Good morning.
A new month begins with showers and thunderstorms in Whitewater and a high of sixty-one. Sunrise is 6:53 AM and sunset 6:35 PM, for 11h 42m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 60.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred ninety-second day.
On this day in 1890, an act of Congress creates Yosemite National Park.
Recommended for reading in full — The end of GOP conservativism, why Trump can’t win the war on demography, working Americans are worse off under Trump, the Senate’s Kavanaugh hearing was about shielding Kavanaugh, and video on how we may get to Alpha Centauri —
Conservative Eliot A. Cohen writes The Republican Party Abandons Conservatism:
There has always been a dark side to American conservatism, much of it originating in the antebellum curse of a society, large parts of which favored slavery and the extermination of America’s native population, the exclusion of immigrants from American life, and discrimination against Catholics and Jews. Many of us had hoped that the civil-rights achievements of the mid-20th century (in which Republicans were indispensable partners), changing social norms regarding women, and that rising levels of education had eliminated the germs that produced secession, lynching, and Indian massacres. Instead, those microbes simply went into dormancy, and now, in the presence of Trump, erupt again like plague buboes—bitter, potent and vile.
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It is impossible at this moment to envisage the Republican Party coming back. Like a brontosaurus with some brain-eating disorder it might lumber forward in the direction dictated by its past, favoring deregulation of businesses here and standing up to a rising China there, but there will be no higher mental functioning at work. And so it will plod into a future in which it is detested in a general way by women, African Americans, recent immigrants, and the educated young as well as progressives pure and simple. It might stumble into a political tar pit and cease to exist or it might survive as a curious, decaying relic of more savage times and more primitive instincts, lashing out and crushing things but incapable of much else.
Intellectuals do not build American political parties. Politicians do. The most we can do is point out the truths as we see them, and cheer on those who can do the necessary work. It is supposedly inconceivable that a genuinely conservative party could emerge, but then again, who thought the United States could be where it is now? And progressives, no less than bereft conservatives, should want this to happen, because the conservative virtues remain real virtues, the conservative insights real insights, and the conservative temperament an indispensable internal gyro keeping a country stable and sane. “Cometh the hour, cometh the man” runs the proverb. The hour is upon the country: Conservatives wait for the men (or more likely women) to meet it.
William H. Frey contends Trump Can’t Win the War on Demography:
Since the early days of his campaign, from his proposal to build a wall along the Mexican border to his discredited committee on voter fraud, President Trump has declared war on America’s changing demography. His administration has followed through on that strategy with a proposal to add a question to the 2020 census asking about citizenship. If the question remains on the form, millions of households, particularly Hispanic and Asian-American, could skip the census, leading to an overrepresentation of white Americans during this once-a-decade count.
Six lawsuits seeking to remove the proposed question are moving through the federal courts, with the first trial likely to take place this fall.
If it is added to the census form, the citizenship question will distort our understanding of who resides in the country. What this selective underenumeration will not do is make America’s growing racial minority populations disappear. The losers from this undercount include members of Mr. Trump’s older white base, who will suffer from lost investments in a younger generation, whose successes and contributions to the economy will be necessary to keep America great.
The demographic trends make this plain. America’s white population is growing tepidly because of substantial declines among younger whites. Since 2000, the white population under the age of 18 has shrunk by seven million, and declines are projected among white 20-somethings and 30-somethings over the next two decades and beyond. This is a result of both low fertility rates among young whites and modest white immigration — a trend that is not likely to change despite Mr. Trump’s wish for more immigrants from Norway.
Robert J. Shapiro writes Don’t be fooled: Working Americans are worse off under Trump:
Another blow to the White House’s preferred economic narrative: The current earnings decline is a new development. Using the same measure, real median weekly earnings increased substantially during Barack Obama’s final 18 months as president.
Before adjusting for inflation, median weekly earnings increased during Obama’s last 18 months from $803 in the third quarter of 2015 to $849 in the last quarter of 2016. People’s average weekly earnings thus increased $46, or 5.73 percent, before adjusting for inflation. Over the same months, cumulative inflation from July 2015 to December 2016 was 1.12 percent, so the real earnings of a typical working person clearly increased. By how much? Adjust the median weekly earnings in December 2016 of $849 for the 1.08 percent inflation over the preceding 18 months, which comes to $838.82. In real terms, the weekly earnings of a typical employed American increased $35.82, or 4.5 percent, over Obama’s last 18 months in office, growing from $803 in the third quarter of 2015 to $838.82 in the fourth quarter of 2016.
In Ronald Reagan’s succinct terms, average working Americans are worse off under the Trump presidency than they were under Obama’s. Yes, low unemployment is something to applaud, but there might be a good reason that so many who have jobs aren’t clapping.
Matt Thompson writes This Was Never About Finding Out the Truth (“Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony before the Senate was a lesson in power—who wields it, and at whose expense”):
The all-male body of Republicans leading the Senate Judiciary Committee were attuned enough to the paper-thin foundation of their credibility that they asked a female prosecutor to lead in the questioning on Thursday. But after Brett Kavanaugh demonstrated his willingness to wield power, to bark derisively at Senator Amy Klobuchar, the woman who was questioning him, the men on the committee grew more confident in their own. “Boy, you all want power,” seethed Senator Lindsey Graham, reclaiming his time. “God, I hope you never get it.”
“A conservatism … organized around the fears and grievances of prominent men, and seemingly indifferent to the legitimacy of certain kinds of female anger—will end up defining all its constituent parts, all its causes and concerns, as subordinate to the defense of male impunity,” wrote Ross Douthat in The New York Times. “If [Kavanaugh’s] accuser testifies publicly and credibly, if her allegation isn’t undermined by a week of scrutiny and testimony, if it remains unprovable but squarely in the realm of plausibility, then all the abortion opponents who were supporting him should hope that his nomination is withdrawn—with, ideally, a woman nominated in his place.”
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How, against this backdrop, can the fiction persist that this spectacle has been in pursuit of truth? If truth, rather than power, were the object, we would have to look more carefully at the patchwork of claims about Kavanaugh’s temperancethat his classmates contradict. If truth were the object, we would have to speak more plainly about a band of men gathered for the second time in recent history to speed another man past charges of sexual misbehavior into our nation’s highest court. And we would have to stop pretending that one of the main engines of our politics at this moment is not who holds power over women—not merely over women’s rights or bodies, but over the very reality they inhabit.