‘Biden And Trump Have Succeeded In Breaking Reality’. If M. Gessen writes it, I read it:
(B)oth campaigns are creating a sense of unreality, in presenting politics as formulaic spectacle, abstracted from the actual politics each candidate represents and from people’s lived experiences.
To be sure, the two campaigns are telling very different stories. The Republican story is one of constant danger, eternal heartbreak, looming catastrophe.
Autocrats and aspiring autocrats, whatever their political orientation, have been telling this story for a long time. They say that the country is on the verge of catastrophe and that only one person — the great leader — can save it. They use this rhetorical strategy because it works. That is, it works in times when a critical number of people are feeling insecure, precarious, frightened, as many Americans clearly are.
The Biden campaign’s approach to these anxieties is to insist that Americans are wrong — that experts’ objective economic data disproves ordinary people’s subjective sense of precarity. Rather than listen to their lived experience, which tells them that they are insecure despite all the job creation and economic growth, or accept what they see and hear, which tells them that the president is too old for the job, Americans should fear only Donald Trump, the Democrats insist — and put their trust in Biden, the only leader who can save us from the autocratic abyss.
Whether you are a supporter of Trump who believes that the many criminal cases against him are part of a persecution campaign, or someone who believes, based on the evidence, that he committed a number of crimes, the message is clear: justice in the United States is contingent and entirely partisan.
If he is elected, a second Trump administration seems likely to bring what the Hungarian sociologist Balint Magyar has termed an “autocratic breakthrough” — structural political change that is impossible to reverse by electoral means. But if we are in an environment in which nothing is believable, in which imagined secrets inspire more trust than the public statements of any authority, then we are already living in an autocratic reality, described by another of Arendt’s famous phrases: “Nothing is true and everything is possible.”
It’s official. I’m done with Daily Kos for the time being. Agree or disagree on what Biden should do–the Daily Kos has now turned into a full-throated operation to keep Biden in the race.
Senator Chris Coons, the national co-chair of Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, said on Friday that the president was “weighing” the viability of his candidacy as more and more elected Democrats call for him to step aside.
“This is an internal party matter and a matter of the campaign that is playing out very publicly,” Coons said at the Aspen Security Forum, an annual security and foreign policy conference, according to The Hill. “I think our president is weighing what he should weigh, which is: Who is the best candidate to win in November and to carry forward the Democratic Party’s values and priorities in this campaign?”
My take? Coons is weighing his ‘viability’ for a Cabinet post and considering which candidate is more likely to make that dream a reality.
Citizens United Killed Democracy. Just one more example:
The multimillionaire and prominent election denier Patrick Byrne has been boosting his funding to the Maga-allied America Project and using it to steer six-figure checks to far-right groups that push voting conspiracies in Arizona, Michigan and elsewhere, according to tax records and voting experts.
Byrne, the former CEO of online retailer Overstock.com, said last fall that only $3m of the $30m the Florida-based project had raised at that point came from “the public”, with the rest coming from him.
In 2022, the America Project almost doubled its revenues to $14.3m versus some $7.7m the prior year, according to tax records first disclosed by Issue One, a bipartisan political reform group.
The America Project was launched in April 2021 by Byrne and Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser to Donald Trump when he was president; both Byrne and Flynn have been vocal purveyors of falsehoods that Trump lost the 2020 election due to fraud. They were also both at a meeting with Trump and others in late 2020 to brainstorm ways to overturn his loss.
There are so many instances just like this that I can’t keep up. But when we enter the autocratic age, we’ll understand just how much this decision impacted where we’ve ended up.
Yep, Raw Milk Can Be Hazardous To Your Health. Which reminds me, let’s see what happened to that bill legalizing and promoting raw milk sales in Delaware. Be back in a sec…Jee-zus, it awaits the Governor’s signature. Wonder what Delaware’s self-proclaimed leader in health (BHL) will say about this. Only seven legislators voted against it–Reps. Heffernan and Minor-Brown; Senators Hansen, Lockman, Mantzavinos, Townsend and Walsh.
Yet another example of Why Delaware Sucks.
What do you want to talk about?