Brian Kilmeade is co-host of “Fox & Friends,” the president’s favorite weekday morning show. Kilmeade is, well — he’s not that bright. To be sure, he’s very good at advancing the party line. Sometimes, though, he gets mixed up. This morning, he tried saying something bad about the Democrats but ended up saying something bad about the Republicans, and in the process, intimating accidentally the truth about the GOP:

Historically, it was the Democratic Party [that was] the party of the [Ku Klux Klan]. It was the Republican Party [that was] the party of Frederick Douglass as well as Abraham Lincoln. So somehow, I guess in the 60s, things all reversed.

All things did indeed reverse more than half a century ago. The Democratic Party’s ruling coalition, which had prevailed since the 1930s, shattered under the weight of the backlash against the Vietnam War and the passing of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts. At the same time, the Republican Party, seeing a power vacuum, traded white liberal conservatives (which was the majority of New England) and Black Republicans for southern segregationists. It has been waging variations of soft civil war ever since.

That wasn’t Kilmeade’s goal. His goal — or that of his newswriters — was influencing the opinion of Republican voters uncomfortable with the president’s overt racism but still desiring to support a Republican. The goal is portraying the Democrats, and by extension Joe Biden, as being just as racist as Donald Trump, or more racist, so that white people who do not want to vote for a racist will feel OK voting for a racist.

This now appears to be acceptable discourse on Fox, which we should take to be indicative of respectable opinion among Republicans. It is a major shift from decades past. It is also a consequence of pragmatic need. Trump, when a candidate, didn’t bother coding the rhetoric of white supremacy the way Republicans had since Richard Nixon courted segregationists successfully in the late 1960s. As long as racism was covert, partisans had plausible deniability on their side. They could talk about what they wanted to. With it now being overt, partisans are forced to find ways to take the offensive. The result is malicious nihilism. Fine, the GOP partisans now say, Trump is a racist. The Democrats are just as bad, though. May as well vote for the Republican.

That Republicans coded white supremacy was itself a concession to gains made by the civil rights movement. To paraphrase Lee Atwater, overt racism used to be a winner, but after the late 1960s, it backfired. Republican rhetoric, therefore, grew more and more abstract, so that “forced busing” became “welfare queens” and became “tax cuts” over time, so that white racists heard one thing while white voters who did not want to support racists heard something else entirely, but both ended up voting Republican. This compromise is sometimes called “racial liberalism” in that the Republican Party played with terms established by someone else, not them, and so that racist politics operated subliminally.

As long as racism was hidden from view — that is to say, from white people who did not want knowingly to support racism — it was all good.

Nils Gilman is correct in saying racial liberalism collapsed in 2016. I’d argue that something related should have collapsed with it, but didn’t: anti-“political correctness” and its various offshoots, including the latest trend, “cancel culture.” It didn’t collapse because legions of people, perhaps half the pundit corps, are invested in exposing liberals and social reformers as hypocrites or worse.

These anti-PC critics say that racism and other forms of sadism can’t possibly be as bad as liberals and social reformers say they are, because racism is longer as bad as it was before 1968. And the reason it’s no longer as bad as it was is because they can’t see it. And because it is no longer as bad as it was, liberals and social reformers must have malign motivations, motivations perhaps on par with authoritarians of the past.

When anti-PC critics look at college students of color who are demanding progress on campus, they don’t see agents of change, they see authoritarians of the kind that led to racial liberalism’s collapse.

They are wrong. What’s more, they are dangerous. The scores of anti-PC critics who signed an open letter published Tuesday by Harper’s, which condemns “cancel culture,” are, consciously or not, aiding and abetting authoritarian energies they say they stand against.

White supremacy is no longer coded. The president is campaigning as a full-on fascist. The evidence of institutional racism leading to the murder of Black men is undeniable. Yet these anti-PC critics are behaving as if Pandora’s box remains closed. In doing this, they are, in effect, doing what Brian Kilmeade and his Fox newswriters are doing: telling white people who do not want to vote for a racist that it’s OK to vote for a racist, because liberals and social reformers are just as bad as Donald Trump.

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: 08 July 2020

Word Count: 832

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The pandemic keeps raging. The economy hasn’t recovered. The president has still done nothing to stop the Kremlin from putting a price on American heads. And white police officers continue to humiliate, harm and murder Black Americans. All of this, and surely more to come, is culminating in an anti-Donald Trump majority coalition.

For their part, the Republicans are in a pickle. They can’t talk about the economy. They can’t talk about what they’ve accomplished, because their accomplishments are forgotten or bad. The 2017 tax cuts are long gone. The recent $2 trillion bailout went to the rich and well-connected more than to normal people. They can talk about judges, sure, but that doesn’t have broad appeal. All they can do is stand by their man.

This state of Republican affairs is being portrayed almost universally as something unique to our time. It’s not. The modern Republican Party has always been the party of “special-interests,” meaning the very, very rich. To the party of the very, very rich, democracy has always been problematic. How do people representing a tiny fraction of the electorate build a majority big enough to win? The answer is familiar to anyone paying attention. They pour gasoline on the white flame of ancient race-hatreds.

That’s not the whole story, though. In a review over the weekend of Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s new book, Let Them Eat Tweets, which explicates the politics of the “conservative dilemma” noted above, Franklin Foer identified the key animus of the 1 percent: greed. “Never content with the last tax cut or the last burst of deregulation, American plutocrats keep pushing for more. With each success, their economic agenda becomes more radical and less salable. To compensate for its unpopularity, the Republicans must resort to ever greater doses of toxic emotionalism,” Foer wrote.

Greed, which never quits, combined with bigotry, which never quits, is usually a winning combination in American politics, especially when added to another plutocratic specialty: never-ending intellectual dishonesty and bad faith. Today’s Republicans may be forced to stand by their man, and they may suffer in November as a consequence, but they are hardly hamstrung. They’ll do what they have always done: foment conflict so attention is paid to words, not the persons, things and ideas that words represent. To top it off, a few self-serving liberals can be trusted to join them.

Consider “free speech.” There’s a cottage industry of partisans paid large sums to pay close attention to political activity on college campuses. The result of this investment has been the establishment of a conventional wisdom widely accepted even among university administrators who ought to know better: that free speech is in crisis.

Free speech is not in crisis. Not in the way that “First Amendment warriors” mean. What they mean is that some people, usually “conservative intellectuals,” are being “silenced” by “mobs” of “angry radicals” intolerant of “liberal values.” To be sure, some conservatives are “disinvited” from campus speaking engagements. Some have even seen “angry radicals” throw stuff at their cars. But they are not silenced. First of all, they complain non-stop about their poor treatment, and powerful people take their complaints very seriously. Second, these people have enormous followings on social media, lucrative book contracts or cushy gigs at Washington think tanks. Saying they’ve been “silenced” would be laughable if it were not also conventional wisdom.

There is, however, a real crisis of free speech. It’s the same crisis all out-groups have faced in the history of our country. College students, very often students of color, use their free speech to express views contrary to the interests of those with the power to establish the terms of debate. Put another way, young people of color are establishing new terms, and those invested in the old terms are reluctant to change. That’s fine. That’s what the marketplace of ideas is about. But partisans aren’t paid to let the marketplace work things out. They’re paid to accuse college students of suppressing speech, thus creating conditions in which student speech is effectively suppressed.

This in microcosm is what the Republican Party does in macrocosm — decontextualize, manipulate, distort and decouple words from the things they represent so that good-faith agents of progress can’t be heard on their own terms, so that they always sound more unhinged, revolutionary or even violent than they are, and are thus discredited. Making matters worse is that the Democratic Party has for decades defined its positions according to the Republican Party’s bad-faith arguments. The result has been one step toward greater justice and equality starting from two steps back.

That changed, happily, the moment Donald Trump traded in a dog whistle for a bull horn, to paraphrase Hacker and Pierson. The GOP’s racism, hence the racism of the very, very wealthy, is no longer coded. Joe Biden can’t pivot, but younger Democrats of color, such as Kamala Harris and Tammy Duckworth, can. They are now free to establish new terms of debate. When they talk about “defunding” the police, they don’t talk about it using emotional language disconnected from concrete experience. They talk about it for the purpose of stopping white cops from murdering Black men.

Greed, bigotry, bad faith — there are no limits.

Unless a majority can see them for they are.

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 July 2020

Word Count: 880

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The president delivered a breathtaking speech last week at the foot of Mount Rushmore that most people did not hear. He spoke on a Friday. It was, moreover, a Friday before the Fourth of July. Most people had something better to do than listen to Donald Trump use language amounting to an unofficial declaration of a civil war.

It wasn’t for you, anyway. It was for them. By “them,” I mean people who inhabit a wholly imagined nation-within-a-nation, a confederacy of the mind and the spirit, in which “real Americans” are oppressed by the slow roll of majority opinion and whose freedom to humiliate others is violated by the founding ideals of equality and justice. This “nation,” for those who are geographically minded, is predominantly southern, but, like the Confederate flag, is seen wherever “real Americans” hang their hats.

This is my way of understanding properly the president’s speech and its appeal to the hardest of his hardcore supporters. Liberals, socialists, city-dwellers, intellectuals, atheists, LGBTQ people, Black people and Americans of color — they are all the same essentially as our-way-of-life-threatening foreigners. They live here but don’t belong here. They are an enemy that must be destroyed by any means, including betrayal, sabotage and collusion with foreign conspirators. The target of their fury has indeed shifted from “illegal” immigrants in 2016 to citizens in 2020. Is anyone truly surprised?

I don’t think the president has any doubt about losing virtually all nonwhite voters this year, so he does his best to prevent white voters from bolting, especially white voters who did not watch his speech, because they had better things to do on a Friday before a holiday, but who are invested in some way in the idea that they are not racists. They already know that Trump is a white supremacist, but they can’t quite bring themselves to vote for a Democrat, because the Democrats, thanks to years of GOP propaganda and intellectual fraud among “respectable” pundits, seem almost to be anti-white.

One way the president holds onto this cohort of “moderate” white voters is by portraying the Democratic Party as full of terrifying boogeymen — communists, violent anarchists, mobs of radical leftists and so on. More important to Trump, I think, is portraying Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee, as being as corrupt as he is. This seems like hypocrisy — a transparently corrupt president who lies at the rate in which he breathes is accusing Biden of corruption? — but it’s more cynical than that. In pulling Biden down to his level, Trump is making the choice between them appear morally relative. In doing so, Trump is betting the bonds of whiteness will make it OK for “moderate” white people who do not want to vote for a racist to vote for a racist.

The president’s methods are blunt, but there are far more subtle means of achieving the same goals. Instead of bringing Biden down to Trump’s level, thus turning the public square into a brownfield, one could worry about “liberal mobs” tearing down statues, trying to “erase history” like totalitarians of yore. (Protesters are in fact tearing down paeans to slavocracy and genocide, actions related to the mass demonstrations demanding justice for George Floyd’s murder, but I digress.) Instead of inventing boogeymen that are easily debunked, one could worry, as the New York Times’ Bret Stephens did this weekend, about “thought police” emerging out of a growing “cancel culture.”

I’m not going to say much about “cancel culture” except that it’s almost entirely make-believe. Critics do not generally take into account actual arguments made by social reformers but instead fabricate arguments in order to undercut them. The point that I want to make is that Stephens and other dishonest intellectuals, comprising maybe half the pundit corps, are in effect, to borrow from the late Philip Roth, koshering Trump.

In the novelist’s The Plot Against America, Charles Lindbergh, renown for antisemitism as much as aviation, defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 election with the help of a rabbi who “koshers” him — that is, makes clear to non-Jews who do not want to vote for a renown antisemite that Lindbergh’s antisemitism is fine. It’s OK to vote for him. (Many thanks to Seth Cotlar for bringing this aspect of Roth’s novel to my attention.)

Koshering, I hope it’s clear, shouldn’t be limited to minimizing or whitewashing antisemitism. Diamond and Silk, a pair of Black grifters, kosher Trump when they make clear to white people that the president’s racism is OK. But again, this is only an obvious form of koshering.

When “moderate” pundits write columns worrying about “cancel culture” or “political correctness” more than a literal fascist president coming very close to declaring war on other Americans; when they fret about Confederate statues more than the mountains of evidence pointing to institutional racism injuring and murdering Black Americans; when they fixate on the norms of language more than the norms of socially acceptable sadism; and, when they talk about a white backlash more than they talk about the crimes of history — that’s a kind of koshering, 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: 06 July 2020

Word Count: 845

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Brian Stelter is CNN’s chief media reporter. His Sunday program, “Reliable Sources,” is probably as close to conventional wisdom among members of the Washington press corps as one can get. On Thursday, he tweeted a video clip from John Berman’s show in which reporter Miguel Marquez started crying after reporting scenes from a Texas hospital that was full to bursting with patients suffering from the new coronavirus.

Marquez’s report and Berman’s discussion afterward were of serious public interest. Republican Governor Greg Abbott rushed in May to “reopen” his state in the service of a GOP president desperate to campaign on the economy. For Donald Trump’s sake, Abbott straw-bossed Texas back to normal. He even barred big cities from mandating masks in public. He changed his mind yesterday after Covid-19 cases surged to new records. It was too little, too late, though. There are more sick Texans than hospital beds to heal them in. Marquez’s report put flesh on public-health statistics. More importantly, it took a side. It took the side of human beings suffering needlessly.

That was the experience of those watching CNN. For those like me following Brian Stelter on Twitter, the experience was quite different. What was important, according to what he decided was worthy of our attention, was not a public-health disaster resulting from negligent leadership putting partisan self-interest above the potential for and the devastating reality of human suffering. It was that a reporter got weepy. Stelter is a pro, but try as he might, he can’t quit TV biases, which are for novelty, conflict and emotion, especially crying. Tears are the crack cocaine of cable news.

Bias isn’t so bad as long as it’s yoked to something real, like human suffering, and as long as it illustrates who is doing what to whom — as long as it points to the whole truth. Television viewers got a sense of that. Stelter, however, directed his followers toward Marquez’s tears as if they were newsworthy on their own. The result was a kind of drama without context, emotion without causation. People are dying, but nobody did anything wrong. Justice is therefore pointless. I do not doubt that Stelter was acting in good faith, but an outcome of his conventional wisdom was the invention of a political fiction in which everything is as good or bad as everything else, and nothing matters.

Moral relativism and nihilism were less dangerous to the body politic (as well as to literal bodies) when presidents recognized the difference between the news media and the real world. The incumbent, however, sees no difference, because he is a product of a fictional, meaningless and morally relative world. Reality isn’t what it is. Reality is what Donald Trump says it is. If he says the economy is getting better in the face of a pandemic that has killed over 131,500 people and counting, then it’s getting better. Moreover, it’s unfair that the press corps is paying more attention to suffering in Texas, Florida and other states than to his super-duper “policies.” Trump must invent reality in order to survive. It harms him politically when the press corps ignores it.

He isn’t alone of course. His Republican confederates, especially from southern states that rushed to reopen for his benefit, are equally invested in creating a worldview in which nothing matters. Republican Tom Cotton, senator of Arkansas, whose state is reeling from sickness and death, found the time yesterday to dash off a tweet that managed to slander, lie, distort and malign in a mere 28 words. He appears obsessed with something he calls the “liberal mob.” I could not find one tweet — not one — expressing anything, not even sympathy, for those sick or dead from the coronavirus. Cotton doesn’t need to invent reality to survive. He doesn’t need to impugn the press corps for ignoring this made-up world. He’s doing both for the president’s sake.

I see Brian Stelter’s tweet as illustrative of a kind of transition taking place between the old way of doing things in journalism and the new. In the old way, one side said this and the other said that. They were presented as equal even if one was a fact and one was a lie, giving the impression that the truth is partisan and morality relative. In the old way, the press corps was complicit in the creation of a cynical, meaningless and made-up world immediately beneficial to the interests of the Republican Party.

The new way, as practiced by younger reporters, especially younger reporters of color, is morally responsible. It is therefore pissing the president off. It’s self-evidently bad when people get sick. It’s self-evidently bad when people die. It’s self-evidently bad when sickness and death could have been prevented by leaders who knew that what they were doing was self-evidently bad as they were doing it for reasons incompatible with human health.

Yes, tears will be the result of disease, death and the dereliction of duty, but tears alone are not newsworthy. They are part of a context, part of a system of causality, one that responsible reporters duly report. The GOP hates that, of course.

 

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 July 2020

Word Count: 856

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I disliked President George W. Bush immensely. I thought he was illegitimate. The US Supreme Court decided his 2000 victory, not voters. I thought he was weak. Dick Cheney was in charge more than he was. I thought he was a liar. Iraq did not possess “weapons of mass destruction.” I thought he was dangerous. His gross ineptitude destabilized the international order. It enfeebled what had been the Pax Americana.

I never thought he was disloyal, though.

Indeed, his love of country was such that he believed democracy could grow out of the end of a gun barrel; that scores of thousands of dead Iraqis were an even trade for 3,000 dead Americans; that moral and legal abominations like torture and “enemy combatants” were acceptable to achieving American security; that war crimes and atrocities were OK if they meant preserving life and liberty at home; that being an American citizen meant more rights and privileges than being a mere human being. Call me quaint if you wish, but I want presidents to pursue truth, justice and the American way — in that order. For George W. Bush, it was the American way or zip.

For the current president, there is no American way. Sure, he won on a message of “America First,” but the “America” in that hoary campaign slogan never meant the United States. It meant a wholly imagined community, a confederacy of the mind and the spirit, that’s always already at work, often covertly but these days overtly, and that seeks to undermine the US by any means, including treason, to accomplish its goals.

George W. Bush, as bad as he was, was a patriot. Donald Trump and his confederates in the Republican Party, however, are not. They are quite literally the enemies within.

You could say, well, they’re still American. They’re not traitors. They haven’t done anything to help another country at the expense of the US. That depends on what you mean by “another country,” though. During the American Civil War, the Confederate States asked but failed to get imperial powers to lend a hand in destroying the union. Trump and his GOP confederates are also seeking foreign assistance. In standing idly by, Senate Republicans are tacitly inviting Russian propagandists to poison the public understanding of Joe Biden. More explicitly, the Trump campaign, namely Rudy Giuliani, is working with a Ukrainian lawmaker to smear the Democratic nominee. The enemies within are working with the enemies without to injure the United States.

The GOP confederates don’t believe they are traitors. They believe their confederacy of the mind and the spirit is the true home of the “real Americans” for whom God chose a flawed leader to deliver into their hands an America that is subordinate to their righteous domination. That arrangement demanded that they trust Donald Trump, which meant that arrangement could not possibly endure. At some point, sooner or later, there’d be a moment in which it was clear, even to GOP confederates, that the president had betrayed them the way he betrayed everyone else in his life.

That moment seems to be here. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press and others have reported that the president knew the Kremlin was paying Afghani terrorists to kill American troops stationed overseas. The AP says Trump knew about Russian bounties in early 2019. Yet the administration did nothing, and continues to do nothing, even as it denies that it knew anything at all. Moreover, he’s defending the Russians and their association with the Taliban, the very people who aided and abetted Osama bin Laden, who conceived and executed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a time of existential angst among GOP confederates that comes close to rivaling the election of the first Black president of the United States.

The Washington press corps is reporting a split in the Republican Party between people loyal to the nation-within-a-nation and people, especially senators up for reelection, worried about the appearance of being loyal to the nation-within-a-nation. But I think the GOP is being split in another way not yet being reported: between confederates disloyal to the United States and a president disloyal to Republican confederates. The “American Taliban” are supposed to be liberal activists tearing down statues of the founders, according to US Sen. Ted Cruz. They are not supposed to be members of the Republican Party whose chief loyalty is to the nation-within-a-nation. The president is creating cognitive dissonance that may never be resolved.

If I’m right, the GOP confederates will crumble the way the Confederate States crumbled. Betrayal is a feature, not a bug. For all his flaws, George W. Bush’s allies and opponents knew where he stood.

This is what happens when a major political party abandons its values, its history and its former leaders. It inevitably self-destructs.

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: 02 July 2020

Word Count: 808

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I trust that you know that when I talk about Berniebros, I’m not talking about Bernie Sanders. I’m not talking about progressives, liberals, or socialists. I’m not even talking about democratic socialists or social democrats. I’m talking about the Very Loud Leftists (VLLs) who had more invested in the Vermont senator than advancing his candidacy.

They had a financial stake. Moreover, they believe even more money would follow what they thought in 2016 was Sanders’ rising star. That didn’t pan out, of course. Sanders honorably bowed out. He joined Joe Biden’s effort to unseat the incumbent. Most Sanderistas followed him. The policy, though not the spirit, of The Revolution has been assimilated. Thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic and its attendant recession, Biden now sees the need for a presidency as bold, shrewd and forward-thinking as Franklin Roosevelt’s. In terms of political influence, the VLLs should be high-fiving each other.

They aren’t. They didn’t want to influence. They wanted to destroy. And now they are on the outside looking in. They no longer have the clout they once had. They no longer have the audience they once had. They might not even have the revenues. That’s a very long way to fall. People like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Katie Halper and Nathan Robinson went to war only to see their hero side with the enemy. American history is chock full of betrayed extremists ping-ponging between ideological poles. There’s plenty of precedent for the VLLs now appearing to be open to the idea of the enemy of their enemy being their friend. Greenwald asked Thursday: “Should the Populist Left Work With the Populist Right Where They Have Common Ground, or Shun Them?”

I’ll leave it to others to discuss the finer points of populism and the rest of Greenwald’s piece. For my part, what I think needs saying seems obvious to me but baffling to Greenwald and his cadre of VLLs: class is not one-dimensional. Indeed, the working class, to anyone who has lived within its constraints, isn’t theoretical. It’s certainly not theoretical enough to be one-dimensional. To those withstanding the injuries of class, a Biden presidency is a transparently obvious boon. Yet to hear Lee Fang, who works with Greenwald, tell it, the only things rising from the ashes of Sanders’ so-called “Revolution” are disappointment, bitterness and conspiracy. “The dream of a revived working class left built on mass economic redistribution is dead for now. In its place we have a chummy handshake between media, academia and corporations content with revolution in the form of diverse board rooms and toppled statues.” These people are primed and ready to find common cause with the enemies of their enemies.

I know it sounds strange. How can people fighting for the American working class not understand how class works in America? It’s simple really. They read about it, but didn’t experience it. The same people dedicating their lives to smashing the “dominant neoliberal ideology” understand that ideology better than they understand the working class, because they come from it directly. Taibbi, Halper and Robinson, for instance, are all products of elite college prep schools connected to the Ivy League. Hard work and playing by the rules — merit — had relatively little to do with their success, because they were born successful. They have spent their careers, in one fashion or another, trying to bust the myth of meritocracy. In that, the VLLs are righteous authorities.

And in that, they were born to misunderstand class. The working class — the real multi-hued working class — does not want to destroy the status quo. It wants to reform it. It wants to be let in. The “dream of a revived working class left” isn’t dead and the VLLs would know that if they bothered looking. Among other things, the George Floyd movement is a class-conscious effort wanting what every out-group in US history has wanted: equal opportunity, equal justice, greater peace, and greater liberty. This month’s protests have been an amazing demonstration of cross-racial solidarity and cross-class solidarity, the very things the VLLs went to war for but now can’t bring themselves to see. Merit must mean something. Merit must be made real if it isn’t currently. The VLLs think they are helping working-class Americans by removing the scales of illusion from their eyes. What they are really doing is pissing people off.

The VLLs are always wrong about the Democratic Party. It isn’t “neoliberal.” It isn’t conservative. (It isn’t as bad as the Republican Party.) But we might thank them for going all the way ’round the bend, from one extreme pole to the other, joining Republican fascists who long ago abandoned “movement conservatism.” Greenwald and his ilk are shifting the landscape so that liberalism looks safer, more acceptable, more central, so that working-class demands to expand the franchise don’t seem so radical compared to the true believers on the left and right who want to smash 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: 26 June 2020

Word Count: 820

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I’m not sure why negligent homicide is not at the center of debate over the reopening of southern and plains states like Texas, Florida, and Oklahoma. I’m not sure why we are not discussing what these Republican governors knew, and when they knew it, as they rushed to reopen in the face of authorities saying it would lead quickly to eye-popping spikes in rates of coronavirus infection. So far, the debate seems centered on partisan politics, especially the president. That’s not where it ought to be, though.

Consider what this might look like in a nonpartisan setting. In the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Carnival’s Grand Princess cruise liner was still at sea. Company executives discovered she’d grown lousy with coronavirus. They knew Carnival would face wrongful death lawsuits. The firm might even be subject to criminal prosecution, depending on the severity of the outbreak. They decided to let passengers party on. About 1,500 got sick, and dozens more have died since March. Company executives knew what they were doing when they did it and went ahead with doing it anyway. Whatever the cost of defending the firm in the future was going to be less than the profits earned from maintaining the status quo. This is what happens when human health and human suffering are gains and losses in the accounting department.

This strategy was perfected by the tobacco industry. It knew smoking caused cancer. It knew smoking was addictive. It knew a cancer-causing, addictive and socially accepted product like the cigarette had killed and would kill scores of millions of people. Cigarettes were cash cows, though. So for decades, Big Tobacco mounted a two-pronged front. One: sell sell sell. Two: deny deny deny. Eventually, the public figured out its game, but not before scores of millions were dead. The industry later had to pay out, sure, but after profits secured and no one going to jail. The strategy has been repeated by the companies peddling plastics, coal, consumer products and others.

I see the Republican governors of Florida and Texas and others playing a similar game. They knew the status quo — no masks, no social distancing, and/or no orders to require them — was going to sicken or kill people, especially people of color and the elderly. Greg Abbott and other GOP governors were even forthright about being aware of the risks and pressing ahead with reopening without a comprehensive plan for doing so. I think they believed reopening in a hurry was going to “profit” in the form of economic activity that would boost Donald Trump’s chances of being reelected. They made a cold-blooded “business” decision. Dead people were the cost of doing GOP politics.

As a consequence of their gross negligence, Wednesday saw a record 36,000 new cases, the biggest one-day increase since late April. As a consequence, the case number and death toll in the United States keeps climbing while they keep falling in other western nations. As a consequence, states that flattened the curve — specifically, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut — now require visitors from “hot spots” to quarantine. As a consequence, the European Union might bar travel from the US, as if the US were a banana republic whose corrupt leader is indifferent to the suffering of his people.

It was a bad decision, though. I don’t mean “bad” in terms of public health. I don’t mean “bad” in terms of economics. Those are obvious. I mean bad politically. And because it was bad politically, it was bad in every other sense. Remember that Republican governors, like their national counterparts, represent most the country’s 1 percent, and the 1 percent views the world almost entirely through a lens of gains and losses. So, quite naturally, Republican governors believed everyone else does too.

Everyone else does not. If that were true, highly taxed New Yorkers would vote red, and federally subsidized Kentuckians would vote blue. Republicans leaders, moreover, should know better. They knew Republican voters thought the economy was terrible at the end of Barack Obama’s tenure. They knew Republican voters thought the economy was terrific after Trump was inaugurated. Their “economic anxiety” went poof! — gone in the span of a month! That’s not due to economics. That’s due entirely to politics. They thought a strong economy was going to win it for Trump. Instead, they have brought a plague upon themselves and supporters the president cannot afford to lose.

Republican governors probably won’t face criminal consequences for negligent homicide, but they will probably face political ones, as the president is. Greg Abbott announced today policies to slow down the reopening of Texas, perhaps to the point of a second lock down. He must act for the sake of public health, of course, but he must act for the sake of his political fortunes, too. As the death toll accelerates, the absence of action will spark louder and more numerous cries of negligent homicide on his part. I’m not sure why we are not talking about that more, but indeed we ought to be.

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: 25 June 2020

Word Count: 839

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It’s not that I don’t trust the New York Times when it says a new poll found that Joe Biden has “a commanding” 14-point lead over the president among registered voters. It’s not that I doubt that most women and Americans of color support the former vice president. It’s not even that I think some Republicans aren’t going soft on Donald Trump. It’s that we do not know what we cannot know until the moment has arrived in which knowing is made possible. In other words, I’ll believe Joe Biden is winning on the day he wins.

What we can know right now is more worthy of our attention. What we can know is that attention itself, lots of people paying attention, is probably the most important causal factor moving public opinion Biden’s way. As I have said often, most people most of the time have something better to do than pay attention to politics, and that’s always true except when it isn’t, and it isn’t when there’s a pandemic that has killed the equivalent of forty-one 9/11s and that has unemployed scores of millions of people. Out of this context arose mass demands for racial justice. Out of the commingling of these energies arose a majority of the people speaking undeniably with one voice.

To be sure, these energies remain volatile and likely will shoot off in a thousand competing directions. But we should, at least for the time being, recognize this as an achievement, and appreciate it. The majority rarely speaks in unison. As a matter of fact, elites in politics and business trust that it won’t, just as much as they trust that the opinion of the majority will reflect elite opinion. Only during times of dire national emergency does the status quo become inverted. American elites usually take the lead. They usually do not scramble, as they are doing now, to catch up with the majority. They too did not know what they could not know until the moment they knew it.

Moments arrive but understanding that they have arrived is another matter. Consider the Senate Republicans. During Trump’s impeachment trial, many of them behaved as if they understood perfectly well what the president had done, and why it was wrong, yet they refused to believe his misconduct (treason) was grounds for removal. They refused to believe it was grounds for removal, because they presumed probably that they understood what a majority in their states thought about Trump’s misconduct. Importantly, the Senate Republicans presumed a majority knew what they knew.

A majority of voters almost certainly did not know what the Senate Republicans knew, because, well, to repeat myself: most people most of the time have something better to do than pay attention to politics.

Indeed, the majority of voters in their states is now paying close attention thanks to the pandemic and the recession, and what they are seeing is:

• John Bolton, the conservative’s conservative, confirmed the charges against the president; and,

• the charges against the president were understood perfectly by the Senate Republicans;

• but Senate Republicans, believing their voters knew what they knew, decided to acquit Trump of all charges anyway;

• which is news to the majority of voters in their states.

Given that most people have other things to do, it’s possible Bolton testimony might have had less impact during the impeachment trial than his book is now having during a time in which lots of people are at home, paying attention.

Especially the elderly, people who vote every time it’s time to vote. The pandemic has created conditions in which Democratic lawmakers are demanding mail-in balloting for the sake of democracy and public health. Mail-in balloting is a dire threat to Trump. It overcomes the state-by-state infrastructure the Republicans have built to suppress votes. The president is therefore going to war with mail-in balloting, which is taking the form of going to war with democracy itself in eyes of the people on the receiving end of Trump’s attacks — a gigantic cohort of Americans that’s now paying close attention to politics, because there isn’t much else to do.

Even the most hard-shelled racist is now a potential victim of disenfranchisement, so even the most hard-shelled racist might have good reason to second-guess Donald Trump.

We do not know what we cannot know until the moment of knowing (Election Day) has arrived. But we do know — now — that fascism thrives when the majority is divided, when it has better things to do than pay attention to politics. Fascism and the fascists who practice it tend to wither under scrutiny, yielding to the majority’s moral authority. That, or they go to pieces, as the president appears to be doing currently.

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 June 2020

Word Count: 781

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I think we have entered a kind of second phase of nationwide protests demanding justice for George Floyd and every person of color, but especially Black men, murdered by agents of the state. This phase is focused on statues and other emblems of our past.

It’s reasonable to ask where the line is. Do we take down all statues of men connected to slavery? Is George Washington as worthy of condemnation as Robert E. Lee? I have an opinion but for now I want to say I have faith. I believe there is a line though we don’t know collectively what it is. I believe it will be the product of passionate public debate. At some point, perhaps sooner than we think, we will know where this ends.

There are those, however, who are lacking faith. They do not trust the public to comprehend the problem or to determine who to tear down from platforms of honor and who to leave in place. For these people, any deviation for the status quo is disorder on the brink of anarchy. For these people, any call for change is a “slippery slope” with no end in sight. The marketplace of ideas isn’t a source of excitement. It’s a source of anxiety and uncertainty, a source of something they fear called “mob rule.” When Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell says protesters are tearing down statues of the founding fathers like they were statues of Saddam Hussein, he’s not criticizing protesters on the merits. What he’s really doing is telling Americans to shut up.

Rudy Giuliani isn’t good for much, but he is good for illustrating this mindset. Last night, on Laura Ingraham’s show, he said Black Lives Matter is the same as antifa is the same as Communism is the same as totalitarianism. “That’s part of a plan,” he said (there is no plan), “and we better wake up to it and we better stop being silly. People who say they are favorable to Black Lives Matter — Black Lives Matter wants to come and take your house away from you. They want to take your property away from you.” (For the sake of the integrity of the public sphere, I must say these are lies, all of it).

I take Giuliani’s remarks as part of a cohort of Americans that is searching very hard for evidence that 2020 is the same as 1968, and that public arguments over who to memorialize and who to condemn have the makings of a counterargument wholly in favor of the president and his bid for reelection. For these people, there is no social upheaval that does not remind them of their teenaged years, and there is no step forward that does not trigger a “conservative” white backlash. (To be fair to Giuliani, which I dislike doing, some liberal pundits have the same political orientation.)

They could be right. Morning Consult, a pollster, found that by a 12-point margin a majority of Americans think Confederate statues should remain standing. The same poll found public opinion evolving, though. While 52 percent in 2017 said Confederate statues should stay, only 44 percent say so today. The difference can be explained by the different between a biracial cosmopolitan chief executive whose tenure ended in 2017 and the cheating, illegitimate, white supremacist we’ve been stuck with since. Lots of white people, as I have noted before, could not quite bring themselves to believe the claims of Black Lives Matter while the country was being run by its first Black president. Under Donald Trump, however, they have less trouble believing BLM’s claims. Most white people are unlikely to see a rightwing counterargument, because tearing down General Lee is for them the same as tearing down President Trump.

Comparisons to 1968 are probably apt but not for reasons some think. That year saw riots, massive antiwar demonstrations and violence in every city that mattered. That year saw the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. That year saw the crackup of the Democratic Party’s ruling coalition that had prevailed in American politics since the 1930s. This was the context for Richard Nixon’s message of law and order (it was the context for his “silent majority” gambit later). Put another way, Nixon was not seen as part of “the problem” however that was defined. He was seen, indeed, he positioned himself to be seen, as a solution to apparent anarchy.

Even if a rightwing counterargument managed to take off, Trump usually ends up clipping it. That’s precisely what he did when he said he’d outlaw tearing down statues. The focus of attention wasn’t protesters. It was him. Again. The more he tries, the more it seems to backfire. He uses Nixon’s slogans as if they were magic spells. Just speaking the words makes them come true! They won’t, of course. What’s more, I suspect most people have stopped listening. They are busy focusing on the problem of systemic state-sanctioned violence against Black Americans. They are busy debating where to draw the line. Most people keep the faith. Others, sadly, have none at all.

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 June 2020

Word Count: 849

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I’m not one of those journalists who laments the news cycle as if the Washington press corps has no choice but to cover everything this president does as if everything he does were of equal importance. The Trump administration is indeed a dust devil of disaster, but some things are more important than others, and reporters should say so.

This weekend saw wall-to-wall coverage of Donald Trump’s attempt to reboot his bid for reelection. The setting was Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the Covid-19 pandemic is surging, and where civic and business leaders said now’s the wrong time to gather 20-some thousand people in one place. The Trump campaign, meanwhile, crowed about how many people were going to show up only to be humiliated when less than half did.

Empty seats evidently signal “vulnerabilities” heading into the election, according to the AP’s Steve Peoples and Jonathan Lemire. “Trump’s return to the campaign trail was designed to show strength and enthusiasm but instead highlighted growing vulnerabilities. It also crystallized a divisive reelection message that largely ignores broad swaths of voters, who could play a decisive role on Election Day, and the critical and dominant national issue of racial injustice. National unity was not mentioned.”

I get it. I’m as human as the next guy. The president was embarrassed. Cue the Schadenfreude. But if we’re going to talk seriously about Trump’s “vulnerabilities” in a “divisive election” in which he’s pandering to his base of support while ignoring a majority of Americans, let’s remember that that’s what the president did last time around. That’s why he had to cheat. Cheating, for this guy, is a feature, not a bug.

Indeed, cheating was confirmed Friday. The US Department of Justice released unredacted parts of Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in 2016. The parts involved Roger Stone, the president’s friend and confidant. (They were redacted while Stone’s federal trial was ongoing.) Thanks to Buzzfeed, which sued for the release of the information, it’s abundantly clear there was a link between Trump and Kremlin operatives attacking Democrat Hillary Clinton. That link was Stone.

During testimony to the US Congress, Robert Mueller said the Russians waged a cyber-offensive against Clinton to benefit Trump. His report explained how hackers under the direction of Vladimir Putin gave stolen documents to WikiLeaks, which timed their release for maximum impact. Unclear, however, was whether the Trump campaign knew about Putin’s efforts and more importantly, whether Trump himself knew about his campaign’s effort to obtain the information. If a link could be established, it would be clear that to win, the president colluded with the enemy.

The link was … already established? The New York Times and the Washington Post, in reporting the results of Buzzfeed’s lawsuit, said there wasn’t anything new to report other than the possibility of the president having lied to Mueller’s team. Apparently, the link between Trump and Russia had already been reported! Apparently, that link was clear after Roger Stone was convicted of lying to federal investigators! I mean, OK, fine, so maybe I should’ve been paying more and better attention, but I do this stuff for a living. If I missed this link, I’m betting lots of normal people missed it, too, and if lots of normal people missed it, too, that’s probably an indicator of some sort of institutional failing, right?

Think about it. If this president, or any president, is shown to have cheated to get to where he is today, that means this president, or any president, is illegitimate. That means this president, or any president, defrauded the American people, violated national sovereignty, and seized the right to rule without the consent of the ruled. That means it doesn’t matter what this president, or any president, has done or will do from now on. The fact that this president, or any president, cheated means he has to go.

He has to, because once a cheater, always a cheater. Trump cheated again when he tried involving two foreign leaders in a scheme to interfere this year, and in doing so either betrayed American values (he’s willing to look away from China cracks down on Hongkongers and Uighur Muslims) or literally committed treason (with Ukraine, in my view). Cheating, in other words, isn’t a bug for this guy. It’s a permanent feature.

The Washington press corps can choose not to cover everything Trump does as if everything he does were of equal importance. When it comes to reporting a campaign rally in which half the people showed up who were supposed to show up, cheating is a news context as valid as any other. It could be the pandemic kept people away. Just as plausible, however — and plausibility is the best that reporters have to work with — is that people are not showing up to give an illegitimate president a second chance.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 June 2020

Word Count: 806

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