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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Robert Reich: Voters can replace a party that knows how to fight with one that knows how to govern
The division between Republicans and Democrats is no longer between left and right but between different core competences
As America heads into its quadrennial circus of nominating conventions (this year’s even more surreal because of the pandemic), it’s important to understand the real difference between America’s two political parties at this point in history.
Instead of “left” versus “right”, think of two different core competences.
The Democratic party is basically a governing party, organized around developing and implementing public policies. The Republican party has become an attack party, organized around developing and implementing political vitriol. Democrats legislate. Republicans fulminate.
In theory, politics requires both capacities – to govern, but also to fight to attain and retain power. The dysfunction today is that Republicans can’t govern and Democrats can’t fight.
Donald Trump is the culmination of a half-century of Republican belligerence. Richard Nixon’s “dirty tricks” were followed by Republican operative Lee Atwater’s smear tactics, Newt Gingrich’s take-no-prisoners reign as House speaker, the “Swift-boating” of John Kerry, and the Republicans’ increasingly blatant uses of racism and xenophobia to build an overwhelmingly white, rural base.
Heather Digby Parton: Donald Trump didn’t invent vote suppression — he’s just taking it to the next level
Undermining voting rights and squelching democracy isn’t just a Trump thing. It’s been a GOP thing for decades
One of the more tedious tasks in writing about politics is that every single election year it’s necessary to discuss the latest cheating schemes cooked up by the Republican Party to suppress the votes of minorities, challenge the legality of perfectly legal votes and otherwise make all elections they do not win look suspect in the eyes of American voters. Needless to say, this year is worse than usual because Donald Trump makes everything worse than usual.
But it’s important not to ascribe the latest attempts to manipulate the election results solely to Trump and his minions. Even though he is more crude and obvious about what he’s doing, he is actually following in a longstanding tradition of the modern GOP, traceable all the way back to the 1960s. [..]
For more than 50 years the Republican Party has been working feverishly to ensure that Democratic voters are denied the right to vote, especially African Americans and other minorities. It hasn’t just been Southern white supremacists in deep-red states doing this. Such campaigns have been sanctioned and endorsed by the highest reaches of the Republican establishment. The corruption that lies at the heart of this project has been demonstrated by Republican Departments of Justice and the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, with essentially no repercussions.
So, let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that because Donald Trump is crude and ignorant his current attempt to sabotage the November election by defunding the post office and delegitimizing the vote-by-mail system is an anomaly. It may not have the subtlety of vote caging or the elegant sophistry of insisting that counting all the votes will disenfranchise voters, but it’s very much in line with the Republicans’ ongoing program of vote suppression.
William H. McRaven: Trump is actively working to undermine the Postal Service — and every major U.S. institution
In the 1997 film “The Postman,” set in post-apocalyptic America, Kevin Costner plays a drifter trying to restore order to the United States by providing one essential service, mail delivery. In the story, hate crimes, racially motivated attacks and a plague have caused the breakdown of society as we know it. In his quest to restore order and dignity to the nation, the Postman tries to recruit other postal workers to help rebuild the U.S. government. But Costner’s character is opposed by the evil General Bethlehem, who is fighting to suppress the postal carriers so he can establish a totalitarian government. Fortunately, our hero, gaining inspiration from the motto, “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night,” fights on against Bethlehem and saves the country.
Not surprisingly, the movie was panned by critics and was a financial disaster. I mean really, racial strife and a plague so bad that it threatened our society? And even if that happened, who would try to destroy the Postal Service? Where do they come up with these crazy plots?
In retrospect, maybe we should give the movie another look. Today, as we struggle with social upheaval, soaring debt, record unemployment, a runaway pandemic, and rising threats from China and Russia, President Trump is actively working to undermine every major institution in this country. He has planted the seeds of doubt in the minds of many Americans that our institutions aren’t functioning properly. And, if the president doesn’t trust the intelligence community, law enforcement, the press, the military, the Supreme Court, the medical professionals, election officials and the postal workers, then why should we? And if Americans stop believing in the system of institutions, then what is left but chaos and who can bring order out of chaos: only Trump. It is the theme of every autocrat who ever seized power or tried to hold onto it.
Paul Waldman: Is QAnon the shape of the Republican backlash to come?
Should President Trump lose in November, the Joe Biden presidency will be the target of some kind of angry far-right movement consumed with conspiracy theories. We know this because it’s what always happens when a Democrat gets elected. But how widespread it becomes and how much it affects mainstream politics are uncertain; it could be as influential as the tea party during Barack Obama’s time in office, or as fringe as the militia movement was during Bill Clinton’s.
The leading contender is already taking shape and working its way into the GOP: the lunatic conspiracy theory known as QAnon. It already has its first soon-to-be member of Congress, along with a raft of candidates who have captured Republican nominations for a number of offices, including in the U.S. Senate. And it has establishment Republicans confused and uncertain, aghast at what it represents but too cowardly to purge it from their ranks. [..]
Donald Trump was elected, in no small part, because he told disaffected white people that he could help them to take back the social primacy and dignity they felt had been stolen from them by forces larger than themselves: corporations, popular culture, increasing diversity, even modernity itself. What QAnon offers is not that different, even if it’s in a more deranged form.
So even if QAnon isn’t the vehicle for the inevitable conservative backlash, something like it — perhaps a QAnon Lite — could be. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Chad Marlow: The US Postal Service Was Never a Business. Stop Treating It Like One
Congress should do everything in its power to ensure the U.S. Postal Service remains vibrant and strong.
When the Continental Congress appointed Benjamin Franklin as the first Postmaster General, our nation had not yet been founded. The Bill of Rights would not be drafted for another 16 years. Yet nearly two and a half centuries later, the United States Postal Service’s ability to provide every person in America with a private, affordable, and reliable means to exchange information transformed it from a mail delivery service into a baseline for the exercise of American constitutional rights.
Recent news that the Postal Service’s financial condition is being used as a pretext for degrading its service—including allowing mail to go undelivered for days and scaling back the hours of or closing post offices—threatens to degrade that constitutional baseline as well. [..]
The U.S. Postal Service was never a business. It is an essential government service guaranteed to the American people by the U.S. Constitution and it should be preserved accordingly.
To understand how the Postal Service became so central to America’s national identity and the actualization of our constitutional rights, one needs to examine its history.
The constitutional amendment that finally did pass Congress bore Anthony’s name. It came up before the House of Representatives in 1918 with the two-thirds votes needed for passage barely within reach. One congressman who had been in the hospital for six months had himself carted to the floor so he could support suffrage. Another, who had just broken his shoulder, refused to have it set for fear he’d be too late to be counted. Representative Frederick Hicks of New York had been at the bedside of his dying wife but left at her urging to support the cause. He provided the final, crucial vote, and then returned home for her funeral.
Ninety years ago this month, all eyes turned to Tennessee, the only state yet to ratify with its Legislature still in session. The resolution sailed through the Tennessee Senate. As it moved on to the House, the most vigorous opposition came from the liquor industry, which was pretty sure that if women got the vote, they’d use it to pass Prohibition. Distillery lobbyists came to fight, bearing samples.