Tuesday Tab Clearing
- This 2017 piece from Bloomberg is worth revisiting: The Mostly Forgotten Tax Increases of 1982-1993. It is an opinion piece written by someone sympathetic to Reagan’s big tax cut, but who also looks at the data and sees that a major reason for the Clinton era budget surplus, and by extension, the best way to lower deficits, is via tax increases.
- This book review is worth a read for anyone interested in the fascism deabte as it pertains to contemporary politics. Via S-USIH: “The Wolves Came”: Richard Steigmann-Gall on Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins’s *Did it Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America*.
- Along those lines I recommend this essay by Andy Craig at The UnPopulist: Trump’s Effort to become the Supreme Leader Has Roots in a Nazi Philosopher.
- Via YNet: Qatar lobby reaches deep into US conservative media, documents show.
- Via Fortune: DOGE said 40% of the Social Security Agency’s calls were ‘fraudulent.’ Data suggests it was actually less than 1%. Matt Bernius mentioned this in a comment thread recently, but it deserves reinforcement.
- Via WBUR: Feds yank funds from Harvard breast cancer, fertility, antibiotics research.
“It feels like the academic equivalent of nuclear war,” said Dr. Michael Barnett, an associate professor of health policy at the school of public health. “Nukes have been launched and there’s just increasingly complete devastation”
The loss of funding is a blow to researchers who’ve spent decades working to improve human health, to lab staff who hoped findings would launch their careers, and to patients around the world who rely on this work.
But, you know, who cares about cancer research when you can stick it to Harvard? Amiright?
Oh, come now. All MAGAs know that Harvard’s a shitty school that teaches nothing but deranged radical leftist ideology.
aka. Fiscal Responsibility, or the exact opposite of what Trump and congressional Republicans are plotting rn.
Re “The Wolves Came” above, Digby links to a 2023 piece by one David Roberts that says very well something I’ve tried to get to here a few times.
Everyone defaults to describing politics as tit-for-tat. The current example is Dems pushed gays and trans down everyone’s throat so GOPs are of course campaigning against trans. But Dems never pushed gays and trans. Obama famously ducked gay marriage for years. There are so few trans the public would be barely aware of trans as an issue if GOPs hadn’t blown it all out of proportion. There was no tit before the tat. “a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place.” indeed.
Roberts continues,
I’ve been re-reading Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die. It’s full of valuable insights into modern autocracy. But I’ve come to worry about books like this. I have no doubt there are PhDs at AEI and their ilk reading them as instruction manuals. The path to autocracy is well trod and well documented for anyone setting out to follow it.
@gVOR10: I’d like to push back a little against the attempt to use reactionary as an alternative to fascist to avoid the semantic arguments over the latter. All fascists are reactionaries, but not all reactionaries are fascists. And what he describes is broadly true about reactionaries, not just the fascist ones. Much of the rhetoric in defense of Jim Crow (and no–Jim Crow was definitely anti-democratic, but not fascist, at least not intrinsically) was to cast the white oppressors as in fact the oppressed. You’ve heard me quote the following from Sen. Richard Russell in his speech opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964:
“In all of the sanctimony about protecting the rights of minorities, let us understand fully that the bill is aimed at what has become the most despised and mistreated minority in the country — namely, the white people of the Southern States.”
The segregationists also accused the civil rights movement of wishing to give black people “special rights,” a phrase that would later be appropriated by opponents of LGBT rights. Bob Dole used the phrase in 1996 after returning a donation from the Log Cabin Republicans. Rick Perry used it in 2011 in protest against a memorandum from the Obama Admin combating the persecution of gay people in other countries, particularly Uganda, which aimed to (and eventually did) make homosexuality a capital offense.
This type of language inversion is not limited to fascists. It’s the essential tool of all bigots trying to rationalize what they’re doing by casting themselves as the victims rather than the perpetrators.
Why is the comment I posted not appearing?
@Kylopod:
Caching issues.
@Matt Bernius: Hoping you’ll see this comment soon, we do appreciate your efforts on behalf of the site. I expect it’s turned into a lot more than you thought you signed up for.