A chance to become a truly multiracial democracy

Joan McCarter of Daily Kos explained why the tax season that is about to start is going to be a mess. It will be so much of a mess that officials at the Treasury are talking to reporters to lower expectations. The IRS has about 15,000 employees, about the same as in 1970, even though the population has grown by 60% since then. Those 15,000 employees will be faced with 240 million phone calls this season – you will be on hold a long time if you speak to someone at all. That’s because Republicans keep forcing budget cuts on the agency. Their reasoning is simple. An understaffed IRS can audit some working class and poor people with straightforward returns but just don’t have the staff to audit the complicated returns of rich people, the ones whose tax bills are six figures and up and who have accountants and lawyers to litigate each step. The Build Back Better bill, the one that hasn’t passed yet, allocates money to beef up the IRS. This could bring in another $400 billion in taxes. That whole bill is blocked by Sen. Joe Manchin – who is likely one of those rich people with a big tax bill he doesn’t want to pay. Historian Kevin Kruse tweeted a thread about the uses of the filibuster. He included images of newspapers of the time. He started with the filibuster against a civil rights bill in 1874. There are filibusters against confirming a black official, anti-lynching bills, bills to end discrimination in employment or housing, and more civil rights bills. This definitely shows the purpose of the filibuster was racism. Kruse added the list is not exhaustive. I mentioned yesterday that Reagan came up with a way for conservatives to rewrite Martin Luther King’s legacy. Laura Clawson of Kos wants us to remember the full scope of MLK’s message, which was not popular at the time. She mentioned a couple areas: He spoke out against the Vietnam War. That prompted major newspapers to declare he had diminished his usefulness. He focused on poverty. He recognized integrating a lunch counter didn’t really cost the nation. But ending poverty would cost billions. Clawson concluded:

There were of course those who brutally opposed integrated lunch counters and hotels and the right to vote—one major party is still committed to limiting voting rights, though with less personal violence than in King’s lifetime. But as King saw, those changes, however important they were, threatened fewer people’s complacent comfort than calling for the nation to fix the economic results of centuries of slavery and segregation. That’s a fight we’re still having, and that’s one reason why if he had lived, King would likely still be a controversial figure today rather than a depoliticized saintly figure.

Godwin’s Law is “as an online discussion grows longer the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1” – meaning it becomes more certain. Mehdi Hasan, host of his own show in MSNBC, has now created Mehdi’s Law:

As a discussion on racism grows longer, the probability of a Republican quoting one out-of-context line from MLK approaches one

. A few days ago I wrote the new conservative buzzword is “transparency.” A bill in the Indiana legislature proposes that schools must put all curriculum materials on the internet so parents could decry the use of this text or that. Walter Einenkel of Kos described the bill in more detail with a piece titled, “New Indiana GOP bill allows everyone except teachers to decide what is actual history.” Speaking of the bill’s lead sponsor Sen. Scott Baldwin, Einenkel wrote:

If it almost feels like they are trying to codify a certain, very narrow set of fascist, conservative, white-power rules, that’s because they are. Like virtually anything coming from the right wing of the country resembling a “policy” these days, this one is yet another projection of Baldwin and his own political party’s sins. These attempts at trying to quash “divisive” subjects are simply attempts to actually cancel education. The claim that Baldwin and other Republicans are trying to keep “politics” out of our schools by allowing partisan voting committees to supersede educators on what they can and cannot teach is the equivalent of letting voters decide on whether or not the sun is at the center of our solar system. ... This bill, this pretend “transparency,” is the poison pill that conservatives have been searching for to kill public education forever. The adage that “reality has a liberal bias” is not simply true. It is the fundamental issue facing the Republican Party in regards to our democracy.

Michel Martin of NPR talked to Steven Levitsky, a co-author of the book How Democracies Die. They talked about the filibuster and how undemocratic it is, then about other things authoritarians do to gain power. Levitsky said if American democracy dies it won’t because of another attack like a year ago.

Elected autocrats - almost always, the first thing that they do, the first thing they try to do is capture the referee, is place loyalists in the courts, in the attorney general's office, the prosecutor's office, in the electoral authorities, in the intelligence agencies, in all the places that allow the law to be used as a partisan weapon both to protect the government from the investigation and to investigate and punish rivals.

Levitsky asked if anything that encourages him:

I think that the United States has an opportunity to do something that is really unique in world history, and that is become a truly multiracial democracy. We became a multiracial democracy on paper in 1965, but we will not be a truly multiracial democracy until individuals of every ethnic group get treated equally by the state. We've made enormous progress in that direction. We're becoming a much more diverse and more racially egalitarian society. It's precisely that movement towards multiracial democracy that Trumpism is pushing back against. But I think we're going to get there because the multiracial Democratic coalition in this country is a majority, it is growing and it's particularly pronounced among younger generations. But I actually think we stand a good chance of getting there. And when we get to the other side, the U.S. has a chance to become a multiracial democracy that can be a model for the world.

Andee Tagle of NPR’s Life Kit spoke to Nadia Craddock of the Center for Appearance Research in the UK about diet culture. That can go by a lot of different names, such as wellness or healthy lifestyle. Craddock said:

But it's just a rebranding. There's that very common error of equating health and fitness as one and the same and that you can tell how healthy someone is by their body size.

Tagle added:

Thinness and health are not the same, and fatness does not necessarily equate to being unhealthy.

Telling someone they look great is a good thing. Adding, “Did you lose weight?” is Diet Culture speaking. Also be careful how you talk to yourself, that you don’t reinforce Diet Culture.