The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: daniel patrick moynihan
The Shame Of The 'Where's Nancy?' Republicans -- And How To Stop Them

The Shame Of The 'Where's Nancy?' Republicans -- And How To Stop Them

On Wednesday, President Biden argued that “democracy is on the ballot” this year and he’s right. About 300 heads-we-win-tails-you-lose authoritarian Republican candidates pose, in the words of conservative former Judge J. Michael Luttig, “a clear and present danger” to the republic.

Take the Republican candidate for governor of Wisconsin, Tim Michels:

That’s scary enough. What’s less understood is that decency is on the ballot, too, and speaking out against cruel candidates could be a good closing argument for Democrats trying to motivate decent people — many of them independents — who make up their minds about whether to vote at the last minute.

Yes, voters care a lot more about inflation than the way politicians treat each other. And Democratic operatives are concerned that Biden’s speech reinforces the idea that the midterms are a referendum on him, which they don’t want it to be. But the Pelosi story brings Trump’s depravity — a huge motivator in the last two elections — back into the conversation at the right time for Democrats and it helps motivate the hundreds of thousands of volunteers they need for their get-out-the-vote operations by directly connecting January 6 to November 8. As Biden noted, the man who attacked Paul Pelosi used the same words as the insurrectionists: “Where is Nancy?”

But it wasn’t the attack of the nut job that so shook Biden and, arguably, American democracy. It was the reaction to it inside the GOP — the appalling fact that instead of coming together behind common decency, as every Democrat did after the 2018 shooting of GOP Rep. Steve Scalise by a leftwinger at a congressional baseball game, so many Republicans turned the whole thing into a cruel joke. Most important, these “‘Where’s Nancy?’ Republicans” refused to condemn political violence. For them, it’s almost as if they want the whiff of it to be part of their political identity — like support for tax cuts or opposition to mail-in ballots.

The problem is that violence is not just another position or tactic. It’s the gateway to true fascism, which has always had physical menace at its core. When you read accounts of Mussolini’s Black Shirts or Hitler’s Brown Shirts before the dictators took power, the thugs aren’t always beating people up on direct orders. They’re often doing so in the shadows, inspired by propaganda and covered by lies.

Trump peddled a ludicrous lie about the Pelosi attack. Per The New York Times:

“Weird things going on in that household in the last couple of weeks,” Mr. Trump said on the Chris Stigall show, winking at a lie that has flourished in right-wing media and is increasingly being given credence by Republicans. “The glass, it seems, was broken from the inside to the out — so it wasn’t a break-in, it was a break out.

This appeared as a “Political Memo” sidebar on page A14 in the print edition of the Times. In other words, it’s being played as just another “shocked but not surprised” story about Trump and the GOP.

I’ve used the “shocked but not surprised” formulation myself in the past but I now view it as a dangerous evasion of moral responsibility — the equivalent of offering “thoughts and prayers” after a school shooting. Think about all the sins it covers.

Trump, who is heavily favored to be the 2024 Republican nominee for president, is an Orange Alex Jones who peddles sick lies about an 82-year-old man in the ICU and our reaction is: “shocked but not surprised.”

I think we need to redefine major news so that it’s not only what’s new and surprising but also what’s shocking and dangerous to democracy, even if perfectly predictable.

So beyond voting next week, what do we do? Just as America is built on a set of ideas — the rule of law, fair play, the peaceful transfer of power — the road back to decency and democracy begins with ideas that eventually work their way into our thinking. Here’s one to consider, from a formidable public intellectual I always enjoyed interviewing.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who died in 2003, will soon be best-known as a train station — well, actually, as Moynihan Train Hall, the spectacular new $1.6 billion dollar transit hub and concourse that he envisioned and that finally opened in the 100 year-old Farley Post Office Building across Eighth Avenue from Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan.

In the 20th century, Moynihan was famous as a four-term senator from New York and a combative UN ambassador, but he was also a sociologist who wrote 15 books. In a landmark 1993 article in The American Scholar, titledDefining Deviancy Down, Moynihan built on the work of sociologists Emil Durkheim and Kai T. Erikson in explaining that when a society faces rising crime, it responds by “redefining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized.”

Moynihan wrote just after murders in New York City had peaked in 1990 at 2,245 — an average of more than seven a day. Last year brought 485 murders — between one and two a day — and that’s up 25 percent from a few years ago. What changed, in New York City and across the country? Possible explanations include more cops, new strategies for community policing, rigidly enforced gun control, and declining birth rates (partly attributable to increased abortions), among others. The larger idea that unifies them is that society should stop being numb to the problem — stop defining it down. Crime was still sky-high in 1993, but Moynihan saw reasons for hope:

I was hugely encouraged by an address which [New York City] Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly gave to the FBI's Second Symposium on Addressing Violent Crime Through Community Involvement. His address was entitled "Toward a New Intolerance" In it, he called for an intolerance of violence, an end to what Judge Edwin Torres describes as our "narcoleptic state" of acceptance….
… If our analysis wins general acceptance, if, for example, more of us came to share Judge Torres's genuine alarm at "the trivialization of the lunatic crime rate" in his city (and mine), we might surprise ourselves how well we respond to the manifest decline of the American civic order. Might.

Moynihan’s analysis did win “general acceptance” and — through the efforts of thousands of people in hundreds of cities — crime rates plummeted and stayed low for years.

Now, with crime ticking up, Republicans have found an issue that works for them politically. But their hypocrisy knows no bounds. After January 6, their position on the Capitol Police was: Back the blue— unless it’s a coup. After the attack on Paul Pelosi, their take is: the police are lying about what happened. The intruder was actually a gay hippie prostitute.

The lying, hypocrisy, and rampant election denying add up to a different kind of “decline of the American civic order.” The broad answer to the present crisis is to stop defining political deviancy down — and work like hell to save decency and democracy. We might surprise ourselves how well we respond. Might.

Jonathan Alter is a bestselling author, Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker, and a contributing correspondent and political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. His Substack newsletter is OLD GOATS: Ruminating with Friends.

Reprinted with permission from OLD GOATS

Bless Their Hearts: How Red States Screw Blue States

Bless Their Hearts: How Red States Screw Blue States

Nothing angers Andrew Cuomo more than the notion that taxpayers in "red states" should resent or resist assistance for "blue states" struggling against the coronavirus. Hearing that message from Senate Republicans provoked the Democratic New York governor to remind the nation several times of the gross disparity between what his state remits to the Treasury and what their states reclaim in federal benefits.

Cuomo noted acidly that New York pays $116 billion more than it gets back annually, while lucky Kentucky, the home of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, gets $148 billion more than it pays. By that reckoning, New York has kicked in far more over the past few decades than any of the states whose Republican leaders criticize supposed liberal profligacy.

Read NowShow less
The Unpolarized Moynihan

The Unpolarized Moynihan

WASHINGTON — The problem with most discussions of political polarization is that they reach quickly for technical causes and solutions. Our politics are polarized, we are told, because of gerrymandered districts, the rise of opinionated media sources and party primaries closed off to independents or voters in the other party.

There’s nothing wrong with thinking about such things, but all the mechanical fixes in the world will not overcome a brute fact about the United States in 2015: We really do have profound disagreements with each other that are intellectual, moral, partisan, and ideological.

Because the facts are clear on this, it’s always important to note that our polarization is asymmetric: Republicans are much more conservative as a group (close to two-thirds of them) than Democrats are liberal (about one-third). Still, if our divisions are intellectually rooted, who has ideas that might bring us together?

One name comes to mind when you try to think of someone who managed to live on both sides of the ideological divide and still kept his own thinking coherent. The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan worked for both John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. He opposed the Vietnam War but was not wild about anti-war protesters. He was often called a neoconservative but thought of himself as a liberal. He was a Democratic senator from New York for 24 years and managed to get votes from just about everybody. In his last re-election race in 1994 — a bad year for Democrats — he won by 14 points.

How did he do this? The question is interesting enough that two volumes were published this year to try to explain the matter. In his gem of a book, The Professor and the President, Stephen Hess, who worked for Moynihan (and is my Brookings Institution colleague), tells the story of the unlikely Nixon-Moynihan political courtship. And Moynihan was an interesting enough thinker that Greg Weiner, a political philosopher himself, treats him as one in American Burke: The Uncommon Liberalism of Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Weiner’s notion is that Moynihan was undoubtedly a liberal “through and through” because he “believed in government as an agent of social improvement” and thought it capable of doing large and important things. But he shared with Edmund Burke, often seen as the founder of modern conservatism, a skepticism about grand schemes for “wholesale social transformation” and a belief in limits. “Both were conserving reformers who valued traditional systems of authority, most primarily the family,” Weiner writes, and both “interpreted politics in terms of the observable and the concrete rather than the metaphysical and the abstract.”

Weiner argues, and I am inclined to agree, that one reason we miss Moynihan, who died in 2003, is because we have a need for more Burkean liberals and more Burkean conservatives. They would share in common a concern for evidence, an understanding of the limits of human reason, a skepticism about our ability to transform “complex social systems,” and a belief that we can always make things better but will never make them perfect. From these shared assumptions, they could then argue about such matters as how much social generosity to expect from government.

Moynihan’s Burkean nature no doubt made it easier for the lifelong Democrat to work for a Republican president. Hess shows how he was also a brilliant inside player who knew how to get around bureaucratic and human obstacles — and how he appealed to Nixon. Moynihan made him laugh, which wasn’t a common thing in that White House, and also acted as a tutor, which flattered Nixon by taking his intellectual curiosity seriously, whose insecurities ultimately undid him.

Hess details the still astonishing story of how Moynihan got Nixon to propose a truly radical innovation, a guaranteed annual income for all Americans. The Family Assistance Plan was killed in Congress because it was too liberal for Republicans and not generous enough for Democrats. But it was, in its way, a classic Burkean program. Instead of creating intricate and expensive new services for the poor, Moynihan proposed to give them what they definitely needed more of, which was money.

As a skeptic about technical solutions to polarization, I certainly won’t propose that all Americans study their Burke and their Moynihan. But as an antidote to the tendency these days toward the-sky-is-falling rhetoric, we could usefully remember this very Burkean warning from Moynihan: “When situations of considerable but not impossible difficulty are described in apocalyptic terms, responses tend to be erratic, even convulsive.” As Moynihan would never say: Chill.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.

Photo via Wikicommons