Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Kamala D. Harris: Voting is the best way to honor generations of women who paved the way for me
After the 19th Amendment, women of color fought voter suppression. Now, we all need to.
One hundred years ago, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was formally adopted. Courageous American women had been organizing and protesting for seven decades to be treated as equal participants in our democracy, and their hard work finally paid off. After ratification votes from 36 states, it was official: Our Constitution would forevermore enshrine the right to vote for American women.
That is, unless you were Black. Or Latina. Or Asian. Or Indigenous.
We cannot mark this day, now known as Women’s Equality Day, without remembering all the American women who were not included in that voting rights victory a century ago. Black activists such as Ida B. Wells had dealt with discrimination and rejection from White suffragists in their work to secure the vote. And when the 19th Amendment was ratified at last, Black women were again left behind: Poll taxes, literacy tests and other Jim Crow voter suppression tactics effectively prohibited most people of color from voting.
In fact, if I had been alive in 1920, I might not have been allowed to cast a ballot alongside White women. Neither would my mother, an immigrant from India, who first taught me how sacred our vote is. It would be another 45 years until the Voting Rights Act protected the voting rights of millions more voters of color — and an additional 10 years until Latinas and Indigenous women were no longer subject to literacy tests.
So although the centennial of the 19th Amendment offers a reminder that extraordinary progress is possible, it is also a reminder that there has never truly been universal suffrage in America.
Thomas B. Edsall: ‘I Fear That We Are Witnessing the End of American Democracy’
The frank racism of the contemporary Republican agenda is on display at the R.N.C.
The center-right political coalition in America — the Republican Party as it stands today — can be described as holding two overarching goals: First, deregulation and reductions in corporate and other tax liabilities — each clearly stated on the White House website — and second, but packing a bigger punch, the preservation of the status quo by stemming the erosion of the privileged status of white Christian America. [..]
The most important issue driving Trump’s ascendance, however, has not been the economy but race. [..]
The emergence of a right-populist, authoritarian-inclined Republican Party coincides with the advent of a bifurcated Democratic Party led, in large part, by a well-educated, urban, globally engaged multicultural elite allied with a growing minority electorate.
Structurally, the Democratic Party has become the ideal adversary for a Republican Party attempting to define political competition as a contest between “us the people” against “them, the others” — the enemy. The short- and medium-term prognosis for productive political competition is not good.
Joshua Greene, the Harvard psychologist, closed his email with an addendum: “P.S. I think that Biden will probably win and will probably be the next president. But the fact that I can’t say more than ‘probably’ is terrifying to me. I fear that we are witnessing the end of American democracy.”
Jamelle Bouie: Grievances on Parade
The Republican Party may not have a platform, but it has a plan.
Republicans chose not to produce a platform for their convention, no statement of values or declaration of principle. Instead, the party has approved a resolution to “enthusiastically support” President Trump’s “America-first agenda,” whatever that may be. And while the White House has produced a bullet-point outline of its second-term agenda, this week’s convention itself has little content planned other than cultural grievance and worshipful praise for the president. As one veteran congressional aide told Politico, the only thing Republicans believe now is “Owning the libs and pissing off the media.”
It’s easy, observing all of this, to say that the Republican Party has fallen fully into a cult of personality around Trump and his family, a shocking number of whom have featured speaking roles at the convention. It’s also easy to say the party has no ideas or plans for the future. But that would be a mistake. For the Republican Party, the situation now isn’t too different from what it was in 2016. Trump lacked a serious agenda then just as he lacks one now. Rather than bring a new program to bear on the party, he has made the equivalent of a trade: total support for his personal and political concerns in exchange for almost total pursuit of conservative ideological interests.
Robert Reich: Amid fire and pestilence, floods and storms, the personal is political: Trump must go
Americans face existential challenges. The president has done nothing to help and much to make things worse
My wife and I have been warned we may need to evacuate our cabin in the hills north of San Francisco, because of fires ravaging the Bay Area.
Climate change is largely to blame for these fires, which are growing in number and intensity every year. It’s also to blame for the increasing number and virulence of hurricanes hitting the Gulf and south-east, flash floods along the eastern seaboard, and fierce winds across middle America.
Two tropical storms are developing in the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf has never before had two hurricanes at the same time. Both are moving toward Louisiana.
In early August, Illinois and Iowa were hit with winds of up to 110mph. Homes were leveled. At least 10 million acres of crops were destroyed. Many are still without power.
Trump isn’t singularly responsible for climate change, of course. But he’s done nothing to stop it. In fact, he’s done everything he can to accelerate it.
This coming week, he’ll be nominated for a second term. I doubt he or anyone else at the Republican convention will mention his abandonment of the Paris agreement, his rollback of environmental regulations or his boundless generosity to the fossil fuel industry.
Yet I’ll be thinking about all this, and in a newly personal way. So will many others, including, I suspect, some who voted for Trump last time, who reside in the Gulf states, the eastern seaboard and the Midwest.
It’s one thing to understand climate change in the abstract. It’s another to live inside it.
Amanda Marcotte: Were Don Jr. and Kimberly “coked up”? Maybe not, but it’s all part of the fascist tradition
Hyperactive, aggressive rhetoric — with a stimulant-style flair — is meant to overwhelm the audience emotionally
During the first night of the Republican National Convention, the word “cocaine” started to trend on Twitter, and not because there was any breaking news about the infamous party drug. No, it’s because many of the speakers at the convention brought a hyperactive bombast to the proceedings that was highly reminiscent of the effects of cocaine and other illegal stimulants. Watching some of the speeches, in fact, felt quite a bit like sitting through that scene in “Boogie Nights” where a menacing half-naked cocaine dealer brandishes a gun while pacing and ranting to 1980s hits like “Sister Christian” and “Jessie’s Girl.” The only thing missing was a dude in the corner setting off fireworks randomly to keep people even more on edge.
In particular, Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, along with his girlfriend, former Fox News host and current Trump campaign factotum Kimberly Guilfoyle, delivered speeches that caused widespread speculation on social media about the use of chemical assistance.
This entire display left progressives, mainstream journalists and anyone who isn’t already in the Trump tribe befuddled. It was grotesque and overwhelming, and only served to unnerve viewers. Even the presence of speakers who took a more measured tone, like former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, didn’t help matters. If anything, the rapid and dramatic tonal shifts only served to discombobulate viewers more. It was an emotional roller coaster that was, yes, reminiscent of the wild mood swings of someone who’s cranked up on hardcore stimulants.
As gross as it all was, it would be a mistake to assume that Republicans don’t know what they’re doing. On the contrary, this coked-up aesthetic has a long and unsavory history in the annals of fascism, authoritarianism and other forms of personality cult.
Hitting audiences with a firehose of emotions is about deliberately unmooring them, spinning them so hard emotionally that they can’t tell up from down. It’s about breaking down people’s sense of self and their grip on reality, so they turn into putty at the hands of the authoritarian leader, to be rebuilt in the form that he prefers.