The Daily Escape:
Death Valley sunset, Death Valley NP, CA and NV – February 2023 photo by Leila Shehab Photography
From the NYT:
“To Democrats, the train derailment and chemical leak in the hamlet of East Palestine, Ohio, is a story of logic, action, and consequences: Rail safety regulations put in place by the Obama administration were intended to prevent just such accidents. The Trump administration gutted them.
To Republicans, East Palestine is a symbol of something…more emotional: a forgotten town in a conservative state, like so many others in Middle America, struggling for survival against an uncaring mega-corporation and an unseeing government…”
If you follow FOX news you can be forgiven for thinking that the federal disaster relief teams just got around to dealing with the hazardous materials spill in East Palestine, Ohio.
Actually, those federal teams have been on the scene since it happened.
Republicans are trying to make a political meatloaf out of Biden’s visiting Ukraine rather than visiting Ohio. Or why it took Pete Buttigieg three weeks to visit the site. Even the East Palestine mayor Trent Conaway said Biden’s trip to Eastern Europe was “a slap in the face.” But if Biden had visited, you know the mayor would say he had better things to do than shepherd around a bigwig.
Their message is that Democrats are indifferent to working-class voters.
But maybe there’s something under the surface of these politics-as-usual arguments. The derailment presents issues that Republicans rarely like to grapple with: Corporate power and a clear need for government regulation.
What may be brewing is a new and different message by the GOP’s populist wing, one that breaks with Party orthodoxy and targets corporate America. And Norfolk Southern, owner of the derailed train and also behind a clear lobbying effort to keep the government from improving rail safety, is a big and very easy target.
Vox quotes Saurabh Sharma, the president of American Moment, a public policy organization that aims to influence young conservatives to become more populist:
“I think that this tragedy that happened in East Palestine is an opportunity for Republicans that have been looking for opportunities to distinguish themselves from the neoliberal set in the party to do so.”
The execrable JD Vance was in East Palestine with Trump, and told Axios afterwards that figures like Trump, Tucker Carlson and himself recognize that East Palestine residents and those like them were the GOP’s voters:
“The three of us, in our own ways, recognized instantly: This is fundamentally our voters, right? These are sort of our people. It’s a reasonably rural community. It’s been affected by industrialization,” Vance said. “These are the people who really lost when we lost our manufacturing base to China, And these are the people who are going to be forgotten by the media unless certain voices make sure that their interests are at the forefront.”
Wow, Yale grad Vance, trying to speak mid-western English says: “This is fundamentally our voters, right?”
The question is: Can Republicans build an economic populist base within their Party? It’s clear that Trump deserves criticism from the Democrats over the accident, since it’s easy to connect the derailment to Trump’s deregulation of ineffective train braking systems, the cause of the accident. That means Trump wouldn’t be exempt from political attacks by economic populist Republicans.
Conservatives like Jon Schweppe, the director at the American Principles Project, a conservative think tank, tried to link a few ideas together:
“There is a growing sense that all of these corporations are against us — not only are they trying to screw us over on the woke stuff, but generally, they just don’t care about ordinary people.”
The American Principles Project is virulently anti-woke, anti-trans and anti-voting rights. Can they also be anti-corporations? And how close are they to mainstream Republicans?
Can the East Palestine accident cause Republicans to embrace truly populist issues? Would the GOP tie corporate graft and greed to bureaucratic incompetence and Democratic indifference? They seem to fit easily within existing Tucker Carlson messaging.
BTW: All of it also fits very easily into Democratic messaging.
But let’s forget about who’s woke or, how will the second year of the Ukraine war go? It’s time for our Saturday Soother, when we disengage from the world as completely as possible and focus on finding a calm state to prepare us for the week to come.
Here in the Mansion of Wrong, we spent time upgrading our internet service to fiber optic. That wasn’t the promised slick changeover touted by the provider, but it’s finally working.
To get soothed, settle in a big chair by a south-facing window and watch Lang Lang play Debussy’s “Suite Bergamasque, or Clair de lune”. This performance was part of an album launched in Paris on Valentine’s Day, 2019. Listen as Lang Lang performs on a boat cruising along the Seine while you enjoy Paris at night:
