Between Hell and High Water

What About a Stimulus Package?

By Mike Koetting October 29, 2020

I don’t want to jinx anything, but maybe we do need to start taking the possibility of a Biden victory seriously. I am not saying we shouldn’t continue worrying—like we could stop worrying even if we wanted to?—but the polling is solid and there are lots of signs of various Republicans trying to put some distance between themselves and Trump.

So, what should we do if we win?

The whole answer is long and has many facets. I smell grist for upcoming posts. But there is one thing that may require a more or less immediate direction, a stimulus package.

It Just Won’t Go Away Fast Enough

By Mike Koetting October 20, 2020

Like most of America, I can’t wait for the election to be over. I am accustomed to thinking a lot about politics, but this is crazy. It feels like every waking minute. And the cognitive dissonance is psychically exhausting. Everything tangible suggests a substantial Democratic victory. As I write FiveThirtyEight says Democrats flip the Senate 3 out of 4 times and Biden wins 5 out of 6 times, the latter I can’t help but notice, being the same odds you get in Russian roulette. The likelihood of a Biden win corresponds with my own sense of the world. I have never seen an election where so many high-ranking Republicans, including several ex-cabinet members of the sitting president, are refusing to endorse their candidate, or actually endorsing his opponent. Truth is, from my perspective, this president is so conspicuously unfit for the office and so utterly indifferent to democratic norms that the fact he’s even competitive is beyond my imagination. Surely enough people see this.

But I still can’t shed the fear, the anxiety. What if there are really enough people in the country who hate whatever I stand for so much that they would still vote for Trump? What if there are large pockets of Trump voters in swing states unwilling to tell pollsters who they are really going to vote for? What if enough voters in Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland and Philly don’t want to wade through all the obstacles the Republicans have created? It isn’t just the uncertainty of how the election will turn out. It is the continual nagging questions of how could people have such different perceptions and is there any way of having real conversations about the direction of the country.

I want it over.

The Election and the Rule of Law

By Mike Koetting October 8, 2020

I wrote the first draft of this post about three weeks ago. I was surprised at the number of friends who were at least flirting with the idea that, no matter what was the underlying will of the people, Donald Trump would simply refuse to recognize the results and chaos would ensue. I acknowledged there was concern, but I thought they were overstating the problem.

Things have happened since then. I still believe we will not fall into this tar pit, although my confidence ebbs and flows depending on the day. However, as much as the specific risks, I am alarmed at the broader consequences of the deterioration of public trust. At least one survey reports that half of the country believes Trump would refuse to accept a narrow defeat.

This is potentially catastrophic.

Election Bric-a-Brac

By Mike Koetting September 24, 2020

Today’s post is comprised of three shorter thoughts about the election. I couldn’t think of an easy way to connect them, but they each seemed worth consideration.

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If someone asked you how many days to the election, you’d probably say 40 days. I don’t think that’s the right answer. Voting is already taking place in most states. My conclusion from studying a compilation of the voting practices in the six most critical swing states is that 50% of all votes in those states will be cast by mid-October, maybe more. It is widely believed the majority of votes will be cast before election day. In other words, the election is now.

Republicans Begat Trump—Now What?

By Mike Koetting September 10, 2020

This is the third of three posts on why I think the Republican Party must be electorally annihilated.

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The first two posts made the argument that the Republican Party no longer had moral claim to be one of the parties in America’s two-party system. These arguments did not mention Donald Trump. I believe Trump is a symptom—a particularly toxic symptom to be sure—but not the fundamental reason for the Republicans’ loss of legitimacy in the American system.

I don’t want to downplay the outrageous excesses of Donald Trump. In private, even Republican legislators shake their heads and roll their eyes at Trump. But however awful Trump is—and he is a real threat to democracy–the more important point for this argument is that he is in fact the logical end point of today’s Republican Party.

Why the GOP Is No Longer a Responsible Party

By Mike Koetting August 27, 2020

This is the second of three posts on why the Republican Party in its current form deserves electoral annihilation.

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In the decade after Gingrich unveiled the Contract with America, Republicans faced two problems:

The number of people likely to be consumed by total fear of the changes in society was declining as the demography changed.
The “make whatever you can and treat taxes as theft” message was really attractive to only a small sliver of the population. A sliver with access to phenomenal resources to be sure. But still a message that most Americans found suspect.

Steve Greenberg/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Context for a Change in Party Structure

By Mike Koetting August 14, 2020

Perhaps I flatter myself—or flatter you—but I believe that most of the people who read this blog accept the basic notion that most difficult social and political issues don’t have easy or even clear answers. There is a tendency to view all broadly assertive statements with a question about the other side of the coin and etc. So it’s unusual for me to launch a post with a clean, aggressive prescription, in this case that the only way to address America’s political malaise is the electoral annihilation of the Republican Party as it now stands.

Now, there are so many things this assertion does not mean that they will have to be addressed separately in a later post. Until then, today’s post outlines the context for this assertion.

Fixing Racism Is Even Harder Than It Seems

By Mike Koetting June 6, 2020

NOTE: This was written in the first week of June, but I am just now posting. I ran into some nasty health issues that made it impossible to post—and, in fact, put the entire blog on hiatus. But I am recovering nicely and anticipate that I’ll be posting again on my usual semi-regular schedule starting in mid-August. Thanks to all who sent words of support.

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In 1967, I was 19 and spending the summer in New York, where the drinking age was 18. For 10 day in the middle of July, every night was spent in a Bronxville tavern glued to riots, first in Newark, then in Detroit.

If you don’t remember this, I doubt it is possible to recreate the impact of watching the flames and the tanks roll through those cities. Now the very names Newark and Detroit summon images of urban decay and despair. But in 1967, they were still major centers of commerce. Until then we had grown up in this haze of unending, if largely unexamined, national optimism. Riots and tanks in the streets were things that happened elsewhere, not in America.

The conversation those evenings was a stew of despair about what we were seeing and what we understood was behind it, and optimism that somehow we would make it right. This wouldn’t happen again on our watch.

Fifty-three years later, I stood on my balcony and saw the smoke rising from the Loop where the crowd had set a police car on fire. We failed. It was harder than we thought and, one has to concede, we didn’t care enough.

The Intractability of What We Have

By Mike Koetting May 22, 2020

I am happy to report I got more comments than usual on my recent post outlining my take on what the virus told us about Federalism. Some people applauded that states provided an alternative source power when their populace didn’t agree with the flavors on offer from the central government. Others noted the need for local components to target appropriately for local circumstances and, sometimes, simply to develop local support necessary for a program to be effective.

Both fair comments. But I was still skeptical states are the best vehicle for either of these. So I decided to think about what alternatives might exist.

Set aside the fact that from a practical perspective, making a major change in the role of states is a non-starter, short of a catastrophe so bad that we don’t want to think about it. People like me can sit around and think of reasons why states don’t work until the cows come home. No matter how impressive the list of problems, change seems well less likely than absolutely no way.

Federalism and the Virus

By Mike Koetting May 12, 2020

I am not a big fan of the idea of states. It’s hard to see what reality they are mapping aside from historical precedent. Take Illinois. While the Chicago metropolitan area shares one media market, one air and water space, a common labor pool, a shared healthcare market and intertwined transportation, there are at least two state governments that get involved, often to peculiar results, and two other states impacted. Conversely, the rest of Illinois is perpetually aggrieved by the idea that Illinois government is overly shaped by Chicago.

The history of state governments in the U.S. is of course inextricably linked to the founding of the country. At the time of the Revolutionary War, political and practical identity was tied to individual states, which in fact had already evolved in different ways because of the political and economic circumstances of their founding.

At the time of the Constitution, there was simply no way of creating a unified country that didn’t carefully limit federal power over the individual states. No states, no country. It was as simple as that. It was also as simple as no slavery, no country. Giving states power to regulate that matter was a necessary condition for forming a country. It was a moral dodge required by reality. The Senate, and the electoral college, were part of the package.