United States (US)

File under "Paywalled but pertinent."

The Harris campaign chose not to respond to the Trump ads — not even to point out, as the Lincoln Project did, that trans health care for prisoners (including surgery) was the policy of Trump’s Bureau of Prisons during his first term. In campaign rallies, Harris’s litany of “freedoms” invariably ended with gay rights (“The freedom to love who you love openly and with pride”). It never once included trans rights. The same was true for Democratic candidates down the ballot. Before McBride was banned from the Capitol bathrooms, she was excluded from the Democratic National Convention stage.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., called the  Capitol trans bathroom ban dangerous for “all women and girls” because “all it does is allow these Republicans to go around and bully any woman who isn’t wearing a skirt because she might not look woman enough.” That’s a lot like someone in 1955 objecting to Jim Crow laws because some white people might get mistaken for Black people. AOC didn’t mention McBride or civil rights.

Trans people have become untouchables.

[…] 

If it sounds like I’m terrified, I am — as are many trans Americans and their families. In recent years there has been an escalation in the number of anti-trans bills introduced in Republican state houses (669 bills in 2024). Most are targeting trans minors, taking away bathrooms, sports, books, forcibly outing them, outlawing “crossdressing,” greenlighting hate speech, criminalizing any mention of gender identity, and criminalizing their parents, doctors and counselors. As Trump has vowed, and as the state of Oklahoma has done, they’re not going to stop with children.

But what terrifies me most doesn’t just concern trans people. I’ll pose my fear as a question: What percentage of the German population was Jewish at the time of Hitler’s rise? The answer — 0.75% — is lower than most people guess.

The Nazi party gaslit a nation into thinking that a group comprising 0.75% of its population was a threat that could “poison” its culture, seize its economy and needed to be stopped. During the 1930s, before Germany’s “final solution” to “the Jewish problem,” more than 400 anti-Jewish decrees and regulations were issued by national, regional and municipal officials, gradually eliminating Jews from public life, employment, education, culture, travel, hospital care and turning them into outcasts.

JD Vance brought all of that pathological hatred of Haitians to bear when he accused Haitian immigrants, whom he considers a threat, of eating cats (the same cats he also considers a threat to white birth rates). The racists who participate in the anti-immigrant online mobs do the same. Not everybody who is piling on is aware of the deep and disgusting history of racism toward Haitians: After all, many online MAGAs have an aversion to knowing things about the other peoples of the world. But they know enough (that Haitians are Black and vulnerable in this country) to derive glee from participating in cruelty.

It hurts, of course. It always hurts when you are reminded of just how many white folks hate your people. It always stings to see a few other Black people or other supposed allies join in the denigration. I think the insult that Haitians are eating pets is doubled for me because I know for a fact that white Americans care more about their family pets than they do about Haitian immigrants being threatened and harassed right now. If all of Haiti were a nature preserve for cats and dogs, it would be protected at all costs. Since it is a home for free Black folks, its people are treated like dogs.

But being hurt and being defeated are two different things. White folks have been trying to strangle Haiti and Haitians into submission for over 200 years, and yet we are still here. What I can laugh about is this: The white supremacist forces multicultural America is trying to defeat in this election are forces little ol’ Haitians defeated literal centuries ago. America is still trying to get at our level.

My happy but plain vanilla life stands in contrast to the lurid rhetoric and terrifying intentions of Governor Greg Abbott, his allies in the state Legislature, and Republican lawmakers across the country, as well as the goals of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s extremist blueprint for America’s future. Friends out of state urge me to leave Texas, which is where I have always lived. They fear for my safety. Some trans people I know refuse even to travel through Texas.

Their fears are not unwarranted. What I’ve found, however, is that even in rural Texas the average person couldn’t care less about my gender. Most Texans who know me and hear my story are supportive, wherever they happen to lie on the political spectrum. They may not understand it, but they accept it and move on. Those who do shun, hate, or fear seem, in my view, to be either insecure in their own identity or to be captured by merchants of fear in right-wing media.

Trans people endure constant psychic strain as we make our spaces and serve our communities while lawmakers plot our extinction. But the staged uproar over our supposed effrontery has less to do with reality than with our antagonists’ covert aims and unexamined anxieties. Someone I know recently suggested that trans people bring hate upon our own heads by always seeking attention and affirmation. The prosaic truth is that we simply want to exist.

This is just heartbreaking. And this was two years ago!

As some states become increasingly hostile to transgender youth, families are weighing a difficult decision of whether to leave their schools, jobs and communities behind to flee to a state with greater LGBTQ protections.

Finally, the pervasive tendency among nominally anti-MAGA leaders to accommodate Trumpism in power and cling to a treacherous idea of “normalcy” is also rooted in foundational myths that shape the collective imaginary of liberal America, in particular. We may be decades removed from the heyday of the so-called “liberal consensus” of the post-war era, that shared understanding among the country’s elite that America is fundamentally good, the institutions essentially healthy, and the U.S. inexorably on its way to overcoming whatever vestigial problems there might still be – but such ideas of exceptional goodness are still powerful today. They often go hand in hand with a mythical tale of American democracy being exceptionally stable. Never mind that, empirically speaking, multiracial democracy has existed for only about 60s years in this country and has been hotly contested at all times: What could possibly happen to America’s supposedly “old, consolidated” democracy? A fundamentally healthy, functioning, consolidated democracy cannot, in this imagination, be brought down by an authoritarian threat rising within its midst. So, either the system is not healthy – or the Trumpist regime is not an acute threat to the survival of American democracy. The latter is a much more comfortable proposition.

The Left in the U.S. doesn’t want an energetic president with the power to bend the executive branch to the will of the American people. They don’t want a vibrant Congress where great questions are debated and decided in front of the American people and the tradeoffs made there. They don’t want empowered members. They want discouraged and bored back benchers. They want all-empowered career “experts” like Tony Fauci to wield power behind the curtains.

And in America, the scary part is that this regime is now increasingly arrayed against the American people. It is both woke and weaponized. The national security state, with organs like the FBI, NSA, and CIA, are aligned against the American people, who are outraged by this revolution they never assented to. The FBI is investigating concerned parents attending open school board meetings as domestic terrorists. They are putting political opponents in jail. The NSA is surveilling the conversations of citizens. Therefore, the hour is late and time is of the essence to expose the charade, rally the country against it toward self-government once again, and seize every leverage point to arrest the damage.

Whatever the term or image, the imperative that conservatives must break from the past and forge a new political identity cannot be overstated. It is time now for something new, for a new way of thinking and speaking about what conservative politics should be. The fusionism of past decades, in which conservatives made common cause with market-obsessed libertarians and foreign policy neocons, is finished. So too is Conservatism Inc. and the establishment GOP it enabled, whose first priority was always tax cuts for big business at the expense of everything else. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 heralded a populist wave and the end of Republican politics as we knew it, and now we are in uncharted waters.

[…]

The left will only stop when conservatives stop them, which means conservatives will have to discard outdated and irrelevant notions about “small government.” The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life — and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.

To stop Big Tech, for example, will require using antitrust powers to break up the largest Silicon Valley firms. To stop universities from spreading poisonous ideologies will require state legislatures to starve them of public funds. To stop the disintegration of the family might require reversing the travesty of no-fault divorce, combined with generous subsidies for families with small children. Conservatives need not shy away from making these arguments because they betray some cherished libertarian fantasy about free markets and small government. It is time to clear our minds of cant. 

[…]

To those who worry that power corrupts, and that once the right seizes power it too will be corrupted, they certainly have a point. If conservatives manage to save the country and rebuild our institutions, will they ever relinquish power and go the way of Cincinnatus? It is a fair question, and we should attend to it with care after we have won the war.

For now, there are only two paths open to conservatives. Either they awake from decades of slumber to reclaim and re-found what has been lost, or they will watch our civilization die. There is no third road. 

In 1994, the ten largest builders had just 10% of the national market. By 2018, the top ten builders had a little less than a third. Partly this consolidation is due to a credit crunch. During the financial crisis from 2007-2012, 55% of residential developers disappeared. There were also post-crisis mergers, like Pulte Homes and Centex, Lennar and CalAtlantic, Tri Pointe and Weyerhauser, and so forth, but many of the acquisitions these days are smaller roll-ups, like D.R. Horton buying an Arkansas specialty builder Riggins Custom Homes, Gulf Coast builder Truland Homes, or lot developer Forestar Group, or Lennar acquiring developer WCI Communities. Analysts are projecting 2024 to be another strong year for M&A.

Of course, such numbers understate consolidation; national shares matter very little, since housing is local, and concentration is higher when you get to local levels. In Miami-Fort Lauderdale, for instance, Lennar has 47% of the market for new homes, in Los Angeles, D.R. Horton has about a third. As economist Luis Quintero noted in a paper, 60% of local markets are now “highly concentrated,” a new phenomenon. In 25 of the top 82 markets, one builder controls at least 25% of the market. That’s 60% of the housing markets in “Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, and western Pennsylvania.”

[…]

So why all the consolidation? And more importantly, why hasn’t the number of builders bounced back? If margins are up, why aren’t there new entrants coming in to take profit and share? To answer this question I started by reading a bunch of investor documents from the big homebuilders. And I realized that to call these businesses “homebuilders” is misleading. It’s striking how little of their business has to do with, well, building. For instance, here’s D.R. Horton in 2023: “Substantially all of our land development and home construction work is performed by subcontractors.” Here’s Lennar in 2023: “We use independent subcontractors for most aspects of land development and home construction.” I suspect most of the other big guys would say something similar. These aren’t builders, they are financiers that borrow cheaper than real developers and use that cheap credit to speculate in land, hiring contractors to do the work. They are, in other words, middlemen.

The smug, self-righteous “moral” crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. It reduces a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. It allows Democratic politicians to blithely ignore their base -  77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support an arms embargo against Israel. The open collusion with corporate oppression and refusal to heed the desires and needs of the electorate neuters the press and Trump  critics. These corporate puppets stand for nothing, other than their own advancement. The lies they tell to working men and women, especially with programs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), do far more damage than any of the lies uttered by Trump.

Oswald Spengler in “The Decline of the West” predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of “monied thugs,” people such as Trump, would replace the traditional political elites. Democracy would become a sham. Hatred would be fostered and fed to the masses to encourage them to tear themselves apart.

The American dream has become an American nightmare.

The social bonds, including jobs that gave working Americans a sense of purpose and stability, that gave them meaning and hope, have been sundered. The stagnation of tens of millions of lives, the realization that it will not be better for their children, the predatory nature of our institutions, including education, health care and prisons, have engendered, along with despair, feelings of powerlessness and humiliation. It has bred loneliness, frustration, anger and a sense of worthlessness.

I have thoughts backed up, many of them, obviously. As election day approached, I found myself thinking more and more about Lakoff, in the context of the New Republicans' ability to convey a narrative about who they are and what they stand for. It's monstrous, but has a kind of coherence. By contrast the Democrats don't have anything like that. As an institution, they are a moral and civil vacuum. They are rightly seen as calculating and untrustworthy.

However I take issue with Duran and Lakoff's assertion that the Democrats were practicing identity politics. If anything they were doing quite the reverse: identity complacency. The Republicans have been wielding identity politics frighteningly effectively.

In 2024, Kamala Harris tried to move to the right to find the mythical “center.” It didn’t work. Moving to the right doesn't get you to the center – because there is no center. When a Democratic politician moves to "the right" during an election, it erodes their authenticity. In fact, such tactics might have demotivated Democratic voters who were disillusioned to see their candidate running as a Republican Lite.

[…]

Moving forward, Democrats must stop making these superficial, last-minute lurches toward Republican ideas. They must frame the case not as left or right, but for the people and the public good. Moving to the right only convinces voters that the right has better ideas. It's a desperate short-term strategy with harmful long-term consequences.

[…]

Especially helpful to Trump were large social media accounts that thrive on engagement from outraged Democrats. As in 2016, Trump’s "opponents" created a parasitic economy in which constant outrage over Trump's every utterance was the name of the game. Again, this was a massive failure – because focusing attention on Trump’s power — even his power to harm — helps Trump. (Don't expect these professional social media hounds to change their tactics. Amplifying Trump is their bread and butter.)

The attacks on Trump managed to help spread his message far and wide. If Democrats and the liberal press had spent less time reacting to Trump, they might have done a lot better job of trumpeting — and trumpeting loudly — their own candidate’s positives.