The president came close to inciting violence today. Regarding his upcoming rally in Tulsa, Donald Trump tweeted that “any protesters, anarchists, agitators, looters or lowlifes who are going to Oklahoma, please understand, you will not be treated like you have been in New York, Seattle, or Minneapolis. It will be a much different scene!”

This is evidence, I would argue, of the president being the nominal head of a loose network of vigilantes inside and outside law enforcement prepared to use violence when normal democratic politics fails to yield the right results. This is an expression of confederate (i.e., fascist) elements always already at work in this country ready to burn down the status quo if the status quo gets in the way. This is a reality that isn’t even conceivable when we continue calling rightwing illiberalism by its wrong name.

The wrong name is “conservative.”

My friend Seth Cotlar teaches American political history at Oregon’s Willamette University. He asked recently if it might be better to rethink conservatism, especially what we are told it means. He located his question in the 1964 presidential election, which is generally considered the starting point of so-called movement conservatism in which Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory arose from the ashes of Barry Goldwater’s defeat. (Reagan launched the “conservative” regime that we are living in today.)

“What if we think of 1964 as the moment when the Republican Party committed to being a party of the illiberal far right,” Seth said, “and then it took 20 or 30 years for them to push out the remaining (classical) liberal conservatives in their coalition?” Seth then turned to the Democrats. 1968 is generally considered the year in which the ruling coalition the Democrats had enjoyed since the 1930s fell apart in the wake of the civil rights movement, specifically the white backlash to it, and the Vietnam War.

Seth asked if we should “think of the post-1968 Democrats (and their moderate GOP allies) as the true conservatives, as the folks devoted primarily to conserving the democratic and egalitarian elements of the New Deal order that the illiberal elements in the GOP sought to destroy?” Seth then asked us to “conceptualize ‘the American left’ as the portions of the Democratic party that sought not just to preserve the New Deal order, but expand upon it,” and that it was the American left that had “to battle the illiberals in the GOP as well as the conservatives” in both parties (my italics).

After this, Seth said, we might have different view of “conservatism.” He said: “I think it’s done much damage to our political culture that we’ve used the term ‘conservative’ to refer to a radical movement that sought to dismantle huge swaths of the American state and fight against social movements for equality and democracy.” Additionally, we have a different view of “liberal” and “leftist.” Amid the current “conservative” political regime that started with Reagan, the liberals have been conservative while the leftists have been pushing the franchise’s boundaries to include people who had not been included previously, for instance, transgender people. As the left keeps trying to open the door wider, rightwing illiberals keep trying to push it shut. Liberals and leftists believe everyone is American no matter who they are. The “conservatives,” however, define “American” according to a set of ancient hatreds and bigotries.

The conventional wisdom is that conservatives don’t like change but will go along if and when a majority of the people believe it’s time. According to this widely accepted definition of conservatism, conservatives will yield in time to popular sovereignty. But, as Seth hinted, “conservatives” since 1964 haven’t done that. Liberals and leftists have used the tools of democracy — free speech, grassroots organizing, legal advocacy, and science, to name just a few — to include more people. The “conservatives,” meanwhile, increasingly find themselves losing ground. Instead of adapting, as true conservatives like George Romney and Nelson Rockefeller did in the 1960s and 1970s, rightwing illiberals have increasingly found ways to sabotage the tools of democracy themselves. The next step, as the president intimated today, is an embrace of political violence.

Many people think the Republicans turned their backs on democracy when Senate Republicans nullified Barack Obama’s right to name a new Supreme Court justice. But I think there’s another moment that gets little attention, because it’s about mass death and gun violence, not democratic norms. That moment was the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre in which 20 six-year-old children were shot to pieces. That was when true conservatives in the Republican Party, seeking to preserve life and liberty — the very essence of that which must be conserved — would have acted. They did no such thing.

Sandy Hook proved there are no conservatives left in national politics. Indeed, the GOP went the other way. While Republicans at the Capitol held the line on “gun rights,” Republicans at the state level loosened or abolished gun laws, allowing them in cafes, churches, libraries, playgrounds and other areas where guns do not belong. The energy that pushed guns deeper and deeper into public affairs is the same energy now threatening state lawmakers acting in interest of public health and ordinary citizens exercising their constitutional right to protest a fascist president in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

True conservatives do not give up on democracy. Rightwing illiberals do. They must. I don’t think it’s possible to understand our current politics if we don’t understand 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: 19 June 2020

Word Count: 903

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I don’t like John Bolton any more than you do. He’s a crank. He’s a snob. He’s a warmonger. One thing you can’t question, though, is his loyalty. No matter how wrongheaded, how dangerous, how much he prefers airstrikes to diplomacy, you can’t doubt (I don’t doubt) his dedication to the United States. Indeed, he’s loyal to a fault.

This is important to point out, because disagreeing with someone, even to the point of fighting like hell to wall him off from power, is not grounds for questioning his love of country. The Democrats usually understand the difference between partisanship and patriotism. They usually get the difference, ultimately. The Republicans, since Barack Obama’s election, have usually demurred. If you are not a Republican, you’re not quite American; if you’re not quite American, you are tantamount to the enemy.

This, I have argued, is the result of a double consciousness among Republicans. Starting in 2008, when the country elected its first African-American president, members of the GOP began splitting their loyalty between the real nation that is the United States and a wholly imagined nation inside the United States, where “real Americans” live and where white Protestant men are chosen by God to rule the United States in His name. Since 2008, you have probably noticed the GOP looking and sounding more Southern. Well, there’s a reason for that. For some people, the Civil War never ended. It just went underground. The result has been that for some Republicans patriotism is optional. They didn’t exercise that option fully until the country was governed by a black man.

Bear this in mind as we consider John Bolton’s new book, parts of which were leaked Wednesday to the Washington Post, the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The former director of the White House National Security Council was present during Donald Trump’s talks with foreign leaders. He paints a familiar picture. From the Times: “It is a withering portrait of a president ignorant of even basic facts about the world, susceptible to transparent flattery by authoritarian leaders manipulating him and prone to false statements, foul-mouthed eruptions and snap decisions that aides try to manage or reverse.”

There are many conclusions we can draw from available parts of the book. (The Bulwark has a handy rundown of takeaways.) I’m interested in two moments when Bolton was a fly on the wall. One is Trump’s discussion of military aid to Ukraine. The other is Trump’s interactions with China’s leader Xi Jinping. To take the second first, the president offered to reduce tariffs imposed on Chinese imports in exchange for Xi’s buying up US farm-products, which would put him in good stead with farm states. In other words, Trump asked China for help in getting reelected, as he did with Ukraine.

The differences are important. As Jonathan Bernstein wrote this morning, it’s probably not abuse of power for Trump to trade favors with China, even if the favor requires turning a blind eye to Xi’s rounding up Uighur Muslims and “reeducating” them in concentration camps in China’s northeast corner. I agree. That’s probably not abuse of power. If Trump’s interest in getting reelected aligns with farm-state interest in selling more soybeans, so be it. But that’s about all the good we can find in this episode. What Trump did in trading blood for soybeans is a repudiation of our republican values and a forfeiture of our influence overseas. This may not be an abuse of power, but it sure-as-hell is a betrayal of everything we tell ourselves we stand for.

As for Ukraine, Bolton confirms what we already knew. The president was extorting Volodymyr Zelensky, holding up tens of millions to aid his country’s eastern war against the Russians in exchange for an investigation into Joe Biden’s son for the purpose of smearing Trump’s most likely opponent in the 2020 election. Or as Bolton put it: Trump “said he wasn’t in favor of sending them anything [military aid] until all the Russia-investigation materials related to Clinton and Biden had been turned over.”

This is usually characterized as Trump not just welcoming foreign interference in our elections (as he did in 2016) but demanding it. That’s bad enough, but we really should call an attempted international criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people by its real name. Yes, we are not at war, which is what critics say whenever I introduce the T-word. I’m not interested in legal and constitutional word-parsing. I’m interested in speaking the whole truth plainly, and what this president did was flat-out treason.

More importantly, I think, is what the Republicans in the Senate did. Remember that John Bolton didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. When the Senate Republicans decided against gathering evidence and hearing testimony in Trump’s impeachment trial, they almost certainly knew they were preventing the public from learning more, thus making their decision to acquit that much easier to defend.

Make no mistake, however. The Republicans would have made the same decision. This president isn’t rogue. He’s an outgrowth of a political party that has become increasing dedicated to a wholly imagined nation within a nation, where “real Americans” are chosen by God to rule the United States in God’s name, the result being that “real Americans” are released from the awesome and solemn responsibility to bargain in good faith in pursuit of the greatest good for the greatest number. Indeed, the greatest good has become the greatest threat, thereby justifying even the highest-order crime.

Let’s be clear: every single Republican senator who voted to acquit Donald Trump knew he was trying to sabotage the sovereignty of the American people. They knew he abused his power. They knew he obstructed justice to cover it up. They acquitted him anyway, the result being a president not only above the law but the law itself. He is a king.

The Civil War never ended. It went underground — until a black man dared be president. The Republican Party died that day, and the Confederacy was reborn. No one dares call it treason, but we should.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 June 2020

Word Count: 1,016

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I don’t mean to belabor the obvious, but the president’s political instincts are rather stale. The price of gas, the ups and downs of the Dow, the unemployment rate, and the US economy generally — these are the indicators Donald Trump turns to in order to determine how he’s doing politically and gauge the likelihood of getting reelected.

Indeed, the economy is so important that he was willing to do pretty much anything to prevent the markets and the electorate from knowing more than he wanted them to know about Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, which will have killed by week’s end 120,000 people and has unemployed more than 44 million others. By the time the markets and the electorate fully understood the danger, but before the pandemic had even peaked, the president had already begun chomping for a return to normal, as if normal were possible in the absence of a vaccine, as if an economy based on consumer demand can recover when consumer demand has all but collapsed.

Most Republican governors went along. Florida’s Rick DeSantis and Texas’ Greg Abbott, for instance, hesitated to implement guidelines designed by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention to slow the spread of the infection (some Republican governors didn’t bother doing anything). Then, after the president gave them some political cover, they were quick to reopen. States that rushed reopening, however, are now seeing a resurgence in rates of the disease. That doesn’t amount to a second wave, according to the Washington Post, so much as a continuation of a first wave that never crested.

The GOP altogether appears to have decided that saving the economy is worth sacrificing scores of thousands of lives. That calculation seems to rest on an accepted truth: that what’s good economically is good politically. The Republicans figure a recovering economy will carry them through. While that logic might be sound, and cold-blooded, what’s good economically is good politically is more assertion than fact.

There has probably always been some kind of link between economics and politics, but the link was of acute interest during the 1992 presidential election. Like this year, that year saw a recession (a small one compared to today’s), and like the current incumbent, George H.W. Bush had, not quite fairly, a reputation for being out-of-touch with the ordinary worries of ordinary Americans. Over time, the link between economics and politics came to be seen as the cause for Bill Clinton’s victory, and the link was later preserved in amber when a campaign advisor quipped, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

No one knows why anyone wins the presidency. If there is indeed a reason, it’s the most obvious one. Ross Perot, that year’s independent candidate, split the Republican vote, giving Clinton a win by plurality. That, however, didn’t prevent James Carville’s “It’s the economy, stupid” from being received as gospel truth by which every first-termer seeks a second. The thinking goes that incumbents can withstand pretty much anything, even something as damaging as an impeachment trial, as long as the economy is performing well. George H.W. Bush’s one-term presidency (and Jimmy Carter’s too) are like ghosts. They haunt the White House and have for 40 years.

Economics might (might!) have determined 1992, but it likely won’t determine 2020, because polarization — the rightwing purification of the Republican Party — will almost certainly prevent self-identified Republican voters from leaving Trump’s side. Yes, his policies, especially his senseless trade war with China, has hurt Republican voters in places like Kansas and Nebraska, but, honestly, they are used to it. The GOP has conditioned its members to endure all kinds of misery. If they could live without expanded Medicaid under Obamacare, they can live with a potentially deadly virus.

If I’m right in saying that economics is not going have much or any bearing on the results of 2020, I have to ask: What’s the point? What’s the point of Republican governors rushing to reopen their states, sacrificing scores of thousands of lives in the process? It could be they think politics — total resistance to the Democratic Party — will win the day. That, however, presumes voters won’t die before they vote, especially elderly voters who tend, as a class, to favor Republicans. The conclusion I come to is honestly the worst conclusion I can come to. If they win, politics will have paid off in the form of power. If they lose, politics will have paid off in the form of profits.

Regardless of what they say about themselves, the Republicans are, first and last, the party of business. Big business, small business, all business, and the pandemic has been the biggest threat to business since no one remembers when. So it should be no surprise that the GOP appears to have taken a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook.

They know their product (politics) is killing people, but they are going to sell as much as they can for as long as they can until people get wise to what they’re doing, and even then they are going to double down in order to squeeze out every last buck. It’s greedy. It’s cynical. It’s defies comprehension utterly. In the end, however, it might work.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 17 June 2020

Word Count: 868

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When it comes to the president’s support among white evangelical Christians, my first instinct is skepticism. Always. These people are not subject to political factors normal people are subject to, such as a pandemic that has killed more than 118,000 people. There’s precious little Donald Trump can do to alienate them, because the point in supporting him isn’t protecting “religious freedom” or outlawing abortion. The point is seeing people punished who deserve to be punished — and enjoying it.

This is why recent discussion over the alleged loss of support among white evangelical Christians was pretty meaningless. True, Trump had sky-high approval in March, and true, that approval dropped around 10 points a month later. But that didn’t indicate a serious shift. His approval was sky-high across all demographics due to the “rally around the flag” effect. That was gone by April, and Trump’s approval went back to normal. The president still has white evangelical Christians in his back pocket.

Still, it’s worth asking what would alienate them. There are probably a few who disapprove of the way he staged a “Bible photo op” in Lafayette Square in front of a Episcopalian Church near the White House. There are probably a few who disagree with the president’s decision to gas peaceful protesters out of the way in order to stage it. And, as I said Monday, there are probably a few who dislike Trump’s little wink to the Washington press corps, saying “it’s a Bible,” God forbid not my Bible, the result being a heightened and painful awareness of his pandering displays of empty piety.

However, white evangelical Christians disgusted by this behavior have probably been disgusted for some time. The photo op didn’t drive them away. It was just one more reason for leaving. White evangelicals taking the teachings of Jesus to heart are not who we should be talking about when asking what Trump could possibly do to alienate white evangelical Christians. A vast majority of that cohort is willing to eat virtually any insult as long as Trump sees to it that the right people are punished and, more importantly, that they can do the punishing. This is why Monday’s ruling by the US Supreme Court, which expanded anti-discrimination workplace protections to LGBTQ people, is a bigger setback than white evangelical leaders are willing to let on.

You have to understand something about ultra-orthodox twice-born Christianity when its comes to sex and gender in public and private life. You’re either a man or you’re a woman; male or female; masculine or feminine. Men married women. Women married men. There is no in-between. There is no gray area. There is no plus/and. You are not born LGBTQ, because birth is the most natural thing of all. Being LGBTQ, however, is unnatural. It’s a choice, a sinful “lifestyle” choice. You didn’t choose anything, of course, but that might not have stopped you from feeling you were born a crime.

This is not just a matter of culture or tradition. This is a matter of the natural order — God’s law — and things outside the natural order are a perversion of God’s law, an abomination that can’t be left alone, because leaving it alone would mean complicity in the perpetration of sin against God. To be LGBTQ is to be a “crime,” which requires punishment. Only through punishment can the human soul be redeemed. Yet the Supreme Court now says such punishment is illegal. The high court has given white evangelical business owners a kind of “Sophie’s Choice”: disobey the state and obey God, or obey the state and disobey God. There is no area of gray. This is either/or.

So it’s strange, to say the least, to see white evangelical Christian leaders like Ralph Reed searching for areas of gray. This isn’t a big deal, Reed told the Washington Post. What matters most is religious freedom and abortion. “They rise far higher in the hierarchy of concerns of faith-based voters. Ultimately seeing a reckoning on Roe vs. Wade looms so much larger in the psyche of the right that I don’t know that this is a de-motivator.”

Projection is the coin of the white evangelical realm, so it’s safe to say that Reed means the opposite of what he’s saying. Senate Republicans nullified Barack Obama’s right to nominate a Supreme Court justice with the full backing of white evangelicals appalled by the court’s extension of marriage rights to same-sex couples. They voted for Donald Trump in order to get an Antonin Scalia lookalike. They thought they got one with Judge Neil Gorsuch. Yet here’s Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing the high court’s majority opinion, saying that white evangelical business owners can obey the law or obey God but not both. If that’s not a “de-motivator,” as Reed calls it, nothing is.

Ralph Reed is a political animal, as many white evangelicals are. They are not Trump’s biggest problem, though. His biggest problem is the truly orthodox, people identifying as Christian first, American second. The ruling is for them a major setback. Many may even feel betrayed by the denial of their “right” to punish those deserving punishment; by having gone all-in for Trump and gotten in return a slap in the face. They are not going to vote for Joe Biden, let’s be real, but they don’t have to vote for the incumbent. They don’t have to vote at all if they feel “de-motivated.” The president has his work cut out for him. To win reelection, Trump can’t lose a single white evangelical vote.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 June 2020

Word Count: 923

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The president of the United States is known the world over for his infidelity to the whole truth. The most recent tally from the Washington Post has him at 18,000 false or misleading statements since taking office. If telling a lie puts Donald Trump in a better light, by his estimation, he will tell it. Conversely, telling the truth rarely puts him in a better light, because he’s a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad president.

Given this incontrovertible fact, I can’t stop thinking about the time earlier this month when the president told the truth even though telling a lie would have probably put him in a better light. I can’t stop wondering if this rare moment of truth, like flickering candlelight in the dead of night, touched supporters in ways they’ve never been touched, and if it did what all the lies could not: introduce, or perhaps deepen, doubt.

The time I’m thinking about is when the president emerged from the White House bunker where he had been hiding for the weekend from demonstrators demanding justice for the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a white cop. After enduring days of withering criticism for appearing to be scared of facing protesters, Trump decided on a show of strength. The White House or the Department of Justice ordered federal authorities to tear gas peaceful protesters out of the way so Trump could stand with the Bible in his hands in front of nearby St. John’s Church. That photo op, according to polling by USA Today and CNN, would be described later as a “defining moment.”

Much has already been said about the photo op. Trump didn’t say a prayer, didn’t go into the church, didn’t do much of anything worthy of a president who enjoys a commanding influence over the country’s large and politically powerful bloc of white evangelical Christians. But not much has been said of what he said about the Bible he was holding, other than the completely obvious: that Donald Trump, a thrice-married womanizer subject to serial accusations of sexual assault, cares nothing for scripture, doesn’t even know how to talk about the Bible with knowledge, much less reverence.

A reporter asked: “Is that your Bible?” Trump answered: “It’s a Bible.”

Other than some social-media tittering, little or nothing has been said of the fact that Trump for once told the truth. No one to my knowledge has wondered why he didn’t just lie? Saying that the Bible was his, after all, would have been in keeping with the purpose of the photo op, which, we were told, was shoring up lagging support among white evangelical Christians during a time in which his image as a strong leader was in jeopardy. This president lies about virtually everything else. Why not this time?

The answer I keep coming back to is that telling the truth this one time was, by his estimation, putting himself in a better light according to the people constituting the president’s real audience, which, in this case anyway, was not white evangelical Christians. Instead, his real audience was people who accept the artifice of photo ops as a given and play along: the press corps. By telling the truth instead of lying like he normally would, the president might have made a grave political error. By telling the truth, he might have drawn attention to the artifice, possibly heightening awareness among white evangelical Christians that this president is taking them for fools.

By saying “it’s not my Bible,” Trump in effect winked at the press, letting White House correspondents in on the joke he’s been playing though the joke required gassing peaceful protesters out of the way for the punchline to work. This, in combination with holding the Bible as if it were a Trump Steak, may have had the effect on twice-born Christians of draining the holy from the moment. By telling the truth, the president broke the fourth wall to confess to playing a fake Christian on television.

I have been, and I still am, very skeptical of the president losing support among white evangelical Christians. At the rate he’s going, however, Trump won’t have to lose too many to lose the election. Christianity in this country is transforming just like every other social phenomenon. The protests over George Floyd’s murder are taking on the form of a religious movement that even twice-born conservatives are not immune to.

The president can’t afford to lose too many supporters, yet he’s given ammunition to minority voices inside the evangelical community to stand against him in November.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 June 2020

Word Count: 765

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Tom Cotton gave a Senate speech Thursday in which the Arkansas Republican, and a figure who’s key to advancing Trumpism beyond Donald Trump, mocked the push to remove statues memorializing “heroes” and other notables of the dead Confederacy:

 The idea that we all need safe spaces from mean words. Trigger warnings on op-eds or TV shows that might constitute a microaggression. This is the language of the campus social justice seminar but increasingly it’s the language of our workplace. Are we going to tear the Washington Monument down? Are we going to rename it the Obelisk of Wokeness?

“Obelisk of Wokeness” is actually pretty cool-sounding, so it naturally got attention. The best came from novelist Gary Shteyngart: 

Fact: The Obelisk of Wokeness is the world’s tallest and wokest obelisk. Originally called the Washington Monument, it was renamed to celebrate the defeat of Donald Trump & his racist minions in 2020.

Cotton deserves mockery, lots of it, but we shouldn’t follow him down the rabbit hole of amorality and indeterminacy where everything is as good or bad as everything else, and nothing matters. Cotton and his GOP confederates benefit from the impression that language is an end in itself and not a representation of people, things, actions and ideas. When words become all, it’s quite easy to conceal who’s doing what to whom. They would love debating “defunding the police,” but not white cops murdering black men.

The thing about Cotton’s argument is that it’s not an argument at all. Arguments, honest ones anyway, come from people who care about not being wrong, at the very least, because not being wrong is the point of the exercise in logic. When comparing the Washington Monument to, say, statues of General Robert E. Lee, Cotton doesn’t care about being right, because being right is beside the point. His objective is discrediting his opponents, tarring them as unreasonable, even as his own “argument” departs from fact and reason, distorting our sense of reality and making us feel crazy.

Insane “arguments” turn plaintiffs into defendants, victims into perpetrators. The Confederates really did betray the United States. They really did defend chattel slavery. They really did invade our nation with the express purpose of overthrowing and replacing a civilized republic with a barbarous slave regime. As “arguments” pertain to historical figures like Columbus, he did indeed sail the ocean blue, but the Italian sailor also really did foment genocide on Hispaniola, mutilating and torturing natives, and selling their children to sex slavers — if he didn’t first feed the babies to his dogs.

Plaintiffs in the statue-removal movement urge us to honor people worthy of honor, not traitors, sadists and criminals against humanity. Yet to hear Josh Hawley tell it the plaintiffs are trying to “erase history.” For The Federalist, the GOP senator from Missouri wrote that the plaintiffs are so cynical and acting so contrary to their claim of seeking healing, that there’s only one conclusion: “The Left Wants a Civil War.” Given the well-documented history of the Republican Party’s soft civil war over the last 40 years, this is gaslighting, my friends, so masterful as to be the envy of Vladimir Putin.

Insane “arguments” are also perverse. Two Buffalo cops really did shove a 75-yer-old protester so hard he fell backwards, cracking his skull on the concrete, and the same two police officers really did walk on by as the elder lay bleeding out. These are indisputable facts captured on video. I watched it. But US Senator Joni Ernst can’t comment until the facts are known (they are known). But, the Iowa Republican said, we might wonder if the victim did anything to justify violence (he didn’t). Facts become questions. Questions become facts. The point isn’t being right. It’s power.

The other thing about Tom Cotton’s “argument” is that it presumes that systemic racism and state-sanctioned violence against out-groups for the safety and benefit of in-groups is fake. Slavery is ended. Racism doesn’t exist anymore. You are not really seeing white police brutality that you really are seeing on newscasts and social media. Instead of believing the evidence of your eyes, Cotton is saying in other words, believe us when we say there’s a few bad apples in police departments, to be sure, but these protesters, like the PC police, are hyping things for their own political reasons, not moral and humane reasons, and any reaction to it, including civil war, is justified.

The “culture war,” as the conflict over language is often called, was made possible by a majority of white people deciding that racism existed only when it was overt. Fights over political correctness, therefore, were fights that would never come to an end as long people like Cotton, Hawley and Ernst had plausible deniability on their side.

George Floyd’s death and the reaction to it mean deniability is implausible.

And yet they still deny.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 12 June 2020

Word Count: 812

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The Republican Party’s influence over the meaning of patriotism over the last 50 years cannot be overstated. Americans inside and outside the party today still credit Ronald Reagan, considered the father of modern conservatism, for defeating the Soviet Union, leading to international conditions by which the US remade the world in its image. Americans inside and outside the GOP, especially after September 11, 2001, equated the Republican Party’s rah-rah militarism with love of country. In the early years of this century, being a Republican was almost synonymous with being a patriot.

The Republican grip on the meaning of patriotism was so nearly total that when black activists demanded the removal of statues in public squares across the south that honored generals, war heroes and other notables of the old Confederacy, the patriotism of their defenders, who were always Republican, was never in doubt. News stories in fact never touched on patriotism or loyalty. The press framing was instead nearly always between activism and “heritage” or anti-racism and racism — if you were lucky. The same dynamic played out in every controversy over the Confederate flag.

Compare that to the last fortnight. An outgrowth of the massive nationwide protests demanding justice for the murder of George Floyd has been a renewed push to remove Confederate statues — and there’s been almost no resistance. Protesters aren’t even waiting for due process. They’re just tearing them down. So far, the public seems to approve. The NFL, meanwhile, apologized for not taking Black Lives Matter seriously. NASCAR announced a ban on the Confederate flag. Senate Democrats are daring the president to veto a defense spending bill that includes provisions requiring the renaming of major military bases named after Confederates, like Fort Benning.

It bears repeating the Confederacy left the United States in order to preserve slavery. The men memorialized in public squares across the south, looking regal on their high horses, gazing over the landscape with eyes heavy with the wisdom of the ancients, betrayed us. Traitors, all of them, and what’s more they invaded and tried bringing down the United States, killing 750,000 in the process. To honor these “heroes” is to honor slavery and racism. It’s to honor sadism and treason. It’s to honor the enemy.

All that was clouded by tales of a “culture war” in which fierce rivals fought each other but who were loyal to the same country. That “culture war,” however, started receding from the foreground on the day the Republican Party formally nominated Donald Trump for president. During the 2016 Republican National Convention, someone passed around little Russian flags. It was supposed to be a joke, it was reported afterward, a way of mocking Democrats who accused Trump of being in the Kremlin’s pay in order to compensate for Hillary Clinton’s flaws. But the flags were no joke.

They were prescient. Over the course of Trump’s first term, we learned of Russia’s covert operation to sabotage the president’s Democratic rival in order to aid and abet Trump’s candidacy. We learned of Republican congressional leaders, in full knowledge of the Kremlin’s ongoing violation of our sovereignty, standing aside and letting it happen. And we witnessed earlier this year the Republican Senate acquitting the president of an international criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people. As they stood with the Confederacy, the Republicans stood with Trump. As they stood with foreign enemies of the past, they stood with foreign enemies of the present.

All this leaves a vacuum being filled by black activists, feminists, liberals, socialists, honest conservatives, former Republicans — a massive cross-demographic coalition threatening to bulldoze the GOP. Protesters had public support before the president gassed them out of the way for a photo op. Afterward, support went through the roof, according to USA Today. That was “defining moment,” the paper said. It appears to have crystallized something in the American psyche, made something once fluid permanent, forced a majority to see anti-racism is patriotism par excellence. More importantly, perhaps, a majority of the people can see, and (I dearly hope) will continue to see, that systemic racism in a diverse republic is the most fascist thing of all.

The once-fraught debate over Confederate statues is no longer fraught. It’s no longer between activism and “heritage” or anti-racism and racism. There’s not even a mushy middle in which the understanding of the Civil War is “complicated” while imbuing traitors and sadists with nobility and grace. That time is over. What had been an argument now appears settled. This is what happens when a major political party not only abandons patriotism, it sides with the enemies of the past and the present.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 June 2020

Word Count: 771

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We’re seeing the birth of a new media narrative that we should be aware of before smothering it in the crib. The narrative goes like this: the president is going to lose. A related subtext goes like this: the president is going to lose so badly to Joe Biden that in the future no one, not even Donald Trump’s House terriers, is going to admit they supported him. Another variation comes from the National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar, who wrote Sunday: “Republican loyalty to Trump won’t survive a November loss.”

This narrative is the result of new polls showing people drifting away who would not normally drift away, including senior citizens, who usually approve of Republican incumbents, as well as some working class white voters and some white evangelical Christians. This pattern is the result of nationwide protests demanding justice for George Floyd, demonstrations of a once-in-a-lifetime cross-racial solidarity that might signal, as I have argued, a transition from the old political regime to a new one.

More importantly, this narrative is the result of white Americans starting to view the United States, its history, and its institutions through the lens of the African-American experience, which is to say, seeing, perhaps for the first time in their lives, that black people experience all the time fascism at the hands of corrupt police officers, and that black people, as a result of that experience, understand better than any other cohort that fascism or its variants will be with us long after Donald Trump is out of power.

It’s one thing to say white people are starting to see the world through black eyes, as I have, but quite another to assert a cultural shift among white Americans, and that recent polling is evidence of that shift. That is an enormous and dangerous assertion that could lay the groundwork for a repeat of 2016, when, as you will recall, everyone, including Trump, believed he couldn’t win — all the way up to the moment he did. We need to push back against this new media narrative. We need to push back even if polling is right in suggesting a Democratic victory. Better yet, let’s smother it.

Here’s what polling isn’t telling you because polling can’t: Donald Trump is the reason why white Americans are starting to see the fascism that has informed, shaped and built our law enforcement institutions. Black Lives Matter activists tried to tell white Americans. They tried telling us that systemic racism is real and that we must act in the name of democracy, liberty and justice. But many white Americans could not quite believe things were as bad as that, because a biracial cosmopolitan intellectual sat in the Oval Office. Barack Obama seemed the embodiment of a “post-racial America.”

Systemic racism allows white Americans to live their whole lives not knowing what cops do to people of color, especially black people. But after 2016, and after Trump took sides with white supremacists, sadists and despots, white Americans could not not be aware of what was happening, and eventually, after black people raised hell in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, white people figured out being anti-Trump was like being anti-racist, the consequence being a historic convergence and uprising. (I still think it is, or should be, a pan-religious movement as well as a political one.)

Solidarity can be fragile, though. It takes time for new coalitions to ripen in the form of electoral politics, deepen in the form of policy and programming, and broaden to the point of becoming the conventional wisdom of the status quo. At the same time, white Americans can be fickle allies, as students of black history know, and given that history, it probably won’t take much for white Americans to think the problems we are facing have been solved. All it would take, I would say, is Donald Trump’s defeat.

It’s not hard to imagine, after the results of the election are in, white Americans high-fiving each other before packing up to go home, leaving black Americans to fight for liberty and justice alone. This scenario is not just plausible, it would be, if it happened, a monumental demonstration of white privilege, a demonstration already being keyed up and primed by a media narrative about a cultural shift among white voters, as if those shifts are permanent, and about Republican lawmakers accepting the inevitable and starting to grieve, all of which suggests to white people the job is nearly done.

It’s not. The conditions that gave rise to a fascist president will outlive him unless white Americans do what they usually have not done: checked their privilege.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 10 June 2020

Word Count: 772

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One of the many hard-to-watch videos that surfaced last weekend showing white police officers intimidating, harassing, injuring and otherwise assaulting peaceful protesters demonstrating after the murder of George Floyd came from Buffalo.

In the video, a white elderly man can be seen walking in one direction on the sidewalk while an armed and armored “emergency response team” is walking in the opposite direction on the same sidewalk. Martin Gugino, a 75-year-old Catholic Worker well-known locally, stops to exchange words with two officers. The officers then shove Gugino so hard he falls backward, slamming his head on the concrete. As he lies supine, immobile and bleeding, the officers keep walking, as does the riot squad.

Officers Aaron Torgalski and Robert McCabe, who are white, were arrested Saturday and charged with felony assault. Suspended without pay, they pleaded not guilty at their arraignment. Their release on personal recognizance was met with cheers from supporters. One American News, a startup trying to out-Fox Fox News, has taken up their case for a story about law and order versus anarchy. This morning, the outlet’s most important viewer took out of his busy day the time to tweet the following:

 

Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment. @OANN I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?

Before I unpack this, let’s be clear about something. There is no ambiguity — there is no doubt whatsoever — what Torgalski and McCabe did. The video, by WBFO, the city’s NPR affiliate, shows what happened. There is only one unknown, what Gugino said to them, which could not have been so bad that two armed and armored cops in prime physical health were justified in assaulting a septuagenarian peace activist.

Because video evidence is so total in removing all doubt about who did what to whom and how, it leaves the police officers and their defenders little or no room to move short of departing the world of facts and reason entirely, which is what OANN apparently did. It dipped into the toxic slough of conspiracy theory to invent a story about a covert agent of Antifa sabotaging cops before setting them up for a fall.

It’s truly hard finding the words to capture how despicable the president’s tweet is. Blaming an old man for his injuries is peak gaslighting, a superlative act of sadism. But if we stop there, if we stop with merely knocking down Donald Trump’s bonkers mindset, democracy will not have learned what it must to survive. As I keep saying, the moral corruption eating the heart out of the United States won’t stop with Trump’s defeat. If citizens are to take back their sovereignty, they must take the next steps.

Next steps include seeing the invention of fake enemies in order to justify virtually any government response to the president’s real enemies. Antifa, or Anti-Fascist, is a real thing. (Indeed, the US, in defeating Nazi Germany, was once a nation of Antifa.) But it is not what the president or his confederates say. They talk about it as if it were a highly organized underground organization operating in the shadow. It is no such thing. New York Jets fans are better structured and more determined. Antifa is a loose network (though “network” is too strong) of ideologically aligned activists, some of whom prefer streetfighting, most of whom are nonviolent anti-fascist activists. The most famous member of Antifa is fascist Richard Spencer’s celebrated assailant.

I very much doubt a 75-year-old peacenik like Martin Gugino has ever even heard of Antifa, but that doesn’t matter to Trump, who desires more than anything a means of discrediting a popular uprising in the form of Black Lives Matter protests that are growing in strength and threatening to topple him in November. More frighteningly, what matters to Bill Barr, the United States Attorney General, is the invention of a criminal to which prosecutors can affix a crime, with which to destroy the president’s real enemies. Barr has defined Antifa so broadly as to include virtually any American protesting for justice. He is deploying a tactic familiar to fascists all the world over.

By accusing a victim of a crime of being the true criminal, the president is gaslighting Gugino as well as the rest of us. But he’s not doing anything cops don’t do all the time. Gugino was shoved. That’s clear. Anyone with eyesight could see that. Yet the Buffalo Police Department issued a statement saying Gugino “tripped and fell.” This is not an exception. Lying is endemic in police departments. Ask any local reporter on the cops beat. They regularly depart the world of fact and reason when the world of fact and reason challenges the maintenance of the in-group’s domination over the out-group. (The out-group, depending on the circumstances, can be anyone who’s “anti-cop”; and like Barr, police departments often invent crimes to enforce, like breaking curfew.)

That’s textbook fascism.

Remember, Gugino is elderly. He’s white. He’s well-known. Now imagine, or recall, what communities of color are right now experiencing — the gaslighting, the sadism, the disrespect and outright violation of guaranteed civil rights and civil liberties. Thanks to racism, white Americans can live their whole lives not knowing what their fellow citizens endure. Thanks to a fascist president, they know. Defeating him, however, isn’t enough. In one sense Barr is right. All of us are, or should be, Antifa.

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: 09 June 2020

Word Count: 924

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The tide is not turning. The tipping point is not here.

And I’m very tired of otherwise very smart white people reducing all American politics to the victory or defeat of Donald Trump. One presidential election is not going to reform our government. One presidential election is not going to heal our wounds.

It’s as if the pundit corps and other elites can’t see with their own eyes what white police officers are doing — right now — to American citizens deemed the enemy. Do they believe electing a Democrat will mend a broken nation? Do they believe legitimate, institutionalized and legal sadism will end with Joe Biden’s presidency? I hope not.

In fact, corrupt police departments nationwide will benefit greatly from a Democratic turn, not in material ways, I hasten to add, but because the nation’s gaze will turn away from local atrocities committed in the name of law and order and instead toward a new administration and its palace intrigues. That will give rotten cop shops all the room they need to carry on, which means fascism as usual for black and brown people while for white people, it amounts to congratulating themselves for a job well done.

If white allies marching in the streets really believe that black lives matter, their united struggle for liberty and justice for all must not stop in November. Their united struggle must become part of America’s political culture, of the vocabulary we use to talk about national affairs, and central to our moral fiber. Culture, language, morality, black interest and white interest — these must be fused in order to become mainstream, and hence the beating heart of whatever new political regime awaits in the years ahead.

This is, or should be, a movement of morality as much as it is a movement of politics. Without a group effort, the George Floyd protests risk the same fate as the Occupy Wall Street Movement, becoming a political slogan more than a political program. White Americans may be experiencing a “great awokening,” as Matt Yglesias’ claimed last year. The key, however, will be staying woke long after Donald Trump is gone. And staying woke will require seeing politics as being about more than mere politics.

The Rev. William Barber of North Carolina believes the history of the United States can be broken into three epochs, or three “reconstructions,” in which white Americans and black Americans fused their interests — what he calls “fusion politics” — in order to create a new birth of freedom. The first reconstruction came after the Civil War with the ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. The second reconstruction came in the late 1960s with passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. The third reconstruction, Barber believes, is currently progressing under the shadow of Barack Obama’s election, and the larger shadow of the white backlash against it. Each of these epochs saw more than fused interests, though. They saw fused destinies.

The pundit corps might not see it, but I suspect normal people are starting to. There’s something about George Floyd’s murder — under the illegitimate rule of a president who got away with treason before mismanaging a pandemic that has killed more than 112,500 Americans — that touches Americans spiritually, that pokes a throbbing knot of public sin, offensive not only to traditional faith in right and wrong, but to God, too. Normal people seem to feel we’ve taken a turn down a winding road toward cruelty and serfdom, and I sense a deep desire for correction, for the straight and the narrow, and for healing but especially redemption on the part of white allies, a yearning they wrongly believed was realized with the election of a black president.

You could say “injustice to one is injustice to all” is a political statement. But you could also say it’s also a religious statement. Moreover, demanding equal justice is faith in action. Here’s how the Rev. Michael Bulkley of Kingdom Life Christian Church in Milford, Conn., who spoke recently for a church coalition in New Haven, put it:

 Our country is broken. When something is broken and needs fixing you must start someplace. This afternoon is not a protest, [protests] are necessary, but equally necessary is that churches stand together in prayer, unity, and love. We represent churches from diverse backgrounds, culturally, theologically, generationally. But we are bound together by the recognition that we must stand against injustice, we must pray for peace, and we must love as Christ loved (italics are most emphatically mind).

“Prayer, unity and love” are the hallmarks of what might be called a new Great Awakening in which religious identity takes a backseat to religious action. White evangelical Christians, such as Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, of Texas, like to claim that the sin of racism can be cleansed by loving God. Faith alone, however, isn’t enough.

Doing unto others what you would have done unto you, the teachings of Christ and the “Golden Rule” principle common to all the world’s religions — these seem to be moving from the margins of political culture to the center. The tide is not turning. The tipping point is not here. Politics is about more than elections. It’s more than about politics. When the political and religious meaning of “good works” are fused, change will come.

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 June 2020

Word Count: 885

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