Mediaboss Marketing

In October of 1860, The Atlantics first editor, James Russell Lowell, wrote of Abraham Lincoln that he had experience enough in public affairs to make him a statesman, and not enough to make him a politician. Lowell, in his endorsement, was mainly concerned not with Lincolns personal qualities but with the redemptive possibilities of his new party. The Republicans, Lowell wrote, know that true policy is gradual in its advances, that it is conditional and not absolute, that it must deal with facts and not with sentiments.

Check out the full table of contents and find your next story to read.

There is insufficient space in any one issue of this magazine to trace the Republican Partys decomposition from Lincolns day to ours. It is enough to say that its most recent, and most catastrophic, turntoward authoritarianism, nativism, and conspiracismthreatens the republic that it was founded to save.

From the October 1860 issue: James Russell Lowell endorses Abraham Lincoln for president

Stating plainly that one of Americas two major parties, the party putatively devoted to advancing the ideas and ideals of conservatism, has now fallen into autocratic disrepute is unnerving for a magazine committed to being, in the words of our founding manifesto, of no party or clique. Criticism of the Republican Party does not suggest an axiomatic endorsement of the Democratic Party, its leaders and policies. Substantive, even caustic, critiques can of course be made up and down the Democratic line. But avoiding partisan entanglement does not mean that we must turn away from the obvious. The leaders of the Republican Partythe soul-blighted Donald Trump and the satraps and lackeys who abet his nefarious behaviorare attempting to destroy the foundations of American democracy. This must be stated clearly, and repeatedly.

There will be no recovery from this crisis until the Republican Party recommits itself to democracy, says this magazines David Frum, who was one of the first writers to warn that America possessed no special immunities against demagoguery and authoritarianism.

In 2020, we asked another of our staff writers, Barton Gellman, to examine the ways in which Trumpism was weakening the norms and structures of American democracy. We published his cover story The Election That Could Break America before the election, and well before the insurrection of January 6. Something far out of the norm is likely to happen, Gellman wrote. Probably more than one thing. Expecting otherwise will dull our reflexes. It will lull us into spurious hope that Trump is tractable to forces that constrain normal incumbents.

The Big Story: Join Barton Gellman, along with staff writer Anne Applebaum and Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, for a live virtual conversation about the threats to American democracy on December 13.

As we know, the system held, but barely, America having been blessed, once again, by dumb luck. (The bravery of police officers on Capitol Hill, and the wisdom of a handful of state and local officials, also helped.) When President Joe Biden was safely inaugurated, two weeks after the attack on the Capitol, a belief took hold that Trump, and Trumpism, might very well go into eclipse.

But that belief was wrong. Which is why we asked Bart to examine, once again, the state of our democracy and the various attempts by Trump and other leading Republicans to claim power through voter suppression, subterfuge, and any other means necessary. His current cover story, January 6 Was Practice, suggests that we are closecloser than most of us ever thought possibleto losing not only our democracy, but whats left of our shared understanding of reality.

You will find in this issue other essays and reporting that illuminate the political, moral, and epistemological challenges we face today, including an investigation by Vann R. Newkirk II into Republican voter-suppression efforts, and an article by Kaitlyn Tiffany on a child-sex-trafficking panic intensified by the far rights descent into conspiratorial thinking. The crisis is in good measure a crisis of the Republican Party. A healthy democracy requires a strong conservative party and a strong liberal party arguing for their views publicly and vigorously. What we have instead today is a liberal party battling an authoritarian cult of personality. As David Brooks writes in his essay I Remember Conservatism: To be a conservative today, you have to oppose much of what the Republican Party has come to stand for.

The Atlantic, across its long history, has held true to the belief that the American experiment is a worthy one, which is why were devoting this issue, and so much of our journalism in the coming years, to its possible demise.

This article appears in the January/February 2022 print edition with the headline A Party, and Nation, in Crisis.

Go here to see the original:
Jeffrey Goldberg: The Republican Party, and America, Are in Crisis - The Atlantic

Its understandable if you thought the threat had gone. Donald Trump left office nearly a year ago, is no longer serving up daily outrages by tweet, and is reduced to appearing with Nigel Farage on GB News. But the menace he represented lingers, and not only because Trump remains the most likely Republican presidential nominee for 2024, a contest he could well win given the parlous approval ratings of the current incumbent.

Trumpism lives on in the legacy he left behind, its most visible incarnation perhaps the three ultra-conservative judges he selected for the supreme court, who this week began hearing a case on abortion one that many expect to result in the removal of American womens constitutionally protected right to end an unwanted pregnancy.

But Trumpism endures too in the party he remade in his own image. He has left behind a Republican party no longer committed to democracy. That sounds hyperbolic but, if anything, it understates the case. Republicans are breaking from the principle that precedes the idea of democracy and is even more fundamental: the belief that arguments between citizens should be resolved by peaceful means. Todays Republican party is normalising the notion of violence as a means of securing a political outcome.

Start with the case of Paul Gosar, the Republican member of Congress for Arizona. He retweeted an anime-style video that depicted him murdering his Democratic colleague, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as swinging a sword at Joe Biden. Appalling though that was, especially at a time when AOC and others face constant threats of violence, more telling was the response of Gosars party. When Democrats moved to censure him, only two Republicans voted with them. The 200-odd others gave Gosar their blessing.

Earlier, Republicans had had to make a similar decision. Before her election to Congress in 2020, Marjorie Taylor Greene had posted on Facebook a photograph of herself holding a gun next to an image of AOC and two other members of the so-called Squad, made up of left-leaning Democratic women of colour. Taylor Greene also all but called for the execution of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi. Yet when Democrats voted to kick the Georgia Republican off the various congressional committees she sat on, only 11 members of her party voted with them. The rest stood with her.

Of course, the pattern was set with the Republican response to Trump himself, and his encouragement of the attempt to overturn a democratic election by force earlier this year. Republicans could have repudiated the storming of the Capitol on 6 January by joining their Democratic colleagues in voting to impeach the outgoing president for inciting an insurrection. But only 10 Republicans did so.

Since then, those 10 dissenters have been pilloried and ostracised by their fellow Republicans. Among the shunned is Liz Cheney, who was stripped of her House leadership role and expelled from the state Republican party in her native Wyoming. Shes an arch-conservative like her former vice-president father, but that didnt matter. Cheney believes in respecting elections and that was enough to put her beyond the pale.

These responses coddling the advocates of violence, punishing those who denounce it prove the truth of the declaration that Taylor Greene made this week: We are not the fringe. We are the base of the party.

Shes right. She and Gosar are in lockstep with a Republican party whose face can be seen in the death threats now routinely meted out not only to nationally famous politicians such as AOC, but to the officials and volunteers who serve in public health, local government or on school boards across the country.

Trumps downplaying of the dangers of the pandemic and his hostility to mask-wearing made those stances articles of faith among his most ardent supporters who now threaten murderous violence against those who cross them, their fury directed especially at schools that require their pupils to wear masks. In early October, the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, felt it necessary to send in the FBI to help protect school administrators, who were facing what the National School Boards Association calls a form of domestic terrorism.

To be clear, not every Republican in the House or Senate agrees with Gosar, Taylor Greene or the Republican candidate in Pennsylvania who promised to bring 20 strong men to a school board meeting because this is how you get stuff done but they are terrified of them, just as they are terrified of Trump and his supporters. They know that if they step out of line, they will soon face an internal, primary challenge for their own seat. So they say nothing.

The espousal of, or acquiescence in, political violence is the sharpest expression of Republicans steady march away from democracy, but it is not the only one. At the milder end is the unabashed gerrymandering under way in many of the states where Republicans are in control, redrawing boundaries to give themselves permanent and insurmountable majorities.

More troubling still are the hundreds of voter suppression measures advanced by Republican state legislatures, nakedly designed to make voting harder for groups that tend to vote Democratic, especially low-income Americans and those from ethnic minorities. Whether its demanding stricter proof of identity, reducing early or postal voting say, by allowing only one dropbox in each county, no matter how many people live there or how large it is the desired goal is the same: to shrink the franchise, hurting Democrats and helping Republicans.

The drive is, once again, fealty to Trump. Polls show that 68% of Republicans believe the former presidents big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him and they are determined to make sure it wont happen again. To ensure there is no risk of Trump losing in 2024, Republicans are both making it harder for Democrats to vote and working to install reliable allies as election scrutineers: they want no repeat of 2020, when Republican officials allowed the votes to be counted fairly and declared Biden the winner.

What is fuelling this shift is not solely the cult of personality that still envelopes Donald Trump, though that devotion is a mighty force. Studies have long shown a potent authoritarian impulse on the American right drawn to the notion of a strong leader imposing order and guarding the nation against outsiders one greater than in comparable countries. As always with the US, race plays a central role. Enough white Americans fear a future in which they are no longer the dominant majority and are ready to do what it takes to stay in charge: to avert demography, theyll sacrifice democracy.

This represents a mortal threat to the American republic. But the US remains the worlds most powerful nation. As of now, only one of its two governing parties is committed to democracy and that poses a danger to us all.

See the original post here:
The Republican party is embracing violence in the name of Trump - The Guardian

Sign up for The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

Texas Republicans are increasing their involvement in local races, hoping to do more to influence municipal and school board elections that have turned into political battlegrounds during the coronavirus pandemic.

The state Republican Party announced Monday it had formed a new Local Government Committee to work with county parties on backing candidates in nonpartisan local elections, where issues like mask mandates and the teaching of what some conservatives call critical race theory have become flashpoints.

"That's really been the match that totally" ignited this, said Rolando Garcia, a member of the State Republican Executive Committee who chairs the new group. "School board races have always been important, but it's been hard to get the attention and resources to them, and so they've been sleepy affairs."

The state GOP is emboldened by recent wins in places like Carroll Independent School District, where opponents of a district proposal to address racism in schools captured a majority on the school board last month. Republicans are also looking to build on victories like that of Javier Villalobos, a Republican who won his election earlier this year as the mayor of McAllen, which traditionally votes for Democrats.

"Democrats across the country see the importance of local elections in the fight for America, and so does the Texas GOP," Matt Rinaldi, chair of the Texas GOP, said in a statement.

The state Democratic Party has been supporting local nonpartisan candidates through a program, Project LIFT, that started in 2015. The program, which stands for Local Investment in the Future of Texas, recruits, trains and provides resources to people running for municipal offices and school board.

"We've got to take an aggressive approach in these races," said Odus Evbagharu, chair of the Harris County Democratic Party. "Our democracy's on the line, and it starts at our most local level."

In recent months, school boards have gained new attention in Texas and nationwide amid raging debates over pandemic rules. Even though Gov. Greg Abbott has banned public schools from requiring masks, some school boards have defied him and sought to mandate masks anyway, prompting legal action from the state.

This year, parents have turned their attention to the perception that "critical race theory" is being taught to their children and have pushed to remove books from school libraries that contain offensive content. Critical race theory is a concept teaches that racism is embedded in society, and while there is no evidence it is widely taught in K-12 schools in Texas, the Legislature passed a law aiming to crack down on it that went into effect Thursday. That law is behind a GOP state lawmaker's recent investigation into the types of books that school districts have.

Additionally, Abbott has been on a hunt to root out any "pornographic" material in public schools, telling the Texas Education Agency to investigate it last month.

Garcia is from Houston, where the Harris County GOP has already charged into local contests. The county party backed three challengers who ousted members of the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District school board in November. The county party has also endorsed three candidates in the Houston Independent School District school board runoffs that are happening Saturday.

For example, one of those candidates, Bridget Wade, opposes mask requirements for students and has said she is against schools teaching "our children that one race is better than the other."

Evbagharu said the party is "in it to win it" when it comes to the Houston ISD runoffs. He denounced the GOP crusade against critical race theory as "classroom censorship," saying Republicans are "trying to disrupt democracy and disrupt the way history is taught."

Garcia said the Local Government Committee is focused on educating county parties that they can indeed endorse in local nonpartisan races and then giving them guidelines on how to support a candidate if they do choose to endorse. Typically, a majority of precinct chairs must approve before a county party can formally support a candidate in a local election.

After a county party gets behind a candidate, the state party may come in with its aid like a mailer but Garcia emphasized that "these are conversations that each county party needs to have" first.

In the meantime, school boards are continuing to garner statewide GOP attention. Some Republican state lawmakers have called on the Texas Association of School Boards to sever ties with the National Associations of School Boards after it asked the Biden administration to look at recent parental hostility toward school board members as "domestic terrorism."

On Monday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called for the resignation of the co-chair of Fort Worth Independent School District's Racial Equity Committee after she shared personal information about parents who sued the district to stop its mask mandate. (Patrick referred to the committee member, Norma Garcia-Lopez, as a school board member, but the committee is separate from the school board and advises it.)

Disclosure: Texas Association of School Boards has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

Continued here:
Texas Republicans getting involved in local school board, city elections - The Texas Tribune

(Damon Winter | The New York Times)A congressional staffer works late on Capitol Hill as lawmakers voted on a continuing resolution to fund the federal government, Thursday, Dec. 2, 2021. The current GOP attempts at extortion are both more naked and less rational than what happened during the Obama years, Paul Krugman writes.

By Paul Krugman | The New York Times

| Dec. 6, 2021, 8:00 p.m.

With everything else going on the likely imminent demise of Roe v. Wade, the revelation that Donald Trump knew he had tested positive for the coronavirus before he debated Joe Biden, and more I dont know how many readers are aware that the U.S. government came close to being shut down last weekend. A last-minute deal averted that crisis, but in any case another crisis will follow in a couple of weeks: The government is expected to hit its debt ceiling in the middle of this month, and failure to raise the ceiling would wreak havoc not just with governance but with Americas financial reputation.

The thing is, the federal government isnt having any problem raising money in fact, it can borrow at interest rates well below the inflation rate, so that the real cost of servicing additional federal debt is actually negative. Instead, this is all about politics. Both continuing government funding and raising the debt limit are subject to the filibuster, and many Republican senators wont support doing either unless Democrats meet their demands.

And what has Republicans so exercised that theyre willing to endanger both the functioning of our government and the nations financial stability? Whatever they may say, they arent taking a stand on principle or at least, not on any principle other than the proposition that even duly elected Democrats have no legitimate right to govern.

In some ways weve seen this movie before. Republicans led by Newt Gingrich partly shut down the government in 1995-96 in an attempt to extract concessions from President Bill Clinton. GOP legislators created a series of funding crises under President Barack Obama, again in a (partly successful) attempt to extract policy concessions. Creating budget crises whenever a Democrat sits in the White House has become standard Republican operating procedure.

Yet current GOP attempts at extortion are both more naked and less rational than what happened during the Obama years.

Under Obama, leading Republicans claimed that their fiscal brinkmanship was motivated by concerns about budget deficits. Some of us argued even at the time that self-proclaimed deficit hawks were phonies, that they didnt actually care about government debt a view validated by their silence when the Trump administration blew up the deficit and that they actually wanted to see the economy suffer on Obamas watch. But they maintained enough of a veneer of responsibility to fool many commentators.

This time, Republican obstructionists arent even pretending to care about red ink. Instead, theyre threatening to shut everything down unless the Biden administration abandons its efforts to fight the coronavirus with vaccine mandates.

Whats that about? As many observers have pointed out, claims that opposition to vaccine mandates (and similar opposition to mask mandates) is about maintaining personal freedom dont stand up to any kind of scrutiny. No reasonable definition of freedom includes the right to endanger other peoples health and lives because you dont feel like taking basic precautions.

Furthermore, actions by Republican-controlled state governments, for example in Florida and Texas, show a party that isnt so much pro-freedom as it is pro-COVID. How else can you explain attempts to prevent private businesses whose freedom to choose was supposed to be sacrosanct from requiring that their workers be vaccinated, or offers of special unemployment benefits for the unvaccinated?

In other words, the GOP doesnt look like a party trying to defend liberty; it looks like a party trying to block any effective response to a deadly disease. Why is it doing this?

To some extent it surely reflects a coldly cynical political calculation. Voters tend to blame whichever party holds the White House for anything bad that happens on its watch, which creates an incentive for a sufficiently ruthless party to engage in outright sabotage. Sure enough, Republicans who fought all efforts to contain the coronavirus are now attacking the Biden administration for failing to end the pandemic.

But trying to shut down the government to block vaccinations seems like overreach, even for hardened cynics. Its notable that Mitch McConnell, whom nobody could accuse of being a do-gooder, isnt part of the anti-vaccine caucus.

What seems to be happening instead goes beyond cold calculation. As Ive pointed out in the past, Republican politicians now act like apparatchiks in an authoritarian regime, competing to take ever more extreme positions as a way to demonstrate their loyalty to the cause and to The Leader. Catering to anti-vaccine hysteria, doing all they can to keep the pandemic going, has become something Republicans do to remain in good standing within the party.

The result is that one of Americas two major political parties isnt just refusing to help the nation deal with its problems; its actively working to make the country ungovernable.

And I hope the rest of us havent lost the ability to be properly horrified at this spectacle.

Paul Krugman | The New York Times(CREDIT: Fred R. Conrad)

Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, is a columnist for The New York Times.

See the article here:
Paul Krugman: How saboteurs took over the Republican Party - Salt Lake Tribune

Sign up for the Guardians Fight to Vote newsletter

Hello, and Happy Thursday,

Over the last few months, weve seen lawmakers in several states draw new, distorted political districts that entrench their political power for the next decade. Republicans are carving up Texas, North Carolina and Georgia to hold on to their majorities. Democrats have the power to draw maps in far fewer places, but theyve also shown a willingness to use it where they have it, in places like Illinois and Maryland.

But something uniquely disturbing is happening in Ohio.

Republicans control the legislature there and recently enacted new maps that would give them a supermajority in the state legislature and allow them to hold on to at least 12 of the states 15 congressional seats. Its an advantage that doesnt reflect how politically competitive Ohio is: Donald Trump won the state in 2020 with 53% of the vote.

Whats worse is that Ohio voters have specifically enacted reforms in recent years that were supposed to prevent this kind of manipulation. Republicans have completely ignored them. It underscores how challenging it is for reformers to wrest mapmaking power from politicians.

Its incredibly difficult to get folks to say, OK, were just gonna do this fairly after years and years and decades and decades of crafting districts that favor one political party, Catherine Turcer, the executive director of the Ohio chapter of Common Cause, a government watchdog group that backed the reforms, told me earlier this year. I did not envision this being as shady.

In 2015 and 2018, Ohio voters overwhelmingly approved two separate constitutional amendments that were meant to make mapmaking fairer. The 2015 amendment dealt with drawing state legislative districts and gave a seven-person panel, comprised of elected officials from both parties, power to draw districts. If the panel couldnt agree on new maps, they would only be in effect for four years, as opposed to the usual 10.

The 2018 amendment laid out a slightly different process for drawing congressional districts, but the overall idea was the same. Both reforms also said districts could not unfairly favor or disfavor a political party.

Something started to seem amiss earlier this fall when the panel got to work trying to create the new state legislative districts. The two top Republicans in the legislature wound up drawing the maps in secret, shutting their fellow GOP members out of the process. After reaching an impasse with Democrats, Republicans on the panel approved a plan that gives the GOP a majority in the state legislature for the next four years.

When it came time to draw congressional maps, things did not go much better. The panel barely even attempted to fulfill its mission, kicking mapmaking power back to the state legislature. Lawmakers there quickly enacted the congressional plan that benefits the GOP for the next four years.

The new map benefits the GOP by cracking Democratic-heavy Hamilton county, home of Cincinnati, into three different congressional districts, noted the Cook Political Report. It also transforms a district in northern Ohio, currently represented by Democrat Marcy Kaptur, the longest serving woman in Congress, from one Joe Biden carried by 19 points in 2020 to one Trump would have carried by 5 points.

The maps already face several lawsuits, and their fate will ultimately be decided by the Ohio supreme court. Republicans have a 4-3 advantage on the court, though one of the GOP justices is considered a swing vote. Well soon see if voter-approved reforms will be completely defanged.

Reader questions

Please continue to write to me each week with your questions about elections and voting at sam.levine@theguardian.com or DM me on Twitter at @srl and Ill try to answer as many as I can.

Few places better encapsulate the new Republican effort to undermine American elections than Wisconsin. Some Republicans there are calling for the removal of the non-partisan head of the states election commission.

Georgia saw a jump in the percentage of rejected mail-in ballot requests in one of the first elections after Republicans imposed new requirements. Many of those who had their ballot requests rejected didnt ultimately vote in person, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

The Justice Department on Tuesday filed a statement of interest in voting rights lawsuits in Arizona, Texas and Florida. All three filings significantly defend the power and scope of section two of the Voting Rights Act, one of the most powerful remaining provisions of the 1965 civil rights law.

Read the original here:
A Republican power grab in Ohio might be the GOPs most brazen yet - The Guardian