Diplomacy With China, How Parties Die, and Debasing the Squad

 #Peter Hessler, Manufacturing Diplomacy," The New Yorker, March 15, 2021. - "Market Pulse, which analyses e-commerce, has said that nearly half of Amazon's top sellers -- those with more than a million dollars in annual sales in the U.S. -- are in China." "Bill Clinton turned out to be better for China than anybody would have predicted. In his second term, Congress granted China permanent trading privileges, and Clinton began the process of negotiating for China's admission to the World Trade Organization, which happened in 2001." 

"By 2000, there were more than seventy thousand American companies doing business in China. Meanwhile, the Chinese were producing much of the P.P.E. and may other goods that were bought by Americans during a time of crisis." "China was the only major economy that had grown in 2020, and domestic support  for the pandemic policies had become stronger as the year went on."

"In March [of 2020] the Trump administration sharply limited the number of Chinese who were allowed to work in America for state-run news organizations." "After the Capitol was stormed, on January 6, Chinese reporter Jin Gang, reported a spike in orders for Trump flags."

"Along with four other economists, [Scott] Baker [of Northwestern University], had analyzed high-frequency bank-transactions data for more than thirty thousand customers. They concluded that the 2020 stimulus was less effective than previous programs, in part because of the unique nature of the pandemic, which had caused consumers to be wary of visiting a car dealership or having appliances delivered by strangers."

#Jelani Cobb, "How Parties Die," The New Yorker, March 15, 2021. - "Mitch McConnell, the Party's leader in the Senate, has long played this game of despising Donald Trump, but knuckling under to the reality of his immense popularity among Republican voters." "The combination of a  base stoked by a sensationalist right-wind media and the emergence of kook adjacent figures in the so-called Gingrich Revolution of 1994, and the Tea Party, have redefined the Party's temper and its ideological boundaries." "But the Party still controls thirty state legislatures and twenty-seven governorships."

"In 2018, some seventy per cent of 'safe' or 'likely' Republican districts were in Southern states. Prior to last year's election, Southerners composed forty-eight per cent of the Party's ranking committee members." 

Thomas Patterson, a political scientist at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, writes: "It [the Republican Party] cannot reinvent itself in a convincing enough way for a quick turnabout. Republicans have traded the party's future for yesterday's America." "That blend of populist rage and overt-racism was the active ingredient in what eventually became the Trump movement." 

"Last month, Reuters reported that dozens of Republicans who had served in government during the George W. Bush era were abandoning the party." "Last year, for the first time, the number of registered Independents exceeded the number of registered Republicans." "By 2020, eighty-one per cent of Republican voters were white and fifty per cent were male."

#Kali Holloway, "Protect the Squad," The Nation, 3.22 - 29.2021. - "They are also, as Ocasio-Cortex has not so obliquely noted, among the key players in a faction of Republicans who maintain 'fealty to white supremacists organizations' not just 'as a political tool' but because they themselves are 'legitimate white supremacists sympathizers.' " 

[Marjorie Taylor Greene] "who recently wore a mask reading 'Nolon laba', (a Greek phrase favored by gun nuts meaning 'Come and take them.'), had also posted an image of herself holding an assault rifle next to the faces of Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, and Tlaib, whom she had labeled 'hate America leftists.' "

"There's a particularly vicious and violent hatred white right-wingers have for Black and brown women, who they believe do not know their place." "Trump's harassment campaign pulled out every racist greatest hit, demanding the four [the 'Squad'] 'go back' to where they came from, debasing them as 'savages,' and accusing them of being 'not really smart' -- meaning innately, genetically unqualified."