Trump authoritarianism

I've recently gone back to the various reports collected in The Authoritarian Personality (1950), the famous study by "Adorno et al," as it's usually cited. The was a major study headed by Max Horkheimer, head of the Institute for Social Research, more widely known as "the Frankfurt School." It is part of the Studies in Prejudice series that was a product of a project on prejudice and anti-Semitism sponsored by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) in the 1940s.

I was reminded that it is a rich source that I still hadn't fully explored by my friend Deborah Antunes in her recent book, Por um Conhecimento Sincero no Mundo Falso: 1 (2014) that discusses how this work fits into the development in the thought of Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno and in the development of the larger field of Critical Theory.

In the strange precincts of the far right, this work was a target of one of the many paranoid political conspiracy theories on the crackpot right, "Cultural Marxism." But that's another story.

Trying to milk quotable stand-alone zingers out of the The Authoritarian Personality isn't an advisable undertaking. It involves the explanation and interpretation of a major sociological study, involving some complex philosophical, historical and psychological assumptions. And it is a publication from 65 years ago, discussing field work that took place several years before that. But there are nevertheless themes that resonate with today's Radical Right politics.

And Radical Right politics is more prevalent in the Republican Party today than ever before. Writing about today's party and its currently leading Presidential candidate for 2016, Donald Trump, Paul Krugman says (From Trump on Down, the Republicans Can’t Be Serious New York Times 08/07/2015):

For while it’s true that Mr. Trump is, fundamentally, an absurd figure, so are his rivals. If you pay attention to what any one of them is actually saying, as opposed to how he says it, you discover incoherence and extremism every bit as bad as anything Mr. Trump has to offer. And that’s not an accident: Talking nonsense is what you have to do to get anywhere in today’s Republican Party. ...

Or to put it another way, modern Republican politicians can’t be serious — not if they want to win primaries and have any future within the party. Crank economics, crank science, crank foreign policy are all necessary parts of a candidate’s resume. [my emphasis]

And David "Bobo" Brooks has offered his Deep Thoughts on Donald Trump's surge in popularity in the Republican Party, Donald Trump’s Allure: Ego as Ideology New York Times 08/04/2015. Bobo's analysis of today's political scene isn't quite so, uh, nuanced as Theodor Adorno's in 1950. Bobo:

The times are perfect for Donald Trump. He’s an outsider, which appeals to the alienated. He’s confrontational, which appeals to the frustrated. And, in a unique 21st-century wrinkle, he’s a narcissist who thinks he can solve every problem, which appeals to people who in challenging times don’t feel confident in their understanding of their surroundings and who crave leaders who seem to be. ...

When Trump is striking populist chords, he appeals to people who experience this invisibility. He appeals to members of the alienated middle class ... who believe that neither the rich nor the poor have to play by the same rules they do. He appeals to people who are resentful of immigrants who get what they, allegedly, don’t deserve.

Bobo's concluding sentence illustrates the profundity of his analysis, "He is deeply rooted in the currents of our time." As opposed to, I guess, people who died 100 years ago?

He also offers this puzzling description of Trump's message: "Society is led by losers, who scorn and disrespect the people who are actually the winners."

Adorno's famously dense prose is direct and clear compared to that!

Bobo in his column is using words and phrases which, strung together competently, sound Very Serious because they are so familiar. But these are the kinds of observations that politicians and pundits use to describe demagogues without saying their are appealing to hateful and violent impulses among their supporters.

Adorno in his chapter Politics and Economics in the Interview Material, isn't so delicate.

Here, I want to concentrate on Adorno's observations on what he calls "pseudoconservatism." Political terms like right, left, liberal, conservative, radical are famously plastic. Adorno in 1950 defined the difference between "genuine" and "pseudo" conservatives this way:

[A differentiation between scores in a group surveyed] was interpreted in terms of genuine and pseudoconservatives, the former supporting not only capitalism in its liberal, individualistic form but also those tenets of traditional Americanism which are definitely antirepressive and sincerely democratic, as indicated by an unqualified rejection of antiminority prejudices. ...

The idea [of pseudoconservatism] is that the potentially fascist character, in the specific sense given to this concept through our studies, is not only on the overt level but throughout the make-up of his personality a pseudoconservative rather than a genuine conservative. The psychological structure that corresponds to pseudoconservatism is conventionality and authoritarian submissiveness on the ego level, with violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere. [my emphasis]

Which more meaningfully describes the kind of voters to whom a rich, egotistical, belligerent bully like Donald Trump appeals? Bobo's "members of the alienated middle class ... who believe that neither the rich nor the poor have to play by the same rules they do"? Or Adorno's "authoritarian submissiveness on the ego level, with violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere"? I'm thinking the 1950 characterization works better than the 2015 one does.

Adorno goes on to say:

This break-through of the nonconservative element is enhanced by certain supra-individual changes in today's ideology in which traditional values, such as the inalienable rights of each human being, are subject to a rarely articulate but nevertheless very severe attack by ascendent forces of crude repression, of virtual condemnation of anything that is deemed weak. There is reason to believe that those developmental tendencies of our society which point into the direction of some more or less fascist, state capitalist organization bring to the fore formerly hidden tendencies of violence and discrimination in ideology. All fascist movements officially employ traditional ideas and values but actually give them an entirely different, antihumanistic meaning. (p. 676) [my emphasis]

The "supra-individual changes" he talks about there probably refers in particular to the concern Sigmund Freud expressed in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930, German: Das Unbehagen in der Kultur) that the increasing complexity of modern society brings with it an increase in internal feelings of guilt in individuals that also boosts aggressive impulses. Adorno's Frankfurt School colleagues Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm would elaborate on such concerns in the following decades.

He mentions two key things about the authoritarian inclination: contempt for the weak, and the use of "traditional values" to justify hostility, exclusion and violence rather than the building of community.

Authoritarian Ibérico Saint-Jean (1922-2012)

There is an infamous quote illustrating authoritarian attitudes toward the weak. It's from General Ibérico Saint-Jean, military governor of Buenos Aires Province 1976-1981:

Primero mataremos a todos los subversivos; luego mataremos a sus colaboradores, después a sus simpatizantes, enseguida a aquellos que permanecen indiferentes y, finalmente, mataremos a los tímidos

[First we kill all the subversives; later we kill their collaborators, then their sympathizers; after that, those who remain indifferent and, finally, we kill the timid.]

(See: Ibérico Saint-Jean Wikipedia, accessed 08/07/2015; ¡Basta de confrontación, argentinos! La batalla cultural n/d, accessed 08/07/2015)

Richard Hofstader also famously used the term "pseudoconservative" to describe the Radical Right of the 1950s: The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt The American Scholar Winter 1954-55. He said explicitly that he borrowed the term from The Authoritarian Personality. He framed it this way:

... its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions and institutions. They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word, and they are far from pleased with the dominant practical conservatism of the moment as it is represented by the Eisenhower Administration. Their political reactions express rather a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways — a hatred which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive clinical evidence.

Here was Donald Trump's closing statement at the August 6 Republican Presidential debate, the last of the evening (Transcript of the 2015 GOP debate (9 pm) 08/07/2015):

Our country is in serious trouble. We don't win anymore.

We don't beat China in trade. We don't beat Japan, with their millions and millions of cars coming into this country, in trade. We can't beat Mexico, at the border or in trade.

We can't do anything right. Our military has to be strengthened. Our vets have to be taken care of. We have to end Obamacare, and we have to make our country great again, and I will do that.

Thank you.

This attitude, of course, simultaneously trashes conditions as they are and promises to "make our country great again."

Digby Parton notes of the August 6 debate (Fear & loathing at the GOP debates Salon 08/07/2015):

These Republicans are running on fear and anger and nothing more. Even their various ways of saying “let’s make America great again” are demoralizing. It’s understandable. They know they are unlikely to win the presidency as long as their angry, fearful, conservative white base insists on insulting everyone who doesn’t look like them but they have no choice but to roll with it.

One always has to keep in mind in talking about American politics prior to 1965, the left-right/liberal-conservative divide overlapped the two parties. On a variety of issues including segregation, there were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, as well as conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats.

Hofstadter used these examples of the pseudoconservative phenomenon:

The lady who, when General Eisenhower’s victory over Senator Taft had finally become official, stalked out of the Hilton Hotel declaiming, “This means eight more years of socialism” was probably a fairly good representative of the pseudo-conservative mentality. So also were the gentlemen who, at the Freedom Congress held at Omaha over a year ago by some “patriotic” organizations, objected to Earl Warren’s appointment to the Supreme Court with the assertion: “Middle-of-the-road thinking can and will destroy us”; the general who spoke to the same group, demanding “an Air Force capable of wiping out the Russian Air Force and industry in one sweep,” but also “a material reduction in military expenditures”; the people who a few years ago believed simultaneously that we had no business to be fighting communism in Korea, but that the war should immediately be extended to an Asia-wide crusade against communism ...

Adorno addressed the situation of people with no realistic prospect of becoming very wealthy themselves who nevertheless identify with wealthy people who advocate policies designed to benefit people like themselves primarily or exclusively:

This socioeconomic aspect of pseudoconservatism is often hard to distinguish from the psychological one. To the prospective fascist his social identification is as precarious as that with the father. At the social root of this phenomenon is probably the fact that to rise by the means of "normal" economic competition becomes increasingly difficult, so that people who want to "make it"-which leads back to the psychological situation-are forced to seek other ways in order to be admitted into the ruling group. They must look for a kind of "co-optation," somewhat after the fashion of those who want to be admitted to a smart club. Snobbery, so violently denounced by the fascist, probably for reasons of projection, has been democratized and is part and parcel of their own mental make-up: who wants to make a "career" must really rely on "pull and climbing" rather than on individual merit in business or the professions. Identification with higher groups is the presupposition for climbing, or at least appears so to the outsider, whereas the "genuine" conservative group is utterly allergic to it. However, the man who often, in accordance with the old Horatio Alger ideology, maintains his own "upward social mobility" draws from it at least some narcissistic gratifications and felicitously anticipates internally a status which he ultimately hopes to attain in reality. [my emphasis]

He also addresses the superficially odd combination of hyperconservatism and identification with traditional values, on the one hand, and revolutionary/subversive rhetoric on the other. The latter is a common feature of gun-proliferation advocates and neo-Confederates, both of which are very common in today's Republican Party base, despite the recent image problems of the Confederate battle flag.

Rand "Baby Doc" Paul used such a combination last night when talking about his opposition to same-sex marriage and his support of religious-liberty arguments to justify persecution of LGBT people outside of the personal-life and church contexts:

Look, I don't want my marriage or my guns registered in Washington. And if people have an opinion, it's a religious opinion that is heartly felt, obviously they should be allowed to practice that and no government should interfere with them. One of the things, one of the things that really got to me was the thing in Houston where you had the government, the mayor actually, trying to get the sermons of ministers. When the government tries to invade the church to enforce its own opinion on marriage, that's when it's time to resist. [my emphasis]

Baby Doc was carefully hinting that resistance with guns against the lesbian mayor of Houston might have been justified in the issue to which he refers (and describes inaccurately).

The urban-legend analysis site Snopes explains the incident to which Baby Doc referred in Houston Hustle 10/17/2014. (Short version: it wasn't what conspiracy-theory fan Baby Doc made it sound like.) See also: Katie Zavadski, Is Houston’s Lesbian Mayor Really Out to Get Conservative Preachers? New York 10/15/2014, who explains that Houston's Mayor Annise Parker, actually criticized attorneys working on behalf of the city over the subpoena in a case which, like many topics that the Republicans and other conspiracy theorists blow up into tales of persecution, was actually a fairly obscure legal question on a narrow issue.

Adorno notes that for subjects who scored high on the authoritarianism scale, conspiracy theories were among their "favorite subjects." (p. 709)

He also notes that "conspiracy fantasies ... are so highly characteristic of the usurper complex." (p. 689) The topic of the "usurper complex" focused on Franklin Roosevelt during the time the study was done. It's notable that the theme of usurper has become now a standard Republican attitude toward Democratic President. And not just for official partisans. Sally Quinn's famous column expressing the contempt of the Beltway Village toward Bill Clinton, In Washington, That Letdown Feeling Washington Post 11/02/1998, gives great examples of this. She quotes the man who was for many years called The Dean Of The Washington Press Corps: "'He [Clinton] came in here and he trashed the place,' says Washington Post columnist David Broder, 'and it's not his place.'"

The usurper charge has more recently been embodied by the "birthers" like Donald Trump who have insisted that the first African-American President wasn't born in the US and is therefore ineligible to be President.

Adorno quotes an accountant in their study who:

... states quite clearly and in fairly objective terms the contradiction which seems at the hub of anti-Roosevelt sentiment:

Subject did not like Roosevelt because of WP A. It creates a class of lazy people who would rather get $20 a week than work. She feels that Roosevelt did not accomplish what he set out to do - raise the standard of the poorer classes.

The conceptions of communist, internationalist, and war-monger are close to another one previously mentioned-that of the snob. Just as the fascist agitator persistently mixes up radicals and bankers, claiming that the latter financed the revolution and that the former seek financial gains, the contradictory ideas of an ultraleftist and an exclusive person alienated from the people are brought together by anti-Roosevelt sentiment. One may venture the hypothesis that the ultimate content of both objections is the same: the resentment of the frustrated middle-class person against those who represent the idea of happiness, be it by wanting other people-even the "lazy ones" - to be happy, be it that they are enjoying life themselves. This irrationality can be grasped better on the level of personality than on that of ideology. [my emphasis]

Obviously, the rage of Republicans against the lazy is a favorite topic of conservation and of campaign appeals to "individual responsibility."

Adorno also notes the wide latitude that foreign policy gives leaders to offer a focus for expressing aggression and rage:

During the last several years all the propaganda machinery of the country has been devoted to promoting anticommunist feeling in the sense of an irrational "scare" and there are probably not many people, except followers of the "party line," who have been able to resist the incessant ideological pressure. At the same time, during the past two or three years it may have become more "conventional" to be overtly opposed to anti-Semitism, if the large number of magazine articles, books, and films with wide circulation can be regarded as symptomatic of a trend. The underlying character structure has little bearing on such fluctuations. If they could be ascertained, they would demonstrate the extreme importance of propaganda in political matters. Propaganda, when directed to the antidemocratic potential in the people, determines to a large extent the choice of the social objects of psychological aggressiveness. (p. 726) [my emphasis]

The pseudoconservatives of the postwar period still showed signs of prewar Isolationism. Hofstadter wrote of the pseudocon, "He is the most bitter of all our citizens about our involvement in the wars of the past, but seems the least concerned about avoiding the next one."

But the underlying nationalist belligerence was still there. The "libertarian" trend represented most prominently by Baby Doc Paul today has a similar posture. Baby Doc is critical of aspects US war policy. But he wants to bomb ISIS anyway.

Least surprising of all to those familiar with American politics is that subjects scoring high on the authoritarianism scale also expressed a higher intensity of white racism against blacks. This is from the chapter by William Morrow, Criminality and Antidemocratic Trends: A Study of Prison Inmates:

In the interviews, the principal traits ascribed to Negroes by high scorers are uninhibited sexuality, "laziness," "dirtiness," crude aggression, asocial acquisitiveness (petty thievery), pathological (infantile) lying, and exhibitionism. In a word, Negroes are held to be characterized by "untamed instincts," which keep them "primitive" and "childish." This imagery is partly expressed in questionnaire Item p: Negroes are "lazy, ignorant, and without self-control."

The most conventional of the prejudiced interviewees, Robert, summarizes this idea in general terms: "They have more of a primitive nature ... just want to exist as the cannibal type of man." The fascists tend to be more picturesque: "They're very closely linked with the jungle. They're built for it" (Floyd). Or, Negroes "originated from the apes" (Buck), and are "still half-African savage, no matter how dressed up they get" (Adrian).

Digby in Untitled Hullabaloo 08/06/2015 comments on the importance of race for the authoritarian base voters of today's Republican Party:

For all the blabber about Trump being the avatar of "tell-it-like-it-is", anti-Washington fervor, they [Republican base voters] really just love him for articulating their hatred for people who don't look and sound like them. That's what powers right wing populism, here and elsewhere. Sure they are against Big Gummint and bailouts etc. But mostly they just hate foreigners and African Americans taking things they don't deserve.

Regular Republican elites are nervous about all this because they can see the demographic problem they face nationally if large numbers of young American Latinos come to identify as Democrats and see Republicans as their enemies. (Party ID tends not to change.) It wouldn't last forever but it's likely to be a problem for quite some time, particularly since Mexican and Central American migration is different than earlier waves of immigration. It's always there. [my emphasis]

When rightists fall out

This is a post I wrote back in 2008 but wound up not posting. But I'm posting it know, with minor edits, because it gives some perspective on the "libertarian" position of which Rand Paul is currently the most prominent.

The reporting on the 2008 Ron Paul campaign kicked up a lot of information on the "libertarian" right.

The Libertarian Party split in 1988, after Paul's Presidential run on their ticket. The wing of the movement reflected by the Cato Institute and Reason magazine focuses on business deregulation but presents a friendly, personal-liberties face. Although since even that wing is generally opposed to anti-discrimination laws, their actual commitment to individuals' freedom from invidious discrimination is more than questionable. The Cato crowd also tends toward isolationist foreign policy.

The other wing centered around the Von Mises Institute, that wing probably best know to critics of the Cheney-Bush foreign policy through the Antiwar.com Web site. Prominent leaders in that wing of the movement were longtime Paul staffer and business associate Lew Rockwell and Old Right isolationist Murray Rothbard.

This article by Julian Sanchez and David Weigel, Who Wrote Ron Paul's Newsletters? Reason 01/16/08, gives their version of the split and an account of how the Rockwell-Rothbard "paleoconservatives", as they called themselves, begin pandering hard to racists and nativists. Sanchez and Weigel describe their strategy this way:

The [Ron Paul] newsletters' obsession with blacks and gays was of a piece with a conscious political strategy adopted at that same time by Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard. After breaking with the Libertarian Party following the 1988 presidential election, Rockwell and Rothbard formed a schismatic "paleolibertarian" movement, which rejected what they saw as the social libertinism and leftist tendencies of mainstream libertarians. In 1990, they launched the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, where they crafted a plan they hoped would midwife a broad new "paleo" coalition.

Rockwell explained the thrust of the idea in a 1990 Liberty essay entitled "The Case for Paleo-Libertarianism." To Rockwell, the LP was a "party of the stoned," a halfway house for libertines that had to be "de-loused." To grow, the movement had to embrace older conservative values. "State-enforced segregation," Rockwell wrote, "was wrong, but so is State-enforced integration. State-enforced segregation was not wrong because separateness is wrong, however. Wishing to associate with members of one's own race, nationality, religion, class, sex, or even political party is a natural and normal human impulse."

The most detailed description of the strategy came in an essay Rothbard wrote for the January 1992 Rothbard-Rockwell Report, titled "Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement." Lamenting that mainstream intellectuals and opinion leaders were too invested in the status quo to be brought around to a libertarian view, Rothbard pointed to David Duke and Joseph McCarthy as models for an "Outreach to the Rednecks," which would fashion a broad libertarian/paleoconservative coalition by targeting the disaffected working and middle classes. (Duke, a former Klansman, was discussed in strikingly similar terms in a 1990 Ron Paul Political Report.) These groups could be mobilized to oppose an expansive state, Rothbard posited, by exposing an "unholy alliance of 'corporate liberal' Big Business and media elites, who, through big government, have privileged and caused to rise up a parasitic Underclass, who, among them all, are looting and oppressing the bulk of the middle and working classes in America." (my emphasis)

See also, The Reckoning Over Ron Paul by Jamie Kirchick New Republic blog 01/15/08.

Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo, an adherent of the Rockwell-Rothbard school of "libertarianism", has written on his version of Old Right isolationist history at the online magazine Taki's Top Drawer:

The Real American Right: Part I 01/08/08

The Real American Right: Part II 01/09/08

The Real American Right: Part III 01/10/08

In the same publication, he defends the leading theorist of "national socialism" in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s: The Subversion of Lawrence Dennis 09/26/07

Cory Booker and Republican segregationists

Joan Walsh discusses the latest segregationist dance steps in The right’s pathetically low curve: How it got a pass on race and poverty Salon 07/25/2014. I was especially struck by the section on Rand "Baby Doc" Paul, who sports a rawer segregationist ideology than most Republican politicians, though that's not saying much given today's Republican Party:

Then there’s Rand Paul, continuing his "outreach" to African Americans with his visit to the Urban League annual convention. Paul actually deserves credit for trying to tackle issues of criminal justice reform with Sen. Cory Booker. But in his Friday speech he also seemed to decry voter suppression laws, insisting his goal is to "help more people vote," in the words of the Louisville Courier-Journal.

"We have to be together to defend the rights of all minorities," Paul said.

But Paul flip-flops on this issue every chance he gets. "I don’t think there is objective evidence that we're precluding African-Americans from voting any longer," he said last year, after the Supreme Court curtailed the Voting Rights Act. But a few months later, he seemed to have second thoughts.

"Everybody's gone completely crazy on this voter-ID thing," Paul the New York Times. "I think it’s wrong for Republicans to go too crazy on this issue because it's offending people."

That was big news. But then, confronted by his friends at Fox, he lurched into reverse. Paul assured Sean Hannity he was fully on board with the Republican voter ID strategy. "No I agree, there's nothing wrong with it. To see Eric Holder you've got to show your driver's license to get in the building. So I don't really object to having some rules for how we vote. I show my driver’s license every time I vote in Kentucky ... and I don’t feel like it is a great burden. So it's funny that it got reported that way."

"It's funny it got reported that way," when that's what Paul said. [my emphasis]

I've written before about Booker's dubious politics, What kind of Democrat is Cory Booker? Not a reliably progressive one 08/14/2013. He's been a Wall Street loyalist, even criticizing Obama for making an issue out of the harmful acts of Bain Capital under Mitt Romney's direction. Booker's personal business dealings are entirely admirable.

In that earlier post, I included this video of Sam Seder talking about Booker's politics Cory Booker's Role Models: Ted Cruz, Rand Paul 08/13/2013:

And I also cited an article about Booker's ties to Pentecostal Christian Dominionists, Susie Madrak's Anybody But Cory Booker C&L 08/12/2013:

Cory Booker is very, very tight with the religious right wing -- but he's also very careful about what he says, since he hopes to run for president one day and cultivates strong LGBT support. The problem is, he hangs with the Dominionists. Is this a case of "I'll work with anybody who wants to help my city", or is there something more?

He's very religious himself. So where are the lines he won't cross? Is it okay for Democrats to validate and support any parts of the right-wing agenda that's politically convenient? [my emphasis]

And he's not just co-sponsoring a prison reform bill with Baby Doc. He's going out of his way to generate publicity about his friendly alliance with the hardline Kentucky segregationist.

Sarah Smith reports for Politico (aka, Tiger Beat on the Potomac per Charlie Pierce) that Cory Booker, Rand Paul join on 'common sense' 07/09/2014. It features an embedded video titled there, "Rand Paul, Cory Booker talk bromance." And it's pretty clear that Booker isn't just tactically cooperating with Baby Doc on a politics-makes-strange-bedfellows issue of prison reform. Booker is branding himself as a partner of segregationists and Ayn Rand disciple Baby Doc:

The two also talked about their friendship, to applause throughout the room.

"I'm just wondering if we could get a reality show and if Ethics would allow us to get any compensation," Paul joked.

They used their friendship and collaboration as an example for a government that’s been widely dubbed as too partisan to get anything done. Paul criticized each party for overreaching on deals instead of compromising; Booker, for his part, got agitated over too much talk on parties and too little talk on issues.

"Why don't we stop talking about party and start talking about the real issues?" Booker demanded.

At the Playbook event, Paul and Booker covered a variety of issues — and steadfastly declined to answer political questions like their opinions on the immigration crisis and the fate of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. They discussed minority outreach, technology and innovation for low-income communities — during which Booker mentioned the benefit of the free market.
Paul leaned forward.

"Maybe you could become a Republican," he said. "You said 'free market.'" [my emphasis]

It's worth people keeping a close eye on what they mean by "prison reform," what it could become in the legislative sausage-making and what will actually past the House dominated by Baby Doc's segregationist colleagues. Prison reform is very much a civil rights issue because of the disproportionate and unfair effects the justice system has on African-Americans and other minorities. So is this House going to let a bill that seriously ameliorates that problem pass?

Bloomberg Business Week reported the same story in much the same tone in a piece by Josh Eidelson, Rand Paul and Cory Booker's Washington Love Affair 07/17/2014:

As one lobbyist in the hall announced, they were “just here for the show”: the first joint appearance by Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, and Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, Washington's newest odd couple.

The two politicians appear to have little in common except, perhaps, the ambition to be president someday. One is a Texas-reared libertarian and longtime antitax activist who built a thriving ophthalmology practice before becoming a standard-bearer of the Tea Party movement. The other is an Ivy League-educated Rhodes Scholar, beloved by progressives, who built his political career in the postindustrial wasteland of Newark, where he was a councilman and then mayor. "I'm worried who’s Felix and who’s Oscar," Booker joked at the Newseum event, organized by Politico and hosted by Mike Allen, the capital’s chief gossip.

In recent weeks the freshman legislators have established a close working relationship that harks back to a long-ago era of political cooperation on Capitol Hill. [my emphasis]

Our Pod Pundits just loo-oove this stuff: Bipartisanship! Cooperation! Reaching across the aisle!

But notice what it takes to stage this fantasy: defining Booker as "beloved by progressives." A shamelessly-Wall Street-friendly corporate Dem, who made millions from ethically dubious business dealings, closely tied to Christianist theocrats ... "beloved by progressives."

"Why don't we stop talking about party and start talking about the real issues?" Yeah, a New Kind of Democrat, yee-haw!

He sounds more like "Joe Lieberman" for the second half of the 2010's to me!

Also, credit to Eidelson for identifying Politico's Mike Allen as "the capital's chief gossip."

Tags: cory booker, rand paul

Baby Doc Paul and plagiarism

It's good to periodically revisit some basics. Rand "Baby Doc" Paul's recent problems over plagiarism made me reflect again on just what constitutes plagiarism.

The American Historical Association has a Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct (2005) which includes Section 4 on plagiarism. This excerpt gives a pretty good picture of what I think of as plagiarism:

Plagiarism includes more subtle abuses than simply expropriating the exact wording of another author without attribution. Plagiarism can also include the limited borrowing, without sufficient attribution, of another person's distinctive and significant research findings or interpretations. Of course, historical knowledge is cumulative, and thus in some contexts—such as textbooks, encyclopedia articles, broad syntheses, and certain forms of public presentation—the form of attribution, and the permissible extent of dependence on prior scholarship, citation, and other forms of attribution will differ from what is expected in more limited monographs. As knowledge is disseminated to a wide public, it loses some of its personal reference. What belongs to whom becomes less distinct. But even in textbooks a historian should acknowledge the sources of recent or distinctive findings and interpretations, those not yet a part of the common understanding of the profession. Similarly, while some forms of historical work do not lend themselves to explicit attribution (e.g., films and exhibitions), every effort should be made to give due credit to scholarship informing such work.

Plagiarism, then, takes many forms. The clearest abuse is the use of another's language without quotation marks and citation. More subtle abuses include the appropriation of concepts, data, or notes all disguised in newly crafted sentences, or reference to a borrowed work in an early note and then extensive further use without subsequent attribution. Borrowing unexamined primary source references from a secondary work without citing that work is likewise inappropriate. All such tactics reflect an unworthy disregard for the contributions of others.

No matter what the context, the best professional practice for avoiding a charge of plagiarism is always to be explicit, thorough, and generous in acknowledging one's intellectual debts. (emphasis in original)

From this report from Luke Johnson, Rand Paul Adding Footnotes So People 'Leave Me The Hell Alone' Huffington Post 11/05/2013, it sounds like Baby Doc overstepped the boundaries in a print article in the Washington Times. And not for the first time: Andrew Kaczynski, Three Pages Of Rand Paul’s Book Were Plagiarized From Think Tank BuzzFeed 11/02/2013.

Still, as generally unsympathetic as I find Baby Doc's segregationist politics and thinking, I found myself having some sympathy with him over his descriptions in speeches of a couple of movies that supposedly had been plagiarized from Wikipedia. So he strung together a couple of words during a political speech in the same order they appear in a Wikipedia article. Who cares? And isn't Wikipedia crowd-sourced? How do we know he didn't write the original descriptions himself?

But this response on ABC's This Week is a good example of the kind of OCD response that Bircher types love, even when it sounds as whiny as this:

Maybe the non-FOX press should start inspecting FOX News broadcasts for unattributed quotes of Republican talking points, Republican politicians, and the FOX News guests who were spouting the same words in the same order a few minutes before.

Tags: plagiarism, rand paul

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 17: Vote suppression

Gary May in this excerpt from his book Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy (2013), How conservatives invented "voter fraud" to attack civil rights Salon 04/14/2013, discusses the segregationist voter suppression laws and tricks that the Republican Party has made central to their long-term strategy. The nominal justification they use, when they can keep their minds focused on the official line, anyway, is that these measures are intended to prevent voter fraud. But sometimes they slip and actually tell the truth in public:

Although Republicans continued to insist that the new laws were created solely to fight voter fraud, GOP officials twice revealed another motive. At a meeting of the Pennsylvania Republican State Committee in June 2012, Mike Turzai, the House majority leader, boasted openly that Pennsylvania’s new law would affect the next presidential election. Proudly listing the GOP’s achievements, Turzai said, “Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania: Done.” Similarly, when, in August 2012, the Columbia Dispatch asked Doug Preise, a prominent Republican official and adviser to the state’s governor, why he so strongly supported curtailing early voting in Ohio, Preise admitted, “I really actually feel that we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban — read African American — voter turn-out machine.” These admissions indicate that winning the presidency by suppressing the minority vote was the real reason behind the laws requiring voter IDs, limited voting hours, obstructed registration, and the like that Republican legislatures passed since the party’s victory in 2010. [my emphasis]

Requiring certain types of government-issued IDs is a favorite method, which they justify (when they're being polite!) by pretending that in-person voter fraud is rampant. But it's actually so rare as to be effectively non-existent. Yes, there's that little evidence for the claimed "voter fraud" problem.

But these laws are increasingly popular with Republicans:

Before the Republican victory in the 2010 midterms, only two states had rigorous voter ID requirements. By August 2012, 34 state legislatures had considered photo ID laws and 13 had passed them; five more made it past state legislatures only to be vetoed by the Democratic governors of Montana, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina and New Hampshire. By that same summer, a number of states already had the new laws in place: Pennsylvania (where it was estimated that 9.2 percent of registered voters had no photo ID), Alabama, Mississippi (approved by referendum), Rhode Island, New Hampshire (whose state General Court overrode the governor’s veto) and five whose sponsors were all ALEC members — Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin. In Alabama, Kansas and Tennessee, people wishing to register or vote must show their birth certificate. To acquire that document, they must pay a fee, which many believe is the equivalent of the poll tax, banned by the Constitution’s twenty-fourth amendment. Minnesota's citizens would vote on a state constitutional amendment in the 2012 election; if passed, voters could cast their ballot after showing a government-issued photo ID. [my emphasis]

This is straight out of the Southern segregationist playbook.

It's also worth remembering if you hear anyone who supports these voter-suppression laws say how much they love the Constitution and its "original intention." It was many decades after the Constitution went into effect before "photo ID" was available to the general public. The Frenchman Nicéphore Niépce produced the first photograph in the sense we know it no earlier than 1826. He successfully took a picture of a courtyard. He exposed the pewter plate medium he was using for eight hours to get the picture. By 1835 or so, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre had figured out to use iodized silver and mercury to record the image and got the exposure time down to 30 minutes.

Nope, no "photo ID" in the original intent.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2013, rand paul, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2013, April 16: Again on Rand Paul at Howard University

Rand Paul's awkward appearance at Howard University has generated quite a bit of commentary relating to the present-day segregationist mentality.

Charlie Pierce in Keeping Up With the Pauls Esquire Politics Blog 04/12/2013 reminds us what a politically extreme act the father-song pair of Ron "Papa Doc" and Rand "Baby Doc" Paul really are. Papa Doc is joining with two other neo-Confederate and Christian dominionist-minded sorts, Gary North and Thomas Woods, Jr., to produce far-right propaganda to be passed off as textbooks to Christian homeschoolers. And he notes of Baby Doc:

And, believe this, the kid's not much better, just a little slicker. His hilarious floundering at Howard University this week wasn't just a function of his being dumb as a stump, though he really is, it also was a result of his attempting to fashion the discreet de facto bigotry of his fundamental political philosophy — "I am not a racist, although almost every social policy I champion inevitably has resulted in terribly racist outcomes." — into something more palatable, which the kids at Howard would not buy if it came with a free introductory bag of emeralds. [my emphasis]

On this story, see also Rachel Tabachnick's Ron Paul Curriculum Launched by Reconstructionist Gary North and Neo-Confederate Thomas Woods Talk to Action 04/09/2013, who notes that Woods proudly describes himself as a founder of the white racist and overtly neo-Confederate League of the South:

Woods is from Massachusetts with degrees from Harvard and Columbia, but he has described himself as one of "the founders of the League of the South." He is also affiliated with the Abbeville Institute, described by the Chronicle of Higher Education as a group of 64 scholars nostalgic for the Old South and Secession. Time Magazine described the institute, founded by Emory University professor Donald Livingston, as a group of "Lincoln loathers." The Southern Poverty Law Center has listed the Abbeville Institute founder as one of the leaders in the modern neo-Confederate movement and, as described in a Chronicle of Higher Education article, pointed out the following quote in its mission statement.

I wrote in my earlier post on Baby Doc's speech that I don't think his Howard University speech was really aimed at an African-American audience but rather at Republican white base voters. Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Journey to Mecca The Atlantic Online 04/15/2013 is more generous in that regard, writing:

I think Rand Paul deserves credit. These sorts of speeches are often done by conservatives as a way of signaling to moderate whites that they aren't racist. ... I think Paul's was different. I can't remember a potential Republican presidential candidate standing before a group of black students like that and actually taking questions. And these were not plants. Paul got the full brunt of a school where black history and politics are the air.

He then proceeds to critique his performance and obvious lack of preparation. "It's not so much that Rand Paul is a Republican that matters, its his obvious lack of either good African-American advisers, or advisors who simply cared enough to do some recon. Someone who knew Howard could have told him that he was walking into a lion's den. This is the real and hard value of diversity ..."

But in the subsequent post The Limits of Good Faith 04/105/2013, he was already repenting his generosity. It seems that when Baby Doc was later asked about his reception at Howard, he fell back on standard white-whining that the mean black people were pickin' on him: "I think some think a white person is not allowed to talk about black history ... which I think is unfair." And Coates concludes:

Rand Paul went to Howard University, lied, and then got his ass kicked. That's not so bad. I got my ass kicked regularly at Howard. That was the reason my parents sent me there. But having gotten his ass kicked, his answer is to not to reflect but to make an allegation of racial discrimination.

One of the things I try to do in my work is -- in general -- take people at their word. It's very hard to communicate about anything without good faith. This, of course, assumes that communication is the goal. That was my assumption about Rand Paul. I was clearly wrong.

Elspeth Reeve in Rand Paul's Twisted History Blames GOP Race Problem on Depression-Era Gifts The Atlantic Wire 04/10/2013 takes on some of Baby Doc's revisionist history:

Rand Paul's explanation for how Republicans lost the support of black voters sounds a lot like Mitt Romney's explanation for why he lost the 2012 election — that Obama won because he offered "gifts," "especially the African-American community, the Hispanic community and young people." Rand Paul's explanation is wrong. Paul did not mention that the New Deal is why white people voted for Democrats, too. ...

Paul only got to it when asked by a student whether he was from the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln or "post-1968 Republican party — Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan." Paul disagreed that there was any difference between the Lincoln party and the Reagan one. "People perceive those as being completely different parties," Paul said. ...

There is a difference! Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 general election campaign near Philadelphia, Mississippi, a place that is solely famous for being the site of three civil rights murders. Reagan invented "welfare queens." In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich said he would crack down on crime by building emergency prisons and advertising longer sentences on "MTV and rap radio." Rand Paul's father Ron Paul made millions of dollars selling newsletters that warned of a looming "race war." This is not disputed history. Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman apologized for the Southern Strategy in 2005.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2013, rand paul, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2013, April 14: Rand Paul tries to talk to some Negroes, or, real-time white racism, playing somewhere near you (2)

This video from the FreedomWorksAction YouTube channel, Liberty & Civil Rights speech by Senator Rand Paul Howard University 04/10/2013, shows "Baby Doc" Paul's full speech at historically African-American Howard University this past week:

Baby Doc's cringe-worthy presentation is like a time-capsule out of 1960 or something of a stiff, educated John Birch Society doctor trying to talk friendly to "the Negroes." If he weren't such a jerk, I would almost feel sorry for him in his obvious stiffness and general cluelessness about what he's doing. Like around 30:20 when he forgets the name of the former African-American Massachusetts Senator Edward Brook, who he calls "Edwin Brooks" after the audience tries to help him.

Is it fair for me to label this post as providing an example real-time white racism"? After all, he didn't say "n----r," like Jim Gile.

If you think that white racism is a matter of manners, then, yes, it would be unfair.

But speeches like this were always a part of the defense of segregation. At around 26:00, a questioner raises the real-time issue of voter suppression targeted to African-American and Latino voters. He defends this typical segregationist practice by brushing it off. And he criticizes literacy tests in the Deep South of past times that are not one of the current Republican menu of voter suppression methods. He doesn't criticize any that his Party actually is promoting.

His whole framework of discussing history is typical of the way in which neo-Confederates make up cartoon versions of history. At around 29:45ff, for instance, he refers to "horrible Jim Crow and horrible racism that happened in the 30s, 40s, 50s, it was all Democrats." Kevin Levin writes of the speech, "Paul's collapse of the past 150 years constitutes not only a superficial understanding of American history, but a false Civil War Memory." (Rand Paul's False Civil War Memory Civil War Memory 04/11/2013)

The real history of white racism doesn't interest him. Much less its institutional nature. And he's certainly not willing to acknowledge anything in the current Republican Party programs that could even be legitimately perceived as expressions of white racism, other than inadequate advertising.

I don't think this kind of presentation by Baby Doc is really aimed at African-American audience at all, except possibly those who aspire to be a Herman Cain of the future. His speech could serve as an example of what Republican white people think that "respectable Negroes" should be saying about politics and race.

But his real targets is conservative Republican white base voters, who will be encouraged to see him talking smack to predominantly black audience and informing them what a respectable Republican African-American would sound like, i.e., like a conservative white guy such as Baby Doc Paul.

Jon Stewart skewers Baby Doc's speech here in a perceptive way:

Tags: confederate heritage month 2013, rand paul, white racism

Aqua Buddha goon applies Cheney Rules

Cheney rules being: if I shoot you in the face, you have to apologize to me.

Randy Paul goon version: Rand Paul Supporter Tim Profitt Wants Victim To Apologize To Him Huffington Post 10/27/2010.

Tags: radical right, rand paul

A serious bit of political thuggery in Kentucky

This video shows the attack by two goons, Rand Paul supporters, assaulting a woman from MoveOn.org last night outside the studio where Paul was debating his Democratic opponent in the Senate race, Jack Conway:



Two obviously very brave white guys gang up on a woman, one holds her on the pavement and the other stomps on her head. This little maneuver left her with a concussion.

Seeing the video of this, these two brave defenders of White Power may have been trying to do what's called "curbing", in which the assailants put the target's face on a curb and stomp on her head, which can simultaneously break face bones, cause neck injuries and leave a concussion.

Brave heroes of freedom like these, though, always claim "the other side does it too." So some female White Power Paul supporter claims somebody stepped on her foot. So "both sides" are at fault. We'll see whether the Tea Party lovers of freedom and order will rat out their fellow thugs who assaulted the woman in the video. And I'm sure *none* of this has to do with with FOX News and Rush Limbaugh incessently accusing MoveOn.org of being anti-American and various other forms of evil.

John Hudson of the National Journal gave it the boths-sides-do-it treatment in LIGHTNING ROD: Kentucky's Head Stompin' Senate Debate 10/26/2010:

Kentucky's rough-and-tumble Senate race got even rougher Monday night as violence erupted outside the Rand Paul-Jack Conway debate. In one scuffle, a woman from the liberal group MoveOn was held down and kicked in the head by two male Paul supporters. In another, a Conway supporter stomped on the foot of a female Paul supporter who was recovering from foot surgery. That woman's surgical incision was cut open from the blow and both women ended up filing assault reports. The Conway and Paul camps condemned the violence.

The assault shown is this video is some serious political thuggery. There are nonviolent ways to respond to people in a political crowd getting pushy or even violent, and as a general rule the nonviolent approaches are preferable.

But stomping on someone's head and neck can do serious and permanent damage. In fact, it's hard to believe that wasn't their intent. Any bystander intervening to stop an assault like this would be legally and morally justified in doing so, even if it required doing serious physical injury to one of the assailants.

I've been to many protests and political rallies and other types of political meetings, including some that involved scuffles and people who were out to start a fight. Hell, I work at a university where hardly a week goes by without seeing some protest or other on campus. And I know this head-and-neck stomping business is unusally nasty shit.

If you know anyone who is the sort of white-trash type who enjoys going out with one of his buddies and assaulting women like we see in this video, I would offer a couple of pieces of advice. One is that you might want to tell them doing stuff like this could wind up with them being injured and doing serious prison time on top of it. The other is that they are the kind of rotten punks not decent person would want to hang around with any more than they absoutely had to.

The evidence on the allegation of the woman who claimed her injured foot was stomped isn't as clear from the reporting as on the head-and-neck stomping assault. If the foot-stomping incident turns out to be true, I don't have a problem saying it was wrong, with a full stop at the end of the sentence.

I also won't have any problem distinguishing such an incident from what we see in this video. What these two punks did to that woman could have left her seriously paralized with a neck injury.

Bill Estep and Josh Kegley report in Rand Paul volunteer being served with criminal summons after stomping incident Bluegrass Politics 10/26/2010 that someone is being charged in the attck:

A supporter of Republican U.S. Senate nominee Rand Paul is being served with a criminal summons after he was seen on video stepping on a liberal activist’s head, according to Lexington police

Tim Profitt, a volunteer with the Republican’s U.S. Senate campaign, apologized on Tuesday and told The Associated Press that the camera angle made the scuffle Monday night appear worse that it was. He criticized police for not stepping in and says other supporters warned authorities about the activist.

Rand Paul, the fine Christian white man who did a full-blown WATB act when he claimed Conway was attack his sacred faith, hid like a good White Citizens Council type behind a both-sides-do-it statement:

Paul has cut ties with Profitt, of Paris, Ky., who allegedly assaulted a liberal activist during a rally Monday night in Lexington, his campaign announced Tuesday afternoon.

Paul had been criticized earlier in the day for not denouncing the attack strongly enough, but the new statement said Paul is “extremely disappointed in, and condemns” the actions of what it called a supporter.

“The Paul campaign has disassociated itself from the volunteer who took part in this incident, and once again urges all activists — on both sides — to remember that their political passions should never manifest themselves in physical altercations of any kind,” the statement said. [my emphasis]

And, as we see in that report, also in good White Power fashion, he cut his fan loose as quickly as he could. Sorry, dude, that's the kind of crowd head-stomping punks like you run with. The White Power types aren't know for being big on this whole loyalty thing when it might inconvenience them. Also:

On Fox News Tuesday morning, Paul said there was a lot of passion on both sides when he showed up for the debate. Scores of Paul and Conway supporters had gathered in the parking lot of KET.

"It really was something where you walk into a daze of lights flashing, people yelling and screaming, bumping up. There was a bit of a crowd control problem," Paul said on Fox. "I don’t want anybody, though, to be involved in things that aren’t civil. I think this should always be about the issues. It is an unusual situation to have so many people, so passionate on both sides, jockeying back and forth and it wasn't something that I liked or anybody liked about that situation." [my emphasis]

The Paul supporter with the foot-stomping accusation isn't providing much detail, it seems:

The stomping was one of two reported to Lexington police outside the debate. Paul supporter Marsha Foster, 49, reported that earlier in the night a person had intentionally stomped on her broken foot, causing "minor visible injuries," according to a police report. Foster could not be reached immediately for comment.

There is a Marsha Foster listed on the website of Liberty Candidates.org with the following bio:

Marsha Foster
Team member
Candidate for Nicholas County Constable
Nicholas County, KY

Marsha is a stay-at-home-mom home schooling midwife apprentice liberty activist who lives in Kentucky. Her business is Great Expectations Birth Services.

She serves on a watchdog board reviewing the current activity in the KY state legislature. She has served as Campaign for Liberty KY-CD4 coordinator. She is the Nicholas County GOP vice chair and has served as district and state delegate. (Hey, you gotta start somewhere!)

She is a current (2010) candidate for Nicholas county constable. The inspiration to get involved in the fight for liberty came during Ron Paul's presidential run in 2008.

She is a former CPA/tax preparer but sent the certificate back and retired from tax prep for ethical reasons.

It includes this photo:



Here's a video of Aqua Buddha commenting on the assault incident:



As Emma Mustich notes in Paul, MoveOn respond Salon 10/26/2010, in this interview Aqua Buddha "conspicuously declined the opportunity to condemn the attack."

Dave Neiwert reports in Rand Paul's lame response: Won't condemn or disavow assault by supporter, calls it 'unusual situation' C&L 10/26/2010, "The stomper has been identified as Rand Paul's Bourbon County coordinator, Tim Profitt."

Tags: radical right, rand paul