Here’s How Democrats Can Expose the GOP’s Dishonesty About Fascism.
TDS Strategy Memos
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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March 15: Do Voters Care About Veeps?
Decided to explore a hardy perennial topic in a period of intense speculation about various candidates for Vice President, and wrote it up at New York:
In political circles, it’s high season for veep speculation. Democrats worried about Joe Biden’s age and their ticket’s electability fret about whether incumbent Vice-President Kamala Harris is the best bet to serve as the presidential understudy in 2024 as Republicans yell and point at her as an alleged radical leftist. Republicans worried about their party’s post-Trump direction fret about the erratic former president’s choice of a running mate to replace his 2016–20 toady, the since-discarded Mike Pence. Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is doing his own veep reveal on March 26; it has drawn interest partly because it could indicate which major party’s success might be spoiled by his bid and partly because ultracelebrity NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers could be in the mix. And the nonpartisan organization No Labels will soon be unveiling its own potential 2024 plans, which are likely to deploy a Democratic vice-presidential candidate to balance a Republican at the top of its “unity ticket.”
Do veep candidates really matter in determining the outcome of presidential elections?
To be clear, this is a very different question than the real-world relevance of vice-presidents. Fifteen veeps have gone on to become president, eight of them suddenly on the death of the boss and another when the boss was forced to resign. It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of Abraham Lincoln choosing Andrew Johnson as his 1864 running mate (making congressional Reconstruction necessary), or FDR replacing Henry Wallace with Harry Truman in 1944 (removing a Soviet sympathizer from the line of succession). The political insiders who often influence the choice of vice-presidential candidates understand why they matter, which is why they definitely care about them even in the absence of evidence that voters care at all.
And to be honest, there has never been much evidence that most voters care at all. Political scientists are generally in agreement that the identity of the second person on a presidential ticket matters mostly on the margins. Even St. Louis University’s Joel Goldstein, who is to vice-presidents what Andy Cohen is to Real Housewives, concedes that their identity is usually an electoral cipher. He has said, “Vice-presidential choice is unlikely to make much of a difference where potential swing voters have a strong preference for one presidential candidate over the other.” He points to very close elections with lots of swing voters, notably in 1960 when LBJ might have helped swing Texas into JFK’s column, as exceptions to a general rule.
On the other hand, there’s quite a bit of recent evidence that the selection of a particular running mate may play a role in preventing defections of voters from a presidential candidate with a shaky electoral base.
Most obviously, in 2016 Donald Trump was facing a potential revolt among movement-conservative and Evangelical voters, which he addressed by choosing the movement-conservative Evangelical politician Pence (who had the added reassuring value of a long résumé of elected offices). We can’t prove Trump would have lost without Pence onboard, but his victory was narrow enough that a Pence-less loss is a plausible counterfactual scenario. Similarly, in 2020 Biden’s choice of Harris made sense after a grueling nomination contest in which old white guy Biden prevailed over multiple women and people of color (not to mention two Jews), reversing the diversity trend established by his predecessors Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Biden himself, of course, was chosen by the first Black presidential nominee, who was also a freshman senator, in no small part because he was an old white guy with a Washington résumé as long as his arm.
What Trump must decide is whether he needs to worry about potential Republican defections in choosing a running mate or is instead more motivated by a determination to avoid the “disloyalty” Pence eventually displayed on January 6, 2021. And Democrats contemplating either a replacement of their entire 2024 ticket as a likely loser or just the selection of a new VP less likely to cause worries about a possible presidential disability or death need to assess the potential backlash to making Harris the first sitting vice-president in three-quarters of a century (since Henry Wallace) to get the heave-ho. (Yes, technically speaking, Gerald Ford booted Nelson Rockefeller from the 1976 ticket to placate conservatives, but it was theoretically a voluntary retirement and neither of these men was elected by voters in the first place.)
For non-major-party campaigns, like RFK Jr.’s or the putative No Labels effort, the veep selection could be more significant simply by giving a clearer definition to a fuzzy presidential candidacy.
In general, though, there’s a reason presidential candidates tend to play it safe with their running-mate selections: It usually doesn’t matter much unless it draws more attention than people aiming to become the “leader of the free world” typically want. John McCain’s “high risk, high reward” choice of an obscure first-term Alaska governor named Sarah Palin in 2008 is an eternal warning to would-be presidents that you don’t want a veep voters notice because she’s being regularly lampooned on Saturday Night Live.
Euclid, brown shoe polish is brown and so are feces, but to compare the two because they are the same color is to confess the inability to distinguish shit from Shinola.
(note: the brief comment posted above is intended to be a reply to the Feb 18 comment by Euclid. It is posted in the wrong location)
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Mr. Lawford continues to seem utterly and completely baffled by the concept of how to compare the actions of MAGA/Republicans and Fascists on a scale of 0 to 10 which is what the strategy memo itself discusses.
If I am asked to compare brown shoe polish and feces on a scale of 0 to 10 I would at first probably assign the comparison a 0. If someone then correctly points out that the two things do indeed share the color brown I would probably then revise my rating to a 0.5 or so in order to indicate that in that one minor respect an extremely slight relationship does indeed exist.
But I certainly would not be so utterly mystified by the task as Mr. Lawford seems to be. Setting aside his rather immature attempt at humor, the logical content of his comment is that “if both A and B are brown, anyone who notes this similarity in comparing the two must therefore be completely unable to distinguish between them at all.”
It is, one hopes, unnecessary to explain at any length why this argument is wrong.
In reality, what Mr. Lawrence is actually attempting to do is to ridicule any possible comparisons of the behavior of the MAGA wing of the GOP with events in Germany in the 1930’s as being so utterly and entirely absurd that only a complete idiot would do so.
Well, Dr. Deborah Lipstadt is not an idiot. She is one of the most respected historians of the Holocaust. The following quotation from the strategy memo being discussed makes a preliminary point and then directly quotes her perspective:
“Since most Americans have absolutely no knowledge about Italian, Spanish and post-war Neo-Fascism only extremely vague images of German Nazi fascism in the 1930’s (images based largely on movies) Republicans easily dismiss any discussion of the issue by arguing that all comparisons of Trump and MAGA with fascism represent absurd accusations that they are engaging in mass arrests, torture and genocide. But anyone with even a limited knowledge of the period is aware that that there are more subtle comparisons that are not so easily discounted. ”
“As the leading historian of the period Deborah Lipstadt has noted:”
“I do think certain comparisons are fitting … it’s certainly not 1938,” when Nazis led the Kristallnacht pogroms throughout Germany. “It’s not even September 1935, and the Nuremberg Laws” institutionalizing racist policies. “What it well might be, however, is [the earlier period around] December 1932, Hitler comes to power on Jan. 30, 1933 – it might be Jan. 15, 1933.”
There is, therefore, absolutely nothing at all absurd or idiotic about discussing comparisons between MAGA and fascism.
Indeed, one would certainly hope that Mr. Lawford would not walk up to Dr. Lipstadt at an academic conference and tell her that she is so stupid that “she cannot tell shit from shinola.” If he would be ashamed to say this to her – as one would certainly hope he would be — he should also be ashamed to say it to anyone else as well.
No one with a minor knowledge of fascism in history would take seriously any of Andrew Levison’s accusation of fascism toward the Republican Party. For example, Levison compares Trump’s claim of a stolen election in 2020 to the Reichstag fire. Does Levison realize that after the Reichstag fire, Hitler had all the Socialist deputies to the Reichstag arrested and sent to concentration camps? Trump did nothing of the sort. Quite the contrary, he allowed the Democrats to gain a Congressional majority. Levison compares Fox News and other right wing media to the Reich Propaganda Ministry. The latter was a government office which monopolized German radio and had dissenting newspapers forcibly shut down. Fox News is a private enterprise which is anything but a monopoly and has no power to suppress its competitors. Soon after taking power, Hitler had 150 leaders of the Storm Troopers arrested and shot without trial. How many Republicans did Trump have assassinated? Did Hitler ever run for re-election?
Would Hitler have tolerated being impeached? I have seen many silly comparisons of Trump and the Republicans to Hitler and the Nazis, but Levison’s takes the cake.
The commenter apparently does not understand how comparing two things on a scale of one to 10 works. One can assign a very low number that indicates there is little or no relationship or one can assign a 9 or 10 to indicate a very close relationship. As the author of the commentary notes MAGA and Trump supporters would assign very low numbers to the comparisons suggested while others would assign higher ones.
The commenter seems to think that comparing two things on a scale of 1 to 10 means that they all are automatically assigned a 10.
This is not how comparing things on a scale of one to ten works.
I hope this simple explanation clarifies the commenters confusion. Otherwise, when a doctor asks him to rank his pain on a scale of one to 10 he will shout – “Are you crazy? I’m not in agony.”