While looking for something nice (Fun!) to read, I came upon Ramona Grigg’s article, When the Cameras Leave Flint, Michigan Will Still Be Michigan. It’s a very good article — you should go read the whole thing. She takes us back to the first days of Rick Snyder’s administration. She’s right that Rachel Maddow was all over the story of Michigan’s “emergency manager” law that was basically being used to destroy local democracy in Michigan. I remember those segments because they reminded me of the old 60 Minutes, where stories actually had an effect. In this case, not so much.

In fact, as Ramona noted, in 2014, Snyder won re-election “handily” — by over 4 percentage points. I remember wondering how that could be. But then I remembered that Hitler would have won in a landslide in 1938 if he had had to run for election. As long as you are screwing over a small percentage of the people, and the economy is good: you are golden. The fact that turnout was even lower in 2014 than it was in 2010, didn’t help. And maybe it’s good to remember that in 2010, he won by over 18 percentage point. It was a small amount of progress.

The fundamental issue here is that democracy wasn’t curtailed in Michigan (or most of the other states where Republicans have control) by accident. The people of Flint were not poisoned by accident. I discussed this the other day, What Conservatism Means to the Republican Base. In it, I used Marco Rubio’s statement that no one wanted to poison the people of Flint. No one is saying they did. It’s like when I’m walking down the road: I step on and kill countless insects. I don’t want to kill them. It’s not my intent to kill them. But their deaths don’t mean anything to me compared to my goal of walking to wherever I’m walking.

That’s the Republican Party. It doesn’t want to hurt the poor (although I would say a good deal of its voting base does and the party uses this fact for political advantage). It just doesn’t care. Getting tax breaks for the rich, gutting regulations to make the rich richer, destroying unions to make the party stronger and the rich richer: these are the things the Republican Party cares about. If it means countless lives are destroyed because of lead poisoning, so what?! It only became a problem to the party when it became a political problem. It is as if the local paper started writing stories, “Frank Moraes Thoughtlessly Kills Insects on Walks.” That might just turn me into a Jain — at least in public.

But what I don’t understand is why this goes on. I don’t mean, “Why was Rick Snyder re-elected?” I don’t understand why he was elected in the first place. How did the people of Michigan think that he was going to do anything but what he did? It’s kind of like the Bill Clinton sex scandal. In that case, I think most people didn’t care because they knew when they voted for him, he was the kind of guy who would have a sex scandal. (Also: what a pathetic sex scandal!) So why is there any surprise when a Republican acts in a way that shows complete callousness toward everyone but their rich buddies?

Ramona is right: Michigan will remain. And the residents of the state will continue to be abused as long as they vote for Republicans. It’s an unfortunate side effect of democracy. In 2010, roughly 40% of the voters did not vote to have Flint’s water poisoned. But 60% did. Rick Snyder didn’t pull a bait and switch. And even if he had: he’s a Republican. He won’t necessarily poison your water, but it certainly wasn’t on his “Do Not Do” list. But raising taxes sure was. And that’s true all over America. I’ll quote Rashomon, “I just don’t understand.”

Nancy Reagan is dead, and good for her! She lived 94 years. She deserves a rest. And I mean that. Regular readers know that I am not tenacious of life. Death is not a bad thing after all those years — especially when you consider how good her life was relative to the vast majority of Americans. Lives end, and I’ve often thought that heaven works as a perfect metaphor for nonexistence. Really: can you imagine dealing with eternity in any form other than nonexistence? That, to me, would be hell. But I did want to spend a little time thinking about, “Just say no!”

What I’ve always assume that the “Just say no!” campaign was all about was a response to peer pressure. Kids would say, “What am I supposed to do when someone asks me if I want to smoke a reefer.” And the answer was, “Just say no!” It’s been widely mocked as a simplistic answer to a complicated question. I would go further. Our drug problems, if you want to think of them as such, are not due to peer pressure. People don’t become junkies because they don’t want to look uncool. Indeed, research on junkies in the 1960s and 1970s, found that they were not the insecure kids, but the strong alpha kids.

But what Nancy Reagan gave to the campaign was a great symbol of the arrogant and clueless elite. And that makes her really important, because that makes her a great symbol of the Drug War enablers. Nancy Reagan could be out there trying to get the kids to “Just say no!” And that gave cover for destroying millions of lives with drug laws that were never designed to stop drug use, and only ever designed to keep despised minorities down. The same thing goes on to this day.

What did Nancy Reagan know about drug addiction? Just what she was told by others who had the same vested interest in making drug problems worse. I talk a lot around here about how Republicans approach every problem with a long list of things they will not even consider for ideological reasons. Democrats are more than willing to cut the size the government if it made things better, but Republicans will not improve the common good if it involves making the government bigger. (They will, of course, make the government bigger if it enriches the rich or grows the military and police state.) Well, that’s the way drug policy has been in the country for the last century.

We can solve the government created drug problem by telling kids, “Just say no!” Meanwhile, the sentences for those who don’t? They get longer and longer. These non-compliant people are forced into more and more oppressive drug “treatment” programs (In and out of jail!) that don’t work, because they operate from a false premise. This is why the 12 Step programs are so popular: they claim drug use is a moral failing, even while alcohol ads blanket the television screen on weekends.

But there’s something more about “Just say no!” And I think it says a lot about Nancy Reagan herself. The slogan says in no unsubtle way: don’t think for yourself; just do as we tell you. It’s an authoritarian mantra. All you poor kids, just do what the nice white woman with a million dollar wardrobe tells you. She’s your better and you should listen to her. And if you don’t, well, her husband has less pleasant ways to coerce you.

Afterword: Just Say No to Murder!

I’m pretty sure that the same people who killed Scalia killed Nancy Reagan. She was so beloved, that she was going to stop the race war that Obama is going to start any day now.

I don’t think of myself as someone who scoffs at people. But it’s gotten pretty hard not to do a whole lot of scoffing at the Republican establishment as it grapples with the rise of Donald Trump. And that brings me to Michael Gerson’s column in The Washington Post last week, What Are Anti-Trump Republicans To Do? Here Are Four Options. It’s pathetic in so many ways, but the blunt stupidity is this: it doesn’t mention the one thing that the anti-Trump Republicans have consistently said they will do: support Trump. And we know Republicans: they will support Trump because it is axiomatic: anyone calling themselves a Republican is better than anyone calling themselves a Democrat.

But I was most taken with his idea of getting a representative of “civil rights Republicanism” to run as a third party candidate. Who are these rare creatures that make up so much of the Republican Party? You would think that if there were even a decent number of them, there would have been a presidential candidate to represent them. You know: like Bernie Sanders came into the Democratic nominating contest because there were a lot of liberal (and even socialist) Democrats? But not one person decided to go after this brand of Republican — probably because it is largely or completely a myth.

That’s not to say that Michael Gerson doesn’t have a candidate in mind. It’s the candidate that all Republicans keep in their back pockets to fight off the charge of racism and sexism: Condoleezza Rice. She’s black! She’s a woman! She’s a Republican! The Republican Party is therefore not a grand bastion of hatred and ignorance used in support of the rich and powerful. No, Condoleezza Rice proves that isn’t the case because, after all, she was a powerful member of a Republican administration that’s sole claim to (positive) fame is that the week after 9/11, George W Bush didn’t set up concentration camps for every American Muslim.

Note that Michael Gerson was part of that very same civil rights loving administration. That’s the same administration that brought back systemic torture to our federal government. And what did Michael Gerson have to say about that? He said that an explicit ban on torture (which was a bi-partisan thing as recently as 1988 under Ronald Reagan) might be admirable, “But holding this view is not an option for those in government…” Because, you know, you can defeat the Nazis without torture, but not any old threat that comes along today that the Republican Party can demagogue!

Of course, Michael Gerson isn’t proposing himself as this civil rights Republican who will save us all. I’m all in favor of saints without being one. The problem is that Condoleezza Rice supports torture too. So it turns out, she’s just an African American woman who happens to be your typical Republican. As I recall, that includes being incompetent at both her jobs in the Bush White House, but that is a subject for another day.

I’ve picked torture because it is the most obvious example of the Republican Party’s lack of commitment to civil rights. It’s not that I’m unaware of what Michael Gerson is really getting at: he wants a Republican who will talk like civil rights were fixed in 1965. This is a game that people in the Republican establishment like to play. They like to pretend that they are high minded. They are all Edmund Burke in their minds. (Not that Burke was ultimately anything but an apologist for the power elite.)

But most of the things that Trump has said that have so outraged the likes of Michael Gerson are a good deal less horrible than things Michael Gerson’s old boss and his mythic civil rights Republican Condoleezza Rice actually did. As Glenn Greenwald noted yesterday in a brilliant article, Trump is gauche, but not in any categorical way worse than the Republican establishment (and much of the Democratic establishment too). I thought this was particularly apt:

Yes, Michael Gerson thinks it would be better to support people who actually ordered torture than to support a man who talks about it in such an open and vulgar manner. The truth is that the only thing that separates these supposed civil rights Republicans and the bigots who support Trump is style. It would seem that if the Republicans are to become the party of “civil rights,” all they have to do is send about half their voters to finishing school.