Quote of the Day
The always colorful Roger Stone, who, incidentally, sports a Nixon back tat, has a history making ill considered life decisions.
The Warnock-Walker debate is sure to be a media showstopper tonight with sound bytes flowing well into the weekend. “You cannot tell me that anybody 60 years old would trade brains with Herschel Walker,” notes James Carville. “’cause you wouldn’t.” Fer realsies!
CNN describes it as “Make or Break.” And Quinnipiac University polling has Warnock at 52% and Walker, astonishingly, at 45% (Averted Gaze). Walker, to be sure, is lowering expectations in his debate performance. After all, Warnock is the senior pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Jr’s church. He makes exceptional sermons every Sunday.
Walker, by way of contrast, is the poster boy for football concussions; a walking, talking African-American stereotype with out-of-wedlock children chiming in to the media every week (Christian Walker to his father: “Wear a condom”).
“The Senate contest, one of the most competitive in the country and key to winning control of the chamber, has been scrambled in recent days by news reports that Walker, a conservative who supports a full federal abortion ban with no exceptions, allegedly paid for a woman to terminate her pregnancy and then, two years later, encouraged the same woman to have the procedure a second time,” Dan Merica, Gabby Orr and Gregory Krieg write on CNN.com. “Walker has denied the allegations, which have not been independently confirmed by CNN.”
The shockwaves after the collapse of the William F. Buckley wing of conservatism continue to reverberate. Buckley, the founding editor of the now wholly irrelevant National Review magazine, was the media face of modern conservatism before Trump. Will what Gore Vidal used to call the United States of Amnesia even remember the Buckley name? Or, for that matter, does anyone remember Gore Vidal?
There has been a lot of good writing of late about how Buckley’s marshalling of all the dark and corrosive forces that composed the American right of the 40s and 50s into something resembling respectability exploded. Jeet Heer of The Nation has been doing excellent work, tracing the fault lines of the Republican crackup to a Buckley family affair. Buckley’s own brother-in-law, Brent Bozell, once the junior partner in the Yale debating phenomenon, has now become, in Jeet Heer’s retelling of the modern conservatism origin story, the godfather of Trumpism. It is the Bill Buckley wing that is in retrograde, as the Bozellian wing rises.
Above: Bozell and Buckley, co-authors of McCarthy and his Enemies, May 1954
Here is not alone in revisiting the ghosts of conservatism past. There is also Matthew Continetti’s history of conservatism. Journo Jonathan Rauch, who came to Washington in the 80s, reviewed that book for the Times. “We did not then know that Reagan’s triumph was also a culmination,” Rauch writes. “The Cold War’s end dissolved the conservative coalition’s glue, Buckley’s sparkling generation receded, Kristol’s journal closed, Rush Limbaugh ascended.” There is also Nicole Hemmer’s new book, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s. Of that book, Claire Potter writes in her review in The New Republic:
Although Reagan’s sunny, optimistic style contrasts sharply with Trump’s lament of “American carnage,” he, too, successfully distracted voters from his lack of policy achievements by blowing the smoke that his voters wanted to inhale. As economic journalist William Greider wrote in December 1984, a few weeks after Reagan thumped Democrat Walter Mondale by 18 points, the president cruised to victory on a gauzy cloud of lies and obfuscation. Even journalists had “yielded to the techniques of mass propaganda,” Greider wrote, “large lies told through the calculated repetition of soothing imagery and potent symbolism. The harsh facts of contradictory realities were no match for it.” If the recent election “describes the future,” he continued, “then Americans are being reduced to a nation of befogged sheep, beguiled by false images and manipulated ruthlessly.”
Well, hello. And while that new voting public would not emerge full-blown until 2016, populism’s capacity to disrupt old arrangements became clear by 1992. In Hemmer’s telling, the possibility of a populist president in the Trump mold emerged when mainstream GOP strategists understood that Pat Buchanan’s bid for the Republican nomination, and the independent candidacy of Texas tech billionaire Ross Perot, generated a fervor that Reaganism—with its focus on abstract economic theories and weak response to culture wars issues like feminism, immigration, and gay rights—lacked. Buchanan’s nativist, isolationist, racist, and homophobic appeal to old-style Cold War conservatives resonated with a younger generation of aggrieved white candidates and voters who were coming out of the shadows. It’s no accident, Hemmer points out, that only one week before Buchanan entered the race, David Duke—an active Nazi, and former Klansman—announced his own campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.
Will historians of the future write that 1992 was the year that the ticket ultimately exploded?
Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s award-winning investigation of Harvey Weinstein, which sparked the #MeToo movement, is now a film, and it made its debut at the New York Film Festival. “She Said, an investigative thriller in the spirit of journalism procedurals like Spotlight and All the President’s Men, follows the two journalists as they break the (Harvey) Weinstein story, piecing together the Hollywood producer’s serial sexual assault and harassment and the broader system—of paid-for silence and intimidation—that allowed him to get away with the abuse for as long as he did. It’s based on the book (with which it shares a name) published by Kantor and Twohey in 2019, which gets more into the nitty gritty of the reporting but, like the movie, focuses heavily on the women who came forward,” writes Charlotte Klein for Vanity Fair. “Some of them were in the audience, and were invited to stand after the film ended, to roaring applause.”
In the last weeks before the midterm elections, Fox News and all the GOP candidates have been touting All-Crime-All-The-Time as their closing argument. They cynical style was most conspicuous in the Wisconsin Senate debate. Dr. Oz is also utilizing it to great effect (his poll numbers are rising despite his being essentially a ridiculous candidate). Of course, Crime is shorthand for Race. It has been that way since Willie Horton; it has been that way since the overhyping of the so-called Defund the Police “movement.” “‘When they talk about crime, it's usually people of color’ that candidates and ad-makers are referencing, says Christopher Stout, an Oregon State University professor and author of two books on racial politics,” writes Susan Milligan in USA Today.
It is a long and lusty dog whistle into the suburbs by the Republican party, reminding white voters which party is, sotto vocce, “soft on crime” and is the preferred choice of voters of brown people. From Eric Alterman:
This problem is a perennial one. Voters almost always have misguided impressions of the state of violent crime, both locally and nationally. This is due to the success that politicians almost always enjoy in hyping the issue on local news programs, which love to run the footage to which police departments happily give them access. Highlighting crime almost always favors right-wing candidates in any election, because their perceived “toughness” appeals to voters—see above—despite the fact that the “solutions” they propose often, if not always, turn out to be counterproductive.
Reinforcing those points is a recent column in The Washington Post by Philip Bump that took a look at the manner in which Fox News covered what its paid propagandists call the “crime crisis in America.” Bump noted, “Data released by the FBI on Wednesday suggested that violent crime nationally didn’t increase much in 2021 relative to 2020. That comports with recent figures from crime victimization data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), which indicated that reported violent crime was flat in 2021 and down from before the pandemic.” And while the “best available data, though, suggest violent crime isn’t up significantly since last year,” the lack of precise data from many localities provides an “opportunity for those who might find it useful to suggest that crime is out of control.”
Our Missing Hearts is third novel from bestselling author Celeste Ng and I am all in. “In her new novel, Our Missing Hearts, it’s millions of lives progressively compromised, crushed, and stealthily snuffed out in a not-so-distant future as China perpetually hovers on the verge of a planet-annihilating war with the rest of the globe,” Celia McGee writes in Avenue. “In this dystopian narrative, that standoff has steered the United States into devoting much of its national and cultural defense mechanisms at home to anti-Asian propaganda.”
Sound vaguely familiar?