and taking the shackles off U.S. energy producers. That means new antitrust laws for Big Tech that will bust up monopolies such as Google and restore competition to the marketplace. And while we’re at it, we should start relocating federal agencies such as the Departments of Energy, Interior and Agriculture to middle America. It’s long past time for cosseted policymakers to confront the real-world consequences of their decisions, economic or otherwise.

We need explicit support in our tax code for marriage and family, such as a parent tax credit for working families. We should adopt new protections for parents to ensure they control their children’s education and medical care, such as a Parents’ Bill of Rights. And families can’t thrive unless they are safe. That’s why we need 100,000 new police officers on the streets, spread across every state in America.

Right now, the Republican Party stands at a crossroads. Its leaders can, of course, attempt to resurrect the dead consensus of offshoring, amnesties and “free trade.” That’s the path to further losses.

A reborn Republican Party must look very different. It must offer good jobs and good lives, not just higher stock prices for Wall Street. And it must place working Americans at its heart and take them as they are, rather than treating them as resources to be exploited or engineered away.

That’s the way to victory. That’s the way to national renewal.

This is warmed-over Fortress America Isolationist bullshit dressed up in flowery rhetoric that still means mostly nothing.

And don't ever forget who - or what - this little prick is.

http://ProLeftPod.com

Today's Press Poodle

Michelle Goldberg can be one of the Poodliest of the Press Poodles.

That said, she does show signs - on occasion - of pulling her head out of her ass.

Her OpEd piece today is one such occasion. Kinda.

(pay wall)

Four Stark Lessons From a Democratic Upset


By Michelle Goldberg

When I reached Marie Gluesenkamp Perez on Monday morning, the Democratic representative-elect from Washington State was sitting on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.

Her race against Joe Kent, a stolen-election conspiracy theorist endorsed by Donald Trump, had been called on Saturday, giving her enough time to get to Capitol Hill for new-member orientation. Because of the Republican lean of her district, Washington’s Third, her victory was widely considered the biggest upset of any House contest; FiveThirtyEight’s final forecast had given her a mere 2 percent chance of winning. “A lot of people sacrificed to get me here,” she told me, speaking with particular gratitude of all the mothers who called in babysitting favors to knock on doors for her.

I’d gone to Gluesenkamp Perez’s district in September because I saw it as a microcosm of the midterms. Kent, a Fox News regular who put a member of the Proud Boys on his payroll, had ousted Jaime Herrera Beutler, one of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection, in the primary. Gluesenkamp Perez hoped that there would be enough moderate Republicans worried about the future of American democracy, and aghast at the end of Roe v. Wade, to offset Kent’s partisan advantage. The outcome, I thought, would tell us whether Republicans would pay any price for their extremism.

It is a profound relief to see that they have. Having spent a fair amount of time thinking about this bellwether race, I see four main takeaways from it.

1. Democrats need to recruit more working-class and rural candidates.

Gluesenkamp Perez is a young mother who owns an auto repair shop with her husband. They live in rural Skamania County, in a hillside house they built themselves when they couldn’t get a mortgage to buy one. On the trail she spoke frequently of bringing her young son to work because they couldn’t find child care. She shares both the cultural signifiers and economic struggles of many of the voters she needed to win over.

“I hope that people see that this as a model,” she told me on Monday. “We need to recruit different kinds of candidates. We need to be listening more closely to the districts — people want a Congress that looks like America.”

2. Voters can see the link between abortion bans and authoritarianism.

During her campaign, Gluesenkamp Perez spoke about having a miscarriage and being forced to make her way through a wall of protesters to get medical care at a Planned Parenthood clinic. While Kent called for a national abortion ban, she appealed to her district’s libertarian streak by including both gun rights and reproductive rights in her promise to “protect our freedoms.”

On Monday, she said that voters connected abortion bans to a broader narrative of right-wing radicalism. Even if voters thought abortion rights in Washington State were safe with Democrats in charge, the end of Roe showed that Republicans are willing to upend some basic assumptions undergirding American life. “It made people take Republicans, especially the extreme wing, seriously when they say they want to defund the Department of Education, the Department of Justice, the F.B.I.,” she said.

Heads Up: Here comes the Both Sides razor blade in the apple - although it's a tiny bit less obvious than what NYT editors usually require.

Please proceed.

3. MAGA Republicans are stuck in a media echo chamber.

A common rap on liberals is that they’re trapped in their own ideological bubble, unable to connect with normal people who don’t share their niche concerns. This cycle, that was much truer of conservatives. The ultimate example of this was the Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters, the human incarnation of a right-wing message board, who lauded the Unabomber manifesto and put out gun fetishist campaign ads that made him look like a serial killer.

Kent suffered from a similar sort of insularity. He attacked sports fans, suggesting it’s not masculine for men to “watch other men compete in a silly game,” a view common in corners of the alt-right but unintelligible to normies. Gluesenkamp Perez said Kent seemed shocked when, during a debate, his line about vaccines as “experimental gene therapy” didn’t go over well, which she took as a sign that he’d spent too much time “operating in the chat rooms.”

The ultimate expression of the right-wing echo chamber was the Stop the Steal movement itself. Conservatives might have been less credulous about it if they weren’t so out of touch with the Biden-voting majority.

4. Data isn’t everything.

As FiveThirtyEight’s Nathaniel Rakich acknowledged on Twitter, the site’s model didn’t take into account Kent’s personal weaknesses, and included only one post-Labor Day poll. An overreliance on a few data points made Gluesenkamp Perez’s position look weaker than it really was. Democrats I spoke to in Washington State — as well as some Republicans — believed she had a decent shot, but national Democrats seem to have remained unconvinced. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee gave her no financial support.

Democrats obviously shouldn’t disregard poll numbers or data about the partisan breakdown of the electorate. But we underestimate the human factor in politics at our peril.

“You’ve got a Trump cult-of-personality acolyte, and everybody writes off the district,” Brian Baird, a Democrat who represented the Third District from 1999 to 2011, told me in September. “But up steps this young, feisty, bright, moderate woman, with a young child, trying to run a small business, and she says, ‘I’m not going to put up with this.’” Sometimes stories tell you what statistics can’t.