#what appealed to me was the stuff that was against far right conservatism

[uiruu]

woah when did the amazing atheist get based as hell... wasn't he like an antifeminist a decade ago? i mean im still fairly skeptical of him, but if he’s trying to be a better person then that’s a good thing, i guess. it’s cool that he’s tweeting things like this to an audience who needs to hear this stuff, but the only reason that his audience is full of incels and MRAs and altrights is because that’s the audience he spent like 15 years cultivating. so.... okay then

[douchebagbrainwaves]

POST-RES SOCIETY

If you look at history, it seems that most people who got rich by creating wealth did it by developing new technology? I even make a conscious effort to visualize the place beforehand, so I'll have a detailed image to diff with reality. As often happens, Ron discovered how to be the thing-that-doesn't-scale that defines your company. It took me a while to hit your stride. What is it about you that they love? 027040077 quite 0. 99. It was presumably many thousands of years studying really be a waste of time just studied other things. And the present recession could be that impact. Another feeling that seems alarming but is in fact normal in a startup are just unbelievably low. What do you do about it? I was never sure about that in high school, I find still have black marks against their names anyway.

In theory it seemed that the conclusion of a really good essay ought not to need to say any more than QED. It does seem to me what philosophy should look like: quite general observations that would cause someone who understood them to do something people want. But the techniques for building integrated circuits, and techniques for building integrated circuits, and techniques for building integrated circuits spread rapidly to other countries. Phrased that way, and how much is the natural conservatism that made them work for the big companies in the first paragraph the fatal pinch? Wealth is what you want, you have to try to write software that recognizes their messages, there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage. It would still have been a total immersion. I don't know why I avoided trying the statistical approach is not usually the first one people try when they write spam filters. It's what impresses reporters, and potential new users. About what, and why? But in practice it would not be likely to. If so, now's the time.

More importantly, such a company would attract people who wanted to learn about physics didn't need to start doing something people want. Life in a zoo is easier, but it would be misleading to say the field is 2500 years old, because for most of college. And when you discover a new way to do things, its value is multiplied by all the people who want to get it over with as soon as you can. If people have to choose between something that's cheap, heavily marketed, and appealing in the long term, which do you think, oh good, now everything will be all right? You should only write about the very richest, and these tend to be an all-or-nothing aspect of startups was not something we wanted. Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, David Hornik, Jessica Livingston, Greg Mcadoo, Aydin Senkut, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this. I was looking for an old friend especially if he is a hacker to suddenly send you an email talking about sex, but someone sending you mail for the first time would not be so naive as it sounds. But in the late nineteenth century, the 'riting component of the 3 Rs was morphed into English. I hadn't read the books we were assigned carefully enough. For most users, missing legitimate email is an order of magnitude worse than receiving spam, so a filter that yields false positives is like an acne cure that carries a risk of death to the patient.

Investors have much higher standards for companies that have an existing relationship with the recipient. Well, therein lies half the work of being inconsistent. And you have leverage in the sense of having a single thing lots of people use. The spammers are businessmen. What's so unnatural about working for a big company. I find that American adults are no better or worse informed about literature than art, despite the fact that he has to do all the company's errands as well as they were ever going to be. A job means doing something people want.

But kids are so bad at making things, the craftsmen. It would not be so useful if it delivered your dinner to a random location in central Asia. It turned out that economies of scale were not the only way to get paid more by doing more. What's so unnatural about working for a big company and their own startup is probably going to live. By giving him something he wants in return. A startup is not merely ten people, but ten people like you. And if they do, they may not have to. The single biggest thing the government could do to increase the number of emails in each, rather than for any practical need. I felt most would fail. We don't know if Plato or Aristotle were the first to see signs of a divergence between founders and investors in the attitudes of existing startups we've funded. What most businesses really do is make wealth. John Smith, 22, a software developer at such and such corporation.

And of course if they continued to spam me or a network I was part of, Hostex itself would be recognized as a spam term. Suppose another multiple of two, at least working on problems of minor importance. For the next year or so, if anyone expressed the slightest curiosity about Viaweb we would try to sell them the company. The real lesson here is that the founders get rich. People frightened by Lisp make up other reasons for not using it. An essay has to come up with answers. The most dramatic I learned immediately, in the first place.

In languages, as in math and science, they only show you the finished product. Scholars had to figure out what he meant. For example, I think it could give you an edge to understand the way Newton's Principia is, but it is not only manufacturing companies that create wealth. When I run into difficulties, I notice that I tend to conclude with a few vague questions and then drift off to get a cup of tea. Its fifteen most interesting words in this spam, with their probabilities, are: madam 0. It meant uncle Sid's shoe store. When you're running a startup is, economically: a way of saying that is that half of you are going to die.

If it were simply a matter of working harder than an ordinary employee and getting paid proportionately, it would be a shortcut straight to wisdom. But they were competing against opponents who couldn't change the rules on the fly by discovering new technology. Indeed, most antispam techniques so far have been like pesticides that do nothing more than a Bayesian combination of the spam probabilities of individual words. The company that did was RCA, and Farnsworth's reward for his efforts was a decade of patent litigation. The difference between then and now is that now I understand why Berkeley is probably not worth trying to decompose them. If you want a potato or a pencil or a place to live, you have to know what people want, companies that move things also create wealth. So few businesses really pay attention to making customers happy. I thought studying philosophy would be a flaw. But not quite. Appendix: More Ideas One idea that I haven't tried yet is to filter based on word pairs see below might well catch this one: cost effective, setup fee, money back—pretty incriminating stuff. What this meant in practice was that we deliberately sought hard problems.

[evilelitest2]

Letters to my Grandmother: The Republican Bubble and Party Asymmetry

The Republican Bubble

So everybody knows that the US is a two party system, our politics are filtered through the democratic or republican perspective, those two parties control the political narrative, and all power is confined to these two parties.  And in many ways, the leaders of the two parties fundamentally agree on many issues, both parties are ok with campaign contributions, both parties are ok with Gerrymandering (until very recently) both parties are very close to the corporate class etc etc.  From about the late 70s onwards, there is a general consensus of what the parties will tacitly agree on (money in politics, interventionist foreign policy, neoliberal economics, free trade, socialism=bad, don’t address wages, deregulations etc) with a small area of fierce disagreement (Abortion, gun laws, taxes, gay marriage, prayer in school, Obamacare).  This has broken down in recent years, but for twice my life type, that was the default of American politics.  This is why people get disillusioned with the two party system, after all if you’re top priority is getting money out of politics, BIll Clinton and Obama aren’t going to do you any favors in that department.  

But it is important to understand that just because the two parties are opposed and share many similarities, they aren’t mirror images of each other, this isn’t the Capulet and Montague where they are both basically the same people but wearing slightly different colored outfits, these are fundamentally asymmetrical organizations, their fundamental build up is radically different and beyond a few basic elements, they are really quite distinct. I understand the temptation to see them as just the Right and Left wing mirrors of each other, like the factions in Princess Monokee, but I think this is a very...limited way of understanding these groups.

There is a great book called “Party Asymmetry” which talks about how the parties are fundamentally organized in an entirely unique way, their very makeup is distinct from each other, they are organized in fundamentally different ways.  Let me break some of these differences down

Firstly, the Democrats are significantly larger than the Republican Party, you might be tempted to think that they are each 50% of the population, but that frankly isn’t true.  You know that map of the US which shows the majority of the states as red with mostly the coasts as blue?  Yeah, well….most of the population live in those blue states.  Remember in 2016, the Democrats had surprisingly low democratic turnout, and the Republicans had shockingly high voter turn out and despite that, the Dems still got 3 million more votes.  The Republicans are a minority party, it’s just that the 18th century set up of the US political system means that parties are rewarded for having the most land rather than the most people.  And this is important to understand for the Republican psychology, they know full well that if democratic reforms are ever issued, then they are going to lose.  Like if you abolish the Electoral College, then the GOP will likely never win a presidential election, hence why they are so absolutely terrified of ever letting the democrats win.

Secondly, the Republican base is extremely….monolithic.  It is overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly Christian, majority male, and most importantly for our purposes, overwhelmingly old.  The Republicans are a primarily the party of old white people though not exclusively (Hi Grandma I love you very much), and when your party is well...dying that puts them in a very unusual position.  Every year, elections get harder and harder for Republicans because more and more GOP voters die and more and more Democratic voters come of age, but here is the thing.  Elderly people are the most consistent voters, they will vote more than any other group in the US, while young people are the least reliable voters.  I’ll get into the reasons for another time, but just remember this, Elderly people vote consistently, young people vote inconsistently.  Actually elderly people are the best voters because they don’t just vote in the presidential election, they vote in the mid term elections, they vote for the governors, they vote for Senators, Representative, they even vote in the state legislature, I mean when was the last time you voted for your state representative.  However the downside is that appealing to old people usually comes at the expense of leaving anybody else.  Except my grandparents of course (I love you very much Grandmother).

Thirdly, the Democrats actually are a governing party, the Republicans are not.  What do I mean by that?  Well the democratic party, as a collective whole, wants to live in a multi plural democracy where decisions are made via compromise and the 4th estate is a major check on power.  There have been numerous reports that show that democratic voters approve of politicians who make compromises in order to produce progress or support the party most when it makes the country function day to day, and care what the mainstream news has to say. Imagine for a moment, that Obama was able to get a partial gun law passed that only banned a certain class of weapons with the help of some republicans, or if he was able to pass a major climate change initiative in exchange for allowing massive corporations to make huge amounts of money off of it.  Most democrats would be ok with that, and would applaud it as a victory.  If the NYT or the Washington Post, or CNN came out strongly against Obama calling him a dangerous liar, democrats would care, and listen, even those who don’t value those reporters would at least consider what they have to say.  If Obama insulted the Prime Minister of Australia on a phone call, most democrats would be upset.  In all of these instances they might mute how upset they are or reduce it if they felt it would give the Republicans a win, but there would still be effect.  This is not true of the Republican Party, because they don’t care about governance, at least the base doesn’t, not anymore.  They approve of their political leaders who don’t make compromise, who have the most inflammatory rhetoric, and who treat the Democrats as an opposing side in a war rather than simply an opposing party.  

   What does this add up to?  Well the Republican Party is...well it’s a culture.  Democrats are notoriously disunified compared to the far more organized Republican unity, and that is because being a Republican is an identity in a way that being a democrat is not.  Democrats are primarily unified by ‘OMG the right are completely insane we need to stop them before they destroy the country” but beyond that there isn’t much of a unifier, because being a democrat basically means “being interested in actually governance”.  It’s not just that Clinton, Obama, and Warren are all radically different politicians, they isn’t even much of an attempt to unify them except against a common enemy.  

Republicans meanwhile have a full identity, they have a subculture, they effectively are their own nation using the European sense of the term.  Republicans watch their own TV, listen to their own radio, they read their own exclusive newspapers, they have their own media, their own music, they have their own entirely exclusive world view.  The only voices who Republicans care about are those of...other Republicans.  If you ever meet “lifetime republicans”, you will notice how all encompassing the experience is, everything they do is either “Republican Approved” or its the so called “Apolitical Media”, aka stuff which works hard to not show much in the way of overt political bias.  Imagine the Republican base like an insular subculture, there is a lot of room for disagreement and alternative opinions within that group, but all of them rally together against any sort of outsider.  They don’t care about the mainstream press because they have their own alternative press, they have their alternative culture, they have their alternative understanding of politics, they have an entirely distinct world view and psychology, and one which means they only trust are others of their community.  Notice how frequent the claim of “Rhino” or “Cuckservative” is among mainstream Republican pundits, while only the far left has the whole “This person isn’t a Democrat”.  When Obama faced off against Clinton, neither was like “oh this person isn’t a real leftist”, they were instead like “I respect my opponent, but they are wrong”.  Meanwhile even before Trump showed up, Huckabee, Ryan, and Romney were all implying the other was a traitor who was secretly trying to destroy conservatism.  And there is no single kingmaker on the left the awy you have for the Right.  

The left and the right share a lot of traits, but their is no singular figure on the left who demands as much power as Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity on the right, there is no network that is the left wing Fox News, and the left doesn’t have an entire alternative unifying subculture that binds them together.  So why did the right go this way while the left did not?  Well I will explain that...next time.

Oh that was a great ending note, but I love running things, so this is my last notice on the difference between the two groups.  Republicans know full well that their way of life is dying out, that if the democrats can win like...two elections, that's it.  They are fighting for a way of life which is on the verge of coming to an end at any point, so they are always going to be more committed to this than we are, and that is why republicans need voter fervor so much, they know that their base will do everything you want voters to do as long as they can protect them from gay people getting married, black people not being shot on police whim, or poor people being able to live comfortable lives.  

[nothingman]

His presidential campaigns may have mobilized the country's angriest, young white men.

Last December as the smoke was clearing from the electoral explosion and many of us were still shell-shocked and wandering around blindly searching for emotional shelter, Salon’s Matthew Sheffield wrote a series of articles about the rise of the “alt-right.” The movement had been discussed during the campaign, of course. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton even gave a big speech about it. Trump’s campaign strategist and chief consigliere, Steve Bannon — the once and future executive editor of Breitbart News — had even bragged that his operation was the “platform” of the alt-right just a few months earlier. But after the election there was more interest than ever in this emerging political movement.

It’s an interesting story about a group of non-interventionist right-wingers who came together in the middle of the last decade in search of solidarity in their antipathy toward the Bush administration’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was a motley group of conservatives, white nationalists and libertarians that broke apart almost as soon as they came together. The more clever among them saw the potential for this new “brand” and began to market themselves as the “alt-right” and it eventually morphed into what it is today. The series is a good read and explains that the alt-right really was a discrete new movement within the far right wing and not simply a clever renaming of racist and Nazi groups.

This week conservative writer Matt Lewis of the Daily Beast, a Trump critic, wrote a piece about the libertarian influence on the alt-right and suggested that libertarians work harder to distance themselves from this now-infamous movement. He points out that former Rep. Ron Paul’s presidential campaigns were a nexus of what became alt-right activism. Sheffield had written about that too:

Pretty much all of the top personalities at the Right Stuff, a neo-Nazi troll mecca, started off as conventional libertarians and Paul supporters, according to the site’s creator, an anonymous man who goes by the name “Mike Enoch.”

“We were all libertarians back in the day. I mean, everybody knows this,” he said on an alt-right podcast last month.

It wasn’t just obscure neo-Nazi trolls. Virtually all the prominent figures in or around the alt-right movement, excepting sympathizers and fellow travelers like Bannon and Donald Trump himself, were Paul supporters: Richard Spencer, Paul Gottfried, Jared Taylor, Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones. (The latter two deny being part of the alt-right, but have unquestionably contributed to its rise in prominence.) Paul’s online support formed the basis for what would become the online alt-right, the beating heart of the new movement.

In fact, Ron Paul — then a Texas congressman and the father of Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky — was the original alt-right candidate, long before Donald Trump came along. Paul was also, by far, the most popular libertarian in America.

Those of us observing the Paul phenomenon and libertarianism from the left always found it curious in this regard. Paul’s racism was simply undeniable. It was documented for decades. He hid behind the “states’ rights” argument, as pro-Confederate racists have always done, but it was never very convincing. If you are a principled libertarian who believes in small government and inalienable individual rights, what difference does it make whether a federal or state government is the instrument of oppression?

Most of us thought a lot of Paul’s appeal, especially to young white males, came down to a loathing for the uptight religious conservatism of the GOP, along with Paul’s endorsement of drug legalization. That made some sense. Why would all these young dudes care about the capital gains tax?

And let’s face facts, it wasn’t just libertarians who could be dazzled by Paul’s iconoclasm. There were plenty of progressives drawn to his isolationist stance as well. But as it turns out, among that group of “Atlas Shrugged” fans and stoners were a whole lot of white supremacists, all of whom abandoned Ron Paul’s son Rand in 2016 when Donald Trump came along and spoke directly to their hearts and minds.

Is there something about libertarianism that attracts white supremacists? It seems unlikely except to the extent that it was a handy way to argue against federal civil rights laws, something that both Paul père and fils endorsed during their careers, legitimizing that point of view as a libertarian principle. (In fairness, Rand Paul has tried to pursue more progressive racial policies in recent years — which may also have helped drive away his dad’s supporters.) Other than that, though, it seems to me that libertarianism has simply been a way station for young and angry white males as they awaited their “God Emperor,” as they call Trump on the wildly popular alt-right site, r/The_Donald.

Still, libertarians do have something to answer for. While principled libertarians like Cathy Young certainly condemned the racism in their ranks at the time, others who supported Ron Paul failed to properly condemn the rank bigotry undergirding the Paul philosophy.

Lewis’s Daily Beast piece certainly provoked some reaction among libertarians. Nick Gillespie at Reason objected to the characterization of libertarianism as a “pipeline” to the alt-right, writing that “the alt-right — and Trumpism, too, to the extent that it has any coherence — is an explicit rejection of foundational libertarian beliefs in ‘free trade and free migration’ along with experiments in living that make a mess of rigid categories that appeal to racists, sexists, protectionists, and other reactionaries.” So he rejects calls to purge libertarianism of alt-righters since he believes they were never really libertarians in the first place.

Gillespie does, however, agree that libertarian true believers should call out such people “wherever we find them espousing their anti-modern, tribalistic, anti-individualistic, and anti-freedom agenda.” (It would have been easy to include “racist” in that list but, being generous, perhaps he meant it to fall under the term “tribalistic.”)

Meanwhile, over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Jonathan Adler addresses some libertarians’ “misplaced affinity for the Confederacy,” a phenomenon I must admit I didn’t know existed. Evidently, there really are libertarians who take the side of the secessionists, supposedly on the basis of tariffs and Abraham Lincoln’s allegedly “monstrous record on civil liberties.” Adler patiently explains why this is all nonsense and wrote, “Libertarianism may not be responsible for the alt-right, but it’s fair to ask whether enough libertarians have done enough to fight it within their own ranks.”

Good for these prominent libertarians for being willing to confront the currents of racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia that at the very least have contaminated their movement. We await the same honest self-appraisal from the conservative movement and Republican leaders as a whole.

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Virginia Racial Violence Has Deep Roots in Antebellum Vigilante Groups

via AlterNet.org Main RSS Feed

[senelkins-blog]

NEW YORK TIMES. FEBRUARY 2017. 

SENATOR ELKINS DID NOT ASK TO BE A BELLWETHER. At no point in his prodigious career did he ever ask for the mantle of prophet or did he demand the cardboard sign of an apocalyptic herald. Instead, his thirty-plus years of dedication to the conservative cause gradually transformed him into a tough love advocate for its transformation. His devotion to the right-wing has pushed him into battles with everyone from his own party to each branch of the government —— federal, state, and local levels, too. His image is one of a protector, if not necessarily a cage-fighter. He hearkens back to a different age of politics (one that he suspects never truly existed) when good men got their hands dirty behind close doors and while wearing gloves. The word integrity comes to mind, though it may perhaps be a partisan twist of the term. He does the right thing, even if that thing is announcing —— unflinchingly —— the impending demise of his own movement.

November 9th, 2016. The senator gives his final public speech of the year. At the time, no one suspected that he would disappear behind the scenes well into the new year. His ghost-like presence on the campaign grew gradually more public until the very last minute; his final speech was every bit what would have been expected. However, no one —— not even members of the Solis campaign itself  —— could have predicted that the godfather of the party would seemingly turn his back in their darkest hour. In that speech, which some of his long-time enemies regard as infamous, he concluded by paying homage to Barry Goldwater.

“Offer a choice, not an echo,” the senator repeats to me. His home in Raleigh is every bit what one would expect: we sit on a massive wraparound porch; his wife handed me a cold glass of sweet tea with a wedge of lemon before disappearing in her scarf to the garden; there are a couple of grandchildren chasing each other along the edge of a cornfield in the front yard; the sounds of the city are just far enough away to emphasis that of a tractor somewhere in the distance; the senator’s mint-condition 1953 F-100 sits in the driveway. I sit in awe of my surroundings, aware of the depth to which the senator’s carefully crafted image goes.

“Voters want change, and that’s a fact. Even when things are good, they ain’t satisfied. They want better. They deserve better, and they know it. A lot of politicians would tell you off the record that the people are dumb, and their attention just ain’t long enough to keep track of four years of work. But, that’s plainly wrong. They know —— they sense it in their guts without having to pick up a copy of the Post. America is more than a place, you know. It’s a state of mind, it’s a place in the heart. It’s an ideal that voters expect us to strive toward. Do we?”

He lets the question hang in the air and, at the time, I wonder if he recalls my original question. A few minutes earlier, I brought up a recent topic from an interview he allowed in his Hill office. Deterioration of the Republican party, he had said. Everyone from the RNC chair to the House Minority Leader have been forced to comment, and they all say the same thing: he’s working on it. The phrase has become synonymous with Senator Elkins over the years; when he gets to work on something, be it a vintage car or an improbable slog uphill and back into power, the work tends to be fruitful. But, rather than hashing through the how, I want to know the why.

“Right after we lose our way, we do.” He continues abruptly. The illusion of distraction comes across as he leans forward in his rocking chair to wave at a grandchild who has ducked toward the porch —— presumably for a glass of the tea, though I later see her rush outside with a model dump truck with working wheels which the senator says he hand-painted last Christmas. We take a break from the interview to go help the little girl load the back of the toy with dirt from Mrs. Elkin’s garden.

It is here that he really elaborates on his thoughts. I realize that I get real answers on his terms, usually as a product of a roundabout discussion that leaves the questions I fed him untouched to the point of frustration. Still, the senator’s home life is a fascinating look into who he is as a person. For a politician so paradoxically impersonal, even the way he helps his wife pull weeds tells a small story about who he is in Washington.

“The Republican party ain’t smart anymore. Emotions are a powerful political tool, be we’ve been using them right poorly as of late. Good ole McCain was destined to lose, going up against all the hopey-changey stuff.” He pauses to wink at me. “But, it’s been bad ever since then. Romney was out of touch. Solis was … a miscalculation.”

The Carolina soil under my nails is dark and wet; Mrs. Elkin’s tomatoes are beautiful.

“We went back to the Fifties, I think. We offered voters two shades of the same color, and they went with the one that did it best. Frankly, the conservative vision has become watered-down, weak, too indecisive to appeal to the average voter. They see a bunch of rich [jerks] in suits vying for a spot on some wealthy donor’s lap. It’s sickening, and people from Coal Country and the Delta and even the suburban Triangle can see that. Theresa Wright should not have won. She’s not as charismatic as Barack Obama, she offered herself as a lite version of him, and everything about her screamed centrism.” He clears his throat, and the sound is intentionally ugly. “We’re picking up the piece right now. I can’t figure out for the life of me how we were so off.”

This sounds like an aside. Can’t sounds more like paint when he says it.

“Conservatism looks like elitism these days. I want to take it back to the little people, and do it quick. The Dems have abandoned mom and pop and Joe and Suzy with even more zeal than we have, and it’s gonna become a race back to the trailer park once the midterms wipe them out.”

I ask over barbecue sandwiches if he truly believes that there will be Republican majorities in 2018.

“Absolutely. I like the word deterioration. I also like the word regeneration. I got things in the works, you know. Ever since Obama, we’ve been trying to make ourselves palatable. We like to play to the center as much as our base, and we went a little too far during the campaign. Not enough red meat. Not enough contrast. Wright is leading everyone into the wrong, and I can feel it like an ulcer. The people know when they’re being duped, and they know when Washington don’t care about them. Am I waiting for her to make a wrong move? Yes, I sure as hell am. When she does, we’ll show the nation that we ain’t an echo —— of anything, of anyone. People want something to believe in, and they want to believe in change. More than anything else, they want solid and real choices.”

                                                                                  by Gia Saab.

[digitalwhatever]

The paranoid style is back, and better than ever

I know I’ve said this ad nauseam in these pages, but oh man are we in trouble as a nation. We find ourselves today in such an extremely ugly place, in the post-Obama era—an era riddled with hysteria, paranoia, division, hatred, extremism disguised as normal discourse. In fact, thanks to Fox news and the public institutions of hysteria (Rush Limbaugh, et al) much of what once might have been considered radical, violent, extreme or just plain socially unacceptable views or behavior is now normalized across the airwaves on a daily basis. It’s mainstream!

This trend has been exasperated by the anonymity and free expression (or rather “free of consequence” expression) allowed by the internet that leads us deeper off the cliff. Thus, here we are now, in the throws of the golden age of paranoia—a deeply shameful and disgusting time in America. Hallelujah!

So I figured this is the perfect time to go back and reread the original article “The Paranoid Style” by Richard Hofstadter (from Harper’s Magazine, 1964) which put into writing, clearly and thoughtfully for the thinking world to see a phenomenon that’s plagued the human race for centuries.

Hofstadter writes about popular movements in American history fed by conspiracy theories, and politicians who used those conspiracies to manipulate and stimulate voters’ passions. The anti-freemason movement of the late eighteenth century; the anti-catholic movement of the mid-nineteenth; the ani-shadow banker movement of the early 20th century; and of course, everyone’s favorite anti-communist frenzy of the McCarthy era. He ends on, what was then, the current rage in Paranoid Politics: the Barry Goldwater campaign, in which many of the pillars of modern conservative conspiracies were born and cemented.

But one thing I can’t help in reading about all these great moments in paranoid politics, is how quaint they are. How simple and relatively innocuous.

Hofstadter writes that one of the noteworthy developments to occur in the “modern” Goldwater era was the infusion of mass media to help fuel whatever strange and depraved messages were being brokered. Oh, but how gentle and dated the Goldwater days seem now, in comparison to today’s white hot mess. If Goldwater only had access to forces like Fox news and the internet, there’s no telling how far he could have gone. But he didn’t.

Rereading about the basic tenants of the paranoid mind and the exploitation thereof, it puts much clarity on what is happening to us now in this moment, and on how it is happening. The fears, the types of conspiracies, the invented enemies that politicians and media personalities use to manipulate voters, they come from well worn places in the human (or at least, the American white male) psyche. Capitalism is being undermined! Infiltrators from “outside” have worked their way to the highest levels of government. Backed by, and in cahoots with international radicals and powerful shadowy figureheads, they are plotting the destruction of the United States.

By the way, here’s an exercise for you: watch Fox news tonight and count how many times the say the word “socialist” in the course of a between-commercials segment. Also, how many times they pair the word “socialist” with “democrat” or “democrat party.” This is a way to get very drunk, very fast.

Even more disturbing and appalling then the actual practice is the skill with which the perpetrators of today’s paranoid politics inflict their craft. Whether it’s Trump, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, or some Russian troll farm, these people know what the fuck they’re doing.

Look at the Russian trolls of 2016, for instance. They knew the exact type of conspiracy theory to publish, the exact kinds of stories that would gain traction and be share (amplified) by their intended audience: Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. Proof she was corrupted by foreign governments—a corrupt insider who’s infiltrated the highest levels of US government! Classic stuff, right out of the pages of Hofstadter.

Our current president, despite his massive faults, nastiness and moral deprivations, is an extremely gifted Paranoid politician. He has taken the art to new heights. In fact, in most instances, it’s all he’s got.

His particular gift is language. He finds perfect little packets of words to neatly summarize, encapsulate and motivate the conspiratorial spirit:

“The system is rigged”

“Fake news”

“Witch hunt”

“Giant hoax”

He repeats these over, and over, and over.

Let us not forget as well, that this guy’s entré into the world of national politics was through the “birther” movement, which itself was something of a high paranoid achievement. The president (Obama) was actually born outside the United States and is therefore not legitimate. He’s a foreigner, hell-bent on destroying democracy, capitalism and the constitution! The fact that Obama was African American worked doubly well on the paranoid mind: the theory fit so perfectly into those warped pre-conceived paranoid notions that blackness is otherness, and that those with dark skin represent a threat to the natural order of America. It was a paranoid home run, giving rise to a whole new era of mind bogglingly delusional right-wing ranting.

Cutting his teeth on this vast and rich material, the current office holder of the presidency continues to use the dark sentiments of “birtherism” to his advantage. Another of his overused verbal bludgeons is to blame all negative things happening in our country on Obama. And weirdly, to justify any untoward practices he uses himself in office by claiming, mostly wrongly that “Obama did it!” There is no logic or reality to this, but to the paranoid mind, it all makes perfect sense.

Sadly, it’s this same deep paranoid fear of dark skin that gives fuel to one of the greatest national disgraces of our era: our current immigration policy and this ridiculous turmoil about “the Wall.” None of this nonsense would be possible if not for a broader fear of dark skin “infiltration” which has been building with the paranoid crowd over the last 10 years or so.

In fact, when you look at just about any of today’s most important political battles today, it seems that the obstacles to progress and sensible policy are built out of paranoid building blocks. Whether it’s immigration policies, stopping the epidemic of gun violence, curbing widespread sexual harassment, ensuring fair and equal voting practices, or just about any issue on the table, you encounter some very emotionally powerful appeals to the great, white, irrational mind.

For instance:

Immigration:

Dark skinned rapists are crossing the border, stealing our jobs!

Gun Violence:

Democrats and liberals want to take away our guns!

Institutionalized Sexual Harassment:

White men in this country are under attack. Liberals want to destroy our careers!

Voting Rights:

Black people, Mexicans and democrats are voting illegally! They’re stealing our elections!

Environmental Policy

Global warming is a Chinese hoax! Regulations are killing our jobs!

Healthcare:

They’re trying to import European-style socialism and destroy capitalism!

Religion:

Christians and christianity are under attack from atheists and democrats who want to dismantle your religious liberty.

Fair taxation:

Socialism!

The fact that these conspiratorial roadblocks have been in use for such a long time and have been set in high-repeat mode puts us in a very tricky situation.

These paranoid sentiments are no longer loony-bin, fringe and weirdo rantings. They have become a standard, acceptable form of mainstream political discourse. People are using them ad nauseam to distort and short-circuit any type of rational political debate.

The birth of a new Rational Movement in politics

Rereading Hofstadter's original article, and working through some of my thoughts have helped tremendously to give me a sense of clarity towards our current political predicament.  It’s also helped to clarify some thoughts about a possible way out of this mess.

Here’s what I hope to see: some politician, or several politicians really, thought leaders, public voices, personalities, spokespeople from all walks of life and political persuasions, rising up from the current crop to begin a massive, persistent de-bunking and re-framing campaign.

They will need formidable language skills, guts, conviction, and god-like perseverance. The end goal: re-frame the debate. Shed light on the bizarre and out-of-whack nature of our current politics. Make it crystal clear what’s happening.

They cannot be the wonky, policy-minded politicians of today’s left, or the quirky, quick-witted personalities of MSNBC or late night TV. They cannot be merely smart people with good ideas. They need to convey the weight of truth and urgency in their words. They need to clarify in a concise, colloquial way. They need to lay it all on the table.

We are fighting against deep paranoid fears and the people who exploit such fear.

This is not a debate between left and right or liberalism versus conservatism. It’s a debate between sanity and insanity. Between rational thought, and bizarre ranting. It's a debate between very real ideas and irrational fear.

The Fox news crowd needs to be called out again and again, not as the “right” or the “right wing, but as the “paranoid right.” The two words can never be uncoupled.

Most importantly, politicians cannot pretend to debate against opponents who eschew this garbage. Call off the debates. Don’t yell at each other across the podium or from different boxes of the TV screen. Do not argue with insanity—it only serves to elevate it and make it seem like it’s a real, valid point-of-view.

At this point in time, I believe there is still a soft middle in the American electorate—people who have not yet been radicalized, polarized, marginalized, cannibalized or disenfranchised. People  who are still open to political discourse and are still capable of making decisions based on thought and information. These are the people who need to be reached and influenced. These are the people that can save our collective hides.

Of course, a few other things need to happen. For instance, Fox news needs to be put off the air once and for all. And the internet needs to be unplugged. But those are discussions for another day.

[irisplate9-blog]

Texas’s Favorite Grocery Store Is a Way of Life<p class="p-dropcap has-dropcap p-large-text" id="vavTjJ"><strong>The story of H-E-B seems</strong> unoriginal, as far as cult grocers go: A family launches a store in a small town a long time ago (in this case, the Butt family, in Kerrville, Texas, in 1905). That store earns a loyal following and expands throughout the region (Texas). It becomes known among its fans for its wildly dedicated employees (many have worked there for 30-plus years), top-notch customer service (only at H-E-B will someone hand you a freshly baked tortilla to snack on while you shop), and unique food products (hatch chile cookies!). Adoring <a href="https://www.epicurious.com/expert-advice/the-best-grocery-store-in-america-is-heb-article">public odes</a> are published about it across the Internet. <a href="https://www.itemonline.com/news/local_news/customers-flock-to-new-h-e-b-store-on-opening/article_1f9c3d27-617c-597d-9ab9-b9eeb81673bc.html">Long lines form</a> whenever a new location touches down. </p> <p id="D5oF9v">This tale could be told of any beloved regional grocery store — your Publixes, your Wegmans, your Harris Teeters — except that San Antonio-based H-E-B exists in a single U.S. state (with 52 stores across the border in Mexico) and is the 12th-largest private company in the country, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/largest-private-companies/list/#tab:rank">according to <em>Forbes</em></a>. What’s the difference between H-E-B and everyone else? Sure, it’s <a href="https://www.glassdoor.com/Award/Best-Places-to-Work-2018-LST_KQ0,24.htm">ranked among the top places to work</a> and is pretty ahead-of-the-curve with its mobile checkout (maybe that’s <a href="https://www.mysanantonio.com/business/local/article/Amazon-looked-at-H-E-B-Whole-Foods-to-break-into-11303341.php">why employees at Amazon suggested that the tech giant acquire H-E-B</a> before it settled on that <a href="https://www.eater.com/2017/6/16/15816202/amazon-buys-whole-foods">other Texas grocer</a>). </p> <p id="SciLGZ">But, really, H-E-B has just tapped into one of the most powerful cultural forces in existence: Texas pride. H-E-B’s corporate campus — where many of the buildings are made of Texas limestone, and the neoclassical design is quintessential Texas architecture — runs along the San Antonio River Walk, and is built on an old military compound called the <a href="https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/qbs02">San Antonio Arsenal</a>. A Texas landmark, known for being a major supply depot during both world wars, it now supplies Texas to Texans, from Whataburger Fancy Ketchup to Takis rolled tortilla chips to Franklin Barbecue sauce. </p> <p id="AJRBzf">The H-E-B <a href="https://careers.heb.com/about-heb/">website</a> prominently declares that H-E-B has “proudly served Texans since 1905,” and that its stores are all about “outfitting Texas families with all they need for Texas lifestyles.” In 2016, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/us/what-makes-texas-texas.html">Manny Fernandez succinctly described</a> what that means in the<em> New York Times:</em> “You don’t just move to Texas. It moves into you ... We tattoo Texas on our arms, buy Texas-built trucks and climb fire escapes with Texas dirt in our pockets. Place, we are unsubtly suggesting, matters.” Being from most states is just part of your bio; being from Texas is a lifelong commitment. </p> <p id="2F2SFv">I know this is true because I am from Texas. My parents moved the family to Dallas from New Hampshire when I was around a year old. My dad shades his face from the Texas sun with a cowboy hat on his daily walks, and has long identified as more Texan than Indian; as kids, my sister and I posed for photos off the highway amid the Texas bluebonnets every spring; I know all the lyrics to the de facto state song, “Deep in the Heart of Texas”; and though I live in Brooklyn now, I still wear shorts emblazoned with the Texas flag to the gym. </p> <p id="50sbXJ">If you’re not from Texas, the state might seem like one giant stereotype of cowboys, conservatism, and brashness. But Texan identity is more complex than that: There’s rural Texas, Silicon Prairie Texas, honky-tonk Texas, hipster Texas, Latinx Texas, oil-soaked Texas, Vietnamese Texas, and yes, gun-slinging Texas — just to name a few. A grocery store can be a prism for identity, refracting and focusing it; Whole Foods famously does this for an entire group of people held together by little more than social class and a vague sense of taste. What’s unique about H-E-B fandom is that its customers are ultimately loyal to H-E-B <em>in so far </em>as they are loyal to Texas. This is perhaps one of the most distinguishing factors between H-E-B and the other cult grocers: People love Publix subs, crave Trader Joe’s snacks, and revere Wegmans’ customer service, but H-E-B is a way of life. </p> <hr class="p-entry-hr" id="sR5Xpr"/><p class="p-large-text" id="uEuADT"><strong>Have you ever wanted</strong> a cast-iron skillet in the shape of the Lone Star state? Party tray? Burger-shaper? Cutting board? Pecan cake? Cheese? You can find them all in the aisles of H-E-B. Texas’s unique outline, with its right angles and craggly edges, is probably <a href="https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/the-shape-were-in/">one of the most recognizable</a> in the country. There are hundreds — literally hundreds — of Texas-shaped items at H-E-B. An employee at a San Antonio location tried to convince me that the Texas-shaped tortilla chips are superior because the unique silhouette, with its handle and curved ridges, was practically made for scooping up salsa. A shopper from Schulenburg, who regularly drives 25 miles to visit her nearest H-E-B, told me that she fills her grandchildren’s Christmas stockings exclusively with Texas-shaped novelty items purchased at H-E-B stores.</p> <p id="zXt6A1">It turns out that, after oil, Texas pride may be the state’s single most lucrative natural resource — in part because it can take so many different forms, each of which can be sold to a distinct audience. Against the backdrop of a <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1516589&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newyorker.com%2Fmagazine%2F2017%2F07%2F10%2Famericas-future-is-texas" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">broader conversation about the future of Texas</a> and Texan identity, H-E-B is unabashedly embracing the longer, wider, more diverse view of <a href="https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/the-native-texan/">what it means to be a proud Texan</a>, and reaping the financial rewards of doing so; H-E-B’s more than 340 stores span several concepts, each of which appeals to a specific Lone Star State community or sensibility.</p> <p id="uHKAEn">Most notably, in 2006, H-E-B launched Mi Tienda, a grocery chain that caters to the needs of the state’s vast Latinx population, with a masa factory and tortilla presses in each store, products like dulce de leche and Mexican wedding cookies, and <a href="http://mitiendatx.com/">a default Spanish-language website</a>. Additionally, there’s Central Market, H-E-B’s specialty-foods store, which was launched in 1994 to appeal to a more globalized audience by offering a cross section of the cuisines that comprise an increasingly multicultural Texas, and now competes with Whole Foods; Joe V’s Smart Shop, a budget grocery brand; and Oaks Crossing, a family-friendly restaurant in one San Antonio store serving chicken-fried carne asada and brisket nachos. </p> <p id="ZMpoyY">Four years ago, H-E-B ventured into the barbecue business — the category of food that Texans are the <em>most</em> particular about (even if <a href="https://www.eater.com/2018/3/7/17081968/best-food-texas-tex-mex-barbecue">Tex-Mex is what more Texans actually eat</a>). “What is the most Texan food we can put out there?” Kristin Irvin, who is in charge of development for H-E-B’s True Texas Barbecue, asked me. “It’s barbecue.” She added that her team tasted barbecue from more than 25 different iconic Texas spots — Black’s,<strong> </strong>Franklin, and the like — to make sure that their version would pass muster. To Irvin and her team’s credit, the food I tried at a True Texas Barbecue inside a San Antonio H-E-B was pretty good — the sausage was appropriately snappy and well-spiced, the char on the brisket was just right, and even the turkey tasted impressively juicy. There are now 10 True Texas Barbecue locations spread across the state. </p> <p id="O44eMa">True Texas Barbecue was followed by another True Texas business, True Texas Tacos, which opened earlier this year in San Antonio. The restaurant, which focuses on breakfast tacos, is housed in another spin-off concept, the H-E-B Convenience Store, because eating gas station breakfast tacos is, to some, a Texas rite of passage. At True Texas Tacos, the tortillas are flour (anything else would be blasphemous) and freshly made on site. The fillings come in <em>barbacoa</em> (stewed cow’s head), <em>picadillo</em> (ground beef), and my personal favorite, a crisp slab of bacon with refried beans and cheese. </p> <p id="azF1Yn">You can also grab a Big Red, the bubble gum-flavored soda that was invented in Waco and is taken as a matter of fact to be the ideal counterpart to a smoky barbacoa taco. When an H-E-B employee found out that I had never even heard of Big Red, despite growing up less than 100 miles away from its birthplace, they immediately filled a large cup with the frighteningly red soda, and made me try it with the barbacoa taco — the combo was at first cloying, then pleasantly salty. (I probably could have done without the Big Red.) Still, I couldn’t believe that I had missed out on this allegedly quintessential Texas experience. It made me wonder: If H-E-B doesn’t do it, is it really Texan?</p> <p id="C78439">In Dallas, where I’m from, there’s no vanilla H-E-B location, a source of <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/texas/comments/8nw1fa/rant_why_is_there_no_heb_in_dallas/">extreme annoyance</a> among locals. But my family has long been devoted to Central Market, where we could buy whole spices, ghee, <em>masoor dal</em> (red lentils), and whole-wheat tortillas, which are (still) the closest approximation my mom has found to roti in any mainstream grocery store. Central Market also introduced my family to English double cream, arborio rice, and miso, broadening our palates with tastes from other cuisines. There are still sizable communities that H-E-B could do a better job of showcasing — the state’s robust immigrant populations from China and Vietnam come to mind — but it’s hard to think of another brand that’s as expansive in its vision of who and what gets to be Texan, or that comes as close to its aspirations to represent all of Texas. Whatever the future of Texas looks like, there’s a good chance it’ll show up in H-E-B.</p> <hr class="p-entry-hr" id="cqZ2Ua"/><p class="p-large-text" id="MY2nZ2"><strong>We may </strong><a href="https://www.curbed.com/a/texas-california"><strong>live in</strong> the United States of California and Texas</a>, but H-E-B has no plans to expand beyond Texas, at least in the U.S. Julie Bedingfield, an H-E-B public affairs manager, says that the company gets requests to open stores outside of Texas, mainly from Texas natives living elsewhere, “every single day.” You’d think that, in the same way that Popeyes has exported its Louisiana fried chicken across the country, H-E-B would <em>want </em>to sell its brand of Texas to people outside of the state. But H-E-B just wants to dig into its native soil even harder: Shortly after Amazon acquired Austin-based Whole Foods, H-E-B announced the creation of a tech and innovation lab in Austin, which will house its latest acquisition, a Texas-based delivery app called Favor. </p> <p id="8Ypp10">The strategy seems to be working. “I don’t really like Whole Foods after they got bought by Amazon,” an H-E-B customer in San Antonio told me. “I don’t like seeing the Amazon stuff everywhere.” With H-E-B, on the other hand, “I feel like they do things to support the community,” she added. “Many people I know, their kids work there ... I think H-E-B has earned the monopoly.” </p> <p id="ceD2Rr">The dedicated barbecue sauce aisles and the chicken-fried steak may sometimes seem a bit like Texas caricature — but whether or not every H-E-B customer connects with every Texas-adjacent item isn’t the point. It’s all just a way for H-E-B to communicate its message, loud and clear: <em>We get it. You love Texas, and so do we. </em></p> <p class="c-end-para" id="fO5SdF">I’ve noticed, living in New York, that people tend to write off Texas as a Wild West of conservatism and unruliness. Similarly, when my parents moved to Dallas from Nashua, New Hampshire in the ’90s, everyone told them they would face intense racism. Instead, we’ve all found the opposite to be true, at least where we’ve lived — Texans, on the whole, are open, honest, dedicated, and friendly. Maybe that’s why H-E-B resonates so strongly in Texas. The stores represent Texans as they<em> </em>see themselves. There is no attempt to construct a monolithic image of Texas — or even to help people outside of Texas understand Texas. H-E-B is the secret that only Texans are in on. It’s a retailer whose ethos is very clear: This is Texas — where the food is better, the people are more loyal, and the shape of our state is actually quite remarkable. <em>Y’all got any questions? </em></p> <p id="J8iole"><a href="https://twitter.com/PKgourmet"><small><em>Priya Krishna</em></small></a><small><em> is a food writer who contributes regularly to the </em></small><small>New York Times</small><small><em>, </em></small><small>Bon Appétit</small><small><em>, and other publications. Her cookbook, </em></small><a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1516589&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FIndian-ish-Recipes-Antics-Modern-American%2Fdp%2F1328482472%2Fref%3Dsr_1_1%3Fie%3DUTF8%26qid%3D1536589970%26sr%3D8-1%26keywords%3Dindianish" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><small>Indian-ish</small></a><small><em>, is out April 2019. </em></small><br/><a href="https://www.instagram.com/laurakraaydesign/"><small><em>Laura Kraay</em></small></a><small><em> is a freelance illustrator living in Austin, Texas. </em></small><br/><small><em>Fact checked by </em></small><a href="https://twitter.com/emgrill_o?lang=en"><small><em>Emma Grillo</em></small></a><br/><small><em>Copy edited by Rachel P. Kreiter</em></small></p> <aside id="YtlPqm"><div class="c-newsletter_signup_box" id="newsletter-signup-short-form" data-newsletter-slug="eater" readability="7.8834196891192"> <div class="c-newsletter_signup_box__main" readability="33"> <span class="c-newsletter_signup_box__icon"> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" version="1.1" id="Layer_1" x="0px" y="0px" viewbox="0 0 38 54.231" xml:space="preserve"><g><path d="M1,20.304v9.981v6.393c0,9.046,7.332,16.375,16.375,16.375H33.75v-11.09H17.375 c-2.914,0-5.285-2.369-5.285-5.285v-6.393h18.383v-9.981H12.09V11.09h21.66V0H1V20.304z"/></g></svg></span> <h3 class="c-newsletter_signup_box__title"> Eater.com </h3> <p class="c-newsletter_signup_box__blurb">The freshest news from the food world every day</p> </div> <div class="c-newsletter_signup_box__disclaimer" readability="8.6"> By signing up, you agree to our <a href="https://www.voxmedia.com/pages/privacy-policy">Privacy Policy</a> and European users agree to the data transfer policy. </div> </div> </aside><br/><br/>Source: https://www.eater.com/2018/12/11/18133776/heb-texas-origin-cult-following<br/><img src="https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/chef-cooking-kitchen-stove-flame-frying-pan-31742315.jpg"/><br/>

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In 2000, John McCain’s “Straight Talk Express” barreled down what has become the road not taken for the Republican Party. McCain’s 2000 bid for the GOP presidential nomination is best remembered for his irreverence in the hours he spent happily jousting with reporters on the bus while his campaign strategists abandoned any hope of controlling, much less directing, his message.

But in his insurgent campaign that year against front-runner George W. Bush, McCain also sketched an expansive and inclusive reform-oriented conservatism that harkened back to the early-20th-century vision of Theodore Roosevelt. In the process, McCain advanced a set of priorities and approaches that could still provide inspiration for the small band of Republicans looking to redirect the party from Donald Trump’s divisive and racially infused nationalism—even if McCain himself can no longer lead that fight.

McCain was never a systematic thinker and he would often roll his eyes at rivals who burnished their own agendas with grand labels (like Bill Clinton’s The New Covenant or Bush’s Compassionate Conservatism.) But in the heyday of his maverick period—roughly the decade from the middle of Clinton’s presidency through the second half of Bush’s—McCain created an ideology on the fly, through the causes and commitments he embraced.

During those peak maverick years, McCain venerated above all the notions of duty, loyalty to country that transcended partisan attachments, the cleansing of politics from the influence of special interests, and a pragmatic problem-solving ethos centered on building bipartisan consensus.

These themes powerfully echoed the arguments that Theodore Roosevelt, one of McCain’s heroes, stressed during his own presidency. Often colliding with the conservative “old guard” of the GOP during that era, Roosevelt saw government as a necessary counterweight to the growing power of business and sought to transcend the growing tensions between labor and business, native-born and immigrants, city and country, with resonant appeals to the mutual obligations and shared interests of all Americans. “We are all Americans,” Roosevelt insisted in one speech. “Our common interests are as broad as the continent.”

During the years that bookended the 2000 campaign, McCain embodied those same sentiments. “McCain’s hero is Theodore Roosevelt and they have much in common, a willingness to take maverick stances against Wall Street and big business interests and promoting local communities and the military and civic groups over the shell game of billionaires, outsourcing and the like: Everything about him is really a TR maverick,” historian Douglas Brinkley, who has written extensively about Theodore Roosevelt, told me. “Roosevelt and McCain didn’t believe that the business of America is business; they think of it being about civic duty.”

Roosevelt didn’t always uphold his ideal of a government that transcended “sectional or personal advantage”: He resisted many of the steps that more left-leaning progressives considered necessary to check the power of the expanding corporate behemoths or to promote labor, and at times he bent much too far toward his era’s backlash against large-scale immigration. Neither was McCain immune to the demands of partisan loyalties in an increasingly polarized era: He voted to convict Bill Clinton and remove him from office on both articles of impeachment in 1999. And McCain’s hawkish approach to foreign policy—capped by his unswerving support for the Iraq War—alienated many centrists and liberals drawn to his iconoclastic views on domestic issues.

But during his high maverick years, McCain displayed an unmatched willingness to cross his own party, and to partner with Democrats on tough issues. McCain was never a master of legislative minutiae; details, particularly on domestic policy, bored him. (Among the most futile hours of my life was an attempt to coax him into comparing his approaches to education, entitlement, and health-care reform with Bush’s ideas in an interview during the 2000 campaign.) He operated with the swagger of the fighter pilot he had been, maneuvering more by reflex than reflection. But he recognized, particularly after his meteoric 2000 race, that he had established an unparalleled brand for independence and authenticity that invested great credibility in the causes he cared about. And, over a decade or so of concentrated productivity, he used that credibility to advance a succession of bipartisan achievements.

McCain was the keystone in partnerships with Democrats that led to the passage of the Patient’s Bill of Rights in 2001, campaign-finance legislation (with the Democrat Russ Feingold) in 2002, and, in partnership with Edward M. Kennedy, comprehensive immigration reform (including a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented) that cleared the Senate in 2006. (House Republicans ultimately refused to consider the bill.) He led major bipartisan Senate coalitions that sought to combat teen smoking under Clinton and reduce the carbon emissions linked to global climate change under Bush; conservative resistance eventually blocked both efforts. He helped to broker the 2005 agreement that (temporarily) preserved the filibuster for judicial appointments, while clearing a backlog of stalled GOP nominees.

Even in national security, McCain led the bipartisan effort that in 2005 banned the Bush administration from using torture. And for good measure, McCain voted against both the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, on the grounds that each was too heavily tilted toward the rich and would open too large a hole in the federal budget. “He is the ultimate reform Republican,” says Brinkley, “but that means he never found a home within the conservative movement, in the same way TR never did.”

During many of these initiatives, McCain’s Democratic partner was Kennedy (who, ironically, died from the same aggressive brain cancer that took McCain.) Both were tough, funny, and thick-skinned: Both believed an opponent today could be an ally tomorrow. And they shared a belief that seems almost quaint now: that the point of the Senate, of Washington, of government, was to find solutions to the country’s big problems. Unlike a growing number of his Republican colleagues, McCain never accepted the contention, immortalized by the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, that the most important thing government could do was “leave us alone.”

Like Kennedy, McCain was “an institutionalist,” noted Stephanie Cutter, Kennedy’s longtime communications director. “They believed in the Senate. This is an anathema today. Nobody works like this anymore. They were probably the last great partnership.”

The pragmatic, alliance-building McCain was most on display in his 2000 campaign. He began the race as a long shot, far behind Bush, who, as the son of a former president and the governor of the second-largest state, started with massive advantages in money, organization, and name identification. But McCain pounded his message of reform (particularly in campaign finance), duty to country, and non-ideological problem solving through an endless procession of town halls in snowy New Hampshire towns and shocked Bush with a decisive victory in the first-in-the-nation primary there. (I was having lunch on the day of the vote with members of the Bush high command, including the top strategist Karl Rove, who abruptly left the table, ashen faced, as the first exit poll results trickled in.)

With that New Hampshire win, McCain’s “straight talk express” blasted such a hole in Bush’s defenses that the shaken front-runner was forced to rechristen himself as a “Reformer with Results,” in an attempt to take back some of the ground his challenger had seized.

After reinforcing those defenses, Bush mostly ran at McCain from the right in the next critical contest: a scorched-earth South Carolina primary that remains the most riveting political race I have ever covered. Both men inspired massive turnouts over nearly three weeks of gripping campaigning. But Bush ultimately posted a solid victory, setting the template he would follow as he bested McCain through most of the remaining contests: Bush dominated the senator among conservatives, white evangelical Christians, and self-identified partisan Republicans by questioning his commitment to conservative causes (like cutting taxes). Yet even as Bush marched toward the nomination, McCain consistently beat him among moderate and independent voters.

The 2000 campaign model of McCain, like his work in the Senate just before and after that race, presented an ideological hybrid that blended traditional GOP positions on some key issues (such as opposition to abortion and an indivisibly hawkish posture on national security) with the less doctrinaire approaches that allowed him to partner with Democrats in Congress and appeal so heavily to independents in the electorate. “It was an interesting attempt to try to create an anti-D.C., pro-reform coalition on top of a conservative party, by John being strong on defense, right-to-life, and terrific on the [limiting federal] spending stuff,” one of his senior strategists at the time recalled to me last week.

In retrospect, McCain’s 2000 campaign may have represented the last off-ramp for the GOP on the road toward the confrontational and tribal conservatism that has transformed the party over nearly the past two decades. After veering right against McCain, Bush turned back to the center (at least thematically) in the 2000 general election. But in office he governed in a much more partisan manner—even before the Iraq War—and ultimately built his reelection strategy by maximizing turnout among an increasingly militant Republican base (around such issues as banning gay marriage).

By the time McCain ran for president again in 2008, he had grown more isolated in a Republican Party dominated by its most conservative and combative voices. To win the nomination on his second try, McCain was forced to renounce several of his earlier heresies from conservative orthodoxy, particularly his opposition to tax cuts and support for immigration reform. McCain’s vice-presidential choice captured how deeply his impulses were conflicted by that point: When a threatened revolt on the convention floor convinced him to reluctantly abandon his initial idea of running on a unity ticket with Joe Lieberman, the former Democrat then serving as an independent senator from Connecticut, McCain impulsively veered to former Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, a combative conservative populist who helped to cut the mold for Trump’s later politics of cultural and racial grievance.

All of this positioned McCain as a much more conventional Republican than in 2000, which left him highly vulnerable in the general election to the discontent with Bush, the outgoing Republican president. Yet McCain never entirely surrendered to the rising current of partisan confrontation. When a woman at a town hall questioned the loyalty to America of his opponent Barack Obama (and described him as an “Arab”), McCain forcefully shut her down. Country over party was not just a slogan to him.

With the rise of the Tea Party movement, the GOP further radicalized during Obama’s presidency, shrinking the audience even more for the bipartisan consensus-building McCain had earlier championed. McCain’s own enthusiasm for building bridges also palpably waned with his 2008 opponent in the Oval Office. During Obama’s two terms, McCain functioned more as a conventional conservative Republican than ever before, partly from personal pique, partly because he faced rising conservative resistance at home in Arizona. (Conservatives mounted serious primary challenges against him in both 2010 and 2016.)

Still, even then, he joined the “gang of eight” that again passed comprehensive, bipartisan immigration reform (including a pathway to citizenship) through the Senate in 2013, before the Republican-controlled House once more refused to consider it.

The ascent of Trump, who openly mocked McCain during the 2016 primaries, culminated the Senator’s isolation in the party—but also helped him recover his independent voice. Trump, with his preening self-absorption, open appeals to white racial resentment, and feral attacks on any institution or individual he believes can threaten him, negated all the ideals McCain had espoused at every stage of his career.

Repeatedly, McCain warned of the risks Trump presented to the founding principles not only of the GOP, but the country itself. McCain’s critical vote to block Trump and the vast majority of GOP legislators from repealing the Affordable Care Act on a party-line vote was a powerful statement against the growing sectarianism of modern politics. But now it looks like McCain’s final statement.

Yet even if McCain himself is no longer available to lead the internal Republican resistance to Trump, he bequeaths those critics a usable past. McCain’s 2000 campaign, with its message of reform, duty, and unity that demonstrated a powerful appeal to less-partisan voters, offers the party a potential path to electoral success that does not abandon conservative principles but also does not rely on the divisiveness, vitriol, and racial antagonism integral to Trump’s strategy.

It may be that since 2000, the GOP’s evolution into a party centered on white unease over demographic and social change has advanced too far for a McCain-style message to win a nominating primary. But those hoping to free the Republican Party from Trump’s grip won’t find a better place to start than reclaiming the commitment to service, civility, and civic obligation that defined John McCain’s incredible life.

Editor’s note: The Atlantic senior editor Ronald Brownstein has covered John McCain since his election to the House of Representatives in 1982. His wife served as the communications director in McCain’s Senate office for part of George W. Bush’s second term.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2Lzdjn2