How Republicans Stoke Anti-Government Hatred
Tearing down faith in the common good has helped the GOP for years, but it’s killing the country.
In At War with Government: How Conservatives Weaponized Distrust from Goldwater to Trump (Columbia University Press, 2021), Fried and Harris provide a powerful exegesis of American politics and explain how conservative elites have cultivated a toxic distrust of government. This is not a traditional conservative argument about levels of spending and taxation or American commitments abroad. It means playing on the fears of citizens that their government is corrupt, undemocratic, elitist and their enemy. This, they contend, is “the fundamental strategy of conservative Republican politics.” It relies “on public dissatisfaction to build their movement, to win elections, to engage in separation-of-powers conflicts, and to thwart liberal policy advances.” Sometimes leaders struggle to control those they roused. Sometimes they egg them on. And whether implicit or overt, racism and xenophobia are essential components to these efforts.
https://washingtonmonthly.c...
I was a Jan. 6 juror. What I learned surprised me. Trump’s pardons of virtually all of the Jan. 6 rioters left me dejected. Am I safe? When the jury summons for federal criminal court arrived in my mailbox in November 2023, I knew I had to answer it. And not just because I had been deferring and deferring and now I was all out of deferments. I had to answer this one because in my gut I knew it wasn’t going to be just any old criminal case. I remember saying to my partner, “I bet you anything it’s a January 6 case.” Make sense of the latest news and debates with our daily newsletter At that point, it had been more than two years since a violent mob attacked the U.S. Capitol in the city that has been my home for 16 years. But criminal cases related to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection were still making their way through the federal court in D.C. at a pretty steady clip. At the time my summons arrived, roughly 1,200 Jan. 6 cases had already been adjudicated, and there were still many mor...
Comments
Post a Comment