'Complicated and Telling Truths'

The Sunday Night Reader for 7/31/22

Jul 31, 2022

Lasting Impact for Thee but Not for Me

I know this has become a recurring theme, but indulge me. The News-Gazette recently gave another three-quarters of a page to Wirepoints, an outlet funded by two long-time right-wing operatives who use a cheapo website and a couple of part-time employees to launder their opinions through an “independent non-profit.” This week’s item marks at least the eighth time in six months that the paper has used Wirepoints as a source for a column or story, as well as the third time that they’ve run a “guest commentary” from one of Wirepoints’ founders.

In the commentary, Mark Glennon claims that Bruce Rauner's 2015-17 budget impasse “did not have much lasting impact.” It’s a cold and factually wrong statement that ignores the families and organizations devastated by the impasse.

For example, a United Way of Illinois survey taken at the time showed that 70 percent of social service agencies did not receive or received reduced payments that they had been promised by the state in FY17. Ninety percent of those were unable to replace what they were stiffed on through philanthropy.

Public schools ate about $8 billion in expected payments for about 22 months, according to a report from Deputy Governor Dan Hynes. Homeless shelters, addiction treatment centers, and children's services programs across the state closed and never reopened. NAMI Illinois, meanwhile, reported that 85 percent of psychiatric service providers who accepted Medicaid reduced services or closed in the first 10 months of the impasse.

Local service providers who keep the most marginalized people in the region fed, housed, and safer took it in the teeth without respite for nearly 2 years. They were terrified and exhausted. Several came within a hair’s breadth of closing.

Yes, the state still nominally ran. But, despite Glennon’s claim, the impasse had a lasting impact on hundreds of thousands of lives.

They were and are the lives of people we do our best to ignore, and we do a damn good job of it when we publish and uncritically consume these obviously incorrect and blithely cruel commentaries.

The piece is intended to slag Governor Pritzker for spending federal money to (begin to) right Illinois’ fiscal ship, which is in itself a pretty thin complaint. “This Democrat who ran on raising taxes and cleaning up the fiscal mess didn't get his graduated income tax but is using other unexpected revenues to do what he said he was going to do anyway,” it seems to argue. “And he's even proud of the fact that he’s accomplishing something! And he's talking about it in public!”

I can handle taking a swipe at a billionaire governor of a screwed-up state, even if it’s a groaner of an argument. But to do so by minimizing something that was so disruptive and harmful to so many people whose difficulties already get minimized at every turn? That sticks in my craw.

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Claiming to Dislike Authoritarianism While Reaping Its Benefits

Jared Yates Sexton on weak opposition to authoritarianism and complicity in its face. From his Twitter account:

“Powerful people spend their time criticizing ‘wokeness,’ accurate depictions of history, and what happens on college campuses because they see these things as more dangerous to their power and wealth than rising authoritarianism. Hidden inside a lot of moderate and ‘liberal’ worldviews is a belief that the system must work because it’s served the powerful well, and with that is a belief that ‘lesser’ people need controlled.

Which is why so many people ‘oppose’ authoritarianism but end up welcoming it.

We’ve been taught that Fascism and Nazism were these movements that only a small group of insanely evil people engaged with. They were mass movements that included the middle class, which wanted desperately to defend their power and wealth at all costs. Right now, there are a lot of wealthy and powerful people who are very vocal about a dislike for growing authoritarianism but would be more than happy to reap the benefits of defended wealth, worsening exploitation, and an attack on elements they consider ‘dangerous.’

A thing to remember: you’ve been fed an intentionally simplified story of ‘Left vs Right’ that obscures a ton of complicated and telling truths. Regardless of affiliation, politicians and media of all stripes are capable of supporting and believing disturbing things.”

Band-Aids Don’t Fix Bullet Holes

Jamelle Bouie’s New York Times column does a good job of explaining revisions to the 1887 Electoral Count Act — the weaknesses of which Trump Republicans attempted to exploit in their subversion of the 2020 election. The changes are working their way through the Senate, but, as Bouie points out, “We can and should patch the holes in the system we have. We should also recognize that it would be better, in the long run, to scrap the rules that make subversion a tempting option to begin with.

With that said, the most important safeguard for our electoral system isn’t a particular set of rules and arrangements, but political actors who accept defeat, honor the results of an election and allow the winner to take and exercise the power to which they’re entitled. And it is a serious, possibly existential problem for American democracy that a large part of one of our two major parties just doesn’t want to play ball.” Read more.