Emmanuel Macron is paying a high price for his push on pension reform as a survey on Sunday showed the French president is facing a new low in popularity — as low as during the protests of the so-called Yellow Jackets.
As the French take to the streets to protest against Macron’s pension reform, 70 percent of respondents said they are dissatisfied with the president, according to the Ifop barometer published by Le Journal du Dimanche. Macron’s popularity rating fell by 4 points in one month, it showed.
Since December, Macron has suffered a substantial drop of 8 points, and he now sees only 28 percent satisfied and 70 percent dissatisfied, according to the poll carried out, Le Figaro emphasized, between March 9 and 16.
That is the same period as the negotiations that finally led the Elysée to shun parliament and impose the unpopular pension reforms via a special constitutional power, the so-called Article 49.3, which provides that the government can pass a bill without a vote at the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament, after a deliberation at a Cabinet meeting.
The procedure has been used in the past by various governments. But this time it’s prompting a lot of criticism because of the massive public opposition to the proposed reform, which raises the legal retirement age from 62 to 64 years. Some media stress that recent opinion polls have shown that a majority of the French are opposed to this type of procedure.
“You have to go back to the end of the Yellow Jackets crisis in early 2019 to find comparable levels of unpopularity,” writes Le Journal du Dimanche commenting the survey. The outlet also stresses that dissatisfaction with Macron crosses all categories, the younger generations as well as the blue- and white-collar workers.
A total of 169 people, including 122 in Paris, were taken in custody for questioning on Saturday evening in France during demonstrations marred by tensions between the police and the protesters, according to French media citing figures communicated on Sunday by the Ministry of the Interior.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
If that’s true, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy certainly didn’t get the memo. He reportedly sees merit in parts of China’s plan, and looks forward to discussing it with China’s leaders. In fact, it was just reported that Chinese President Xi Jinping plans to meet virtually with Zelenskyy when he’s in Moscow next week to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. According to Zelenskyy, “The more countries, especially… large ones, influential ones, think about how to end the war in Ukraine while respecting our sovereignty, with a just peace, the sooner it will happen.”
Ukraine’s openness to China’s involvement makes sense. The plan isn’t stacked in Russia’s favor, despite the two nations’ supposed “friendship without limits” (a characterization that has proven overblown). Besides urging respect for Ukraine’s sovereignty, it contains quite a few elements which also should make Russia bristle: protecting civilians, condemning threats to use nuclear weapons and ending interference with humanitarian aid.
Importantly, Ukraine will also want to maintain good relations with China when the war is over. The cost to rebuild its infrastructure will likely exceed what the West is willing or able to provide, and the plan concludes by stating China’s desire to join the international community in supporting post-conflict reconstruction.
To be clear, this isn’t an argument for the Chinese plan itself. The plan is thin on details, and an immediate ceasefire could freeze Russia’s territorial gains in place and sap Ukrainian battlefield momentum. When China didn’t vote with the majority of countries at the United Nations to condemn Russia’s invasion as illegal, China’s judgment and impartiality were rightly questioned. Beijing also might be motivated as much by a desire to boost its international reputation as a desire to effect peace.
But when creative diplomacy is the only alternative to a costly and expensive forever war, no diplomatic effort should be summarily brushed aside. The Biden administration should see this as an opportunity to work collaboratively with China, to combine the clout each has with one of the combatants to, say, co-host negotiations which ultimately reaffirm Ukraine’s sovereignty and assure its future security. Unfortunately, Washington seems so allergic to the prospect of China playing a major diplomatic role that it is blind to the reality that U.S. interests might be well served by a Chinese diplomatic success.
Many analysts and U.S. officials have long believed that Ukraine will be unable to retake all of its territory by force, and that ending the war will require a diplomatic settlement. Well-entrenched Russian forces cannot be expelled from Crimea without the sort of Western-backed Ukrainian offensive which would risk triggering Russia’s use of nuclear weapons. Though it publicly supports Ukraine’s right to recapture Crimea, the Biden administration shrewdly refuses to supply Ukraine’s military with the long-range missiles such an effort would require, and privately asked Zelenskyy to remain open to negotiations.
Within the administration, the military leadership has shown the most prudence. I recently sat down with Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for an upcoming episode of Eurasia Group Foundation’s None Of The Above podcast, and he said neither Russia nor Ukraine is likely to achieve their “complete political objectives through military means.” Instead, he insists the war will probably end when “somewhere, somehow, someone’s going to figure out how to get to a negotiating table.” When asked if the U.S. should take any peace plan seriously, regardless of whether it came from Italy, Turkey or even China, Milley didn’t disagree.
A negotiated outcome would be morally unsatisfying compared to a decisive defeat and Russia’s full withdrawal from occupied Ukrainian territory. But such a withdrawal remains improbable given the harsh realities of Russia’s degraded but still-considerable military capacity, continued resolve to fight and nuclear posture. The decision about whether and how to negotiate ultimately belongs to the leaders of Ukraine and Russia alone, not the U.S. (or China). But we should not automatically dismiss peace overtures from perhaps the only country which possesses both close diplomatic ties with and considerable economic leverage over Russia.
If Putin’s battlefield failures continue to mount, pressure from China could help bring him to the negotiating table. America’s approach to ending the war in Ukraine should recognize these realities. It should also recognize the hypocrisy inherent in touting Ukraine’s agency when it prosecutes war, but not when it pursues peace.
The Biden administration’s tendency to cast international politics as a grand struggle between democracy and autocracy could muddy its strategic calculations. The president stated it would not be “rational” for China to assist with peace negotiations, reinforcing a notion that autocratic countries simply can’t play a constructive role in resolving the war which happens to pit an autocracy against a democracy.
Such an ideologically inflected approach ignores the possibility that successful diplomacy is often based on shared interests, not just shared values. China might not share America’s frustration with Russia’s challenge to the Western-led geopolitical order, but Chinese leaders want to limit economic disruptions and nuclear escalation risk. We can criticize China’s form of government and human rights violations while appreciating their rational interests in ending the war.
Ukraine is fighting a just and courageous battle, and the Biden administration’s support for Kyiv has been at turns generous and judicious. But as the stakes, costs and risks increase, the U.S. will want to accelerate the end of hostilities.
If China can actually help Ukraine reach mutually acceptable terms with the country that invaded it, killed scores of its people and occupied its territory, surely the U.S. can muster the humility to permit its main geopolitical rival a diplomatic victory. After all, true diplomacy requires working with competitors, not just friends. In his State of the Union address, Biden said he is “committed to work with China where it can advance American interests and benefit the world.” This could be the first real test of that commitment. In Ukraine, China’s win need not be America’s loss.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Way too many long shots flattering themselves with White House dreams have become the default setting in American presidential politics. In the old days, five or six candidates would declare each cycle for their party’s nomination. There were always a few cranks, earnest celebrities, political outliers, one-issue gadflies, hustlers, attention seekers, billionaires with too much time on their hands and cable TV host wannabes. But now the process of surfacing candidates for hopeless runs for the presidency has become as fecund as a dime-store hamster.
In the 2016 cycle, 17 Republicans announced their candidacies for president, marking a new record. There were so many Republican candidates that cycle that they couldn’t fit them all on one stage at the same time, leading to “main debates” and “secondary debates.” Then came 2020, when at least 28 Democrats declared, breaking the 2016 mark. Why this over-participation in presidential primary politics? What do these political also-rans expect to get out of their campaigns aside from humiliation? Should we prevent the herd from spawning, or is the over-abundance of candidates a good thing?
If you want to blame somebody for the candidate surge, stick it on Barack Obama, who, at the time of his first run for the presidency, was among the least experienced politicians to run for the nomination. He had put eight years in the Illinois Senate — which the National Conference of State Legislatures calls a “full-time lite” position for the small districts its members serve and the brief sessions they work — and failed to win a U.S. House of Representatives contest. He had only two years in the U.S. Senate before announcing his presidential run, a position he won in part by virtue, his detractors say, of a political fluke that scuttled his original Republican Senate opponent and left him facing a weak one (and habitual presidential candidate Alan Keyes, at that). Just before Obama declared his presidential candidacy, an ABC News/Washington Post poll placed him 24 points behind the heavily favored Hillary Clinton. And yet he won. Obama’s ultimate victory gave faith to candidates across the spectrum: They, too, could knock off the front-runner.
If you have any blame left in your quiver, fire it at Donald Trump, the greatest political neophyte ever to run for president. He wasn’t even a war hero like Eisenhower or Grant. In 2015, pollsters, pundits, academics and celebrities by the score insisted that Trump couldn’t possibly win the GOP contest and after he did they insisted that he couldn’t possibly defeat Clinton. After he did both, White House aspirants who would ordinarily work their way up the political ladder before announcing began to ask what these relative newcomers had that they didn’t. They concluded the answer was “nothing,” and started running. Hence the presidential candidacies of featherweights like Andrew Yang and Eric Swalwell and Tulsi Gabbard, who when afflicted with the presidential itch, scratched it with the vigor of those heavy lotto-card players who think if they keep at it, they’ll get the lucky draw.
Hopeless runs for the presidency are partly informed by the historical record, which suggests that to win you must first lose, even if you’re an established pol. Richard Nixon ran once before he won on the second time. Ronald Reagan lost twice, George H.W. Bush, once, and Joe Biden, twice. But what attracts so many contemporary dark horses is a media environment that splashes them with a quality of attention they could never reap by merely serving on the backbench or writing books or protesting this or that. For 20th century socialists like Eugene V. Debs (five times on the ballot) and Norman Thomas (six!) or a Communist Party leader like Gus Hall (four), hopeless runs were not about winning but building cadre for the movement.
But candidates like Williamson and RFK Jr. aren’t building cadre or grooming voters for a future successful run. They are there to reap publicity, appear on TV, expand their circle of influence, travel the country on donor dollars and advance their issues, most of which is legit. The only real harm that can be done is personal, when they become a punch line for running too many losing campaign, like Harold Stassen (nine times), who would be running from the grave if it were legal.
Prick any politician and he’ll bleed presidential ambition. The only thing that’s changed is more politicians are pricking themselves than ever before. But instead of lamenting the overgrazed field, perhaps we should be grateful for our numerous candidates. Thanks to Obama and Trump, the variety of candidates has expanded, increasing the dimension of the debate. This has made way for a few self-regarding billionaires (Bloomberg, Tom Steyer, Ramaswamy) but also for outsiders like Bernie Sanders, who widened what was considered proper for political debate.
You might believe the current plethora of presidential candidates to be a bad thing because an oversubscribed field, like the Republicans had in 2016, resulted in the “better” candidates overlapping and canceling one another out and allowing Trump to win the nomination with a relatively small share of the vote, as the Washington Post’s Philip Bump has written. But it was thanks to the large field in 2020 that Elizabeth Warren was on the debate stage to humiliate Bloomberg and drive him out of the race.
However awful the candidate congestion might be, it’s preferable to the way we used to pick nominees. In the 1800s and into the mid-1900s, you weren’t likely to run for president until the right smoke-filled room characters who ran the political machines called your name and put you up for election.
Still, the cost has been steep. In previous campaign cycles, we had to endure Rick Santorum on the hustings. Ben Carson. Bill de Blasio. George Pataki. Kirsten Gillibrand. Bobby Jindal. John Hickenlooper. These are people I wouldn’t let park my car, let alone vote for. But at least the mobbing of candidates opens the scope on the topics deemed worthy of campaign debate. It’s a cheap price to pay even if it provides Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a place on the debate stage.
******
Susquehanna Polling & Research conducted a poll in late February of possible Democrats for president. Williamson didn’t even register but Gavin Newsom, who says he won’t challenge Biden, did. Send your nominee to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter feed thinks Twitter is rigged. My Mastodon and Post accounts demand a recount even before the first count. My RSS feed awaits the dictatorship of the proletariat.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Joe Biden is at pains to assert that “I’m a capitalist. I’m not a socialist.”
A lot of what Biden is proposing would look quite at home in Scandinavia and Western Europe.
Those nations aren’t really “socialist” at all, even if they’re celebrated by America’s best-known socialist.
Republicans really, really hate socialism — but will also scream bloody murder if Democrats suggest they want to so much as touch the most obviously socialistic programs of the American government.
Making sense of these assertions does not require squaring a circle; what it does require is an understanding of just how amorphous the term “socialist” is, and why whatever you call Biden’s various policy goals, they are firmly within the American political tradition — and may indeed be very smart politics, at that.
All through his two presidential runs, Sen. Bernie Sanders was asked what it meant that he called himself a “democratic socialist.” Invariably, the Vermont independent would point to the Scandinavian nations and their universal health care, paid family leave and free college education. (He did not call for the government to “control the means of production and distribution,” the classic definition of socialism and an omission at odds with the Democratic Socialists of America, a 92,000-member organization that asserts: “We want to collectively own the key economic drivers that dominate our lives, such as energy production and transportation.”)
But are Denmark, Sweden and Norway really “socialist” nations? They wouldn’t cut it for the DSA. The private sector is alive and well, businesses have a lighter tax burden than in the U.S., and even their health care systems are far from totally public. In Sweden, by one estimate, some 40 percent of health clinics are private, for-profit enterprises.
Indeed, throughout the industrialized world, the traditional goal of socialism has long since been jettisoned, even as elements of its core philosophy have been embedded in government policy. For example, Germany, whether run by center-right Christian Democrats or center-left Social Democrats, is a resolutely capitalist land, but its laws also require workers to be well represented on large corporations’ supervisory boards, where key decisions are made. In Britain, the Labour Party under Tony Blair renounced nationalization almost 30 years ago. The last Labour leader to embrace the idea, Jeremy Corbyn, presided over a historic walloping at the polls, and current leader Keir Starmer says he would not nationalize the energy industry (though a significant element of the party’s rank and file embraces the notion of “common ownership”).
Ideas like universal health care and expansive workers’ rights have long carried the label of “social democracy”: if not full socialism, then the notion that the government should craft a strong social safety net, impose higher taxes on the wealthy and limit the private sector’s power. (Those who see the hand of Karl Marx in such ideas — as Ronald Reagan did when he assailed the idea of Medicare back in 1964 — need to contend with the fact that the father of government-financed old age and health insurance was the ardent anti-socialist Otto von Bismarck, who first proposed the idea in 1881).
In the 2020 Democratic presidential contest, the left had its champions and Biden was most certainly not among them. But even the most committed Bernie Bro might acknowledge the president’s progress toward nudging the United States toward social democracy.
Consider the elements of Biden’s bipartisan $40 billion investment in semiconductor manufacturing — itself an impressive display of industrial policy. The package comes with strings, the New York Times notes. Companies have to pay union wages; they have to share some of their profits with the government; they have to provide free childcare for their workers; they have to run their plants with environmentally friendly energy sources. These proposals are of a piece with some of the more ambitious Biden policies, some of which, like the expanded child-tax credit, have expired, and some of which, like capping the price of insulin for seniors, remain in place and have been embraced by the private sector. His recent State of the Union address contained a swath of proposals to limit the power of private companies, whether by capping excessive airline baggage fees or hidden credit card charges.
The response to all of this from Republicans has been to raise the specter of “socialism.” Last month, the GOP-controlled House voted 328-86 for a resolution declaring that “socialist ideology necessitates a concentration of power that has time and time again collapsed into communist regimes, totalitarian rule, and brutal dictatorships. … Congress denounces socialism in all its forms, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States of America.” If the goal was to split their opponents, Republicans succeeded: More than 100 Democrats voted for the resolution which, taken literally, would condemn the policies of some of America’s most resolute allies, and which was clearly designed to throw shade at the president.
Of course, almost as vociferous as the GOP’s denunciation of socialism was its fury at the very idea the party might be moving to lay a finger on the two most clearly socialistic elements of U.S. policy — Social Security and Medicare.
When Biden used his State of the Union address to note that “some” Republicans were suggesting cuts in the programs — most specifically Sen. Rick Scott of Florida — GOP lawmakers erupted in anger. Scott, for his part, quickly amended his proposal sunsetting government programs by exempting the popular social insurance systems. It calls to mind the cry of a citizen at a congressional town hall meeting years ago: “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!” (Notably, Donald Trump also deserves some credit for steering the GOP away from a free-market orthodoxy intent on gutting retirement programs.)
It’s a little unfair to ascribe cognitive dissonance solely to Republicans. The confusion about what consists of “socialism” is pervasive. Polls show Americans disapprove of “entitlements,” but overwhelmingly approve of Social Security, Medicare and veterans’ benefits — in other words, programs people are entitled to by law. Sanders’ idea of free tuition for public colleges may seem a reach, but a generation or two ago, free college was widely available. City University of New York was famously tuition free from 1847 until 1976, and many state universities once imposed only fees. In some places, community college is still free.
A large majority of Americans see health care as a right, even as majorities of Americans say the government is too powerful and tries to do too much. This dissonance was crystalized by the election victory of Ronald Reagan, who proclaimed in his 1981 Inaugural Address that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” and then presided over a government that was bigger when he left it. (For that matter, Margaret Thatcher never tried to repeal Britain’s national health insurance.)
In this populist moment, Biden has also won applause from the left and right for flexing government’s muscle when it comes to cracking down on Big Tech and the growth of monopolies, be they in the form of airlines or book publishers. Biden is showing his Rooseveltian roots, not just FDR but TR.
A long-running debate exists over why socialism failed to take root in the United States, unlike in Europe. In the near run, the success of Biden’s “social democracy” efforts will stand or fall on whether he can — as many of his Democratic predecessors did — define his policies not as the importation of a foreign ideology, but as part of a continuing effort to make the economic playing field fairer and safer without changing the fundamental rules of the game.
For a century or more, those efforts have met with powerful resistance, even as the political consensus gradually shifts toward a more robust American welfare state. The most recent example: Republicans have given up their efforts to repeal Obamacare after years of pushing to do just that. It turns out that, with a little more modest ambitions, “socialism” has found a home of sorts in this land of individual freedom — as long as you call it something else.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
I served as a senior professional staff member on the January 6th Select Committee and helped write its final report. I got a close look at some of the video evidence that Carlson obtained — and his manipulation of the audience was immediately obvious to me. Here’s why.
First, the premise of his “investigation,” that the USCP footage was being withheld to cover up the full story, was always false. Working with the Select Committee’s members, the investigative team and staffers reviewed the USCP’s recordings, which provided new angles at some key locations. But it did not change our basic understanding of what transpired. How could it? The riot is one of the most widely covered events in history. There is no dearth of footage from that day.
In addition to the USCP’s surveillance video, the Select Committee reviewed footage recorded by cameras worn by Metropolitan Police Department officers, the work of documentary filmmakers and countless open-source videos, including clips recorded by the rioters themselves. Many Americans have already seen some of this footage with their own eyes. They know the mob was not at the Capitol primarily for sightseeing, as Carlson claimed.
On Monday night, the Fox News host showed just several minutes of cherry-picked footage. Cameras inside the Capitol and on its grounds recorded many more scenes that he did not play for viewers. Some of this footage has long been available online. For example, you can watch rioters ramming their way through USCP officers at the Senate Wing door, members of the mob smashing the ornate East Rotunda doors before other rioters open them from the inside, and the melee at the west plaza tunnel (at the two-hour, 14-minute mark). You can also view a timeline of events used by federal prosecutors, who relied on the USCP’s camera footage. Carlson’s team had access to this footage, and more, but chose not to show any of it to Fox News viewers Monday night. It’s easy to see why. The full USCP cache tells a very different story from the one Carlson wants people to see.
There is another fundamental problem with Carlson’s presentation that may not be so easy for the casual viewer to spot. He has repeatedly whitewashed the key role played by far-right extremists, namely, the Proud Boys. Their story, including how then-President Donald Trump inspired them, is told in Chapters 6 and 8 of the January 6th Select Committee’s final report. The Proud Boys and other extremists led the mob, but Carlson refuses to let his viewers know it.
Let us compare one of Carlson’s conspiracy theories to the well-established facts. For more than two years, Carlson has chased a bogeyman, arguing that provocateurs working for the federal government (or, alternatively, agitators on the left) somehow tricked Trump’s “patriots” into rioting. He still cannot identify any federal agents working for the so-called “deep state.” Carlson and others have focused on a lone individual who has not been charged, Ray Epps, insinuating that he was a secret FBI plant. This claim is baseless. They’ve produced no evidence connecting Epps, a Trump supporter, to the FBI or any other federal agency.
Meanwhile, Carlson has ignored nearly all of the evidence collected against the approximately 1,000 January 6th defendants who have been charged. That evidence reveals the real parties responsible for channeling the mob’s anger.
In fact, one of the most important January 6th trials is currently ongoing in a Washington, D.C., courtroom. Five members of the Proud Boys, including the group’s chair, Enrique Tarrio, have been charged with seditious conspiracy and other serious crimes. The Department of Justice claims the Proud Boys “conspired to prevent, hinder and delay the certification of the Electoral College vote, and to oppose by force the authority of the government of the United States.” Moreover, on Jan. 6, 2021, the Proud Boys “directed, mobilized and led members of the crowd onto the Capitol grounds and into the Capitol, leading to dismantling of metal barricades, destruction of property, breaching of the Capitol building, and assaults on law enforcement.”
The DOJ’s allegations are consistent with the Select Committee’s findings, as well as the investigative work done by real reporters. Law enforcement officials have collected overwhelming evidence, including text messages and videos, showing how the Proud Boys conspired against America’s democracy. They discovered that Tarrio told his men to “storm the Capitol” in the days leading up to the joint session of Congress.
While the attack was underway, Tarrio also claimed responsibility, messaging his men: “Make no mistake…” and “We did this.” Then, on the night of Jan. 6, Tarrio posted a video on the conservative social media site Parler that he titled, “Premonition.” The video shows a masked man, dressed as a super villain, standing in front of the Capitol. The figure is presumably Tarrio himself and the clip, recorded prior to Jan. 6, implies that he had foreknowledge of that day’s events.
You can watch “Premonition” here. It’s the type of spooky scene, set to foreboding background music, that makes for good television. Carlson did not show it to his viewers. In fact, he did not mention the Proud Boys at all.
The Select Committee’s review of video footage from multiple sources, including the U.S. Capitol Police, showed that the Proud Boys were conspicuously present on the front lines and at key breach points throughout the attack. Prosecutors are currently relying on the same type of footage, as well as additional sources of video, to make their case to a jury.
For example, Proud Boy leaders Joe Biggs and Ethan Nordean riled up the crowd at the Peace Circle Monument just outside of the U.S. Capitol. The Select Committee showed how the Proud Boys marched from the Washington Monument, around the Capitol, and then instigated the first perimeter breach at this key location. By attacking the police officers stationed between the monument and the Capitol, sweeping away security fences in the process, the Proud Boys and their associates opened a clear path onto the Capitol’s grounds. Thousands of Trump’s supporters marched down Pennsylvania Avenue and through the Peace Circle after leaving the president’s rally at the White House Ellipse.
Dominic Pezzola, another Proud Boy, was responsible for the first breach of the U.S. Capitol building itself. Pezzola smashed in a Senate Wing window with a stolen riot shield. This allowed the mob to swarm into the Capitol through both the window and a nearby door. Pezzola bragged about his actions in a video he recorded of himself inside the Capitol. While smoking a victory cigar, Pezzola said: “I knew we could take this motherfucker over if we just tried hard enough. Proud of your motherfuckin’ boy.”
During his presentation Monday night, Carlson focused on Jacob Chansley, a.k.a. the QAnon Shaman, pretending that he is the central figure in the January 6th story. Carlson claimed that we still don’t know how he entered the building. That’s not true — even the footage shown by Carlson makes it clear that Chansley entered through the Senate Wing door next to the window Pezzola bashed in.
There is much more evidence against the Proud Boys. Some members of the group have already pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy and other charges, admitting that their comrades planned to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. And the Proud Boys were not the only far right extremists involved. Members of two anti-government groups, the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, attacked the Capitol as well. Some Oath Keepers have pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy, while juries convicted the group’s leader and other members of the same crime. White nationalists were also among the extremists who stormed the Capitol.
The Fox News audience did not hear any of this. Nor did they hear how Trump summoned these extremists to Washington, D.C., for Jan. 6 via his tweets and statements. This part of the story is explained at great length in the Select Committee’s final report.
Tucker Carlson wants people to believe that phantom government agents were responsible. No one who relies on facts and logic will be fooled.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Carlson continued: “What he’s good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.” Elsewhere, Carlson said of the Trump presidency, “That’s the last four years. We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.”
In an earlier filing, we learn that Carlson cared more about Fox’s bottom line than he did about journalistic accuracy after Fox’s White House correspondent dispelled notions about voter fraud and Dominion. “Please get her fired,” Carlson texted to Fox hosts Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity. “Seriously … What the fuck? I’m actually shocked… It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”
To accuse the leading attraction on cable news of being so craven is a big claim. Can we really believe that a prime-time nightly cable host would gin up a unique and false persona just to sucker viewers into watching his show? What responsible observer could make such a claim? Well, two decades ago, Tucker Carlson said exactly that. In his 2003 book, Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites: My Adventures in Cable News, written long before he joined Fox, Carlson had this to say about Bill O’Reilly, then the king of cable news.
“Like everyone in TV, he has a shtick. O’Reilly is Everyman — the faithful but slightly lapsed Catholic son of the working class who knows slick, eastern Establishment BS when he sees it. A guy who tells the truth and demands that others do the same. A man who won’t be pushed around or take maybe for an answer,” Carlson wrote, completely on target.
With a little tweaking, this assessment of O’Reilly could be cut and tapered to dress Carlson. But there’s more. Did Carlson know that he was writing his future prospectus when he continued with these insights about cable’s top host?
“O’Reilly’s success is built on the perception that he really is who he claims to be,” Carlson wrote. “If he ever gets caught out of character, it’s over. If someday he punches out a flight attendant on the Concorde for bringing him a glass of warm champagne, the whole franchise will come tumbling down. He’ll make the whatever-happened-to … ? list quicker than you can say ‘Morton Downey, Jr.’”
Soon after the book was published, Carlson went on C-SPAN to reiterate his worship and disdain of O’Reilly. “Bill O’Reilly is really talented, he’s more talented than I am, he’s got a lot more viewers, he’s a better communicator than I am, but I think there is a deep phoniness at the center of his schtick, and again as I say the schtick is built on the perception that he is the character he plays,” Carlson said.
What Carlson wrote and said in 2003 surprised nobody, especially O’Reilly’s friends, his acquaintances in the journalism profession or even some viewers of his nightly Fox News Channel program. O’Reilly was clearly playing a character of his own invention in a multi-episode TV drama called The O’Reilly Factor. The bluster and outrage, the name calling, O’Reilly’s endless demands that his interview subjects “shut up!“ was all a performance.
Bill O’Reilly was a phony, and so now we can all see that Tucker Carlson is, too.
Having diagnosed O’Reilly’s shortcomings so long ago, how did Carlson eventually become him? As many have written before, Carlson was one of the most talented Washington-based journalists of his generation. He excelled at the Weekly Standard. At Tina Brown’s Talk magazine, he scored a KO on presidential candidate George W. Bush. He distinguished himself as a New York magazine columnist. He wrote for Esquire.
TV came calling at about the same time, and he answered. As I’ve theorized before, Carlson’s slide into the dark side that is Fox News began with his initial failures in the medium. After several years doing CNN’s Crossfire, his show got blown to bits by Jon Stewart’s October 2004 guest appearance. A few months later, the show was canceled and Carlson’s contract was not renewed. Not counting a short run at PBS with a show titled Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered, his next TV stop was MSNBC, which ran from 2005 to 2008. Carlson was genuine to his journalistic values on all of these shows, but none of them took root.
Running out of networks to work for, he finally joined Fox in 2009 and served as a sort of utility player on the network’s shows. It was there and then, I surmise, that Carlson vowed he would not fail at TV again, no matter what. In 2016, Fox returned him to prime-time and gave him his own show. It was then that Carlson began to cultivate the deep phoniness that had made O’Reilly so popular. He co-opted O’Reilly’s everyman schtick, his bluster, his truth-teller guise, and his populism, and he soared in the ratings. When Fox dumped O’Reilly in 2017 — not for breaking character, as Carlson had predicted, but following allegations of sexual harassment — Carlson became the network’s face. And, finally, a towering success.
How much of the Trump agenda did Carlson really buy and how much of it was put on? Absent additional court filings revealing his unguarded thoughts, we may never know. But what we do know now, thanks to the Dominion lawsuit, is that the extremely talented and accomplished Tucker Carlson, hoodwinked by his own ambition, became the very thing the younger and smarter Tucker Carlson scorned in 2003. A transparent phony.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
This way of thinking in a Republican primary is something new. Once upon a time, pretty much every Republican wanted to be a Reagan Republican. If the Trump camp gets its way, Reaganism will have gone from passé in 2016 to an affirmative vulnerability in 2024.
There are layers to this intra-Republican debate. It is certainly true that conservatives became overly obsessed with identifying themselves with Ronald Reagan. By the time something becomes an -ism, it is likely to be simplified and ossified, and so it was.
Then, there’s the sheer passage of time. Reagan left office 34 years ago. As of 2020, more than half of Americans were under age 40, meaning they have no real memory of Reagan. Trying to run again on a version of the Reagan platform would be like doing the same thing with Abraham Lincoln’s program in 1899, or someone being a devoted acolyte of Joe Biden in the 2050s.
Neither the pro- or anti-Reagan side tends to do justice to the real, historical political figure, instead creating an uncomplicated archetype to be embraced or rejected. Reagan was right on much, wrong on some things (immigration), and flexible and practical the way a successful practical politician needs to be.
Reagan was a free marketeer, but wasn’t doctrinaire. He accepted the fact of the New Deal.
He was a free-trader, yet acted to protect American auto makers and Harley Davison from Japanese imports.
If he was hawkish on foreign policy, he was always prudent. The defense budget grew, and he was insistent on deploying intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe. He pursued missile defense over fierce opposition. He was unsparing in his anti-Soviet rhetoric and armed anti-Soviet guerrillas. He forcefully promoted human rights.
On the other hand, he was cautious about deploying U.S. troops overseas, and pulled back from Lebanon after the devastating attack at the Marine barracks in Beirut. Despite calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” he was willing to talk to Mikhail Gorbachev and even contemplated eliminating nuclear weapons at a summit with Gorbachev in Reykjavik.
Some populist nationalists tend to think of pre-Trump conservatism as being complacent on social issues. But Reagan allied with the religious right and wrote an anti-abortion book when he was in office. He banned the use of federal funds for abortions overseas. He wanted a constitutional amendment to allow prayer in schools and said, “the truth is, politics and morality are inseparable.”
If Reagan eventually came to define conventional Republicanism, he took on his party’s liberal establishment and brought a populist voice to issues like the Panama Canal and crime.
So he is more complex than advertised, but the so-called Zombie Reaganism that the populists inveigh against is a real phenomenon.
This thoughtless version of Reaganism doesn’t take sufficient account of how circumstances in the country have changed over the last 30 years. Take taxes. The burden of federal income taxes isn’t nearly as heavy on middle-class families as it was in the 1970s and 1980s, when inflation pushed them into ever-higher tax brackets. And Republicans have cut taxes so many times, any positive economic effect of further reductions is limited.
Nonetheless, for the longest time, the standard Republican approach to domestic policy, with some differences in emphasis, was to cut taxes and reduce the debt, with everything else fading to the background. As it happens, Trump also ran on these two priorities in 2016, although he was only serious about the tax cuts. Not schooled in Republican orthodoxies, Trump mixed in new policies and attitudes, on the border, entitlements, trade and foreign policy. He expanded the Overton window well beyond what most people would have thought possible.
Other Republicans should be similarly coming up with an agenda to meet the challenges of today, not those of the 1970s (although the problems of inflation and crime are common to both eras).
All that said, Reagan’s achievements are momentous and should be acknowledged as such by all Republican factions. He set the predicate for winning the Cold War without firing a shot. He slayed inflation, both by sticking by Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker, despite considerable political pressure to buckle, and by pursuing pro-growth policies that created more supply in the economy. He ended the energy crisis. His administration gave a boost to the nascent conservative legal movement. He brought a new constituency into the Republican Party, the so-called Reagan Democrats (an analogue of Democrats who would vote for Trump), and forced a turn to the center by the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton. He changed the mood of the country.
As a sheer political matter, it doesn’t make any sense for Trump to assail Reagan by name, given his standing in the party.
A Pew Research survey in December 2020 found that 42 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents picked Reagan when asked which president had done the best job of the last four decades, and 37 percent picked Trump.
Even the Trump partisans feel warmly toward Reagan: 73 percent make him their second choice.
At the end of the day, Reagan can’t be separated from the Cold War context that so defined him and the conservative movement of his era. There’s no substitute for the coherence brought by that long-running conflict, a truly existential struggle that activated all elements of the Republican coalition: The defense hawks, obviously, but also social conservatives, who opposed godless communism, and free-marketeers determined to see capitalism triumph over unchecked statism.
There’s been a fracturing in Republican politics ever since. The famous Reaganite three-legged “stool” is rickety but is still standing. Freedom is a major theme for both DeSantis and Nikki Haley, and the House Freedom Caucus is going to put spending cuts front and center this year; the crusade against all things “woke” can be seen as another front in the party’s long-standing fight for traditional values; and the GOP’s withering reaction to Biden’s Afghan withdrawal and its support for aid to Ukraine — for now — show its reflex is still toward strength in foreign affairs.
Meanwhile, the example of Reagan, like that of all talented and accomplished statesmen, offers broad-gauge lessons that can be continually drawn on — about how to balance prudence and principle, how to affect a broad political vision, how to deplore what ails the country without giving in to despair, and how to build coalitions.
The last may be most useful to Ron DeSantis once he enters the nomination battle. Trump wants to tempt DeSantis to try follow him in his “Maga More Than Ever” messaging, but the governor can only go so far down this path. He’s not going to peel off enough Trump voters to beat Trump. To win the nomination, DeSantis is going to need to win over a segment of Trump populists at the same time he locks down Republican voters who like Reagan more than Trump. (He presumably reached these type of voters with his speech to a packed auditorium at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library while Trump was at CPAC.)
The Trump forces are going to try to make DeSantis’ roots in the party of Reagan disqualifying. Instead, played correctly, it can be a strength.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
I could not have imagined the LGBTQ movement building such momentum when I first visited Ukraine as a reporter in 2013. Ukraine was then on the verge of consummating its long-negotiated “association agreement” with the European Union, a step Russian President Vladimir Putin bitterly opposed. As the deadline to sign the agreement approached, an oligarch close to Putin funded a campaign with billboards reading, “Association with EU means same-sex marriage.” Anti-EU protesters dubbed the EU “Gayropa.”
This effort failed to dissuade Ukrainians from a European path. When Ukraine’s then-president, Viktor Yanukovych, tried to call off the EU deal at the last moment, pro-European protesters revolted, taking to the streets across Ukraine until a new government was installed and moved ahead with the deal. (This became known as the Revolution of Dignity, or the Maidan, after the square where the protests were centered.) LGBTQ activists across the country were integral to this movement, reflecting both their aspirations for their country and the belief that becoming a European democracy would advance LGBTQ rights. When Russia responded to the revolution with bloodshed — seizing Crimea and backing puppet armies in the eastern Donbas region — LGBTQ people stepped up to support the Ukrainian military fighting for the country’s autonomy.
But Ukrainians and their leaders did not immediately recognize LGBTQ people’s contribution to the fight for democracy, nor that true democracy required LGBTQ equality.
At the time, Ukraine’s new lawmakers refused to comply with a standard requirement for countries seeking closer ties with the EU, to adopt legislation banning employment discrimination based on sexual orientation. The EU bent its rules to move ahead with the process anyway, allowing the Ukrainian government to later quietly ban employment discrimination with an administrative order that required no vote in parliament. When activists planned an LGBTQ pride march in Kyiv in 2014, Mayor Vitaly Klitschko used the fight with Russian-backed forces in the country’s east to argue a pride parade would be inappropriate “when battle actions take place and many people die.”
As Ukrainian activists organized new pride parades in city after city over the last decade, many have been met with hostility from city leaders, violence, or both. This was in part just a reflection of the times — anti-LGBTQ policies still prevailed in much of Europe, especially in the eastern part of the continent. But anti-LGBTQ propaganda coming out of Russia also swayed many Russian-speakers in the region, and this messaging gained moral legitimacy from anti-LGBTQ religious leaders.
But the past decade has also seen Ukrainians standing firm in their commitment to democracy, and a growing understanding that this includes protections for fundamental rights.
There was an explosion of organizing by LGBTQ people in the years that followed the Revolution of Dignity, and some slow advances were made. But it’s been the stories of queer Ukrainians fighting and dying in the war with Russia that have truly helped other Ukrainians to see them as full citizens.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
The key to political ID theft is to bring something new to the mix. Kennedy brought Kennedyness, Reagan brought star power and Trump brought charisma. So what is so special about DeSantis? Is he more a louder echo than a new choice? Trump and DeSantis aren’t identical pols. DeSantis flies with the hawks in foreign policy, or did until recently; Trump practices intervention avoidance. Both oppose abortion, but DeSantis out-wings Trump on the issue with Florida’s 15-week ban that allows no exceptions for incest, rape or human trafficking. DeSantis co-exists with his former GOP congressional brethren while Trump has made many enemies on the Hill; the two quibble over trade; and they probably enjoy different fast food preferences. The biggest separation between the two comes over Covid-19 politics — Trump has been typecast as a vaccine touter because he launched the Warp Speed effort while DeSantis fashioned himself (eventually) as the leader of the shutdown resistance and increasingly a vaccine skeptic.
If their greatest divergences are now mostly stylistic, how best to tell the two apart from a distance and pick one over the other? Which is more electable? That one may not be clear either. To plunder one of Marshall McLuhan’s contributions to the art of taxonomy, Trump is hot while DeSantis is cool. Trump shouts and gesticulates. He incites. He plays the game by instinct. He excels at social media mugging. He nicknames people (“Tiny D” and “Ron DisHonest” are the newest examples of his potential work) and ridicules them directly. DeSantis takes the names of his political foes but rarely speaks them. And Trump can’t help but offend, even when he attempts to walk a straight line.
DeSantis’ coolness bespeaks the frigidity of his Yale and Harvard Law educations. He climbs many of the same political stairs as Trump, but takes one deliberate step after another instead of leaping three at a time. He shuts the press out instead of confronting it directly. DeSantis rarely overshoots his political targets, while Trump often must strafe in order to score a hit. DeSantis is measured when Trump is anarchic, reserved where Trump is manic. DeSantis cultivates looking smart while Trump doesn’t mind appearing dumb if it will garner applause. He’s known for being aloof, while Trump loves the crowd.
Positioning himself as a cooler, reskinned Trump, DeSantis offers an option to voters who still want to swing with Trump but have grown weary of his 24/7 show. In making his pitch to voters, DeSantis has deliberately taken Trumpism to new frontiers that make Trump look unimaginative. DeSantis’ bans on the teaching of sexual orientation and the history of racism, his remaking of New College of Florida in the conservative image and his general opposition to “indoctrination in education,” all have Trump playing catch up.
DeSantis’ decision to pit himself against one of the state’s largest employers, the Walt Disney Company, has made him look like a strong man to voters who prefer that profile in their politicians. With a plan of attack straight out of organizer Saul Alinsky’s playbook, DeSantis made the Orlando mouseworks the object of his demagoguery after it publicly opposed his so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill. In Alinskyesque fashion, DeSantis isolated Disney, froze it, personalized the company in many of his obsessions and polarized the issues. He accused Disney of genuflecting to China and denounced it as “woke.” He worked to remove its special tax district. For sheer gall and execution, going medieval on Disney out Trumped Trump. Disney, after all, had been a loyal DeSantis campaign contributor. He’s a man! Disney is a mouse! Not since President Harry Truman nationalized the steel industry had a politician so completely taken an American business hostage.
Devoted now to repelling one another, Trump and DeSantis are doomed to engage in a bloody outrage spiral. We got a taste of that over the weekend when Trump told the CPAC crowd, “For those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.” Like a lost sermon from the Book of Revelation, Trump went off on RINOS and globalists, neocons and “freaks,” saying, “This is the final battle, they know it. I know it, you know it, and everybody knows it, this is it. Either they win or we win. And if they win, we no longer have a country.” Meanwhile, DeSantis resonated on the same frequency in his weekend speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, ripping the “woke mind virus,” California tax policy, sexual “indoctrination,” natch, and saluted himself for having ended Disney’s “corporate kingdom.”
Do you favor Coke or New Coke? Last year’s iPhone or this year’s? Windows 7 or Windows 10? The 2024 Republican nomination has already reduced itself to a choice and its more subdued echo.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Vish Burra, who worked for Bannon’s “War Room” podcast and is now an aide to another lightning rod, Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), once told me about the MAGA movement, “We don’t have an ideology, we have vibes.”
As I saw firsthand over the last few days while mingling with MAGA fans wearing over-the-top merch, the vibes were off at CPAC this year — a worrisome thing for a party built on vibes.
Vibes matter, and not just in today’s hyperactive political-media ecosystem, where everyone craves authenticity and a shared sense of style and spirit — elements which more or less define a vibe. The centrality of vibes goes back to 18th century philosopher and grandfather of the conservative movement, Edmund Burke, who spoke of politics’ need for “pleasing illusions” and “sentiments which beautify.” A shared vibe can transcend difference, unite ideologues and tap into a larger shared spirit. It’s something former President Donald Trump was able to do in 2016. And in the years since, as the Republican Party gave up on defining any agreed set of ideas or policies — famously failing to pass a party platform in 2020 — vibes were pretty much all the party had left.
Nowhere in the Republican universe did this seem to be more true than at CPAC. Since its inaugural conference in 1974 (during which future President Ronald Reagan spoke) CPAC has acted as a “hot or not” barometer for emerging conservative stars, ideas and aesthetics. It’s the flagship meeting of grassroots conservatism and media activism.
But this year, from the start, things were amiss — and it wasn’t just because of the drama surrounding CPAC chair Matt Schlapp, who is battling sexual assault allegations from a male campaign staffer, a claim he denies. Speakers like Donald Trump Jr. and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) addressed nearly empty rooms. Fewer trainings on conservative activism were being held, cutting down on opportunities for interest groups to interact. Even the Wi-Fi failed to work at times, leaving press members disgruntled.
Who wasn’t there said a lot about what was missing. MAGA darling and CPAC favorite Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA were nowhere to be found — along with their legions of Instagramming College Republicans. Only a few TPUSA ambassadors lurked. Fox News was not a sponsor and did not set up their usual broadcast booth in the media row. Likely presidential contender Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis instead was attending conflicting event hosted by the Club for Growth in his state. The absences confirmed the sense that a Trump–DeSantis proxy war has begun and CPAC was clearly Trump territory.
If there was a single transcendent moment for attendees, it came during Trump’s appearance on stage when he delivered the most compelling speech of CPAC. He used the majority of nearly two hours to focus on issues that could potentially appeal to Americans beyond the CPAC circuit — critiquing “free trade fanatics,” military interventionism and corrupt establishment Republicans.
But even he is not the powerful figure in politics he used to be. Now a former president, he is no longer an insurgent underdog for disaffected Republicans to take a risk on. Meanwhile, his bombastic style has been mimicked tirelessly without generating the same real nationalist populist appeal, and voters have grown wary of a broader insurgent energy that can’t sustainably deliver promises beyond endless controversy.
The consequence is clear as the 2024 presidential campaign begins: Conservatives — both Trump and institutional Republicans alike — aren’t vibing with each other. They are as disjointed and uncoordinated as the understaffed CPAC employees trying to get the Internet to turn on and the badge machines to print the correct names of speakers. The party has lost its vibes.
The GOP Loves Vibes
Republicans know that vibes are a powerful tool when used correctly. Vibes are magnets: They bring people together and they bring people in.
Speaking of the new-right in 1967, the philosopher Theodor Adorno noted, “Propaganda actually constitutes the substance of politics.” Adorno — a refugee from Nazi Germany — knew that the most effective propaganda elicited strong feelings of belonging. When the GOP is at its most powerful, aesthetics, style and rhetoric are more central than policy, institutions and processes, generating that important feeling of belonging to a community. Case in point? Trump enthralled America with his TV-ready speeches and transgressive Tweets — echoed by online and cable outlets from Breitbart to Fox. Vibes are essential. Once the vibe is lost, power is too.
Trump understood that better than any of his conservative peers and marketed himself as a guy who vibed with everyday Americans — he understood their plight at the hands of “globalists” and fought to “Make America Great Again.” He was seen as authentic, and gave the GOP both new narratives and symbols for a party that was not known for being “cool.” At the time, Republicans knew they had no choice but to embrace him as they saw how his populist style trumped tired tax cut talk.
At the time, this was in stark contrast to Democrats, who no longer had former President Barack Obama at the top of the ticket. With Hillary Clinton as their nominee, Democrats were perceived by many as wonkish policy types lacking in style, authenticity, and, well, vibes. Clinton’s long laundry list of policy proposals may have been well thought out, but it was also boring and felt as inauthentic as her cringy attempt at SNL comedy. Trump and his surrogates on the other hand, embraced a high-drama tabloid style that elicited an emotional response, and it worked.
Now, after Trump’s 2020 defeat, the Jan. 6 riot, a disappointing 2022 midterms with Trump himself partly to blame, it’s clear this approach isn’t working.
Vibes address the present moment, but on this year’s CPAC mainstage? There were few fresh talking points, new players, or even, quite frankly, good jokes.
Unlike his father, Donald Trump Jr. didn’t land his bits, including those attacking Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), to the near-empty room he spoke to. Instead of realistically addressing the United States’ trade dependency on China, CPAC speakers fixated on communism in a kind of “Zombie Reagan” Cold War gripe. Even though these events were tailored as greatest hits to their activist fandom, the audience felt it was low energy. “It’s stale,” said one organizer of a conservative advocacy group. “It’s self-building stardom.”
“Anti-wokeism is the closest thing they have that could have a cultural texture and emotional punch,” Reece Peck, author of Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class, told me over the phone. “But this discourse has become so overly coded as a Republican talking point, it fails to have a broader transcendent element. It’s not something interesting like Trump critiquing Hillary from the left on trade in 2016.”
“Apart from Trump, the wider movement is listless because it is now dominated by people whose primary motivation is appearances,” Raheem Kassam, editor of the National Pulse and former CPAC darling, told me when I texted him to get his take on this year’s conference, which he decided to skip. “The appearance of influence. The appearance of answers. And the appearance of contrarianism. The same side who banged on about authenticity has handed the keys over to those who have none.”
A Post-Vibe GOP
CPAC’s failure as a MAGA-fest may seem like a win for the establishment, but in reality, it spells out trouble for the party in the long run.
CPAC has long been a hub for student activists and grassroots movement — a place for them to network and strategize, keeping the conservative movement robust and energized. Animated youth and subcultures bring a bottom-up authentic spirit.
That was no longer happening at scale at this year’s CPAC.
There have been fewer young faces at the convention ever since Turning Point USA started its own flagship event, America Fest, in 2021. College Republicans flock there instead for concerts and high-energy confettied talks, and to mingle directly with social media influencers. The noticeable lack of students and Turning Point presence at CPAC indicates that Kirk might take his legions and their cultural power to another candidate and away from Trump.
Similarly, interest groups and grassroots organizers — from tax wonks to anti-abortion advocates — who used to meet in breakout rooms did not use CPAC to train or convene to the extent of years past. Even visually, clothing that used to advertise niche causes was replaced with MAGA hats or anti-CCP totes (with the exception of a 12-year CPAC veteran wearing a “cops say legalize heroin” T-shirt).
One of the few conservative activist groups to have a CPAC-advertised breakout session at the convention were prosecuted Jan. 6 protestors — a tiny radicalized faction that took part in a riot that a majority of Americans saw as a threat to democracy. If CPAC’s most visible interest group is also its most fringe, this does not bode well for the party’s future for relatability or coalition building.
The loss of ideological diversity at CPAC makes it difficult for Republicans running for office to get a survey of their own field. Republicans will have to build a coalition of voters beyond the MAGA wing to stay relevant. But if CPAC falls apart, they lose a key event for grassroots organizations of all conservative beliefs to mingle and energize the party. What’s left is a MAGA faction out for RINO blood — and completely culling the party won’t help them win elections, at least in the near term. It is enough, however, to throw crucial cooperation between the establishment and grassroots into turmoil.
Culture writer Sean Monahan recently declared a “vibe-shift” in our broader culture, described by New York magazine as when “a once-dominant social wavelength starts to feel dated.” As I drifted around the Gaylord, listening to attendees complain about how there was no hot tub like in CPAC Florida, all I could think was that the decline of CPAC signals a vibe-shift for conservatism.
In the end, CPAC did not hedge its bets by keeping relationships hot with other power players in conservatism and it is losing — in finances, numbers and appeal. They tried to mimic Trump’s populist allure and failed to do it authentically. In that process they have hurt Republicans more broadly, who no longer have a Big Tent activist event but instead have a Big Tent circus taking place on the ugly 2008-era carpeting of a cold convention center in Maryland.
While the embattled yet die-hard MAGA movement may try to push forward a Trump campaign, it may not have the transcendent appeal, the vibes, to connect to an emotionally exhausted America any more.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
