WINTERS -- THEN AND NOW

I used to hate winter.

Not the period from Christmas through New Years.

That was fun.

Family, parties, presents . . .

Egg-nog.

The short days and long nights were illusory at Christmas time. 

The Brooklyn neighborhood I grew up in was always a sea of bright lights. The nativity scenes seemed appropriately staged.  The directors had decided that each creche had to be bathed in the warmth of  a well-lit December night.  If the Bethlehem of Jesus's birth had not welcomed Him, at least Brooklyn did.

Eventually, of course, the lights went out.

The long, cold nights returned. 

It was winter.

What to do? 

In the ''50s and '60s, the post-war America of my boomer youth was on the move.  Eisenhower's interstates were being built. People started flying en masse. Because gas was cheap, they drove en masse too. Escaping winter became possible.

In 1971, my family actually went to Florida for Christmas. My retired grandparents had moved to Orlando. An aunt and her two children -- my cousins -- flew down.  My father, mother, sister and I drove.  

It was a learning experience.  

I learned that Eisenhower's interstates were by no mean complete.  This made it impossible to avoid the sharecropper poverty of battered see-through shacks standing aside US-1 in the Carolinas and Georgia. Or the billboards that announced we were in "Klan Country". In Lumberton, North Carolina, where we stayed the first night of our two day drive, my father  learned that restaurants did not serve liquor in that dry state. A guy who liked his martinis, he was disappointed but survived.  

Driving to Florida was also an education on what actually constituted escape.

Back then, New Yorkers in January wanted a respite from the weather.  To get one, however, you could not just "go south".  In fact, if you were driving down that not-yet-finished interstate, things did not really warm up until you passed Jacksonville.  Since states weren't reliably red or blue then, the snowbirds made sure they made it past Jacksonville in their search for summer in winter.  In April or so, most of them also made sure they returned.

A lot has changed since then.

To begin, most of those leaving are not returning.  

According to the US Census Bureau, more than 200,000 people left New York in the year ending July 31, 2023.  This was a net loss, accounting for those who moved in and out. Over the past three years, the state's population has declined by more than 600,000.  New York is not the leader here.  That honor belongs to California, which saw a net out-flow of 338,000 people during the same period.  The six other states that lost population were Illinois, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Hawaii and West Virginia.

Republicans think these numbers are to their advantage. 

Of the ten states whose populations grew the most between 2010 and 2023, six were reliably red or Republican, one was reliably blue or Democratic, and the other three were competitive. In absolute numbers -- which matter most when the nation's 435 Congressional seats are apportioned -- the biggest gainers were Florida and Texas.

The GOP, however, might want to curb its enthusiasm

Because . . . 

Depending on the state, the claim that migration from blue to red is a net benefit for the GOP is not at all ineluctable.  

Georgia, for example, is a red state state where population increased by 14.7% between 2010 and 2023. It did not make the top ten but was close at number twelve.  Of its new arrivals, however, the percentages of Republicans and Democrats were roughly equal. And for the nation as a whole, while one study showed that, of those moving to red states, 46% registered as Republicans and 30% registered as Democrats, the largest category of new arrivals were already Republicans and were coming from  Republican states. In other words, they did not alter the national political balance in their favor. 

The same study showed that while moves from red to blue states had more Democrats retaining their identification than Republicans doing the same, in moves from blue to red states the ratio was about even. If that's the case, migration may actually be helping Democrats, i.e., blue states may actually be getting bluer while red states are just running in place.

This data also appears to be consistent with some more general views of where states are heading on the question of political identity. 

To wit:

Florida is reliably red and not changing anytime soon.  Its population has grown but its new arrivals aren't changing the landscape as much as fitting into one that already existed.  Georgia, however, is by no means monolithically red and its new arrivals did not change that reality. The same may also be true in Arizona. And Texas, which has been a magnet for those leaving California, is becoming less red. That may be due as much to immigration as anything else.  But those blue Californians settling in Austin cannot be ignored.

Back in the '70s, and perhaps for all the wrong reasons, the regional divide was not as great. The south still had large numbers of conservative Democrats and the north still had large numbers of liberal Republicans.  That started to change with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and was thereafter turbocharged by Ronald Reagan in the '80s, Newt Gingrich in the '90s, and Trump and the politicization of evangelical Christianity more recently.  The evolution of those three versions of the Republican Party has led us to the present moment.

Which is a very dangerous one.

A large part of the danger has been described ad nauseum over the last few years. A crypto-fascist, pathologically lying narcissist has taken over the Republican Party.  He orchestrated an attempted coup on January 6, 2021 and has since convinced more than half his party that he won an election he lost (and did not rape a woman a jury concluded he had). He owns the Republican caucus in the House of  Representative,130 of whom have endorsed his now third run for the presidency, and is actively working to insure (fellow crypto-fascist) Putin's takeover of Ukraine by having the House kill the military assistance that would stop it. 

His MAGA faithful resemble Germans in the 1930s.

They have swallowed his lies whole just as the Germans swallowed Hitler's.. They think January 6 was either justified, peaceful or allowed to become violent because Nancy Pelosi did not summon a National Guard over which she had no power. They think the four criminal cases against him are political hit jobs, even though the witnesses to his alleged crimes are either Republicans themselves, his former aides and/or staffers, or both. They think the more than 1200 January 6 defendants now found guilty are "hostages".

All this is bad enough.

What is worse, however, is the GOP establishment's gelded inability to end his reign of terror.

This has not been for lack of opportunity.

Nor only for lack of backbone.

And it is persisting.

Nikki Haley is the establishment's latest best hope.  

She is running for president and is Trump's only remaining GOP opponent.  In theory, this is what the non-Trump GOP establishment has been waiting for.  Back in 2016, when Trump was still a political footnote but had started to win attention (and convention delegates) with some decidedly small margins, the political cognoscenti all prayed that the Bush-Rubio-Cruz-Christie-Kasich-Huckabee-Paul-Carson-Fiorina wing of presidential wannabees would reduce itself by eight and send Trump back to reality TV after he lost a string of one-on-ones.

They didn't.

And so he didn't.

January 2024, however, is not January 2016.

Trump entered the body politic in 2016.  Thereafter, our finely tuned political immune system did not deliver the antibodies needed to defeat him.  Over time, we went from pussy-grabbing to Covid incompetence to election denial to insurrection, each more politically virulent than the other.   In 2021, in a unique dereliction of duty,  the Senators to whom our Founders had entrusted the vaccine of impeachment refused to administer the shot. The virus then continued to spread.

Vaccines eliminate viruses because they supercharge the immune system.  They literally create (many) more antibodies to fight the pathogen.  For a number of reasons, however, Nikki Haley is coming up short..

Because she thinks she must, she is campaigning as if President Biden and Donald Trump are equally out of touch.  And for roughly similar reasons. Biden is forever confused, she falsely claims; Trump forever chaotic, she understatedly concedes.  In marrying the first with the second, however, she allows herself and Trump's supporters to ignore his much greater sins (like supporting an attempted coup).  In her world, Trump is not a fascist, a pathological liar, or a dangerous narcissist. Rather, as she puts it, "rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him".  She is silently saying -- or allowing Trump supporters to hear her saying --  "it's not his fault".  Just like it's not Biden's fault he is confused. 

They're just two old guys. 

Who need to be put out to pasture.

Trump voters, however, aren't buying it.

Because . . .

In today's America, Haley's understatement on Trump doesn't take him down.

In fact, it actually builds him up. 

For two reasons.

One is that our culture is enthralled by disrupters.  People like Elon Musk command attention and -- with many -- admiration. Chaos is not something to be embarrassed by or to run from. It is their secret sauce.  In truth, this is probably just an over-hyped excuse for the obnoxiousness inherent in people like Musk or Trump.  But be that as it may, Musk's fatal flaws haven't stopped him from producing high-end cars.  Trump's, on the other hand, have done significant damage to the country.

The truth -- and this is the second reason -- is that Haley is in a bind.

For that bind, she can thank Reagan and Gingrich and her fellow establishment Republicans.

Because it is a bind caused by the GOP's inability to come up with any policies that actually combat the popular distaste which fueled Trump's rise and explains his survival.  

Tax cuts and culture wars have not restored the economic fortunes of the rural white men who form the impregnable part of Trump's base.  Nor has overturning Roe v. Wade (in fact, that just made their wives and daughters less MAGA-friendly). On policy, however, this is all Reagan and Gingrich offered in their heyday and it is all establishment and non-MAGA conservatives (including Haley) are offering now. 

Haley, like many of her GOP establishment cohorts, wants to cut taxes and then reduce the deficit by changing Social Security and means testing entitlements. She is against raising the minimum wage. She opposed Obamacare and as Governor refused to implement health insurance exchanges or expand Medicaid. She called Biden's Inflation Reduction Act a "Communist manifesto" and she opposed the BiPartisan Infrastructure Law.

Given this absence of policy, grievance has taken over the GOP base and Trump has poured gallons of gasoline on the fires of hatred it has lit.  As Tim Alberta has painstakingly recounted in The Kingdom and the Power; American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, many leading pastors in America's evangelical churches have also fanned those flames by turning their Sunday services into holy endorsements of Trump's lies.  In this environment, people like Haley are not putting them out with their talk of tax cuts and chaos.   The base knows more of the first will not work.  And as far as the pastors are concerned, chaos doesn't matter.  In their mind, it followed Jesus too. 

Whether Haley is too little too late remains to be seen.  A sizeable group of Republican voters say they will not vote for Trump if he is convicted of a crime. And while others are twisting themselves in knots to avoid commenting on the verdict in E. Jean Carroll's rape and defamation case against Trump, Haley said on Sunday that she "absolutely trust[s] the jury" and "thinks they made their decision based on the evidence."  

For now, she is probably hoping Trump's voters trust the jury as well.  

But even if they don't . . .

There are more juries in Trump's future.

I can't remember precisely when I stopped hating winter 

Maybe it was on February 5, 2000. 

That was the day I got married.

For the second time.

This one worked. 

The federal judge who married us was a Reagan appointee and a former professor at Yale Law School. He was also one of the group of conservative academics Reagan put on the bench.  The others were Scalia, Bork, Posner and Easterbrook,  I became friendly with him when I was a student at the law school and  clerked for him immediately upon graduating. He always bragged about his ability to hire clerks who did not share his political loyalties.  At our wedding, he claimed that he and my wife-to-be were the only Republicans in the room. Debbie corrected him with a quick "Wait'll you meet the rest of his family".  

Over time, he remarked about how uncommon friendships like ours were becoming.

How politics had driven people into silos from whence they never emerged.

The lesson was that it did not have to be that way.

And in not being that way, it wasn't because everyone would be silent and avoid political discussion or disagreement lest kumbayah be imperiled.  

Far from it.  

He and I laughed a lot. An awful lot.  

But we also argued at lot.  

The arguments often became heated.  

Neither one of us could ever be characterized as unemotional or placid.  For every bit of experience he (correctly) claimed I was ignoring, there were professorial barbs I (correctly) challenged as ad hominems.   We weren't equal.  He was more experienced. And on the law, his knowledge was encyclopedic; so there were some arguments I never came close to winning and should not have even made. 

But no one invented facts or ignored them when they refuted a claim. 

No one condemned anyone else.  

No one stopped talking.

And the friendship lasted forever.

America should try it.

I started clerking for him in January 1982. 

I didn't hate that winter either.