James Gillen

“The current Court is textualist only when being so suits it. When that method would frustrate broader goals, special canons like the ‘major questions doctrine’ magically appear as get out-of-text-free cards.”

– Supreme Court Associate Justice Elena Kagan, re: West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency

But the real problem with “conservative” opposition to the socialist agenda is that if we are going to define socialism in terms of Soviet-style communism and illiberal politics, we can no longer say that conservatism is the opposite of that.

-Me

At the end of the last Supreme Court session in June, Justice Stephen Breyer officially retired and swore in his replacement, Biden Administration appointee Ketanji Brown Jackson. Which means there was one thing to celebrate about this particular term of the Court: It ended.

In addition to Dobbs v. Mississippi (which liberals only refer to as ‘the Roe v. Wade reversal’ as though not naming the thing means it is not precedent) this term of the Court decided that a defendant can no longer sue the government if law enforcement didn’t read their Miranda rights. In contradiction of the idea that the Court has no standing to regulate abortion on a federal level, this Court did decide that it can stop any state from writing its own concealed-carry laws. And in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District the Court ruled that a high school football coach may pray on the football field without violating the separation of Church and State.

Personally, I think that if we have a house chaplain in Congress, then an official praying in public is not a violation of the First Amendment. It IS a violation of Matthew 6:5.

In the Dobbs case, Justice Samuel Alito decided that the Fourteenth Amendment due process standard did not apply in the case of abortion and that there had been no legal precedents or language in the original Constitution allowing it. Now, while many right-wingers have objected that the result of Roe v. Wade created a federal standard when the abortion issue should have been left to the states, Alito’s position blanks out the point that we had a Fourteenth Amendment in the first place because we already tried leaving the issue of slavery up to the states and that didn’t work out. Which brings up the relevant point that if the Reconstruction Amendments were meant to correct an institutional racism that had more precedent in American law than the standard going forward, and Alito has decided that these amendments do not apply to women because there was no previous historical standard protecting abortion rights, then there’s all kinds of things they don’t have to apply to.

When liberalism was ascendant in the judicial branch and creating “penumbras” and other standards asserting an unwritten or “living” Constitution that did not exist, rather than referring to existing standards like the Ninth or Fourteenth Amendments, conservatives- correctly- asserted that this was not interpreting the original source material as it existed but rather “legislating from the bench.” But apparently now that the Right is ascendant, that’s okay.

Now, new Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson may be a Democratic appointee, but she had said in her March confirmation hearings that “the Constitution is fixed in its meaning.” I personally think it’s better that we start from a fixed basis than assuming that the text means whatever a Justice writing the opinion wants it to mean. Of course, all the people who voted for Dobbs told their confirmation committees that Roe v. Wade was “settled law”, so take that for what you will. In any event, Jackson is only a replacement for retiring liberal-moderate Stephen Breyer, and the “conservative” majority is still 6-3, so a small infusion of new blood is not enough to reassert common sense in the Court.

But if the radicalization of the Court is clearly of a religious nature, there are contradictions in that: It has been pointed out that seven of the nine Supreme Court Justices are Catholic or baptized Catholic (all of the conservatives plus Sonia Sotomayor) but Catholic dogma asserts a pro-life position at all points, including the death penalty, and condemns gun violence. Not this court. In addition to the New York decision on concealed carry, the Supreme Court reinstated the death sentence of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev against the decision of a federal appeals court.

The other seeming contradiction is that the Religious Right is ascendant politically at a time when organized religion in America may be at its lowest point. According to a Gallup poll in 2021, US worship attendance (church, mosque or synagogue) had fallen below 50 percent for the first time, although some of this may be due to local COVID quarantine. However according to at least one other source, less than 20 percent of Americans actually attend church. An article in a religious site attributes the difference to a “halo effect” of overreporting socially approved behaviors like church attendance while under-reporting activities like drinking. But comparison of church membership rolls to attendance figures indicated a figure of 17.7 percent. In a 2002 survey of 1,159 U.S. churches, author Thom Rainer’s research team found that only 6 percent of the churches were growing, defining growth as not only increasing in church attendance, but also increasing at a pace faster than its community”s population growth rate. One other interesting statistic from the article: Other than Hawaii, the states that are actually leading in church growth are Texas, Florida and the Deep South states of Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma. One of the researchers notes: “states with very diverse cultures tend to have lower attendance numbers than the states surrounding them. ‘Most of our churches know how to address only one culture,’ he says.”

So basically what we’re seeing in government is a drive to push not faith in general but the faith culture of a specific demographic, and as that culture becomes less popular with the body of the nation, the more determined that minority group is to use government to force its position on the rest of us. Of course these are the same people who oppose any state or federal effort to tell them what to do as “socialist”, apparently failing to grasp the irony. Thus, the spirit moves me to define their nature of their movement with a proper title: religious socialism.

I have said before that I do consider National Socialism (Nazism) to be a type of socialism even though the Left would vehemently disagree. This disagreement stems from the idea that Nazis and Socialists were opposed in their goals. In many ways they were, but they were frequently in agreement that the culture was undermined by capitalism and materialism, with the Nazis going that much farther in identifying these things as inherent to Jews as people, whereas Marx simply identified them with Jewish culture that could be changed. They both saw the liberal world order as the main enemy, much as the new Right attacks the financial system and “globalism”. It is generally agreed that National Socialism is a subset of Fascism, not leftist socialism, but Fascism was developed by Benito Mussolini, formerly a Marxist, anti-war, anti-nationalist journalist who decided in the middle of World War I that becoming an Italian nationalist would be better for his political career. He took over Italy in 1922 and got a lot farther in creating a one-party state that re-ordered the entire country toward one political vision than the established Italian Left had managed to do previously. The word “fascism” was invented by Mussolini as part of his appeal to Italian nationalism, referring to the fasces that was used as a symbol of authority in ancient Rome. Meanwhile in Germany, post-war nationalists organized in groups similar to those formed by the Left, because they were the existing model. (Prior to the German Empire losing the war, nationalists didn’t need to form revolutionary action groups, because they were the establishment.) Mussolini’s takeover in Italy directly inspired the former “German Workers’ Party” to organize on the fascist model, and led to the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, which was unsuccessful in the short term.

National Socialism is a subset of Fascism specifically geared towards the German culture, especially the prevailing “Aryan vs. Jew” myth of anti-Semitism. But the phrase “national socialism” is actually more generically descriptive of the concept than “fascism” which refers specifically to a Roman/Italian origin.

National socialism is nothing more or less than that: the application of socialist means towards nationalist ends. Specifically it is the radical collectivization of a society under one non-pluralist government towards the goal of creating a reactionary political culture.

Of course the leftist will object to this opinion, but the real contradiction is the Right’s bad-faith insistence that their new collectivism is anti-socialist and pro-liberty. Or as I put it elsewhere, if Socialism is Bad and Nazis Are The REAL Socialists, then why do “conservatives” emulate the Nazis? For example, if Democrats are the bad guys because they are the Party of the Confederacy and rebellion and segregation, then why did Trump’s fan club carry the Confederate battle flag into the Capitol on January 6, to rebel against a lawful election?

Part of this is just projecting, but another part is labeling: If Socialism is Bad, then the reactionary revolutionary seeks to position his movement as the opposite, representing God, Mom, Apple Pie and everything that’s good about America or whatever the local equivalent is. (In Mussolini’s Italy, the equivalents were the Crown and the Church, which is why the King of Italy, who could have easily stopped his coup, instead chose to endorse it in order to combat Marxism, while later Mussolini as head of government managed to negotiate a peace with the Catholic Church making the Vatican part of Rome a sovereign territory, a treaty that exists to this day.)

Frankly, I use this term “religious socialist” for precisely the same reason that the Left is offended by the idea that “National Socialism” is an accurate term or that socialism can refer to anything bad. I do not use the term in the same way as the British Fabians or the German Social Democrats who thought that the goals of 19^th Century socialism could be achieved, and should be achieved, through democratic processes. I am using it in the same way that Lenin and Mao used it, because they thought that it was not enough to act through bourgeois democratic governments and one could only ally with them temporarily until absolute power was achieved. To the Nazi or Leninist, the means are more important than the ends, because the means are the ends. A Menshevik in Russia might have been okay with gradual reform of the Czarist system and the March Revolution might have transitioned to a democratic republic. The Bolshevik goal wasn’t to achieve a better living standard that could or could not be accomplished under a socialist majority. The Bolshevik goal was to destroy the aristocracy and murder all of its political opponents, including those on the Left (especially anyone on the Left, who might have had a more humane idea). Achieving better living standards was secondary at best, and if they actually did so, it merely reflects on how backward the Russian Empire was compared to Western countries that had gotten farther along in Marx’ analysis of historical development.

Not that the new Right, which asserts any opposition to its agenda as “socialism” is willing to embrace the label of fascism. Lenin, of course, defined his system as “democratic” centralism. Hitler and Nazi theorists defined their system as “Germanic democracy.” In the modern day, Hungarian leader Viktor Orban defined his approach as “illiberal democracy.” Which is not a direct contradiction. If democracy simply means giving the people what they want, and human rights are subject to a majority vote, you can understand why classical liberals like the Founding Fathers did not see democracy as synonymous with liberty and sometimes thought that democracy was opposed to it. That is why in America’s case, the Founders were at pains to create the Electoral College, the Senate and other measures to counter direct majority rule in their republic.

But what the classical liberals did not anticipate and the new authoritarians have learned all too well is that the historical success of liberal representative government obliged statists to couch their power grabs as being in some way representing “the will of the people” as opposed to the Crown or the Church. If their schemes are not in fact representing the majority, they simply have to limit the number of people who can vote on them until they get the result they want and present that as “the will of the people.” And it’s in this aim that having a counter-majoritarian system really helps.

The current Supreme Court set up could be the greatest example of this strategy in practice: You have six conservatives, four of whom were appointed by presidents who won the Electoral College without the popular vote (a result which conservatives still insist reflects a federal consensus), one of whom was directly appointed because Senate Majority Leader McConnell used an effective veto against President Obama’s last appointee to prevent them from even having a confirmation hearing (when Article I of the Constitution doesn’t say whether the Senate Majority Leader has such power, perhaps because Article I does not say anything creating an office of Senate Majority Leader), the last of whom was frantically chosen and sent through committee in the wake of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death even at the risk of the senators getting coronavirus, because they wanted to have a “real” conservative to override John Roberts, and the end result has in one month overturned “settled law” that had been the case for decades, and the majority can’t do anything about it because these are all lifetime appointees, because we consider some issues too important to be left to democracy.

Much of this is justified or down-played by certain apologists on the Right who are much more concerned about the pernicious influence of the Left on this country, eliding the point that the Left’s overall success in the political culture prior to Trump meant that they did not reward radicalism in the same way that the Right does now, and to the extent that there are unreasonable, anti-reality radicals on the Left, they don’t have nearly as much influence on the mainstream Democratic Party as the woke Right has on the Republican Party. The Right asserts, accurately, that identity politics is poisoning our discourse, but they blank out the fact that one of the consequences of this is that it encourages identity politics among (mostly white) conservatives who see a number of pluralities with growing voices and are starting to realize that they are no longer the political default.

Occasionally, some of these traditional conservatives realize that their side’s bigotry, authoritarianism and subsequent abuse of innocents have done more to alienate the general public than any left-wing propaganda. But you would have to have the brains of a Rod Dreher to realize that, and such thoughtfulness is not common in the “conservative” movement these days. Including Rod Dreher.

For the sake of paying lip service to civic structures that they increasingly feel able to denounce in public, Republicans need to game the system, change who qualifies as a voter and then after the fact of election, change which votes qualify as valid if enough of them go against them, as they tried to do between November 2020 and January 2021.

Which is why I have been saying that pretty soon the real white majority in this country is going to find out what it’s like to be black people. Not that some level of default “white privilege” isn’t going to accrue in other areas, but in the sense that our votes aren’t going to count. You can see with the cases of Clarence Thomas and Stephen Miller that the cult is willing to accept people who aren’t of good Nordic stock, but they still go by percentages. It may be that their policies discriminate against black people mainly because black people vote Democrat, but that kind of begs the question of why Black neighborhoods and districts don’t go Republican. In any event, even if it’s not the same motivation as racism, it may come off as a distinction without a difference.

I am a secular humanist (though I would not describe myself as a leftist). And I know a lot of leftists and secularists have bashed religion over abortion and other reasons. I’ve done it. But look: Liz Cheney is a hard-core anti-abortion Christian conservative, but she is not a religious socialist. Pope Francis is a hard-core pro-life Catholic (obviously), who unlike the new American Right, has endorsed welfare programs for the poor. But he is not a religious socialist. Neither of these two thinks that one religion, or one approach to religion, should be supreme in a government, but the main Republican Party does. If anything Catholicism has always tried to hold that God is above the state and so are human values. But then I have another theory which holds that the difference between Catholic monarchy and Protestant monarchy is the the Catholic believes the State is a lesser aspect of the Church, while the Protestant believes the Church is a lesser aspect of the State.

What is the approach which endorses neither and holds the question to be moot because Church and State are to be kept separate? Liberal representative government. And it is that model of government that religious socialism seeks to destroy.

I return to another Dreher article where he spoke somewhat approvingly of the East European return to illiberalism even as he took apart Catholic integralism.

“I don’t know if (James) Kalb is an integralist, but he’s right about the nature of the Good as the basis of a postliberal political order. The problem, though, is that we in the United States are a highly pluralistic nation, in which Catholics are a minority, and the number of Catholics willing to submit their lives to the teaching authority of the Church is very small. … If political Catholicism is in trouble in Poland, where almost everybody is Catholic, at least nominally, how on earth is it ever going to triumph in the United States, where Catholics (nominal and serious) only number about 20 percent of the population? And of that number, how many of them would be willing to surrender American liberties for a reactionary 19th century ideal establishing the Catholic Church, and making the State subordinate to it? I bet you could fit all of them into Adrian Vermeule’s backyard in Cambridge, Mass.

“In any case, the vague definition of integralism on the Josias doesn’t sound threatening. It’s when you start asking what that means in real life that it turns freaky. Normally, intellectual engagement is something to be enjoyed and engaged. There are plenty of non-Catholics who are interested to figure out a workable future under the condition of postliberalism, and would like to talk it all out. Not these cats. See, this is the thing that you must not do — ask what this would mean in real life. It makes our integralists mad. They blow up online, and sneer, act all indignant, and say that you must be one of those David French types for asking. It’s a silly act, but it tells us something important about them. If they thought that their program would be appealing to people, they would be eager to lay it out and try to win converts. [my emphasis] They seem to think that they are going to insult and sh*tpost their way to power.

“…I am sure I would prefer integralism to whatever we are likely to get if liberal democracy falls. We will likely get Caesarism of either the Left or the Right. I see no reason to believe that the Catholic Church would be part of this. But maybe I’m wrong. When Vladimir Putin took over from the ruins left by Boris Yeltsin and the catastrophe of the 1990s in Russia, he knew that he needed some kind of legitimating authority, so he began to rehabilitate the Orthodox Church in public life. It was a wise thing for him to do, strictly speaking from a political perspective. Should Continental European countries undergo a similar catastrophe, it would make sense for whatever political order emerges from the aftermath to do the same thing with Catholicism.

“The United States, however, is an historically Protestant nation. My guess is that if a right-wing Caesar emerged, he would look something like Gen. Michael Flynn: a hard nationalist authoritarian with at least a veneer of Christianity. Unlike much of Europe, we simply don’t have the “bones,” so to speak, to support Catholic integralism in this country. … How Catholic integralism comes to be in a historically Protestant country like the US is impossible to fathom. It’s an interesting thought experiment, but nothing more. We are far more likely to get a nationalist-conservative government like Hungary’s, a Christian democracy that provides something that a majority can potentially affirm. That’s what I hope for, anyway, not a scheme in which we surrender our liberties to representatives of a Christian religion that only a minority accept.”

And again, that’s the thoughtful position in the Right.

The real problem with creating a homogeneous theocracy (that leans on Catholicism or in Putin’s case, Orthodoxy) in the United States is theology. Anybody who’s studied history knows that it’s hard enough to get everybody on the same page even when there is a state religion (as in the Eastern Orthodox Roman Empire, aka the Byzantine Empire). Literal wars have been fought over issues like transubstantiation. This is what Dreher means when he says our American religious culture is really not of a Catholic nature (that is, assuming an encompassing authority). Given that is the case, the appeal to religion necessarily has to be non-denominational and focused on the subjects that hard-right Catholics and Protestants can agree on, namely banning abortion. But a Catholic would insist that there has to be some doctrinal consistency and authority, otherwise the agenda is less a religious agenda using government than a political agenda under the label of religion. As Dreher also says, this project is most likely to produce a “hard nationalist authoritarian with at least a veneer of Christianity.” But when actual church-going in America is at its lowest point, why is the veneer even necessary?

Because, frankly, it is a lot easier to seal the appeal to authority fallacy when the authority is God. God by definition is above human values and therefore above human judgment, so saying “God told us to do this” is a lot harder for most people to argue with than saying “Jefferson (or Roosevelt, or Lenin, or Putin) told us to do this.” By the same token, the Left doesn’t understand that most people are not materialists and are not motivated by Marxist economic arguments. Many people would sacrifice their lives for God or Country. I don’t know who would sacrifice their lives for a tractor.

At the same time, the lack of reliance on a specific religious tradition or dogma is a plus in political terms. The need for a non-material universe persists in people who were raised in a Christian default culture, and if they don’t participate in traditional religious services, they still want to feel like they’re on that side. Equating one’s political allegiance to religion allows the “conservative” to feel that he has the benefits of religious faith without the spiritual work.

There may be “trad” conservatives like Dreher or the integralists who seriously think that doctrinal rigor is important, but they are ultimately only instrumental to the new Right’s political process, and the political process is not concerned with consistency or doctrine, only results. So it doesn’t matter that all of the conservatives on the Supreme Court are Catholic, because their “pro-life” doctrine is just as inconsistent and expedient as their federalism. The goal is to create the American doctrine and the American religion, and that religion is basically whatever the secular authorities say it is.

To the religious socialist, cognitive dissonance doesn’t matter because when you have total control of a population, their cognition doesn’t matter, only their obedience. Of course not even experienced totalitarians like Hitler, Stalin and Mao could exercise absolute control all the time, and their systems either collapsed or had to be heavily modified. But the new Right endorses this sort of thing on the assumption that liberal, individualist civilization is spiritually and intellectually exhausted. In point of fact, the history is that liberalism developed in the first place because we tried religious absolutism, found it to be spiritually and intellectually exhausted, unfit for modern conditions, and we had to get rid of it because it sucked. Now you can’t be surprised that the gang that threw out 50 years of legal precedent last month wouldn’t be scared of overturning 246 years of Enlightenment, but this is America. We don’t understand history any better than we understand socialism, and we clearly understand religion even less.

To honor our nation’s greatest holiday, I am posting a link to a speech about what the holiday really means and what freedom and independence mean at a crucial point in history, by writer and activist Frederick Douglass. This guy, I hear he’s doing really good things.

https://genius.com/Frederick-douglass-what-to-the-slave-is-the-fourth-of-july-annotated

Well, after first announcing that the January 6 congressional hearings would only take place in the month of June, then announcing new hearings for July, they just announced Monday that there was going to be a hearing called on Tuesday the 28^th, on the basis of “newly received information.”

By 6 am Eastern time it was announced that the main witness was one Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Trump Organization Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

Today Hutchinson testified, along with many other funny things, that Donald Trump, once and future Viceroy for Russian North America, heard that the Republican protestors on January 6 had weapons, and told Meadows’ staff, “I don’t f’ing care if they have weapons, they’re not here to hurt me.” He was apparently not happy that the Secret Service were screening people for weapons. When he heard about violence at the Capitol, he “almost had a lack of reaction.” Hutchinson said that when Trump was in the limo after his speech (where he said he wanted to join the march to the Capitol), a Secret Service agent who was at the wheel told her that Trump tried to lunge for the wheel to grab it from him. She testified that White House lawyer Pat Cipollone said that one reason the staff was against going to the Capitol with the mob is that Trump and his aides could be charged with “every crime imaginable.” She also corroborated Liz Cheney’s statement that when Trump heard the mob wanted to hang Mike Pence, he said “Mike deserves it.”

Hutchinson also said, “There were several times throughout my tenure with the chief of staff that I was aware of either him (Trump) throwing dishes or flipping the tablecloth to let all the contents of the table go onto the floor and likely break or go everywhere.”

I frankly don’t see any cause for surprise or alarm. Donald Trump is a flaming asshole. Quelle surprise. Lyndon Johnson was a flaming asshole. And he didn’t do anything bad besides, well, start a war in Vietnam while creating a giant redistribution program that combined to give us an inflationary economy that we are still living with. But even if you don’t like Johnson’s programs, at least he didn’t institute them to make the ex-head of the KGB happy.

This does give evidence, as if we needed it, that we need to scrap the Electoral College or at least modify the method of tallies, because the result that the Founding Fathers were so afraid of – that an unqualified demagogue could appeal to the gullible masses to get undeserved power – was only possible because that institution allowed Trump to get critical states and win on that basis even though he never won a popular majority. If the vote had been a national popularity poll, then you would have gotten Hillary Clinton, which really would have been the lesser evil. I mean, a lesser evil on the level of Asmodeus vs. Cthulhu, but the Devil has less slime and tentacles.

If nothing else, these January 6 hearings are gonna make Liddle Donnie’s campaign ads for 2024 SO much funnier.

“Hi! I’m Liddle Donnie Trump! I’m a screaming baby-man who can barely spell his own name, and I want YOU to give me back the nuclear weapons codes!!”

The real punch line is that that appeal works for so many people.

You raise up your head
And you ask, “Is this where it is?”
And somebody points to you and says
“It’s his“
And you say, “What’s mine?”
And somebody else says, “Well what is?”
And you say, “Oh my God
Am I here all alone?”

But something is happening
And you don’t know what it is…
Do you.. Mister Jones?

-Bob Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man”

June 24 ad from Evan McMullin in Utah, Mormon and recovering Republican:

“Following today’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, some states are enacting extreme laws — total bans on abortion, onerous limits on birth control, and criminalization of women in desperate situations. I oppose such extreme laws.

“My opponent, Senator Mike Lee, continues to weaponize this issue to divide the country for political gain. I’m running for Senate to accomplish the opposite.

“When we do more to help women and children, abortions decline. Making contraception more available and otherwise doing much more to support families is what truly protects life — not extremist laws that target women in their most vulnerable moments.

“Our commitment to life must be more comprehensive, and start with judging less and doing more to help those in difficult circumstances who need our compassion. “

Of course Mormons were one of the denominations promoting the so-called “three exceptions”, allowing abortions in cases of rape, incest or threat to a mother’s health. But then what we’re dealing with here isn’t even Catholic. Catholic dogma IS pro-life in all cases (as opposed to the pro-gun, pro-death penalty Supreme Court). What we’ve got here is an agenda that makes The Handmaid’s Tale look like Woodstock.

What does a “pro-life” government mean? Well, let’s look at an ACTUAL Catholic country: Ireland. Ireland is (or was) more damn Catholic than Italy, and from its founding as a republic retained a strict abortion ban from British times, saying that the woman (not the doctor) who induced an abortion was “to be kept in penal servitude for life”. There was some support for abortion rights but while it built up steadily over decades, support for abortion bans remained fairly strong. What really changed things was a 2012 case in which an Indian national suffered an unsuccessful pregnancy at 17 weeks’ gestation. Her water broke but this did not expel the fetus. Her hospital refused to remove (abort) the pregnancy and she ended up dying of maternal sepsis. The national outcry led to the country re-writing the laws by 2018 so that abortion is allowed in some cases under 12 weeks’ pregnancy or in cases where medical examiners have determined a threat to the life of the mother or a medical issue indicating the fetus could not survive. Again, the terms “Irish” and “Catholic” used to be nearly synonymous. Not that this issue was the only reason for the steep decline of the Church institution in Ireland, but it sure didn’t help.

Yet the anti-Democratic party that appointed six of our nine justices looks at other people’s history and instead of learning from it, does what it always does and doubles down on stupid. Clearly they don’t care that “maternal sepsis” is a thing, that late-period abortions are only performed in cases of medical necessity precisely because the parents wanted a child and are in an unexpected medical emergency, and it doesn’t matter to them that their dogmatic ban will result in the deaths of pregnant women and probably their children too. Any sacrifice, even in the hundreds or thousands, is justified for the sake of PROTECTING HUMAN LIFE.

PRAISE Trump! Uh, ah mean Jesus.

And if one thought that Thomas E. Dobbs et al v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was the endgame, think again. In his concurring opinion, Justice Thomas (who apparently was not allowed to write Friday’s opinion because it would have been too extreme) said that the court needs to “reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence V. Texas, Loving v. Virginia – I’m sorry, what?”

Yet Andrew Sullivan, who was on Bill Maher’s show same day, said in his Friday column: “”Has my previous confidence that the end Roe was unrelated to these precedents waned? Not really. … Abortion has long been controversial — and is still furiously contested. Marriage equality reached a record consensus just this month: 71 percent approval, with 55 percent approval among Republicans last year. Thomas was trolling.”

This was my response to dish.andrewsullivan.com:
“Of course Thomas was trolling. He always has been. He and Alito have been trolling for quite some time. They’ve made their positions clear a long time before today, but they needed three Trump SCOTUS nominees before their trolling on abortion became “settled law.” Of course now there is no such thing as settled law, and really, there never was. It’s just that prior to now the Court saw itself as above political bias and wanted to not make it so obvious.

“Here are several other words besides abortion that are mentioned nowhere in the main Constitution or the Bill of Rights: Homosexual. Heterosexual. Machine gun. Semi-automatic. Internet.

“By Alito’s Solomonic approach to “strict constructionism”, some liberal justice could at some point assert that the Constitution does not protect a citizen’s right to semi-automatic weaponry or certain types of ammunition, because the Constitution doesn’t specifically protect them, and smirkingly cite Alito’s opinion in their reasoning, just as Alito smirkingly refers to Ginsburg and Blackmun in his reasoning.

“One only takes such a position, knowing it could be reversed by an equally biased leftist court, on the assumption that one is either immortal, or that the executive branch will keep appointing equally reactionary justices in perpetuity, and largely thanks to Thomas’ gutting of the Voting Rights Act, that will be a lot more likely. And since Republican Party politics are that much more subject to escalating reactionary sentiment than the Court is, future presidents will most likely appoint Justices who make Thomas look like Blackmun.”

I mean yes, the purpose of a court system is to make sure it isn’t subject to the vicissitudes of public opinion, but there’s a difference between not being overly solicitous of public opinion and saying “Fuck public opinion right up the ass with a six-foot cactus attached to a Harley-Davidson engine.” Frankly, that is the stuff of which revolutions are made.

And while we’re on the subject of revolutions, or Justice Clarence Thomas, let’s not forget that his wife, Ginni Thomas, was one of the people pushing Trump Organization Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to “stop the steal” by putting Democrats and establishment Republicans in Guantanamo Bay, and for some reason Justice Thomas was the sole dissent in the post-election case the Trump Organization brought to SCOTUS, which confirmed that Trump had no right to block the release of documents to the January 6 congressional investigation.

I am reminded of one of those Facebook memes I saw recently. This is one of those jokes where they show a few panels from a movie everybody’s seen, with the dialogue changed to show the characters being perceptive and reasonable rather than reacting as dictated by the plot. Thus the last panel of the meme is the final credits of the movie, cause if everyone did the intelligent thing and cut through the plot contrivance the whole thing would be over.

In this case, the movie was Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Specifically the scene where Anakin, Padme and Obi-Wan are chained up in the Geonosis arena. Obi-Wan points out the Clone Troopers to Anakin, then says that he’d discovered that they were part of a secret project by Chancellor Palpatine, then tells him that Count Dooku imprisoned him and told him that Darth Sidious is in control of the Senate. Anakin deduces that if the clone army is Palpatine’s project and Palpatine is Sidious, then Dooku and Palpatine are working together. And then the next panel is “Written and Directed by George Lucas” because if they made the obvious deduction and took the obvious next steps, Palpatine’s whole plot would be over.

I saw that meme and thought, “Wow, it’s like the Jedi in these movies were all Democrats.”

It should be obvious by now that a literally anti-democratic party, enabled by the Alito court, has declared war against the rest of the country and is trying to eliminate not just political opposition to its opinions but legal opposition as well. And yet the institutional Democratic Party refuses to make the obvious deduction and take the obvious next steps, perhaps realizing that such legitimacy as they have depends on entertaining the increasingly unsupported idea that this is a multi-party democracy and that the Republican Party is a legitimate part of it, even as that party seeks to destroy that system from within.

A cartel system is no more healthy for a government than it is for a free market. If the cartel partners eliminate all competition to their establishment, then there is no recourse if one or more of the partners becomes dysfunctional and less able to hold on to its gains. The weaker party eventually goes defunct and the last survivor becomes a monopoly. And that stage is even less healthy for government than it is for capitalism.

We’re screwed either way. If you hate woke socialism and political correctness, your only choice is the Republican Party, which means submitting to the even more smothering political correctness of their made-up theocracy and Trump worship. If you don’t want to be ruled by Trump and his wannabe fascists, your only choice is the Democratic Party, which on one hand advocates for woke socialism and political correctness and on the other hand does a piss-poor job of implementing them.

Because Republicans are largely responsible for America’s political dysfunction, and are its main beneficiaries, the serious change America’s political system needs has to first come through the Democrats, and that is unlikely because one, they have their own ulterior motives, two, the system resists change, and three, more than that, the American people resist change.

I mean, I personally think that were it not for COVID, aka Trump Virus (TM) that Donald Trump might have gotten re-elected. Prior to 2020, things were good enough, or at least okay, for the majority of Americans that they would have ignored the negative aspects of his agenda and not gone out to the polls to stop him. But then Trump Virus happened, and it became clear that Trump only cared about dealing with it to the extent that it hurt his chances for re-election, and in fact let it run wild on the assumption that it would most hurt the communities he and his Party didn’t like. At that point the country as a whole started to grasp the extent of Trump’s callous disregard for human life. Or rather, callous disregard for human life was half the reason to vote for Trump, and it only became an issue when that disregard started affecting his voters.

Even then, Trump still got more votes than he did in 2016, which goes to show what kind of cult we’re dealing with. What made the difference was the rest of the country getting that much more motivated to go out and vote for Biden. Now this year is a midterm election, which rarely goes well for the party in the White House, cause enemies blame them for everything that goes wrong, and allies aren’t as motivated by state elections as the national election. But you’d think that if anything could change that, it’s the prospect of Trump state governments agitating for a Fugitive Uterus Act.

I am not really sure that that is enough to light a fire under the notRepublican majority in this country, but it may be the only thing that could. But even if Democrats buck the trend and keep their technical majority in Congress, that’s not enough.

I will have much, much more to say on this in the future, but for now I look at something else that happened this week, which seems to be an unrelated subject but is ultimately the same matter.

Even as the January 6 committee held a Thursday June 23 hearing on how Viceroy Trump tried to foist his election coup by getting an inexperienced attorney named Jeffrey Clark to be his Attorney General (he would have been the third in two weeks after William Barr resigned), they found out along with the rest of the country that Clark’s home had been raided by federal investigators overnight just hours before the hearing focusing on his actions. After which, Clark went on Tucker Carlson’s show and whined that the government acted like the East German secret police. I believe this is what Freudians call “projecting.”

Apparently Attorney General Merrick Garland actually was paying attention to the proceedings and he, or someone under him, acted on what they already knew. As I just said, that’s not enough, but it’s a start, and some of us were beginning to wonder if we’d even have that.

I mean, if one side declares a civil war, the truly civil thing to do is to return the gesture.

The problem with news coming so fast and furious (and with equally silly sequels) is that I really can’t keep up. On the other hand, waiting a little bit to comment means that one catches all the subsequent news that expands the context of the news event beyond the immediate hot take.

For example, the shooting in Uvalde, Texas. It wasn’t even that long after the fact that people found out the shooter was able to obtain his weapons, legally, once he reached his 18^th birthday. Which is exactly what he did.

Every one of these mass shootings brought up by the media is indeed a macabre ritual, and we are reaching the stage of the rite where liberal high dudgeon sinks into resignation and despair as they realize yet again that all their “common sense gun safety measures” would not have stopped the Uvalde shooting, that nothing short of precrime would have stopped this shooting, and barring psychic powers, the only thing that would have is the state of Texas being just as prejudiced against gun fans as they are against women seeking abortions.

Then there’s what we found out about the police response. Or acute lack thereof. Apparently a member of the Department of Public Safety was one of the first officers to confront the shooter. At one point there were cops on the scene for the better part of an hour, but according to the Public Safety officer, they waited because “they could’ve been shot.”

As one Internet wag put it, “Never saw a fireman stand outside a burning building cause they were too scared to go in. Maybe that’s why there aren’t any ‘fuck the fire department’ songs.”

I mean, half the argument made by the gun nuts is that you need guns to protect yourself in the heat of the moment cause 911 Is A Joke, “I’d rather be judged by twelve than carried by six”, and all that. And the liberal counter-argument is that we’re supposed to trust the police to secure law and order. Really?

Maybe Republicans are right and we should be should be arming the teachers. After all, if a thug comes busting in the school, it’s not like the POLICE are gonna do anything.

But Uvalde was hardly the only shooting in the limited period. It’s just the one that got publicity for some reason. If one defines a “mass shooting” as one where four or more people are shot in the same incident, then since the Uvalde shooting on May 24 there have been…. well, I quit counting after 20. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2022 Four were on June 19. Keep checking the link!

Even so, the fact that Uvalde is just a few bullets dropped on an over-full bucket meant that Democrats in Washington were actually able to pressure Republicans into having bipartisan negotiations toward gun regulations. I guess some professional Christians actually figured out there’s no point in protecting individual pregnancies when it’s so easy to commit retroactive abortion in mass quantities. Of course everyone acted like some progress was going to be made, and then some of the Republicans who declared themselves in favor of negotiation started to back off.

The main objection seems to be with the concept of “red flag” provisions against domestic abusers, including eliminating “the boyfriend loophole” where the laws do not apply to an individual who had not been co-habiting with a potential victim. This is allegedly because of a concern that such laws could be abused against certain targets, but it really seems to be because Republicans know their base.

I mean, I could make serious cases against these laws on Second Amendment grounds or the rights of an accused, but it should be pretty clear from the past few years, if not decades, that “conservative” positions are based on the most superficial, bad-faith and political ulterior motives. Rights of the individual, let alone the functioning of government, are meaningless compared to pandering for votes.

Again, my position is actually that of arch-conservative Senator John Kennedy (BR.-Louisiana) who said, “We don’t need gun control, we need idiot control.” But again, in both cases it’s Kennedy’s Republican Party that’s standing in the way of that, cause if there’s anything they love more than guns, it’s idiots.

—

Which gets to my second issue: The January 6 hearings and why they still matter.

The congressional hearings, managed by Bennie Thompson (D.-Mississippi) and Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney (representing what’s left of the non-Trump Republican Party), determined among other things, that Trump’s “Stop the Steal” fundraiser campaign didn’t go to legal efforts to contest the vote but straight into his pockets (certainly the least surprising news so far), that the Proud Boys (whom Viceroy Trump told to ‘stand back and stand by’ in a debate) would have killed Mike Pence if they had had a chance, and that while some of the actual ‘peaceful tourists’ were milling about the area or listening to Trump’s speech, some of the Proud Boys were taking advance positions, some of which they’d been shown the day before, and assaulted security barricades before Trump’s speech even finished.

“The attack on our Capitol was not a spontaneous riot,” committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said. She added that intelligence available before Jan. 6 identified plans to “invade the Capitol, occupy the Capitol, and take other steps to halt Congress’s count of electoral votes that day.”

That sort of advance maneuver and coordination (such as bringing zip ties, body armor and a scaffolding to a ‘peaceful protest’, as one does) not only undermines the idea that we had a spontaneous gathering that “got a little out of hand”, it directly confronts Trump’s best defense, what legal people would call mens rea – basically that Trump was too stupid or ignorant or crazy to know he was breaking the law. Several times, people who were not crazy (like Bill Barr) and even people who ARE crazy (like Rudy Guiliani) told Trump that his substitute-electors scheme was not legally feasible, and the fact that he pursued it anyway demonstrates intent. And while Trump, like any good Mob boss, was at pains to avoid direct involvement, this week the committee brought up how he pressured various state election boards and was caught on tape by the Georgia Secretary of State telling him to “find” just enough votes to swing the state. (Remember, the Trump Organization is like the Corleone Family, except everybody is Fredo.)

All of which returns us to the question that has been pressing ever since the 2016 presidential campaign: Why haven’t we put this babbling orangutan in a cage where he belongs?

But then we know the answer to that question is the answer to how he became president in the first place: Because enough people in enough critical states supported him and continue to do so. It’s why Mitch “the Bitch” McConnell refused to press for a conviction in Trump’s second impeachment, even though his term was over and conviction was simply a matter of making sure he could never run again. Because enough people (besides Trump himself) would like that.
Which is pretty clear, because if the Banana Republican Party really wished to “move on” and start over, they wouldn’t be so defensive about the subject. They could just say, “hey we agreed with Trump’s policies, he gave us a conservative court, but he made a huge mistake and we have other candidates who can do what he did without the baggage.” But no.

No, you have Church of Trump junior priests like Congressman Gym Jordan (BR.-Ohio) tweeting that the Democratic Congress is ignoring “Gas at $5 per gallon. Moms can’t find baby formula. Grocery prices skyrocketing. Border in crisis.”

Christ on a pogo stick. Yes, Trumpniks. The economy sucks. Inflation sucks. Democrats suck. Now, can you point out the section of the Constitution that says a bunch of crybabies with Confederate flags get to overturn the result of the Electoral College once gas hits five dollars a gallon? Because if you can’t, that argument is just dodging the point.

As if that objection even matters though, cause even if you acknowledge there’s only so much this or any other president can do about global supply chain issues, it doesn’t make inflation hurt any less. But then the Republican Party is no longer the conservative wing of a political system where everyone believes in market liberal economics and constitutional rule of law. It’s the right-wing version of a Leninist party that participates in the political system only to the extent that it can game its rules to make sure they never have to worry about elections again. And to do that they need to make sure the declared defenders of that system – the Democrats – fail.

And if the suck-ass economy continues to drag down the country, it may drag down the Democrats in the midterms and there won’t be much chance of bringing the coup party to justice.

—

Which leads to my third set of observations.

It seems that Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is finally starting to turn against the defenders. One bad sign: The Western media isn’t covering Ukraine nearly as much anymore.

The fact is, Putin’s current strategy is the one he probably should have pursued all along. After mistakenly thinking that the Russian military had the logistics and operational capacity to take down a country the size of Ukraine in a few days or weeks, Putin downsized his expectations and narrowed the focus to the small eastern area of Donets where he already has local support and a concentrated front. Now most of Ukraine’s casualties are being inflicted by Russians at a safe distance with artillery, and Ukraine is running out of the Soviet/Russian gear they started off with, while the better Western gear is going to take time to deliver, and time to train with.

And while the goal of the West was to use sanctions to cut off Russia from its oil-based economic supports, according to Business Insider, “Russia is on track to make more money off oil and gas exports this year than it did in 2021, and it’s got the EU to thank“. The Russian ruble actually increased in value from its prewar levels. As it turns out, restricting the supply of something, either via war or sanctions, makes it more valuable. Capitalism works, who knew? Apparently not the Biden Administration.

To such extent as we have had a sanctions regime, Russia has been getting around it with exports to India, China and other places that aren’t really aligned against or with the US. And since both Russia and Ukraine are major exporters of food staples like grain and sunflower oil, Putin’s war of choice is already creating a global food crisis. And we can already see that as this goes on, the domestic impact is undermining the governments that are trying to resist Putin in favor of his local friends.

It’s almost like Russia’s national policy depends on making the entire world worse.

And the domestic impact of this manufactured crisis may be worse for EU countries than it is for America. We can ramp up our oil production, but for nations like Germany and Hungary, American fuel exports aren’t as convenient as those from Russia. But you know who has a lot of oil and mineral deposits in Europe outside of Russia? Ukraine!

Now does all this make more sense?

Putin was clearly trying to assimilate the entire nation (for one thing it was the main export route for Russian natural gas to those EU countries) but what he’s got right now is the next best thing.

Right now, the sketch plan looks like this:

1. Invade Ukraine, Russia’s main competitor and secondary source for both food and fuel,
2. Thereby creating both a food crisis and energy crisis which itself raises prices on everything else,
3. Block off the Black Sea so Ukraine can’t export food and fuel, exacerbating the artificial price crisis,
4. Keep the pressure on Ukraine (no matter what the cost to ordinary Russians) and maintain the manufactured inflation until the Western nations get sick of it,
5. Have Putin’s Little Bitch Boy run for president again, help him win (again) and wait until 2025 so he can turn the USA back into Russian North America,
6. Profit!

Of course bad as things look for Ukraine, and as bad as they’re going to get, this mode of thinking really means that Putin is trying to hurt the West at least as much as Ukraine. And we’re not the ones really hurting. That may be one reason the American public’s commitment is lacking, but by the same token, it’s not like the government really needs a public commitment to engage in foreign policy maneuvers. After all, who really asked for a war in Yemen which is continuing without any real resolution? Nobody, except the Saudis and the Americans who are financing that war effort, and that business opportunity is what matters to them.

Basically, Putin is betting that our entitled consumer culture and greed will cause us to succumb to Russia but Russia will not succumb to the greed and production capacity of our military-industrial complex.

I seem to recall that Putin’s mentors in the Soviet Union made a similar bet with the invasion of Afghanistan. It didn’t work out too well.

You have to understand. Most people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured and so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.

-Morpheus, The Matrix

I could be talking about… all this… that happened Tuesday, over the last weekend, or over the last month or so, but I’m going to talk about something else that seems to be unrelated but actually touches upon exactly how this country got so fucked up.

There was a recent article on The Nevada Independent website showing how the state’s Democratic Party establishment is speaking out against a ranked choice voting reform that is on the ballot for this year. In his statement to the Independent, Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak said the initiative was “a rushed constitutional change that would make our system more confusing, error-prone and exclusionary.” Senator Jacky Rosen said that it would “make casting a ballot more confusing and time-consuming, lead to increased errors that cause eligible votes to be thrown out, and disproportionately impact communities of color.”

Not only is this a really patronizing attitude in and of itself, it actually plays into the “Great Replacement Theory” of Tucker Carlson and other professional racists, who state that the liberals are out to undermine America’s system of government with an influx of brown, “obedient“, easily led immigrants who need voting to be as easy as possible. For Republicans like Carlson, the fact that they want to make voting a more complicated pain in the ass than a do-it-yourself colonoscopy is exactly the point, because they don’t think voting is a right for all but a privilege of the select. Voting should be left to those square-headed folk of good Nordic stock who grasp Western concepts like analytical thinking.

The Democrats might indeed have a point about how the change would make casting a ballot more complicated, but the actual wording of the initiative isn’t that hard to figure out: “The general election ballots for partisan office shall be designed so that the voter is directed to mark candidates in order of preference and to mark as many candidates as the voter wishes, but not to assign the same ranking to more than one candidate for the same office.” In and of itself, that’s hardly different from the process Nevada Democrats themselves used for the Nevada presidential caucus in 2020. Reading deeper, the establishment’s objection seems to be the creation of a new Section 17 in the state Constitution’s Article 15, stating “A person may become a candidate at the primary election for a partisan office regardless of the person’s association with a political party, or lack thereof.” Further: “Any registered voter may cast a primary ballot for any candidate regardless of the political party affiliation of the voter or any political party preference indicated by the candidate. The primary election for partisan office does not serve to determine the nominee of a political party or political group but serves only to narrow the number of candidates whose names will appear on the ballot at the general election for partisan office.” In effect, this would mean that the “primary” is no longer a partisan event but the first stage in a runoff system election process.

Which I’m pretty sure is what’s got the Democrats’ undies in a wad.

For both the socialist Left and corporatist Right, freedom of choice only counts if you pick the result they like, and if you don’t, they’d rather you have no choice at all.

Now, Sisolak and the other Nevada Democrats may indeed be the best choices we have available, but that’s not because they are ideal or even good. It means exactly that- they’re the best choice we have available because the selected alternative is so poor. That would be the case regardless of whether we had a ranked choice system now. For example, in the Nevada Governor’s race, the Republican primary includes Joe Lombardo, who will be retiring as Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Sheriff this year. That’s a non-partisan office. I think that by and large, Lombardo was a pretty good Sheriff and on paper would be a fair choice to be Governor. However he’s running as a Republican and feels obliged to go full Trump robot on all the political buzzwords and catchphrases, and playing ¿Quien es mas macho? with points like “Joe Lombardo is the only candidate in the race for Governor who has carried a gun every day for the past three decades“. So if he weren’t a Trumpnik, I might have voted for Lombardo, but as long as he and his party continue to believe in performative idiocy over governance, I have to go for Sisolak.

But that gets to the point I want to make: Most sheriffs are politically conservative or at least “law and order”, but their races are non-partisan. Nobody votes for sheriff on the question of whether they think George Soros wants to encourage abortion on demand so that trans people can adopt the abortions and then teach the abortions critical race theory.

Why is this craziness incentivized? Because of the political party system, specifically the modern primary system.

That is, if you’re aligned with a major party, you have to vote for their candidates if for no other purpose than to stop the other party from winning. And that means that your choices are really made for you in the primary round, so the people pushing certain candidates can just push the most partisan, “red meat” issues to display ideological loyalty, the most partisan, red meat voters are the ones who are more likely to show up for the primary (since it’s only that party voting on its own candidates), and they basically dictate the course for everybody in the general election. Even if you would have in the past voted for a non-Trumpnik, non-Q candidate in the general election, if you’re a Republican, you HAVE to vote for Ms. Jewish Space Lasers, cause what else are you going to do, let the DEMOCRAT win????

Why? Because those ideological fanatics in the Republican Party are the ones you can count on to show up and vote no matter what. And so the party has catered to them more and more over the years, and as they did so, the fanatics realized their pet issues (like abortion prohibition) were being given lip service by a party establishment that (correctly) assessed that those dreams were unpopular with the rest of the country. And so they started pushing more and more candidates who were taking positions that would have been rejected by earlier Republicans, and those candidates started winning primaries, and in “safe” districts, that means they won office. That’s why when Trump ran in 2016, all the establishment Republicans refused to really organize against him, because that would mean pissing off their “base”, since he was directly appealing to it. And once Trump did get nominated for president, every Republican had to go along with his idiocy, even the ones who knew better. And since he was the official candidate, all the stuff he said that would have gotten him laughed out of a Libertarian or Green convention as being too immoral or impractical suddenly became the respectable mainstream position.

And as a result, a major-party system that conservatives like William Buckley intended to be a screening mechanism to keep the Birchers, Randians and other crazies out of conservatism instead became the very mechanism by which the crazy became the governing majority, at least on that side.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is still capable of screening its ideologues to keep them from positions of real power (just ask Bernie Sanders), and while that is on balance a good thing it also means that the Democrats are, ironically, more conservative in the general sense than the Party of Trump, which say what you will, actually changed with its base. And that desire for control I think plays into Sisolak’s apparent fear of reform.

Perhaps with the Biden Administration’s other problems, the only way Democrats think they can win this year is to frame the election as a choice between the two parties. In other words, rather than objectively assess whether incumbent Democrats are doing good jobs, just point out that the Republicans would be so much worse.

I guess some of them still haven’t figured out that that didn’t work in 2016.

I would prefer an old-style, center-right party that reflects the practical, “common sense” attitude that I think most Americans prefer. I had thought that was the Republicans, but if they ever really did have a constructive approach to government, they threw it out long ago. I had thought it was the Libertarians, but right now they’ve decided to join the Republicans in COVID-land.

It might be better to just throw out political parties altogether and make all races, including federal races, nonpartisan in the way judges’ elections and most sheriffs’ races are. That’s not quite the same as banning political parties. You can’t stop freedom of association. We also cannot directly control people’s minds and get them to engage in what one party or the other considers to be goodthink. What we can do with government and specifically with elections is to create incentives and disincentives.

Specifically, we need to remove the incentives that make it so easy for ideological nutjobs to get into office by catering to a few while discouraging the participation of the general public. Right now the Republicans are the ones who are most consciously engaged in creating the political system they want because they are the ones who have both the desire to change a system they see as being against them, and the position to do something about it. Democrats are only just starting to realize that their status quo ante is not the best and perfect and permanent state of affairs and that the incentives they created are being turned against them.

With all the various roadblocks and complications that Republican-run states are putting in the way of voting, mainly to stop Democratic constituencies from mobilizing, it should be clear that Republicans are turning Democrats into a “third” party by doing to them what Democrats and Republicans have done to the Libertarians and Greens for years. And it’s testimony to the institutional bias of establishment Democrats that they won’t react appropriately or even acknowledge the issue. Now, some of them have, which is how you have ranked choice voting in other states (including Alaska and Maine, which are more Republican-friendly), and open primaries in California, which has hardly hurt Democrats’ dominance of the state.

We are reaching the terminal point in the duopoly’s downward spiral, and giving people more choices may be America’s only way out. Of course that would require Democrats to both acknowledge the problem and give up some of their control over the process. So we can’t be surprised that some in the party of “choice” want to put a stop to it.