Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, March 22, 2025
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70 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
Twitter and/or
BlueSky.
How many legal Acts are on the books that people have been ringing their hands about for years:
Alien Enemies Act
Comstock Act
Insurrection Act
Espionage Act
And yet, despite the foreshadowing of the abuse and misuse of these acts, Congress has done nothing.
Every state has the same issue. Other than another commission that will produce little, I’m not sure what can be done.
George Foreman 76
RIP
The Florida headline of the day- Woman drowns dog in Florida airport bathroom because she couldn’t take it on flight, police say
@Scott: And the Enemy Aliens Act was one of the Alien and Sedition Acts which are frequently presented as shameful, as the low point of early American democracy. I guess they’re also an example of how deep the authoritarian impulse runs.
Here’s a video I saw last week and wanted to share with y’all about Trump supporters. Some of you might be a little unhappy with the first bit, but stick to it.
While I’m skeptical about some of it, I think this is a much more helpful way to understand people’s motivations.
@Scott: One of the most frustrating aspects of the Biden years was the inability, or inattention, or unwillingness to fix the framework of American democracy. Despite high hopes for addressing problems like these acts, or vulnerability to foreign interference in elections, or DC and Puerto Rico statehood, or countless other issues people had hoped would be on the agenda, little or nothing actually happened. I’m not saying that to assign blame, just to point out how expectations dwarfed results. And here we are.
Just in case you were a little confident in the courts to block the authoritarian steamroller, Paul, Weiss was just the beginning of the intimidation of the legal profession. Problem is, you need lawyers willing to confront the federal government in court:
https://bsky.app/profile/chrisgeidner.bsky.social/post/3lkwpgoprts2m
Thanks to LGM for the link.
The big, buzzy story this morning is the one about Columbia University caving in to Trump.
Under threat from Trump, Columbia University agrees to policy changes
I’m sorry but Columbia’s endowment is $15B. Why are they beholden to any kind of blackmail?
@Kingdaddy: I think a lot more could’ve been done without Manchin and Sinema.
A thread:
https://bsky.app/profile/angus.bsky.social/post/3lkw3v3oon22v
More thread, to conclusion:
Oh, great! Just as Season 2 of The Last of Us is about to kick off.
Fungus labeled ‘urgent threat’ by CDC is spreading rapidly, hospital study finds
@Scott:
What must happen is examples of standing up against this kind of bullshit to show, by example, it can be done.
@Scott:
After this, anyone who donates as much as a penny to Columbia ought to be declared legally incompetent.
@Scott:
Agreed. If anything, the 2021 Dems should have paid more attention to such things.
Of course, if the Reps were as serious about “limited government” as they used to say they were, they should have, too, years ago.
@Jay L Gischer: The video is a good example of the halo effect. The speaker is trained in psychology, so people trust him as an expert in American politics. He never supports his statements though. They’re parroted left-wing talking points.
As for his psychology, I’d like to ask him why, if the right-wing is so psychologically damaged, does the left exhibit such a higher rate of mental illness. He should consider how his side consumes media and reinforces its own thinking too.
Trump has revoked the security clearances of all the Bidens, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Liz Cheney, Anthony Blinken, Adam Kinzinger, Jake Sullivan, Alexander Vindman, Mark Zaid, Andrew Weissman, and Lisa Monaco.
@Scott:
The Columbia trustees should just rename it Trump University.
I wonder if a fascist America will be good for the arts?
The arts – music, film, literature – have stalled out. In the midst of the rapid decline of the US, music has zero political relevance. Where is this generation’s Dylan or Neil Young? Film/TV are in a downward spiral of moribund franchises and re-animated creative zombies. (Fetus Sheldon, anyone?) Literature is culturally irrelevant, a niche devoted to tickling women’s erotic fantasies. Artists are our canaries in the coal mines and those canaries have been dropping off their perches.
Name the last song, book or movie to land with any real cultural or political impact.
Arts and culture are nothing but commodities, just more empty calories to be consumed by a numbed, listless, vacant, passive society. It may not be Germany 1939, but America, 1950. We’re compiling black lists, chasin’ commies, reducing women to being baby factories, hating gays and stamping on the faces of racial and religious minorities. But this time around we don’t have the relative economic strength we had then. We did not just emerge unscathed from a world war that flattened all competitors. Then we were triumphant and empowered. Now we are triumphant and diminished.
History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. The repression of the 50’s led us to the creative explosion of the 60’s. So maybe there’s a new Dylan out there somewhere. But of course it won’t play out the same way, I don’t expect Beats or flower children. But maybe out of the ashes of American civilization a new ethos will emerge. Emphasis on new, not a restoration of the old. For better or worse the old America is dead and will not be revived. A new America must be imagined.
@Fortune:
And I’d like to ask you for supporting evidence. Followers of Q are really not in a position to question anyone’s mental health.
Kitty Dukakis, 88, has died. RIP.
@Michael Reynolds: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unique-everybody-else/202103/personality-traits-mental-illness-and-ideology
https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/why-depression-rates-are-higher-among-liberals
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8713953/
@CSK: First, I thought he had done this a month ago and, second, how does this address any issue any other American cares about. Another day ending in y.
@Joe:
Beats me. The MAGAs are happy, though some believe Clinton et al. belong in Leavenworth.
CBP denied entry of a French scientist after they searched his phone and found messages to colleagues critical of the Trump administration.
Dangerous stuff like this:
Maybe CBP found even more strongly worded stuff in this scientist’s messages to his colleagues. But what I’ve seen so far in various articles seems to be along the lines of above.
Perhaps nobody high up has explicitly asked for this level of zealous enforcement, but I’ll also bet none of them mind. I’m wondering also if there’s some sort of dynamic going on where they have quotas or performance incentives based on how many folks they need to deport, so it’s leading to some CBP folks looking for any excuse they can to send folks packing. Also, I’m sure some of them just do it for the lolz or love of their divine leader.
In all seriousness folks, be careful if you’re traveling by plane, especially overseas. Seems we’ve already reached the point that it’s best to travel using burner phones and leave the main one at home.
I’ll admit, I didn’t think we’d get to this point this quickly, but I’ve been saying that about a lot of things lately.
Btw, welcome back online OTB and big thanks to Matt, Prof. Taylor, and Dr. Joyner for all the work making it so. This space was very much missed by many folks.
@Scott:
The House Republicans have introduced a bill that would place a heavy tax on private university endowments.
The higher level of depression among liberals has been studied quite a bit. What they are mostly measuring is unhappiness and not whether or not people are actually mentally ill. For example, I was very unhappy when I found out the grandkids liked the Masked Singer and wanted me to watch it with them. Where did we go wrong and let them develop a taste for such a show? Anyway, being unhappy is different than actual depression. What you really want to know is how many people have a clinical diagnosis of depression. Maybe that exists but I haven’t seen it. (Will look later when have time.) However we do know that the rates of suicide are much higher in states that are more conservative. See link. It’s not totally surprising that liberals might have more periods of unhappiness as on most tests liberals score as more likely to worry about stuff, including worrying about others. So, just based upon evidence, I think you can say liberals are bit less happy than conservatives but I dont think you can claim its true of mental illness.
http://roperld.com/personal/politics/suicides.htm
The higher suicide rates contribute to higher death rates and lower life expectancies seen in red states. Indeed, when you test for political ideology you find that conservatism is a negative for those issues.
Of course conservative personality traits lead to other issues besides dying a lot earlier. While both sides of the political spectrum are susceptible to conspiracies at about the same rates, it is Republicans who are most susceptible to political conspiracies, especially ones of consequence.
Steve
@Jay L Gischer: I thought the most useful part was the interview with the KGB defector about how much his former employer invested in divorcing their targets from reality. Thanks for posting.
@CSK:
Vindman says he hasn’t had a security clearance for five years, so in his case Trump revoked…nothing.
@Fortune:
Cross-reference for education, IQ and residence. Educated, urban people have far greater awareness of and access to mental health diagnosis and treatment. Smart people are always going to be more likely to experience depression.
So yes, poorly-educated rustics are less likely to be diagnosed. Now take a look at suicide rates by state. 10 states with least suicide:
DC
NJ
MA
NY
MD
CA
CT
RI
DE
IL
All blue states. Every single one. Here are the ten states with the highest suicide rate:
MT
AL
WY
NM
ND
ID
UT
SD
OK
CO
8 hard red states, one blue NM, one purple CO.
Diagnoses will vary by education, intelligence and access. Suicide is a nice, solid number.
ETA: I see @steve beat me to it. Also AL should be AK.
@Michael Cain:..The House Republicans have introduced a bill that would place a heavy tax on private university endowments.
Bob Jones University would be a good place to start taxing endowments.
This is from the AI section of the Google page.
It is the first time that I have noted AI for anything as far as I know.
Looking for some help to find good books or articles (academic ones are fine) specifically about why people fear foreign/unfamiliar/different things. This is kinda embarrassing since it should have been obvious to me, but I only yesterday realized just how important fear of people who are different is to authoritarian tendencies. I’m very drawn toward difference/novelty so this is a big blind spot for me. I get that this probably seems obvious to people that are more normal than me, but since I don’t feel it I’ll need to understand it from an intellectual standpoint. Thanks in advance for any suggestions!
@gVOR10: The proposal was for a benevolent aristocratic republic. The condition was that we would keep electing benevolent aristocrats.
@Erik:
You could start here: http://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20211022-why-were-so-terrified-of-the-unknown
@Michael Reynolds:
Checking at the CDC, the second state should be AK (Alaska) rather than AL (Alabama). What jumps out at me from that list is not the politics, but the geography. AK is in a class by itself, or course. The other nine are Great Plains/Mountain West. Nos. 11, 12, and 13 are Nevada, Arizona, and Kansas, which also match that geographical filter.
My first guess on cause would be vast empty spaces. I had cause to update my rural Great Plains statistics recently. 520,000 square miles, average population density of 9.94 people per square mile. Exclude the Texas counties and you have 415,000 square miles with an average density of 6.96. That meets the historical definition of frontier, less than 7.0 people per square mile. Most people don’t really realize that the US has a stripe 300-500 miles wide down the middle from Canada to Mexico that is basically empty of people.
ETA: I see that Michael already caught the Alaska correction.
Another ETA: On further reflection, my first guess ought to be Native Americans. The rural reservations and surrounding areas have notoriously high suicide rates, and most of the top 13 states have larger-than-typical Native populations.
@CSK: thanks!
@Jay L Gischer: My inner Manichean laughed all the way through but agreed with you that no one wants to accept responsibility for who they are and what they did.
It’s always someone else’s fault: “The serpent beguiled me.” “The woman gave me the fruit.” It’s not my fault; I only ate it (or in this case, voted it in). That was the only thing I did; I didn’t cause any of this. No huh.
@Scott:
Because the answer to “how much do I need” is always “more.”
@Michael Cain:
Might also look at rates of gun ownership. Guns make suicide easy and successful. Alaska is a unique case, perhaps, in that men outnumber women by ~10% and men kill themselves a lot more than woman. And yes to Indian reservations as a hot bed.
One other possible consideration, the relative number of immigrants. States with higher numbers of immigrants have fewer suicides.
@just nutha:
We need to de-normalize this way of thinking. Greed is not a virtue, it is a vice and we should see it as a vice.
I’m avoiding this trap by actually setting a number, after which, if we happen to get to that point, we just give money away. I’d have enough now TBH, if I were not obsessing about leaving enough for our kids. I don’t want a bigger home – we’d like fewer guests not more, and I dread the idea of ‘staff.’ I have two nice cars and am going to sell off one because while I love it, I don’t use it much at all. All I want is to be able to fly business class, stay in nice hotels and dine as I please.
@Michael Reynolds:
Someplace where you’re (or I’m, for that matter) unlikely to notice them, just like in previous generations.
(And their message is just as likely to be discounted as a terrible way to win the hearts and minds of “the voters we need in order to win,” too.)
@Michael Reynolds:
I’m reminded of a saying that was popular at the Harvard Business School back in the 1980s: “Do you want to be happy, or do you want a house in the Hamptons?”
@Mister Bluster: The community college I taught at has an endowment fund over 10 times the size of BJU. The community college endowment to which I contribute is several million dollars larger than BJU’s. I’m saddened to see that the ill-treatment you feel you received at the hands of the LCMS has contaminated your thinking to the point of not being able to see the difference between 18 million and 15 billion.
And feel free to make the BJU joke you’re probably thinking about.
As I’ve mostly run out of music that I like that I can recommend here, I thought I’d switch to books. It will be mostly Science Fiction, with some non-fiction here and there.
I’ll start with something rather atypical, though, namely Arthur C. Clarke’s sole non-science fiction novel: Glide Path.
It’s about the implementation and testing during WWII of a radar system to guide planes for landing in poor visibility, known as ground-controlled approach. This is something Clarke was involved with, when he served in the Royal air Force in WWII.
I’m listing it mostly as a curiosity, as I don’t recall much about the plot itself.
@just nutha:
Today’s record labels are not going to be doing a big promotional push to get the new Bob Dylan on the radio — not that people listen to radio anymore.
I assume even old people had heard of Dylan in the late 1960s. The fractured media, and the streaming apps, makes that less likely now. There are a lot more niche artists.
@Michael Reynolds: This is what the FI/RE (Financial Independence/Retire Early) movement is all about.
A fellow out of Longmont, Colorado who calls himself Mr. Money Mustache was one of the early promoters of this idea back in 2011 – building on the work of a book called “Your Money or Your Life” from the 1990s, as well as some work on a Safe Withdrawal Rate (~4% when investments are in a stock mutual fund/bond mutual fund at 75%/25%).
The idea is to be intentional about your savings, saving a large percentage of your pay each month. The large amount of savings does two things – it saves money that compounds on itself, but it also gets us used to living on less money than we earn – a skill that helps when we ultimately retire young.
I quit a low-six-figures job and retired at 53. I walked away from several million dollars in continued earning power, because I didn’t need several million more dollars – but I did need control over my day, my thoughts, and my stress levels.
Some people, my father for example, get great joy from their work. I was a management-cog in the wheels of corporate America and easily replaced by a new cog – so I moved on to fully focus on a role that only I can fulfill. Husband, father, grandpa.
A punk band, UK Subs, has been denied entry into the US. They were scheduled to play a gig, landed in LA, were detained and then three were sent back to the UK. One band member was allowed to remain.
Between the mistreatment of the Canadian with a work visa, the German green card holder (NH), the Welsh tourist, the German who had her tattoo equipment with her so they locked her up saying she was lying and was trying to stay and work in the US, the French scientist, and now this…I am thinking that any tourist-dependent states are going to have a rough time going forward because this is definitely going to have a chilling effect.
@Jen:
My visa for the US expired in 2022. I’ve delayed renewing it, because wait times since the trump pandemic were ridiculous (like over 700 days). it hasn’t improved.
On the plus side, I couldn’t enter the US even if I wanted to.
Piece re: Trump and obeying court orders.
Short version: Murdoch says he should, Trump pays attention.
“Digby“
@Jen:
Have you noticed the several articles in the local media about the number of cancellations by Canadians who typically vacation at the NH and Maine beach towns. There’s a growing panic in York and Hampton, due to cancellations and lack of reservations.
The other shoe to drop will be the guest workers, historically a large number of the tourism jobs around here were filled by Canadian college students, that has been supplemented by young adults from eastern Europe in the last 10 years.
@just nutha:..
Q: Why did the chicken cross Wade Hampton Blvd. in Greenville, SC?
A: So it could attend Bob Jones University.
(Should I expect a bill for all this pseudo analysis of me that you are posting? Do you accept Medicare?)
@Sleeping Dog: Yep, I have read the local articles.
It’s going to be an interesting summer I think.
@Mister Bluster: No, I simply offered a regret at what I see as anger. No charge and no recommendation. Just sadness.
@Sleeping Dog: @Jen:
Myrtle Beach, SC is also being hard hit. They have been having a Can-Am week in March for 64 years.
@Michael Reynolds: We were talking about mental health by party affiliation not suicide rate by state. You can’t really use state data as a substitute for party affiliation, and suicide isn’t a good substitute for mental illness. It varies by culture, and skews heavily white in the US. We do have data for mental health by ideology anyway. Jonathan Haidt made a well-known graph which you can find in the article below. The mental health partisan divide isn’t even debated, it’s “settled science”. I thought even the left acknowledged it.
https://www.thefp.com/p/why-the-mental-health-of-liberal
Colorado now has Colorado-Canada Friendship Day as an official thing. Canada is our largest export destination, some amount of our tourism business is Canadians, and a number of Canadian companies have branches in Colorado employing thousands of people. So far, ICE arresting and holding Canadians/Europeans on entry seem to be focused at airports in cities close to the physical borders.
@just nutha:..
You’re going to have to fill me in on the BJU joke because I don’t know what you are talking about.
@Mister Bluster:
It might be Blow Job University. Just a suggestion.
@Michael Reynolds: Alcoholism plays a big role in the native community up there. Seems there is little genetic resistance to the disease in native Americans. Europeans have had thousands of years of exposure and seem to have, generally speaking, developed significantly more.
There are about 70 predominantly native American towns in Alaska which have banned alcohol altogether. I suppose it would be easy to compare the stats on suicide between those towns and those that are not on the wagon, but I saw smuggling going on in my brief time there. The dry towns are not completely dry.
@Tony W:
It’s too late for me to retire early – I’m 70 – but TBH my working life is pretty mellow.
I don’t get the mentality of these guys who need more, more, more. To what end? For what purpose? Do they have no interests outside of making money? And to add fame/notoriety to it just seems to defeat the purpose. Where can Bezos or Musk go without having to be Bezos or Musk? These guys can’t see David in Florence, or drift from tapas bar to tapas bar in San Sebastian or wander the streets of Tokyo. They’re prisoners in gilded cages.
I like money, and I have expensive tastes, but you have to watch the lines on the graph and not get to the point where increased wealth becomes a limitation and you’re serving the money rather than the money serving you.
@Fortune:
We do have voter registrations, which are by party in many states, so we could cross reference if we had the datasets.
The correlation between suicide and mental illness is harder to square as there are so many other types of mental illness than depression. And suicide itself has enough correlated variables, because guns are so good at the job, and there’s a partisan bias with how people attempt it.
However, the article you link to is about teen data, and I think teens are their own special thing. Forming minds vs formed mind. It’s likely a very different health crisis that would respond to very different stressors and remedies. Do I know it’s different? No. But I would keep that data separate until I know they aren’t. You’re likely bringing a cat to a dog show with that.
Why address what the Trump administration is doing, when you can pontificate about how depressed the poor libs are. Amiright?
@Fortune: Not quite. You were asserting something lacking in documentation about mental health by party affiliation and the rest of “we” were questioning what you meant by “mental health” because the sources you cited were faulty on some specific way that I don’t quite understand because I’m only lurking on this one. Once again, your predilections toward drive-by shooting style argument is thwarting your point. 🙁
You’ll never convince the lurkers this way. Most of us have low mind-reading skills. 🙁
@Gustopher: I was pointing the reader to a graph showing mental illness diagnoses from age 18 through 65+. Yes, suicide and teen depression are important topics but I was responding to Michael Reynolds’s request for supporting evidence.
@CSK: Yeah. I thought he’d make that connection right away. I mean, I did, and I didn’t leave the fundies behind until I was waaaay older than 12. I must be more of a perv than I realized. Not that I didn’t realize it, you understand. I’ve known that since not much after 12.
@Gustopher: Yeah. I was about to ask him about how that article correlated. Then I realized he wouldn’t answer the question. Thanks for bringing it up for the other lurkers to consider. [Thumbs up emoji]
@Fortune:
And, yet again, failing to explain what MR and the rest of us are missing about whatever point you were trying to assert when you cited the correlation to begin with. (Which is part of how I concluded that there’s no sense in trying to converse with you.)
Going back to lurking now. Have a day. 😉
@just nutha: Jay L Gischer posted a video in which a psychiatrist made claims about the right’s mental health. If you watch the video, read my replies and the articles I posted, it’s A-B-C.
@just nutha:..I thought he’d make that connection right away.
Perhaps you are getting all your exercise jumping to conclusions about me.
Most of us have low mind-reading skills.
However if you want to play therapist on the internet carry on.
I have no idea what statistics may exist on partisan mental illness, nor how reliable they might be. But I’m pretty sure conservatives would be more depressed if they understood what’s going on.
@Gustopher:
Even mental illnesses not commonly associated with depression, such as OCD, have higher-than-normal rates of suicidality.