She’s Right And She’s Right

A recent essay by Mona Charen in The Bulwark stirred an old memory. Many–many–years ago, I debated Charen at a local synagogue. I no longer recall the reason or the subject; we were both considered conservative Republicans at the time, although my very foggy recollection is that she was much farther to the Right (or wrong) on whatever issue it was. (Permit me to note that back then “the Right” was considerably more “woke” than it is today. As I often point out, I was pro-choice, pro gay rights and pro women serving in combat when I won a Republican primary in 1980.)

In any event, kudos to Charen these days. She is a vocal member of the Never Trump contingent, and an editor of The Bulwark, a decidedly anti-MAGA publication. In a recent essay, she critiqued Trump’s recent prime-time speech, under the headline “Can we get that 18 minutes back?” In the process, she made some very good points.

She began with an entirely appropriate sentiment, quoting someone named Tim Miller: “I was embarrassed. It’s really unbelievably stupid that we’re here, that this person is the president, and that that was real—that was not a spoof.”

Charen characterized the speech as “a waste of 18 minutes of prime time,” but admitted she’d nevertheless been relieved–at least Trump hadn’t used the time to declare war on Venezuela, which she’d feared.

There’s another reason for my sense of relief. Last night’s speech reveals Trump has no sense of how he might save his foundering presidency, or even much of an inclination to try to do so. Indeed, yesterday’s Republican meltdown in the House in the face of increased health insurance costs, a faltering economy, and the deadline for the release of the Epstein files tomorrow—all of these suggest a rough holiday season for the administration.

Which is good. A weaker Trump administration is better for America.

Charen then reminded readers that any former President would have used the occasion of a prime-time speech to reflect upon–or at least reference–the previous week’s tragedies. During that week, two U.S. soldiers had been killed in Syria, students were killed in yet another mass shooting at Brown, there had been an attack with multiple fatalities on Jews celebrating Hanukkah in Sydney, and the tragic, horrible murder of Rob and Michele Reiner. Trump ignored even a perfunctory reference to any of those events, although he had previously posted truly despicable “thoughts” on the Reiner tragedy to his vanity platform, Truth Social.

Charen then addressed a central quote from the speech–Trump’s assertion that “One year ago our country was dead. We were absolutely dead, but now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world. And that’s said by every single leader that I’ve spoken to over the last five months.”

Trump has bragged before that he’s received such praise, naming those who have purportedly flattered him: Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, “the king of Saudi Arabia,” “the emir of Qatar,” the prime minister of Hungary, and “every leader of NATO.” As Charen notes,

Trump is, of course, lying. Some foreign leaders, to flatter him and mitigate their risk of exorbitant tariffs, have probably told him he’s doing a great job. But it’s absurd to imagine that all the presidents and prime ministers of NATO countries have told him (as Trump has alleged more than once) that America was dead a year ago. To say such a thing wouldn’t just overtax their tolerance for self-abasing dishonesty, it would damage their post-Trump relations with the United States.

So why does Trump keep boasting that they said it? Because he’s a pathological narcissist. And because he thinks it will impress Americans.

If Trump really thinks rational Americans will be impressed by these transparent lies, he’s even stupider–and more demented–than previously thought.

Charen closed her essay by citing (and refuting) Trump’s insistence that he’s bringing prices down. Evidently, he expects Americans to believe his lie and ignore the contrary evidence they encounter daily. He seems to believe that Americans will believe him that they’re doing well, because (he says) Putin, Xi, and MBS have told him so.

The Bulwark, Lincoln Square and several other publications established by Never Trump former Republicans stir memories of the “before times,” when pundits, strategists and other assorted political junkies across the political spectrum argued about policy and what constituted good governance.

Given the ongoing takeover of legacy news sources like CBS by cronies benefitting financially from the antics of our demented would-be King, those Never Trumpers are providing a valuable service.

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Explaining MAGA

I have frequently cited research showing that racial resentment is the single most predictive element of a vote for Trump, and his administration has rewarded those voters with its efforts to elevate White “Christian” men and erase efforts at fairness and inclusion. They don’t even bother to hide their intentions anymore–J.D. Vance was recently quoted saying “You don’t have to apologize for being White anymore.”

Attributing Trump’s election to racism is fair, but insufficient. Despite Trump’s recent assertion that he “created” MAGA, America’s racism and misogyny are hardly new. The much harder question is “what sort of individual harbors these beliefs?

A recent, lengthy essay from The Rational League explored that question.

As the author noted, observers tend to dismiss bigotry as stupidity, malice, or moral collapse, but such explanations are intellectually lazy. “They flatter the observer while obscuring the phenomenon they claim to diagnose.” Such explanations also fail to explain the internal consistency of the MAGA movement, its ability to persist in the face of contradiction, the way it transforms norm violations into virtues, or why Its exposure to contrary evidence actually can harden belief rather than weaken it.

The essay does a deep dive into the psychological literature, and concludes that some people filter information through a different lens–one based upon “threat perception, authority preference, group identity, and moral reclassification.” In other words, they filter reality differently. The author says that MAGA folks’ worldview  didn’t arise from madness, “but from a system that works, psychologically, emotionally, and politically, for those who inhabit it.”

What is that worldview, and where did it come from?

Long before a person encounters slogans, parties, or leaders, they acquire something more durable: a way of relating to uncertainty, authority, and threat.

Longitudinal research tracking individuals from infancy into adulthood shows that political orientation is shaped not only by what parents say, but by how they raise their children, and by how those children respond to the world around them. In Developmental Antecedents of Political Ideology, Fraley, Griffin, Belsky, and Roisman followed participants from birth to age eighteen and found that parents who endorsed more authoritarian child-rearing attitudes when their children were just one month old were significantly more likely to have children who later identified as conservative. Parents who endorsed more egalitarian and autonomy-supportive attitudes predicted the opposite outcome.

The scholarship suggests that children raised by parents who emphasized obedience, rule-following, and deference to authority are more likely to adopt political beliefs that emphasize those same principles. Furthermore, individual temperaments compound the effect. Children with higher levels of fearfulness in early childhood have been found to be more likely to identify as conservative in later years.

It isn’t just parenting style; as twin studies have demonstrated, there are also shared genetic influences. (Party identity isn’t inherited,  but “threat sensitivity, need for order, and discomfort with ambiguity” are heritable traits that often find partisan and/or ideological expression.)

None of this implies inevitability. A child raised with strict norms does not automatically become authoritarian, just as a fearful temperament does not mandate political rigidity. What this research establishes is something subtler and more consequential: that some individuals enter adulthood with a heightened preference for order, stability, and authority as psychological goods. These preferences remain largely dormant until circumstances give them political meaning.

The scholarship shows that, in periods of social change–especially the growth of cultural pluralism– conservatives react with efforts to reduce uncertainty, restore order, and defend existing social structures. They have a preference for “certainty over ambiguity and security over openness.” As the author notes, “Order must be imposed, and dominance must be maintained.”

This is where collective narcissism comes in.

Collective narcissism is described as an emotional investment in an inflated image of one’s ingroup. Its function is psychological, not ideological, and It

transforms threat into insult. Disagreement becomes betrayal. Constraint becomes humiliation. Because the ingroup’s greatness is experienced as both exceptional and insufficiently recognized, any challenge, real or imagined, demands retaliation. The leader who promises restoration, recognition, and vengeance is no longer merely persuasive; they become necessary.

As the essay notes, the left is not immune to bias, groupthink, or moral error. MAGA, however, represents a particular configuration of psychological traits, “activated by threat, reinforced by grievance, and stabilized by identity, that is not mirrored on the left at comparable scale or intensity.”

The danger of the MAGA lens is not that it abandons reason, but that it applies reason in service of a closed moral system, one capable of justifying coercion as protection, exclusion as fairness, and domination as restoration once the conditions are met.

There is much more, and I strongly recommend reading the entire linked essay.

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An Unfit Judicial Nominee

Apologies for inundating your inboxes yesterday. The post was sent by accident–it was scheduled for January 1st and will repeat then. Mea culpa. (When I’m in a hurry…)

Speaking of the courts, as I did yesterday, an Indiana lawyer named Justin Olsen has been nominated for a judgeship by Donald Trump. He is apparently as qualified as the members of Trump’s cabinet…which is to say, not.

The first clue was his rapturous introduction by Indiana’s White Christian nationalist Senator, Jim Banks. And while Bank’s endorsement should really have told us all we needed to know, a google search turned up a lot more.

Trump has nominated Olsen to fill a vacancy in Indiana’s Southern District federal court. A brief review of Olsen’s confirmation hearing certainly confirmed one thing–he is manifestly unfit to join that respected and respectable bench.

The Indiana Lawyer has reported on the “highlights” of that hearing.

Not only did Olsen refuse to say that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election, he refused to respond to questions about the insurrection of Jan. 6th, saying only that those events were a ‘matter of public controversy.” He even declined to offer an opinion on whether those events–videos of which were widely publicized– constituted an assault on the U.S. Capitol.

His responses to other questions–even friendly questions from Republican members of the committee–elicited beliefs that only Samuel Alito could love.

Olsen was asked about a sermon he had delivered as a Reformed Presbyterian elder, in which he  opined that people with disabilities should not marry, that having sex outside of marriage was a “form of sexual perversion,” and that wives should be subservient to their husbands. He responded that it was the doctrine of the church he was attending that fornication is a sin, and in response to a question about wives being subservient to their husbands, his response was that he believed “every word of the Bible.” (Presumably, if he is confirmed, that “biblical belief” would supercede any pesky, contrary constitutional precedents.)

Excuse me, but belief in “every word” of the bible requires ignoring that good book’s multiple contradictions.

Respected theologians have pointed to numerous passages in the bible that contradict each other. For example, Samuel 17:50 says David killed Goliath, but in Samuel 21:19, it says Elhanan kills Goliath the Gittite. Matthew 27:5 says Judas hanged himself, but Acts 1:18 has Judas falling headlong, bursting open with his intestines spilling out. Malachi 3:6 says God doesn’t change his mind, but Genesis 6:6 says God regrets creating humanity, and Jonah 3:10 tells us that God changed His mind about destroying Nineveh. There are numerous other examples–typically ignored by the so-called “biblical literalists” who use their “piety” as an excuse to impose their favored beliefs on others and who cherry pick their bibles for the passages that can be used to support their biases.

His selective “biblical” beliefs have evidently animated Olsen’s previous legal work. As the Indiana Lawyer reported,

When Trump nominated Olson, he prominently touted that that Indiana attorney has been representing three former University of Pennsylvania women swimmers that sued Penn, Harvard University, the Ivy League and the Indianapolis-based NCAA for alleged Title IX  violations by allowing transgender swimmer Lia Thomas to compete on Penn’s women’s swim team in 2021-2022.

An article from Balls and Strikes on the confirmation hearing reported Olsen’s reply to a question about a 2022 sermon in which he said that “transgenderism, homosexuality, fornication, and all sorts of sexual perversions” were forms of hypocrisy that come from “shame on the inside.” In his response, Olson said that he didn’t “recall the precise wording” of his remarks, but conceded that the language sounded familiar.

As the linked report concluded,

Olsen said that he meant his words “for the edification of the people that I was preaching to,” and assured Kennedy and the rest of the committee that if confirmed, he would set aside his personal beliefs, apply the rule of law, and so on and so forth. I am sure that normal people in Indiana who do not want their federal judges to be alarmingly anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-disabled, anti-sex weirdos therefore have nothing to worry about.

No wonder Indiana’s Christian nationalist Senator Jim Banks was quoted as saying that he was “blown away by Olsen’s credentials” and asserting “that the nominee has a record of doing the right thing.”

When people like Jim Banks are deciding what “the right thing” is, Indiana’s litigants are in a lot of trouble.

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Fixing The Court

If there is one word that has been over-used ever since Donald Trump emerged from whatever fetid swamp he previously inhabited, it’s “normalization.” As the administration ignores the rule of law, breaches longstanding norms, and otherwise engages in decidedly abnormal behaviors, the legacy media and national businesses and institutions have largely gone along–metaphorically shrugging their shoulders while murmuring their objections.

That normalizing isn’t new. For years, those same institutions (and to be fair, the majority of the American public) have ignored the increasingly erratic operation of many of America’s governing structures–the misuse of the filibuster, the anti-democratic effects of the Electoral College, the blatant gerrymandering, and the problematic functioning of the Supreme Court.

The Court’s current, blatantly corrupt majority has focused public attention on its erratic and partisan rulings. But for years–well before the more recent decisions that have damaged the Supreme Court’s legitimacy, scholars who study the judicial system had been sounding alarms. Most of those concerns were focused on practices that had resulted in the Supreme Court accepting review of fewer cases each year, and the fact that Justices were living much longer these days–raising the probability of judicial senility. Well before Trump, scholars were calling for various reforms, especially the imposition of term limits (most favored eighteen years–long enough to accomplish the Founders’ goal of shielding Justices from popular passions.)

The subject of Court reform has taken on new urgency, for obvious reasons, and a number of possible “fixes” await a federal Democratic trifecta. One of the most intriguing was offered by Robert Hubbell, a lawyer whose Substack I read daily. Hubbell cites a book reviewed by The Guardian, in which legal scholars argue that the Court has “so delegitimized itself that nothing short of truly radical reform will save democracy.”

As Hubbell writes,

If we do not act boldly and quickly when we next have the chance, the damage Trump has inflicted on the DOJ and the Supreme Court may last a generation. Expand the number of justices to the point that the reactionary majority is impotent, and then begin a three-year plan to reverse every lawless, racist, anti-democratic decision issued by the Roberts Court.

Expansion of the Court, while controversial, is a common recommendation. What isn’t common is another proposal, which I found both fascinating and persuasive-“to split the Supreme Court into two divisions—one that hears cases within the “original jurisdiction” of the Court, and one that hears cases in the appellate jurisdiction of the Court.” That would allow “the assignment of “senior” justices to cases that are almost never presented to the Court—”so-called cases of original jurisdiction involving (e.g.) disputes between princes and ambassadors.”

Hubbell quotes an article from Daily Kos describing the plan:

We will need Congress to pass a new law that pushes the older justices aside and ties them up handling cases that don’t mean much to the American people.

The new law would say, “Justices of the Supreme Court who have served for 15 years or more shall be assigned to Division A of the court.

Division A will hear all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls;—all cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction . . . (These are cases that the existing Supreme Court now hears with “original jurisdiction.” It means the Supreme Court handles these cases from beginning to end with no trials in the lower courts.)

The statute should go on to say, “Division B shall be made up of justices who have served less than 15 years on the Supreme Court. After the year 2028, the president may appoint additional justices to this body . . . .

Survey research confirms that public opinion of the Court is at historic lows. A majority of Americans–and a significant majority of the legal profession– see the current Court as an overtly politicised body with significant ethics issues. Its unprecedented use of the “shadow docket” has unsettled both litigants and judges on the lower courts. And there is widespread disapproval of this Court’s consistent disregard for precedent and its dangerous undermining of Separation of Powers in order to empower our would-be king.

As the Editorial Board of the New York Times recently wrote, the lower courts “have responded heroically to Mr. Trump’s ill-founded efforts to centralize power and weaken democracy.” District and appellate courts have blocked Trump policies hundreds of times this year. “In many of those instances, however, the Supreme Court later overruled the lower courts, allowing Mr. Trump’s power grabs. It did so almost entirely on its emergency docket..”

Normalizing this rogue Court–failing to check its excesses–would neuter the Constitution and jettison the rule of law. We can argue about the details, but reform is essential.

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Happy Holidays

Very few of you will be reading a blog on Christmas, so I’m taking the day off.

Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, Happy Kwanzaa–whatever you celebrate, I’m wishing you a lovely day.

I’ll be back at it tomorrow….

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