The irony is that for all of the Republican Party’s cultural affinity for rural America, its policy agenda is singularly hostile to the material interests of the millions of Americans who live in rural areas. But no one seems to want to ask Republicans, or Donald Trump for that matter, to explain the yawning distance between what they promise for rural Americans and what they actually do for rural Americans.
If Trump and the Republican Party can successfully cut Medicaid and SNAP to pay for upper-income tax cuts, they will almost certainly plunge millions of people — including many of their supporters — into poverty, possibly made worse by the economic disruption of the president’s trade agenda. It is a good thing for Republicans, then, that they have grown exceptionally skilled at using cultural grievance and resentment to spin devastation, often of their own making, into political gold.
What I Wrote
My Wednesday column was on the administration’s latest attacks on the Constitution. I also speculated on why conservatives seem uninterested in standing against the president’s contempt for some of the basic elements of the American political tradition.
Which brings us back to the current president. What Trump brings to the table of American politics is personalist and authoritarian rule of a kind that we haven’t seen in the national government but that we have seen in other countries — and even in certain places at certain points in our own history. But whether you think this moment is continuous with our past or a break from it, one thing we can say for sure is that conservative support for this type of governance is not an aberration. It belongs to a consistent pattern of enthusiastic support for tyrants and would-be tyrants.
Now Reading
Adam Hochschild on Manisha Sinha’s new history of Reconstruction for The New York Review of Books.
Just as we talk about the First Republic, the Second Empire, or the Fifth Republic in France, so Sinha divides American history into phases, although the transition from one to another is not so neatly demarcated, sometimes taking years. Her focus is on what she calls our Second Republic: the promise of Reconstruction following the Civil War. This period, she points out, brought not just new rights for the formerly enslaved but hope for women and Native Americans, surprising flashes of solidarity with freedom struggles elsewhere, and “the forgotten origin point of social democracy in the United States.”
Alex Shephard on Trump’s corruption for The New Republic.
For Trump, this is what being president is all about: He is entitled to a massive windfall and a luxury jet because he is in charge of the world’s most powerful country. He explained the jet as a simple perk of being the commander in chief of the American military. “I think it was a gesture because of the fact that we help, have helped, and continue to, we will continue to, all of those countries: Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Qatar, and others,” he said on Monday. A $400 million jet he will use when he leaves office is simply a perk of the job — as are lucrative real estate and cryptocurrency deals. Trump calls it a gesture, but it’s clearly something more.
Ted Chiang on artificial intelligence for The New Yorker. (This is an older story, but it’s still very good and worth reading.)
The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.
J. Michael Luttig on the end of the rule of law in America, for The Atlantic.
For the almost 250 years since the founding of this nation, America has been the beacon of freedom to the world because of its democracy and rule of law. Our system of checks and balances has been strained before, but democracy — government by the people — and the rule of law have always won the day. Until now, that is. America will never again be that same beacon to the world, because the president of the United States has subverted America’s democracy and corrupted its rule of law.
Caitlin M. Green on transphobia and false compassion for Liberal Currents.
Again, when we are “thinking of the children,” we are supposed to imagine our child as cisgender, not as one of the trans and cis kids who would benefit from gender-affirming health care.
