The Supreme Court Guts Roe and Opens a New Era of Nullification

The Supreme Court Guts Roe and Opens a New Era of Nullification

September 2, 2021

Luppe B. Luppen

Dear Readers,

I wrote to you in the wee hours of yesterday morning about the Supreme Court’s unusual silence on the emergency application to stop Texas’s new six-week abortion ban, an omission that meant the type of abortion Norma McCorvey sought to obtain in Roe v. Wade became illegal in the state where she sought it. The Court kept up that silence until just about midnight tonight, when it made things agonizingly official, refusing by a five to four vote to block the effectiveness of the law. The decision has led many observers of the Court to conclude, with some justice, that the Court has overturned Roe on its shadow docket.

In their brief, unsigned opening to the opinion accompanying the Court’s order, the five conservative Justices who denied the emergency application are at pains to rebut this notion. Their order, they say, “is not based on any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas’s law.” In fact, they insist, the decision is a procedural one:

To prevail in an application for a stay or an injunction, an applicant must carry the burden of making a “strong showing” that it is “likely to succeed on the merits,” that it will be “irreparably injured absent a stay,” that the balance of the equities favors it, and that a stay is consistent with the public interest. […] The applicants now before us have raised serious questions regarding the constitutionality of the Texas law at issue. But their application also presents complex and novel antecedent procedural questions on which they have not carried their burden.

You’ll notice that in the structure of these sentences the majority Justices imply—deniably, without ever saying it—that the applicants have carried their burden of likelihood of success on the merits regarding the constitutional issues. This is an old trick, allowing them to sidestep whatever it is they’re planning for the future of Roe, and focus on the procedural issues they’ve settled on as a rationale.

All of those procedural issues turn out to be creatures of a unique invention by the Texas legislature, which authorized its citizenry at large to enforce this ban using private lawsuits and made that mode of private enforcement exclusive by restraining public officials from enforcing the ban themselves. The majority Justices outlined their supposed conundrums arising from this:

For example, federal courts enjoy the power to enjoin individuals tasked with enforcing laws, not the laws themselves. […] And it is unclear whether the named defendants in this lawsuit can or will seek to enforce the Texas law against the applicants in a manner that might permit our intervention. […] The State has represented that neither it nor its executive employees possess the authority to enforce the Texas law either directly or indirectly. Nor is it clear whether, under existing precedent, this Court can issue an injunction against state judges asked to decide a lawsuit under Texas’s law.

This is, to be honest, poppycock. When a federal court has a matter properly under its jurisdiction and a legal right has been invaded, federal law affords the court great latitude to frame the necessary procedures in order to provide a remedy. The law that allows them to do this, the All Writs Act, is one of the first Congress ever passed—a part of the Judiciary Act in 1789. But the principle that “where there is a legal right there is also a legal remedy” is older still; Blackstone’s commentaries call it an “general and indisputable rule.” The rule in other contexts has allowed courts to craft genuinely innovative remedies that would have astonished the 18th century draftsmen of the All Writs Act, like ordering a third party telephone company to lease equipment to the FBI to help the Bureau produce a register of a person’s phone calls. As the Justice White wrote for the majority in that case:

“This Court has repeatedly recognized the power of a federal court to issue such commands under the All Writs Act as may be necessary or appropriate to effectuate and prevent the frustration of orders it has previously issued in its exercise of jurisdiction otherwise obtained: "This statute has served since its inclusion, in substance, in the original Judiciary Act as a 'legislatively approved source of procedural instruments designed to achieve "the rational ends of law."

Accordingly, the sidestep move the majority Justices have used doesn’t hold together logically. If the applicants have shown they are likely to succeed on the merits (showing that a constitutional right under Roe and its successor cases that should be vindicated, which they clearly can), then the procedural tools to redress their injuries will necessarily follow. Thanks to the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, the Supreme Court’s constitutional decisions—and the orders it frames based on them—override state law and are binding on state judges. Put another way, because of the Court’s broad constitutional and statutory authority, state law-based procedural obstacles cannot be a fit reason to find the applicants’ constitutional claims are unlikely to succeed; the inquiry should only turn on the merits.

As Justice Breyer writes in his dissent:

There may be other not-very-new procedural bottles that can also adequately hold what is, in essence, very old and very important legal wine: The ability to ask the Judiciary to protect an individual from the invasion of a constitutional right—an invasion that threatens immediate and serious injury.

The majority’s sidestep from the constitutional merits to rank proceduralism should be recognized for what it is: a shabby dodge permitting the majority Justices to disable Roe—withholding for the first time the Court’s 48 year protection for the rights of millions of women—without officially overruling the precedent.

By resorting to this dodge, the Justices have potentially ushered in a new era of mischief from the states.

If state legislatures can effectively turn off constitutionally protected rights by inventing or copying procedures that flummox these five Justices, they may well try to do it. Blue states, for instance, might try to ban the possession of categories of weapons that are, according to the Court’s cases, protected by the Second Amendment and, like Texas, authorize their citizens to enforce the ban by suing one another. Supposing a similar emergency challenge to such a weapons ban reached the Supreme Court (big ifs, but bear with me), the majority Justices would have to reverse the principles announced in this opinion to stop the law from becoming effective. Alternatively and more nefariously, some state legislatures might start to tinker with authorizing their citizens to sue each other to suppress disfavored political expression (e.g., promoting Trump’s big lie about the 2020 election, burning the US or a state flag, or teaching critical race theory) or protected religious practices.

By claiming that its decision disabling Roe turned on Texas’s procedural inventions, the Court has opened its door to other attempts to nullify the rights its precedents protect. It’s a low moment in the history of the institution.

The parallels between UFOs and covid-19 continue

The parallels between UFOs and covid-19 continue

Regarding the intelligence community’s report on the origins of covid-19

A member of a World Health Organization team makes a field visit to the Hubei Animal Disease Control and Prevention Center in Wuhan, China, on Feb. 2. (Ng Han Guan/AP)

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Back in May, the hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts noted some interesting parallels between elite attitudes about UFOs and the origins of covid-19. In both instances, there was initially an establishment consensus that pooh-poohed anything but the conventional wisdom (UFOs are not real, covid-19 had zoonotic origins). Then, as time passed, inconvenient data points began to emerge (unimpeachable witnesses for UFOs, the absence of evidence for natural origins). Eventually, it became respectable to believe that UFOs are real and that it was possible that covid-19 leaked into the world from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has played an interesting part in affecting the shift in elite attitudes on both subjects. Last year, Congress mandated a report on the state of U.S. government knowledge about unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), which is the Defense Department’s way of saying UFOs. That report came out in June, and what was noteworthy about it was that it pretty much admitted that there were multiple candidate explanations for UFOs. Some of them were mundane, some of them were … less mundane. Basically, the ODNI admitted that it knew what it did not know, and pledged to gather more data. As I noted at the time, “the stigmatization of [reporting] UAP incidents has been dramatically reduced.”

Last Friday, the ODNI issued an unclassified summary of its assessment of the origins of covid-19. It was even shorter than its UFO assessment. Mostly, the assessment simply reifies the current lack of consensus. Anyone looking for clarity will not find it in the sentence, “After examining all available intelligence reporting and other information, though, the [intelligence community] remains divided on the most likely origin of covid-19.” Four intelligence agencies lean toward the natural origins story, one agency thinks it came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and three other agencies could not even form an internal consensus. Most of these assessments were made with low confidence.

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That said, there are important areas of consensus that rule a few things out. The ODNI summary says flat out that “the virus was not developed as a biological weapon” and that “China’s officials did not have foreknowledge of the virus before the initial outbreak of covid-19 emerged.” Given some of the former president’s more wild accusations levied against China, this seems noteworthy. So it would seem that, as with UFOs, the ODNI report rules out a few of the ultra-hawkish theories but cannot reach a consensus about much else.

The key difference between the two reports is more disturbing, however. On UAP, the intelligence community has pledged to systematize further data collection. On the origins of covid-19, the intelligence assessment is much more bleak: “China’s cooperation most likely would be needed to reach a conclusive assessment of the origins of covid-19. Beijing, however, continues to hinder the global investigation, resist sharing information and blame other countries, including the United States. These actions reflect, in part, China’s government’s own uncertainty about where an investigation could lead as well as its frustration the international community is using the issue to exert political pressure on China.”

This conclusion is doubly disturbing. Obviously, without China’s cooperation, we may never know the answer about the origins of covid-19. The intransigence of the Chinese government reveals something even more discouraging, however. Chinese officials are not stupid; they are undoubtedly aware that stonewalling the investigation of covid-19′s origins harms perceptions of them in the United States. Their decision to remain unbending, however, shows that they are more concerned with what an investigation could yield than any hardening of U.S. attitudes.

As strange as it sounds, five years from now the United States government is likely to know more about UFOs than the origins of covid-19.

What Biden Gets Right About the Politics of Afghanistan

What Biden Gets Right About the Politics of Afghanistan

The president has been shrewd to frame the withdrawal as a choice between staying and leaving. Voters have short memories, and the images of Kabul chaos will recede.

By Jonathan Bernstein

September 1, 2021, 10:21 PM GMT+9

President Joe Biden gave a speech on Tuesday following the final withdrawals from Afghanistan that got the most important thing right and lots of less important things … well, not quite right.

What he got right, as he has been doing for the last three weeks, was to frame the events in terms of a binary choice: staying or leaving. That put him on the popular side of a question — polling still suggests that a solid majority of Americans still supports ending the conflict. 

It also put him on the right side of the media’s and the public’s attention span. The odds are strong that with the U.S. mission in Afghanistan over, and no more dramatic pictures coming from the Kabul airport, news organizations will rapidly shift to other stories, in part because most news consumers will be more interested in events at home than events abroad that don’t directly involve Americans. It’s possible that Taliban atrocities or Afghanistan-based terrorist attacks could change that, but the odds are that “we got out” will soon defeat “but it went badly” in the realm of public opinion.

To be sure, Congress should hold hearings on the endgame during both the Biden and Donald Trump presidencies. Journalists should keep explaining all the mistakes that at least five presidents, and a dozen Congresses, and for that matter plenty of journalists made over the years. I hope they do. It might be useful. But it’s unlikely to grab the public’s interest, or to be a factor in future elections. 

Biden put it bluntly: “We faced one of two choices: follow the agreement of the previous administration and extend it to have more time for people to get out, or send in thousands more troops and escalate the war. To those asking for a third decade of war in Afghanistan, I ask: What is the vital national interest?”

That part of Biden’s speech went well. And the necessary appreciation of the job done by U.S. troops was fine. There were other good bits.

But as a piece of theater, the speech was in dire need of an edit and another rehearsal. For one thing, Biden spent much of the first half of the speech arguing back against various criticisms of how the withdrawal was orchestrated. As one who is fairly sympathetic to a lot of Biden’s case, I still found the exercise defensive and, if not inappropriate, not helpful to him or to listeners. The truth is that presidents don’t win arguments with their critics that way. Mostly, they don’t win those arguments at all, given that few critics of any president and his or her policies are apt to be open-minded about it. Sure, it’s a fine idea to send members of the administration out to make key points, and yes, some members of the media might be swayed. But save Biden for the stuff that he and only he can do, such as trying to frame the question the way he wants it.

For those listening carefully, Biden’s defense really didn’t answer some of the obvious questions. Why exactly are some U.S. citizens still in Afghanistan? Of the impressive number of Afghans evacuated, how many are in the special visa category that includes translators and other U.S. allies? How many were not able to be rescued? 

It didn’t help, either, that Biden used what I think of as his shouting mode for the first half of the speech. During a few appearances over the last three weeks, some observers thought he seemed tired and worn out. On Tuesday, he did what he had done during the Democratic debates back in 2019 when similar criticisms had been voiced, which was to turn loud and, I suppose, forceful. To me, it just makes him seem defensive. Halfway through, he dropped that tone and shifted back to his normal speech-giving style, which is fine; he’s no Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama, both of whom were masters of delivering written speeches, but he’s perfectly OK.

During that first section, former presidential speechwriter and White House rhetoric maven James Fallows made a good comparison: “If Harry Truman had existed in the TV age, this is the kind of speech he would have given.” What he meant was that Biden was using plain language to tell truths that some politicians would duck. What I’d add, however, is that Truman — an excellent president — was unpopular during most of his time in office, and his plain language and truth-telling were often seen as petulant score-settling and only became popular in retrospect during Richard Nixon’s presidency, when the White House was serving up a very different style of talk. 

Biden has done what Truman didn’t do in Korea, what Nixon did only partially in Vietnam and only after tremendous losses, and what George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump didn’t do in Afghanistan. I suspect that what he did is eventually going to be seen as more important than how he did it. And it will certainly be more important than Tuesday’s not very memorable speech.

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We’re still lying to ourselves about American military power

We’re still lying to ourselves about American military power

Opinion by 

Paul Waldman

Columnist

Yesterday at 1:03 p.m. EDT

On Monday morning, we learned that a U.S. drone strike targeted at a car bomb “killed 10 civilians in Kabul, including several small children,” and that “the dead were all from a single extended family and were getting out of a car in their modest driveway when the strike hit a nearby vehicle.”

Unlike most such events — and there have been hundreds over our two-decade War on Terror — this one will get a bit of notice in the U.S. media. But only a bit. Neither these deaths, nor the deaths of 13 U.S. servicemembers at the Kabul airport, nor the difficulties of our withdrawal from Afghanistan, are likely to puncture the lies we have been telling ourselves about the way we use our bristling machinery of war all over the world.

In the debate we’re now having about that withdrawal, you can see all those lies repeated and polished anew. Let’s consider a few of them:

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U.S. wars are just and noble, undertaken for all the right reasons. This is always part of the story we are told about any war; if it’s not the primary justification, it comes in a close second.

We invaded Afghanistan to exact revenge for 9/11, but arguments quickly followed about how we’d liberate Afghan women, banish the cruel Taliban, and help move the country into the 21st century. We made the same case in Iraq: Yes, that war was sold on lies about weapons of mass destruction, but we were also going to free the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein’s despotic rule. Thus it is with every country we invade, bomb, or cripple with economic sanctions: We’re doing this not for ourselves, but for them.

People in other countries appreciate that our motives are good. This is a particularly vital lie we tell ourselves: Though we are aggressively ignorant about other countries and often unable to see things from anyone else’s perspective, we assume that our good will is self-evident to everyone, even in places where we have brought misery and destruction.

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Americans literally cannot imagine what it would be like to have a foreign power bomb their streets, let alone watch a foreign military overthrow their government and occupy their country. Yet we assume that people will respond to it by saying “These are some hard times, but the Americans are only trying to help.”

When we say, as a military spokesperson did about that drone attack, “We would be deeply saddened by any potential loss of innocent life,” we think they’ll believe us, although it happens with such regularity and everything we do communicates that we don’t value their lives at all.

Our anger is righteous and deserved; anyone else’s is not. When President Biden says of those who ordered the Kabul airport attack, “We will hunt you down and make you pay,” people elsewhere know what we prefer not to think about: that in the execution of this payment, it’s almost certain that significant numbers of innocent civilians will be killed. We see that as unfortunate but necessary; those in the places where the missiles are landing may not be so understanding.

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If we don’t demonstrate “strength” and “resolve” there will be more terrorism. This is already a key part of the Republican criticism of the withdrawal. “The chance of another 9/11 just went through the roof,” says Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) says our withdrawal has “emboldened” terrorists.

Remember that word? We used to hear it constantly from Republicans, who insisted that every military escalation would make terrorists less bold, while any sign of weakness would supercharge their boldness.

But 9/11 didn’t happen because we allowed terrorists to become bold, and it didn’t happen because Afghanistan was a “safe haven” for al-Qaeda. It didn’t require enormous training camps or large swaths of land. Terrorism is a tool the weak use against the strong; the idea that a longer, more destructive U.S. military presence in far-off lands makes terrorism less likely is positively deranged.

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The tools we use to force other countries to bend to our will, including but not limited to military power, are effective. Every time we plan another military action or ramp up a new sanctions regime, it’s as though we just had our brains wiped of the memory of all the mistakes we made, the unintended consequences of our decisions, the liberation we failed to bring, and the suffering we caused. This time it will work, we say — then it doesn’t, and we say it again.

Not all of us, of course. But millions of us think that we’ve really helped the people of Cuba, and if we just keep that embargo on for another few decades everything will work out. They think that Iraqis and Afghans appreciate all we’ve done for them. They think that anywhere there’s a dictatorship, people are saying, “What we need is an American invasion.” They think that if a drone strike killed their child, they’d say, “That was regrettable, but they were trying to do the right thing.”

In many ways, we’re still in thrall to the (simplified) story of World War II, that we saved the world and helped it rebuild. But that war ended 76 years ago, and what has happened since shouldn’t give us any faith that tomorrow we can repeat what we did in 1945. The sooner we come to terms with that, the better off we — and the rest of the world — will be.

Madison Cawthorn’s vile lies about Jan. 6 reveal a big truth about the right

Madison Cawthorn’s vile lies about Jan. 6 reveal a big truth about the right

Opinion by 

Greg Sargent

Columnist

Yesterday at 10:33 a.m. EDT

Rep. Madison Cawthorn is under fire for predicting “bloodshed” if our elections “continue to be rigged” and “continue to be stolen.” The North Carolina Republican, speaking at a political event, appeared to be encouraging more violent insurrection along the lines of Jan. 6. Indeed, Cawthorn also hailed the insurrectionists as heroes, as “political prisoners.”

But as vile as that is, the subsequent clarification from Cawthorn’s spokesman captured something even more essential about today’s Trumpified right wing — about its continued ecstatic enthrallment to the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, and about its broader radicalization and ongoing abandonment of democracy:

Luke Ball, a spokesman for Cawthorn, said in a statement Monday that the lawmaker was “in no way supporting or advocating for any form of violence.”

“In his comments, Congressman Cawthorn is CLEARLY advocating for violence not to occur over election integrity questions,” Ball said. “He fears others would erroneously choose that route and strongly states that election integrity issues should be resolved peacefully and never through violence.”

There you have the reigning ethos of today’s right wing laid bare: If we keep lying uncontrollably to our supporters about the totalitarian left’s repression of them, they just might resort to violence, and gosh almighty, wouldn’t that be just terrible!

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The big truth captured here is that for many right-wing personalities, the lying about the left is prior and essential to their radicalization, abandonment of democracy and increasing embrace of authoritarianism. The former inspires and justifies the latter: Once you unshackle yourself entirely from any obligation to reality in depicting the leftist menace, it’s a short leap to envisioning and then justifying pretty much anything in response to it.

The Cawthorn dust-up captures this nicely. His spokesman says he “fears” that “others” will “erroneously choose” violence, as long as “election integrity questions” remain unresolved.

But Cawthorn himself cheerfully does all he can to give life to those “questions,” even though they’re based in lies. He says our elections continue to be “rigged” and “stolen,” and that the only way to avert violence is to insist that “we have election security in all 50 states.”

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We do have election security, of course. The 2020 voting was scrutinized to an extraordinary degree, subject to numerous intensive reviews by elections officials and litigated over in dozens of nationally watched court battles.

So at best, there’s a vaguely extortive element to this: If you don’t give us more election security — i.e., more voter suppression, more “audits” designed to cast doubt on the election’s outcome, more doubling down on counter-majoritarian tactics — the millions of Americans unfairly victimized by the last election’s outcome just might resort to bloodshed! And that would be just awful!

You see versions of this constantly from the right’s superstars. Remember when Tucker Carlson agreed that virtuous conservatives just might get pushed into fascism if and when the left’s excesses require it? This was justified by the invention that the left is already perilously close to this point, creating a perfect feedback loop of self-justification.

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Similarly, when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) flirted with political violence, she did so by seemingly agreeing with the need to combat various leftist tyrannies that were simply invented.

And when Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) sought to justify his lead role in trying to invalidate President Biden’s electors in Congress, he claimed to be merely giving voice to constituents who had doubts about the outcome. In reality, of course, he actively fed those doubts, and then used them to reverse-justify his effort to subvert the outcome, an effort that helped inspire Jan. 6.

Political theorist Laura Field has offered a conceptual framework for understanding all this. The ongoing slide of many Republicans and right-wing luminaries into authoritarianism rests on an essential foundation, a “justificatory schema” made up of lies.

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In this telling, the lies about the election — from Cawthorn’s claim that voters are right to believe our elections are “stolen” to Hawley’s suggestion that his constituents have reasonable grounds for doubting the 2020 outcome — are at bottom lies about the left. They are lies about the true nature of our system of majority rule, and even about the true nature of the majority in this country that ousted Trump:

The main problem isn’t the GOP’s disbelief in democracy, troubling though that is. The main problem, or in the very least the corollary problem, is all the misinformation and lying about the majority. Right-wing leaders are constantly peddling falsehoods about the threat posed by the majority, and these — which range from distortive hyperbole to manipulative lies — form the justificatory foundation of their anti-democratic efforts.

As Field concludes, the increasing comfort with “overturning the system” takes its justification from “distortive lies about the left.” As a result, to fully reckon with this slide into authoritarianism, “it’s crucial to keep the lying front and center.”

I think something like this helps explain why so many of these right-wing personalities often seem to be inhabiting a gray area hovering just on the edge of explicitly endorsing stealing future elections and even political violence.

While they take care to publicly condemn such extreme measures, on some level they have conjured up a way to manufacture a core of righteousness to the cause of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. And the unsettling truth of the matter is that for them that cause, in some form or other, endures, and very well may be used to justify far worse in the future.

How right-wing media and social isolation lead people to eat horse paste

How right-wing media and social isolation lead people to eat horse paste

Opinion by 

Paul Waldman

Columnist

Today at 1:07 p.m. EDT

A horse attempts to nuzzle an equine field mate but gets rebuffed in a snowy field near Poolesville, Md., on Jan. 31, 2021. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)

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“There is no such thing as society,” Margaret Thatcher famously said in 1987, insisting that we all had to take responsibility for our own fate. But something tells me that even Thatcher would be alarmed if she saw people so determined to isolate themselves from institutions, mutual responsibility and simple sanity that they wound up eating horse dewormer to cure themselves of a deadly disease for which there was a widely available vaccine.

The story of ivermectin — the horse paste in question — is about the omnipresent grifters who prey on the Republican masses. It’s about the merging of politics and media on the right, and how they can combine to nurture people’s worst instincts. And it’s about the atomization and alienation that conservative ideology can produce when confronted with a pandemic and taken to an absurd degree.

Ivermectin, of course, is the latest supposed miracle cure for covid-19 that people on the right have seized on as an excuse to not get vaccinated. I don’t need some vaccine that probably has a microchip in it so Bill Gates can track me! If I get sick, I’ll just take this stuff!

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Last year it was hydroxychloroquine, and a month from now people may be drinking antifreeze. But now feed stores are overrun with people stocking up on horse dewormer, some of whom wind up frantically calling poison control after they overdose.

One might argue that people are idiots and always will be, so this kind of thing isn’t unexpected. But this is a conservative phenomenon, and one particular to this moment in history.

The first element that drives it forward is the unstoppable right-wing grift machine, which sees the Republican masses as gullible fools just waiting to be separated from their money. Every major development in politics or current events — the rise of Donald Trump, the tea party, the pandemic — produces a wave of opportunists who get rich (or richer) by hitting up those masses for “donations” to scam PACs, support for phony charities, or the sale of cheap memorabilia. GOP elites have long seen average Republicans as suckers and marks just waiting to be exploited.

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The second element is the union of media and politics on the right that is now more entrenched than ever. Republican politicians move seamlessly into Fox News gigs, right-wing media personalities are featured performers at political rallies, and no one pretends that conservative media are much more than a propaganda apparatus for the Republican cause.

That union is responsible for an enormous amount of conservative resistance to coronavirus vaccines. Fox News hosts including Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham have acted as a kind of nightly clearinghouse of anti-vaccine propaganda; Republican politicians, knowing their most vocal and passionate constituents are watching those shows, parrot (or pander to) vaccine skepticism, and over time, vaccine resistance becomes a key part of Republican identity, a way to define who you are and, more importantly, whom you hate.

That’s where things really come together. It’s almost as though all the trends in conservative identity politics were built for making people resist vaccines and gravitate to quack cures, no matter how outlandish and distasteful (that’s meant literally; apparently the horse paste tastes absolutely disgusting).

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The long-standing conservative inclination toward individualism and independence has in recent years grown into not just a skepticism toward institutions and systems of expertise but a burning hostility toward them. Conservatives have weaved a tale of their own noble martyrdom, in which every element of society is arrayed against them: government, corporations, pop culture, schools, the media, even democracy itself — all are supposedly opposed to their values and out to destroy them.

So the fact that government agencies, the scientific community and the mainstream media are all urging you to (1) take the vaccine, and (2) not eat horse paste only makes the horse paste more compelling.

After all, aren’t those the very people who fought against Trump, stole the 2020 election and want to turn America into a socialist dystopia? And the fact that liberals are gleefully mocking people for eating horse paste further convinces some that that’s exactly what they should do. If I have to poison myself to own the libs, it’s worth it.

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All this is wrapped up in a narrative of individual rights (If I have to wear a mask in the supermarket, I’m not free!) and self-reliance, in which one’s disconnection from others becomes a source not of despair but of empowerment.

Conservatives are constantly telling each other to “do your research." That means almost the opposite of what it purports to say: It means ignore those with authority and credentials and instead dive into the sea of social media misinformation until you’ve heard enough lunatic conspiracy theories that you arrive at a whole other kind of “truth.”

The endpoint of “doing your research” isn’t the realization that coronavirus vaccines are a remarkably effective way to avoid dying; the endpoint is an embrace of QAnon-style conspiracy theories and a livestock dewormer appetizer. You’ve found a “truth” that is likely to further isolate you from your existing community — co-workers, friends, family — and substitute for it an online community of like-minded paranoiacs.

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But you know who isn’t sucking down horse paste? Tucker Carlson and the rest of the multimillionaire Fox personalities. One local-market anti-vax right-wing radio host after another may be dying from covid, but that’s because they got high on their own supply. The folks running this show never forget that it’s a scam you feed the rubes — and the lonelier and more alienated the masses feel, the better.

The violent style in American politics

The violent style in American politics

By 

Philip Bump

National correspondent

Yesterday at 10:40 a.m. EDT

Filling an hour of airtime every night obviously means that, on occasion, you’re going to have to go back to the same well. So, during his Fox News show on Monday night, Tucker Carlson framed the arrival of refugees from Afghanistan in terms that his show’s viewers would find familiar.

“They’re just using a crisis to change our country,” he said at the end of an interview, casually referring to a component of his toxic long-running White replacement theory rhetoric. “They’ll never lose another election. That’s the point, as you know.”

Just by itself, this is a ridiculous claim, a hammer announcing the discovery of a nail. Refugees from Afghanistan are being brought to America because their country was overtaken by a group that, at another point on this show, Carlson described as a “medieval theocracy,” not because Democrats are trying to offset Republican voters.

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If that is the Democratic strategy, it’s a foolish one. About 120,000 Afghans were evacuated from the country, not all by the United States. But if they did all come here — and all became citizens, all registered to vote and all voted as Democrats — it would constitute 0.07 percent of the votes cast in 2020 — potentially bringing President Biden’s victory margin last year from 4.46 percentage points to 4.53 percentage points. Those devious Dems!

Carlson’s point, though, isn’t really about electoral politics, as he has made clear repeatedly. It is, instead, to foment a sense of America under threat, to argue that the nation is being remade in dangerous and unprecedented ways. When he says that Democrats won’t lose another election, he means that White Republicans will find themselves a diminishing component of the country. That’s the sentiment he is hoping to stoke, in part because he seems to believe it and in part because it keeps his viewers at a rolling boil.

In 1964, Harper’s Magazine published an article from historian Richard Hofstadter that considered the candidacy of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater as part of a long tradition of American political turbulence. Hofstadter outlined “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” as the article was called, tracing various patterns of conspiracy theorizing that had overlapped with politics at various points in the country’s history. One point made by Hofstadter is worth elevating in the context of Carlson’s claims: that the perceived diminishment of power helps amplify instability.

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“The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest — perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands — are shut out of the political process,” Hofstadter wrote. “Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed.”

It is not the case that Republicans or members of the right-wing fringe are shut out of the process. But it is the case that Carlson and others are amplifying the sense that they’re about to be, or that rampant voter fraud means that to some extent they already are. Their followers are primed through these false claims or apocalyptic predictions to view their opponents as a danger to the country and to themselves. And instead of simply burrowing deeper into conspiracy theories, they are often excited by the idea that they can and must take up arms in defense of their country.

At a Republican event over the weekend, Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) argued that nonexistent fraud might necessitate violent revolution.

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“The things that we are wanting to fight for, it doesn’t matter if our votes don’t count,” he said. “Because, you know, if our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen, then it’s going to lead to one place — and it’s bloodshed.”

He later added that there was “nothing that I would dread doing more than having to pick up arms against a fellow American,” an attempt to suggest that such an event was an undesired worst-case outcome. Yet it is also one that he might nonetheless at some point “have” to do.

The violent style in American politics. Not new but apparently having a moment.

It’s deranged to go from accepting obviously false claims about election fraud to the purported need to murder fellow citizens. Cawthorn has been a good example of how violent or extreme rhetoric can wobble between sincere and utilitarian. He makes a comment to gain attention and then tries to moderate it. In a statement to CNN, his spokesman insisted that Cawthorn is “CLEARLY advocating for violence not to occur over election integrity questions,” which is a bit like the bully arguing that he’s CLEARLY telling you not to hit yourself.

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Again, though, notice that Cawthorn’s argument that violence might be necessary is centered on the idea that electoral power is otherwise unattainable because of that nonexistent fraud. If Republicans lose power, then it’s illegitimate, and bloodshed will be the result.

It echoes another recent comment from Steve Lynch, a candidate for county executive in Northampton County, Pennsylvania. At a rally over the weekend, Lynch — who was at President Donald Trump’s rally on Jan. 6 and who has espoused false claims of fraud — argued for the forcible takeover of school boards because of mask mandates.

“Forget going into these school boards with freaking data. You go into these school boards to remove them. That’s what you do,” he said. “They don’t follow the law. You go in and you remove them. I’m going in with 20 strong men. I’m going to speak in front of the school board, and I’m going to give them an option — they can leave or they can be removed.”

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This, he said, is “how you get stuff done.”

That is not how you get stuff done in America or in a democracy. It’s how you get stuff done under fascism. It’s a far less important point, but this wouldn’t even work as Lynch seems to suggest. The power of a school board doesn’t derive from who is in the room during a school board meeting but from the authority granted by the election of the members.

But the point isn’t really that Lynch wants to reshape the system. It’s that he feels impotent. He preceded his furious demand about storming a school board meeting with a desperate request for masculine backup: “Men, where are you?” he said. “Make men great again. Make men men again. Let’s go, men, I need you.”

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Lynch, like Cawthorn, framed the urgency of the moment in life-or-death terms.

“Forget writing your legislators. Forget it. They’re not listening. You’ve got to do something,” he said. “When I see criminals trying to take my rights and my beautiful children and everything that they’re going to do — you’re going to have to take my life. There’s no way. I’ll die on this hill.”

It’s easy to see why rhetoric like Lynch’s and Cawthorn’s would meet with applause. Polling from YouGov conducted for CBS News earlier this year found that most Republicans view Democrats not as political opponents but as enemies. And, of course, most Republicans also believe Trump’s false claims about election fraud.

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It’s also absolutely true that part of this rhetoric is a function of the scramble for attention in a right-wing media ecosystem that rewards this sort of “I hate to say it but” extremism. Here I am, writing about an obscure candidate for a county seat. Here’s Cawthorn getting another write-up for another sly bit of controversy. But this, too, is the point: It doesn’t take much to go from self-aware rhetoric about violence to real violence.

Earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security sent an alert to local law enforcement that rhetoric about stolen elections might lead to acts of violence. Two weeks later, a guy showed up on Capitol Hill claiming to have a bomb in his pickup truck and insisting that Biden would be removed from office. Less than a month later, a member of Congress argued publicly that such a response is justifiable.

Then there’s Carlson. Millions of people were probably tuned in to his show last night to hear him disparage the effort to provide refuge to Afghans fleeing the Taliban. They also heard him rant about the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country and the need for an apology from the Biden administration. Such an apology is “not just practically important, it’s spiritually important,” he said.

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“This can’t go on,” Carlson said. “When leaders refuse to hold themselves accountable, over time, people revolt. That happens. We need to change course immediately and start acknowledging our mistakes. The people who made them need to start acknowledging them, or else the consequences will be awful.”

There was no similar demand for accountability from Trump, certainly, but again Carlson is only addressing his real point obliquely. The point is that America is slipping away and, lamentably, there is little recourse but the worst. Carlson then went to commercial, teasing his upcoming segment about the dangers of those refugees.

correction

This article originally misstated the seat Lynch is seeking. It has been corrected.