ricncaric

Working with Lexington Books

I’m happy to announce that I have received a book contract from Lexington Books for my long-term project on Philadelphia history, “White Laboring Men and the Transformation of Popular Culture in Philadelphia, 1785-1850.” The deadline for completing a full manuscript is two years away on July 1, 2024 and I am eager to resume writing. I delivered papers at both a political science conference and a popular culture conference last spring and was on the verge of thinking that doing the conferences was a waste of time. But Lexington Books contacted me at almost the same time that I was giving my paper and things moved quickly from there as I rewrote my book proposal and waited for Lexington Books to decide. Things were finalized this Thursday and I’ll continue to work on my chapter on the blackface bands of the 1840’s. At the same time, I’ll also continue blogging about politics. I still don’t believe I’ve found my voice for this blog but I feel like I have all kinds of worthwhile ideas about current politics and culture and can’t help but keep working on them. Anyway, the plan is to keep doing what I’m doing as I finish my book project.

Biden Speech on Guns Gets It Done

On Thursday evening, President Biden gave a nationally televised speech on gun policy in the wake of the mass shootings in Buffalo, Uvalde, Tulsa, and other places. President Biden has a reputation as a poor communicator stemming from his days as a shoot from the hip gaffe machine. j

But those days are long over.

Since the beginning of his 2020 presidential campaign, President Biden has disciplined himself to avoid egregious gaffes and has emerged both as a skilled and forceful presidential speaker and a master of making policy through spontaneous policy.

The speech on guns is a good example of President Biden’s speech chops. President Biden has a clipped manner of speaking that communicates his points in a forceful manner. Instead of being “eloquent” in the manner of Barack Obama (and his vision) or Bill Clinton (with his lists), President Biden is pointed and sharp and it’s a highly effective way of getting his message across. Some of the effect comes across in the text.

The day before, we visited Uvalde — Uvalde, Texas. In front of Robb Elementary School, we stood before 21 crosses for 19 third and fourth graders and two teachers. On each cross, a name. And nearby, a photo of each victim that Jill and I reached out to touch. Innocent victims, murdered in a classroom that had been turned into a killing field.

Short sentences, briefly expressed thoughts, combining quickly to generate rhetorical force culminating in the image of a killing field. It’s not “To Be Or Not To Be” and it’s not Obama’s Philadelphia speech, but it is effective oratory.

Another virtue of the speech is that Biden did not kowtow to GOP Senators. No mention of “hardening schools,” video games, pornography, abortion, or other Republican bullshit distracting attention from the role of firearms availability in mass shooting. Likewise, the only mention Biden made of mental illness was in the context of helping people deal with the trauma of surviving so much loss. Biden’s proposals to ban assault weapons, pass red flag laws, repeal gunmaker immunity, and the like were designed to address the problem rather than cater to the right. And he proposes them directly:

We need to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. And if we can’t ban assault weapons, then we should raise the age to purchase them from 18 to 21. Strengthen background checks. Enact safe storage laws and red-flag laws. Repeal the immunity that protects gun manufacturers from liability. Address the mental health crisis deepening the trauma of gun violence and as a consequence of that violence.

A small group of Senate Democrats is negotiating with Republican colleagues like Susan Collins. But Biden was emphatic about the irresponsibility of Senate Republicans.

I support the bipartisan efforts that include a small group of Democrats and Republican senators trying to find a way. But my God, the fact that the majority of the Senate Republicans don’t want any of these proposals even to be debated or come up for a vote, I find unconscionable. We can’t fail the American people again.

He finds the majority of Republican senators to be unconscionable. With my small twitter account, I’m one of the people who persistently urges President Biden to be more aggressive and partisan with Republicans and more persistent about that partisan aggression as well. But President Biden has made a fundamental break with Republicans and conservatives. He no longer cares what they think and no longer cares about their sensitive, snowflake feelings. That’s a big step for Joe Biden and even a bigger step for the Democratic Party.

And President Biden deserves credit for that.

Biden further helped his cause by summarizing his list of seven gun reform proposals before explaining them in more detail. That bit of speech writing strategy kept the president’s gun policy agenda from getting lost in details and contributed to the clarity of the speech.

As a result, the substance of the speech had a clarity and urgency that matched President Biden’s mode of delivery.

Another striking element in President Biden’s speech was the way he generated outrage for mass murderers from his empathy for the suffering in Buffalo and Uvalde. Having talking about the crosses at the school, faces of the children, and the grief almost everywhere, Biden conveyed a growing sense of outrage over the failure to control mass murders that culminated as he kept intoning “enough.” Much of that happened after the policy proposals and gave further moral and civic weight to Biden’s policy ideas.

Altogether, President Biden’s speech got the job done. Now the President and his people need to be just as effective with their follow-up.

Uvalde Cops: Policing as Usual?

I wonder if the Uvalde cops just saw themselves as doing their “normal jobs” when they started harassing parents rather than going inside the school. Between the time that a heavily armed Salvador Ramos entered Robb Elementary school around 11:40 and when he was finally killed, the police focused on crowd control rather than mass murder control. The New York Times reports:

During that terrifying time — well over an hour — parents of students who were trapped in the school gathered outside the building as word spread of the shooting. Some were physically restrained by the police in a scene that witnesses described as disorder bordering on mayhem. The crowd grew to hundreds. “Parents were crying and some were fighting verbally with the police and screaming that they wanted their children,” Marcela Cabralez, a pastor, said. Miguel Palacios, a small-business owner, said frantic parents were so upset that at one point they tried to take down the school’s chain-link fence. “The parents were on one side of the fence, the Border Patrol and police were on the other side of the fence, and they were trying to tear it open,” he said.

As Salvador Ramos began shooting kids, the Uvalde police devoted their energy to preventing parents from entering the school to save their children. They were also preventing a Border Patrol special team from entering the school but I want to reflect on the connection between Uvalde police treatment of parents and everyday policing. The connection is suggested by Uvalde resident and twitter user @deenoonandraws who writes: “We are helpless. The cops do nothing but harass citizens they are suppose to be serving and protecting.” What would be “normal” police work would be bullying teenagers, rousting people from bars, hunting down people smoking pot, and other things that are safe for cops. No doubt justified by a rich vein of racial, ethnic, class, and gender stereotypes and enjoyed as an exercise in power..

Part of that power is lying. According to former local prosecutor @Miriam2626–“based on my past interactions with Uvalde PD, you will never know the truth about what went down in that school until every inch of video tape is released to the press.”

It’s like telling the truth is a disease the Uvalde Police don’t want to catch.

Controlling crowds, stifling the locals, handcuffing a guy worried about his kids, lying like hell–that all looks like a fairly normal day’s cop work in Uvalde.

Running into (potential) gunfire to save the kids of people you don’t respect–that’s for training exercises not real life.

On an extraordinary day, Uvalde police may have chosen to be their normal selves.

Beto Takes on the Texas GOP, Becomes Democratic Role Model

On Tuesday around 11:30am, 18 year old Salvador Ramos invaded Robb Elementary School in the South Texas town of Uvalde, locked a classroom door behind him, and killed 19 students and 2 teachers before Border Patrol ran down a key, opened the classroom door, and shot him to death. Ramos purchased two AR-15’s and 375 rounds of ammunition for his 18th birthday and had apparently begun adopting an identity as a mass murderer when he put “Kids be scared irl [in real life]” into his twitter bio. Ramos began his spree by shooting the grandmother with whom he was living, crashing a car into a ditch, and invading the school after exchanging shots with law enforcement at the school.

Evidently, local law enforcement not only stood around outside during the 40 minutes Ramos was inside shooting but was preventing parents and relatives from trying to rescue their children themselves.

Personally, I’m numb with grief and disbelief and have trouble sleeping. The Uvalde massacre is almost as traumatic for me as the May 14 Buffalo massacre where the shooter was from my home region in Upstate NY.

But I want to discuss Beto O’Rourke and the politics of the Democratic Party in relation to the Uvalde Massacre, the Buffalo Massacre, and other mass shootings. Yesterday (May 25), Greg Abbott and Texas Republican officials were holding a news conference about the Uvalde Massacre in the town itself when Beto O’Rourke interrupted. Here’s a still picture:

In some ways, it was Beto O’Rourke standing up as a lone citizen against the corrupt Republican establishment of Texas with Gov. Greg Abbott seated in blue, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick sitting on Abbott’s right, and Sen. Rafael (Ted) Cruz standing above Abbott. In some ways, it was a Jimmy Stewart kind of moment.

YouTube.com

Good for Beto!

I want to explain what is particularly effective about Beto’s appearance at the Abbott press conference in Uvalde. The Democratic leadership in Washington has been aggressive, determined, and disciplined about Covid, the Build Back Better proposal, and Ukraine. Even though his down in the polls and events haven’t gone his way, Joe Biden has been a much more effective president than I anticipated. At the same time, the Biden administration has done a poor job of promoting itself and I could say the same thing for the Democratic Congressional leadership of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Same with Jaime Harrison and the Democratic National Committee. They’re all strong in the trenches but find themselves in weak political positions despite having super-majorities of public opinion on their side. They should have done a lot better in taking the battle to Republicans on Covid, critical race theory, the homophobic campaign against public schools, and voting rights. They need to do better when Roe v Wade is overturned this summer.

So what is Beto doing that the Democrats need to do? He

MADE NEWS. Beto got in front of Gov. Greg Abbott and the Texas GOP Establishment at a sensitive time and let him have it. Beto’s interference with Abbott made the press conference into an event that centered around Beto and it was reported in the Washington Post, New York Times, the New York Times Again, CNN, a CNN op ed by Chris Cilliza, CBS News, and so on. In other words, Beto O’Rourke criticized Texas Republicans in a way that was amplified by the mainstream media. That should be an objective for Biden White House communications–make news that is amplified by the mainstream media.
MADE REPUBLICANS DEFEND THEMSELVES. Beto’s appearance at the press conference forced an immediate defense from Greg Abbott himself. According to Abbott, “every Texan, every American has a responsibility where we need to focus not on ourselves and our agendas, but we need to focus on the healing . . .” It was a weak response that did address anything O’Rourke said while Beto himself expanded on his condemnation of Abbott after being forced outside. In other words, Beto kept dominating the moment. Still feeling the need to defend Texas Republicans and conservatism, Fox News had Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick appear on Laura Ingraham’s show last night to attack O’Rourke. By forcing Republicans to respond, O’Rourke kept amplifying the story and further pushing the Republicans to defend their inhuman positions on gun possession and gun violence. Some of these defenses are foolish and open the GOP to further criticism and ridicule. For instance, the twitterati reminded Trump apparatchik Andrea Kremer about Rafael Cruz when she attacked Beto by using his birth name “Robert Francis.” Speaking of Sen. Cruz, he got upset when a reporter asked him why school shootings only happened in the U.S. That question might not have been asked if O’Rourke hadn’t inflamed the “controversy.”
CREATED MORE OPENINGS. O’Rourke’s criticism of Abbott will most likely keep the Uvalde Massacre in the media beyond the three days allotted for the murder of 10 black shoppers in Buffalo. Beto’s critique of Abbott both for “doing nothing” and enacting new gun laws which made the situation worse a theme that could apply to the Republicans on Covid, infrastructure, Ukraine, and other issues. However, Beto can’t do this himself. He needs President Biden, VP Harris, the White House Communication Office, and the DNC to keep coming back to “doing nothing” and “making things worse” as the main imperatives of Republican politics.

Orban, Western Civilization, and CPAC

I watched Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s CPAC speech so you don’t have to. American conservatives held CPAC in Orban’s Hungary because they want to follow Orban in establishing an authoritarian regime within a democratic political system.

They also hate America.

Towards the end of his 30 minute speech, Orban identified the political right with “Western Civilization” by which he meant traditional male-headed families and the pre-eminence of the “Church” among institutions. “The cause of the nation is not a matter of ideology, nor even of tradition. The reason that churches and families must be supported is that they are the building blocks of the nation.” In other words, what conservatives want is Patriarchal Families, a Patriarchal Church, and Patriarchal Government.

However, the popular image of “Western Civilization” is almost entirely about progress–the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Declaration of the Rights of Man in France, the Declaration of Independence in the United States, printing, global exploration, philosophy, poetry, Voltaire, and Shakespeare. Orban constricts “Western Civilization” into the elements of family and religion that in fact were the least distinct characteristics of the Modern West. It sounds like Orban is identifying Western civilization with figures like Clovis, Charles Martel, and Charlemagne, all of whom flourished before the accomplishments usually identified with “Western Civilization.” That’s both bizarre and dumb.

Of course, the idea of progress also served to cover up the monstrosity of the slave trade, native genocides, colonial tyrannies, or religious war. That’s an important part of the story of Western Civilization and so have the advent of ideas of religious tolerance, the resistance of Black populations in the U.S. and other countries, women, LGBT’s, and the various peoples subject to Western colonization. That resistance and the cultural creativity of all these populations is now an important part of the history of Western Civilization as well. However, Orban follows U.S. conservatives in ridiculing the critique of progress and new centers of political power and cultural creativity as “woke” despite not identifying himself with the original progress of the West. Such is the way with conservatives in Europe as well as the U.S. but there’s also a way in which Orban is writing conservatism out of Western Civilization.

To the extent that there is a Western Civilization, it’s morphed since WWII into a global culture. That’s partly a political matter resulting from the spread of democracy and the UN, partly an economic matter with the development of global corporations and global markets, and partly a matter of popular culture as the recording industry, movies, and television programs reached global audiences along with trends in Black American culture, anime, and KPop. An American pop performer like Demi Lovato is just as welcome in Sao Paulo, Brazil as San Diego, CA. There has also been global pressure on monotheism as Christianity declined dramatically in Western Europe, various kinds of pagan figures were revived by comic book mythologies, and Chinese, Korean, and Japanese forms of ancestor worship became globally recognized.

In the West, official values are liberal and multicultural and dominate in the major institutions, high culture, and popular culture. Conservatism is mostly a counter-culture appealing to large populations ambivalent about modern life but having few of its own cultural products. This is something Orban recognizes better than most Dems in the U.S.–

This problem–if I am not mistaken, both in America and Western Europe, is the domination of public life by progressive liberals. The problem is the fact that they hold the most important positions in the most important institutions, that they occupy the dominant positions in the media, they are the progressive left telling us what is true and that they produce all the politically indoctrinating works of high and mass culture. They–the progressive left–tell us what is the truth and what is not, what is right and what is wrong. And as conservatives, our lot is to feel about our nation’s public life as Sting felt in New York: like a legal alien.

Orban operates under the assumption that conservatives are such strangers in society that “the cause of [national conservatism] is not a matter of ideology, nor even of tradition.” That’s because conservative ideologies (fascism in Europe, militarism and supply-side economics in the United States have so little credibility. Given post-WWII communism, Hungarian conservatism has little tradition while the main traditions of American conservatives (slavery, segregation) are just as negative for conservative politics in the United States as fascism is for the European right.

For Orban, the patriarchal family and religion are the only institutions that can be used as conservative reference points. Because the West is so identified with liberalism, Orban has to avoid talking about the West in order to promote “Western Civilization.”

Orban isn’t impressed with Trump either. His main comment is that “President Trump has undeniable merits, but nevertheless he was not re-elected in 2020.” In other words, Trump’s pretty much a loser and the real model for American conservatives should be Hungary.

What about Orban’s “12 Principles for Conservatives?” It’s almost all warmed over stuff that U.S. conservatives have been doing for years if not decades.

Between Conklin and Buffalo

BUFFALO, New York — A weekend trip to the grocery store descended into a bloody tragedy for dozens of people Saturday. Jennifer Tookes, of Buffalo, had been in the Tops Friendly Market shopping with a cousin in separate aisles for about two minutes when she heard multiple gunshots coming from the front of the store. When it was over, 10 people were dead and three were wounded. A white 18-year-old who dressed in tactical gear and carried an assault weapon was arrested at the scene. He was arraigned Saturday evening on a first-degree murder charge and jailed without bond.

Maybe it’s a problem but what most ties up my emotion with the mass shooting in Buffalo is the extent to which the shooter Payton Gendron is like me and mine. The Fox News/Buffalo shooter is from Conklin, NY, a village of about 5,000 about 20 miles southeast of Binghamton on the Susquehanna River at the meeting point of Rt 68 and I 81. Conklin and the neighboring town of Kirkwood form a rural district of about 10,000. My own home town of Waverly is about 50 miles west of Conklin and grouped with three small Pennsylvania towns into what’s known locally as “The Valley.” When I was taking social studies classes in elementary school, the Binghamton area was thought to be on the verge of booming because of IBM, highway construction, etc. But by high school gradation, the whole region was in decline. That was especially the case with “The Valley” as IBM moved out of Binghamton and Owego and railroad repair shops and a highway equipment company moved out of the area. With an Amazon distribution center and a Dick’s Sporting Goods facility, Conklin and Kirkwood look to be doing better than Waverly with its empty downtown stores and boarded up houses. But declining opportunities, shrinking populations, and various drugs epidemics are the order of the day and both towns are “Trump Country.”

Waverly is not listed on this Google map of the trip between Conklin and Buffalo but Waverly is like Conklin in being right on the NY/PA border and Gendron would have dipped into PA at the two Waverly exits on Rt 68 as he was driving from Conklin to Buffalo to kill as many black people as he could.

Beginning with the racism.

Regional notions vary but I’ve always thought of the “Southern Tier” of Upstate NY as extending from east of Binghamton to Ithaca in the North and Elmira/Horseheads in the West. I last lived in the area in 1977, but have rock-solid confidence in saying It’s a racist place. I went to a lecture by a Binghamton University prof at the University of Louisville in the late 90’s where she mentioned the racism of the Binghamton area but I also remember reports of Klan groups associated with guards at the Elmira, NY prison and Klan meetings in Athens, PA just across the border. Waverly had an unusual number of black families who worked at the big restaurant on the hill and I knew a number of black guys growing up. But the fact that all my black acquaintances left town and didn’t come back says a lot about the strain of living as a black family in Waverly. My own family was racist to the core. My mother bragged about her adapted home town of Sayre, PA (actually she lived in Athens but graduated from Sayre High and always referred to Sayre as her home town) having a law against black people residing there (something which I’ve never confirmed or disconfirmed) and my parents had a broad early hostility to rock as “n-word” music. My father was even more racist and made a sustained effort to socialize me into white racism in my early teens as part of his effort to “make a man” out of me. Remembering, my father’s racism had an abstract quality. As far as I remember, he never said anything derogatory about any of the black people living in the Waverly area and it’s not like he spent much time in areas with black populations either. It’s like my father had animosity toward black people as a “category” and viewed that animosity as important to both his and MY being a “man.” Because of the categorical character of the animosity, my father’s racism was always impervious to counter-arguments, examples to the contrary, or anything having to do with the real world. It was necessary and obvious, and my disagreement made him less in his eyes without bringing his own self-esteem into question. Anyway, the effort backfired and reinforced the sense of him being repulsive that I had been forming for a couple years as a result of his abuse of my mother and more than occasional pummeling of me. Over time, I began to perceive Waverly as part American Graffiti, part “Harper Valley PTA,” and part Blue Velvet with nice people socializing in the living room while Dennis Hopper tortured Isabella Rosellini in the basement. I grew up in a Blue Velvet family and racism was an ingrained part of the experience.

The Racism and the Guns.

I wonder where Payton Gendron developed his interest in guns. Was it part of a “hunting culture” in which guns are central to stories about the hunt, the kills, the misses, dressing the carcasses, being with your buddies, and the male identity with that? Or was Gendron more into the fetishism of “gun culture”–the brands, names, fire power, ammunition, cammo gear, and all their possibilities, how all of that is displayed, counted, priced, and shared competitively with relatives and friends. When Payton Gendron travelled from Conklin to Buffalo for his massacre at the Topps market, he carried two guns with him, ammunition, body armor, and a helmet, and started opening fire. Like my father’s racism, there was an abstraction about that. Gendron not only did not know any of people he killed, he picked out the neighborhood because it was the zip code with the highest concentration of black people in Upstate NY. The aim was to kill black people generically and that killing black people was a kind of categorical imperative to Gendron. My father was also a dangerous gun owner as I was growing up in the 60’s and 70’s and shot at least three of our family pets in the head when they began to decline in health or got run over by cars. But the guns were never part of the bullying, gas lighting, or beatings that he dished out to my mother (who got it bad), myself, or my siblings. It’s like he never made the leap from thinking of guns as an instrument of hunting and display to guns as an instrument for the family abuse to which he was so highly committed. Once I became aware of murder-suicides, I am very grateful for my father never catching on to the idea.

The Racism and the Guns.

I wonder where Payton Gendron developed his interest in guns. Was it part of a “hunting culture” in which guns are central to stories about going on hunt, getting the kills, the ones that got away, dressing the carcasses, being with your buddies, and all the white male identification that goes with that? Or was Gendron more into the fetishism of “gun culture”–the brands, names, fire power, ammunition, camo gear, body armor and all how all of that is displayed, counted, priced, and shared competitively with relatives and friends. When Payton Gendron travelled from Conklin to Buffalo for his massacre at the Topps market, he carried two guns, ammunition, body armor, and a helmet, and started opening fire after a day of scouting. He also wrote about them in his 180 page manifesto. Of course, there’s a great deal of overlap between hunting culture and gun culture but I’m wondering if Gendron’s interest in guns morphed from hunting culture or gun culture into mass murder or whether he first developed an interest in guns AFTER beginning to see himself as a mass murderer on the examples of Charleston killer Dylan Roof and New Zealand shooter Brenton Tarrant. In political discourse, Roof, Tarrant, and Gendron are accurately seen in terms of accepting the “Great Replacement Theory” of white people in the United States and Europe being “replaced” by a combination of Black, Asian, Muslim, and Hispanic non-white populations and the whole thing orchestrated by a global Jewish conspiracy. What’s unique about Gendron is that he chose being a mass murderer before he decided which mass murder narrative he was adapting. At first, Gendron showed interest in shooting up Susquehanna Valley High School in Conklin. But some of his writing on the topic was seen and he was sent to a psychiatrist for evaluation. It was only after the “school shooter” path to mass murder was closed that Gendron adapted his race war blather to his ambitions to become a mass murderer. In this sense, answering the question about Gendron’s interest in guns might concern figuring out his path to the persona of a mass murderer.

Choosing.

Being a racist mass murderer was Gendron’s second choice, but being a mass murderer was most definitely a choice. There are a variety of identities available to small town white guys. In my case, it was the college prep path that I took because I wanted to leave town and leaving town was my overriding purpose from age 7-17. Gendron could have chosen “getting out of Dodge” as an identity as well. Or he could have just chosen college prep. Gendry’s parents were both college graduates and engineers, Gendry himself did well at school, and he could have chosen a college path without an overriding plan to leave town. He could have also chosen to adapt a hunting and fishing or golfing identity. If Gendron wanted to be working class, there are working class jobs at the Amazon Distribution Center in Conklin. I went to high school with guys from Waverly who lived to hunt and fish, other guys who lived to play golf, and still others who wanted more physical, traditional working-class kinds of jobs. Payton Gendron refused all these modes of white male identification and more in favor of being a mass murderer.

But why! It may be that Gendron had some sort of psychological disability that prevented him from taking any of the established paths for small town guys. Likewise, there may be some sort of trauma in his background. All of that may or may not come out as Gendron’s case is investigated. But the “positive” aspects of being a mass murderer need to be considered as well. I remember several cases in which mass killers reveled in the expectation of their posthumous celebrity and their association with other famous mass murderers and that association seems to be a real plus for Gendron. But I haven’t seen any consideration for the kinds of pleasures and ego boosts involved in mass murders. When I was forty years younger, I certainly got a lot of pleasure from separating from all the “losers” I grew up with in Waverly and I noticed the same imperative when I was teaching small town students in Kentucky. The Kentucky term was “dumbasses” but the feeling is the same. Given all the taboos against murder, the murder of people who are defenseless, and the murder of people with no reason. It may be that the breaking of all these kinds of taboos enhances the pleasure of separation in ways that are not recognized in mainstream culture. The same pleasure in breaking taboos can be seen in the 1830’s and 1840’s blackface minstrelsy that broke many of the taboos involved in racial boundaries. The same intensity of pleasure can be seen in the behavior of slave owners in the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. In certain ways, mass murder is an even more extravagant expression of “I don’t give a shit about anything” as antebellum slave ownership. Indeed, mass murderers have a not entirely dissimilar power of life and death over their (short-term) victims as slave owners. For a few minutes, the mass murderer is the lord of everything he surveys.

Schumer Shows Some Spine: The Senate Vote on the Women’s Health Protection Act

Yesterday, head Democrat in the Senate and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called up the Women’s Health Protective Act for a vote and the vote failed by a margin of 49-51 with Joe Manchin and the two pro-choice Republicans voting against the measure.

But I see the vote as a step forward for the Democrats.

The Women’s Health Protective Act was originally passed by the House in 2021 and contains the following items according to Congress.Gov:

This bill prohibits governmental restrictions on the provision of, and access to, abortion services. Specifically, governments may not limit a provider’s ability to

prescribe certain drugs,
offer abortion services via telemedicine, or
immediately provide abortion services when the provider determines a delay risks the patient’s health.
perform unnecessary medical procedures,
provide medically inaccurate information,
comply with credentialing or other conditions that do not apply to providers whose services are medically comparable to abortions, or
carry out all services connected to an abortion.

In addition, governments may not (1) require patients to make medically unnecessary in-person visits before receiving abortion services or disclose their reasons for obtaining such services, or (2) prohibit abortion services before fetal viability or after fetal viability when a provider determines the pregnancy risks the patient’s life or health.

In other words, the Women’s Health Protective Act reaffirms the fundamental right to terminate pregnancies before a fetus is viable, identifies a woman and her doctor as the primary agents of decision making in relation to abortion health care, and bans all the impediments conservative states like Texas and Kentucky have been putting in place to make abortions more difficult and costly.

In addition, the Women’s Health Protective Act did not provide for any religious-based exceptions to its provisions.

Thus, the Women’s Health Protective Act affirmed women’s rights to abortion procedures as normal medical practice and provided no exceptions for state’s rights, Catholic hospitals, or the tender sensitivities of the religious right.

It’s an excellent bill and that’s why GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell was outraged.

Leader Schumer wants the Senate to vote again on a Democrat bill that would effectively legalize abortion on demand through all nine months. Their bill is written to protect abortionists rather than mothers. It would roll back health regulations. It would attack Americans’ conscience rights and religious freedoms. It would overturn modest and overwhelmingly popular safeguards like waiting periods, informed consent laws, and possibly even parental notification. And it is written so that in practice, it would allow elective abortion until birth. Democrats’ extreme position is radical on a global scale and it is wildly unpopular with the American people.”

A lot of what McConnell says is laughable regurgitation of things that the forced birth movement has been making up about abortion for decades.

However, one of the main points about the Women’s Health Protective Act is that the House authors did not care about anti-abortion opinion.

And neither did Chuck Schumer in bringing up the bill for a vote.

Failing to understand Roe v Wade, Sen. Joe Manchin called the Women’s Health Protective Act an “expansion” of Roe v Wade and voted “no.”

Make no mistake, it is not Roe v. Wade codification,” he said of the Women’s Health Protection Act. “It is an expansion. It wipes 500 state laws off the books, it expands abortion, and with that, that’s not where we are today.

I’m sure Manchin’s Republican friends provided him with that number but the bill would have codified Roe v Wade rather than all the slices Republicans have taken out of abortion rights since 1973

But Chuck Schumer didn’t care what Manchin said and neither should I.

“Pro-life” Republicans Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski also voted against the bill because it didn’t provide any religious exemptions.

However, given that Collins jerked the Democrats around on Obamacare and voted attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh onto the Supreme Court, the Democrats have stopped viewing her as an honest person with whom they could negotiate.

So Chuck Schumer didn’t care what Collins and Murkowski had to say either.

The Never Trumper journal The Bulwark accuses Schumer of “once again playing to the activist base rather than to his gettable colleagues.” That’s exactly right. Schumer and Congressional Democrats needed to stop listening to Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell, moderate conservatives like Susan Collins, and GOP leaning Democrats like Joe Manchin.

And they have.

Schumer still needs to get better at legislative strategy and all Democratic leaders in Congress and the Biden administration desperately need to improve their partisan messaging, find ways to get their message amplified, and stick their rhetorical landings.

But the mainstream Democratic leadership has crossed the Rubicon of giving up on the Republicans and the fact that Chuck Schumer now has a spine is a big step forward.

A Layman’s Maximalist Defense of Abortion Rights

Samuel Alito’s draft of an opinion overturning Roe v Wade is a candidate for history’s best-known first draft. What I want to draft here is an outline of a maximalist defense of the right to an abortion that provides an aggressive alternative justification to the one codified in Roe v. Wade.

I. A Crime Against Human Rights. In overturning Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court will take away the rights of more than 150 million women in the United States and subject them to bans on abortion procedures that include elective procedures, procedures to save the life of the mother, and procedures to end pregnancies caused by rape and incest. Following on the publication of Alito’s draft, conservatives have been quick to propose bans on abortion pills, contraception, laws that criminalize travel to pro-women states for abortions, and other things. In effect, the Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade will authorize the creation of totalitarian systems for nullifying the human rights of women in the United States.

2. The Governing Standard. The governing standard for Constitutional evaluation of laws about abortion of other matters primarily affecting women (job and salary discrimination, etc.) should be the full citizenship of women that is recognized by the 19th Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title IX, and other laws. Likewise, the primarily references for understanding what is meant by full citizenship for women should be the feminist tradition that reaches back to Mary Wollstonecraft in England and includes American figures from Maria Stewart, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, and others extending through the several waves of feminist thought since 1963. Given that English authorities on the common law did not recognize full citizenship for women, Samuel Alito’s reliance on those authorities was wrong-headed in a fundamental way.

3. The Weightlessness of “Potential Life.” According to Alito, “Roe and Casey each struck a particular balance between the interests of a woman who wants an abortion and the interests of what they termed “potential life.” Given that women are full human beings and citizens of the United States, the rights and interests of women are paramount in the situation while the “interest in potential life” is miniscule if it should be considered at all. Of the rights of speech, press, religion, and assembly, a fetus knows nothing just as it knows nothing of its interests. The rights and interests of women are a fundamental element for any understanding of the Constitution while any talk of the rights and interests of a fetus is patent nonsense.

4. Heightened Scrutiny. Alito ridicules the idea of the “heightened scrutiny” that Roe originally demanded in relation to laws concerning abortion. However, Roe actually did not go far enough in that regard. Given the fundamental character of the full humanity of women, all the laws, regulations, and practices of government that concern women should be subject to strict scrutiny for both recognizing and promoting the full humanity of women. The scrutiny should be especially strict in terms of forbidding the reintroduction of any practice originating from the period in which women were not assumed to be fully equal. Much of the reason for overturning abortion restrictions is that they originate from traditions in which women are not treated equally.

5. No Good Faith in Abortion Opponents. Alito argues that “even Roe and Casey did not question the good faith of abortion opponents.” Given the violence of abortion opponents and their facetious arguments for parental notice, waiting periods, informed consent, and clinic qualifications, it’s become increasingly difficult to fully portray the extent of the bad faith of abortion opponents. More importantly, abortion opponents can not have “good faith” in relation to the reproduction decisions of women because they do not accept women as fully human beings who have a right to direct their own sexual and reproductive lives. It’s especially the case on the religious right that anti-abortion activists believe that women are “the weaker sex” and should live in subordination to men and under the protection of men. As long as abortion opponents reject the views on female equality in American society, they can not be considered as acting in “good faith” for legal purposes.

To briefly summarize, opponents of abortion should have no standing to legislate in opposition to the rights of women, including the right to terminate a pregnancy at will.

Marjorie Greene: GOP Spokeswoman

The Democrats should stop treating Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell, the Republican National Committee, and Ronna Romney McDaniel as “Republican leaders” or “GOP Spokespeople.”

Yes, these figures are members of the Republican Party who hold offices in Congress and the national party, but they no longer represent “Republican opinion” and are not particularly significant for understanding the internal dynamics of the Republican Party.

You know who is significant for understanding the Republican Party—Marjorie Taylor Greene!!!

The Republican Party consists of one thin layer, a larger layer of inertia, and an extremely thick and active MAGA layer.

The thinnest elite layer is the configuration of office holders and big business titans. Think the alliance between Mitch McConnell and the Business Roundtable.

Along with the elites, there’s the layer of small government, cut taxes, and deregulation Republicans who have a marginal preference for the McConnells but are just fine and dandy with supporting Trump and everything associated with Trump. That’s probably 35% of the GOP voting public. However, that constituency is also politically inert and therefore not a dynamic force in the Republican Party.

That leaves MAGA Republicans who broadly divide into the highly overlapping spheres of the conspiracy world, the religious right, and gun culture. That represents a heavy majority of Republican voters, 95% of the dynamism in the Republican Party, and also serves as the political base for Donald Trump.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is the most prominent spokeswoman for the MAGA majority of the Republican Party and therefore the most prominent spokeswoman for the Republican Party. Of course, she’s not nearly as important as the Lord God Trump but I bet Donald Trump looks to Greene’s pronouncements to help him understand the MAGA base and how he should pander to it.

When Greene goes, the Republican Party is already there.

Greene speaks at a white nationalist event because the GOP is a white nationalist party.

Greene proclaims that Catholicism is Satanic because the GOP believes that Catholicism is satanic.

Greene believes that women are the weaker sex because Republicans believe women are the weaker sex.

Greene thinks that anyone who is pro-gay rights is a “groomer” because that’s the position of the Republican Party.

All of Greene’s pronouncements should be thought of as the official position of the Republican Party.

The Joy Reid Model for Democratic Communication

Like many activist Democrats, I’m chronically dissatisfied with the messaging of the Biden administration, the Democratic National Committee, and the lib/left media more generally. Much of the communication reads like public service announcements, there’s not enough anti-GOP partisanship, what partisanship exists (“And no Republicans voted for this”) has little bite, and none of the more effective messages get amplified.

Both the Biden administration and the DNC have improved over the last month but recent tweeting by MSNBC broadcaster Joy Reid provides an excellent model for what official Democratic communication should look like:

1. An Aggressive Attack. My guess is that Joy Reid did not mean this as “Democratic messaging” but it’s excellent Democratic messaging all the same. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida used three black kids as props for his most recent anti-CRT announcement and Reid aggressively called him out for child abuse barely qualifying the statement as “tantamount to child abuse.” The anti-CRT announcement was another high point of DeSantis going after teachers and corporate training but Reid saw an element of racial abuse in the staging of the event and called him out.

2. Creates Controversy. When I accessed twitter this morning, Joy Reid was trending and there was an article about Reid’s accusation on the Fox News web site. As has often been the case with controversies pushed by Trump and the GOP, the Fox News headline served to spread Reid’s message:

MSNBC’s Joy Reid calls photos of Black kids at DeSantis event as ‘child abuse’

Yeah, the headline was that big!

In other words, Reid’s attack on DeSantis “made news.” One could say that Reid’s tweet would be even more effective if the “controversy” was reported by the New York Times and Washington Post or taken up by CNN, other MSNBC shows, and network news.

But one of the benchmarks for Democratic communication should be that it needs to “make news.”

3. Forcing A Response. Another benchmark for successful Democratic messaging is forcing a defensive response from the propagandists of the right and this is another area where Joy Reid’s attack was successful. In answer to Reid, DeSantis flak and superstar homophobic bigot Christina Pushaw tweeted:

“I was working at this event and helped with the set up. My colleague talked to all the kids beforehand & told them what the issue was & what bills @GovRonDeSantis was signing. Hundreds of people attended this event; those ~50 who ended up on stage freely chose to stand on stage,” Pushaw wrote.

4. Follow-up. Because the mainstream media views the right-wing as having a monopoly on controversy, the Democrats have a hard time getting their message amplified, such a hard time that the Biden White House needs to focus much more of their time on amplifying Democratic messages. It will be interesting to see if Joy Reid will address the controversy on The ReidOut tonight. But she did follow up with another post in the thread:

Joy-Ann (Pro-Democracy) Reid, @JoyAnnReid

Apr 22 That sure looks like T. Willard Fair in the background. But I’ve been told by a trusted source that these were not Miami Urban League kids, standing there looking like they were at the dentist. Any Florida journalists have insight into this?

That prompted more discussion in the thread which brought out more facts.

4. Audiences. This kind of messaging doesn’t just serve to attack the Republicans. It gets Democratic messages to independent and moderate voters and also provides encouragement and support for Democrats. Democratic elites often get hung up on the idea of identity politics and campaign against the idea of politics as “teams.” But white conservative identity is the main thing driving GOP support for Trump, ideas of violent insurrection, opposition to Covid relief measures, etc. The Democrats need more identity politics, not less.