A hard-charging, uncompromisingly conservative faction

My Sunday movie was the documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story. Reeve is best known for being the title character in the Superman movies of the 1970s and ‘80s. When he said he was going to that audition his acting friends thought he was selling out. The first one rocketed him to stardom. The fourth was forgettable. But he did a lot more than that. In one film (maybe two) he played a gay character. The one I know about was Deathtrap, which is a thriller (or dark comedy) and I remember seeing after it was released in 1982 and made its way to TV. He also played gay in a stage production (I didn’t get the name) which annoyed some people that Superman would stoop to that. The other thing he was well known for was a horse riding accident in 1995 that left him paralyzed from the neck down. He lived another nine years totally dependent on others. He still managed to do a lot. Growing up he had a messy home life that did not show a healthy marriage and ended in divorce. He had a father who was hard to please. From both of those he found relief in theater. When filming Superman he met Gae Exton, who became mother to his children Matthew and Alexandra. They never married and after a while the relationship fell apart. Months later he met Dana who became the mother of son Will (who now looks a lot like his father) and became his wife. Will Reeve is in the film industry as an actor and producer. Dana made sure to include Matthew and Alexandra as part of the family. Reeve saw how a marriage should work. He was roommates with Robin Williams in acting school (Julliard?) and they were lifelong friends. After the accident Williams was able to get Reeve to laugh and he knew life would be okay. Reeve used his stardom to gain access as an advocate. After the accident he became an advocate for those paralyzed, creating the Christopher Reeve Foundation to raise money for paralysis research. He wanted to find a cure. Dana wanted to improve the care of those paralyzed. Before the accident Reeve was quite active. After that he realized what was important wasn’t the activity but the relationship. That deepened with his kids. I very much enjoyed the film and recommend it. Christopher Reeve was a hero both on and off the screen. An article by Kavitha Surana for ProPublica and posted on Daily Kos discussed Emily Waldorf and her miscarriage and its complications, made worse because she lives in Arkansas. She was caught in limbo, her body started the miscarriage but over several days couldn’t complete it. In the meantime her uterus was open to infection. But doctors said they could do nothing until the fetal heartbeat ended, she went into labor, or she showed signs of dangerous infection. When doctors told her they could not treat her she started keeping notes of her experience. Texas modified its rules around abortion and miscarriage to say Waldorf’s situation is one where evacuating the uterus was medically necessary. Arkansas and many of the others that ban abortion haven’t done the same. Other women with this complication have died. Waldorf lived to tell the story, though resolving her case required a four hour ambulance trip to Kansas, were abortion is legal. There her uterus could be emptied. The whole thing left her with $147,000 in medical costs, which includes $5,000 for the ambulance ride. She worked at the hospital that refused to treat her. She did go back after he medical leave was over and quit a month later. No doctor has yet been sued under the abortion ban. But the hospital lawyers are way too wary of over eager prosecutors. To me they aren’t sufficiently concerned about malpractice. Eleanor Klibanoff, in an article for The Texas Tribune posted on Kos, explains how the nasty guy has transformed the Republican Party in Texas (and elsewhere). There was a lot of news recently about the nasty guy endorsing Ken Paxton for US Senate over incumbent John Cornyn, which Paxton won big. The story is enough Republican voters are loyal to the nasty guy to vote for whoever he says to vote for and get the results he wants. But Klibanoff wrote the dynamics began before the nasty guy appeared a decade ago. Before MAGA there was the Tea Party (remember them?), which formed the ground from which MAGA arose.

Once led by chamber of commerce conservatives who preached small government and big business, the Texas Republican Party has been conquered over the last 15 years by a hard-charging, uncompromisingly conservative faction, operating on the vanguard of the nation’s culture wars and driven by a sense of perpetual insurgency.

Since then there has been a power struggle in the party where “the hardliners, who paint themselves as the perennial underdogs, just keep winning.” The nasty guy cultivated candidates who were “aggressive, ideological, proudly politically incorrect and, above all, loyal.” And voters keep voting for them. Oliver Willis of Kos, as part of his series Explaining the Right delves into why Republicans continue to support the nasty guy.

For decades, the conservative media ecosystem primed these voters for a political figure like Trump. Right-wing talk radio, news sites, and especially Fox News have beamed propaganda into millions of American homes. Trump, an avid watcher of Fox News, learned what many other Republicans struggled with: that conservatives are extraordinarily responsive to messages that echo what they hear as part of their daily media diet. While other Republicans tend to focus on conservative policy issues, Trump has focused on the red meat of the right. This means snappy, punchy, insulting, bigoted statements and the like.

Voters want to continue with candidates ready with the insult rather than supporting the party establishment. So what the party does when the nasty guy can no longer be on the ballot is an open question. At the moment Republican candidates are sticking as tightly as they can to the nasty guy.

Right now, the most prudent path for Republicans probably seems to be the pro-Trump lane, but the writing is already on the wall. Voters have been rejecting Trumpism in droves. And the odds are it will hurt them in the long run.

That is American voters who are rejecting the nasty guy and all he’s been doing. Republican voters still vote for their man. Stephen Fowler of NPR went to a Republican rally in Iowa and reported on what he heard there. Most of the speakers Fowler featured did the usual thing that all good stuff comes from Republicans and all bad stuff comes from Democrats. What caught my attention is the anger coming off one speaker. The anger level was so high I wanted to cringe and cower. Alas, since the transcript doesn’t portray the anger I can’t tell which one it was (and I’m not listening to it again). In today’s pundit roundup Greg Dworkin of Kos quoted Lawrence Winnerman of Blue Amp discussing what is actually happening in the American economy. He says it is worse than a recession.

We are running an economy this week on the country we were in February. The shelves still look mostly normal. The shipping bays still seem mostly full. The cargo still appears mostly on time where it is supposed to appear. None of this is the world we are actually living in. We are spending down the last inventory of the country we used to have and we are spending it down on a clock. Inventory is mercy. Inventory is the cushion the world leaves you between the moment a thing breaks and the moment you feel it break. The blast wave is real, but the blast wave is also delayed by the length of a supply chain, by the contents of a warehouse, by the days it takes a tanker to cross an ocean. We have this week the strange privilege of standing inside the cushion. We will not have that privilege for long.

Lisa Needham of Kos wrote about the recent legal issues of the nasty guy and his minions. A pair of them caught my attention. The first of the pair is acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and his handling of the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case. The Campaign for Accountability decided there’s enough unethical stuff in Blanche’s actions they’ve filed a complaint with the bar of New York. The second of the pair is Blanche’s predecessor and former boss Pam Bondi. She’s facing a bar complaint in Florida. And she no longer has the protection of being a member of the president’s cabinet. This here blog has set another record in viewership with 313,818 views during May! That is 76% higher than the previous record of 177,760 set in April. Just a few days ago the daily viewership hit 29,010, also setting a record. As I mentioned last month the viewership is now quite broad. Blogger shows me the top 19 countries (“Other” is the 20th) and over the last seven days every one of those countries has had at least 1,860 views. That one is Tunisia. At the top of the list is Brazil at 12,878 views, Bangladesh at 6,000 views, Iraq at 5,704 views, and Vietnam at 5,234 views before we get to the US at 4,762 views. Other is at 39.8K views, so there are at least 21 more countries that have viewed this blog over the last week.