Adam Jentleson used to be deputy chief of staff for US Senator Harry Reid. He wrote an op-ed for the New York Times Tuesday outlining concerns familiar to Editorial Board readers. Our nightmare won’t end with Donald Trump’s end. “If Mr. Biden wins, there will be a temptation to embrace a big lie: Mr. Trump was the problem, and with him gone, the Republican Party can return to normal,” Jentleson wrote. “But today’s Republican Party won’t moderate itself, because Trumpism is its natural state. Democrats should avoid the temptation to expect Republican cooperation in governing this country.”

I think Jentleson is putting things mildly. About 40 percent of the electorate approves of the president, whether he’s engaged in sabotage, corruption or negligent homicide. Those people will be with us after the election. If Joe Biden becomes president, he will no doubt order a national face-mask mandate in a bid to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus. The Republican Party will in turn mount resistance to the new president the way they did to Barack Obama, even though the effort will surely leave in its wake dead Republican voters aplenty. As I wrote Tuesday, “they will fight ‘big government tyranny’ even if that fight leads to self-destruction.” The question is whether the Democrats, in seeking good-faith governing partners, are going to play along.

If anyone doubts the futility of finding good-faith governing partners in the ranks of the Republican Party, let them consider Tuesday’s release of a nearly 1,000-page bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee (the fifth of five installments). Here’s how Patrick Tucker, an editor at the national security publication Defense One, led his reporting: “President Donald Trump’s friend and campaign advisor Roger Stone was in active discussion with Wikileaks to learn about future Russian information dumps and to help the Trump campaign,” he wrote. “Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort was also in conversations with Kremlin-backed oligarchs and Russian intelligence officers, and was trading inside campaign information in an effort to draw down his personal financial debt. It’s a picture of a campaign willfully soliciting help from a hostile foreign power and providing valuable intelligence. (Italics mine.)

The report concludes explicitly “no collusion” between Trump and Russian agents, but the actual facts of the actual report actually contradict that conclusion, according to Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes. Before outlining instances in which it kinda sorta really does look a lot like collusion, Wittes writes: “What Senate Republicans are saying about their own report comes perilously close to simple lying.”

In a press release, the Senate’s current majority leader appears to be all-in on the big lie. “Their report reaffirms Special Counsel Mueller’s finding that President Trump did not collude with Russia,” said Mitch McConnell, “These serious threats need to unite our nation. We can’t afford for them to just further divide us. That is exactly what our adversaries want.”

Let’s leave aside for the moment a few things. One, that McConnell is gaslighting the hell out of us. Two, that the president cheated once. Three, that he cheated twice when he extorted Ukraine’s president into an international criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people (for the second time). Four, that his goons (namely, Rudy Giuliani) continue seeking “dirt” on Biden from Vladimir Putin’s patsies in the Ukrainian government even after the president was impeached for doing just that. Five, that Trump retweeted that “dirt” on Sunday. Six, that the Senate Republicans decided against removing him from office despite knowing what he was doing, therefore establishing a precedent by which future presidents can safely commit treason.

Let’s leave one through six aside for a moment to focus on this latest report so we can ask: Can the Democrats trust the Republicans to govern in the country’s best interest when they have shown they can’t be trusted to say what’s in their own report about the president’s collusion with a foreign dictator who continues to mount a cyber-offensive to impact the outcome of this year’s election?

No can do, I think we can safely say.

It’s time to zap the filibuster among other reforms that would reshape the electorate as well as the structure of government, but a President Biden and his Democrats must do more. They must insist on the investigation and prosecution of a former president. Trust cannot be reestablished without reestablishing justice and accountability first.

For those worried about the precedent this would create, it’s already created. US Attorney General Bill Barr appointed prosecutor John Durham, a US attorney from Connecticut, to investigate the investigation of Trump’s collusion with the Russians. His mandate, wrote The Globalist’s Frank Vogl is to find “evidence” supporting the president’s claim of the “Russia hoax.”

“The Durham report could call for indictments against former Justice Department, FBI and other intelligence agency officials,” Vogl wrote. “Perhaps, it could even include people who served in Obama’s White House. The aim is crude: To demonstrate that the Obama-Biden Administration was crooked.”

The aim could be much more than that. Twice in two days, Trump said he’s owed a third term: “Considering we caught President Obama and sleepy Joe Biden spying on our campaign — treason — we’ll probably be entitled to another four more years.”

For those worried about an investigation being partisan, consider this. Sixty-six percent of Americans said in May that they’d take a coronavirus vaccine if one were available today. That dropped 10 points a month later, almost certainly due to the president’s propaganda. The Republicans can be expected to carry on that theme long after Trump, as they foment resistance to a new administration.

In the process of seeking partisan advantage, they will endanger the entire populace. They do not have incentive to change right now. They will not have incentive to change in the future.

Put a former president in jail, however, and they will.

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: 19 August 2020

Word Count: 971

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There was bellyaching among some progressives at the sight of John Kasich at last night’s opening of the Democratic National Convention. But the appearance of a former Republican governor of Ohio, who is renown for his “moderate” politics, was important. The goal wasn’t persuading the president’s supporters to come over to Joe Biden’s side. It was giving license to white Republicans who do not want to vote for an authoritarian but who fear “the radical left” that it’s all right to vote for this Democrat.

“I’m sure there are Republicans and independents who couldn’t imagine crossing over to support a Democrat,” Kasich said Monday evening. “They fear Joe may turn sharp left and leave them behind. I don’t believe that. Because I know the measure of the man — reasonable, faithful, respectful. And you know, no one pushes Joe around.”

I thought the bellyaching was understandable. Donald Trump imperils not only the republic but actual human lives. (As of this writing, more than 174,000 Americans have died from the new coronavirus.) If white Republicans haven’t figured that out, there’s no point in courting them.

This critique, while understandable, underestimates something that should never be underestimated in this country: the power of white solidarity, the social phenomenon permitting white people to rationalize terrible behavior on the part of other white people, reassuring each other that they are good, decent citizens even as they demonstrate and benefit from white supremacy.

White Republicans are sensitive to anti-racism like all white people are, but probably more so. They fear the “radical left” is going to usurp their privilege. For this reason, Kasich’s appearance was vital. He was, in a sense, Biden’s wypipo-whisperer.

Liberals and leftists will chafe at the idea, but the Democrats must make room. We cannot allow disillusioned white Republicans to return to the GOP fold when the current president is no longer in office. Liberals and leftists, however, need not soften the “sharp left,” as Kasich did. They only need to make clear to white Republicans who do not want to vote for authoritarian candidates that huge numbers of other white people are predisposed to authoritarianism.

Liberals and leftists must make clear that huge numbers of white Americans would be fine with this statement: “We are going to win four more years,” the president said Monday. “Then after that we’ll go for another four years, because they spied on my campaign. We should get a redo of four years.”

Let’s be clear. These disillusioned white Republicans, demographically known as independents, are educated, middle class, upwardly mobile, property-owning, and suburban. They are culturally distinct from the “non-college whites” in the Rust Belt and white evangelical Protestants in the south and midwest, two cohorts making up the lion’s share of the president’s support. (They have a lot more in common with the petty bourgeoisie, the pillar of Trumpism, but have better taste and more fashion sense.)

They’d normally vote for Republicans, because Republicans protect their money, or check the Democrats from drifting “too far left” (whatever that might mean). They have lived their whole lives blissfully ignorant of, or sufficiently motivated to ignore, the forces of anti-democracy awaiting for a demagogue to awaken. These voters must never be allowed to forget the dangers posed by millions of white Americans.

In particular, they must understand that white evangelical Protestants (WEPs) not only oppose abortion. They oppose democracy. They are classic examples of what’s called “the authoritarian personality”: submissive to authority, punitive toward minorities and cultural difference, and rigidly adherent to tradition (e.g., the “nuclear family), according to Threat to Democracy by political psychologist Fathali Moghaddam, which explores the appeal of authoritarianism in the post-2016 age.

Importantly, people with authoritarian personalities are obedient to leadership, “including when they are ordered to do harm to others.” They can’t tolerate nuance, ambiguity and uncertainty. “They are categorical thinkers,” Moghaddam wrote. The world is broken down between us and them, black and white, good and evil. Their “antiscientific attitude” dismisses science and fact if they “do not correspond to what the potential or actual dictator presents as the truth. Historically, this has resulted in great catastrophes.”

These people are not going away after the election. They constitute about 40 percent of the electorate, the same number that right now approves of the current president no matter what he does or does not do, whether that’s treason or negligent homicide. They will populate the Republican resistance to a Democratic administration that must mandate and enforce face masks during a pandemic. They will fight the mandate under the guise of “individual liberty” just as they will refuse to inoculate themselves against Covid-19 long after a viable vaccine has been developed.

Authoritarian personalities already dominate politics in southern and midwestern states, where they have already endangered their own children and the elderly in order to “own the libs.” They will fight “big government tyranny” even if that fight leads to self-destruction.

Disillusioned white Republicans ultimately make a familiar mistake. They worry about “the left” the way real leftists worry about liberals (they see liberals as squishes, politically). Both end up overlooking the suicidal power of the authoritarian right. Both need to make room for each other in the middle — in the Democratic Party.

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 August 2020

Word Count: 871

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There’s still too much confusion over the president’s bond with white evangelical Protestants (WEPs). I suppose there will always be as long as outsiders presume that Donald Trump’s strongest supporters believe in loving thy neighbor as thyself.

Once you see that WEPs do not apply the Golden Rule universally and unconditionally, things become clearer. Once this Christian concept is removed from the discussion, “paradoxes” melt into the air. What’s left is a natural alignment of political interests.

How do I know WEPs don’t truly believe in the Golden Rule? From life experience. I know what I’m talking about.

All you have to do is listen carefully, however, and know what to listen for. Elizabeth Dias wrote a big piece in the New York Times last week trying to clear up the “contradiction” of WEPs standing by Trump “when he shut out Muslim refugees. When he separated children from their parents at the border. When he issued brash insults over social media. When he uttered falsehoods as if they were true. When he was impeached.” A source explains helpfully that there’s no contraction at all.

“The years of the Obama presidency were confusing to her,” Dias wrote of her source. “She said she heard talk of giving freedoms to gay people and members of minority groups. But to her it felt like her freedoms were being taken away. And that she was turning into the minority.”

The source: “I do not love Trump. I think Trump is good for America as a country. I think Trump is going to restore our freedoms, where we spent eight years, if not more, with our freedoms slowly being taken away under the guise of giving freedoms to all. Caucasian-Americans are becoming a minority. Rapidly.”

This makes no sense to outsiders. Freedom for “gay people and members of minority groups” is not taking anything away from anybody. This makes no sense because outsiders do not generally accept a worldview in which power is ordered. First God, then man, then woman, then child. White over nonwhite. Heterosexual over LGBTQ. Christian over non-Christian. When you believe with your whole being that power is ordered according to God’s will, “giving freedoms to gay people and members of minority groups” is not political equality, as outsiders would often see it. It’s knocking you out of the order of power. It’s taking something away. Equality is literally theft.

When political equality is theft, you cannot apply the Golden Rule universally and unconditionally. If you did, you’d be complicit in a crime. The Golden Rule demands white people share power with nonwhite people. It demands husbands share power with their wives. Neither can ever be done.

A wife, according to the same source in Dias’ reporting, must “submit” to her husband in accordance with God’s law. If she does not, she’s trying “to rule over him.” Same for whites and nonwhites. If white people are not at the top of the order, they are being ruled over. This is why Dias’ source says that, “Caucasian-Americans are becoming a minority. Rapidly.” The more for “them,” the less for “us.” They believe Trump prevents that from happening.

They believe Trump is “restoring their freedom.” Utter nonsense. What they are really saying is that the president will prevent people lower down the order of power from achieving more freedom and equality, “violating” their “freedom.” He must do that by any means, even if he confiscates kids from their mothers, bans a world religion, or commits treason. None of that matters as much as maintaining the supremacy of a religious identity built on sand. And make no mistake: this is a religious identity.

These are very real anti-democratic Christians hostile to critical thinking, modernity, pluralism, and all forms of equality. “It’s almost like it is a reverse intolerance,” a WEP source told Dias. “If you have somebody that’s maybe on the liberal side, they say that we are intolerant of them. But it is inverse intolerant if we can’t live out our faith.”

If WEPs believed in the Golden Rule, they’d never tolerate other people’s pain. They do tolerate it, however. Indeed, they like it. It feels good to see the president “restoring their freedom.”

When WEPs say they want to “live out our faith,” what they mean is sadism is and should be a natural consequence of the natural order of things in which God’s people are chosen to rule in God’s name. “Evangelicals did not support Mr. Trump in spite of who he is,” Dias wrote. “They supported him because of who he is, and because of who they are.” That’s correct, but take that to its logical conclusion.

His enemies are their enemies. His pleasures, their pleasures. Their bond is far from a contradiction. It’s an alignment of political interests in which sadism is the point.

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 August 2020

Word Count: 804

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I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is the word “sabotage” is being used more often and with more feeling by leading Democrats and liberals than I have witnessed since the president took office. This is an important development.

Too few Americans appreciate the depth of Donald Trump’s malice. If there’s a way to betray the republic, he will find it. The more people understand this, the more prepared they will be when this chapter in our history comes to an end — if it comes to an end.

The bad news is people are seeing only one dimension of Trump’s multi-dimensional sabotage. However, that’s to be expected. It’s not every day a demi-despot blurts out his intentions the way Trump did Thursday on the Fox Business Network. He “explicitly noted two funding provisions that Democrats are seeking in a relief package that has stalled on Capitol Hill,” according to reporting by the AP. “Without the additional money, he said, the Postal Service won’t have the resources to handle a flood of ballots from voters who are seeking to avoid polling places during the coronavirus pandemic.”

He told Maria Bartiromo: “If we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting; they just can’t have it.”

Sabotaging the United States Postal Service got the headlines, as it should have, but the problem doesn’t stop with a president saying, “Yeah, I’m gonna starve the post office to keep Americans from voting me out of office.” Remember the political context: the stimulus talks. The last round of fiscal spending — $2.2 trillion — is all but gone. The $1,200 in direct payments were spent months ago. The $600 a week in extended unemployment benefits dried up last month. The moratorium on evictions has expired. Scores of millions, according to the New York Times, are now faced with choosing between essentials: the car or food. By sabotaging the USPS, Trump is sabotaging, well, everything: “Yeah, I’m gonna starve the post office to keep Americans from voting me out of office, even if that means taking the economy as my hostage.”

I’m afraid there’s even more sabotage to report. Again, context: He thinks he has the advantage over the Democrats pushing for USPS funding as well as billions in relief for cities and states fighting a resurgence of the new coronavirus (thanks to Trump’s negligence). He believes, evidently, that four executive orders signed over the weekend do what the Congress can’t (on account of Trump’s obstruction).

In particular, he apparently thinks ordering the Internal Revenue Service to stop collecting the payroll tax is going to stimulate the economy. The president, therefore, thinks he doesn’t have to agree to the demands for USPS funding, which he believes would undo him.

If only life were as simply as our simpleton president! First, not collecting the payroll tax won’t help the unemployed, because, you know, they aren’t on a payroll. Second, not collecting the payroll tax is not the same as a payroll tax cut. Those taxes, even if they are not collected, are still due. For the millions of businesses in this country, that means a gigantic tax bill at some point in the future — unless the Congress forgives it.

The Congress is unlikely to waive these taxes for a very good reason. Payroll taxes fund popular programs like Social Security and Medicare. Not collecting them, or forgiving them some time in the future, means Social Security and Medicare take a bigly hit. Believe it or not, Trump wants to make all of this worse. He’d like to eliminate payroll taxes, which would mean, consequently, eliminating Social Security and Medicare.

As you can see, Trump has bumbled his way into a multiverse of sabotage. He started out thinking he’d starve the post office to save his ass, but he’s doing more than that. “Yeah, I’m gonna starve the post office to keep Americans from voting me out of office, even if that means taking the economy as my hostage, even if that means kicking meemaw and peepaw out of the nursing home and into paupers’ graves.” He may not have planned this out (I doubt he did) but he’ll sure as hell insist on doing this — if the Senate Republicans don’t step in. That, I think, is the question. Will they?

More certain is the Democrats don’t need to budge. Indeed, they must not. The pandemic means voting in-person is dangerous, especially to the elderly, who are the most habitual voters, and to Americans of color, who are the Democratic base and the demographic most vulnerable to Covid-19. The Democrats must hold the line on USPS funding for health reasons as well as for political reasons.

If they cave, they’ll kneecap Joe Biden. They must stand firm and united even when the economy free falls while accusing the president of sabotaging the republic for his own political gain.

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 August 2020

Word Count: 824

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Nate Silver’s team of data journalists released its highly anticipated survey this week showing the president has a 29 percent chance of getting reelected while Joe Biden has a 71 percent chance of defeating him. This kind of punditry should give you heartburn.

I don’t mean because we were fooled last time. I mean this kind of data analysis presumes too much. One, that the election will be fair. Two, that the results will be clear. Three, that Donald Trump will accept the results.

The survey’s intent is accessing likely outcomes, but its effect is suggesting there’s more stability than there really is. Put differently, it doesn’t see, because it cannot see, baked-in forms of chaos. Our political system was designed in such a way as to incentivize its own undoing.

Remember these facts: the president does not need to win a majority of the national vote. He does not need to win a majority of votes in any particular state. Indeed, no one, not even the president and his GOP confederates, expects him to win a majority of votes, nationwide or statewide. The only thing that matters is a handful of states and their electoral votes, because people will not determine the outcome. Only states will.

The Republicans understand their advantage is structural, not political. And in case you’re wondering, no, they do not feel guilty about it being anti-democratic. Should Trump win the Electoral College vote, they will declare him the rightful and legitimate president even though 2020 would mark the third time in six elections in which a Republican lost the popular vote.

For reasons like this, the Republican Party will not change. Not if Trump loses. Not if he dies in a landslide. The political system itself is far too advantageous. The only way to change the GOP is to change the system.

We could talk about reforms, like nuking the filibuster or adding a state, but I’d rather talk about the problem. Most people do not appreciate how bad it is. They’d rather think the way Nate Silver and his team thinks — Trump has this or that much chance of losing, Biden has this or that much chance of winning, giving the impression that the country is this close to returning to normal. It’s highly numerate analysis, yes, but it’s highly myopic. It fails to see, because it was not intended to see, our system is the problem. If we return to normal, it’s a matter of time till we’re back where we are.

Consider the case of Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won a Republican primary Tuesday and is now heading for Washington. She’s a promoter of “the QAnon conspiracy theory, whose followers believe Trump is battling a cabal of ‘deep state’ saboteurs of his administration who worship Satan and traffic children for sex,” according to reporting by the Washington Post.

She has also made racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic comments, asserting that Black people are ‘held slaves to the Democratic Party,’ likening the election of the first two Muslim women to Congress to an ‘Islamic invasion of our government’ and calling George Soros, the liberal Jewish donor and Holocaust survivor, a ‘Nazi himself trying to continue what was not finished.’

Naked racism, antisemitism and Islamophobia are bad things in our current climate, so you’d think the Republicans would run away, screaming. They aren’t. Not only is the president embracing Greene as one of his own, the House Republicans are looking forward to seating her (though some have expressed misgivings in private). This is being interpreted as the last gasp of a political party unraveling completely, a party that’s prepared to commit suicide. It’s just crazy to welcome someone that crazy!

No, it’s rational. First, because Greene is from a safe district. The more extreme the Republican candidate, the better. Second, because “willingness to tolerate extreme and bigoted positions,” as the Post put it, aligns perfectly with the Republican Party’s structural advantages. Racism and the other forms of bigotry, while they might appear to be dangerous liabilities, are in fact quite valuable assets. Chaos and fascism are not buggy glitches in the American political system. They are, alas, immanent features.

In the hours since Biden’s tapped Kamala Harris as his running mate, the president had waded farther into the slough of sadism. The farther he goes, according to critics, the stronger Biden gets. Well, maybe, depending on the size of November’s electorate. But all things being equal, which is a realistic starting point, that kind of thinking may be as myopic as Silver’s team’s: it does not take into account the Republicans’ built-in advantages.

The president and his allies are not crazy to think going full-bore fascism is good campaign strategy. Going to the wall isn’t suicidal when the wall is on your side. All he has to do is move just enough people in just enough states. Even if Trump loses, someone will replace him, eventually, and he will have a GOP-friendly system to thank.

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: 13 August 2020

Word Count: 830

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Joe Biden picked Kamala Harris as his running mate. The first thing we should say is that running mates almost never matter. They have very little effect on voter behavior because voters usually just don’t care. Indeed, in the age of Donald Trump, they might care even less. Many people who are going to vote for Biden aren’t really voting for him. They are voting against the president, which means Biden is a secondary thought, which means his running mate is a tertiary thought — if Americans are thinking about vice presidents at all, which is unlikely, given how inconsequential they have been.

Consider, then, who Harris appeals to. It’s not voters who are already anti-Trump. As long as Biden didn’t pick Tulsi Gabbard or Marianne Williamson, they were going to support the Democratic nominee no matter who he picked. For voters who want things to go back to normal, presuming that’s possible, Harris turns out to be the “predictable” and “safe” choice according to nonpartisan analysts and people like David Axelrod, who habitually scolds the Democratic Party for being too liberal.

Barack Obama’s advisor wrote today: “In the end, Biden seriously considered others but returned to Harris as the ‘do no harm’ candidate, unlikely to thrill or outrage many. She may not seem the most comfortable fit as a governing partner, a quality Biden said he was seeking, but Harris was viewed as the safest pick to win in November.” Put another way, Harris isn’t going to affect the minds of anti-Trump voters much.

A word about Never-Trumpers. They make up a small percentage of the total anti-Trump vote. Most mean it. Some, especially some conservative pundits claiming a principled stand against the president, don’t. What they want is a Democratic Party that’s GOP-lite. What they want is a credible reason to vote for Trump without losing the credibility they have amassed in a media landscape rewarding claims to taking a principled stand against him.

After news broke about Harris, some of them made it known on Twitter that Harris being heartbeat away from the presidency was too much for them because of the usual racist reasons. To them, she isn’t a “do no harm” pick because any pick would “do harm.” Now the choice for them is between voting for the president or not voting at all. Let’s hope they double your vote by staying home.

Harris might be “unlikely to thrill or outrage many,” as Axelrod said, but that presumes an electorate that will be the same size it’s been, which is another way of saying mostly white. It’s here that the assertion that vice presidents don’t matter starts to break down. They don’t matter when all electorates are equal. They do matter when electorates aren’t.

Listen to how CNN commentator Baraki Sellers put it to the San Francisco Chronicle before Biden’s announcement: “It’s not about getting those super-voters to the polls — those super-voters, they’re going to go the polls,” the author of My Vanishing Country said. “But what you want my mama to do is, you want my mama to be on the phones, out in her community getting people to the polls, engaging her sorority. You want them to be active participants, and that’s what Kamala brings.”

Harris is a “do no harm” choice for white voters already set to vote for Biden. But a biracial daughter of immigrants who self-identifies as Black is more than “safe” for nonwhite voters like Baraki Sellers’ mom. It’s these voters who have the power to expand the electorate, thereby fueling a landslide victory, which may be the only thing that can force the president out.

Harris isn’t just “the perfect antidote to Trump’s anti-immigrant, anti-Black, xenophobic attitudes,” as USA Today’s Jill Lawrence and David Mastio wrote this morning. Like Obama, she is large and contains multitudes: progressive and moderate, safe and aspirational, conventional and inspirational. By choosing her, and promising that she’ll govern as his equal, Biden is signalling to that part of the electorate that has never been represented by a presidential candidate that the time is soon coming when a Black woman will be president — if and only if you do everything in your power to get everyone you know to go vote for me and Kamala.

A final word. Liberals and Democrats observed this morning that the president and his allies can’t land a punch on Harris. Some say it’s because she’s a “strong woman.” I don’t think that’s it. They are not attacking Harris so much as trying to bring back white voters who don’t want to vote for a racist (because they don’t think of themselves as racists) but will if Trump can show Biden and Harris are as bad or worse than he is.

Ari Fleischer, the former White House press secretary, was on Fox this morning. He said Harris “is just not that historically exciting to African Americans.” Others say she’s not really Black (her mom is Indian and her dad is Jamaican). The message to reluctant white voters: anti-racism is worse than racism. Come home to the GOP so the president can protect you. If this looks despicably cynical, that’s because it is. It probably won’t work, though.

While Biden and Harris are expanding the electorate, the president and his allies are chasing after a base of power that’s getting smaller.

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: 12 August 2020

Word Count: 890

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I hope you don’t take this the wrong way. I’m sure many of you already understand plenty about basic economics. You don’t need a novice like me explaining things. But I’m afraid I must explain, just a little, because the Senate Republicans keep using the fundamentals of economics as rationale for refusing to act responsibly. They must pass legislation to stimulate the economy or the nation faces dire consequences. The problem isn’t ideology, though. That’s a ruse. The problem is they’re bad at politics.

Beneath the debate to extend the flat $600-a-week in unemployment benefits, which is one of the issues preventing both sides from coming to an agreement, is a familiar talking point beloved of Republicans who call themselves conservatives. The federal government, we’re told, should not remit more money to workers than the amount workers would normally earn in the absence of a pandemic that has now killed more than 160,000 Americans, infected 5,000,000 more and dislodged scores of millions from their workplaces.

Remitting more money to workers than they would normally earn would be a disincentive to working, we’re told, which is a moral failing and economic one. No one should get money for which they have not exchanged their labor.

It’s worth bearing in mind nearly all the Senate Republicans are millionaires. For instance, Ted Cruz (Texas) has a net worth of $3,198,068. Mitch McConnell (Kentucky), the majority leader, is worth $34,137,534. Thom Tillis (North Carolina) is worth $10,966,045. Susan Collins (Maine) is worth $7,873,086. Steve Daines (Montana) is worth $32,863,042. David Perdue (Georgia) is worth $30,098,571. Kelly Loeffler (Georgia) is worth a stunning $500,000,000. There are exceptions. John Thune (South Dakota), Senate No. 2, is only worth $310,512. Joni Ernst (Iowa) has a net worth of -$196,984. As someone in debt, she’s the most normal senator. All figures are as of 2018. (Lots of Senate Democrats are millionaires, but they favor extending the benefit.)

Most normal people, if they are able to work, trade labor for money. When you have as much money as most of these Senate Republicans have, however, you don’t trade labor for money anymore. You might work anyway, and that’s certainly the case when the Senate is in session (even if all they’re doing is mass-producing judges). But when you have this much money, it’s your money that’s working for you. (In Cruz’s case, his wedding did the heavy lifting. He married a banker.) The people saying it’s wrong for Americans to get money they have not worked for are the same people who do not work for their money. Their money does that work for them on Wall Street.

Moreover, the same people worried about disincentives to working debunk their own argument. They are rich. They don’t need (have incentive) to work. Yet they work anyway. Bottom line: Money is the most common reason why people work but it’s not the only reason.

You may have noticed an ugliness lurking in the shadows of conservative economic thinking — contempt for people who must work. Greater mortals (people whose money works for them) don’t work for “mere” money. They work for glory or honor or some noble cause.

Lesser mortals can’t do that. Their lot is to toil. The possibility of not having to work, on account of getting money from the government, must be viewed skeptically, because lesser morals, on account of not being greater mortals, can’t be trusted. If they don’t have incentive to work, they won’t work, a consequence that threatens to destabilize the political order, which is the natural order, which is the order maintaining the difference between greater and lesser mortals. Infuse this view with racism and classism, and you have GOP economics over the last four decades.

There’s a problem with this analysis, however. It takes Republican economic thinking too seriously. Fact is, Donald Trump and the GOP don’t know which way to turn, because they are so very bad at politics. The president thought he had the advantage after going around lawmakers. But that was a tell more than leverage. In signing four executive orders that purported to stimulate the economy, Trump broadcast loud and clear how desperate he was to strike a deal.

Moreover, those executive orders are not only small beer, according to analysis from Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, they also put added strain on states already beyond their budgetary limits. Meanwhile, all 50 governors, including Republicans, want Washington to bail their states out.

As for the Republicans in the current Congress, they don’t know what to do either. Some think Trump has already lost. They’re getting ready for the next Democratic president. Others aren’t doing even that, just hunkering down and preparing to say no to everything.

McConnell is renown for being a “master of the Senate,” but it turns out that that plaudit depends on his conference being united against things, not for things, putting him in the ridiculous position of accusing congressional Democrats of obstruction. (The House passed a three-and-a-half-billion dollar stimulus package back in May.) Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats are holding the aces. All they have to do is wait.

It’s tempting, oh-so-tempting, to take GOP economics and knock it down, and sometimes that’s needed. But in this case, the problem isn’t ideology. Trump and the Republicans are bad at politics, and the rest of us may end up suffering for 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: 11 August 2020

Word Count: 894

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Forget about the old days. They are gone. Forget about the old ways of doing things. They are gone. You are facing things your parents never faced. Your children are facing things that you, as a child, never faced. Everything has changed. I mean that completely, categorically. The one exception is our belief in a return to normal. There is no normal. Unless you mean chaos and disaster. Unless you mean they’re normal.

There was a brief period when this country could have done something about the novel coronavirus now crawling over every nook and cranny of our individual lives and society. There was a time when it could have been minimized, even stopped, while we recovered from damage already done. That moment has passed. The pandemic is here to stay. Its individual and social impact is permanent. At first we talked about a lost month. Then about a lost summer. Soon, a lost year, lost decade, until finally, if we’re lucky and if we’re wise, we realize what we’re talking about is a lost generation.

“The first thing I’m going to do when the pandemic is over is give one of my friends a big hug.” That’s what my 9-year-old child said today over breakfast. I’m guessing your children, or grandchildren, have said something similar. I’m guessing they have expressed a longing for a return to normal, a longing you are powerless to make real. I’m guessing you felt the pain I felt but could not — would not — give voice to. Never in the child’s presence. New Haven’s school board decided against in-person teaching. Classes will be virtual. “You will never be able to hug your friends again,” I thought.

Nearly 100,000 children came down with Covid-19 in late July, according to a new report by the American Academy of Pediatrics. That number is likely to go up. The school year has begun in states whose governments refuse to mandate wearing facemasks. Do not believe Joe Biden’s victory, should that happen, will mean going back to sane public health policy. These states decided to endanger the wellbeing of their own children to score political points. Moreover, 11 percent of the country won’t wear a mask no matter what, according to a recent Wall Street Journal survey. That percentage will triple, even quintuple, under a Democratic president. They will rally in numbers high enough for viral spread under flags declaring “Don’t Tread on Me.” Many will refuse to get vaccinated, whenever a vaccine is viable, which might take years, because they already believe vaccines generally are secret plots to harm them. Resistance to masks and vaccines will have the backing of the Republican Party and its billionaire donors. You thought the coronavirus was going to go away someday. Think again.

No one knows the effect on kids. Some exhibit symptoms. Most blessedly don’t. More certain is they give it to you, your parents, your grandparents — teachers, coaches, instructors, tutors — anyone spending time with kids. But again, no one knows. There’s some evidence of what the disease does to the heart. Professional athletes are getting sidelined. There’s more evidence of what it does to the brain. “There are also longer-lasting consequences for the brain, including myalgic encephalomyelitis /chronic fatigue syndrome and Guillain-Barre syndrome,” wrote Natalie Tronson. The University of Michigan neurologist gave us reason to be worried about more than death tolls. “COVID-19 will continue to impact health and well-being long after the pandemic is over. As such, it will be critical to continue to assess the effects of COVID-19 illness in vulnerability to later cognitive decline and dementias.”

The death toll surpassed 160,000 Sunday. The number of infections crested 5,000,000. That’s sure to double, at least, by the time we know who the winner of the election is (a process, as I said last week, that will drag on until 2021). Doubling is sure to happen, I have no doubt, because all things will be equal between now and then; and all things will be equal, because Donald Trump does not want to know whether he’s done a good job of containing the pandemic. He only wants his toadies to tell him that he’s done a good job.

“With polls showing Trump’s popularity on the decline and widespread disapproval of his management of the viral outbreak, staffers have concocted a positive feedback loop,” according to the Washington Post. “They present him with fawning media commentary and craft charts with statistics that back up the president’s claim that the administration has done a great — even historically excellent — job fighting the virus.”

The US is a patchwork. Thirteen and a half thousand school districts with 13,500 ways of going back to school amid a pandemic. The only safe way, however, is with a national response. “We need not only adaptive safety practices at the schools but also lower amounts of virus in each community,” Tom Bossert, a former White House homeland security adviser under Trump, told the Post. “A suppression-level effort to shrink and not just mitigate the spread of covid requires a national strategy.”

A national response is precisely what the president did not want. For one thing, he thought blue-state people were the only ones getting sick. For another, leading a national response would put him at risk of being wrong. And Donald Trump is never wrong. “Trump and several White House aides have instead continued to think that it is politically advantageous to cede the issue to the states to avoid taking ownership or blame for the issue, even though testing shortages are largely seen as a federal failure.”

This is Nero fiddling while Rome burns.

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: 10 August 2020

Word Count: 937

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Among things we can do together to try preventing the president from stealing the election is demanding more from the pundit corps. (This includes yours truly.) We are entering a dangerous period fraught with instability and apprehension as well as potential for violence and bloodshed. Donald Trump is most likely to contest anything that’s short of a landslide for Joe Biden. The president is almost certain to drag the process out well into 2021. Moreover, he has friends and allies inside and outside the GOP and law enforcement able to use extra-legal means of keeping him in power.

As Nils Gilman, of the Transition Integrity Project, told USA Today, the president will “create as many possible pre-narratives for claiming that the results are not legitimate. He wants to create fear, uncertainty and doubt so that people feel frozen and paralyzed, and then the man of action, Trump himself, can ride in and seize the day.”

This is a time for grave seriousness from the pundit corps, especially those with the biggest megaphones. This is not a time to tolerate punditry-as-usual, which is more about entertainment and pose-striking than hard-nosed polemics. I think most of us get it (Gilman and TIP co-founder Rosa Brooks certainly do), but many of us don’t. They are still making pre-2016 arguments for a post-2016 America spiraling madly. Use your free speech to urge them to face reality and force them to snap out of it.

Case in point is SE Cupp. She’s a New York Daily News columnist and CNN host. She’s white, conventionally attractive, wears black glasses and gives the impression of being a deep thinker. In her latest, she said the choice between voting for Biden and a write-in candidate (she’s against Trump) depends on Biden’s choice of a running mate. “As a staunch conservative who has voted Republican in past elections, I don’t take this lightly. I don’t agree with everything that Biden supports, nor am I 100 percent comfortable with the direction he wants to take the country. … For moderates like me who are looking for reasons to vote for Biden, we need to know who’s on that ticket, and soon. I’m hoping, for the sake of the country, he chooses someone I can support.”

For the curious, Cupp likes Kamala Harris, dislikes Susan Rice. (They are reportedly Biden’s top two picks.) It would be interesting if Cupp were to say Harris could ignite the Democratic base, especially Black Democrats and Democrats of color, thus doing the most to ensure Trump’s defeat in a tidal wave. Alas, Cupp doesn’t go there. Instead, she leans into the false thesis of needing a good reason to vote for Biden, as if nearly four years of authoritarianism, corruption, madness and treason were not enough.

Fact is, no one knows if running mates have any effect on voter behavior. Few people base their vote on the person running with a nominee. (The exception widely cited is Sarah Palin.) This goes double this year, because many Americans who say they are voting for Biden aren’t really voting for Biden. They are voting against Trump, which means Biden himself is a secondary thought, which means his running mate is a tertiary thought — if they’re thinking about vice presidents at all, which is unlikely.

Making Cupp’s thesis more absurd: Writing in a candidate is throwing her vote away, which means Biden is the only choice, no matter who his VP pick, if she really means it when she says she’s “sick of all the crap”: “The gaslighting, the puerile tweets, the divisiveness, the rampant ignorance and the utter inability to put the country before his fragile ego. I’m ready to move on, I’m ready to make the presidency normal again.”

To the extent that she insists that writing in a candidate is legitimate, I don’t know what to say, because that’s not voting against Trump. That’s voting for someone who will have no impact, which means Cupp’s opposition to Trump isn’t serious, which means a column about how much depends on Biden’s pick is just striking a pose.

No one knows if running mates matter, but an argument about Harris as Biden’s running mate is a good argument. To pick Harris is to say to the Democratic base: yes, it can happen here. A United States senator from California, former prosecutor and biracial daughter of immigrants could be president one day — if you make it happen. Even if that never happens, the mere possibility of it happening would be enough, in the age of Donald Trump, to supercharge Democratic turnout, fueling a landslide election, which is probably the only thing that would push Trump out of office.

And yet Cupp doesn’t go there.

Ultimately, I think Cupp and others aren’t adapting to our new age of danger, because they don’t want to let go of the old regime once so nurturing to their respective styles of conservative thought. That time is long gone. We are no longer in an age of rugged individualism, because we can’t be. Anything short of we’re-all-in-this-together might kill us all.

Push pundits to accept reality, expect more, or demand they move on.

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: 07 August 2020

Word Count: 860

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There’s nothing wrong with treating American politics like a sport as long as everyone involved in the competition is playing the same sport by the same rules. There’s nothing wrong as long as both sides agree the rules are legitimate, both commit to obeying them and both accept the consequences when they break them.

But there is a problem with treating American politics like a sport when one side is playing soccer and the other is playing football while neither can agree to the rules, because one side won’t commit to obeying them. There is something wrong when one side not only refuses to accept the consequences of rule-breaking but sets out to undermine the idea of rules altogether. In that case, treating politics like a sport, as the Washington press corps habitually does, isn’t helpful. It’s harmful. Even dangerous.

The biggest problem with the upcoming election, from the point of view of Americans who want to see the incumbent gone, is something that would not normally be a problem. Indeed, it has never been a problem in our lifetimes. It has been a civic good. What I’m talking about is blind institutional faith. Most of us, even the great cynics among us, still believe the system is fundamentally sound. We believe the rules are inviolate. Little appears to be standing in the way of a 2020 Democratic landslide.

Before explaining why blind institutional faith is a problem, let me add that it feels so good to have blind faith in our institutions. All of us want to believe the only thing threatening Joe Biden’s victory is voter apathy, and many of us want to believe that voter apathy is moot after the trauma that was the 2016 election. Blind institutional faith is moreover affirmed, and that good feeling compounded, by a Washington press corps that habitually treats American politics like a sport. If all the major polls show Biden ahead of the president by double digits in critical swing states, then surely this nightmare is about to end. Good will triumph over evil, and everything will be fine.

Everything won’t be fine, though, and good might not triumph over evil if recent findings by Nils Gilman and Rosa Brooks are any indication. Together with about 70 experts — legal scholars, retired military officers, former US officials, strategists and attorneys — they oversaw a series of “war games” that “peered ahead to the Nov. 3 election, now less than 90 days away, and explored how the race between Trump and Joe Biden could turn into a post-election crisis,” wrote USA Today’s Joey Garrison. In the process, they demonstrated, I think, how blind institutional faith is problematic.

Called the Transition Integrity Project, the group gamed out, in June, a series of plausible and possible scenarios. Its findings are frightening. “In an election taking place amid a pandemic, a recession and rising political polarization, the group found a substantial risk of legal battles, a contested outcome, violent street clashes and even a constitutional impasse,” Garrison wrote. Here are the key points of group’s report:

The election won’t end on Election Day: “We face a period of contestation,” the report said. “The winner may not, and we assess likely will not, be known on ‘election night’ as officials count mail-in ballots.” “An unscrupulous candidate” — meaning Trump — will cast doubt on the election’s legitimacy and “set up an unprecedented assault on the outcome.” Everyone must be “educated to adjust expectations” starting now.

The election will be contested well into January 2021: “We anticipate lawsuits, divergent media narratives, attempts to stop the counting of ballots, and protests drawing people from both sides.” The president “will very likely use the executive branch to aid his campaign strategy, including through the Department of Justice. There’s a chance the president will try convincing red-state officials “to take actions — including illegal actions — to defy the popular vote.” Of particular concern, the report said, is “how the military would respond in the context of uncertain election results.”

The transition will be highly disrupted: Instead of handing off power, “Trump would prioritize personal gain and self-protection,” the report said. He “may use pardons to thwart future criminal prosecution, arrange business deals with foreign governments that benefit him financially, attempt to bribe and silence associates, declassify sensitive documents, and attempt to divert federal funds to his own businesses.”

The report offers recommendations. They boil down to getting ready. This is not a normal president. This won’t be a normal transition. We are entering a period of historic uncertainty in which none of us can take anything for granted, not even the rules — laws, norms, institutions — that many of us place our trust in. There’s still time to re-balance expecting the worst with hoping for the best. That’s fortunate, because most of us are still expecting the best to happen while praying the worst won’t.

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: 06 August 2020

Word Count: 810

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