So you see, Barr is against Trump, but not in the same way that you and I are. He eventually took a stand against Trump, but let’s recall that it did take him a long time. It wasn’t until Trump’s election denialism after the 2020 election that it all became too much for Barr to swallow. Until then, he was with Trump all the way: through the Muslim ban, through the family separation policies, through the Putin love, through the climate denialism, through the various expressions of racism, through the relentless dividing of the country into an Us and a Them, through the reactionary response to George Floyd’s killing, through the famous walk across Lafayette Park to use a Bible as a prop for the cameras, in which Barr, I remind you, was a happy participant—through every bit of it.

-Michael Tomasky in The New Republic

 One form of aliveness, then, is to resist the foreclosure of our overbearing convictions, to hold at bay our impulse to simplify the world. As William Blake noted: “To generalize is to be an idiot.” Put another way, one way to stave off the deadness of the commonplace is by countering the urge to assimilate people, opinions, experiences into commonplaces in the first place — to be attuned to detail, alert to specificity, curious about difference. In one of these essays, “On Not Believing in Anything,” Phillips reminds us that belief, in one sense, represents the “the fear of curiosity” and that the word curiosity has its root in the Latin cura, meaning care.

-WaPost

 

Opinion 

 Want to help Trump? Keep up the ‘White rural rage’ stereotyping.

By Nicholas F. Jacobs

 and 

Daniel M. Shea

April 17, 2024 at 6:30 a.m. EDT

The Heartland Co-op grain elevator in 2018 in Dallas Center, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall) 

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Nicholas F. Jacobs is an assistant professor of government at Colby College, where Daniel M. Shea is a professor of government. They are the authors of “The Rural Voter.” This op-ed was adapted from an article in UnHerd.

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A good American progressive is meant to disapprove of disparaging political stereotypes. But that hasn’t stopped them gleefully embracing the caricature of the enraged rural American. You know the tropes; they’re the last ones you can utter in respectable conversation: “white trash,” “redneck,” “hillbilly,” all them ignorant belligerents in stark raving anger ready to storm the Capitol.

Academic Thomas Schaller, co-author of “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” recently stoked this prejudice on MSNBC: Rural voters “are the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country. … They are the most likely to excuse or justify violence as an acceptable alternative to peaceful public discourse.” The book was soon trending on X.

As two scholars of rural politics, who have spent the past three years poring over thousands of survey interviews with rural Americans, this caricature of the rural rabble-rouser is deeply puzzling. Instead of threats to democracy, or rebellious politics, or reflexive anger, we keep finding something different: pride in rural living, a sense of communal belonging, a shared fate that intertwines the economic well-being of rich and poor in rural communities. Yes, there are resentments, especially toward government officials and experts. But resentment is not a stereotype. It’s a motivation, a story.

Still, rageful stereotypes sell better than complex backstories. And they’re easier for our political and media ecosystems to make sense of. Reference some data point about QAnon conspiracies in the heartlands, and you’ll raise more money from nervous liberals in the city (who just so happen to live next to three times as many QAnon conspiracy believers). Lash out against the xenophobia in small towns, and you’ll mobilize your city voters to the polls. Rage draws clicks. It makes a splash. Yes, racism and hostility toward these groups exists in the countryside, as it does throughout the United States. And we are deeply troubled by the enduring role it plays in U.S. politics. But it is a national problem, not one to which White rural Americans uniquely contribute.

Such failures help to explain the deep-rooted skepticism in many rural areas toward government policy solutions. Just consider the aftermath of the North American Free Trade Agreement, implemented in 1994. NAFTA’s champions, including both Democrats and Republicans, promised that the deal would bring prosperity to small farmers, but between 1998 and 2018, 1 out of every 10 small U.S. farms disappeared. Not long after the trade barriers were removed, Canadian cattle ranchers flooded the U.S. market with beef and prices plummeted, forcing small farms out of business. Meanwhile, large-scale agribusinesses capitalized on the open borders. If government neglect drove your grandpa off his farm back then, why would you trust it now?

If one is interested in building political coalitions that include rural voters, and which may lead to more inclusive and equitable policymaking, it is these resentments that must be understood. The stereotype of the raging rural American misrepresents the complexities of the rural experience. It is why Hollywood fell for Sen. J.D. Vance’s (R-Ohio) story of Appalachian poverty, while failing to recognize that he was running a political campaign that spoke to the resilience, values and pride of rural residents. And it is why most progressives don’t have much empathy left for rural voters — despite feeling deeply for nearly every other marginalized group in American society.

In some circles, this lack of empathy stems from the fact that these so-called deplorables are blamed for having brought Donald Trump to power. As Paul Waldman, the second co-author of “White Rural Rage,” said: “If Donald Trump gets back to the Oval Office, it will be because — once again — rural Whites put him there.”

Such failures help to explain the deep-rooted skepticism in many rural areas toward government policy solutions. Just consider the aftermath of the North American Free Trade Agreement, implemented in 1994. NAFTA’s champions, including both Democrats and Republicans, promised that the deal would bring prosperity to small farmers, but between 1998 and 2018, 1 out of every 10 small U.S. farms disappeared. Not long after the trade barriers were removed, Canadian cattle ranchers flooded the U.S. market with beef and prices plummeted, forcing small farms out of business. Meanwhile, large-scale agribusinesses capitalized on the open borders. If government neglect drove your grandpa off his farm back then, why would you trust it now?

If one is interested in building political coalitions that include rural voters, and which may lead to more inclusive and equitable policymaking, it is these resentments that must be understood. The stereotype of the raging rural American misrepresents the complexities of the rural experience. It is why Hollywood fell for Sen. J.D. Vance’s (R-Ohio) story of Appalachian poverty, while failing to recognize that he was running a political campaign that spoke to the resilience, values and pride of rural residents. And it is why most progressives don’t have much empathy left for rural voters — despite feeling deeply for nearly every other marginalized group in American society.

In some circles, this lack of empathy stems from the fact that these so-called deplorables are blamed for having brought Donald Trump to power. As Paul Waldman, the second co-author of “White Rural Rage,” said: “If Donald Trump gets back to the Oval Office, it will be because — once again — rural Whites put him there.”

To genuinely heal societal rifts and to find common ground, we have to dispel the myths of blind rage and focus instead on a common desire for recognition. And yet, it appears that progressive commitments to multiculturalism and pluralism extend only to groups that vote the “right” way. It’s almost as if they haven’t learned their lesson: As long as rural America is treated with disdain, should we really be surprised when, once again, it reluctantly turns to Trump?

Trump is Falling Apart

 "Study in contrasts" is an entirely inadequate phrase to describe the different experiences of President Joe Biden and Donald Trump over the weekend. Regardless of one's opinion about the conflict in the Middle East, there's no doubt that Biden spent Saturday overseeing an impressive multinational effort to shoot down hundreds of Iranian drones, preventing what could have been a devastating attack on Israel. Meanwhile, Trump spent Saturday night babbling for more than an hour at a crowd of thousands in Pennsylvania, who gamely ignored their leader's incoherence enough to cheer whenever he dropped some of the buzzwords they know so well from Fox News. 

Trump has never been big on making sense, but close observers have noticedthat he's suffering a rapid decline from his already low standards lately. Saturday was a particularly cringeworthy demonstration, with Trump frequently drifting off into nonsense and stumbling over his own words.

-Amanda Marcotte in Salon.com

 Donald Trump’s first criminal trial is finally scheduled to begin this week in Manhattan, on charges of paying hush money to adult-film performer Stormy Daniels. With three other criminal cases pending in Florida, Georgia and Washington, D.C., the corrupt ex-president faces at least the hypothetical possibility of incarceration, in addition to the hundreds of millions of dollars he already owes in civil penalties and legal expenses. As a practical matter, given Trump’s advanced age and his precarious political position, a prison sentence in any of these criminal trials would be likely to end his career in public life and amount to a de facto life sentence.

-Chauncey Devega in Salon.com

 “This case is an early chapter in the story of Trump’s willingness to cheat in elections and break the law in order to win,” Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney during the Obama administration, wrote Monday. “In that sense, it’s the most fitting place for prosecution to start.”

-Salon.com

 

Federal criminal investigation opened into Key Bridge crash

By Katie Mettler

, 

Devlin Barrett

, 

Danny Nguyen

 and 

Peter Hermann

Updated April 15, 2024 at 7:41 a.m. EDT|Published April 15, 2024 at 7:09 a.m. EDT

-WaPost