I’m talking about fanatical centrists, who aren’t a large slice of the electorate, but have played an outsize role in elite opinion and media coverage. These are people who may have been willing to concede that Trump was a bad guy, but otherwise maintained, in the teeth of the evidence, that our two major parties were basically equivalent: Each party had its extremists, but each also had its moderates, and everything would be fine if these moderates could work together. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/07/opinion/republicans-trump-moderates.html Some of us have been pushing back against that worldview for many years, arguing that today’s Republican Party is a radical force increasingly opposed to democracy. Way back in 2003 I wrote that modern conservatism is “a movement whose leaders do not accept the legitimacy of our current political system.” In 2012 Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein declared that the central problem of U.S. politics was a G.O.P. that was not just extreme but “dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” For a long time, however, making that case — pointing out that Republicans were sounding ever more authoritarian and violating more and more democratic norms — got you dismissed as shrill if not deranged. Even Trump’s rise, and the obvious parallels between Trumpism and the authoritarian movements that have gutted democracy in places like Hungary and Poland, barely dented centrist complacency. Remember, just a few months ago most of the news media treated Attorney General William Barr’s highly misleading summary of the Mueller report as credible.
Breaking: Rep. Ralph Abraham has introduced a resolution to expel Speaker Pelosi from Congress. For far too long, Pelosi has used the speaker's gavel as a weapon to attack political opponents. Your voice is having a major impact: Sign our petition to support the resolution to expel Pelosi from Congress: bit.ly/expel_pelosi_from_congress
Question: Do you think, though, there is a benefit to have this connection with China that an American presence in a country such as this and our American values perhaps seep into the culture? https://www.latimes.com/sports/story/2019-10-12/nba-china-human-rights-issues Me: It’s an exchange. … Yes, we are exporting a certain degree of freedom of expression. But we are also importing communist censorship. That is, there’s only going to be so much of our freedom in which China allows in. If you want to do business with them consider the censorship of our own.
