New Years Eve 2022 - Reflections on the State of the Union
The New Year seems to be bringing in a new sense of relative calm and unexpected possibilities.
It feels like the fever has broken. The relentless attacks, threats and the generalized mayhem and nastiness of the last six years featured – no, celebrated and promoted – by our national media, legacy and digital, has begun to ebb. Big media and big tech are both laying off thousands of employees. People are losing interest in the manufactured drama.
We’re all exhausted. We’ve been exhausted. And now, with the sense that the threat is receding somewhat, we are collectively relaxing enough to notice how exhausted we are.
The combined effect of the January 6th Committee hearings, the Mar-A-Lago documents affair, and the ’22 election have changed the political dynamic. The battle is not over, and the body politic will take years to heal, but the Republic is still standing, and the wheels of justice are grinding away.
House Republicans’ plans for a three-ring circus of “investigations” have been blunted. In particular, the planned rage-a-thon over the January 6th Committee has fizzled in the face of the extensive documentation of Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. It’s a bad look for Republicans no matter how you slice it. They are now planning to ignore January 6th, and focus their faux outrage on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
I think they’re going to find that the American people are weary of their bad faith posturing. The fairly long list of accomplishments of the 117th Congress gave the public a taste of what can be done if their representatives are willing to work together.
Meanwhile, the razor-thin Republican majority populated by die-hard Trumpsters at one extreme, and vulnerable moderates on the other, has them fighting among themselves, which is a good thing for the rest of us. With only a few days left until the new Congress is sworn in, Kevin McCarthy is still unable to consolidate the votes to become Speaker.
Trump seems to have lost his mojo. The failure of his election denial strategy and of most of his endorsed candidates, especially those for Senator, has soured his biggest backers, including Rupert Murdoch. He still has the support of his base, but the Party is eager to be rid of him. The January 6th Report is damning and irrefutable, and as of today his tax returns are finally public – another trove of unsavory dealings for the press to unpack in the new year.
Trump himself is in serious legal jeopardy. DOJ is zeroing in on him for a laundry list of crimes, Fani Willis has tied up her special grand jury in Georgia and she is now in decision mode over indictment, and New York AG Letitia James and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg are both proceeding with criminal investigations of Trump and his family following the conviction of the Trump Organization on all 17 counts of criminal tax fraud.
The Jan 6th Committee Report
The many thousands of pages of the January 6th Committee Report, Depositions, Transcripts, etc, are far beyond my ability to review in detail. It will take weeks if not months for big media teams to go through and report on their findings. Journalists will be digging into this trove, revealing new insights for years to come.
For those intrepid enough to dive in, the January 6th Committee Report & related documents are available at Lawfare.com.
The Final Report is 845 pages! The Executive Summary alone is 131 pages. If you watched the hearings, the Report is pretty much a replay of the hearings.
The Table of Contents (pp 20-25) and a search function make it fairly easy to navigate to whatever section, document, topic or person is of interest to you. Interview transcripts are separate documents, also on the Lawfare site. Cassidy Hutchinson’s six entries are especially interesting.
Given the massive volume of information, it’s not surprising that the Report takes pains to keep the focus on Trump and his small circle of plotters, planners & collaborators. But the lack of attention given to the slow-walking/logrolling in front of National Guard deployment to the Capitol by senior leadership at the Pentagon & Homeland Security is disturbing. Also, the total lack of attention given to the funny business at the Secret Service, and the support and participation of Members of Congress is disappointing.
These omissions could come back to haunt us. Leaving these people untouched leaves open the possibility, even likelihood of a recurrence down the line. Hopefully the DOJ won’t drop the ball on this.
People, especially those who work in government, defer to their superiors up the chain of command. If you want to disable the ability of the National Guard to respond to a planned insurrection, all you need is a few recently appointed senior level “Acting” Secretaries in the security agencies to dismiss threat assessments, impose additional bureaucratic impediments to deployment, and then raise concerns about the “optics” of sending the National Guard to the Capitol, even as the Capitol is being overrun and on the scene commanders are begging for help. And that’s exactly what happened…for hours.
Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund made his first request for National Guard troops at 12:59. The first contingent of Guard troops arrived at 5:20. New transcripts are still being released daily. This Times article highlights recent insights related to this matter.
There are two Appendices – pp 693-770 of the Final Report – dealing with these issues. Appendix 2 (beginning p 724) is especially hard to read.
The Committee explicitly gives the people responsible for the delay a pass. “We have no evidence that the delay was intentional.” I expect that we haven’t heard the last of this.
Chief Sund has a book coming out on January 3rd 2023: “Courage Under Fire: Under Seige and Outnumbered 58-1 on January 6th”, promising new revelations.
Republican Woes
It’s not just the Jan 6th Report, and the array of Trump legal problems.
George Santos, the allegedly Gay Jewish Republican who just won his election in New York’s blue leaning 3rd District, is apparently not gay, not Jewish, and not any of the rest of his bio. This puts Republican leadership in a difficult position. They should refuse to seat him, but given their ever so slight majority, they won’t. Democrats will make him the face of the Republican party for the next two years. Kind of embarrassing. Welcome to the beltway, George. He should fit right in. MTG is already fronting for him, praising him for “being honest with his district now.” Yes, really.
All of this is good news, and reason to be hopeful for the re-emergence of reality-based public discourse and a modicum of honor in public life, and for Congress to rediscover the service part of public service, and its mandate to promote the general welfare.
Some reasons for optimism in 2023
The Kellogg School of Management has published an excellent article on 4 Science-Backed Strategies to Curb Partisan Animosity, highlighting the central point that we are constantly being told that we are divided over issues, but the reality is that we are really not far apart on issues, and never were; we’re constantly being subjected to propaganda by politicians and complicit media – designed to make us think that we are far apart on issues, and to inflame partisan animosities.
The partisan culture war is a manufactured phenomenon, in service to deep pocket special interests (billionaires) who have financed it, promoted via the symbiotic relationship between politicians and the media, who gain at the expense of the general welfare.
The Kellogg study highlights rational, deliberate steps that can be taken, individually, organizationally, and collectively, to defeat this destructive nonsense.
A separate study highlights the finding that “People of all political persuasions assume things are worse than they are.” This is not surprising when the mission of the media is to keep us engaged by highlighting daily how bad things are.
Jonathan Haidt’s efforts to promote balance & civility in academia and society in general are expanding.
Haidt has founded 4 non-profits and written several important books to help promote national healing.
· Heterodox Academy – to promote viewpoint diversity in universities.
· EthicalSystems.org – to provide academic research to businesspeople, and to cultivate trust, integrity & cooperation in the corporate world.
· The Constructive Dialogue Institute – Helping people to discuss complex and divisive topics with ease, even when they disagree.
· LetGrow.org – a movement to make childhood independence easy, normal and legal.
I would suggest one more initiative – to focus on journalistic ethics and a better business model for the news business.
Barnes & Nobel is Coming Back!
Booklovers rejoice! Barnes & Noble has survived and is opening new stores!
“Barnes & Noble is flourishing. After a long decline, the company is profitable and growing again—and last week announced plans to open 30 new stores. In some instances, they are taking over locations where Amazon tried (and failed) to operate bookstores.”
Tidbits
This is a great "big picture" look at the state of the country at this point. It's encouraging, and we need that. And I love the Temptations performance of My Girl!