On Feb. 4, 1992, George Herbert Walker Bush was campaigning for reelection at the National Grocers Association convention in Orlando. There, the president “grabbed a quart of milk, a light bulb and a bag of candy and ran them over an electronic scanner,” wrote New York Times correspondent Andrew Rosenthal. “The look of wonder flickered across his face again as he saw the item and price registered on the cash register screen.”

“This is for checking out?” asked Mr. Bush. “I just took a tour through the exhibits here,” he told the grocers later. “Amazed by some of the technology.”

Rosenthal said this small moment was symbolic of something larger: The president, he wrote, “seems unable to escape a central problem: This career politician, who has lived the cloistered life of a top Washington bureaucrat for decades, is having trouble presenting himself to the electorate as a man in touch with middle-class life.” The Times’ frontpage headline — “Bush Encounters the Supermarket, Amazed” — was enough to set off a wave of news stories about Bush’s alleged remoteness from Americans worried about an economic recession that defined the election.

I’ll return to this. For now, I couldn’t helping thinking of this moment in campaign history after watching the current president’s Axios interview. In a long and winding exchange, Donald Trump claimed that the new coronavirus pandemic, which has now killed 160,000 Americans and infected almost 5 million — with no end in sight — is under control. “Under the circumstances right now, I think it’s under control.”

Jonathan Swan, stunned, asked: “How? One thousand Americans are dying a day.” To which the president said: “They are dying. That’s true. And it is what it is. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as you can control it. This is a horrible plague that beset us.” To which Swan, giving Trump room to back away from it is what it is, asked: “You really think this is as much as we can control it? One thousand deaths a day?” To which Trump said — well, nothing really, except more of the same, by which I mean blaming other people for his problems.

It makes no sense whatsoever to say things are under control while at the same time blaming others for letting things get out of control. That’s not my point, though. My point is the president’s perfect absence of human emotion. One thousand deaths a day. That’s one Sept. 11, 2001, every third day. (Globally, someone dies every 15 seconds from Covid-19, according to Reuters.)

In a previous America, a previous American president encountered a supermarket check-out and expressed a bit of amazement at some newfangled technology. We were told it captured something bigger. We were told he’s out of touch. In this life, this president feels nothing in the face of death and disease. He’s not astonished. He’s not shocked. And It is what it is. Has any president been as out of touch? The headline should be: “Trump Encounters Suffering, Unamazed.”

The thing about President’s Bush’s amazement in 1992 is there was a good reason for it. The Associated Press ran a story a week after Rosenthal’s appeared in the Times, explaining that the check-out technology was novel at the time. Bush wasn’t amazed by the sight of a supermarket scanner. He was amazed that the supermarket scanner could read bar-code labels that had been “ripped and jumbled,” a true advancement.

Maybe Andrew Rosenthal just got it wrong, but I suspect something else. The press corps often wants to tell a certain kind of story, a story that will get attention, and it searches for opportunities to tell it. In his case, Rosenthal probably wanted to tell a story about a cloistered incumbent grown distant from the little people, and “the look of wonder” that flickered across Bush’s face was all the prompting he needed.

The same goes for Trump. Even now, the press corps maintains the story of a rich populist with the common touch, because maintaining it mangles political stereotypes in ways wholly satisfying to professionals wholly bored by political stereotypes. That might not be so bad if it did not also undermine previous criteria for being out of touch. Trump has never cooked his own meals, washed his own clothes, paid his own bills, or ever raised his own kids. He sure as hell never went grocery shopping. Yet Bush was out of touch and Trump isn’t, even as this president stares blankly at mass death.

I think we’re seeing less storytelling and more truth-telling. CNN’s Jim Acosta reported this morning what “a source familiar with Trump’s Tuesday Oval Office meeting with his coronavirus task force said” about the president. Trump, the source said, “is still not demonstrating that he has a firm grasp of the severity of the pandemic in the US. ‘He still doesn’t get it,’ the source said. ‘He does not get it.’”

Acosta said that even when the team “tried to stress the dire nature of the situation to the president during the meeting, the source said Trump repeatedly attempted to change the subject.” That’s what you do when you’re out of touch. That’s what you do when you’ve never been in touch. That’s what presidents do when they just don’t care.

Let’s say so.

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: 05 August 2020

Word Count: 887

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Axios released last night clips of Jonathan Swan’s interview with the president. In one of them, Donald Trump shares print-outs of charts and graphs in an apparent bid to convince Swan that the United States is doing better than other countries in the fight against the new coronavirus pandemic. I’ll link to it instead of describing it, but I will say this. The clip is an example of why our collective respect for stupidity is lethal.

Focusing only on stupidity is short-sighted, though. We must also consider incentives. Fact is, the White House is full of ambitious people eager to tell the president what he wants to hear, no matter how idiotic. The president, moreover, is desperate to believe his yes-men. Here’s how my friend Frank Wilkinson characterized this closed circuit: “They gave him big, brightly colored kindergarten charts to pretend the deaths away. His aides know he is a corrupt buffoon who is killing people. But they like working at the White House. And he’s afraid of prison. So many thousands more must die.”

A fool of a president alone isn’t the problem. A fool of a president surrounded by intelligent, craven and morally degenerate toadies who manipulate his stupidity for their own purposes — there’s the problem. But this doesn’t drill down enough, I think. If we’re going to understand how and why the pandemic has now killed nearly 160,000 Americans, infecting nearly 5 million others, blowing up the economy and pretty much ruining our and our children’s lives, we need to search further. We need to look at familiar things with fresh eyes, old structures so normal and ubiquitous as to be invisible. Here I’m talking about the Electoral College, and how this relic of our slave-owning past isn’t just an anti-majoritarian thorn in our sides. It’s an incentive to kill.

The Electoral College is the reason why individuals don’t choose presidents. States do. If individuals chose presidents, the outcome of the contest would be determined by the popular vote. It isn’t. It is determined by the most number of votes by electors, meaning officials picked by each state to represent the choice of most of voters in that state. Combined with a winner-take-all political system, this is why Connecticut’s seven electoral votes (five House members plus two senators) went to Hillary Clinton in 2016 while Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes (18 House members plus two senators) went to Trump. The Electoral College is why we talk about states in terms of red and blue. It is also why so much of our political discourse is grounded in political fictions. Fact is, there are plenty of Republican voters in Connecticut and plenty of Democratic voters in Pennsylvania, but we don’t talk about that political reality, because it mostly doesn’t matter — not when electors choose presidents, not the American people as a whole.

I doubt very much that Donald Trump comprehends any of this, not even a little, but he does understand the talking-heads on Fox who talk about states in terms of red and blue, so that, in the president’s mind, there aren’t any Republicans in Connecticut, and there aren’t any Democrats in Pennsylvania, and anyway, though he has no clue, having a clue doesn’t matter, because, again, individual Americans will not determine the outcome of presidential elections. The point here is that the president, when it came time to choose a plan to respond to the pandemic, didn’t think about the nation as a whole, because the nation as a whole did not, and cannot, decide who’s going to be president in November. To Trump, there are friends and there are enemies; there are red states and there are blue states; and if blue states were getting the worst of the pandemic in the early months, well, so what? What had they done for him lately?

We have known since the beginning that the president is a fool. We have known since the beginning that he surrounds himself with stooges. What we did not know — until Vanity Fair published Katherine Eban’s investigation into the Trump administration’s pandemic response last week — is that the White House consciously decided against a national approach (abdicating the president’s responsibility), because it thought Covid-19 was affecting Trump’s blue-state enemies only.

What we did not know, until Eban’s revealed it to us, is that stupidity combined with corruption combined with an anti-majoritarian structure created an incentive for negligent homicide. You can blame Trump for disease and mass death, and you should. You can blame corrupt aides feeding him “brightly colored kindergarten charts to pretend the deaths away,” and you should.

But the blame can’t end there. Blame the Electoral College, too.

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: 04 August 2020

Word Count: 777

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I’m not sure what kind of game Steven Mnuchin is playing, but it’s pretty clear that it’s a game. Gross domestic product fell by nearly 10 percent in the second quarter, as all of us were forced to cut back on account of the novel coronavirus pandemic. The drop, according to the New York Times, was the equivalent of a 32.5 percent annual rate of decline, “the most devastating three-month collapse on record,” which wiped out five years of growth. All of this would have been worse without government stimulus.

If the president and the US Congress don’t want to see a depression that dwarfs the “Great” one that struck over 90 years ago, here’s what they must do next, according to economists interviewed recently by Businessweek: “a new round of direct payments, especially for those with low income; some extension of extra unemployment benefits; and a sizable chunk of aid to state and local governments,” which was missing from the last round of legislation. (The CARES Act appropriated some $150 billion for municipalities and states to fight Covid-19, but not to replace lost revenues.)

Yet here’s Steven Mnuchin, the secretary of the United States Treasury, appearing on ABC’s “This Week” sounding as if the future of his boss, Donald Trump, is less certain than the future of the Republican Party — as if the president’s reelection were already lost and the time had come to re-lay ideological grounds anticipating a President Joe Biden. “There’s obviously a need to support workers and support the economy,” Mnuchin said. “On the other hand, we have to be careful about not piling on enormous amount of debts for future generations. … In certain cases where we’re paying people more to stay home than to work, that’s created issues in the entire economy.”

His remarks set off familiar ideological flare-ups. Mnuchin is the son of a Goldman Sachs banker, a millionaire hundreds of times over. For a man of the idle rich to suggest it’s bad for people to get a buck more than they’d normally earn, even as they stand in line at food kitchens, is a slap in the face. But while ideological flare-ups are today getting the attention, something important is getting lost. Mnuchin is making this out to be a conventional inter-party fight between the Democrats and the Republicans. It’s not, though. It’s really an intra-party fight. And Trump is losing.

Think about it. If you were a president who let a pandemic get out of control, because you thought it would hurt enemies more than friends, you’d want your team, in this case the Senate Republicans, to dump as much cash as possible onto the economy in the hope that saving it would bring victory. Knowing that’s your best shot (aside from cheating in various and sundry ways), you tell your team to stop bickering and vote for the Heroes Act, the $3.5 trillion aid package already passed by the House. But while your team was on board last time, pushing $2.2 trillion into the economy, almost certainly preventing a drop in GDP from being worse than nearly 10 percent, this time is different. This time, your team is worried about debt. It’s worried about people being “overpaid.” It’s worried about things getting in the way of your being reelected.

Something happened between last time and this time. That something is obvious: poll after poll showing the incumbent behind the challenger by double digits in swing states (or ahead of the challenger within the margin of error in normally safe states). The Republicans, especially in the Senate, seem to be losing faith in this president and now are looking toward a day when they will need to stand on conservative ideology to oppose a Democratic agenda. The president, meanwhile, can’t see what’s happening, not even when his own Cabinet member goes on TV and uses the same talking points cosplay fiscal hawks use to justify why they won’t support any measure to fatten the economy. (Maybe the president didn’t notice, because he was golfing!) Trump can’t quite see he’s being snookered into believing the House Democrats are threatening his reelection by holding things up. They are not. The Republicans are.

When the president suggested postponing the election last week, it was widely interpreted as a sign of weakness, especially after the Senate Republicans said no can do. The so-called reawakening of fiscal hawks is a more potent sign of Trump’s impotence, though. You can’t use ideology to justify postponing an election, but you can to position yourself in case he loses to Biden while also defending yourself against GOP interest groups who would scream if they knew you had lost faith. Either way, the Republicans win the game, which is likely the same one Steven Mnuchin is playing.

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: 03 August 2020

Word Count: 798

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I felt some pangs of regret after saying Thursday that a third of America would cheer, or shrug, if the other two-thirds were wiped out by Covid-19. My point was that we should vote like our lives depend on it (they do!), but no one likes hearing such ugliness about other Americans. An outraged subscriber alleged I was being “deeply cynical.”

 “Instead of talking about the work that needs to be done, you are sabotaging us.”

As I was thinking this through, Vanity Fair published an investigation by Katherine Eban establishing a timeline of the Trump administration’s pandemic response. In the early stages, the White House task force, led by the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, decided a national approach was best. “Simply working together as a nation on it ‘would have put us in a fundamentally different place,’” said Eban’s source.

By early April, things changed. Donald Trump, fearing its effect on the economy and Wall Street, minimized the reality of the virus while accusing his enemies and the press corps of hyping its dangers to wound him. Kushner’s team, along with GOP leaders and their media allies, followed suit. “Against that background, the prospect of launching a large-scale national plan was losing favor, said one public health expert.”

Over time, Kushner’s team convinced itself that the pandemic was not affecting Republican voters. A national approach, therefore, wasn’t needed. Trump downplayed the body count even as he accused Democratic governors of failing to stop its rise. (Ohio and Massachusetts, among the early pandemic states, have GOP governors, but I digress.)

 “Because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. ‘The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,’ said the expert” (emphasis is mine).

During this period, it bears remembering, the president pushed the US Congress to stabilize the economy by shoving billions into it. While GOP allies got preferential access to $2.2 trillion in stimulus, cities and states run by Democrats got nothing — despite being on the front lines of a national pandemic. Democrats in the US House have since passed a bill to replace lost revenues, and then some, but the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, maintains there will be no “blue-state bailout.” The Senate’s latest proposal, which is standing idle while senators are away for August recess, has no appropriations for cities and states, even deep-red Republican ones.

What does this mean? While the president chose to let Americans who live in blue states get sick and die, Congressional Republicans chose to starve those same cities and states of resources amid their struggle to save lives. Given that elected officials, from the president on down, tend to reflect the will of their supporters, it’s safe to say, in light of Trump’s 91 percent approval rating among Republicans (per Gallup), that about a third of America approves of the GOP’s informal policy of negligent homicide. It may sound cynical, but the truth is, the pleasure of other people’s pain often drives politics.

Paying so much attention to sadism runs the risk of ignoring its opposite: masochism. Some Republican voters are willing to hurt themselves, with exquisite pleasure, if hurting themselves exquisitely hurts their enemies. (A textbook example is Republican governors rejecting Obamacare’s health-insurance subsidies in order to undermine a Black president.)

Even as the pandemic is rampaging through Republican-controlled states, setting records in Florida and Texas, many Republicans will never blame Trump, because if he’s wrong, the enemy is right, and the enemy can never be right.

Not all Republicans, though. As small numbers defect due to Trump’s failed leadership, they leave behind individuals still taking immense pleasure in losing themselves to the “collective power structure,” as an EB subscriber described it to me. “All they want is to continue feeling the way being part of a collective power structure makes them feel. The way Trump makes them feel.”

As the group shrinks, so does that pleasure, until one day, however Trump leaves office, MAGA addicts will “crash, many with their entire senses of self having been stripped away. It’s not their ‘evil’ that worries me most. It’s their anguish, and how they will respond to that anguish.” 

The collective trauma that’s coming from millions being forced to go cold turkey? And the fact that nearly every one of us on Team Blue is out of empathy for anyone who supported him? That is what should scare the shit out of everyone.

 

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: 31 July 2020

Word Count: 764

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The Washington Post’s George Will gave voice to an opinion I’ve heard a lot lately — Joe Biden’s victory over the president would mark the end of our “long national nightmare.” The thing about this opinion is that it sounds right. The other thing about this opinion is that sounding right makes it doubly wrong. The nightmare is not going to be over, and everyone thinking it’s going to be over will be complicit in its long-term viability.

Setting aside the problem of presuming Donald Trump is going to lose based on recent polling, and setting aside the problem of presuming the election is going to be fair, consider this: his aggregate approval across-the-board has been and remains about 40-43 percent. That’s not high, but it’s still a lot, especially when you look at the same metric among Republican voters, which is in the high eighties, low nineties. What this tells you is lots of people in this country either like or condone authoritarianism. The old saying in Europe is that a third of it aims to murder a third of it while the other third watches. That might not describe the US exactly, but I’d say we’re headed there.

For this reason, the Republican Party — even if a tidal wave crashes on Trump — is not going to snap out of it and mend its way. That’s a tale told by individuals wanting to believe cold-blooded partisans are not as cold-blooded as they thought. Or by alienated conservatives wanting to believe in good faith that their old party can be redeemed. (Recent Bulwark pieces by Charlie Sykes [“Burn It All Down?”] and Mona Charen [“The GOP Needs to Hit Rock Bottom”] represent nicely this magical school of thought.)

Why seek redemption when over a third of the United States approves of enriching the very rich, criminalizing the weak and disenfranchising the rest? A defeated GOP will almost certainly grow more extreme, as members who managed to survive an anti-Trump landslide will be from safe districts. If the president wins, well, the party will take that to mean it’s all right to go full-fascist. Either way, soul-searching is unlikely.

I don’t see how the “long national nightmare” will be over when 40-43 percent of the country, for the last three and half years and more, has consistently and unwaveringly supported the president’s words and deeds, no matter how despicable they are, or saw loyal opposition from the Democratic Party as so dangerous they abandoned their previous claims to the union. These people want a president to kidnap kids from their immigrant moms. They want a president to banish Muslims. They want a president to privilege white orthodox Christianity. They want a president to punish Black people and LGBTQ people for being who they are. They want a president to deploy secret police to crush dissent. And they hate their “enemies” so much they are willing to overlook a president’s treason. These people will still be here after Election Day.

That’s why the Democrats, if and when they have unified control of government, must change the rules of normal politics. Losing isn’t going to change the Republican Party. Changing the electorate, however, will.

To that end, the Democratic Party must pass sweeping voting rights legislation; kill off the Senate filibuster; push to turn Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., into states; grant full citizenship to all immigrants; defund and reorganize the US Department of Homeland Security; in addition to a host of other measures that would force the Republican Party to act reasonably, because without acting reasonably, the GOP won’t have another reasonable shot at power.

But to do that, the rest of us must remember the unpleasant truth about our fellow Americans, which is that more than a third of them would cheer, or shrug, if the coronavirus pandemic wiped out the other two-thirds. They are the “real Americans,” after all. What obligations do they have to unreal Americans? (Some of them would even catch the virus on purpose in order to hasten that end!)

When they vote, most people believe mistakenly that the political opposition can be reasoned with. These people need to vote like their lives depend on it, because their lives depend on it.

Sadly, most Americans will forget the truth, even if they vote for own their lives on Election Day, and they will forget the truth because they desire forgetting. This goes double for white Americans who feel the pain of being reminded of their whiteness by a president who appeals to white supremacy.

Once he’s gone, white people’s pain will be gone, and once white people’s pain is gone, white people will experience the privileged pleasure of forgetting, and in doing so, permit the nightmare to live on.

It doesn’t have to be that way, though.

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 July 2020

Word Count: 799

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The Wall Street Journal ran an item this morning touching on something I have been thinking about lately: the role of stupidity in our national discourse, and the apparent requirement that the citizenry respect stupidity no matter how dangerous it is.

The subject of the piece was face masks, and why some Americans refuse to wear one. It is beyond dispute that wearing a mask in public is the simplest, cheapest, and easiest means of preventing the coronavirus from spreading. The virus is airborne, meaning it survives in droplets of water so small they float in the air. Sneezing, laughing or just talking loudly, especially indoors with inadequate ventilation — that’s how the novel virus goes from one person to another. If we’d all been wearing one since March, we might not see over 150,000 deaths and over 4 million infections. Wearing a mask should be a no-brainer. As Jennifer Calfas’ reporting shows us, however, it is not.

 It’s a joke,” said Joseph Lee, a 62-year-old in White Bear Lake, Minn. who wore a mask once to comply with rules to get a haircut. “All [mask wearing] does, I think, is give people a false sense of hope.”

Aside from being wrong, if we’re all gonna die, let’s all die with our eyes open?

When asked if the president’s recommendation last week to wear a mask had any impact, Cody Adams, “a 34-year-old pipe welder based in Arkansas,” said no can do.

“It hasn’t swayed my opinion.”

The dumbest reason comes from Peggy Hall. The Orange County, California, resident “who has decried face mask requirements there and elsewhere” actually said out loud:

“The beautiful thing about our country is freedom does come first, and public health comes a distant, distant second, third, fourth, maybe 20th.”

To be sure, as Calfas reports, this is a minority. A recent poll by the Journal and NBC News found that most Americans, most of the time, wear a mask in public no matter their political affiliation, suggesting that good sense can still trump nonsense. Only about 11 percent “rarely or never wear” one, which might be comforting in any social context other than public health. If I’m not mistaken, even a small minority refusing to wear a mask could mean the pandemic won’t end for years until there’s a vaccine. Meanwhile, more people die, more get sick, and mass disruption continues apace.

It’s for this reason we need to talk about the role of stupidity in our national discourse. We should not aim to insult, demean or marginalize anyone. Stupid people are human beings deserving of equal rights and equal justice. We should, however, redefine and reestablish the boundaries of acceptable public opinion. Stupid people deserve equal treatment, but it’s deadly — literally — to give stupid ideas equal respect. (Stupidity, moreover, is not in the eye of the beholder when the medical, scientific and good-government consensus is that wearing masks is good, not wearing masks is bad.)

Of course, redefining and reestablishing the boundaries of acceptable public discourse is at the heart of the controversy over so-called cancel culture. In truth, no one is getting canceled (anyway, not in the way “cancel culture” critics claim). And in truth, the people most likely to complain about getting “canceled” often have access to public platforms so gigantic as to undermine the very premise of their arguments.

Take John Kass, for instance. A columnist for the Chicago Tribune, he wrote recently a piece about George Soros and “lawlessness” in cities run by Democrats. Soros is a frequent subject of anti-Jewish conspiracy theory. Outraged by its antisemitism, some said the column is a firing offense. This week, Kass defended himself against “the angry left-handed broom of America’s cultural revolution [using] fear to sweep through our civic, corporate and personal life.” A column about being a victim of censorship becomes incoherent the moment it’s published. Yet we accept this stupidity, give it respect, and encourage it though it can and does poison our discourse and enable evil.

As I noted recently, “cancel culture” critics aren’t defending speech. They are instead blurring lines. They make it appear as if demands for redefining and reestablishing the boundaries of acceptable public opinion seem as authoritarian as the authoritarian president who really is dispatching his paramilitaries to harass and intimidate social reformers in cities nationwide under the guise of “protecting” federal property. Voters who don’t want to vote for a fascist president might vote for him anyway to “protect” against “the angry left-handed broom of America’s cultural revolution.” Stupidity, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice.”

Bonhoeffer really did get canceled. A Lutheran minister in Germany, he opposed Hitler’s rise and the eventual attempt to exterminate Jews from Europe. The Nazi regime accused him of conspiring to assassinate Hitler, and hanged him just before the war’s end. This is what he said about stupidity. (Here I want to thank Editorial Board subscriber Jim Prevatt for bringing this to my attention):

“One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.

“Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.

“For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”

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 July 2020

Word Count: 991

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The Washington press corps is highly attuned to matters of decorum, language and nuance, and for the most part, I think that’s a good thing. Washington is a place where powerful people say one thing but mean another, and our democracy benefits generally when reporters compete with each other to get as close to the truth as possible.

Such a cast of mind is unhelpful, however, when it comes to the current president. Donald Trump has repeatedly bait-and-switched White House correspondents, one day seeming to take the coronavirus pandemic seriously, the next undermining that apparent seriousness with tales of woe, accusations of unfairness and breathtaking paranoia. By my count, we have seen at least three cycles this year in which the president exploded stories of his newfound “tone” within a few days or even hours.

Last week, the president seemed to concede without taking responsibility the severity of the pandemic. His office released pictures of him wearing a face mask. Yet he retweeted this morning a video in which a “doctor” accuses Dr. Anthony Fauci, the administration’s top infectious disease expert, of covering up a known “cure” for Covid-19 — hydroxychloroquine — in a conspiracy to bring down the president.

It’s no mystery why Trump retweeted a video of a quack. He’s metabolically incapable of admitting error. The pandemic’s not his fault — look! A “doctor” said so! But why did he put on a show of being serious last week? To con the press corps, that much is true. The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker and Philip Rucker, however, discovered another reason.

 Senior advisers began presenting Trump with maps and data showing spikes in coronavirus cases among “our people” in Republican states, a senior administration official said. They also shared projections predicting that virus surges could soon hit politically important states in the Midwest — including Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, the official said. This new approach seemed to resonate, as he hewed closely to pre-scripted remarks in a trio of coronavirus briefings last week.

The idea here is that the president would be doing much better in polls leading up to Election Day if he had “at least pantomimed a sense of command over the crisis or conveyed compassion for the millions of Americans hurt by it.” He couldn’t do even that. He can’t admit error. Knowing this, advisers said he should try faking it, because the coronavirus is killing more than Democrats. It’s killing “our people,” too. This, according to Parker’s and Rucker’s reporting, is what inspired last week’s “new tone.”

Assuming that’s true, and that’s a big assumption, I know, but assuming it is, what conclusion might we draw from a president reversing course, saying one thing one day, then something else entirely the next, undermining attempts to take “command over the crisis or conveyed compassion for the millions of Americans hurt by it”? One, that he can’t say “my bad.” But two, that he believes “our people” will believe him, no matter what he says, which is another way of expressing contempt for Republicans.

If nothing else, the president knows his audience. Like all good showmen, he gives it what it wants. What his audience wants is the advancement of a worldview in which the United States is not a single nation, but an assemblage of states, or regions, half of which refuse to be dominated by the other half, and therefore must be punished. If believing lies and falsehoods is means of advancing that worldview, and creating a legal and political structure in which a white minority rules over the rest, so be it.

But this confederate worldview has a major weakness. It is immanently incapable of facing a national crisis. First, because a crisis cannot be “national” until it comes for “our people.” (“We” are the “real Americans.” A virus killing “them” is fine.) Second, because when it does come, crises take collective effort. That means trusting half the states who refuse to be dominated. That means recognizing the enemy as a political equal. Trump’s audience must decide which is more important: politics or health. And that requires choosing which to believe: the president’s lies or the reality of the virus.

Trump has no moral core. He presumes no one else does, either. He’s banking on his audience taking his side over the side of Covid-19, even as it kills them. He doesn’t have to admit error when he can fool some people all the time. And to be fair to the president, which I don’t like doing, I can’t say I blame him for thinking so. If he can keep duping the Washington press corps, he can keep duping “our people,” too.

 

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 July 2020

Word Count: 774

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The Senate Republicans are no longer dithering. Along with the White House, they have decided to split the difference. They aren’t demanding a payroll tax cut, as the president preferred, but neither are they demanding a continuation of $600-a-week in unemployment benefits, as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell preferred. Instead, they are going to push for reducing that benefit to about $200 a week.

This is bad policy and bad politics, as my friend Marty Longman wrote last week. Two hundred bucks weekly is better than a payroll tax cut. No one would see that (especially if they’re unemployed). But people would see less money coming in amid a pandemic, recession and housing crisis just getting started. (Evictions are set to soar next month.) In the Washington Monthly, Marty said the “compromise” is an “example of the way ideology twists the Republican Party in knots. They wind up worried that they’re disincentivizing work when no one can find work. Then they settle on paying people for nothing because they prefer that to creating a government job.”

Conservative ideology does indeed turn the GOP into knots, but I suspect there’s more going on. At one time in our past, it would have made perfect sense to say, as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin did last week: “We’re not going to use taxpayer money to pay people more to stay home.” While that rhetoric may still persuade some, it by no means persuades most. To put a finer point on it, rhetoric used by Republicans to justify anti-government economics no longer appeals to a majority of white voters, because a majority of white voters, in the era of Donald Trump, realize we’re all in this together. Without a collective effort, our republic may never return to good health.

This transformation, if it is happening (a big if, I concede), can’t be overstated. At some point during the 1980s and the presidency of Ronald Reagan, a majority of white Americans began to think of themselves as consumers and taxpayers, instead of free and responsible citizens. At that point, the conservative movement, which began two decades prior to Reagan’s election, was no longer a movement. It became the conservative political regime of low taxation and low regulation we live in today.

Thinking of themselves as consumers and taxpayers — instead of citizens endowed from birth with rights, liberties and responsibilities — lent itself to thinking about the federal government as separate from the citizenry. “Government” was something done to people. It wasn’t of, by and for them.

Though we needed it for national defense and rule enforcement, we didn’t need it otherwise. “Government” was a byword for coercion and a catalyst for keeping it small. Keeping it small, for the white people thinking of themselves consumers and taxpayers, meant low taxes and low regulation.

Thinking of themselves as consumers and taxpayers affected profoundly the way a majority of white Americans thought about work. If you got more from the federal government than you got out of individual work, you didn’t have the incentive necessary for the maintenance of a free society. You had instead the incentive to stay on “welfare,” requiring more from the people who did work, who were not fellow citizens but consumers and taxpayers bearing undue burdens on the road to serfdom.

In truth, poor people pay far more of their income in taxes than you and I do. Anyway, the government doesn’t tax you. We tax ourselves using government as the instrument of collective taxation. We are citizens who consume and who pay taxes. Indeed, but as citizens, we are much more than consumers and taxpayers, because as a citizenry, we are the ultimate sovereign. When the government gives taxpayer money to people in need, due to some kind of national emergency, we are giving money to ourselves.

Conservative ideology always seemed principled (some of it was, I suppose), but for the most part, it was a fancy way of dividing and conquering a majority of Americans using old-fashioned bigotry. “Taxpayer” really meant “white” while “welfare” really meant “Black.” “Coercion” was interpreted to mean forcing white people to pay the expenses of Black people, who were presumed poor (or criminal) and untaxed. If Mnuchin had said, “We’re not going to use taxpayer money to pay people more to stay home” in 1996, his meaning would have been perfectly clear. Now? I’m not sure.

The confluence of national and constitutional crises seems to be forcing some people, perhaps most people, to rethink how they think about themselves. Consumers and taxpayers are not enough to save a republic from a president who committed treason before walking away from his responsibility of leading a nation out of harm’s way.

Only a citizenry can do that.

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: 27 July 2020

Word Count: 789

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The goal, when you think about it, seems pretty simple: juice up the economy enough before the election so that the president looks like a strong leader who took decisive action in the face of a deadly new coronavirus pandemic that has hobbled the national economy. You’d think the Senate Republicans would be all-in. You’d be wrong, though.

Instead, they’re dithering. (The AP’s Lisa Mascaro incorrectly called it a “GOP revolt.”) Donald Trump is demanding a payroll tax cut for some reason. (That’s unhelpful when you don’t have a job.) Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell favors extending the $600-a-week in unemployment insurance. Texas’ Ted Cruz hates that because that might be a buck or two more than people earn. Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, meanwhile, opposes all forms of fiscal spending, citing his growing concern for the national debt.

You’d think the goal is pretty simple, but that presumes the incumbent has a better than even chance of winning reelection in the next four months. Recent polling in critical states like Florida suggest he doesn’t. They show him trailing Joe Biden by double digits. What we are seeing is not a “revolt” by any stretch. It’s the challenge of political calculation resulting in indecision. The Republicans can’t decide which is the better course: injecting trillions into the economy to save Trump (assuming that it would) or redigging ideological trenches in anticipation of a Democratic president.

I don’t know which way this is going to break any more than you do. What I do know, however, is the importance of vigorously debating Republican bad faith. There are many good people of good faith truly concerned about our debts, but none of those people are currently in the Senate or in the national ranks of the GOP. Debts and deficits, history shows, only matter to elected Republicans when Democrats are in charge. As long as a Republican is president, the party is more than willing to spend freely, because they are spending freely on things they like. The conservatism put into practice by national Republicans calling themselves “conservative” is fraudulent.

Bad faith is more than intent to deceive. In Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, UConn philosopher Lewis Gordon said that,

It is a denial of human reality, an effort to evade freedom, a flight from responsibility, a choice against choice, an assertion of being the only point of view on the world, an assertion of being the world, an effort to deny having a point of view, a flight from displeasing truths to pleasing falsehoods, a form of misanthropy, an act of believing what one does not believe, a form of spirit of seriousness, sincerity, an effort to disarm evidence, a form of sedimented or institutional version of all of these, and a flight from and war against social reality.

Bad faith, as philosopher Jason Stanley said, is one of the many variants of fascism.

Put more simply, it is not mere hypocrisy. It is the intent to harm.

If the Senate Republicans were truly concerned about debts, they would have repealed their 2017 rewrite of the US tax code in order to pay for half of last spring’s $2.2 trillion stimulus legislation that is going to run out by the end of this month (starting today). They didn’t, because they don’t believe in fiscal responsibility — in which budgets are meaningful instruments and revenues matter as much as expenses. They decided to put all that money on a credit card for the next Democratic president to deal with. (This is why Ron Johnson is suddenly voicing concern for debts and deficits.) They did that in order to prevent their greedy billionaire donors from having to foot the bill.

If the Senate Republicans were truly concerned about individual dependence on government subsidies (as Ted Cruz says he is), they would lambaste states like Alabama and Kentucky, which take in more money from Washington than they give in return, while states like New York and Connecticut do the opposite. Cruz does no such thing, because federal subsidies give red states license to keep their tax bases low, benefiting rich residents, while starving public services of resources and accusing poor residents who need those services of being dependent on “government handouts.”

If the Senate Republicans were truly concerned about state’s rights, as they said they were when they said Obamacare imposed the federal government’s will on state sovereignty, they would right now be excoriating the president for deploying paramilitary forces to gas, apprehend and terrorize local residents in Portland and (soon) other cities for the “crime” of demonstrating their constitutional rights. Instead, they are looking the other way or worse: accusing peaceful protesters of rioting. Why? Because the people being harmed are probably Democrats who don’t matter anyway.

Even when conservatism is practiced in good faith, as some people believe to be the case when the Trump administration decided to let the states handle the pandemic, rather than imposing the will of the federal government on the states, it turns out catastrophic. According to the New York Times, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, was explicitly ideological when explaining the administration’s approach: “Only in Washington, D.C., do they think that they have the answer for all of America.” The result has been four million infections and over 147,000 dead with no end in sight. Conservatism can be compassionate in theory. In practice, however, it’s harmful.

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: 24 July 2020

Word Count: 900

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The president announced Wednesday that his administration will send federal agents to Chicago, Albuquerque and other cities to “help combat rising crime,” according to the AP. “There has been a radical movement to defund, dismantle and dissolve our police departments,” Donald Trump said at the White House. He blamed that for “a shocking explosion of shootings, killings, murders and heinous crimes of violence.”

Crime has indeed risen recently but the reasons are associated with the Covid-19 pandemic, soaring unemployment, social unrest and even the weather. (Summer heat often correlates with homicide rates, for instance.) Make no mistake, however. Mass protests demanding justice for the murder of George Floyd did not cause an increase in crime. Calls for reforming police departments across the country did not cause it either. Moreover, cities are not hotbeds of rioting, looting, disorder and discord. With exceptions here and there, the country’s crime rate has been falling for two decades.

The president is doing what authoritarians do. He’s creating a problem, hyping the sense of imminent doom based on the thinnest of rationales, in order to solve the “problem” using means totally unacceptable under normal circumstances. In another time, it would have been scandalous to dispatch federal agents to “combat rising crime,” because that’s not the federal government’s proper role. Doing that, even suggesting that, violates our common understanding of the principles of federalism, state sovereignty and local control, values the Republicans used to say they cherished. Trump is creating an image of American cities that is so dire and so dangerous that the conservative principles of the past must be set aside to restore “law and order.”

It seems the president believes he’s suffering politically. The pandemic is eating into his base. The economy, once the stimulus money runs out at month’s end, is careening toward a cliff. Senate Republicans, who acquitted him of treason, now seem to be hedging. Maine’s Susan Collins, in a tight race, won’t endorse him. Her colleagues seem to think he’s in trouble, too. They are make-believing concern for debts and deficits in anticipation of a Democratic president. States like Texas seem competitive, forcing his campaign to buy television ads there. Trump does not have a good political answer to these political problems. So he’s doing what authoritarians do: solving a political problem using the power of the state. In a sense, he’s militarizing politics.

I’ve called these federal agents “secret police,” and I still think that’s accurate, but another term, perhaps a more accurate term, to describe nameless and badge-less federal agents representing Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement is “paramilitary.” The “para” is important. These people are not regular military. They did not sign up voluntarily to serve their country. They did not answer the call of duty and do not live by a code of conduct. They do not believe in honor or sacrifice. They do not believe they are accountable to the Congress. Those are traditional military values.

The president’s paramilitary is loyal to one thing, above even patriotism. That’s Donald Trump. Jenn Budd is a former Border Patrol agent who’s now a civil rights activist. Early this year, she reported a conversation she had with a former senior CBP official: “Border Patrol believes it is not required to answer to local police, FBI, CIA or any other law enforcement agency,” Budd tweeted on Feb. 12. “They claim to be the ‘premiere’ law enforcement agency, superior to all others. They say they will become a ‘national police force’ to be used by a president to enforce laws even among citizens.”

In a republic, partisans compete according to an agreed-to set of rules by means of persuasion. If I persuade a majority to vote for me, I win. If I can’t, I lose, and live to fight another day. In an autocracy, persuasion is a dead end, because what I want, few others want. So I rewrite the rules in my favor or, the easier way, I use force. Most American cities are run by Democrats. If I can’t beat my opponents fair and square, I can send in the paramilitary in order to occupy “the battle space” under the guise of maintaining order as well as combating the crime of voter fraud. With just enough paramilitary action, a president suffering politically can have a good Election Day.

It’s common for political parties to have paramilitary wings, which make up for the absence of electoral power with violence. Sinn Féin, for instance, is a legitimate party in Ireland. The Irish Republican Army was its illegitimate paramilitary. (Sinn Féin denied officially for decades any connection to the IRA.) And it’s common for those paramilitary wings to be loosely organized, consisting of people inside and outside the government, but who are all dedicated to the purpose of serving a party or individual. Pashtun warlords wield more than kalashnikovs. They wield Afghani bureaucrats, too.

It’s uncommon in the United States, but we are getting there. In addition to the US Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Border Patrol and other agencies, the president has influence over hundreds of small informal citizen militias armed to the teeth thanks to the Republicans pushing guns into all quarters of civic life. Given all this, it’s starting to appear as if the Grand Old Party has its own paramilitary wing.

If you can’t beat ’em, beat ’em.

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: 23 July 2020

Word Count: 894

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