Josh Hawley is the junior US senator from Missouri. He made news this morning, saying he’d help the president in his attempt to stay in power by objecting to the certification of electors on Jan. 6. That means the US Senate will debate the merits of the allegations, which are nil, before voting to approve the Electoral College vote.

Hawley is expected to be one of the leading GOP candidates in the 2024 election. The conventional wisdom says he’s doing this to get as much attention as he can from Donald Trump’s most loyal supporters. While I’m usually skeptical of the conventional wisdom, I think it’s right this time.

Hawley isn’t going to the wall for Trump. In the end, he’ll vote to approve Joe Biden’s victory. This is sound and fury, but also nothing.

What’s interesting, I think, is Hawley’s opposition to Mitch McConnell — or at least the appearance of opposition. The Senate majority leader does not want to go through this song and dance, but instead get on with the business of sabotaging the new president’s administration.

McConnell knows Hawley’s gambit will fail, and fears failing to stop what the president is calling a stolen election might harm Kelly Loeffler’s and David Perdue’s reelection prospects, which will determine which party controls the Senate.

Hawley opposes, or at least appears to oppose, McConnell in another way. The top congressional Republican does not support giving each American $2,000 per month in covid-related economic relief, because Americans who are suffering are more likely to blame the guy in charge, which is to say Joe Biden, than they are the Republican Party.

McConnell did the same thing to Barack Obama. When the former president asked the Republicans for help rebuilding America in the wake of the 2007-2008 financial panic, McConnell said his first priority was making sure Obama was a one-term president.

Hawley, however, does support the House bill appropriating $2,000 per person. And he’s not alone. Loeffler and Perdue, who are fighting for their lives in next month’s runoffs in Georgia, also support the expenditure. So does Marco Rubio, who’s likely to be competing with Hawley in 2024. So what we have here is evidence of the incentive for Republicans to use the government to help Americans who are suffering.

One in five people, according to one estimate, don’t have enough money to buy enough food. This tack is very different, as I said, from McConnell’s preferred tactic, which is to allow widespread suffering if and when suffering lends itself to achieving Republican goals.

But not just any Americans. Only a fool would believe Hawley and the others care about every one of us. Only a fool would believe they are genuinely concerned about political inequality and its erosion of liberal democracy, freedom and self-government.

No, what we’re seeing is the Republicans, or some Republicans gesturing broadly, who are sloughing off the old plutocratic ways and embracing a kind of conservative socialism, which is say, the exclusive sort akin to the compromises of the New Deal, in which the government took the side of the common man as long as the common man was white.

Appearances, however, can be deceiving. Trump was also good at appearing to side with the (white) common man before doing pretty much everything in his power to help the very obscenely rich become even more very obscenely rich. That said, he did prove something useful to ambitious Republicans like Josh Hawley: money talks. Specifically, direct cash payments talk.

The president hurt farmers with his absurd trade war with China, but offset the pain by funneling billions in subsidies their way. In the past, a Republican might have drawn fire from his party for being so openly profligate. Trump, however, proved fiscal conservatism was a lie. It can be set aside when it’s convenient to. Meanwhile, he gave the GOP whatever it wanted (tax cuts, judges, deregulation, etc.). Hawley and McConnell might not be antipodes after all.

Ironically, I think, it’s Hawley who’s proving something — to the Democrats. The lesson is that fascist GOP voters are, far from being opposed to the federal government’s “intervention” into the economy and their personal lives, increasingly open to the idea.

As I said, one in five people aren’t getting enough to eat, according to one estimate. That’s about 50 million Americans, a number that no doubt includes a whole lot of Trump voters. Fascist voters get hungry, too, perhaps so hungry they’d even tolerate liberal democracy empowering Americans they don’t like as long as they get a cut.

Which is why McConnell seems poised to lose after he wins. He’s winning now. He’s blocking, at the behest of his conference, the House bill appropriating $2,000 per person. But I suspect he’s going to lose later.

Biden has said the last round of economic stimulus was a “down payment.” He expects more relief next year. Forty-four House Republicans favor it. Hawley et al. do, too.

By the time of Biden’s inauguration, the pandemic’s death toll could be 5,000 a day. All things being equal, the momentum could be in his favor. If so, Biden and his Democratic Party will get most of the credit, and in the process, they will have bought off many of Donald Trump’s fascist voters.

All the better for democracy.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 30 December 2020

Word Count: 883

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The Editorial Board spends a lot of time talking about the way we talk about politics, because the way we talk about politics often ends up becoming a made-up reality, one that we have to contend with at the same time we contend with real-world reality.

One of the biggest fictions we must all face, because it has been central to the identity of the Republican Party for 40-odd years, is this one: that government is locked in a reciprocal relationship with freedom. In other words, the more government we have, the less freedom we have. The less government we have, the more freedom we have.

This is not necessarily a conservative view. The framers, after all, designed a system by which power is widely distributed — among federal, state and local governments — so no one person, and no one faction, could accumulate power to rule with impunity.

The framers, however, were not reacting to the advances of mid-20th century rights movements (Black rights, women’s rights, gay rights, etc.). Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Bill Buckley and other conservatives were.

When they said government was best when it governed least, they meant the federal government should do two things: get off the backs of the very obscenely rich as well as off the backs of white-power southerners outraged by federal demands that they treat Black people as equals. (The conservative movement wasn’t just a backlash against rising Black freedom; it was also a backlash against the international order’s effort to contain Communism’s creep.)

We now live in a time of the covid, so naturally, there’s some effort to rethink this conservative view (though not by people who call themselves conservatives, because their conservatism has, in fact, devolved into fascism).

While the debate is necessary in light of 343,000 Americans having been killed by the covid, it seems stuck in the reciprocal relationship long ago defined by Reagan. We continue to ask ourselves how much government we need to fight the pandemic versus how much freedom we lose in the bargain (with “mask mandates” and such). It’s time to break that cycle. It’s time to see freedom and government not as two, but as one.

It’s time to see government not as something cut off from the people and their sovereignty, but as an expression of both.

Reagan sourced his mantra in Henry David Thoreau. “I heartily accept the motto — ‘that government is best which governs least’—and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically,” Thoreau wrote in “Civil Disobedience,” published in 1849:

Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe — ‘that government is best which governs not at all’ — and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.

Libertarians say this is not just a call for “limited government,” as the conservatives traditionally argue, but a call to get rid of government altogether. That might make a kind of sense if not for the subject of Thoreau’s civil disobedience.

His principled opposition wasn’t rooted in the size, or the presence or absence, of government. It was rooted in what government constitutionally protected at the time: chattel slavery. By refusing to pay his taxes, he was refusing to support it.

But that’s not all. Thoreau was objecting to being ensnared in a legal conspiracy against freedom. By objecting to be taxed, he was objecting to his “moral involvement in the misdeeds of government.”

The moral involvement of the misdeeds of government was the subject of Edmond Cahn’s “The Predicament of Democratic Man,” published in 1961. A prominent legal philosopher during his short life, Cahn was like Thoreau in refusing to recognize the gap between government and the people, as conservatives and libertarians do.

For Cahn, a democratic government arises from “a democratic temper,” which is to say, “a firm respect for oneself displayed as a sort of briny irreverence toward officials.”

I’m going to close with an extended quote from Cahn, because it seems to me that we are facing the same predicament that he outlines. All of us are responsible for 343,000 dead Americans. All of us have been involved in a misdeed by our government. The question is what we are going to do, because we the people constitute the government.

The democratic temper “asserts that democracy has canceled and obliterated the old line of separation between governments and peoples, that democratic citizens are really operative units and elements within the government, that they are among the number of the governors at the same time that they are among the governed, and that the only acceptable distinction between an official and a general citizen is that the official’s governmental powers, functions and duties are more narrowly defined and specialized. In short, the citizen in a democracy may feel that he too holds an office.”

 

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 29 December 2020

Word Count: 829

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Federal authorities identified the Christmas Day bomber. He is a 63-year-old white man by the name of Anthony Quinn Warner. He blew up an RV in front of the AT&T building in Nashville. He blew himself up, too. The blast rocked downtown, knocked out wireless communications regionally over the weekend, and injured three people. No else was harmed, though. The FBI figured out the who, what, where, when and how. What they don’t know is why. Prediction: that’s where all of this is going to end.

For nearly a decade, we have witnessed dozens if not hundreds of acts of mass violence that seem to have no rhyme or reason. Some are the result of mental illness. Some are the result of recognizable political ideologies. But others, like the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, don’t have anything to them to explain why. One day, Adam Lanza simply decided to murder his mom before shooting to pieces 20 six-year-old kids. No one knows his motive. Lanza doesn’t fit the scheme for understanding mass shooters (unless you believe his autism drove him to kill, an idea, I think, most people reject.)

The result was nothing being done. The result has been nearly a decade of mass death.

The question of motive matters for reasons behind criminal investigations. It matters to lawmaking and policymaking. If we don’t know why someone committed murder on a grand scale, we can’t tailor policy, much less statutory law, with precision. In the absence of a clear motive, we tend to throw up our hands. If it’s not mental illness, if it’s not political ideology, then he (and it’s nearly always a he) is just a “Lone Wolf.”

Making this worse is the widespread acceptance of this as something we can’t prevent. Like it or not, mass death is something we have come to see as normal, even expected.

The thing about “Lone Wolves” is they aren’t alone. Society is chock full of them. Some men, especially some white men, don’t have a reason for wanting to see the world burn other than wanting to see the world burn, even when, or especially when, they burn themselves up in the process.

A “death drive” should be a motive worth recognizing in the court of public opinion, which is where politics is born (though, perhaps, not a court of law, where standards of proof are, and should be, higher). It could be that Anthony Warner blew himself because he wanted to blow himself up.

Suicide bombers usually want something more, though. They usually want glory or fame or notoriety postmortem. For this reason, authorities are reportedly asking if Warner believed “the 5G conspiracy theory.” This is the (baseless) assertion that advanced wireless technology causes illness, like cancer, or makes humans vulnerable to illness, like the covid. (Angry mobs have burned down cell phone towers in the United Kingdom and Europe in the mistaken belief that they are spreading the new strain of the coronavirus.)

It could be, though time will tell, that Warner believed he was doing something noble by setting off an explosion outside Nashville’s AT&T building, thus temporarily knocking out wireless communications regionally. It could be that Warner wanted what most suicide bombers have wanted: to send a message.

Messages are central to political ideologies, which are themselves central to law enforcement agencies determining whether a crime is an act of terrorism. If Warner is found to have believed in “the 5G conspiracy theory,” however, the temptation will be to say that the crime was committed by a tinfoil hat-wearing kook; that it has nothing to with political ideology; that, therefore, it was not terrorism.

The political response from lawmakers and policymakers will likely be, as a consequence, a collective shrug. And sadly, that brings us full circle, back to our impotence in the face of mass death.

I wish more people understood that wanting to blow things up is a motive all its own. I wish more people understood that conspiracy theories are a kind of political ideology in their own right. (Imagine what they demand of people in order to believe they are true). I wish more people understood that conspiracy theories are not a bug but a feature of terrorism. (Imagine a way of thinking in which the enemy is so terrible that you have to kill yourself to kill it.)

If more people understood these truths to be self-evident, I think more people would be able to pressure lawmakers and policymakers into taking necessary action, whatever that might be.

Given that mass death is now normalized, however, most aren’t going to recognize terrorism even after seeing it.

 

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 December 2020

Word Count: 773

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I think the point of wishing someone a happy holiday season is rooted in one of the themes of Christmas — peace on earth and good will toward all humanity. In other words, empathy. It’s a simple consideration for people who might not recognize the messiah but who nonetheless enjoy much-deserved downtime during this time of year.

Even the most conservative Christian can understand the virtue in “Happy Holidays.”

At the same time, many conservative Christians, but especially white evangelical Protestants (WEPs), are told they inhabit a world that persecutes the faithful for believing God sent to earth his only begotten son to redeem the world of Man. Obviously, no one is martyred anymore. Not obvious is that modernity, or modern life, has become a stand-in for Roman Emperors purging the empire of the Cult of Jesus.

The more the United States “progresses,” assuming that it does such a thing, the more WEPs believe a country that’s rightfully theirs to dominate is turning against them.

So right away there is a tension between feeling the need to be generous of heart toward one’s fellow human beings during a season invoking peace on earth and good will toward all humanity, and the need to see oneself as being persecuted (because the very idea of being persecuted for one’s beliefs has been stitched into one’s identity as a Bible-believing Christian).

This tension has always been more or less precariously balanced, but it could no longer be balanced, precariously or otherwise, after Fox News and other right-wing propaganda outlets decided to invent a scandal out of thin air.

I’m talking, of course, about “the war on Christmas.” It is many things, all of them steeped in bad faith, but most of it is this: the more people say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas,” the more persecuted WEPs feel. The more persecuted WEPs feel, the more they’re justified in doing anything necessary to “take back their country” from “cultural Marxism,” etc.

“The war on Christmas” predates Donald Trump by at least a decade. But many WEPs believe God sent the president to save them, according to political scientist Matthew Wilson. “Some evangelicals really do see Trump as an instrument of the Divine Plan,” he said. “It stems in large part from the fact that evangelicals see their ideal of America as a godly commonwealth in existential danger.”

The “war on Christmas” is, therefore, part of another war.

On empathy, for one thing. The decades-long radicalization of the Republican Party has created conditions in which Republicans feel “strong social pressure” to reject the outcome of a lawful democratic election, according to political scientist Elizabeth C. Connors. Similarly, the GOP’s radicalization has created conditions in which any gesture of empathy, large or small, is forbidden.

They are seen as weakness, betrayal or something equally bad. When God is on your side, He’s not on theirs. To feel empathy, therefore — even just wishing someone a “Happy Holiday” — is to stand against God.

For this reason, no one should take “the war on Christmas” lightly. Everyone who cares about the fate of the nation should see it as a deep-seated expression of native-born fascism, which is to say, an outgrowth of the long and soft civil war against our democratic republic.

“The war on Christmas” isn’t silly. It isn’t trivial. It is part of a broader context in which huge swathes of the population reject not only reality but their obligation to other human beings such that the covid pandemic can kill three thousand Americans a day and people are still arguing over whether it’s a hoax.

For some, the way to cultivate empathy is to get people to see what the covid does to the body. Maybe then they’d feel more good will toward humanity. “Patients often grow ashen as their body struggles for nutrients,” wrote the Washington Post’s William Wan and Brittany Shammas. “Their skin becomes mottled with splotches of reddish purple as their heart pumps less and less blood to parts of the body that need it. Often, the room is eerily empty, with nurses and doctors trying to minimize risk of infection. The only constant is the low, steady hum of an oxygen compressor piping air to the patient’s nostrils. Amid the silent void, the patients’ dying breaths become magnified.

“The hardest thing about it is how alone they are in the end,” said Joan Schaum, a nurse with Hospice & Community Care in Lancaster, Pa.

This presumes two things. One, that WEPs and others will derive from empathy the motivation to do more to stop the spread of the covid. However, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, “white evangelical Protestants are the only religious group more likely to say that the outbreak was inevitable (55%) than to say it could have been controlled better (44%).”

You can’t stop a plague sent down by God, especially since doing so might feel like a betrayal of the leader whom God sent.

Two, that WEPs and others recognize the commonality between people. Fact is, most of them don’t. More precisely, most of them won’t. To recognize the common purpose between members of a political community such as the United States is to accept that other people have valid and legitimate political interests, which opens the door to thinking God might love people who you believe are persecuting your belief in God. That’s a place they will never go, because it challenges their core religious identity.

Witnessing what the covid does to the body is not going to elicit empathy. Indeed, it might radicalize “God’s chosen people” more than they already are. For this reason, and in light of the death toll that continues to mount, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that it’s over.

The Republican Party, and WEPs, have won the “war on Christmas.”

 

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 December 2020

Word Count: 970

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Why is the president downplaying the significance of a security breach said to be “on a scale Washington has never experienced,” according to the New York Times? As a result of a Russian hacking operation dating back to October 2019, Joe Biden will now “inherit a government so laced with electronic tunnels bored by Russian intelligence that it may be months, years even, before he can trust the systems that run much of Washington.”

The Russians not only got into government networks, but also its supply chain, which is vast. That’s why the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said it “poses a grave risk to the federal government and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments as well as critical infrastructure entities and other private sector organizations.”

That’s why one expert called it “the most consequential cyberespionage campaign in history and the fact that the government is absent is a huge problem.”

And yet Donald Trump said nothing for days until he said something, which was more of what you’ve come to expect from a man who conspired with the Russians to win the presidency in the first place. “I have been fully briefed and everything is well under control,” Trump tweeted. “The Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality.”

He said the press corps “exaggerated the damage” and “the real issue was whether the election results had been compromised,” per the New York Times. “There could also have been a hit on our ridiculous voting machines during the election,” Trump wrote.

In fact, the breach was like an act of war. US Senator Chris Coons told MSNBC:

It’s pretty hard to distinguish this from an act of aggression that rises to the level of an attack that qualifies as war. … [T]his is as destructive and broad scale an engagement with our military systems, our intelligence systems as has happened in my lifetime.

Biden appears to be preparing some kind of response: “A good defense isn’t enough,” he said, vowing “substantial costs on those responsible for such malicious attacks.”

While reporters look into what that response might be given the damage done to the nation’s security, we should ask why Trump continues to deny Russian sabotage? Denial used to make sense. He feared widespread understanding of his conspiracy with the Russians to win the 2016 election might endanger his chances of being reelected. Denial was in his interest. What’s his interest now in the wake of defeat?

Trump’s might not be clear but the Republican Party’s interest is crystal. With the exception of US Senator Mitt Romney, who has always been a keen Russia critic, no one in the GOP has stepped forward to condemn Russia’s cyber-attack. No one has done what Coons and other Senate Democrats have done, likening the assault to an act of war, promising to support the next commander-in-chief in defending the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

They haven’t because saying nothing is in their interest.

Saying nothing improves their chances of winning Georgia runoffs needed to keep control of the US Senate. Saying nothing tells Vladimir Putin he can do whatever he wants. Saying nothing puts party over country, power over patriotism.

Indeed, the Republican Party’s interest seems rooted in its capacity to look the other way during times of national emergency. They looked away during the financial panic of 2007-2008, leaving the Democrats to pick up after a Republican administration that wrecked the economy while blaming them for ballooning deficits.

They looked away after the Sandy Hook massacre, allowing mass shootings to proliferate while blaming Democrats for trying to take guns away (a lie).

They looked away during the 2016 election, allowing the Russians to sabotage Hillary Clinton while blaming the Democrats for “spying” on Trump’s campaign.

They looked away as a once-a-century plague killed more Americans than all those who died fighting the Second World War.

And they looked away while a defeated president talked about declaring martial law.

What’s Trump’s interest? I don’t have an answer. All I can do is suggest that this latest attack on our sovereignty is a fitting end to a presidency that emerged in the shadow of the Kremlin. All I can do is suggest that small and hard-to-see but nonetheless appreciable acts of war were a feature of Trump’s presidency, not a bug. All I can do is suggest that malicious forces outside our borders have been working in concert and/or in tandem with seditious forces inside our borders to wound our country or worse. All I can do is suggest that the people calling themselves patriots are anything but patriotic.

 

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 21 December 2020

Word Count: 775

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The leaders of the Republican Party are now slowly recognizing publicly that Joe Biden is going to be the next president of the United States. While that may seem reassuring to those with an abiding faith in democratic institutions, it shouldn’t be that reassuring.

The more the GOP leadership moves forward, preparing itself to face a Democratic administration, the more Donald Trump’s insanest followers are going to feel betrayed. The more they feel betrayed, the more they are going to act violently.

I have no doubt about it. The pattern was established in the 1990s. Whenever there’s a Democratic president, there’s mass violence of one variety or another, some of which is transparently political, as when Dylann Storm Roof entered an AME church in Charleston to murder Black people kneeling in prayer.

Most mass shootings are not transparently political but they are nonetheless inherently political. They reflect something sinister in our society, something deeply paranoid yet deeply entitled, and ready to kill itself if that’s what it takes to kill its mortal enemy, whoever that is.

That’s the context. Add to that events of the present: a president refusing to concede while flunkies attempt to execute a coup d’etat; close allies inside and outside the government urging him to declare martial law.

Add to that context events of the past: Trump’s victory by way of Russian sabotage; the insistence that investigations into Trump-Kremlin relations are part of a conspiracy deep in the government attempting to depose him and the confederate nation-within-a-nation for which he stands; the logical transmogrification of that conspiracy theory into one that now ensnares even Trump’s appointees to the US Supreme Court; and leading Republicans, such as US Senator Rand Paul, who give oxygen to it by accusing Biden of stealing the election.

During Trump’s tenure, he encouraged violence against political enemies broadly interpreted by the perpetrators of mass violence to be anyone who was not among the “real Americans” living in the confederate nation-within-a-nation for which the president stood. Anti-Trump protesters were mowed down in Charlottesville in 2017. Jews were massacred in Pittsburgh in 2018. Immigrants, and the urban setting they and their white liberal allies lived in, were targeted for elimination in El Paso in 2019.

In each case, leading Republicans never pointed a finger at Trump. Instead, they sought cover on ground that was sacred to them, the Second Amendment. The occasional spasm of violence, some actually said, was the price of our freedom.

By the time Trump took office, the Republicans were practiced in looking the other way.

They looked the other way when the previous Democratic president asked them to join efforts to save the US economy from collapse; when the Russians helped Trump beat Hillary Clinton; and when the Russians pulled off the biggest hack in our history, including the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees our bomb stockpile.

They continued before and after Robert Mueller all but named Trump in the commission of federal crimes punishable by law; when the president involved a foreign leader in an international scheme to defraud the American people; and when the Senate Republicans acquitted him, as if they did not see the treason in front of them.

The worst time they looked the other way was when the new strain of the coronavirus arrived. Since March, the covid has killed more than 318,000 Americans and infected millions more. This past week saw more than 3,000 deaths per day, with the daily equivalent expected over the next 60 to 90 days despite a vaccine being rolled out and another waiting in the wings.

More people have died from the covid pandemic than all who died fighting in the Second World War. By the time this is all over, more Americans will have died than all who died fighting in all foreign wars combined.

The Republicans have looked the other way during a viral plague just as they looked the other way during a plague of mass shootings and mass death, a plague that will grow in intensity under a Democratic president even as the viral plague subsides. And they will continue looking away even as they stoke the paranoia and entitlement that inspires people to kill themselves in order to kill their enemies, whoever they are.

I haven’t hoped much for reform since Dec. 14, 2012 when 20 first-graders were shot to pieces at Sandy Hook Elementary School, a few miles down the road from where I am writing this, in Newtown, Conn. I don’t see much reason to hope in the near term either. That said, things might change when most people most of the time stop seeing mass shootings as an issue of gun rights that will never be resolved.

All shooting massacres are political violence no matter what the shooter’s motives are. They are political violence in the service of a political party making the political decision to look the other way while sickness, suffering, and death engulf our beloved country.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 December 2020

Word Count: 829

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Details of a $900 billion covid relief bill will likely be released some time today, according to Bloomberg. Sources say the package will likely include “$600 in payments for individuals, $300-per-week in supplemental unemployment insurance payments and aid for small businesses as well as roughly $17 billion for airlines.” Legislation will not include state and city aid, however. That seems to be a concession on the part of the Democrats in exchange for GOP lawmakers dropping a corporate liability shield.

The country is in desperate need of relief, not least because as many as 40 million people risk being evicted from their homes, according to the Aspen Institute. (As I’m writing this, news came of jobless claims jumping unexpectedly to their highest level in three months.)

To truly boost the economy, though, the Democrats should aim at the bottom of the social order, which is to say poor Black people, especially poor Black women. Anything helping people at the bottom is going to help everyone else. To do this, the Congress should get rid of the Hyde Amendment. The Democrats should justify getting rid of it using the same argument that went into establishing it.

What is the Hyde Amendment? It’s a provision of federal law named after the late Henry Hyde, a major abortion opponent. It bans Medicaid money from being used to pay for abortions with few exceptions, including risk of death to the mother. It has been attached, more or less unchanged, to every spending bill since 1976.

For years, even defenders of abortion were OK with it. They recognized the legitimacy of the claim that Americans who oppose abortion on religious grounds should not be forced to pay for something that violates their sincerely held religious beliefs.

Things are different now, as was apparent after then-candidate Joe Biden said he was OK with it before getting excoriated by women’s groups and heel-turning in a hurry. He and other leading Democrats now support repealing it with the so-called EACH Woman Act.

I don’t know how one can go about calculating the economic impact of the Hyde Amendment. I’m sure someone somewhere has. However, common sense tells us that whatever the actual number is, it’s gotta be big, especially with reference to the poor. The poor are not poor because they don’t have money. The poor are poor, because they are stuck in a social context in which they must spend all they have, and more. If they don’t, something bad is going to happen — for instance, going hungry or getting kicked out of the house with nowhere to go.

The Hyde Amendment caused “a 13 percent increase in births among Medicaid recipients after the amendment was enacted, and estimated that it prevented more than 60,000 abortions per year,” according to the New York Times. Again, whatever the actual total of its economic impact, it’s gotta be big.

Which is why the Congress should get rid of it. The Republicans will balk, but that doesn’t mean the Democrats shouldn’t try. And now is the time, because now is when the covid pandemic has turned everything upside down. It’s now OK for taxpayers, even religiously conservative taxpayers, to pay for things that might violate their religious beliefs. That it’s OK is the only logical conclusion one can draw from the absence of any religiously conservative taxpayer lodging a complaint over this fact: religious groups of all varieties received billions in the last round of covid relief.

This might not sound pivotal, but think about it. White evangelical Protestants, most of whom believe Islam, Hinduism and even Catholicism are false religions, paid to keep mosques, temples and parishes open after the covid relief act passed in the spring. White evangelical Protestants, who among all Americans oppose abortion the most, funded congregations that not only tolerate abortion but openly defend its practice, such as the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church (USA), respectively. By the same logic of the Hyde Amendment, white evangelical Protestants saw their sincerely held religious beliefs and liberties violated in one way or another.

Of course, white evangelical Protestants could put a stop to this violation of their faith and religious freedom. They could, as with abortion, demand the Congress not force them to pay for things they don’t agree with. But that would require removing themselves from being eligible for federal aid in the middle of a plague. Given that three-quarters of “Christian churches and Christian organizations” asked for and got forgivable business loans under the Paycheck Protection Program, that seems unlikely.

The solid religious foundation beneath the Hyde Amendment has melted into the air.

The Democrats always make an economic and social justice case for repealing it, but they don’t have to do that anymore. The onus isn’t on them. All they need do is show things have changed. All they need do is show the Republicans, who will insist the Hyde Amendment is about religious freedom, don’t mean it. They don’t mean it, because religious freedom didn’t stop them from voting to fund “false religions” that openly defend abortion on religious grounds.

Indeed, the pandemic is forcing every one of us to reassess what we thought was true but in this new light isn’t so true.

 

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 17 December 2020

Word Count: 873

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The language we use to describe political reality can create its own reality so that we end up fighting over a fiction instead of a fact. I’m thinking particularly of the word “divided.” The Washington press corps uses it loosely to mean opposition of some variety, usually between the two parties, but also nationally. We’re told America is “divided” on any given issue, particularly with reference to the presidential election.

But, again, the language we use to describe political reality can create its own political reality, a false one, if we’re not careful about how and why we use it. The result can be our fighting over a fiction, rather than a fact. The consequence, I contend, is allowing language to control us instead of us controlling the language. The consequence is endangering ourselves instead of affirming and empowering ourselves as we should.

What if we’re not that divided? Consider history. We inhabit, after all, a heterogeneous country, racially, religiously and geographically. It has been this way since before white people settled the continent. You could say, and I would say, we’ve always been divided in one way or another, because the United States is a federation of different regions and states.

Total agreement is not possible or even desirable. Someone will always disagree, and that’s a good thing. So, if America has always been divided, our current “division” seems so unexceptional as to be scarcely worth mentioning.

Of course, it is worth mentioning. The question, then, is how it’s mentioned. Here, we have to be mindful of the Washington press corps’ self-interest, by which I mean professional self-interest. Disagreement, controversy, conflict — these will always be newsworthy, even if they are, in the grand scheme of things, rather insignificant — insignificant because wherever you find human beings gathered in an effort to organize themselves, you’re going to find disagreement, controversy and conflict.

Because most people most of the time don’t have access to information about what’s going on in Washington, most people most of the time trust the press corps to tell them what’s going on. But because the press corps is in the habit of talking up disagreement, controversy and conflict, because disagreement, controversy and conflict are considered newsworthy, most people most of the time believe America is, in fact, divided even though most “division” is rather normal, ordinary and ephemeral.

What about the election? “Half the country” voted for Donald Trump. “The other half” voted for Joe Biden. Indeed, as Dave Wasserman reported, Trump came within 65,009 votes of winning. Surely, no matter how the press corps talks about “division,” the election really does illustrate just how divided we have become as a country.

Looks can be deceiving, though. A margin of more than 65,000 votes is meaningful but only in the context of the Electoral College. The Electoral College is many things, none of them democratic. Something so anti-democratic cannot measure how divided we are.

Fact is, Trump lost by 7.1 million votes. And fact is, Biden won more votes than any candidate, Republican or Democrat, ever. In terms of the percentage of the popular vote, among Democrats, only Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Barack Obama (the first time) got a higher share. Among Republicans, only Dwight Eisenhower (twice), Richard Nixon (reelection), Ronald Reagan (reelection) and George HW Bush did.

Yes, our anti-democratic Electoral College system produced an outcome by which it seems we’re very nearly divided down the middle. That’s until you remember that Trump could have won the Electoral College but lost 7.1 million votes.

What each stood for and against matters, too. Biden for order, union and cooperation. Trump for chaos, disunion and negation. Biden stood for equal human rights and against fascist collectivism. Trump stood for inequality in all its forms and against republican democracy.

Talking up a divided America is privileging the loser over the winner. The privilege ought to go to the candidate who brought as much unity as it’s possible to bring to a country as heterogeneous as ours. It should go especially to the 81,283,485 people who smashed all the old records to save our democratic republic.

The language we use to describe political reality can create its own reality so that we end up fighting over a fiction instead of a fact.

Sixty-two percent of Americans, now that the Electoral College has finalized the results, say the election is over and it’s time to move on, according to a new poll by CBS News. Yes, lots of Republicans disagree, but so what? Unity doesn’t come, and has never come, when everyone agrees. All you need is a majority. Biden has that, and we should remember that.

We keep telling ourselves we’re divided. By any reasonable measure, however, America is united.

 

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 December 2020

Word Count: 793

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Joe Biden is full of surprises. After the Electoral College met Monday to finalize the results of the election, the president-elect delivered a speech I never thought he’d deliver. He did not say you’re with us or against, but that’s what he righteously implied. And by implication, Biden gave a warning.

Treachery, sedition, treason — none of these will be tolerated. All of them, moreover, will come at a price for the Republican Party to pay, the least of which is being characterized as the republic’s mortal enemy.

I wasn’t alone in being surprised. So was Jonathan Bernstein, the politics writer for Bloomberg Opinion. I read the political scientist every morning because of his dispassionate, and therefore accurate, read on contemporary politics. But in today’s column, he’s wrong. Should Biden call out Donald Trump’s lawlessness? he asked:

 

His decision to address it on Monday night after the Electoral College reaffirmed his victory was probably a mistake. Even giving such a speech was a concession of sorts to Trump’s illegitimate challenges. … It may seem weird to say that the president-elect talking about the virtues of democracy could actually harm that cause, but that’s where we are. Scolding Trump, as Biden did on Monday, no doubt appeals to Democrats, and does have the virtue of accurately describing what’s happening. But the last thing Biden wants, and the last thing the nation needs, is a partisan divide over whether democracy is a good thing or not (italics mine).

Bernstein knows we already have a partisan divide over whether democracy is a good thing or not. That’s what this era of Donald Trump has been all about. He’s right to be concerned. We all should be. Conditions are becoming ideal for widespread political violence and, though unlikely, civil war. But he’s wrong in saying that ignoring the GOP’s attempted coup d’etat is better than facing it head on. He’s wrong in suggesting that Biden should avoid engaging in the debate over democracy.

It was failure to engage morally with a revived native-born fascism that gave rise to the last four years of hell.

There is risk to drawing a line and demanding that people pick a side. That risk should be obvious. Lots and lots of people will chose right-wing collectivism over republican democracy every single time. Indeed, many have already chosen collectivism though it has killed more Americans than all those who died fighting in World War II. But that has always been the case.

Native-born fascism will be with us long after Trump is out of the White House. All we can do is manage it. We manage it by engaging morally in debate over whether democracy is a good thing. But even this is missing something.

Democracy, after all, is secondary to equality. That’s what Abraham Lincoln thought. According to Yale philosopher Steven B. Smith, whose book Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes comes out next year, the 16th president

 

regarded the Union not as resting upon the direct expression of the popular will — a kind of American version of Rousseau’s ‘general will’ — but upon a belief in the principle of equal human rights.

A slave-holding republic — one that did not respect the rights and dignity of each individual — was a contradiction in terms. Lincoln expressed his view almost as a political catechism. “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy. (italics mine)

With inequality, you have a social order, but you don’t have a nation. Without a nation, without an idea binding a diverse people together as one, all that’s left are competing factions in an endless struggle for control. This is where we are amid the social and, therefore, economic inequality dominating our lives.

This is why Lincoln believed equal human rights were foundational to an enduring democracy. “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master,” he said. “This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.”

And this is why Biden’s speech was just shy of jaw-dropping. He characterized those standing against “the general will” as standing so far outside the mainstream “we’ve never seen it before — a position that refused to respect the will of the people, refused to respect the rule of law, and refused to honor our Constitution.”

The next step is characterizing the forces of social inequality — especially white supremacy — as being outside the boundaries of our republican democracy. It’s defending anti-racism, which isn’t political correctness. It isn’t “cancel culture.” It’s good old-fashioned patriotism.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 December 2020

Word Count: 782

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Let me start by saying I do not expect the Editorial Board to influence the ways high-profile Democrats in the US Congress think and behave, but it feels pretty damn good when their thinking and behavior echoes what you’ve read in this humble newsletter.

I left you Friday by saying the Republicans had become an insurgency to overthrow the republic. In joining a lawsuit to the US Supreme Court seeking to invalidate millions of votes, the Republicans (from the US House, the US Senate and 18 states) had made a declaration on par with their oaths of office by which

they no longer agree with the superlative principle constituting the foundation of our republic. They have declared where they stand, and where they stand is against America. Yes, the Republicans are performing partisanship. But that performance has led them to the edge of treason.

I also said the Democrats in the Congress must name such misconduct. They won’t, though. Instead, I said, they

 act as if eventually they can negotiate with these ‘suicide bombers.’ They can’t. Indeed, they mustn’t. Compromise begets more of the same. They don’t want to force the Republicans to choose a side. This isn’t, the Democrats say, about ‘us versus them.’ The problem is the Republicans have already chosen.

 Not long after I posted Friday’s edition, Chris Murphy said this on the Senate floor:

The most serious attempt to overthrow our democracy in the history of this country is underway. Those who are pushing to make President Trump president for a second term no matter the outcome of the election are engaged in a treachery against their nation. You cannot at the same time love America and hate democracy. But as we speak, a whole lot of flag-waving Republicans are nakedly trying to invalidate millions of legal votes, because that is the only way that they can make Donald Trump president again. It is the only way … because he didn’t win (my italics).

I don’t think Murphy, my US senator, reads the Editorial Board. He has just an incredible knack for feeling out the rhetorical vanguard. To my knowledge, he’s the highest-ranking Democrat to use “treachery” or something close to “treason.”

Let’s hope other Democrats follow his example. Let’s hope they understand the importance of staking out the high, moral and patriotic ground. They, and we, are going to need it.

The Supreme Court threw out the lawsuit Friday, but the GOP continues to threaten the people’s sovereignty. Some are plotting yet another coup d’etat, according to the New York Times:

As the president continues to refuse to concede, a small group of his most loyal backers in Congress is plotting a final-stage challenge on the floor of the House of Representatives in early January to try to reverse Mr. Biden’s victory.

The plan is to reject the Electoral College votes, a move that would violate federal “safe harbor” laws. Again, the point should not be whether they will succeed. (They won’t.) The point should be that some Republicans are going to try. The point is that trying is sedition.

Naming the GOP’s insurgency is more important than punishing it. For now, anyway. Some House Democrats are asking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi not to seat those Republicans who, when they joined the Supreme Court case, declared themselves the enemy of republican democracy. In the process, a dozen of them did, indeed, allege that their own elections were invalid. But nonsense isn’t a reason to deny majority rule.

The Republicans are lying. Real voters voted for them. The Democrats know that well enough. There’s no need for Pelosi and the Democrats to play along with the lie.

The Democrats don’t need “procedural maximalism,” as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes said, to respond to Republican disloyalty. What they need is patriotic maximalism — which is to say, they need to turn up the rhetoric.

That’s what I saw in Adam Schiff’s remarks Friday night. The House Intelligence Committee chair, and lead prosecutor in Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, said refusing to seat Republicans wasn’t the remedy for their betrayal of the non-negotiable values that America stands for. Instead, he said:

the remedy is to make the case to the American people that they are being betrayed. The Republicans said they stood for something. As it turns out, they don’t stand for anything. Helping the country see how close we are coming to losing our democracy and why it’s worth fighting for. I think we all thought democracy was self-effectuating, that we could count on the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice on its own. We have learned we have to fight for it every day (my italics).

To my ears, this seems like something new. In the past, the Democrats tried saying partisanship was the problem, not the solution. Partisanship is something to run from, not embrace. Schiff is turning that around. And he’s right, too.

Partisanship saved the United States from a second Trump term. Partisanship, therefore, will save us from a political party turned insurgency prepared to kill itself to win. The moral arc of the universe won’t bend on its own, as I intimate at the Editorial Board.

We seem to be witnessing, at long last, a Democratic Party prepared to take its own side in a fight.

 

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 14 December 2020

Word Count: 882

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