One of the habits of the Washington press corps is equalizing the parties so their differences are not apparent. The Republican Party is a vertical organization whose members are inherently deferential to party authority. The Democratic Party is more horizontal. Arrangements of power are negotiated among competing factions. For this reason, the Republicans always come off as forceful and more disciplined in their messaging. For this reason, the Democrats always comes off as indecisive and soft.

That the Democrats sound this way is frustrating to some liberals and progressives — and, these days, a few conservative former Republicans demanding a stronger reaction to an authoritarian president. What these critics don’t see is something journalistic balance prevents them from seeing. The Democrats are the bigger tent, much bigger in the age of Donald Trump. Their messaging may sound wishy-washy, but their power speaks for itself. The GOP, meanwhile, sounds powerful no matter how weak it is.

“Bothsiderism,” as journalistic balance is sometimes called, affects the electorate’s understanding of the role of religion in the parties, too. White evangelical Christians do not constitute the whole of the Republican Party. (Mormons and traditional white Catholics are also important.) But white evangelical Christians, especially in the age of Donald Trump, are so influential that the Republicans, when they talk about religion, talk about religion as if they were the party of twice-born Christianity. Indeed, there’s very little daylight in today’s GOP between ultra-orthodox Christian faith and politics.

A consequence of this seamless merger is the ability among Republicans to portray the Democrats as opposing religion as much as they oppose Republican politics. They can portray the Democrats, moreover, as being so anti-religious their efforts to combat racism and other forms of institutional prejudice are about cynical politics, not morality. Consider what Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick told Fox News this week. The answer to systemic racism wasn’t policy, he said, but “loving God,” but that’s hard to do when “we’ve been working really hard, particularly on the left, to kick God out.”

More on that in a moment.

The Democratic Party, meanwhile, is as religiously diverse as it is racially and economically diverse. The party also boasts a bloc of evangelical Christians, but they are black and Latinx. Jews vote Democratic by huge margins. So do liberal (white) and nonwhite Catholics. The parties tend to split mainline Protestants — Episcopalian, Methodists, Presbyterians, and so on — though I’d guess they lean Democratic these days. When the Democrats talk about religion, they talk about religion with all this diversity in mind, and as a consequence, they sound less forceful than Republicans.

The party is more liberal than the GOP, obviously, and being liberal means it makes room for a spectrum of religious views, including quite conservative ones. For this reason, the Democrats tend to focus — when they talk about religion publicly — less on religious identity and more on universal principles applicable to public affairs that all the world’s religions have in common. There’s less emphasis on loving God due to the variety of ways of imaging what God is. And anyway, what’s loving God got to do with exercising faith in public life? There is more emphasis, however, on loving each other.

The loving-each-other part, or the Golden Rule, is key to understanding the role of religion in each of the parties, and it’s key to understanding why bothsiderism distorts political reality and thus undermines citizen participation in American democracy. Fact is, the massive public protests demanding justice for the murder of George Floyd have featured dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of members of the clergy from an array of religions. They are marching for equality. They are marching for peace and the inherent worth and dignity of all human beings. They are marching to exercise their religion, but you wouldn’t know it. They are largely invisible in press corps reporting.

There’s no shortage, however, indeed there’s a glut, of reporting on the president’s pandering to white evangelical Christians. That’s understandable given its importance to his reelection (and given how ironic it seems that people who hated Bill Clinton for his infidelity love a world-class philanderer like Donald Trump). But whitewashing religious experience from the Democratic Party inadvertently gives the impression that only Republicans care about religion in public life, especially religious freedom.

Bothsiderism ends up favors the Republicans politically by making them appear to be champions of religious freedom and by making the Democrats appear to be champions of secularism, as if religious freedom and secularism were oppositional. They are not. The Democrats do champion secularism, of course, but not to “kick God out” of the country, as Dan Patrick and other evangelicals would have it. It is to protect religion. It’s to make a space in public life for the exercise of all religions to compete in our national political discourse and the “marketplace of ideas.”

Patrick’s accusation is a perversion of the First Amendment’s establishment clause in that it privileges one sect of one religious tradition above all others. But you might not know that by reading the New York Times.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 05 June 2020

Word Count: 845

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In yesterday’s edition of the Editorial Board, I touched briefly on something I’d like to focus on fully today. Thanks to Donald Trump, I said, white Americans are starting to see the United States through the eyes of black Americans who experience every day police departments deploying an array of gestapo tactics. Black Americans, in other words, understand fascism intimately. White Americans are finally seeing that the point of Black Lives Matter wasn’t mere political correctness. It was a yearning for freedom.

That was my primary point. My secondary point, the one I want to focus on fully today, is that many white Americans are now aligning with black Americans to not only demand due process and equal justice for George Floyd — not only demand anti-racist policy to counteract institutional racism — but also demand an end to a 40-year-old “conservative” political regime built precariously on the backs of black Americans.

Perhaps the best way to understand the millions marching in the streets is by comparing them to uprisings overseas, such as the Arab Spring, in which massive protests signaled that the old regime had finally descended into decadence, decay and illegitimacy. The grassroots energy that fueled the establishment of the current regime, which was cemented with the elections of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, was the mirror opposite of the grassroots energy fueling today’s protests. The “conservative” revolution was, among other things, a backlash against the political enfranchisement of black Americans. One could say that the current revolution, if that’s not overstating it, is a backlash against the backlash’s disenfranchisement.

We don’t usually talk about “regimes” when we talk about American politics. “Regime” is a word reserved typically for discussions of dictators and despots. “Regime change” is usually what the United States does to other countries. But our history can be understood, perhaps best understood, as one regime changing into another every 40 years or so, first during a period of flowering, then mainstream acceptance and then a period of decadence, decay and illegitimacy, usually amid some kind of crisis that essentially proves that the old regime’s argument doesn’t matter anymore. At the heart of each transition between established regimes was the question of whether white Americans took seriously the concerns and interests of black Americans. The Republicans broke faith with the republic after a black man became president. That’s probably when the old order began disintegrating. What’s next is anyone’s guess.

The protests are not the only sign of regime change. So is the old regime’s attempt to tighten its grip on political power. As it sinks deeper into illegitimacy, its champions increasingly turn to increasingly illegitimate means of maintaining the old order. The Republicans turned a blind eye to Russia’s sabotage of the 2016 election. The party then acquitted Donald Trump of treason. It is now silent as the president threatens to send military troops to crush public outrage. Those who are not silent, like Sen. Tom Cotton, wade even further into illegitimacy, calling, in the pages of the New York Times, for “an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers.”

Another sign is division among respected representatives of the old order. Every major newspaper in the country, all but two, endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016. That’s a huge indicator given that newspaper publishers nearly always endorse GOP candidates. The Republican Party itself has been split a dozen ways. Moderates like Charlie Dent and Jeff Flake are long gone. So-called “never-Trumpers” have relearned that conservatism without democracy is fascism. George W. Bush these days sounds like a liberal. Most importantly, nonpartisan voices in national security — Mike Mullen and Jim Mattis, among other former intelligence officials from both parties — are growing louder in their denunciation of Trump and the Republican Party, signaling a repudiation of the old order and an openness to future possibilities with new allies.

The Reagan regime’s argument was that government was best when it governed least. That appealed to white supremacists hoping to maintain a custom of sadism going back to slavery. That appealed to liberals who fought against the Vietnam War. That appealed to anyone remembering state-sponsored crimes against humanity in places like Germany, Japan, China, and the Soviet Union. Free markets, not the government, were trustworthy. Free individuals, not community or society, were most important. Demands for a government of, by and for the people were met with deep suspicion.

Make no mistake: nothing is certain. Progress doesn’t happen on its own. America’s future, quite literally, could be more democratic as well as more liberal, or it could be more authoritarian. But one thing, at least, seems certain. The current dust devil of disaster — pandemic, unemployment, and massive social unrest — is probably enough to persuade a majority of people to see that the old argument doesn’t matter anymore.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 04 June 2020

Word Count: 801

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I teach a class at Wesleyan on how to understand the 2020 presidential election. (Well, not at Wesleyan; everything’s over Zoom for the time being.) Students are naturally curious. They want to know where I stand. So I tell them I have a point of view, but that my point of view isn’t set in stone. Indeed, I tell them, points of view are never set in stone. They change over time. They are contingent. It depends on what’s at stake.

Moreover, I tell them that some points of view are more accurate than others. Some points of view are more helpful to understanding politics as it really is. If we do not understand politics as it really is, we cannot perform well our duties as citizens. There are forces at work in our society, I hasten to add, that would very much like us to misunderstand our politics in order that we perform poorly our civic duties. Then I tell students the best way to understand politics is by seeing it through a black lens.

Once white people see American politics from the perspective of the African-American experience, they understand, or at least have an inkling, that what they thought was their country isn’t. It’s a political fiction created for reasons good and bad, but mostly bad, and that continuing to see politics through a white lens not only harms the republic but enables the always-subliminal variants of American fascism. (Disclaimer: I do try in subtle ways to express gratitude to my students of color who don’t need a white visiting professor of public policy explaining their lives to them, and to encourage them to share experience and wisdom vital to our learning together.)

As a teacher, my goal is reaching students individually. That’s how teaching usually works. Even here, in this edition of the Editorial Board, I do not expect to persuade more than one person at a time of the moral and epistemological rightness of viewing politics through a black lens. This week, however, I’m witnessing teaching on a mass scale. It seems the citizenry is teaching itself, and it’s extraordinary. Out of the tragedy of George Floyd’s murder by the hands of a white cop, many Americans, many white Americans, are seeing finally what black Americans have always seen, and that the spirit animating the black experience has always been a yearning for freedom.

To be sure, white Americans, especially white liberals, understood at least in principle that bad cops do bad things sometimes to black Americans. That, however, wasn’t enough to embrace fully Black Lives Matter. While a black man sat in the Oval Office, Black Lives Matter didn’t seem like a life-saving effort to broaden the republican virtues of the Declaration of Independence and the 14th Amendment, but instead a fashionable gesture toward progressive pieties with little bearing on the republic.

Things are different now. Among other reasons, things are different due to the Trump administration’s decision to gas peaceful protesters to make way for the president’s photo op. Things are different now that the Republican Party — once celebrated for its rugged defense of individuals and states against “government tyranny” — is silent in the wake of Donald Trump’s militarized response to the exercise of civil liberties, in the wake of policemen literally criminalizing speech and assembly, and the freedom to petition the government “for a redress of grievances.” Things are different now due to a deeper awareness among white Americans, more so than during the Obama years, that racism isn’t about race per se. It’s about an abuse of power so sadistic that the founders of this country might have recognized it as being worthy of overthrow.

A president who views himself as the embodiment of the state, by which he is not only above the law but the law itself, is creating conditions in which white Americans are starting to see the connection between authoritarianism and systemic racism, that they overlap and intertwine, whether expressed individually or societally, and that by fighting one, white Americans can fight the other, using their privilege as a weapon. After Trump’s forces flash-bombed peaceful protesters Monday, crowds in Washington appeared to increase, perhaps even double, in size the following day. What started as a call for justice for George Floyd is evolving into demands for the end of a 40-year “conservative” regime balanced precariously on the backs of black Americans.

People who used to call themselves conservatives are discovering that in the age of Donald Trump their conservatism depends on the integrity of traditional American liberalism (civil right and civil duties, separation of powers, representative government, checks and balances, etc.) and that without that liberal foundation — when that foundation is undermined by politics — their conservatism turns into something else, something ugly, something akin to America’s enemies foreign and domestic.

No one would question George W. Bush’s conservatism. But in a statement yesterday, in response to Floyd’s murder and outrage over it, the former president said not a word that would be interpreted as conservative. Bush sounded liberal. Bush sounded almost black. Points of view are never set in stone. They evolve and they change. They depend on the stakes. For Bush, and many others, the stakes are liberty and justice for 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: 03 June 2020

Word Count: 875

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As I’m writing these words, the United States Senate is busy doing what it’s been doing for the most part since Donald Trump took office nearly four years: confirming federal judges. Despite everything going on — a pandemic killing tens of thousands, an economy nearing collapse, police officers rioting in the streets — despite a republic on the edge, the Senate Republicans have continued mass-producing judges in order to enshrine minority rule in this country and establish a 21st-century apartheid state.

This is important to point out after the president threatened last night to use the US military to crush public protest of George Floyd’s murder by a white cop. This is important to point out after Trump signaled to his followers — white citizens willing to use illegitimate violence as well as white cops willing to use legitimate violence — that all violence is worthy, and pardonable, when put in the service of his name. Pointing out the mass-production of jurists is important, because totalitarianism didn’t arrive last night, as some seem to think. Fascism and its variants have always been with us, but they have been growing in strength since at least 2000 when one branch of the government invaded another in order to advance a “constitutional revolution.”

The difference between pre- and post-Trump authoritarianism, however, is the difference between lawfulness and lawlessness. The Republicans were always careful about appearing lawful before 2016, but they have since abandoned all pretense in a bid to hasten their jurisprudential project, with Lindsey Graham even urging publicly that retiring judges hurry up before the electorate catches on to what’s happening. The Republicans know in their bones they can’t win playing by the rules, so they must rig the rules in their favor with assistance from friendly jurists. This is so important, the Senate Republicans were not only willing to overlook Trump’s treason; they helped him cover it up, and, in the process, made the president the embodiment of the state.

It hardly needs saying that when a president becomes the embodiment of the state, he is above the law, or more precisely, he is the law itself — which is, or should be, an abomination in the eyes of Americans privileging the rule of law above all other forms of rule. Ignoring a pandemic that has killed 107,000 people so far, and threatening to occupy US cities as if their inhabitants were enemy combatants, are precisely what you’d expect from a president helped into office by a Russian autocrat and acquitted of treason by a political party tightening its grip on power. Indeed, the Republicans are getting a twofer. For their friends, there’s anything. For their enemies, there’s the law.

Make no mistake: it is illegal and unconstitutional for any president to use military power domestically. But being illegal and unconstitutional does not and will not stop a president who has become the embodiment of the state. Do not presume military occupation of, say, Minneapolis cannot happen. It can happen as quickly as Trump’s order to teargas peaceful protesters in Washington, DC, to make way for a photo op. Even if the president does not take such action, however, there are other ways of achieving his objectives. If nothing else, the Floyd protests have revealed, for all Americans to see, that Trump is, ideologically, a Maoist in capitalist form. For him, political power does not grow from the will of the American people. It grows out of the barrel of a gun.

Understand what you are seeing when you see police rioting. It is a system of monopolized violence whose adherents, though not all of them, will not be held accountable for their actions, because they believe accountability is a violation of their natural right to exercise power without legal restraint. What you are seeing when you see police rioting is a real-time expression of what people inhabiting a nation within a nation believe about people outside that nation. They, the real Americans, are chosen by God to rule in God’s name. Morality, for everyone else, means submission. If you refuse to submit, you get what’s coming to you, even if that includes your murder.

The president understands the psychology of the confederate nation within a nation perhaps better than anyone, and he understands, too, the natural kinship between some white cops and white vigilantes, who together constitute a covert and lethal force for maintaining order in or outside the purview of the law. Even if the US military never occupies Minneapolis, the president still has a network of legitimate and illegitimate actors itching for a reason to shoot. Axios reported last night that Trump went full law-and-order.

No, it’s the opposite. Trump went full lawlessness and order.

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 June 2020

Word Count: 782

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A photograph taken Sunday features the finest from the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office, outside Cincinnati, Ohio. They are running up a “Thin Blue Line” flag to replace a stolen American flag to honor a Cincinnati cop who had been shot.

Its defenders, who are incorrect, say the “Thin Blue Line” flag symbolizes police departments as the last line of defense between order and anarchy. Its critics, who are correct, say the flag represents tyranny, the use of lethal force for the most minor of offenses, and the moral and political worldview in which might makes right.

The flag’s manufacturer, Thin Blue Line USA, told USA Today it does not represent “racism, hatred, and bigotry.” Rather it represents unity and solidarity. “We want to get rid of that rivalry between law enforcement and citizens,” VP Pete Forhan said.

If that were the case, one might think Hamilton County deputies would run up that flag along with the flag of the United States. That wasn’t the case. Instead, one symbol of unity replaced another with the implications of that replacement flying for all to see.

Meanwhile, others were attempting, in quite a different way, to “get rid of the rivalry between law enforcement and citizens,” as cities nationally saw myriad protests in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a white Minneapolis police officer. In New Haven, where I am writing these words, our chief of police held a press briefing Saturday outside police headquarters during which he and a few dozen cops, of all hues, “renewed our vow to the city of New Haven” by reciting their oath:

In unison, they said:

“I solemnly swear that I will faithfully and impartially perform the duties of a law enforcement officer to the best of my ability and according to law, and that I will at all times try to use the power entrusted to me as such officer for the best interest of the city, so help me God”

New Haven Police Chief Otoniel Reyes said:

 You will hear the voices of the men and women of the New Haven Police Department, but these are also the voices of law enforcement officers around the country that do their jobs every single day, honoring their oath and their commitment to their cities. So, today we speak for us, and we speak for them (my italics).

Chief Reyes was correct. In cities and localities around the country, according to the Washington Post, cops were not only joining peaceful protesters in denouncing a fellow police officer’s murder of an unarmed black man, some were even taking a knee in apparent homage to Colin Kaepernick, the former pro-football player who famously, or infamously, knelt during the national anthem to protest white police violence.

These cops were expressing unity and solidarity in a very different way from the sheriff’s deputies in Hamilton County, Ohio. The latter sought unity in terms of dominance and submission — you are a friend or you are an enemy. The former sought unity in democratic terms — we rise and fall as one nation under God. At least, the “Thin Blue Line” seems thinner after last weekend. At most, perhaps it’s cracking.

Perhaps it’s cracking because the rest of the country is coming around the seeing they were right. Kaepernick was right. Black Lives Matter was right. Every black person who ever said cops target them just for being black, they were right. That was hard for some white people to see while a black man was president. But with a tyrant like Donald Trump — who encourages violence against minorities; who inspired the white supremacists in Charlottesville; who sucks up to the world’s dictators; and, who is now inspiring right-wing domestic terrorists infiltrating protests to set buildings on fire and let black people take the blame — it’s clear now. They were right. They were right.

They were right, and this weekend’s protests, or rather the violent police reaction to them, deepened the point more. Videos show cops shooting rubber bullets at people’s heads (one bullet shattered the eyeball of a photojournalist); pepper spraying protesters from their cruisers on their way to the scene of a 18-wheeler plowing into a throng; arresting reporters; and, driving a police cruiser into a crowd. Various and sundry, and inexplicable, videos show cops in body armor beating people. Everything Black Lives Matter said was true seemed as clear as the “Thin Blue Line” flag flying proudly in Ohio.

Pointing out the apparent cracks in the “Thin Blue Line” is important, because some people — starting with the president of the United States — want to portray the violence of last weekend’s protests in binary terms — between order and disorder, civilization and anarchy, good guys and bad guys — instead of what it was: justice versus injustice, democracy versus fascism, freedom versus barbarism. Some people — starting with Donald Trump — may use those terms to achieve fascist ends.

I do no overstate one iota.

US Attorney General Bill Barr portrayed protesters as professional leftists bent on destroying the republic. This morning, he deployed “riot teams” to Washington, D.C., and Miami to “quell violent clashes between protesters and police,” according to USA Today. During a conference call with governors, the president said: “You have to dominate, if you don’t dominate you’re wasting your time,” according to audio obtained by CBS News. “They’re going to run over you, you’re going to look like a bunch of jerks. You have to dominate. You’ve got to arrest people, you have to track people, you have to put them in jail for 10 years and you’ll never see this stuff again.”

He’s wrong, of course. The struggle for freedom never stops.

Even some in the “Thin Blue Line” 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: 01 June 2020

Word Count: 954

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I introduced Wednesday the idea of barbarism. “Fascism,” “white supremacy,” “autocracy” and other such labels go some way toward describing our political moment, but, as I said, they are abstract and “do not carry the weight of blood and pain that ‘barbarism’ carries.” We can’t shame a president and Republican Party immune to shame, but we can, and must, name their behavior. When “liberty” means sacrificing the old and weak; when “law and order” means tolerating homicide by agents of the state; when “security” means kidnapping infants — that’s barbarism.

In this, I’m borrowing from the peerless Jedediah Britton-Purdy, who offered two definitions of barbarism in Dissent’s special issue on “Democracy and Barbarism.” First: “a system that makes people into one another’s enemies, victims, and oppressors.” Second: “a system that keeps its people in the dark and gives them no way out. A system, that is, that makes the world as it is both inescapable and unintelligible.”

I want to gloss his work more today by discussing a related aspect: perversion.

By this, I mean taking something we would normally think of as right and good, and turning it into something wrong and bad. Take, for instance, wearing masks in public. Any reasonable person would say that wearing a mask in the middle of a pandemic that has now killed more than 103,000 people (thirty-four 9/11s) and unemployed more than 40 million others is a no-brainer. At the very least, better to be safe than sorry. In fact, wearing a mask is for your benefit as well as the benefit of everyone around you.

Fortunately, polls tell us most people agree. Some don’t, of course, and that’s OK, except that they don’t stop at disagreeing. They take something right and good and turn into something wrong and bad, because doing so advances whatever agenda they might have, which might be merely the barbaric desire to watch the world burn, as Bruce Wayne’s butler said in one of the Batman movies. One propagandist went so far as to call masks a symbol of “social control” intended to deprive us of our freedom. That article, since retweeted by the president, is a perfect example of perversion. The headline: “Mandatory Masks Aren’t About Safety, They’re About Social Control.”

It’s a perfect example not only because it flips morality on its head, but because it masks (no pun intended) the context of power in which political behavior occurs. It conceals who’s doing what to whom. Indeed, there may be bad actors trying to control us, but they are not people wearing masks or politely asking that you wear one. More likely, they are people sabotaging the common good, creating conditions in which a deadly virus can spread more easily, thus pinning normal people between the need to stay healthy and the need to stay employed, literally robbing their freedom. If anyone is abetting social control, it’s paid propagandists yawping about “social control.”

Perversion comes in racist forms, too. It’s not just taking something that’s good and making it bad. It can pervert morality so what’s good for white people is bad for black people. White people carrying semi-automatic rifles to intimidate legislators responsible for the health and well-being of their constituents? That’s an exercise of their guaranteed constitutional rights. That’s good! Unarmed black people demanding justice after a white cop murdered an unarmed black man on video? That’s not good! Those are thugs fomenting a violent insurrection deserving the full force of the state.

Fox’s Tucker Carlson is a masterful pervert. In truth, it’s African-Americans and other citizens of color who need protection from the legitimate but unjust violence of the state. In Carlson’s perverse world, however, everything is upside down, backward and inside out. It’s “society,” Carlson said, that needs protection by the state from people suffering from the legitimate but unjust violence of the state. If that sounds like a recipe for crazy-making, that’s because it is — and it is intended. As Britton-Purdy said of systemic barbarism: It “makes the world as it is both inescapable and unintelligible.”

You could call all this hypocrisy, but that doesn’t have much affect on a president or a party immune to shame. Perversion, however, is more accurate and much more potent. Moreover, barbarism and perversion are retreats from civility, but they’re more than that. They are retreats from the social contract, common good and civilization. Some people are deserving of the law’s privileges and protections. Some people are deserving of the law’s restrictions and punishments. This hierarchy of power is inherently sadist, because sadism is inherent to its preservation. Someone must suffer. Someone will.

But not someone else. Perverts and barbarians like Tucker Carlson don’t believe they’re hurting themselves but in time everyone suffers. A free and open political community cannot endure when some of its members pervert its values. At some point, other members are going to understand, with finality, that those claiming to be champions of the republic are truly its enemies. When that happens, they will be barred from the public square, and from appealing to the common good. There can be no common cause or common fate with political perverts and barbarians. The only answer is exile.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 29 May 2020

Word Count: 865

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The president is expected to sign today an executive order that could weaken legal immunity shielding tech firms hosting third-party content on their websites. The order could empower regulators to “rethink a portion of law known as Section 230. … That law spares tech companies from being held liable for the comments, videos and other content posted by users on their platforms,” according to reporting by the Post.

Section 230 is problematic. Its virtues are worthy of serious and prolonged debate. Donald Trump, however, is hardly interested in the nuances of free speech, free press, and intellectual property. His interests are cruder and less noble, his goal badgering into submission social media companies daring to act as good corporate citizens who rightly see the need to prevent disinformation from poisoning our political discourse.

A public square-turned-brownfield is favorable to Trump. Take one look at his Twitter feed (just one!) to discover a defiled stew of demagoguery, violence and lies. Today, for instance, he retweeted a video in which a supporter says, “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.” His feed embodies Jedediah Britton-Purdy’s second definition of barbarism: “a system that keeps its people in the dark and gives them no way out. A system, that is, that makes the world as it is both inescapable and unintelligible.”

Eventually, someone somewhere is going to bring up the word “socialism” to describe Trump’s attempt at intimidation and censorship. Twitter and other tech firms are, after all, private firms (though publicly traded). In these here United States, a president can’t straw-boss free enterprise into doing whatever he wants, and any whiff of government overreach or bureaucratic tyranny is a sign of “Communist Contagion.”

As I have said before, this lens is ideological and old. It’s a product of the mid-20th century, a time when the US really was the antipode to a real Communist state. Conservatives at that time, Republican as well as Democratic, branded liberals as “Communists” whenever they fought for a government of, by and for the people. By their conservative standard, any redistribution of wealth was “Communist.” By that same standard, the current Republican Party, which cut taxes for billionaires in the middle of pandemic, is more Communist than Vlad Lenin and Joe Stalin combined. Of course, that’s nonsense. But talking nonsense never stopped anyone from talking.

This lens needs upgrading so we can see clearly what’s happening in the 21st century. I’d submit what’s happening isn’t big-c communist in any way connected with the old Soviet bloc but it is, in fact, totalitarian in its objectives, one being censorship. On the one hand, the president will not be restrained from calling on supporters to scare and bully critics and rivals. (One of Trump’s sons this morning singled out a Jewish journalist for ridicule and scorn.) On the other, the administration is moving to conceal information deleterious to the president. It announced this morning that, contrary to precedent, it will not release economic forecasts indicating recession.

I suspect even the GOP’s donor class, busy as it is rehashing the hoary rhetoric of the Cold War, doesn’t suspect its grip on federal power may be slipping. It’s one thing for corporations to have captured government (which is currently the case), quite another to think government has captured corporations. But as economic growth slows and consumer demand collapses, it’s possible to imagine corporations becoming so dependent on the government to maximize shareholder value that they lose control to an authoritarian demagogue believing himself to be the embodiment of the state.

Trump is trying to blame China for the pandemic, with mixed success, but he goes out of his way to compliment, flatter and suck up to that country’s leader, Xi Jinping. Take that for what you will, but understand that Xi’s government is also refusing to release economic forecasts that might indicate recession (which is certainly the case). I see Xi as modeling something for Trump — a corporatist state in which corporations, as they do in China, kneel before the state, gladly kneel in fact, for kneeling is profitable.

We are seeing hints of this dynamic happening here already. Facebook’s owner, Mark Zuckerberg, criticized Twitter’s decision to fact-check Trump. To defend the integrity of the public square would take work and resources, and cut into profits. Better to give in to Trump’s bad faith demands for free and unfettered “free speech” so that he and his confederates can turn the public square into a toxic wasteland in which citizens can’t figure out what’s true, what’s false, before surrendering to will of Dear Leader.

It’s easy this way. It’s better this way. It’s more profitable this way.

America is turning into China.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 May 2020

Word Count: 780

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We all remember moments from Sept. 11, 2001. We remember those moments in up-close and high-def detail. The smoke, the dust, the death — these seared our minds and we vowed: never forget. We promised, as a nation, never forget. Three thousand people were dead in a flash of fire. I suspect most of us have faithfully kept that promise.

Next year will mark the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. Will the Republicans remember? Can they keep their promise without reminding us of the hundreds of thousands who will have died by then from Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus? Can they honor the memory of 3,000 Americans without dishonoring the memories of many, many more? I don’t see how.

I don’t see how they can in good faith recall America post- 9/11 without recalling America post-pandemic, and inviting comparison. On the one hand, a GOP president, unpopular and divisive, found the will to speak for a nation in grief. On the other hand, a GOP president, more unpopular and more divisive, speaks for himself only, leaving mourners alone to cradle their pain, elevating trumpery over tragedy. We have now seen the equivalent of thirty-three 9/11s. We will see tens of times more by the time of its 20th anniversary. It might be best for the Republicans to break their promise.

Of course, they already have.

You don’t follow a man to hell without forgetting, without willfully forgetting, because remembering commitments to democracy, principle and the American way is at best painful, at worst an impediment to gripping power more tightly. As my friend Frank Wilkinson said, Donald Trump is not at odds with his party. He has not only the GOP’s blessing but its abetting. It has helped him break the law. It has helped him cover up crimes. (I’d add that it has helped him get away with treason.) The 2020 election, Frank wrote, is a choice between competing futures: one democratic or one authoritarian.

Frank points out two problems worth prolonged discussion. The first is the problem of what to do when one party is lawless while the other upholds the rule of law. There is no immediate answer. There may never be an answer. Time will tell, obviously. But whatever its solution may be, it’s in connection to the second problem, which is that most Americans have not figured the peril the United States is facing. Frank says:

 Because neither the news media nor the nation’s larger political culture has reckoned with the GOP’s authoritarian evolution, the habitual response is to mislabel GOP authoritarianism as hypocrisy. Calling out hypocrisy is a pointless shaming mechanism for a party that has broken free of shame. Worse, it camouflages a war on democracy as democratic politics as usual.

There is no point in shaming liars, cheats and scoundrels, but there is a point in naming. It’s one thing to say the choice is between democracy and autocracy. But there’s something else going on, something more emotional and right, in saying the choice is between good and evil, and because “good and evil” is too childish, let’s put it this way instead: The 2020 election is a choice between freedom and barbarism.

“Barbarism” is problematic to be sure. It’s usually reserved for describing “uncivilized” societies. The word invokes days of colonialism and imperial hubris. In the weeks and months after 9/11, especially in the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Fox News commentators sometimes intimated barbarism when they said Muslims don’t understand diplomacy. All they understand is expressions of power. Even if we’re wrong about weapons of mass destruction (and we were), we’re still right to invade.

Despite its problematic history, it’s an ideal word to describe our times. The president and the Republicans are not only hostile to science, free speech, free press and the truth itself. They are not only dedicated to preserving the old sadist hierarchies of power. They are pushing Americans back into a workplace infected with a deadly virus in order to maximize short-term returns. They are treating people like a commodity, like “human capital stock,” not citizens with inherent rights and privileges. They are forcing human beings to choose between their health and their wealth. They are literally robbing them of their freedom to work for a better future for themselves.

Sure, we can use words like “fascism,” “white nationalism,” “autocracy” and such to characterize the president’s endless attack on institutions, laws, norms and values. But these are abstract and do not carry the weight of blood and pain that “barbarism” carries. When “assimilation” means conformity or punishment, that’s barbarism. When “liberty” means sacrificing the old and the weak, that’s barbarism. When “law and order” means tolerating homicide by agents of the state, that’s barbarism. When “security” means kidnapping infants and toddlers, that’s barbarism. When “peace and prosperity” means turning a blind eye to 100,000 dead Americans, that’s barbarism.

When the Republicans honored their vow to remember the victims the 9/11, they participated in a political community of shared values and purpose. We grieved as a nation. The body politic mourned as one body. They no longer participate, though. They have long since taken their ball and gone home.

So it’s no longer possible to shame them and so calling out hypocrisy is meaningless. Naming, however, creates a presence, a moral standard over which they have no control but they must nevertheless confront. If the Democrats have no good way of countering a lawless GOP without resorting to lawlessness themselves, name it. It’s not freedom. No escape. A trap.

It’s barbarism.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 27 May 2020

Word Count: 937

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National character is something conservatives, especially elected Republican officials at all levels of government, say they take very seriously. They tell the story often of the United States being the land of the free and the home of the brave. Americans are a hardy folk, they say, ready to face any hardship, determined to overcome any tyranny despite the odds. No one can defeat an idea, they say. In America, that idea is freedom.

If American behavior during the Memorial Day Weekend is any indication, however, that story is false. If our behavior during a pandemic that has killed more than 99,900 people in two months, the equivalent of thirty-three 9/11s, is any indicator, that story is perverse in its distortion of reality. Sure, we want freedom. We don’t want to work for it, though. We want liberty. We don’t want to sacrifice, though. The US isn’t the land of the free, home of the brave — more like land of the weak, home of the depraved. When the going gets tough, we don’t get going. We say whatevs, and head to the beach.

It’s too easy to blame the president. Donald Trump won’t wear a mask. He mocks “social distancing.” He pushes a revival of an economy in the ditch (even though the economic performance probably won’t have anything to do his eventually victory or defeat). As the death toll surpasses 100,000, he expresses no grief, no sympathy, no hope. Instead of revering Americans who died for our liberty, he goes golfing, and throws punches from the safety of Twitter. He was born on third base, but it’s worse than thinking he hit a triple — the accident of his birth means he won the World Series.

But blaming Trump for ordinary behavior is wrong. We shouldn’t give a pass to grown men and women when they choose not to wear a mask, thinking “Well, that’s what happens when leaders fail.” A leader is not a nation. A nation — a people with its own character and cast of mind, its own values separate from leadership — should not be graded on a curve. Our luck ran out with the election of a world-historical liar, but we rise to the occasion or don’t. We work together in facing calamity or don’t. We are a union — or we’re a mishmash of states that can’t stand each other, and won’t stand.

I’m glad to see the cable news networks heading out to interview beach-goers and start-of-summer revelers who have decided to ignore even modest social-distancing guidelines. I’m glad to see people going on record as being ignorant, lazy or misinformed, and therefore dangerous to public safety and health. I’m glad to see exposure of the lie that wearing a mask is somehow a violation of individual liberty.

But the question I keep wanting to ask, as I watch people rationalize the irrational, is: What would you say to other Americans who lost a husband or mother to Covid-19, but could not touch them — could not be in the same room as they were dying — for fear of being infected? What do you say to people whose loved ones were buried by strangers? A less charitable question but worth asking: Aren’t you pissing on their graves?

It’s not hard to imagine the general contour of the answers to those questions, though, to be sure, the answers themselves would be various and sundry. Basically, it would be: you do you. But in the context of a pandemic, in which your decisions affect me just as my decisions affect you, you do you is as polite as it is dishonest. In reality, we’re all in this together and those who won’t see that are a serious problem. An honest answer, moreover, would be: I don’t care about my fellow Americans, I don’t care about the number of dead, and yes, I am pissing on their graves and I’d be happy to do it again. They’d never say this in front of TV cameras, of course. That would take courage.

Allow me to be clear: I don’t really think America is the land of the weak and the home of the depraved. Polls show a massive and silent majority doing what needs to be done, taking extra care to get on with life without accepting unnecessary risks. Most people in this country are indeed rising to the occasion. They just don’t get play on CNN.

But there are people in this country, there have always been people in this country, who embody a wholly imaged nation within a nation, a confederacy in which “real Americans” are chosen by God to rule in God’s name. “Real Americans” believe in order more than law, control more than freedom, conformity more than individualism. A nation within a nation is built to maintain hierarchies of power. Power corrupts. This “nation” is, therefore, soft and decadent, selfish and disloyal, and willing to wound itself to wound it’s enemies. It’s a perversion, in other words, of the real America.

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 May 2020

Word Count: 834

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The president is rich, and, like the rich, he’s different from you, me and everyone we know. He has more money. Being rich means never having to face your fears, because why face your fears when you can pay someone to face them for you? Not all rich folks are cowards, of course. But when the going gets tough, Donald Trump gives up.

F. Scott Fitzgerald might have been describing the president when he said the rich “possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves.”

Being rich means never having to see the truth about himself. In real life, Trump is weak. He’s decadent. He’s immoral. But in his made-for-TV life, initially charged to his dad’s account, his blindness is a blessing. He’s wealthy because he has good blood, and because of that good blood, he’s infallible. The president said as much Thursday of Henry Ford, America’s most notorious antisemite and Adolf Hitler’s inspiration: “Good bloodlines, good bloodlines — if you believe in that stuff, you got good blood.”

Not all rich are cowards, and not all rich are fascist, but the rich do tend to set the tone for the rest of the country. They establish an attitude the rest of the country tends to emulate, consciously or not. In our advance capitalist society, where the rich have become richer than any time in human history, all are encouraged to be like the rich. The result, for most of us, is a tiring tension between material desire and empirical reality, a posture of longing chastened by limits. For some, though, there is no tension, because there are no limits that can’t be overcome with the swipe of a credit card.

Being a rich country, in other words, does something to us. It makes a challenge feel like a hardship. It makes a hardship feel like an emergency. It makes emergencies feel insurmountable. And it makes caring about others, and about our nation as a whole, not only dependent on whether it does something for me but an injustice for demanding that I care. The US is facing a multiverse of crises. One is of morality and the democratic spirit. And I can’t think of a better illustration of that than a recent column in which grown men and women pity themselves for having to do dishes.

Yes, doing the dishes is something most people don’t think about. They just do it. But doing the dishes in an advance capitalist society that encourages everyone to be like the rich is an irony ideal for the Post’s Style section, where Ellen McCarthy penned a lament for this moment in which we must cook for ourselves, entertain ourselves, and clean after ourselves. “A sink perpetually brimming with dirty dishes is a proxy for all that is tedious and tiresome about life at the undramatic edges of this crisis,” she said.

It is incessant, like the quarantine. Repetitive, like our days at home. Demanding and messy, like the tasks that fill those days. And somehow fraught with shame and judgment: Who can claim to have their act together if they can’t fit their Brita pitcher under the faucet?

It’d be one thing to discuss the psychological impact of isolation, the trauma arising from rapid change, or the resulting depths of depression that can make ordinary chores seem gigantic. But no. The goal, apparently, is bewailing (while tactfully appearing not to bewail) the inconvenience of a pandemic that has killed more than 96,600 people and unemployed about 38 million more. The point, apparently, is complaining about the injury to one’s identity when one’s identity is wrapped up in the public performance of one’s social status. Complaining about doing the dishes is not somehow fraught with shame and judgment. It is, or it should be, so much so that any self-respecting newspaper editor would reject a lament for dirty dishes on sight.

Citizens, or members of a political community, do what needs to be done to achieve the ideals of self-determination and the greatest good for the greatest number. Consumers, however, don’t. Consumers want what they want whenever they want it, and they feel entitled to having every desire met immediately and completely. Consumers are not ready to sacrifice for the sake of others. Sacrifice means limits and limits are unfair. Who can claim to have their act together if they can’t fit their Brita pitcher under the faucet?

Many of our rich behave like citizens. Many don’t. Some, in fact, behave just like the president, and they encourage you, me, and everyone we know to be just like them.

Don’t.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 May 2020

Word Count: 821

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