An aspect of white supremacy, reserved for men only, is that it’s always someone else’s fault. It doesn’t matter what I do. It doesn’t matter what decisions I make. I can blame anyone for my errors in judgment, and the best part? White people are going to believe me! I get all the power but none of the responsibility! It’s a grand ole boy’s system.

I was reminded of this while reading reports about Ron Johnson, US senator of Wisconsin. He’s the Republican chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. It voted along party lines to subpoena records related to Hunter Biden, the son of the next Democratic nominee. (Hunter Biden used to work for Ukrainian gas company Burisma when his dad, Joe Biden, was the vice president.)

I was reminded of this while reading reports about Lindsey Graham, US senator of South Carolina. He’s the Republican chair of the Judiciary Committee. He’s seeking a list of Obama administration officials involved in understanding Trump campaign ties to the Kremlin and its efforts to violate US sovereignty in 2016. According to the Washington Post, Graham is helping “advance a narrative that the former president and his allies conspired to inappropriately target Trump, one that Trump has dubbed ‘Obamagate.’”

Johnson seems ready to go where Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wouldn’t go, picking up where Trump left off in attempting to betray the US electorate. Graham seems prepared to whitewash the Kremlin’s sabotage of our sovereignty and its role in electing an illegitimate president. Both men are enabling Trump’s purge of career officials more loyal to truth, justice and the American way than they are to him. Yet from what I can tell, neither is being held accountable for his actions. It’s as if they don’t have agency of their own. According to one member of the Washington press corps, whose perspective I take as conventional wisdom, “they’re cowed by Trump.”

Now, the thing about Johnson and Graham (as well as their colleague Chuck Grassley) is they used to be vocal champions of a transparent and accountable presidency — when Barack Obama governed. Whiffs of resistance to congressional oversight by the executive branch were met with sniffy intolerance. Johnson and Grassley even wrote the book (at least a really big report) on the need for empowered inspectors general.

The same can’t be said of the trio now that a Republican president is mounting a shameful and conspicuous campaign to rid himself of irritating law-abiding good-government gadflies who have the habit of speaking truth to power and humiliating him in public. Trump has quietly fired an array of inspectors general, saying he’s “lost confidence” in them. During the Obama years, Johnson would request reams of documentation justifying unimportant administration decisions. During the Trump years? The president’s word is good enough for him, and that’s all there is to say.

It’s understandable that senators feel enormous pressure to be aligned with presidents from the same party. But there are a thousand ways to uphold the principle of a thing — for instance, that it’s wrong to fire inspectors general in a fit of caprice — without arousing the executive’s enmity. US Senator Susan Collins of Maine has made a virtual art form out of doing just that. She agrees with Trump, but is “concerned” about his statements or is “worried” about how he acts, all the while doing little or nothing to stand in his fitful way. Johnson, Graham and Grassley could follow suit but don’t.

Johnson and Graham, however, are doing more than ho-humming or staying mum. They are advancing authoritarianism, driving its roots deep into the republic’s soil. Graham in particular stands to undermine the special counsel’s investigation that, first, implicated the president as an unindicted co-conspirator (in Michael Cohen’s criminal case) and, second, established the fact of Russia’s covert cyberwar against the United States. Graham seems ready moreover to undermine the Senate’s own bipartisan assessment that Vladimir Putin was expressly on Donald Trump’s side.

Johnson and Graham aren’t being cowed by Trump, because it takes much more than being cowed to turn your back on your own country in a moment when more than 95,100 of its people have died from Covid-19, about 38 million of them seek unemployment benefits, and the real jobless rate could be as high as 25 percent. These confederates are aligning not only with the president but with America’s enemy. That requires more than pressure. That requires a choice, one they are making, willingly.

White supremacists in this country have always thought of themselves as more American than anyone else. They believe they represent the authentic nation within a nation. OK, whatever. But that ends at the water’s edge. If patriotism calls for an alliance with foreign powers seeking to wound the nation, that’s no longer patriotism.

It’s the opposite.

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: 21 May 2020

Word Count: 802

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I still believe no one should presume fairness in this year’s election. Indeed, our best understanding depends on presuming that it won’t be. But it’s worth imagining what our current politics might look like years from now. From a future vantage point, it might be that most people already made up their minds about Donald Trump, and it might be that they made up their minds about him from close to the beginning.

As you know, Trump has never been popular, and his unpopularity has been amazingly stable. The only time his job approval (in the aggregate) fell below the norm of 40 to 44 percent was early last year when he shut down the federal government. The only time his job approval came close to even was in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic when polling indicated what some call the rally-around-the-flag effect. Other than that, the electorate’s opinion of him has been remarkably steady despite what he does.

Some people gnash their teeth at the sight of polling unmoved by news of a president extorting a foreign country into an international criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people. Some people rent their garments after seeing a major political party with majority control of an anti-democratic institution acquitting the president of treason. These people might be right in believing the US is slouching toward Gomorrah. Then again, maybe Americans have already made up their minds, and there’s almost nothing he can do, or fail to do, that’s going to change how they vote.

Consider today’s tweet-storm in which the president threatened to illegally withhold funding from states issuing mail-in ballots to registered voters in anticipation of the current pandemic forcing voters to stay home on Election Day. What Nevada and other states are considering is perfectly legal, not to mention totally moral, but mail-in voting is bad for Trump, because it overcomes the Republican Party’s carefully constructed state-by-state system of voter suppression. Knowing this, the president did what he has done many times over, especially with respect to the subject of his impeachment. Extortion is in his blood. Mafioso tactics are his go-to. He did it to Ukraine. He’s doing it to the United States. And it’s not going to change minds that are already made up.

Consider also that the new coronavirus, which causes Covid-19, which has killed more than 93,700 people (as of this writing), has moved from the coasts into the heartland, where the president’s support is strongest. Some of my liberal brethren appear to believe Republican voters will think twice before voting for him as they witness firsthand the devastation of the disease. That’s unlikely to happen, but I could be wrong — if Trump’s aggregate job approval falls below 40 percent. If so, we’ll know Americans have not already made up their minds. Suffering can move people to reconsider commitments, but it’s just as likely their suffering affirms them.

Other liberal brethren appear to believe Republican voters will reconsider now that the US economy is in a recession (or a depression, depending on whom you ask). This presumes that material self-interests are stronger than partisan attachments, and that has not been the case for many years. Republican voters believed the economy was terrible under Barack Obama. Their “economic anxiety,” however, went poof in the month leading up to Inauguration Day. Even if they’re jobless and hungry, supporters are likely to believe the economy is jim-dandy, as long as Trump is the president.

The exception to my theory, which threatens to undermine it entirely, is the elderly. Not once in our lifetimes have we seen support for a Republican president go soft in the spring of an election year. Not once. And by “soft,” I mean a 14-point drop among voters 75 years of age and older, according to the Public Religion Research Institute’s polling.

When we look back at this moment years from now, it might be clear by then that the only Americans willing and able to change their minds about Donald Trump were seniors who rarely change their minds about anything, and they changed their minds not out of concern for their material interest, but because Trump was ready to sacrifice them. Lots of old people live in Florida, and no Republican has ever won reelection without it. A new poll found Donald Trump behind Joe Biden by nearly five points.

My point in this humble exercise isn’t to predict the election’s outcome. Instead, it’s to understand the most constant aspect of an otherwise chaotic presidency, which is Trump’s unpopularity, and why that constancy remains so despite extortion, treason and other manifestations of a criminal mind. Yes, it could be that the American people just don’t care anymore. But it’s equally plausible that they do care, and that there’s nothing this president can do to change a majority of minds made up a long time ago.

Does that mean he’ll lose?

That question presumes a fair election.

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: 20 May 2020

Word Count: 825

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I don’t fault the press corps (too much) for misunderstanding the dynamics of the American class system. In addition to believing the myth of a nation without caste, most of its members are highly paid and highly educated, blessed with good luck and good parenting, and wouldn’t see a working class person if she were in front of them.

I mean this literally. The real working class is ubiquitous. Real working class people are everywhere. They make our bagels. They take our gas money. They bring us our packages. They do the real labor demanded of an advanced capitalist society — real, as in: an advanced capitalist society would cease functioning without it. Yet for all their ubiquity, for all their essentiality, real working class people and their political interests are virtually invisible in coverage by America’s largest, most influential news media.

There are many historical reasons for this, good as well as ugly, but there’s no longer a justifiable excuse for continued blindness to the truth of our economy. The new coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 92,100 people and unemployed 36.5 million others, is revealing, first, that a class system does exist in the United States, and second, that the US economy cannot endure without exploiting those at the very bottom of it. Workers in grocery stores, pharmacies, gas stations, delivery and distribution services, among others fields, are essential — yet they are paid least and disposed first.

I do fault the press corps for not putting good parenting and good schooling to good use. It doesn’t take much work for intelligent people to see that class in America is multicultural and multiracial — and that it should not be a trope with which to write about white people as if they suffer politically the way black people do. (White people do suffer, but their suffering isn’t equal; white supremacy is too beneficial.) “Class politics” used to be inseparable from “union politics” but thanks to four decades of government-backed union-busting, they scarcely coexist. Reporters typically do not recognize (or even see) class politics if it isn’t connected to what’s left of the unions.

Making matters worse is the press corps’ habit of defining socioeconomic class according to education. If you earned a college degree, you’re middle class and up. If you didn’t earn one, you’re working class. There are problems with this, first and foremost that some “working class” people take home middle-class wages or better. They might be white baby boomers still benefiting from egalitarian policies officially abandoned long ago, or they might be “tiny feudal lords ruling tiny feudal fiefs,” as I said Monday. The “working class revolt” that powered the president to the White House, as I and others have said, was actually a “revolt” of the petty bourgeoisie.

Another problem is that the country is packed with people who earned college degrees but can’t possibly take home middle-class wages, because jobs matching their educations do not exist, or if they do, they exist in such small numbers these people must compete with each other like no generation has competed before. (They are also shouldering a debt load that older non-college educated colleagues never did.) Even so, it wouldn’t do to identify them as working class. Income is as unhelpful as education.

The best way to define class is the simplest — and it jives with my experience growing up in a rural, highly religious, and working-class community. If you have any measure of power in the workplace, you are not working class. This is how Michael Zwieg, a professor of economics at SUNY Stony Brook, defined “working class” in 2006:

It [has] relatively little power at work — white-collar bank tellers, call-center workers, and cashiers; blue-collar machinists, construction workers, and assembly-line workers; pink-collar secretaries, nurses, and home-health care workers skilled and unskilled, men and women of all races, nationalities, and sexual preferences.

Importantly, Zweig said, there are two forms of power that separate the working class from every other socioeconomic class. One, the power to control where, when, for how long, and how you work. Two, the power to work without constant supervision. If you have the power to demand — and command — respect from a boss, you’re not working class.

The implications are obvious. It isn’t so much skill or education, or character traits like perseverance and pluck, that justify how much people earn annually as how much power they have. The more you have, the more money you make, and, of course, the more money you make, the more power you have. It’s a virtuous cycle that members of the press corps tend to recognize as right and true (it worked for them!), but flipped around it’s a vicious cycle that for many spirals downward, grinding them to dust.

The conventional wisdom is that suffering is a natural part of life. Some people are going to be left out of an advanced capitalist society. That’s either acceptable (the Republican view) or a problem for liberal policy makers to address (the Democratic view). But if nothing else, the pandemic has shown how wrong the conventional wisdom is. It’s not that some people might suffer. It’s not that some people might face injustice as a result of broader prosperity. It’s that some people must suffer, because without their suffering our advance capitalist society would cease functioning.

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 May 2020

Word Count: 887

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I’d rather not talk once again about the so-called protests being staged for the benefit of cable-news cameras. I feel I must, however, because public intellectuals like Peggy Noonan (respectable voices, unlike the click-bait bottom-feeders at Breitbart and Fox) keep insisting on two things. One, remaining misinformed about the nature, shape and power of socioeconomic class; and two, understanding these but pretending not to.

Noonan, of course, is a Pulitzer Price-winning columnist for the Wall Street Journal. Last week, she wrote about the “class struggle” being revealed by a pandemic that has killed, as of this writing, over 91,000 people and unemployed 36.5 million others.

Noonan didn’t mean class struggle vis-à-vis inequities of access to health care (vast majorities of Covid-19 victims are people of color). She didn’t mean class struggle vis-à-vis a silent majority staying home and doing its part. She did, however, mean class struggle vis-à-vis white people “protesting” for the freedom to go shoe shopping.

Noonan’s dialectic is between the “overclass” (Michael Lind’s useful nomenclature) and “everyone else” — with the “everyone else” (we are asked implicitly to intuit) being a working class “pushing back” against state shelter-in-place orders, a working class that has lived “harder lives than those now determining their fate,” she said. “They haven’t had familial or economic ease. No one sent them to Yale. They often come from considerable family dysfunction. This has left them tougher or harder.”

When someone like Noonan explains class to actual working-class Americans, I’m reminded of a man who misunderstands sexism explaining sexism to women, or a white person who misunderstands racism explaining racism to people of color. It’s not only embarrassing. It’s not only disrespectful. There’s a depth of hubris and contempt that goes into such demonstrations, a contempt worsened by plausible deniability. It’s a form of gas-lighting, and it’s reasonable to believe the intent is to drive you crazy.

Let me offer an anecdote. I grew up in a trailer “park” in Yorkshire, barely a town on the western end of New York, south of Buffalo, with a human population smaller than the population of cows in the tricounty area. Trailer “parks” are cut up into lots. Each lot has access to sewer, water and power. That’s it, though. It’s a wedge of land you rent but can’t develop or upgrade. Nor can you do a host of things, because each lot is subject to a multitude of rules legally enforced at the pleasure of the trailer “park”’s owner.

You might say that’s no big deal. Condos have rules too. Don’t like them? Sell and leave. But trailers do not appreciate in value. They depreciate. Selling means losing money, even if you bothered improving the interior. Yes, you can move them, but that’s an enormous expense. Mobile homes are almost never mobile. Condos are also not located, as the Stoehr family trailer was, next to a leach bed that bubbled and stank in hot months. Freedom to choose is central to a market economy. But once you’ve made up your mind to live in a trailer “park,” you can’t change your mind. You’re trapped.

The landowner isn’t trapped. His freedom is boundless. Yet all he did was invest the bare minimum (water, sewer, power). Then he let the rents flow. The owner of our trailer “park,” Bill S., was a textbook example of a rent-seeker — a person or entity growing fat on rents without contributing good to the broader society. While my family enjoyed the aroma of summertime shit, Bill S. and his family enjoyed an ostentatious mansion adjacent to riding stables, a fact that cemented forever in my mind that anyone with access to horses understands little to nothing about the working class.

Bill S. didn’t work (his profligate sons ran the business). So he ran for public office. To this day, he is a Cattaraugus County legislator able to enact laws ensuring his freedom to seek rents from workaday families who virtually sign away their own freedom. Bill S. is rural-dwelling non-college educated self-made man beloved of the Wall Street Journal with contemporaries all over the US — tiny feudal lords ruling tiny feudal fiefs. They suffer none of the burdens (or life-threatening dangers) of the working class but they have working-class credibility with the likes of Peggy Noonan, public intellectuals believing they are locked in a “class struggle” against America’s tyrannical “overclass.”

They aren’t. Not, anyway, in the way Noonan means. It’s not the working class, white or otherwise, that’s revolting against government control. The real working class, white or otherwise, needs government on their side, not off their backs. Without the power of government, they are politically powerless — the marker of the working class.

The people wanting government off their backs are the same familiar faces we have seen protesting “government overreach” since at least 2009 — the tiny feudal lords, the petty bourgeoisie, the moguls of minor monopolies, the demi-captains producing little or nothing of value imagining themselves running with the big corporate dogs, whose political power is inversely proportional to government being of, by and for the people.

Noonan may not know what she’s talking about. Yet maybe she does.

If the point is driving you crazy, it works.

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 May 2020

Word Count: 866

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Ned Lamont is the Democratic governor of Connecticut. He’s  done a pretty good job leading my state through the pandemic, though he (understandably) seeks cover from Charlie Baker, Republican of Massachusetts, and Andrew Cuomo, Democrat of New York. Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, has killed more than 3,200 Nutmeggers. Our nursing homes and senior living facilities have been hit hardest.

Some business owners in the state, particularly proprietors of restaurants, night clubs and bars, seem to believe that the worst is over and that the disease is mostly a problem for the sick and old, not their clientele. For this reason, it appears, they have been leaning on Lamont to permit indoor seating after next week’s statewide reboot.

I’m sympathetic to small business owners (I am one), but focusing on the governor is focusing on the wrong problem. Reopening for business does not mean consumers will show up, not in the absence of a viable vaccine. The question shouldn’t be whether and when any governor permits such-and-such business activity. The question should be how to rebuild public trust in an economy that will succeed or fail depending on how seriously all of us take our commitments to collective action and the common good.

The problem is made more difficult by people, including a few business owners, who do not recognize the need for collective action in the service of the common good. They do not recognize that need, because they are either acting in bad faith or, more commonly, they embrace a political worldview in which their freedom does not depend on the protection of everyone else’s freedom. Instead, it depends on everyone else honoring their civic duty and individual responsibility. They don’t care about your liberty. They care about theirs. If they must do what everyone else does out of concern for public health, for instance, they chafe at the perceived violation of their freedom.

It’s greedy. It’s selfish. It’s me-me-me. But it’s more than that.

Consider masks. Wearing one in public is for your benefit as well as everyone’s. The coronavirus is transmitted mostly by water droplets so weightless they float in the air. These droplets are produced not only by sneezing or coughing but by laughing or merely talking. Wearing a mask in public is a form of collective action in the service of the common good, which, when you really think about it, maximizes individual liberty.

Some people are ignorant, misinformed or plain lazy. But others, like the president of the United States, understand the dangers yet choose not to wear a mask. They choose not to, because they do not believe—or indeed, they are hostile toward the idea — that they share common bonds with or bear common responsibilities to others, and their insistence to the contrary justifies sabotage as a necessary exercise of their liberty. People who refuse to wear a mask are not freedom fighters. They are freeloaders.

To some degree, they must know it. Most Americans are in fact wearing masks in public. According to the Post, 73 percent of Democrats and 59 percent of Republicans do so. That’s not as high as it should be, obviously, but that’s a majority. (Most churches, by the way, have been compliant with their state’s stay-at-home orders, according to an unrelated report in the Washington Post; compare that with the TV-mugging few that don’t.) Not doing the work when most responsible law-abiding people are doing the work could be seen as, well, getting something for nothing — a free hand out!

Moochers are not usually presumed white — because, you know, racism — but in this case they are indeed. The same Post report showed larger percentages of non-white Americans wearing masks compared to white Americans. (This is partly explained by inequities in health care. If you’re already sick, your chances of dying are higher. Non-white Americans tend to be sicker than white Americans. The Post said people who know someone who has died from Covid-19 are most likely to wear a mask in public.)

This is important to note, because white Americans who decide against wearing masks in public don’t see themselves as free-riders. They see themselves as principled “lovers of liberty” resisting “tyrannical governments” violating their “personal sovereignty.” That’s nonsense, of course, but it’s not enough to say that it’s nonsense, because saying that it’s nonsense does not show the proper degree of contempt for irresponsible, reckless and life-threatening behavior.

Instead of leaning on my governor, or any governor, to permit such-and-such business activities, private enterprise would be better served calling on governors to prevent moochers from spoiling things for everyone. I’ll patronize a business when I feel it is safe to. Not wearing a mask is like carrying a semi-automatic rifle. It spells danger.

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 May 2020

Word Count: 792

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The president and his confederates in the United States Congress have spent the last four days manufacturing a controversy for the press corps to report and debate. Donald Trump has dubbed it “Obamagate.” I’m not sure what it means. It has something to do with the previous administration’s lawful handling of the case of former Trump aide Michael Flynn, who confessed twice to crimes that would land him in federal prison.

Flynn is off the hook now, thanks to Trump’s goons in the US Department of Justice. That’s the extent of what I know. I don’t need to understand more than that. Neither do you, frankly. What we do need to understand is that the president and his confederates do not themselves understand it, and they do not understand it, because the point of a manufactured controversy isn’t establishing the facts through a rigorous process of inquiry. The point is inventing a scandal out of thin air to bludgeon enemies with.

This manufactured controversy says more about Trump’s confederates than about anything else. His attorneys have twice argued Trump is immune, by dint of being the president, to the normal rule of law, as normal people are not. During his impeachment trial, and in oral arguments this week before the US Supreme Court, lawyers invoked “temporary presidential immunity,” a concept that does not exist and that revives Richard Nixon’s belief that nothing is illegal when a president does it.

What “Obamagate” reveals is the fraudulence of this legal argument. If nothing is illegal when a president does it, then even if the Obama administration’s criminal investigation of Michael Flynn were unlawful (wrong: it was lawful), what’s the problem? Barack Obama was then president. Presidents should be immune to the rule of law, according to Trump’s lawyers. Nothing is illegal when a president does it.

What “Obamagate” exposes is the Republicans’ imperious double standard. It’s OK for a Republican president to break the law. It’s not OK for a Democratic president. The impeachment of a GOP president is “presidential harassment.” The impeachment of a Democratic president, however, “is about cleansing the office. Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office,” said US Rep. Lindsey Graham in 1998.

Something else we need to understand. By affixing “gate,” to “Obama,” the current president is attempting to invoke the memory of what had been the biggest political scandal in US history, namely Nixon’s complicity in burglary and espionage at Washington’s Watergate Hotel in the 1970s. But that scandal has since been dwarfed many times over by the one that’s been unfolding over these last four years, namely, the imposition of an illegitimate president by a hostile foreign power, the committing of treason by said illegitimate president, and the acquittal of the same by a separatist movement, disguised as a major political party, bent on advancing a decades long soft-civil war that now includes appeasing an “invisible enemy” rampaging the landscape.

As of this writing, over 85,300 Americans have died from Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. News came this morning that 36.5 million workers have now filed for unemployment benefits. That’s almost certainly an undercount (same for the death toll; experts told the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof it could be as high as 110,000). All those numbers will likely go up as states and localities try to return to a semblance of normalcy. Yet the current president yammers about the former president, as if Obama had anything to do with the worst societal calamity since the Great Depression.

For many of us, this may seem like a last-ditch effort, as if Trump were desperate to change the subject. For many of us, appearing to be desperate to change the subject inspires thinking that he’s toast. After all, two presidents in recent memory (Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1992) were ousted amid economic downturns. This being the mother of them all seems to suggest that Trump is a goner. While this seems reasonable, it presumes too much — namely, that the 2020 election will be fair.

I’ll count the ways of voter suppression, foreign interference and general skullduggery another time. For now, let’s say presuming a fair election in the time of Trump and the coronavirus is an unconscious act of distorting political reality. If he loses, Trump and his confederates will do everything they can to sabotage the winner’s legislative agenda. Even that, however, presumes there will be an election. I’m not suggesting he will “cancel” it. I am suggesting states, like, say, Texas, might “postpone” theirs, sending the national process of picking a national leader into chaos. Even if Joe Biden is determined to be the actual winner, the created disorder will cloud his legitimacy.

Which is another thing the “Obamagate” thing reveals. If you thought Trump was bad, Biden’s just as bad, and since Biden’s just as bad, I might as well stick with my party: The point is less about bludgeoning one’s enemies than poisoning values, elevating nihilism and reducing ordinary relations to craven considerations of power. It’s not just anti-democratic. It’s anti-republican. A despoliation of human morality.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 14 May 2020

Word Count: 855

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As I said Monday, the new coronavirus pandemic is unlikely to change the minds of dedicated abortion partisans. Those for it are still going to be for it. Those against it are still going to be against it. That “the most pro-life president ever” is wishing away a disease that has killed more than 83,500 Americans isn’t going to change things.

It should, obviously. Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, is being called “this generation’s polio.” It’s deadly, and even survivors are debilitated for years. The biggest question is what it does to child development. Meanwhile, the disease is spreading into the red-state heartland, where Republican governments are ill-prepared or refusing to prepare out of deference to Donald Trump. The University of Washington’s model, used by the White House, revised its estimate to 147,000 deaths by August.

Reality won’t change things, of course, because “pro-life” never really meant “pro-life.” It was and will be a magical incantation declaimed by celebrants of the politics of the occult. They do not intend to make sense, refuse to make sense when asked to, and are hostile toward anyone trying to make sense of something that makes no sense. The politics of the occult only makes sense to its celebrants who understand perfectly well its true political objectives. “Pro-life” means what they say it means same as life begins when they say it begins. If you can’t figure all that out, that’s your problem.

Because the politics of the occult is occult (veiled, hidden, secret, impervious to any and all critical inquiry), it is not practiced in good faith. It can’t be. If it were, it wouldn’t be occult. It would, therefore, be useless. Writer Julia Ioffe said recently in all seriousness: “I still can’t get my head around the pivot from ‘every life matters, even that of the unborn’ or ‘some people are going to die.’” She can’t get her head around the pivot, because there is none. A pivot would make sense. The occult never does.

The most we can hope for (the most I can hope for, I guess) is that the pandemic gets Americans on the sidelines of the abortion debate to recognize the occult nature of “pro-life” and therefore doubt its meaning. More specifically, getting them to see that “right to life” applies to the unborn, but not the already born, and that Republican champions of “the sanctity of life” are actually profaning said sanctity by insisting people get back to work, and thus endanger their own lives, for the economy’s sake.

The very best we can hope for (the very best I can hope for, I guess) is that fence-sitters see who the actual champions of life are. They are not they who say they are.

The real champions of life are states and cities (mostly blue, though not all) that invest in maintaining and expanding a civilized way of life. Life’s enemies are the states (though not cities) as apathetic to human flourishing as they are to human suffering. It’s no surprise that most who are standing against life are the same most who are standing for barbarism.

I use “barbarism” pointedly.

It’s usually the preserve of people like Pat Buchanan, the former Nixon advisor who wrote The Death of the West (2001), which was a veritable blueprint for the resurgence of American fascism. Buchanan and his confederates believe Western civilization faces annihilation due to white people having fewer babies and brown people having more. He literally thinks the US will no longer be a western country once white Americans are a minority at some point in this century. He and anyone extolling virtues of “western civilization” believe they are keeping watch against invading barbarians.

As is often the case in Republican politics, the accusers are the guilty party. As The American Prospect’s Harold Meyerson wrote on Tuesday: “The real difference between blue states and red, if I may borrow a term from the anti-choice movement, is that the blue states are pro-life while the red states are largely indifferent to same.” Florida’s government, for instance, starved itself of funding so much that less than a quarter of nearly 2 million out-of-work Floridians are receiving unemployment benefits. Texas, Meyerson wrote, claims to be well-managed and low cost, but “the state’s supposed fiscal rectitude has created the highest rate of medical uninsurance in the nation.”

To Buchanan, the barbarians are a nation within a nation — immigrants numbering in the millions — who are reproducing their way toward “white genocide.” That, of course, is upside down. The real nation within a nation is one entirely imagined by white Americans fearing “white genocide” so much they abandoned previous commitments to democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law, instituted policies enfeebling working (brown) people, advanced laws invoking eminent domain over a woman’s property, i.e., her own body, and now stand idly by while plague ravages the landscape.

The Nazis believed they stood for the best of Western civilization. In seeking purity, they founded barbarism, the politics of the occult, and mass death. We are not there yet, but that’s where we are headed. All we need is more people expressing more doubt.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 13 May 2020

Word Count: 862

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When it comes to the Covid-19 pandemic, we are hearing three stories. There’s one about human health, one about politics and one about economics. There’s a fourth, however. It’s thus far untold, though it’s arguably the largest for linking the other three. That story is about public trust, especially its new, massive and growing deficit.

As I mentioned last week, businesses can reopen, but they can’t force consumers to resume their previous spending habits. Restaurants, bars, theaters, churches, sporting venues, any public space with a capacity to hold more than five people — none were designed for “social distancing.” In the absence of a vaccine, or the new coronavirus mutating its way into oblivion, all are liabilities. Expecting consumers to trust after witnessing more than 82,000 Americans die is a rough exercise in magical thinking.

Moreover, businesses, especially the giants, are lobbying lawmakers to shield them from future lawsuits seeking damages for getting sick and/or dying. How on earth can businesses expect consumers to trust them when businesses won’t trust themselves? They want the freedom to turn a profit, but none of the social responsibility? The US economy isn’t the only thing in rapid retreat. So is the public’s willingness to trust.

A recent Edelman survey showed for the first time in 20 years less trust in CEOs than in government. According to Business Insider, most of the 13,000 respondents in nearly a dozen countries “said they believe business is not putting people before profits, not implementing enough safety measures to protect employees, and not helping small business suppliers and customers by extending credit or payment terms.”

Richard Edelman said recently the pandemic may inspire a reconsideration of the role of government, specifically its regulation of private enterprise. He said that publicly traded companies should act in the best interest of stakeholders, not stockholders. If they do not show greater concern and care for the broader public interest, “if it’s bad performance by business, just short-term profits, I believe there will be much more government involvement, if not control, over key parts of the economy,” he said.

Trust in government is on the rise — with a huge exception. A new CNN poll shows only 36 percent of Americans trust the president’s statements regarding the new coronavirus pandemic. His job approval, meanwhile, is 45 percent. As John Berman pointed out, that means some of Donald Trump’s own supporters don’t think he’s a trustworthy source of information. (Even fewer trust what they watch on Fox News.)

A poll showing some people support the president despite distrusting him is new, but that cognitive dissonance has probably always been present in the populace. Trump has been unpopular, and therefore weak, since the morning he delivered an inaugural speech written not for US citizens but for “real Americans” living in a confederate and wholly imagined nation within a nation. His legitimacy has always been in doubt. It took an emergency to show that the doubters include more than his dedicated critics.

Some will say the reason is his administration’s bungling of the federal response to the plague, but that doesn’t seem right. Americans are willing to trust a president even if he fails, as long as he demonstrates he’s trying in good faith. Trump isn’t, though. He’s not bothering even to pretend he’s trying. He’s walking away from the crisis, refusing to acknowledge its existence, acting like everything’s OK. The president has always been weak, but what’s new may be the public’s increasing intolerance for that weakness.

Why, though? As I said, the link between competence and job approval is overblown. The actual link, I think, is the one between public trust and courage. A president who demonstrates courage — looking for answers, asking for patience, willing to be held accountable for failure — is a president who can inspire broad public trust. The current president, however, cuts and runs, as they like to say on Fox News. (He literally walked away yesterday in the face of hard questioning by women reporters.) A president who demonstrates cowardice like that is a president who inspires broad public distrust.

That’s bad for him. That’s bad for everyone. If the public can’t trust businesses that refuse to trust themselves, to whom should businesses turn to get the economy going again? In the last major crisis, they turned to a new president who had just won with a huge majority of the US electorate. The work was hard. Barack Obama made mistakes. In the end, however, he led the country through the worst recession in eight decades.

This time, they have the cowardly anti-Obama.

And the crisis is worse.

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 May 2020

Word Count: 767

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As of this writing, more than 80,600 Americans have died from Covid-19, the disease caused by the new strain of the coronavirus. Twelve thousand of that total died in the last seven days alone. The rate of death has increased from less than 2,000 a day now to more than 2,500 a day. We are likely going to see about 100,000 deaths by week’s end.

The more governments push people back to work, the more people are exposed to disease, sending the daily death toll higher. While all leaders must find a way to balance public safety and economic order, Donald Trump and his confederates aren’t bothering to search. GOP governors in states like Georgia have not only dismissed his “reopening” guidelines; they have inspired his administration to abandon them.

Republican governors know sending Americans back to work is almost certainly going to worsen the pandemic in the absence of a viable vaccine. They are moving forward anyway. In doing so, they are in essence telling their constituents that government isn’t going to nanny you. The state isn’t going to second-guess you. They are saying that private decisions of life and death are not the government’s to make. They are yours.

This of course flies in the face of the Republican Party’s monolithic opposition to abortion. If private decisions of life and death are yours to make, not the government’s, why are Republican-controlled states doing everything they can to outlaw abortion so that a private decision of life and death is the government’s to make, not yours?

Moreover, if “the unborn” have a “right to life,” why don’t the already born have that same and equal right? If a fetus isn’t a cluster of cells but a person constitutionally protected under the 14th Amendment — if abortion is a civil rights issue, as anti-abortionist claim — isn’t the onus on the government to protect that right? Isn’t “reopening” economies, and sending some to their doom, a violation of that right?

It’s tempting to quip that the pandemic has turned the Republicans into a pro-choice party (life and death decisions are yours and yours alone). That’s clearly false, though. Truer, I think, is the pandemic has revealed something about the GOP’s stance on abortion. It doesn’t make sense, because it’s not supposed to make sense unless you’re in on a game whose real goal has nothing to do with the rights of “the unborn.” The point is controlling women — or punishing them for experiencing “illegitimate” sex.

This isn’t news, obviously, and it shouldn’t take a pandemic to reveal the moral and legal absurdities of the “pro-life” movement. Think about it. If a fetus is a person, as the anti-abortionists claim, what are they really saying? They are really saying that the government can and should force one person (the mother) to give another person (“the unborn”) access to her body with or without her consent. Flip this around and you have an argument nearly refusing to recognize the moral profanity and legal crime of rape.

But the absurdity doesn’t end there. If there’s a such a thing as a “right to life,” and if a fetus is a person with a constitutional right to access the body of another person for the purpose of living, why not the already born? For instance, if I need a new kidney to avoid dying, and you have one to spare, can I call on the government to force you to surrender one ? A reasonable person would say hell no, but the “pro-life” movement might accept such absurdity if accepting it led to the goal of controlling women and what they choose to do with their bodies, especially their individual freedom to say no.

I hope it’s clear I’m not defending murder (which is one of the moral knots pro-choice people must untie once they concede that a fetus is a person). I am, however, defending abortion as it stands for the benefit of people indifferent to it. The pandemic isn’t going to move partisans, but it might show people on the fence that the argument isn’t about the child so much as the mother’s body, and the argument says less about the rights of “the unborn” than it does the rights of the already born, which include men.

The “pro-life” movement asks us to take seriously a certain set of moral premises, which the movement itself doesn’t take seriously. If it did, Republican governors like Greg Abbott of Texas would not rush to “reopen” his state knowing with a certainty that doing so will increase the likelihood and daily rate of death, not only violating the right to life but falsely suggesting he now believes a women’s body is hers to control.

Since the “pro-life” movement doesn’t take its own premises seriously, all it’s doing is practicing the politics of the occult — it doesn’t make sense, doesn’t intend to make sense, is hostile toward sense-making, and, to the degree that it does make sense, makes sense only to people already in on the movement’s true political objective.

The pandemic isn’t going to change the minds of “pro-life” partisans.

But at least it can reveal their politics of the occult.

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 May 2020

Word Count: 864

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On Monday, I talked about the GOP’s anti-American animus. For the Republicans, treason is always an option, because their greatest loyalty isn’t to the United States but to a nation within a nation, an “imagined community” in which the idea of equality is offensive to the “real Americans” chosen by God to rule a country given by God.

On Tuesday, I talked about the president’s belief in his “genetic superiority.” That constitutes a worldview in which Donald Trump is infallible by dint of being born with “morally good” genes. It’s in keeping with eugenics, fascism, white supremacy or “any political thought privileging the in-group for reasons made out of whole cloth, any rightwing movement rationalizing the out-group’s pain, suffering and even murder.”

Today, I want to connect these, starting with a reminder — that an enemy nation violated our sovereignty by kneecapping the Democratic candidate, thus aiding and abetting the president’s 2016 victory. A bipartisan Senate panel affirmed last month the truth of it, and in doing so, affirmed once and for all Donald Trump’s illegitimacy.

Therefore, an illegitimate president has installed hundreds of jurists, including two justices to the US Supreme Court, who will shape US law for a generation and more.

Therefore, an illegitimate president betrayed his own country by seeking foreign interference in the next election before getting away with it with the help of a Republican Party more loyal to a confederate nation within a nation than to the US.

Therefore, an illegitimate president now stands idly by while a deadly new coronavirus ravages the US population, killing more than 76,600 Americans so far — 2,500 in the last 24 hours alone — and sending the real unemployment rate upwards of 20 percent.

We need to understand, in other words, that the president of the United States is not a true president in any fully republican sense as much as he is a figurehead unworthy of respect except to a nation within a nation advancing an insurrection begun 40 years ago that does not seek political independence from the whole so much as domination of it.

As has been the case since the Civil War, when confederates talk about freedom, they mean their freedom. When they talk about rights, they mean their rights. When they talk about patriotism, they mean their love of a wholly imagined community, not the US. Your patriotism is not equal, because God’s chosen do not have equals. In speaking of their “American values,” confederates always speak in a zero-sum terms. In order for them to win, you must lose; for them to prosper, you must labor for pennies; for them to rule, you must submit.

The president and his confederates say the country can’t stop functioning in the face of a plague, and they are making economic arguments toward that end. But make no mistake. This isn’t an economic debate. It’s a political act. They are not fighting an “invisible enemy.” They are appeasing it. The enemy of their enemy is their friend.

The large majority of the pandemic’s victims are Americans of color residing in large cities or coastal blue states. As the plague creeps across the country, the confederates are right in surmising that its future victims will be akin even if they live in red states. They know “reopening” states will kill more people of color than white people, and they are moving along. The right to life does not apply to the body politic. The right to life applies only to the very few — the privileged few endowed by God to punish the deviant. Such was the natural order envisioned and enforced by slave regimes of yore.

Murder isn’t the goal, of course, because where would they be without cheap labor? Instead, the goal is domination. In choosing to jam Americans of all races and creeds between the need to earn a living and the need to remain healthy, the confederates are discovering a new and improved form of social control, a means of violating and suppressing individual liberty without appearing to do so. The choice in November is less between two men than between two worlds, one of servitude or one of freedom.

Mitch McConnell has said the decision of greatest consequence in his long career was the decision to nullify Barack Obama’s right to nominate a Supreme Court justice. Of equal consequence, but probably more, was his decision to look the other way while Russians attacked our sovereignty and violated the right of the American people to consent to Donald Trump’s rule. It was an easy choice for the Senate majority leader. His greatest loyalty, after all, isn’t to the US. For him, treason was always an option.

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 May 2020

Word Count: 780

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