On the menu today: We return from Labor Day to confront the contention that the Republican Party is strong and powerful and threatens to squash small, vulnerable, defenseless entities such as . . . the Walt Disney Company; President Biden can’t make up his mind on whether Trump voters represent a threat to the country; the 2022 midterms will be a battle of whether you should be more worried about what Republicans could do to you, or what Democrats have already done to you; and finally, some deeply satisfied readers of Gathering Five Storms speak up.
Everybody Wants to Be the Rebel Alliance
My favorite local Barnes and Noble doesn’t clear out the old magazines quickly, so this past weekend, I noticed the cover of Newsweek dated August 12, sporting the headline “War on Woke,” with a cartoon of a massive, angry elephant about to squish Mickey Mouse. “As more companies take a liberal stand on social issues, the right is fighting back,” the caption underneath the headline explains.
Think about the perspective you must have to consider the Walt Disney Company a poor, small, endangered underdog in this dispute. In the minds of those who create the offerings of Newsweek, Disney — with its $67 billion in revenue in 2021; $203 billion in assets; rank of number 53 on the Fortune 500 list of the world’s largest companies; its television networks, movie studios, streaming services, theme parks; and its gargantuan global merchandising business, which more or less makes it “American Childhood Inc.” — is the beleaguered, plucky underdog.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party, which does not control the White House, the Senate, or the House of Representatives, is the menacing giant that is on the verge of flattening Disney. This point is entirely separate from what you think of Disney’s corporate philosophies, company policies or messages, or its Republican critics. It is just an observation about who Newsweek chooses to depict as powerful, and who it chooses to depict as weak.
Considering the image on the cover, you might be surprised to learn that Florida governor Ron DeSantis doesn’t appear until the 24th paragraph of the article: “Disney climbed the wokeness list in March when it advocated overturning Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill. That prompted Governor Ron DeSantis to threaten to take away tax and regulatory favors that have been hugely valuable to Disney’s theme park business since 1967.” You may love DeSantis, or you may hate him, but note that his actions are limited by the U.S. and Florida State constitutions and are subject to judicial review. Also, the people of Florida will have a say in whether he keeps his job in November. DeSantis isn’t powerless, but he’s not an unbridled colossus striding across the landscape, crushing all in his path as the cover image suggests.
This is part of a recurring pattern of immensely powerful figures who believe or want others to believe that they are scrappy dark horses or longshots or some relatable little guy taking on long odds. Everybody wants to be the Rebel Alliance; nobody ever wants to admit that they’re the Empire.
Back in August 2016, I pointed out that the lyrics of Hillary Clinton’s campaign song, “Fight Song,” didn’t fit the candidate because she wasn’t the underdog, the small boat on the ocean that the singer claims to be: “Put aside the fact that small boats do not actually generate big waves, at least on the scale of the ocean. Clinton’s campaign cannot claim that she is the most prepared, experienced candidate in American history and [simultaneously] a scrappy underdog fighting the odds. This is a woman who has spent more than two decades at the center of the American political system. She’s not a rickety fishing trawler attempting to traverse the Atlantic in a storm; she’s a luxury-cruise ship speeding along unencumbered.” In retrospect, a more specific comparison to the Titanic would have been prophetic.
The entertainment world likes to mix up its concepts of who is powerful and who is not. As I noted when Jon Stewart retired from The Daily Show, his show frequently “punched down” at little-known state legislators, small-town school-board members, or obscure local pastors. When reviewing Aaron Sorkin’s HBO program The Newsroom, Jake Tapper wrote, “At a time when Democrats controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, it’s telling that [protagonist Will] McAvoy and Sorkin aim their sights at conservatives seeking power — not moderates and liberals wielding it.”
Once Again, Someone Should Tell Biden What His Positions Are
Thursday, during a primetime address, President Biden warned that “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” Friday morning, Biden reversed course and said to reporters, “I don’t consider any Trump supporter a threat to the country.” But then later that day, Biden’s Twitter account sent out the message: “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”
So, Biden is confused — again. But ask yourself, what do “MAGA Republicans” control? Right now, very little. Yes, they have candidates who want to be secretaries of state, lieutenant governors, senators, and so on. No doubt, some of them are cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs and see their primary mission as ensuring that Trump was declared the winner of the 2024 presidential race, regardless of the voting results. But we have nutty candidates every cycle. Not too long ago, allegedly serious voices in American politics believed that the country could abolish its police forces.
Certainly some members of the current congressional GOP minorities qualify as “MAGA Republicans.” They can go on cable news and demand investigations or indictments or resignations, but they can’t make those things happen. They can’t get bills passed or amendments adopted. If they win a majority in a chamber, maybe they will be able to do more, but their actions will still be subject to the filibuster rule, a presidential veto, judicial review, speedy injunctions handed down from skeptical judges, and the familiar problems of cobbling together 218 House votes on any particular piece of legislation.
And as for the man himself, Donald Trump is the odd kind of authoritarian menace who can’t even get himself back on Twitter.
The message from President Biden and his Democratic allies, from now until Election Day, will be that you, American citizen, dare not vote for Republicans because of what they could do — the threat they could represent to your rights in the future. In the process of focusing on that, you will not focus on what has actually been done to you over the past two years. Inflation bedeviled Americans for about a year, and a major factor was that the Biden administration and the Democratic Congress agreed to spend an additional $1.9 trillion on “Covid relief” in March 2021, just as the vaccines were arriving and the economy was already recovering. Former treasury secretary Larry Summers warned that, “There is a chance that macroeconomic stimulus on a scale closer to World War II levels than normal recession levels will set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation.” [Emphasis added.]
All 220 House Democrats voted to pass the massive spending package; all 210 Republicans voted against it. Every Senate Democrat voted to pass it; every Senate Republican voted against it. A CNN poll from March 2021 found that 94 percent of self-identified Democrats favored it.
And then we experienced “inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation.”
At least on this one consequential issue, Democrats were wrong, and Republicans were right.
Contrast the potential threat that “MAGA Republicans” represent to you with what the U.S. and state governments do to private citizens on a regular basis.
The Internal Revenue Service recently admitted that it had accidentally published the confidential information of about 120,000 individuals. The New York State attorney general’s office leaked IRS documents naming donors to Nikki Haley’s nonprofit political-advocacy group, Stand For America, Inc. Last year, someone within the IRS leaked a vast trove of private information about the country’s wealthiest taxpayers. Because of its power over taxation and the authority to prosecute others for failure to pay or for fraud, the IRS and similar state tax-enforcement agencies have enormous power over your life.
According to Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, during the 2020 election, “The FBI, I think, basically came to us- some folks on our team and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert. . . . We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that, basically, there’s about to be some kind of dump of that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.’” As a result, Facebook limited, but did not completely erase, the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop on its newsfeed. The Biden administration apparently tried to create a Disinformation Governance Board — that even the DHS didn’t think it needed — to formalize this arrangement of pressuring social-media companies to remove information that the government deems dangerous foreign propaganda.
Notice how frequently you are told that the biggest menace that Americans face are those who criticize the government, even though they themselves have little power over your day-to-day life. Notice how rarely you are told that the biggest menaces America faces are those who operate in the ranks in government in secrecy or obscurity, with great access to or great influence over your life, and with little accountability.
ADDENDUM: Over the Labor Day weekend, more reviews of Gathering Five Storms arrived.
Dan kindly writes:
Geraghty’s books are among my go-to reads, the ones I lay down other books for as soon as they drop from the cloud. He’s got a seductive combination of well-researched and thought-provoking a-clef plots, on the one hand, and on the other his light and humorous touch with the Dangerous Clique team. We actually find out why they’re called that, plus the back story on their formation. It’s relevant, as they get caught up in something now tying back to then, long ago near the beginning of the War on Terror. It’s disturbing enough that someone stalks the team, knowing who they are and wanting them dead. It’s more disturbing that the cause goes back so far.
And Brian, a man of few words, declares: “They keep getting better. Ridiculous that I have to use 16 words in order to rate this. Three more words.”