Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Happy indictment week to all who celebrate!

Take your GOP plan out of the witness protection program.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

“I never thought they’d lock HIM up,” sobbed a distraught member of the Lock Her Up Party.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

White supremacy is terrorism.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

You are here: Home / Politics / Domestic Politics / Friday Night Open Thread: Cen(sus)-ual Surprises

Friday Night Open Thread: Cen(sus)-ual Surprises

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In a less crowded era, this would get a proper sercon slot during the day, but then again…


And that trick might actually work, for some older ‘Hispanics’, say. But this is the 21st century, when The Youngs are busily curating their identities into ever-more-exclusive slices:

Reader Interactions

105Comments

  2. 2.

    Mousebumples

    I’m not sure if we’ll learn what actually happened with regards to the census, but I’d love if Trumps attempt at fucking it over meant more Dem leaning House districts….

  3. 3.

    Renie

    Not sure how “open” this thread is but I’ve been reading The Devil’s Chessboard by David Talbot.  It’s primarily about Alan Dulles and his brother Foster Dulles.  Alan was CIA head during Eisenhower and part of Kennedy and Foster was Secy of State during Eisenhower.   The atrocities the CIA did under this Dulles is mind boggling all mostly based on the fear of ‘communism’ taking over.  Being in my 60s I don’t recall these events in real time but have heard of various situations over the years. Yet reading them in a book one after the other, I just can’t stop shaking my head.  These guys at the CIA were truly the “Deep State”, running their own operations with no accountability or consequences.  Makes me wonder how much of this shit continues today and wondering what future generations will think of what we allowed to happen.  Fascinating reading while at the same time maddening.

  4. 4.

    Roger Moore

    It would be amazing if Trump’s attempts to delegitimize the census wound up turning around and biting the Republicans in the ass.  It would be an even bigger self-own than undermining the Senate elections in Georgia.

  5. 5.

    different-church-lady

    The new census data, all told, is *exceptional* for Democrats:

    Of course, the way LGM played this is, “Soon the Senate will have 70 votes for 128 white people” or something like that.

    I am Middle Eastern. Not White.

    I’m literally half Syrian. A few years ago a conversation with a friend went like this:
    ME: “I’m nominally Caucasian”
    FRIEND: “Arab is white”
    ME, NOT WANTING TO HAVE A FIGHT: “Oh. Okay.”

  7. 7.

    Another Scott

    Really enjoying all these articles about what the 2020 census reveals about the changing class composition of the United States.

    Oh, wait…

    — Adam Rothman (@arothmanhistory) August 13, 2021

    Yup.

    There’s a mountain of good, important data in the census. Reducing it to, easy, quick, hot takes about race and then moving on is not a good thing.

    THIS!!!!! Race divisions dominate the census, while class divisions are getting no attention at all. Reinforces the very narrative Trump wanted. https://t.co/QrmoQjY0Jm

    — Heather Cox Richardson (TDPR) (@HC_Richardson) August 13, 2021

    That danger is there, yes. We have to be aware of the framing, and what it means.

    (via nycsouthpaw)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  8. 8.

    Chris

    The new census data, all told, is *exceptional* for Democrats: 1) depopulation of red rural counties everywhere 2) rapid growth of increasingly Democratic suburbs means Dems are now more efficiently spread and harder to pack into a few deep blue district

    God, I hope it all pans out.

    I kind of agree with Ta-Nehisi Coates that we’re just going to redefine “white” to include more people, because it’s not an ethnicity so much as a cartel of ethnicities.

    I don’t disagree, but in order for that to work, the current Racist Native-Born White demographic needs to loosen up on the fucking racism just enough to be able to welcome those new groups into the fold.

  9. 9.

    artem1s

    It’s been a long slow slog towards finally counting ourselves in more realistic ways. For too long American’s had pretty much three choices when being counted by the census, native American, white or not-white.  Back in 2000, I think it was, the census started allowing people to identify as more than one race.  Ever since then the US population has gotten a lot more interesting.  I always envied my friends whose family culture wasn’t defined by what advertisers thought they should look like or buy in a mall. I’ve never understood people who aspire to be as homogenous as possible.

  10. 10.

    schrodingers_cat

    @different-church-lady: Not white, not black and don’t like the People of Color descriptor. I am an immigrant from Mumbai, India. I have lived in the United States longer than I have in India. This quest to flatten identities so that they fit into neat boxes diminishes real live human beings and their experiences.

  11. 11.

    Gin & Tonic

    I don’t want to be that guy, but he was Allen Dulles, and his brother was John Foster Dulles.

    N.B. “Open thread” means open thread. Anything is fair game.

  14. 14.

    different-church-lady

    @schrodingers_cat: I agree, but it’s complicated. For years I’ve been trying to figure out how to reconcile the humanistic urge to have complete transparency about race, yet also acknowledge that recognizing it is the only way to make up for decades and centuries of systemic oppression. And I still have no answer for the quandary.

  15. 15.

    Chris

    @Renie:

    Been meaning to get to that book soon.

    LGM’s “American Grave” series recently visited John Foster Dulles’ grave, whom Loomis commented as the ultimate messianic Cold Warrior: “all he could see was communism.”

    … which isn’t completely wrong, but to me undersells how much of a vulture-capitalist scumbag he and his brother were.  In Guatemala, they weren’t just intervening to protect capitalism generically, they were intervening to boost the profits of a company whose board of directors they personally sat on.  Ditto the Iran coup, which opened up the country to American oil companies whose owners I’m sure they were BFFs with.  The Dulles always struck me as being much less ideological and much more shamelessly venal.

    Real scumabags, in any event.

  18. 18.

    Chris

    @different-church-lady:

    Of course, the way LGM played this is, “Soon the Senate will have 70 votes for 128 white people” or something like that.

    I mean, yeah, that is a concern.  The American system is rigged in such a way that what people do remain in the rural areas are only going to have more and more of a disproportionate voice in the system as they empty out.  We just have to hope suburban growth is enough to offset that.

    I’m literally half Syrian. A few years ago a conversation with a friend went like this:
    ME: “I’m nominally Caucasian”
    FRIEND: “Arab is white”
    ME, NOT WANTING TO HAVE A FIGHT: “Oh. Okay.”

    Heh.  One of my closest friends here is Jewish and similarly doesn’t consider herself white.  One of her strongest arguments for this is the fact that she’s regularly mistaken for Arab by Arabs when traveling in the Middle East.  Would probably make her very sad to know that Arabs, too, are considered white in some quarters.

  20. 20.

    Anonymous At Work

    Depopulating red and rural states only works up to the point where they have 3 electoral votes, like MT, WY, ND, SD, AK.  ID has 1 congressional seat it can lose, Nebraska has 2 and a ton of Southern states have 3.  That’s about it.

    Oh, and the Senate. Cough Cough Sinema and Manchin Cough

  21. 21.

    Chris

    @schrodingers_cat:

    Well, just to be a pedant, Native Americans might contest that title.

    But they’re pretty much the only demographic that can reasonably make that claim, so, yeah.

  23. 23.

    Kent

    I don’t know if the demographic trends are all good for Democrats.  I’m not a demographer.  But I can visualize how long-term even dark red plains states could flip when enough old white people die off in the rural parts of those states and an increasingly young and diverse population takes over in the cities, such as they are.  Iowa, for example, has a shrinking old white rural population, and a growing younger and more diverse population in the cities like Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, etc.  Those are all blue oases in a sea of Red.

    Same with Nebraska.  If Omaha keeps growing and the rest of the state keeps shrinking pretty much purple/blue Omaha and Lincoln will be all that is left.  Even in South Dakota, Sioux Falls is a light blue island.

    We are talking about a generational shift, but it will come I suspect.  Many of those red state cities could turn into mini Portland or Austins.

  24. 24.

    Chris

    @schrodingers_cat:

    Ha!

    The moral is that human beings are terrible at racial profiling.

    One of my high school classmates was from La Réunion, white father and black mother.  She’d been mistaken for Mexican, Haitian, and Laotian, including by natives of all three countries.  Go figure.

  26. 26.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Chris: My family is from the west coast of India. There have been trade routes from the west coast to the rest of the world from the time of Mesopotamian civilization.

    We are all more alike than different is also the moral of the story.

  28. 28.

    jimmiraybob

    Speaking of Gerrymandering, is there any way that the data that is being obtained by the AZ fraudit is designed to get info to aid drawing redistricting lines?

  33. 33.

    Brachiator

    rapid growth of increasingly Democratic suburbs means Dems are now more efficiently spread and harder to pack into a few deep blue districts

    My cynical side says this will lead to more creative gerrymandering.

    From the WaPo

    Our latest lets you explore, for any neighborhood in the U.S., how the population breaks down along race and ethnicity lines in 2020, and how that has changed in the last 30 years.

    The categories for Hispanic, Asian and multi-racial really don’t mean very much. Or rather, there is a lot of detail embedded here as countries of origin have shifted. I don’t think there has been a lot of growth in the Japanese American population in recent years, just based on casual observations in California.

    How are immigrants from the Middle East categorized?

    Lots of fun for demographers.

    ETA. Just on a basic human level, I think the current generation, like every other before it, just becomes American, despite all the feverish nightmares of fools and idiots. The other day at a local McDonald’s, I noticed a young Asian American kid dressed up like his favorite hero, Superman, and enjoying his Happy Meal.

  34. 34.

    Starfish

    @different-church-lady: This is a topic that I wanted to discuss! Dalia Azim wrote an opinion column called I am Middle Eastern. Not White.

    One of the Iranian folks on Twitter went about correcting this saying that the category is more correctly South West Asian and North African (SWANA.) People are turning their back on the term Middle Eastern because that was basically something that came from some European colonizer. Who decided we were the middle? Middle of what?

    As a people, the SWANA category of people are the ones where the first generation may see themselves as white, but all of the post 9/11 nonsense has made a lot of us feel definitely not white.

  37. 37.

    Brachiator

    @Anonymous At Work:

    Census and Congress

    Based on the official counts of the 2020 census, Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, California, and West Virginia will each lose one seat, Texas will gain two seats, and Florida, North Carolina, Colorado, Oregon, and Montana will each gain one seat.

  38. 38.

    Cermet

    @schrodingers_cat: Not really; native americans have suffered far more but certainly, African americans are a too close second. We (whites) most certainly did do massive genocide upon millions of native americans; then forced them into extremely worthless lands (and forced them to live only on hand outs) and have kept most of them that way to this day.

  39. 39.

    Lyrebird

    @different-church-lady: FRIEND: “Arab is white”

    I can’t speak from first hand experience, but what I have heard from Arab friends is that they sure don’t get treated as white going through airport security checks.  Especially with any kind of Muslim name.

     

    ETA: not saying that unequal treatment at the airport is right, of course!

  43. 43.

    Jeffro

    Btw, one odd consequence of the census report is (and I am not kidding here) it makes me want to write a short story where there are three white people left in Wyoming: One liberal, one conservative, and one squish in the middle that they drive nuts trying to win over to their side for the sake of two Senate seats and a House seat.

    i’m already laughing at the possibilities here

  45. 45.

    Roger Moore

    @different-church-lady:

    The way the census deals with race is proof enough that it is a social construct.  We have a very limited number of check boxes because those boxes represent arbitrary categories TPTB in this country decided to lump people into, not because they make any kind of real sense.  Seriously, lumping people from China and India into the same box makes no sense; we do it as a relic of the way European colonialists saw the world.

  46. 46.

    Brachiator

    @Chris:

    I don’t disagree, but in order for that to work, the current Racist Native-Born White demographic needs to loosen up on the fucking racism just enough to be able to welcome those new groups into the fold

    This has been standard operating procedure in America. Prior to the first world war, white ethnics were often seen as lesser compared to English descended Mayflower types. italians, Irish, Hungarians, etc were seen as separate. But soon after these were just “white people.”

    Also, even though some white people, including some liberals, insist on labeling Hispanic folk as people of color, many Hispanics see themselves as white, based on the standards of their own backgrounds.

  47. 47.

    Renie

    @Chris: Yes so much was a combination of ‘communism’ and protecting profits of corporations in which they or their clients from Sullivan & Cromwell had interests in.

  48. 48.

    jnfr

    One thing I noticed in the charts by race is the rise over time of a small but noticeable “other” that included multiracial people or who maybe identify outside the usual categories.

    Also noticed that in addition to “non-Hispanic white” there was some data labeled “non-Hispanic black” which I think is an admission that Hispanic is more than “a race” as we usually think of Black and white people. Same for Asian really, it’s a commingling of different countries and ethnicities.

  49. 49.

    piratedan

    @jimmiraybob: no… az has a legislatively mandated independent comission responsible for congressional districts… the state lege is another story.

  51. 51.

    Renie

    @Jeffro:  No I haven’t read Ellroy and as I said I had heard of many of the CIA doings over the years but to read these incidents one after another is something else.  Not sure if you asking me if I have read about history is suppose to be sarcastic or not but it doesn’t add much to the conversation esp since we just had a lurker open thread where that type of comment was one of the reasons lurkers hold back from commenting at all.

  53. 53.

    Roger Moore

    @Brachiator: ​

    Just on a basic human level, I think the current generation, like every other before it, just becomes American, despite all the feverish nightmares of fools and idiots.

    Absolutely. Assimilation has never happened overnight, but it has always happened. And children who are born here or are brought up here become just as American as their classmates whose families have been here since the Mayflower.
    I think the thing that really upsets people who complain about lack of assimilation is that it does happen, but that it goes both ways. Immigrants adopt American culture, but they change it in the process. To a bigot who believes in racial purity and all that nonsense, that has to be the scariest thing of all.

  54. 54.

    gwangung

    Just on a basic human level, I think the current generation, like every other before it, just becomes American, despite all the feverish nightmares of fools and idiots. The other day at a local McDonald’s, I noticed a young Asian American kid dressed up like his favorite hero, Superman, and enjoying his Happy Meal.

    Kinda obvious to me, but then again, I’ve seen this happen with three generations of Asian Americans.

    (Add the obligatory reminder that these are to a great extent politically constructed identities to gain more power, coalitions and clout. That’s the whole thing about Third World PeoplePeople of Color BIPOCpeople of the global majority terminology.)

  56. 56.

    guachi

    I’ve been playing around with that WaPo link to the changes in the Census data for HOURS. It has data down to the Census district. You can compare data from 2020 and 1990. The only real negative is that “mixed race” wasn’t a choice in 1990.

    E.g. on the changes – the tract in Philadelphia where my father was born in 1947 (in Port Richmond. Quite poor) was 99% white 30 years ago. 78% now. Change mostly Hispanic from 0% to 12%.

    Tract I lived at in Laurel, MD from 2008-2013 – 87% to 19% white from ’90-’20. 6% to 51% Black.

  57. 57.

    gwangung

    @Roger Moore:Seriously, lumping people from China and India into the same box makes no sense; we do it as a relic of the way European colonialists saw the world.

    Ah, typical white person action, trying to take credit for the work of non-white people. We did it ourselves, purposefully, to gain numbers and clout. (I oughta know…while I wasn’t in the room where it happened, I was just outside).

  58. 58.

    Kayla Rudbek

    @Kristine: yes, I’m frantically reading this because it’s an overdue 14-day loan, new book, no renewals allowed.  Mr. Rudbek had it on one of his dressers in the bedroom and I looked all over the house for it.

  60. 60.

    Roger Moore

    @Starfish:

    Who decided we were the middle? Middle of what?

    It’s a very European, even Western European, outlook.  They looked east and divided it into three parts: Near, Middle, and Far.  The Near East was basically the parts of Europe that had been under Ottoman control, mostly the Balkans.  The Middle East were the Muslim parts of Asia, or maybe just the parts where they still speak Arabic.  The Far East was everything further east than that.

  61. 61.

    RSA

    From census.gov:

    We ask a question about a person’s race to create statistics about race and to present other estimates by race groups.

    Local, state, tribal, and federal programs use these data, and they are critical factors in the basic research behind numerous policies, particularly for civil rights. Race data are used in planning and funding government programs that provide funds or services for specific groups.

    These data are also used to evaluate government programs and policies to ensure that they fairly and equitably serve the needs of all racial groups and to monitor compliance with antidiscrimination laws, regulations, and policies.

    I’m oversimplifying, but it seems to me that the modern census asks about race as a check on systemic, unjust discrimination—basically, bigotry that’s ingrained in government and society. It happens that bigotry runs along racial, ethnic, and religious lines (though the census no longer asks about religion, since the 1950s), and we can’t tell if we’re making progress unless we measure it. But the categories we try to measure are fluid, even hard to define. For example, race categories have changed over time, and people may only partially belong to specific categories; whenever we talk about representation and under-representation, a lot depends on how finely we slice up the distinctions.

    I don’t know if there’s a good solution.

  63. 63.

    David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch

    The share of the white population fell from 63.7% in 2010 to 57.8%

    A WHOPPING drop of 6 percent.

    Everything Dump touches dies.

  64. 64.

    Felanius Kootea

    @jnfr: When I gather data from patients for NIH-funded research, it is close to impossible to get Latino patients to fill out the racial categories the way the NIH would like us to report back.

    The NIH has a separate category for ethnicity (Hispanic or Latino vs non-Hispanic or Latino) and then race (American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and White).  95% of the Latino patients leave the racial category blank after filling out ethnicity.  My husband jokes that it’s difficult to put down white, when you don’t get the benefits, and there is no racial category called “mestizo” which is what he considers himself, so he just leaves race blank, like many Latinos do.

  65. 65.

    Jeffro

    @Renie: well, taking offense quickly to a pithy comment is, I guess, a time-honored BJ tradition, so you’re in good company, no need to retreat to lurking.  =)

    There’s a lot of info (as well as great fictional takes like Ellroy’s) out there about all the G-men and spooks who were running amok between the end of WW II and, oh, now.  It’s beyond amazing.

  66. 66.

    The Moar You Know

    White folks not having kids?  What a shock.  Cut the legs out from under the middle class and the inevitable result will be greeted with the inevitable response from the usual suspects, blaming liberals, selfishness, birth control and abortion for the only rational response to being dumped into poverty.   Won’t surprise me even a little if, in the next census, there’s even fewer and the cause is emigration.   I’d leave this shithole country in a second if I could.

  67. 67.

    Roger Moore

    @jnfr:

    Also noticed that in addition to “non-Hispanic white” there was some data labeled “non-Hispanic black” which I think is an admission that Hispanic is more than “a race” as we usually think of Black and white people.

    To the census, Hispanic is a yes/no question separate from the racial category.  This has been true for as long as they’ve been asking about it.  It’s just that now there are enough Hispanics, and people are paying careful enough attention to them, that those kinds of distinctions matter.

  68. 68.

    Roger Moore

    @gwangung: ​
     
    Classifying people as Asian is something the Census Bureau started doing back in the 19th Century, and it was used as an excuse to exclude people long before it became something used to unite people for political power.

  69. 69.

    Starfish

    @Chris: Jewishness like the whole SWANA category is also very strange. There are Black people who are Jewish, and they really feel that they are erased in a lot of conversations about race.

  70. 70.

    Chris

    @Brachiator:

    Totally.  But that’s the thing; those Irish, Italians, and Hungarians might have been happy to ditch their “hyphenated” status, but that wasn’t going to happen in say the 1920s, when the WASPs were literally resurrecting the KKK and marching across the country going “Jews [or Irish or Italians or Hungarians] will not replace us!”  Had to wait until the 1960s and 1970s, when the WASPs had lightened up quite a bit (even allowed an Irish-Catholic president!) for those groups to come together.

    Right now, as best I can tell, most Latinos are in the same place that the “white ethnics” were in in the 1920s – not the 1960s.  Through no fault of their own.  The native-born have to change their attitudes before assimilation can happen.

  72. 72.

    Brachiator

    @Another Scott:

    THIS!!!!! Race divisions dominate the census, while class divisions are getting no attention at all. Reinforces the very narrative Trump wanted.

    I am not sure that class ever meant very much in America. If you have a pile of money, you are ok no matter how you got it.

    And class gets more muddled in the transition from a manufacturing to a service economy.

  74. 74.

    Starfish

    @Roger Moore: I just read a book on second generation Iranian American identity called The Limit of Whiteness, and it said that Iranian Americans are the hinges on which whiteness swings.

    Under US law, we are considered white. Armenian Americans have gone to court laying their claim on whiteness on being whiter than Iranians. Parsi Indians have claimed whiteness based on being related to Iranians.

    Though first generation Iranian Americans may see themselves as white, a lot of second generation Iranian Americans, especially in the post September 11, 2001 era see themselves as non-white due to the rampant Islamophobia.

    There was probably some Indian American girl in high school on some television show and someone made fun of her mustache, and dealing with that type of nonsense was the experience of a lot of people.

  76. 76.

    Chris

    @Roger Moore:

    The thing is, immigration kind of selects for assimilation right off the bat.  The kind of foreigners who are willing to put their whole life behind them and come to a new country are practically predisposed to want to love their new country and be accepted by it.

    After that, the generations that are born in America, well, they’re basically American by definition.  The environment is going to shape you far more than that of an Old Country you’ve never actually lived in.

  77. 77.

    Chris

    @RSA:

    I was a census enumerator in 2010, and I remember a lot of black and Latino people who simply refused to fill it out (we can’t, of course, force anyone to do so).  And I really can’t say I blame them; we’re handing them a form with literally five questions, and the only thing we’re asking other than name, address, and date of birth, is “what’s your race” and “are you Hispanic/Latino?”  Of course a lot of people are going to go “uhhh…  Why is that literally the only thing you care about?”

  78. 78.

    Chris

    @NotMax:

    He’s also written All The Shah’s Men, generally considered the go-to book about the 1953 Iran coup, which I recommend.

  79. 79.

    James E Powell

    @Brachiator:

    Prior to the first world war, white ethnics were often seen as lesser compared to English descended Mayflower types. Italians, Irish, Hungarians, etc were seen as separate.

    I’ve known WASPS who still consider those other Euros – especially the Catholic ones – as the lower strata of the white race.

  80. 80.

    Another Scott

    @Roger Moore:

    And then there’s “oriental”. E.g. The Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago:

    The Oriental Institute was founded in 1919 by James Henry Breasted with the financial support of John D. Rockefeller Jr., and was originally envisaged as a research laboratory for the investigation of the early human career that would trace humankind’s progress from the most ancient days of the Middle East. The goal of the Oriental Institute is to be the world’s leading center for the study of ancient Near Eastern civilizations by combining innovation in theory, methodology, and significant empirical discovery with the highest standards of rigorous scholarship.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  81. 81.

    Brachiator

    @Roger Moore:

    Classifying people as Asian is something the Census Bureau started doing back in the 19th Century, and it was used as an excuse to exclude people long before it became something used to unite people for political power.

    This wasn’t just the Census Bureau. It was immigration law. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 specifically singled out a specific ethnic group, not Asians in general. The earlier Page Act (1875) banned Chinese women from immigrating to this country.

    The courts later twisted itself into knots to justify discrimination against East Indians without legally classifying them as “Negro” or “colored.”

    The history of racism in America is both ludicrous and horrific.

  82. 82.

    NotMax

    Was going to let it pass without highlighting, but this paragraph buried at the bottom of an article has been bothering me more and more each time I read it.

    [Trump’s] personal lawyers argued that Congress has the power to issue subpoenas only for the purpose of writing laws. The demands for Trump’s documents, they said, were instead an effort to conduct investigations, not to legislate. Simply claiming that the information might lead to changing existing laws could not transform a law enforcement effort into a law-making one, they said. Source

    What an astonishing and patently ahistorical leap of illogic. By that Bizarro world argument, for example, the Watergate hearings were an invalid exercise of Congressional authority.

  83. 83.

    the pollyanna from hell

    If tucker asks me i’m going to explain that whites haven’t actually diminished, but nobody wants to claim it now since he and his supremicist friends have made it a label so odious.

  85. 85.

    lurker

    [Posting this here because anyone who is thinking that a recall in CA would be good needs to consider we got lucky last time.  If someone wants this to go on the front-page, WG knows how to reach me and I can work with someone on that. This replies to a comment in a prior thread.]

    @dr. bloor: the right (wrong) person or someone in that vein could do plenty of damage.  This is not an experiment we want to try.

    When Gray Davis was recalled, he managed to combine a bunch of bad circumstances with personal unpopularity and a little too much ruthlessness.  We got lucky with Schwarzenegger, as he was not a real republican.  (It is a little hard to type that, but not the first time I have had to reckon with that sentiment.)

    Regarding Davis:

    • There was a DMV fee increase that made sense but was a great rallying cry for those who needed an excuse.
    • There were rolling blackouts caused by a power market and system that pre-dated him, where PG&E and our old buddies from Enron and other TX-based power brokers decided to game the system and screw things up.  Anyone who looked at the market and regulations could see how to game the system, but some moderate restraint had kept anyone from making things so bad that we got rolling blackouts before that summer. PG&E has always had problems, but their execs at the time seemed to be particularly tone-deaf.
    • Davis had intervened in the Republican primary overtly enough that he basically chose his opponent and did not really try to hide it.  He got someone who was easier to beat, and who was convinced of their own merit, but it just riled up the Republicans even more as a result.
    • Davis was also just a bland politician in general, with that magnified by the press.  He was the first Controller of CA to really try to trumpet that position as a way to raise his personal profile.  So he managed to look a little classless without having much panache to back it up.  Made pretty good technocratic decisions and bored everyone.  Think of someone attempting to self-promote ala the former guy, without enough animal cunning or charisma to pull it off, and with enough smarts to realize he should not really go too far down that road.  So it failed for him.

     

    Regarding Arnold, he had some of the fiscal responsibility ideas and wanted to get the politics out of politics, but for all that he is at least somewhat intelligent (not as dumb as he looks or sounds, especially in some movies), he was out of his depth as a politician.

    • He had to make deals with Democrats in the state legislature to do any legislation.
    • He generally did not pursue policies advocated by the right wing, partly, I suspect, due to growing up in a more progressive Austria relative to the hardcore parts of Republican California.
    • He did largely appoint R judges, some much better than others, and his judge appointments were not completely partisan (they rarely are in CA).  His appointment as chief justice of the CA Supreme Court eventually left the party a couple years ago publicly over Trump.

    Someone else in that position who was more rabidly partisan, or just more interested in a Machiavellian approach to power would be much worse.  The legislature they would be dealing with would have a stronger check on him, as the legislature is currently 2/3+ D in both houses (veto-proof).  But just having a really bad executive, well, we saw what having the former guy was like, and I think we all know that a more intelligent and self-controlled sociopath would be even worse.  Even Kevin McCarthy would be worse, and he really seems to be an idiot, as does Devin Nunes who hails from near there.  Faulconer had a more moderate record as SD mayor, but that is a purple area of the state with a long history of conservative Rs, such as former Governor Pete Wilson, who attempted to ride the anti-immigrant wave of the 90s in CA to the White House.  It was pretty red for a long time, and only recently trended purple.  It is not blue.

    Like I said, not an experiment we want to try.

  89. 89.

    Brachiator

    @James E Powell:

    I’ve known WASPS who still consider those other Euros – especially the Catholic ones – as the lower strata of the white race.

    This is true, but the trend during and after WW1 was to increase folding European ethnic groups into whiteness. In both the US and Britain, anti-German sentiment caused people of German descent, including the British royal family, to shed their German roots and just become English or American. German Americans started naming their sons Donald.

    The movement of African Americans from the South to Northern cities made it more important to single out white from not white. Some unions would accept you if you were Irish, but not if you were black.

    A local talk radio host noted that back in the day, some of his Polish Catholic relatives opposed his marrying an Italian Catholic woman.

    He also noted that some of his relatives never learned to speak English well and were content to live in a Polish American enclave, but saw themselves as white people.

    All kinds of shades of bigotry.

  90. 90.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Sean T at RCP @SeanTrende 2h
    I don’t know that there is much more that we realistically could have done in Afghanistan, but it’s just really sad to watch this if you’re old enough to remember ink-stained fingers, Karzai in his cool hat, and the general air of hopefulness that once prevailed there.

    I remember ink-stained fingers (wasn’t it fashionable for people like Andrew Sullivan to post pictures of themselves with purple thumbs?), I remember the jaunty angle of Karzai’s hat. I do not remember a “general air of hopefulness” ever prevailing everywhere except among the Keyboard Commandos.

  92. 92.

    JaySinWa

    @James E Powell: Here’s a link to the program and transcript. I am not sure why @Poe Larity: thinks it’s exceptional:

    https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/what-should-the-us-role-in-afghanistan-be-now

    excerpt:

    • William Brangham:

      Andrew Bacevich, the Biden administration has been making the argument, it seems, for a while that the Afghan army and the Afghan government have the tools they needed to at least hold the Taliban back, if not repel them and to stop this kind of a surge.

      Is that a fair criticism of the Afghan government, that it’s a leadership and a will, a failure of those things, that’s gotten us to today?

    • Col. Andrew Bacevich:

      I think it’s very fair.

      It’s too late for airstrikes. We need to look at the 20-year experience of the American war. We tried to do two things. Number one, we tried to create a legitimate government that would command the loyalty of have the Afghan people, and we tried to create effective military forces that could provide for the defense of the Afghan nation-state.

      All the evidence shows that we failed on both counts. And I think the beginning of wisdom is to understand the reality of that failure and then, yes, to do as Lisa suggested, to take seriously our responsibility to contain the fallout. And the fallout, in particular, relates to the suffering of those who supported us and the suffering of innocents who now are a victim of our failure.

      But simply to prolong the war, the American war, at this point, it might salve our consciences to some degree, but it won’t do any good.

  95. 95.

    Brachiator

    @Kayla Rudbek:

    So far, I’m thinking that the human species really doesn’t score well on sociality, cooperation, anticipating the responses of others, reciprocity, learning…

    There are always crazy ways in which in-group behavior differs from how we treat people who are deemed to be “out-group.”

  96. 96.

    Brachiator

    @Roger Moore:

    I think the thing that really upsets people who complain about lack of assimilation is that it does happen, but that it goes both ways. Immigrants adopt American culture, but they change it in the process.

    Very true. First there was all American apple pie. Then frankfurters, hamburgers and pizza became as American as apple pie. Then sushi, tacos and salsa became as American as apple pie.

    I can’t find it again (dammit), but years ago I came across the transcription of a letter on some history web site. An  18th century Englishman was complaining that proximity was causing his friend to walk and talk too much like the Africans in his employ in the New World.

  98. 98.

    Brachiator

    @Starfish:

    Late comment…

    We are categorized as white, but some people have petitioned for the SWANA category.

    I did not know about this. Thank you.

    Very interesting stuff.

  102. 102.

    sab

    @James E Powell: Ha! Sounds like my bigoted snobby grandmother, very racist, very anti-Catholic even though her paternal grandparents were laborers from Ireland. She would be horrified to learn that she does not have any all white great-grandchildren.

  104. 104.

    Mo MacArbie

    Purely ex recto, but I want to ascribe part of the decline in the white population to Trumpers claiming they’re black for all the sweet, sweet handouts they just know will come. All aboard the gravy train!

  105. 105.

    Betty

    @different-church-lady: Anderson Cooper did an interesting show on this. He was talking to a group of Iranian women and told them Americans did not consider them to be white. They were shocked. Understandably.

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