This Week in The New York Times Neo-Con Op-Ed Page Looks Longingly to Reagan (4/16)

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Apr 16, 2023, 6:13:48 AM4/16/23

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The New York Times Neo-Con Op-Ed Page Looks Longingly to Reagan

Right after the Passover holiday, after clearing out my accumulated e-mails, I prepared the Tikvah Fund TGIF posts, cooked my Shabbat dinner, and then went straight to The New York Times website.

There were three examples of the paper’s Rightward shift – with one fascinating example of a writer who has apparently rethought his past positions.

https://www.deseret.com/2023/2/24/23608783/new-york-times-conservatives-bias-bari-weiss-david-french

https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/01/03/the-new-york-times-is-diminishing-itself-2/

The first was from a still-confused David Brooks:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/13/opinion/sun-belt-migration.html

The surprise came from the latest Conservative addition, David French:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/13/opinion/tennessee-trump-maga-justin-jones-pearson.html

Who is a friend of Rebbitzen Bengelsdorf:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-to-do-about-guns/id1570872415?i=1000565759542

The last one is from Pamela Paul, whose cultural biases are deeply Reaganite:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/13/opinion/springsteen-seinfeld-shows.html

All three articles follow this note.

The Brooks article is yet another attempt to raise his Social Science theories in the most ignorant manner:

https://www.amazon.com/Bobos-Paradise-Upper-Class-There/dp/0684853787

His “Bobo” theory, the Hippies that turned Capitalist pigs, has much to do with the advent of Reaganism and its cut-throat greedy values.

In the new article, Brooks marks the shift in population from Blue States to Red.

Unfortunately, he does not mention COVID migrations, as he neglects to carefully examine who is actually leaving Liberal enclaves for Trumpworld.

It is quite possible, especially when it comes to Texas, Georgia, and especially Florida, that the emigres are themselves FOX News echo-chamber older people who are gravitating towards their New Promised Land.

It is hard to know if Brooks is aware of this possible dynamic.

His aim is to re-state the Reagan dogmas of deregulation and lower taxes, and once again restate the myth of the Reagan Democrats.

Now what this ultimately means remains unclear, but Brooks seems to think that this migration pattern, which he has not really analyzed properly, portends a “moderation” of the MAGA states.

The David French article puts Brooks’ thinking to bed.

To his credit, French looks clearly and soberly at MAGA and follows developments in Tennessee and DEATH SENTENCE world by tracking the malignant and anti-Constitutional ideologies that undergird the Trumpist movement.

It is an article that could not have been written by the Rebbitzin, or by any of her Tikvah Fund partners in the Straussian MISHPOCHEH.

While French is quite clear in his analysis that there is little to be optimistic about, Pamela Paul continues her Neo-Con fence-straddling, praising Bruce Springsteen and Jerry Seinfeld as the answer to what is wrong with the culture today.

Now, there is a lot wrong with the culture, but two old White guys are not exactly the way to address the problems.

Here is the critical portion of the article:

Both Springsteen and Seinfeld experienced their apogee at a very different political moment in this country. The 1980s and ’90s certainly had their share of problems, but the dominant mood was that things were generally OK in America or at least would get better. Even those who didn’t share Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America” platitudes felt unified in their opposition. And the divisions that existed in the ’90s, which is now enjoying its own cultural revival, feel like sandbox tussles compared with the dark polarization of today.

Seinfeld and Springsteen also both became popular in an era when stars still held mass appeal and exerted broad cultural influence. In our current highly performative culture, there’s a contrasting authenticity to their respective public personas, which have remained pretty consistent over time. Even as Bruce buddies up to Barack Obama and Jerry rides around in fancy cars, neither comes across as elitist or overtly intellectual.

Both Seinfeld and Springsteen have seen better days, their artistic highpoints are long behind them. They have become deeply reactionary, nostalgia-mongering acts for old White people like them.

Springsteen has long sought to avoid the MAGA domination of his audience; the working class teenagers that populated his classic-era 1970s songs are now grown up and are very White and very Trump – and have spare cash to spend to see his Broadway residency, as well as his current 1% Ticketmaster prices:

https://deadline.com/2021/06/springsteen-on-broadway-ticket-prices-1234773143/

https://www.insider.com/bruce-springsteen-ticketmaster-prices-amid-taylor-swift-chaos-2022-11

The cleavage between Springsteen and his Right Wing audience could be seen when he performed “41 Shots” at Madison Square Garden back in 2000, and received very audible boos:

https://www.mtv.com/news/vwmu7o/bruuuce-cheers-interrupted-by-boos-as-springsteen-plays-diallo-song

Though he played the song at the Broadway residency, it is not a fan favorite and is rarely performed live:

https://www.setlist.fm/song/bruce-springsteen/american-skin-41-shots-33d6a05d.html

Back in 2006, Springsteen released what would be one of his most important recordings, “The Seeger Sessions”; a collection of songs associated with the old Commie-Pinko.

https://www.amazon.com/We-Shall-Overcome-Sessions-American/dp/B000GG4XJM

I discussed it in my politically-charged article “Radical Traditionalism: The Passion of the Artistic in a Time of Crisis”:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hD8uMVPUY2VKsWzf7CF2sY09-vB4BWRbgM39WH-PHe0/edit

“Seeger” came as a shock to his “Sopranos” goomba Jersey Shore Trumpist fans, many of whom walked out prior to the end of the concert I saw at the Garden State Arts Center in Holmdel, but if you watch the “Live in Dublin” performance, you will see that it remains one of his most vital projects:

https://www.amazon.com/live-dublin-dvd-springsteen-bruce/dp/B000PUB9KK

Seinfeld, like his fellow Long Islander Billy Joel, has comfortably ensconced himself in a regular residency, Joel at MSG, Seinfeld at the Beacon Theater. Both men are now firmly vanilla and do not seek, as Ms. Paul insists, to ruffle any feathers.

It is interesting to see David French coming clean on the deplorable MAGA trends, where both Brooks and Paul seek the comfy Neo-Con cocoon of the Reagan era as a means of dealing with what is an overwhelming trauma that has been relentless since 2016.

And while we could really use a cultural transformation, it is not possible to raise the specter of the mega-stars of the Reagan era, or to promote deregulation and tax cuts for the rich as the way to go.

The New York Times continues to publish its quotient of Liberal columnists, but with Ross Douthat, Brooks, French, Jewish Genius Stephens, and Paul we have ample replacements for the loss of Bari Weiss.

David Shasha

Why People Are Fleeing Blue Cities for Red States

By: David Brooks

There are a lot of us in the Northeastern media who properly spend a lot of time slamming the Republican Party for what a mess it’s become. I have only one question: If we’re right, why are so many people leaving blue states so they can live in red ones?

Between 2010 and 2020, the fastest-growing states were mostly red — places like Texas, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and South Carolina. During the pandemic that trend accelerated, and once again, most of the big population-gaining states are governed by Republicans.

If you go back further, you see decade after decade of migration toward the more conservative South. The Brookings Institution demographer William Frey has noted that in 1920, the Northeast and the Midwest accounted for 60 percent of America’s population. A century later, the Sunbelt accounts for 62 percent of the nation’s population. These days we are mostly a Sunbelt nation.

Why are these red states growing so rapidly? The short answer is that they are more pro-business. In a study for the American Enterprise Institute, Mark J. Perry compared the top 10 states people were flocking to in 2021 with the top 10 states people were flocking from.

The places they are flocking to have lower taxes. The 10 states that saw the biggest population gains have an average maximum income tax of 3.8 percent. The 10 states with the biggest population loss have an 8 percent average rate.

The growing states also have fewer restrictions on home construction. That contributes to lower housing prices. The median home price in those 10 population-gaining states is an average of 23 percent less than that of the 10 biggest population-losing states.

Perry goes down a range of other factors and concludes that Americans are moving away from blue states with high energy costs, byzantine regulatory regimes and unfriendly business climates. They are moving to economically vibrant red states with lower costs, more conservative fiscal policies and more job opportunities.

Fifty years ago, few would have predicted that the American South would emerge as an economic dynamo — and that people would be flocking to places like South Carolina and Tennessee, but it’s happening.

So can we tell a simple story here: Republican policies work, Democratic policies don’t?

Well, not quite. When you look inside the red states at where the growth is occurring, you notice immediately that the dynamism is not mostly in the red parts of the red states. The growth is in the metro areas — which are often blue cities in red states. A study from the L.B.J. Urban Lab, for example, found that Austin, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth accounted for 71 percent of the jobs created in Texas in 2019.

Edward Glaeser, a Harvard economist who studies cities, provided me with data that showed which cities enjoyed rapid employment growth between 2019 and 2021. They tended to be from warmer parts of the country, an all-star team of Sunbelt blue cities: Austin, Raleigh Durham, Miami, Nashville, Tampa and Phoenix. Republicans may be proud that many of their states are growing, but Austin is not CPAC’s utopia.

If you look at these success stories you see they are actually the product of a red-blue mash-up. Republicans at the state level provide the general business climate, but Democrats at the local level influence the schools, provide many social services and create a civic atmosphere that welcomes diversity and attracts highly educated workers.

Very often the conservative state authorities are at war with the more liberal city authorities over things like minimum wage laws and L.G.B.T.Q. rights. But, at least for right now, the red-blue mash-up seems to work.

So if this is the formula that produces a dynamic and cosmopolitan society, where is the political party that is conservative-leaning on business matters and more liberal-leaning on things like education, immigration and work force development?

Where is the party that stands for the policy blend that manifestly works?

Once upon a time you could squint and imagine the George W. Bush/Mitt Romney Republican Party morphing in that direction. No longer. The G.O.P. is a working-class populist party that has no interest in nurturing highly educated bobo boom towns. The G.O.P. does everything it can to repel those people — and the Tesla they drove in on.

If you look at Democrats on the coasts you don’t see much movement in that direction, either. But Democrats have been growing stronger in exactly these growing Southwestern states. Joe Biden became the first Democrat to win Maricopa County (Phoenix) since 1948. Democrats now hold all six of the Senate seats from Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado. They held both seats in Arizona until Kyrsten Sinema went independent.

As the Democratic Party becomes more and more the party of the college-educated voters and as the Republicans become more the party of white working-class voters, Democratic prospects in the upper Midwest get worse. But Democratic prospects in the Southwestern growth areas get better. It would not surprise me if a different kind of Democrat emerged from these areas.

We know the policy mix that creates a dynamic society. We just don’t yet have a party that wants to promote it.

From The New York Times, April 13, 2023

How Tennessee Illustrates the Three Rules of MAGA

By: David French

On Monday afternoon, a previously unknown 27-year-old Tennessee lawmaker named Justin Jones walked triumphantly up the steps of the Tennessee Capitol building and — surrounded by a crush of press and hundreds of supporters — took the oath of office to return to the Tennessee House of Representatives. The Tennessee legislature had expelled him from the chamber for his part in a protest that disrupted business on the House floor after the mass shooting at Covenant School in Nashville.

Jones was one of two expelled lawmakers. On Wednesday, the Shelby County Board of Commissioners returned his colleague Justin Pearson, also in his late 20s, back to the Tennessee House, thus ending Pearson’s days-long expulsion. Both young men now possess national profiles and are heavily favored to win re-election to their seats. Tennessee Republicans’ decision to throw them both out of the House backfired. It was punitive. It was performative. And it was not merely ineffective, it actively undermined the goals of the Republican House majority.

In other words, the moment represented a perfect illustration of how Trumpism works in the G.O.P. And by “Trumpism” I don’t mean personal dedication to Donald Trump, but rather to the ethos he’s cultivated within the party.

I’ve spent every year of the Trump era living in deep-red America. How thick is my red bubble? There’s a Times tool that allows you to enter your address and find the political composition of your neighborhood. The rural Tennessee neighborhood I lived in until 2018 was 74 percent Republican. The suburban Tennessee neighborhood where I live now is more than 80 percent Republican.

As a result, I’ve heard the Republican rationalizations for Trumpism more times than I can count — not just in the Trumpist think pieces or cable news arguments that we can all read or see, but also in conversation with friends, relatives and acquaintances for the eight long years since Trump announced his first presidential campaign.

While Trumpism is a complex phenomenon, there are three ideas or principles that are consistently present: First, that before Trump the G.O.P. was a political doormat, helplessly walked over by Democrats time and again. Second, that we live in a state of cultural emergency where the right has lost everywhere and must turn to politics to reverse this cultural momentum. And third, that in this state of emergency, all conservatives must rally together. There can be no enemies to the right.

Add these three ideas together, and you have a near-perfect formula for extremism and authoritarianism.

Let’s plug these principles back into my home state of Tennessee. What does it mean if a movement is convinced that its party has been weak and impotent? It means that “normal” politics is seen as a sign of weakness. In Tennessee, for example, in a more normal political moment, the Democratic lawmakers’ brief interruption of House business would have merited censure, or perhaps a suspension of committee assignments. But in the new world, “normal” is deemed weak. It’s imperative to be tough. The more punitive you are, the more you’ve signaled that this isn’t your dad’s G.O.P.

Many Democrats find the idea that Republicans were doormats before Trump to be utterly mystifying. National and state politics were extremely competitive before Trump. As Ballotpedia records, for example, before the 2016 elections, Republicans controlled 68 state legislative chambers, while Democrats controlled only 30. Moreover, at the national level, Republicans had performed exactly as well as you’d expect in a closely divided country. Congressional control flipped back and forth, and so did control over the White House.

Moreover, Republicans in power were hardly impotent. As I wrote in 2019, the G.O.P. was quite successful in passing economic and social legislation in red states (including hundreds of anti-abortion laws), and its presidents were no more and no less effective at passing federal laws than their Democratic counterparts.

The mistaken Republican belief that the party was ineffective before Trump is bad enough, but it’s made incalculably worse by the Trumpist right’s abandonment of limited government politics in favor of embracing an expansive view of state power that views right-wing politics as the last, best hope for a culture in otherwise irreversible decline.

In the Trumpist narrative, the G.O.P.’s previous weakness means that the so-called woke left essentially runs everything. It commands the heights of culture, of business and of education. It’s even making inroads into the military. Republicans who hamstring themselves with a limited government philosophy are on a fool’s errand. Political power must be wielded to bring the left in line.

Let’s take, for example, a “statement of principles” of national conservatism signed by a host of leading figures on the right. Here’s part of what it has to say about “God and Public Religion” (emphasis added):

The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, and as the rightful inheritance of believers and nonbelievers alike. Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private. At the same time, Jews and other religious minorities are to be protected in the observance of their own traditions, in the free governance of their communal institutions, and in all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children. Adult individuals should be protected from religious or ideological coercion in their private lives and in their homes.

This vision of religion and public life is antithetical to the First Amendment. A vision that grants Christianity a privileged position while relegating “Jews and other religious minorities” to lesser status and rendering religious freedom as little more than a protection for non-Christian conduct in people’s “private lives and homes” helps explain the right-wing attack on the culture of free speech.

In Tennessee, for example, the legislature passed an “anti-C. R. T. law” so broad that it can make it perilous to include even some of Martin Luther King Jr.’s work in a school curriculum, and make it difficult to teach both sides of the dispute over, say, race-based affirmative action. Tennessee also passed an anti-drag law that was so vague and overbroad that it was enjoined by a Trump-appointed federal judge.

Tennessee is not alone, of course; the explosion of so-called education gag orders in red-state legislatures represents an effort to change the culture by using raw political power to ban instruction in ideas and concepts that those legislatures dislike.

Florida has been an epicenter of right-wing censorship. The state has passed unconstitutional laws that attempt to regulate social media moderation and limit free expression on public university campuses and in private boardrooms. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, is locked in an escalating political battle with Disney, which was triggered by Disney’s opposition to a state law that sharply limited instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in Florida classrooms.

There is a common thread linking all these legal attacks on free expression — the burning conviction that raw political power is the right’s prime weapon to combat the overwhelming authority of woke America.

Again, this is a sentiment that my Democratic friends find remarkable — especially when it comes from the state of Tennessee. Nashville might be more blue than most of the rest of the state, but it’s also one of the centers of conservative cultural power in the United States. The executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest protestant denomination in the United States, is based in Nashville. The country music and Christian music industries (along with much of Christian publishing) have a powerful local presence.

Indeed, given the cultural power of the evangelical church alone, it’s hard to justify the idea that conservative Americans are left only (or mainly) with politics as a lever for national change. Here in Tennessee the cultural power belongs to the right far more than to the left, and the idea that some form of woke hegemony is inevitable strikes the reasonable observer as bizarre, perhaps even paranoid.

And now let’s discuss the third principle: no enemies to your right. If your political opponents are so formidable that they allegedly neutered the “old” G.O.P. and swept to the commanding heights of cultural power, then resisting this mighty force requires unity and resolve. There can be no retreat. No compromise. Just total resistance. Dissenters aren’t just wrong, they’re “RINOs,” Republicans in name only. And RINOs are traitors to the cause.

This message doesn’t work everywhere, especially not in swing states, but Tennessee is extremely red. In 2020, Trump won the state by 23 points. In 2016, he won by 26. In 2012, Mitt Romney won by 20. The state is also extremely gerrymandered. Even though roughly 40 percent of Tennesseans vote Democratic in any given presidential election, only one of nine members of the state’s delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives is Democratic. The State House is 24 percent Democratic, and the State Senate has only six Democrats out of 33 senators.

Thus, the prime threat to any Republican politician comes almost exclusively from the right, a right that is convinced that it’s been a doormat and that normal politics simply aren’t adequate to the challenge from the left. Even the most reasonable Republicans are tempted to acquiesce to radical demands from the right lest they face a primary loss. Because then, they rationalize, the “real” right-wing radicals would be in charge.

The moment you understand these three principles, the Trumpist Republican Party becomes depressingly predictable. Tennessee is predictable. Ron DeSantis is predictable. The cultural dynamic of the right is relentlessly radicalizing, and so far not even a series of crushing political defeats have caused it to rethink its political commitments.

The “new” Republican Party, the one that’s allegedly a doormat no longer, lost the presidency, the House and the Senate in four short years between 2016 and 2020. (It narrowly regained control of the House in 2022.) The “new” Republican Party controls fewer state legislative chambers than it did before 2016, and it controls fewer governors’ mansions. It keeps losing winnable elections, it keeps passing unconstitutional laws, and — as we just witnessed in Tennessee — its overreach energizes the opposition.

There is hope, however. This week, the Tennessee governor, Bill Lee, proposed an “order of protection” law designed to strip weapons from individuals who indicate that they’re a danger to themselves or others. Two former governors, the Democrat Phil Bredesen and the Republican Bill Haslam, wrote a joint op-ed endorsing a similar concept. There is a Tennessee tradition of Republican statesmen — from Howard Baker to Bill Frist, Lamar Alexander, Bob Corker and Bill Haslam — who’ve often represented the best of the G.O.P.

That DNA still exists within the Tennessee Republican Party. It still exists within the national party. But it struggles to emerge in the atmosphere of rage and hysteria that dominates the grass roots. While that rage and hysteria persists, “punitive” and “performative” are the two words that best describe a movement and a party that has gone so dangerously astray.

From The New York Times, April 13, 2023

Springsteen, Seinfeld and What This Country’s Been Missing

By: Pamela Paul

Is there any sentiment more startling at this current gloomy moment than optimism? Or, at a time when half the country seems to be warring simultaneously with the other half and itself, unity? Perhaps even more disconcerting, that long dormant sensation, hope?

Most live events, whether a sports game or a concert, tend to generate a sense of communion. But last weekend at two performances with ostensibly little in common — Jerry Seinfeld’s 100th appearance at the Beacon Theater on Saturday night and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at the UBS Arena on Long Island on Sunday — the collective emotional response felt almost preternaturally heightened, and unexpectedly similar.

It wasn’t just that the very concept of synchronicity itself is so markedly out of sync with our divisive era. Nor did the feeling of togetherness seem to stem from the shared audience demographics — overwhelmingly white, skewed male and on the whole … not young. Something more than mere nostalgia for their earlier selves seemed to be at play. It was as if the two performances reconnected audiences with an earlier culture, one our current fragmented cacophony of infinite entertainment can no longer deliver.

Bruce Springsteen is 73 and Jerry Seinfeld 68. Both reached the heights of their popularity in a pre-internet, pre-iPhone, pre-streaming era. Back then, a performance was something you witnessed as it happened rather than on demand. As Chuck Klosterman noted in his 2022 book, “The Nineties,” TV at that time was built on the idea that you could watch only at a particular moment in time. “Seinfeld” offered an especially present-tense experience, filmed in front of a studio audience: “For much of a decade, ‘Seinfeld’ was the most popular, most transformative, live-action show on television,” Klosterman writes.

Entertainment was almost necessarily a shared, rather than purely personal, experience, more universal and, in some ways, more accessible. You could buy a concert ticket without a total Ticketmaster-induced meltdown. Springsteen, who with his E Street Band, was once voted by Rolling Stone readers the best live act of all time, owes much of his popularity to touring and live albums. And up until this 2023 tour, Springsteen notably made an effort to keep tickets at a reasonable price.

And there may be particular resonance in the fact that these two quintessential tristate area liberals nonetheless appeal widely to the rest of the country, a rare consensus. Springsteen, of course, channels the hardworking, overlooked American — the Vietnam vet, the blue-collar worker, the underclass. Seinfeld’s shtick is more urban schmo, muddling through daily life, mystified by its absurdities. But in projecting a regular Joe-ness — no small feat for two middle-class kids turned multimillionaires — both have a way of making their audiences feel heard.

Even for this particular non-devotee, to witness the intense bond between Springsteen and his fans was an extraordinary experience. During moments of melancholy and mourning (“Last Man Standing” was dedicated to a recently deceased friend from his first band), I could feel the arena audience lock into Springsteen’s face. The low calls of “Bruuuce” between songs and the way Springsteen met his fans’ raised hands as he walked through the floor toward the end of a three-hour-long night felt like a timeless and almost transcendental communion. “Do you want go home?” Springsteen called out rhythmically to the audience to repeated “Nooooos” in response. They meant it.

Seinfeld’s compact set of less than an hour (“Cut everything, cut it,” he said to Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show” last fall) likewise left his audience with a palpable desire to stay in that moment. Seinfeld had given them exactly what they came for — relatable comic set pieces, easy laughs at unfraught topics, bemusement rather than outrage. There was an almost giddy buoyancy in the air, and despite whatever horrors might be going on outside the theater, inside, it felt that everyone was in alignment.

“Seinfeld” is now streaming on Netflix. Springsteen’s on Spotify. But there’s something about witnessing these performers connect with an audience so ready to meet them that offered a remarkably life-affirming reprieve in this divisive, doomy post-Covid moment. The exuberance, the positivity, this sense of “in it together” felt exactly like what had been missing.