A Different Kind of Birthday Fundraiser

[Artwork by Kelly Latimore, La Sagrada Família.]

Around this time of year, I usually run a short birthday fundraiser, which, I realize, would be an even harder ask than usual this year, given all the campaign fundraising texts and ads under which we're being buried, and the fact that Donald Trump's disastrous policies have driven up the price of everything everywhere.

Nonetheless, I am making a fundraising pitch. But this year, it's not on my own behalf. I'm asking you to kick in a few bucks to support our local Springfield Immigrant Action Network (SIAN), because ICE has landed in Springfield.

From their Facebook page:

Dear friends and neighbors,

ICE is in Springfield, and as part of their strategy of harm and disruption, they no longer publicly announce locations/areas where they conduct raids. They want to prevent and avoid community organizing and they are counting on people to be too afraid to talk. We will not be silent.

Yesterday and today, ICE detained and took at least four adults, and today, half a dozen children went home to find that one of their parents was taken. Make no mistake: the people taken had rights and they were approached in public places, they were followed, chased, and taken, mostly, based on racial profiling and not criminal or judicial warrants. Who they are, where they live, the other details are not public information, and those who care about their safety and wellbeing will not treat their stories as social media content, nor do anything that could compromise rather than contribute to their safety. We will instead center the needs of those affected. These children are citizens and they also have rights.

SIAN’s efforts are currently focused on providing support to families and their children, and knowing that food would be scarce, loss of income is pervasive and inevitable, and mental health services for children and adults that speak languages other than English are difficult to access and secure, we are asking for your help...

I've known the leaders of this group since they came together early in Trump's first term. They're terrific people who've been doing the Lord's work on a shoestring, helping some of the most vulnerable residents of our city in the face of this monstrous regime's escalating savagery.

If you were inclined to kick a couple of bucks my way for my birthday, many thanks. This year, I'd appreciate it if you'd instead contribute to the good work SIAN is doing in Springfield, Illinois. 

I'll keep this post pinned to the top of my blog for the next week, with any new posts I do appearing beneath.

Here's the link to their website.  

The donate button is on the upper right of that screen.  Tell 'em driftglass sent you :-)

Professional Left Podcast: Gone Fiskin'

I did a lot of Liberal media yesterday, so today the Professional Left podcast is taking a day to rest and recharge before next week, which also promises to be a Joe Daisy (an expression my ex-grandmother-in-law used to describe something wild, and which I have never heard elsewhere).

So, in lieu of a fresh TPL episode, this is me on the BradCast yesterday with Brad, Desi, and Digby.

And this is me on with Hal Sparks yesterday for two hours.

All of these worthies are great company during these evil times.

I hope you enjoy it.

Burn The Lifeboats

Professional Left Podcast Episode 1034: Polling For Dollars

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."  -- Mark Twain

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The Three Weird Tricks To Fix Our Democracy That No One Talks About

Other than electing Democrats by overwhelming margins for the next 50 years, there are three ways to begin reversing the massive damage Republicans have inflicted on our democracy.

But no one talks about them.

Are they invoking the 25th Amendment, impeaching and removing Donald Trump, or making Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, or Guam a state?

No.  Because the first two will never happen, and the third would require the aforementioned overwhelming Democratic victories.  But people do talk a lot about these as if they were Easy Buttons, don't they?

What about getting rid of the Electoral College, or ranked-choice voting?  Ranked-choice voting is an interesting idea, but it's not the sweeping solution to our critical problems, even though far too many people pretend it is.  And as to getting rid of the EC, well, that would require a constitutional amendment, which means passage by two-third of the House, two-thirds of the Senate, and ratification by three-quarters of the states.  

Side note: let's agree to put any noble ideas about fundamentally changing the structure of the government on the far back burner for now.  I, for one, would love it if, overnight, we became a constitutional democracy. Open the system up to multiple political parties and coalition building.  But that's not going to happen in my lifetime. 

Also, put not your faith in some third party that will attract enough Democrats, Republicans, and independent voters to do anything other than siphon votes from one major party and help the other squeak into power.  Of course, as long as the republic stands, there will continue to be bumper crops of grifters selling third-party Fool's Gold, and plenty of credulous dopes buying it, but they will solve nothing and change nothing. 

What about everyone's favorite, "Getting the money out of politics"?  Well, best of luck with that!

So, having cursorily examined everyone's favorite democracy-saving magic bullets, let's consider mine.

First, the Conservative media -- all of it -- agrees to get out of the business of spreading lies, slander, bullshit conspiracies, and racist garbage.  

This would cut off the poison that's killing the country on the supply side.  

Second, Republican voters choose to stop seeking and heeding lies, slander, bullshit conspiracies, and racist garbage.

This would cut off the poison that's killing the country on the demand side.  

Third, the legacy media -- all of it -- agrees to stop the "Both Sides" false equivalence nonsense, and instead report bluntly and honestly on the gargantuan asymmetry between American fascists and the opponents of American fascism.  

This would leave undecided/swing/independent voters no place to hide.

Now all three of these genius ideas of mine are, of course, ludicrous. Literally unthinkable.  Fine.  But let's you and I take the next step and ask a more important question.  Why?  Because you'd have to agree that any one of those three weird tricks would be sufficient to back us away from the abyss, and all three together would heal this country almost overnight.  

So why are my ideas so obviously laughable, impossible, and unthinkable, while so many of those other impossible magic bullets fly so easily -- almost reflexively -- off the tongues of so many people?  

If I may hazard a guess, I'd guess that things like impeachment or amendments to the Constitution come from a persistent, credulous belief that the problem lies with the machinery of government.  That if we could just get under the hood and sufficiently tinker with the transmission and carburetor of America's government institutions, we could both crush American fascism here and now and preclude its future recurrence.

Which is, sad to say, ridiculous.  A lovely and vain hope that this is all some kind of Seldon Crisis --

A "Crisis" or "Seldon Crisis" are significant events predicted to occur by Hari Seldon's psychohistory affecting the Foundation. The Foundation, as predicted by Seldon, will encounter these Crisis and, hopefully, prevail.

-- and it is the inherent nature of American democracy which will save itself in the end.  

But it's not democracy that needs fixing.  

I'm sure all the reforms on your personal wish list are worthwhile, and we'd all be better off with them enacted into law, but let's face it, it's not that institutional reforms are worthless. It's that no set of reforms can compensate for a political culture willing to abandon the principles those institutions were built to protect.

If the last ten years have proven anything beyond any doubt, it's that the guardrails of our democracy are no match for a sufficiently large and motivated mob of bigots and imbeciles led by degenerate monsters, narcissists, looters, and wannabe tyrants.  Not when roughly a third of eligible voters couldn't be bothered to cast a ballot in the 2024 presidential election—not even when the future of their own democracy was on the line. Not when fascist propaganda outlets are free to flood the country with garbage all day/every day.  Not when billionaires can spend unlimited sums of cash to effectively buy American elections and legally bribe elected officials.

We don't have an institution problem: we have a people problem.  And the reason my suggestions are, on their face, more ridiculous than the others is that, deep down, everyone knows that the Conservative propaganda industry would never voluntarily give up its core business model of selling malignant racist filth to idiots.  And the legacy media would never voluntarily change its core business model of telling reassuring, toxic "Both Sides" fairy tales to the cowardly and the credulous.

And since none of these private enterprises have any incentive to stop the very profitable business of poisoning American democracy, why dwell on the impossible idea that they would ever consider putting country over profit?  

Because the problem isn't that these people don't understand what's happening. The problem is that what's happening is working for them.

The propagandists get richer. The politicians get power. The media gets access and ratings. The voters get to believe whatever makes them feel righteous. And the rest of us get to live in the country they've made.

So we keep proposing constitutional amendments, parliamentary systems, ranked-choice voting, public financing, and all the other perfectly sensible mechanisms of a functioning democracy.

Which amounts to drawing up blueprints for a house, many of whose occupants have decided they would rather burn it down.

And we keep telling ourselves that if we can just fix the wiring, replace the plumbing, and shore up the foundation fast enough, everything will be fine.

But you cannot patch up a democracy faster than its citizens can be persuaded to destroy it. And no constitutional amendment can save a country where enough of its people no longer want to be saved.

Burn The Lifeboats

Professional Left Podcast Episode 1033: Brush Up Your Shakespeare

"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"  -- Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

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The Persuasion Project Is Hydrogen Fuel

There is, abroad in the land today, a particular kind of political advice that sounds sensible, humane, and eminently reasonable -- right up until you ask how much time, money, and effort it would take to make it work in the actual world.

That advice falls broadly under the umbrella of what we'll call the Persuasion Project, and that project is the hydrogen fuel of political strategies.

And before the pedants come for me, yes, I realize that's a deliberately strained metaphor. Hydrogen can be produced using intermittent energy sources like solar and wind, making it a potentially useful way to store and transport energy that might otherwise go unused. It's whatchacall an "energy carrier".  

But hydrogen isn't something you can simply dig out of the ground and burn. It has to be produced, usually from natural gas or water, and that process requires energy. Depending on how it's made, you can wind up spending substantially more energy producing a fuel than you get back when you use it.

And that, more or less, is the problem with the Persuasion Project.

Once upon a time, there might have been large, harvestable deposits of Republicans who could be coaxed down out of the Stupid Tree with logic, evidence, and a clear, honest presentation.  There may have been a world, long ago, lost to history, in which you could make your case, patiently answer their stupid questions, show your work, and perhaps persuade them that the world was a little more complicated than Rush Limbaugh told them it was.

But that was all before Conservative media spent decades building an alternative political reality in which facts are whatever the Dear Leader says today, expertise is demonic, and telling the mopes anything they don't want to hear is taken as proof that you're part of the conspiracy.  (Fair point.  I am.)

The conservative political project didn't merely fail to persuade Republicans to abandon reason. It built a media ecosystem in which abandoning reason became a condition of membership. And then the people who built that ecosystem turned around and demanded that Democrats turn away all of that wrath with gentle answers and a better PowerPoint deck.

Which means that The Persuasion Project, like an inefficient fuel-production process, has a negative energy balance.

Oh, sure. Give yourself limitless patience, all the time in the world, and a Republican willing to sit still and listen indefinitely, and I'm willing to believe that eventually you might succeed. Like the bird in the Brothers Grimm story “The Shepherd Boy,” which sharpens its beak against a mountain once every thousand years until the mountain is finally worn away, you might persuade your subject that not all Democrats are baby-murdering demons, that tax cuts don't magically pay for themselves, and that perhaps the people who keep promising to make their lives better while making them measurably worse don't deserve their loyalty.

But even that could only happen under a very particular set of circumstances.

You'd need a media vacuum in which Fox News and Hate Radio and the internet did not exist as readily available alternatives. You'd need a Republican willing to listen to an argument that might threaten their sense of identity, their friendships, their political loyalties, and their entire understanding of the country. And you would need the conversation to take place one person at a time, because, in case you hadn't noticed, there is no fucking "Liberal" media.  Nothing remotely comparable to the well-funded propaganda machine that delivers bullshit by the metric ton to the MAGA masses daily.  

And even if there was a genuine Liberal media with some real cops, you absolutely couldn't count on any of those teeming masses of bigots and imbeciles to tune in voluntarily. Unless you took away their remotes, strapped them into chairs, and forced them to watch "A Clockwork Orange"-style, why would they submit themselves to a persuasion campaign whose premises they have already been trained to reject?

And finally, who the hell has the time, energy, and access to devote to this project?

Suppose you are one of those unusually patient, indefatigable souls. You spend months, perhaps years, building a relationship with a Republican voter. You answer every objection. You patiently correct every falsehood. You find just the right words, the right examples, the right moment. And finally, after all that labor, you succeed.

Congratulations! You have persuaded one Republican to become an independent.  Maybe a couple of 'em.

Now what?

One person is not an electoral strategy. A handful of conversions is not a political realignment. And a satisfying personal story about a former Republican who decided that, just maybe, there was some wisdom in what you said is not evidence that the underlying machinery of right-wing misinformation has been dismantled or even mildly inconvenienced.

To make any Persuasion Project work at a scale that could change elections, you would need millions of liberals willing to devote enormous amounts of time and effort and the patience of Job to the task of persuading Republicans, one conversation at a time. And you would need millions of Republican counterparts willing to show up, listen with open minds, and seriously consider the possibility that everything they've believed is wrong and everyone they've trusted has lied to them.

In other words, the strategy depends on an immense supply of labor from one side and an immense supply of good faith from the other.

And the very political and media system you're trying to overcome has spent decades making the second requirement nearly impossible to find.

That's the part the advocates of the Persuasion Project never account for. They're still acting as if the only thing standing between a Republican voter and enlightenment is a sufficiently patient liberal with a sufficiently compelling argument. They act as though the playing field is level, the information environment is neutral, and the MAGA morons are simply waiting for someone to explain things properly.

But the playing field isn't level. The information environment isn't neutral.  The people who built the machinery of conservative grievance have spent years teaching their audience to regard anyone trying to explain things properly as an enemy.  And by the way, we tried all of this already!  In detail.  For years.  It was called "The Obama Administration".  

Jesus, Mary and Harry Hopkins, am I the only one who remembers what these people were already like before Trump showed up? 

You can spend all the energy in the world refining the fuel. If the system is designed to reject it, you're not going to power the country with it.  

So at some point, any sane person acting in good faith would have to stop asking why the persuasion engine isn't producing enough energy and start asking why they're still running it.

Burn The Lifeboats

Professional Left Podcast Episode 1032: Here Come 'The Independents'

"Science is magic that works"  -- Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle.

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I Got My Medicare Bribe Check From Trump last Week

We spent it almost immediately.  

No Half Measures