Felt genuinely victimized by the prospect of equality

In honor of Indigenous People’s Day (yesterday) Melissa Higgins of Daily Kos gathered together several lists of music, movies, and books by and about indigenous people. A cartoon appropriate during Supreme Court confirmation hearings. In hearings today Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett was asked about same-sex marriage. As part of her evasive answer Barrett said:

I have never discriminated on the basis of sexual preference and would never discriminate on the basis of sexual preference.

Kerry Eleveld of Kos explained why that’s a bad, and revealing, answer.

From a social standpoint, only someone stuck in the mindset of last-century anti-LGBTQ dogma would embrace use of the term “preference.” Gay individuals don't wake up one day and decide they prefer dating people of the same sex like they prefer chocolate chip cookies to oatmeal raisin. Did Barrett wake up one morning and decide dating men was a choice for her? No. But the notion that anyone chooses to be gay or date people of the same sex is not only antiquated, it's the also the baseline that anti-LGBTQ activists have used for decades to advance and defend laws expressly discriminating against gay, lesbian, and transgender Americans. … If you believe sexual orientation is a preference, why grant same-sex marital rights to people who could choose otherwise?

In addition, while Barrett’s children attended Trinity School, a private school in South Bend, IN, she was on the board of the school and actively enforced the school’s policy to not accept children from unmarried or same-sex couples. Though she didn’t directly answer the question, she did tell us her views. And lied while doing so. Dartagnan of the Kos community discussed an article by Eric Levitz of the New York Magazine. The central question, as Dartagnan put it, is why would Moscow Mitch and his GOP colleagues

believe they can effectively abandon millions of Americans to homelessness, hunger, and unemployment, even consigning American businesses to bankruptcy, by stonewalling further efforts by Democrats to provide COVID-19 relief funding.

Part of the answer is that a majority of the GOP senators are not up for reelection this year and they would vote against a “blue state bailout.” If Mitch brought it to the floor they would question his leadership. A more important part of the answer is even if Mitch loses his majority now the chances are very good he’ll get it back soon – as in two years. Part of this is 30% of the population votes for 70% of the senators – all those low population red states. And another part is the GOP has said in the past that when they’re not in power they will prevent the Democrats from being able to govern. That’s a reason why Amy Coney Barrett is being rushed to the Supreme Court. The GOP will litigate every progressive law passed under Biden’s leadership. Nothing will get done. The GOP will campaign on the inability of the Dems to do anything and voters will put them back in power. Georgia Logothetis, in her pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times discussing Democratic calls for reform of the Supreme Court. Here’s part of it, which my friend and debate partner would appreciate:

Say this for Republicans: They are very good at umbrage. It might even be sincere; from Reconstruction to the New Deal to the civil rights revolution, conservatives have long felt genuinely victimized by the prospect of equality. That doesn’t mean, however, that bad-faith right-wing arguments about the courts merit a respectful hearing.

Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa of Gaslit Nation had Timothy Snyder on their show (one that I haven’t looked at yet). So when Kendzior’s twitter feed had an interesting tweet from Snyder I read it, then looked at his feed. Here are five worth quoting. One, including a video of part of the nasty guy’s balcony speech.

Mr. Trump's posture of the strong man who survived because of his strength only works if the rest of us are weaker and die.

Two, referring to the nasty guy’s tax returns.

Let us not destroy our democracy so that a lying, cheating failure can avoid the consequences of lying, cheating, and failing. It looks like the presidency is Mr. Trump‘s one hope of avoiding poverty, prison, or both. This is why, from his perspective, he must win.

Three, related to two.

The Trump campaign is tainted by legal and financial desperation. Mr. Trump is not only desperate because he's down in the polls. He's desperate because he's in a typical authoritarian situation – fearing jail or the poorhouse if he loses.

Four, quoting Zack Beauchamp of Vox:

In short, there is a consensus among comparative politics scholars that the Republican Party is one of the most anti-democratic political parties in the developed world.

Five, a quote from his own book On Tyranny.

It’s important not to talk about this as just an election. It’s an election surrounded by the authoritarian language of a coup d’etat. The opposition has to win the election and it has to win the aftermath of the election.

I read that article on Vox by Zack Beauchamp. In 2019 nearly 2,000 experts in comparative democracy were asked to rate political parties of democracies on two metrics, their commitment to democratic principles and commitment to the rights of ethnic minorities. The higher the number the more anti-democratic and intolerant the party is. The USA GOP is in the upper left of the chart, high in both measures. Its neighbors in the chart are Turkey’s AKP, a leading jailer of journalists, and Poland’s PiS, which has threatened dissenting judges with criminal punishment. The USA Dems are towards the lower left, near the median on democratic principles and well below the median (which is the good side) on minority rights. Wrote Beauchamp:

There is no authoritarian plot behind the GOP’s recent maneuvers, and no secret plan to end elections or declare martial law. What there is, instead, is systematic disinterest in behaving according to the democratic rules of the game. The GOP views the Democrats as so illegitimate and dangerous that they are willing to employ virtually any tactic that they can think of in order to entrench their own advantage. This is perhaps the party’s core animating ideology, at every level: we must win because the Democrats cannot be given power.

I shouldn’t leave off the hope, little bit about how to get the GOP out of this situation. Beauchamp wrote:

Any effort to fix American politics needs to be clear-eyed on this point: The Republican Party is so beyond what’s normal in a healthy democracy that some kind of radical pro-democracy reform is required — be it ending the filibuster, court-packing, DC and Puerto Rico statehood, a new Voting Rights Act, or all of above — to try and turn things around. “The Republicans pose too much of an authoritarian threat,” Harvard’s Levitsky tells me, “to simply go on with business as usual.”