Cultural decadence, feminism, and ladies with too many cats

An Associated Press article posted on Daily Kos reported:

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper in Washington, D.C., ruled that the Kennedy Center board’s March 16 vote to close the facility was “ill-informed and seemingly preordained” with no regard for its legal obligations. “The trustees might have assessed the propriety of closure in a number of prudent ways. This was not one,” he wrote. Cooper also concluded that the board “overstepped its statutory bounds” by unilaterally adding Trump’s name to the center. Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it, he said.

The board will appeal. They also said the Center really does need renovations (though I’m sure the place probably doesn’t need to close for two years to do them and doesn’t need to expose the building’s steel skeleton in the process). In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Lauren Gepford wrote in her own Substack about the Democratic Party:

We keep treating every election loss like a communications failure or a leadership failure when the deeper reality is that the Democratic Party apparatus itself no longer functions coherently enough to sustain a strong national brand. The “party brand” problem still deserves the #1 spot it held a decade ago. But branding isn’t just slogans and ads. A political brand is the external expression of an institution’s internal reality. And right now, the internal reality of the Democratic Party is fragmentation, bureaucracy, process obsession, and organizational incoherence. I spent 16 years in Democratic politics, from volunteering for Obama in 2008 to serving as a state party executive director and later executive director of a national party-aligned organization that coordinated with 40+ state parties and 500+ local parties in 2024. Somewhere along that journey, I lost about 90% of my clarity around what the Democratic Party actually is, what it means, and what its purpose is supposed to be — and that’s a problem.

The Bulwark has an article about Ken Paxton winning big in the Texas primary for the US Senate over incumbent John Cornyn.

This result came as a heavy blow to anyone still carrying a hopeful torch for some unsullied original-flavor Republican party to reemerge from the ashes of Trumpism. Believe it or not, these people are still out there; some of them are even senators themselves. For a decade now, these senators have clung frantically to the idea that, if they just stick with Trump for now, eventually he’ll ride off into the sunset and leave them in control of their own party again. And in the meantime, sticking with Trump had its direct benefits: It seemed for a while like a bulletproof shield against grassroots-insurgent primary challenges. You couldn’t find a better poster child for the accommodationist approach that the GOP Senate old guard took than Big John.

Dana Dubois of Blue Amp discussing the nasty guy’s administration calling on women to have more babies. Yes, the birth rate is way down and the nation has an interest to maintain a healthy birth rate.

And yet, here we are. Teen pregnancy rates are down, and Republicans think it’s a bad thing. Young adults are delaying marriage and parenthood. And rather than asking why Americans might feel hesitant about bringing children into this particular moment in history, the pronatalist MAGA right has decided the problem is cultural decadence, feminism, career women, and ladies with too many cats. Women need to log off Slack, put on prairie dresses, go full tradwife and start making babies again, I guess. Except many young Americans are having the exact opposite reaction. And can you blame them? If you wanted to design a society specifically engineered to make people feel terrified of parenthood, you would probably build something pretty close to modern America.

Kos of Kos discussed how weak the nasty guy is, including politically. Kos then highlighted stories from the week that show how deep that weakness is. He concludes:

Trump doesn’t care about Americans’ financial struggles. He doesn’t care about his party’s political future. He doesn’t seem particularly concerned with governing. He cares only about grifting and building monuments to himself. Republicans are trapped following a weak, feeble, self-absorbed man who mistakes loyalty for leadership and ego for strength. They can’t possibly suffer enough because of it.

In an article that’s been hiding in my browser tabs since last September Alex Samuels of Kos discussed why so many Republican voters think the nasty guy is more liberal than he is. Samuels establishes how not liberal he is. This blog has been doing the same for years and hundreds of posts.

And yet, a sizable share of Republicans still see Trump very differently. A late August YouGov poll shows just how off the mark GOP voters are about his record. According to the survey, 35% of Republicans think Trump supports raising the minimum wage, 45% believe he backs stronger worker protections, 26% say he favors higher corporate taxes, and just 29% think he’d raise taxes on the wealthy.

I wonder how much those numbers have changed in the last nine months. In contrast, Democrats and independents have a much more accurate view of the nasty guy. Samuels quoted polls that support that. Whether or not they agree with a position a Democratic politician takes they tend to know what that position is.

So why the misperception? Grant Reeher, a professor of political science at Syracuse University, said it comes down to polarization and “expressive bias.” “I imagine what’s happening among many Republicans is that they start with the notion that they are supporters of Trump,” Reeher told Daily Kos. “Then, when they are asked what he wants to do in those specific policy areas, they choose what they would like to see happen, and assume that’s also what Trump wants to do, because they support Trump.” That’s the polarization effect at work. Expressive bias takes it further. Popular policies—like raising the minimum wage or taxing corporations—are often attributed to Trump by Republicans who want to reinforce their support.

Rheeler also said some supporters may make a connection that doesn’t exist, such assuming if the nasty guy supports this thing he also supports that. And that whole bit about the 2020 election being stolen wasn’t about belief in fraud but about signaling allegiance.

That’s what makes Republicans’ perception of Trump so revealing. If GOP voters truly believe he’s more liberal than he is, it suggests two things: Either Republicans want policies like higher wages and stronger worker protections but don’t realize Trump opposes them, or they don’t know enough about his record to notice the gap between rhetoric and reality.

So perhaps Republicans should be for higher wages and stronger worker protections too? Most voters don’t understand the details of issues and don’t know how the policies of the two major parties differ. That means there is room for misperceptions and loyalty. Also from last September Michel Martin of NPR spoke to Jeff Selingo. He’s been reporting on college admissions and compiled it into the book Dream School: Finding The College That's Right For You. Martin said she had applied to four schools. Selingo said he had done the same. So why are people now applying to 30 schools? Selingo said:

Well, I've worked in and around higher ed for nearly 30 years, and I could say this with certainty that we kind of lost our way. We don't think about purpose anymore in higher ed. We think about prestige. And so what's happened just in the last 20 years is that the number of applications filed to the most selective colleges and universities have gone from about 600,000 applications to nearly 2 million applications.

This is even though the size of the freshman class has stayed the same. Selingo’s point then is to say the most prestigious college may not be the best for a particular student. They may enjoy, learn more, and be supported more at a less selective college. What caught my attention in the discussion is students and parents are looking at the college or university in terms of prestige, in how it improves their place in the social hierarchy, instead of for the education.