I admit it. I write on the theme of betrayal so often I risk diluting the impact of the word with sheer repetition. I can’t help it, though. I see the national Republicans saying they govern in the interest of all Americans, then behaving as if only some citizens count as legitimate Americans. Trust is key to a democracy. We must trust our leaders to act for the sake of the common good, especially in times of crisis. When a partner suddenly demands freedom from responsibility, what word describes that other than betrayal?

Nearly 48,000 Americans have died in the last five weeks from COVID-19, the disease caused by a new strain of the coronavirus. The death toll would almost certainly be higher had not good-faith governors (including Republicans) taken aggressive measures to force people to isolate or distance themselves from each other in order to retard the disease’s spread. A major consequence, of course, has been an economy in near collapse. Today, the government reported another 4.4 million unemployment insurance claims, bringing the total number of official jobless to about 26 million.

Even Donald Trump’s most vocal critics don’t hold him entirely responsible for the damage done, but no reasonable person can say he did even close to enough when it most mattered, or has done enough since. The president’s administration “delayed or bungled basic but crucial steps to contain the spread of infections and prepare the country for a pandemic,” according to a review of government documents by the LA Times. The investigation is just one of a host of reports showing the president privileging his television image over the health and well-being of the populace.

The president might be forgiven (politicians are self-interested, after all) if his Republicans had spared a thought for the 56 million northeasterners facing the worst. But they didn’t. Instead, in each of three relief bills passed so far (a fourth is pending in the House), the Republicans demonstrated concern for the health and well-being of corporations struggling with a near-total absence of consumer demand. To be sure, normal people are getting one-time checks, but big businesses are getting massive, cheap and forgivable loans. Meanwhile, the Fed is printing trillions to take over the bond market and provide virtually unlimited lending to Wall Street banking firms.

Even that, however, wouldn’t be so bad if major cities and blue states got a cut of the action. Fighting mass disease and death has strained their resources to the breaking point. Even the richest municipalities foresee the possibility of insolvency in the near term. If the airline, hospitality, banking and oil industries can get bailouts, surely so can cities and states defending the country against the “invisible enemy” whose existence a Republican president refused to acknowledge for weeks and weeks.

Not so fast, says Mitch McConnell. The Senate majority leader said yesterday that his conference was in no mood for more relief. The national debt is becoming a serious issue, he said, we can’t mortgage our children’s future on a “blue-state bailout.”

“We’re not going to let them take advantage of this pandemic to solve a lot of problems that they created for themselves with bad decisions in the past,” he said. Instead, he’d rather work to change current federal law so states can declare bankruptcy.

It’s hard to express the depths of betrayal here, but I’m going to try. First, future insolvencies are not a consequence of past decisions by the states, but instead recent inaction by a president whose gross negligence and incompetence forced cities and states to take matters into their own hands.

Second, McConnell is suggesting the country does not owe these cities and states a debt of gratitude deserving of federal compensation even if the money ended up covering “bad decisions in the past.”

Third, in not recognizing the debt owed, and instead offering the possibility of bankruptcy, he’s slapping the face of anyone who has sacrificed, which is to say everyone.

With respect to blue states, the betrayal goes even deeper. Blue states are richer, and they send more tax dollars to Washington than they get in return. That’s not so bad given that blue states tend to believe in the common good, plus they used to keep some of the money thanks to a tax code allowing filers to deduct state and local taxes (SALT) from their federal tax returns. In 2017 Trump, McConnell and the Republicans capped SALT deductions, in effect raising taxes on rich states while cutting taxes for obscenely rich individuals. Blue states were already subsidizing red states. Now that went double.

Make it triple. McConnell is fine with extracting wealth from major cities and blue states, redistributing it to red states and GOP-friendly corporations, while at the same time expressing concern for the national debt just when 56 million Americans, who collectively send Democrats to Washington, are in full need of assistance. McConnell is happy, in other words, to let a pandemic weaken and impoverish his political rivals. That’s not what you expect from a leader governing in the interest of all Americans.

It is, however, what you’d expect from a traitor.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 April 2020

Word Count: 857

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The Associated Press ran a story last night all too familiar to critics of bothsidesism, or “false balance.” The headline: “Pandemic fallout tracks nation’s political divide.”

Washington bureau chief Julie Pace wrote that while Donald Trump and Republican governors rush to “reopen” their states in the middle of a coronavirus outbreak that has killed (so far) 45,300 Americans, Democratic governors “are largely keeping strict stay-at-home orders and nonessential business closures in place, resisting small pockets of Trump-aligned protesters and public pressure from the president.”

I’m as tired as the next critic of the press corps’ anti-morality. It wouldn’t hurt a reporter’s credibility in any way to privilege the side of the sick and powerless over the side of the healthy and powerful. But there is some value to the AP’s bad habit of setting “regional and demographic divisions” side by side. It’s a chance to choose.

What’s the choice? First consider that states are forming coalitions to address the pandemic in very different ways. All six New England states have teamed up with New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey to battle the pandemic, shutting themselves down before reviving in an organized, careful and gradual manner. On the west coast, California has joined Washington and Oregon to follow suit. Meanwhile, according to Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, southern states are organizing themselves to be in line with the president’s desire to “reopen” the nation as quickly as possible despite risking a second wave of mass disease and death.

Consider also how Colin Woodard described these “regional and demographic divisions” in his book American Nations. In it, he said the original European settlements established modes of thinking about economics and society, and as a consequence established the political divisions still with us today in one form or another. Woodard’s characterization of each region lines up with the coalitions being formed by the states and their various and opposing approaches to the pandemic. From these characterizations, honest Americans can choose which mode is better.

Woodard’s “Deep South” and “Greater Appalachia” overlap with DeSantis’ southern coalition: Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi. “Greater Appalachia” was settled by white immigrants “from war-ravaged Ulster, northern England, lowland Scotland. Deep commitment to personal sovereignty and individual liberty; intense suspicion of external authority.” “Deep South” was “established by slave lords from English Barbados as a West Indies-style slave society. Modeled on slave states of the ancient world — democracy was the privilege of the few.”

Woodard’s “Yankeedom” fits neatly over the New England bloc. (“Yankeedom” spreads from the east coast through the upper Midwest all the way through Minnesota.) “Puritan legacy; perfect earthly society with social engineering, individual denial for common good; assimilate outsiders; vigorous government to thwart would-be tyrants.” Lastly, his “Left Coast” is the west bloc. “Left Coast” was settled by “New Englanders (by ship) and farmers, prospectors and fur traders from Appalachian Midwest (by wagon). Yankee utopianism meets individual self-expression and exploration.”

“Yankeedom” and “Left Coast” are very different regions, obviously, but what binds them together is the same thing binding together the northeast and west coalitions — a commitment to liberty by way of service to the common good. The common good is more than a slogan. It’s the deeply moral principle by which a political community presumes its many and varied participants share a common purpose, something so valuable that in times of crisis everyone can and will sacrifice for its benefit. In a time of the coronavirus, that common purpose is maintaining basic good health. In working together, as a political community, short-term sacrifice can lead to long-term liberty.

The same cannot be said of the “Deep South” and “Greater Appalachia” nor can it be said of the southern coalition currently falling in line for the president. The common good exists but it’s a limited resource. Like democracy, it’s only for the privileged few. Given the common good often requires a government to enforce it, it’s met with hostility by people committed to “personal sovereignty and individual liberty” even if blind devotion to those otherwise honorable principles is one step closer to death. In a time of the coronavirus, opposition to the common good is opposition to freedom.

Indeed, it’s suicide.

I said the AP’s bad habit of setting “regional and demographic divisions” side by side is an opportunity to choose, but I suspect most Americans have already chosen. (I don’t mean choosing between north and south, or that southern politics is monolithic; it isn’t.) If the most recent Pew survey is any indication, a majority of Americans understand, even if unconsciously, that one of these modes of thinking about economics and society is better than the other (at least during a pandemic).

In other words, most Americans are making moral decisions the anti-moral press is in the bad habit of avoiding altogether. Most Americans, I think, understand that what’s needed in a national emergency is more civic morality, not less. That means a renewed commitment to the common good, and that’s means sharing freedom, not hoarding it.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 April 2020

Word Count: 839

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If you’re like me, you came of age during the “Reagan Revolution,” and therefore have not seen a day go by without some “conservative” lecturing you on the true meaning of freedom.

Granted, freedom meant something different back then. At the time, there really was a Cold War, and there really was dread of global nuclear annihilation, and there really was fear that if good American liberal democracy did not triumph, then some kind of totalitarianism would.

I’m overstating a bit (tensions had eased quite a bit before a newly elected Reagan ramped them up again), but only to make point. There was heft behind the rhetoric. Even if you tired of them hectoring you about liberty — and believe me, Generation X is nothing if not tired — you believed at least they were sincere about it, even if you suspected them of being a little daffy.

Today, the “Evil Empire” is an ancient ruin. The US has not faced an existential menace since 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet “conservatives” continue to rail against the threat of “government tyranny” as if air quality controls, gun safety laws, or Title IX lawsuits signal black helicopters coming to ferry them off to the gulag. Moreover, the president believes that peaceful cooperation with foreign nations equals ceding American independence. What used to be a serious high-stakes debate over the meaning of freedom has turned into something else.

Last week and this, so-called patriots held demonstrations in swing states necessary to Donald Trump’s reelection in order to protest state-based stay-at-home orders that have held the national death toll from the coronavirus pandemic to just over 43,000. (The original prediction was deaths numbering close to 300,000.) These state orders are literally saving individual’s lives by keeping them apart from each other and thus slowing the spread of the disease. The majority of Americans obeying them, as David Perry wrote, are practicing patriotic love. Yet pretend patriots behave as if governing in everyone’s interests is a violation of their “liberty.”

I don’t doubt they hope to succeed in forcing governors into lifting entirely their respective stay-at-home orders, and if they do, they will have succeeded in turning conservative history all the way around so that instead of resisting totalitarianism, they will have powered it. A nation that controls its population through gross negligence in the thick of a pandemic is the moral equivalent of a nation that controls its population with imminent threats of forced labor.

We understand what’s at stake in terms of politics and public health. The president is rushing headlong into “reopening” the economy in order to stave off an economic collapse, and therefore better position himself for November. GOP governors, like Florida’s Ron DeSantis, stand ready to accommodate. As the experts keep warning, however, the faster we “reopen,” the faster a second wave of the pandemic will crest, killing off more Americans than the first.

But we do not understand what’s a stake in terms of freedom, an ideal that “conservatives” have historically held in the highest regard. What is liberty in a context in which the president, first of all, refuses to govern in everyone’s name, and second of all, as a consequence, wedges millions between two impossible poles: their health or their wealth? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, never saw the new coronavirus. But I’m sure the Soviet defector and conservative icon would recognize our feelings of paralysis and imprisonment.

Years from now, it might be clear what happened.

The president committed treason when he invited a foreign nation to sabotage the 2020 election, but his party refused to hold him accountable, clearing him of all charges. Liberated from all constitutional responsibility, as well as his oath of office, Trump failed to take the necessary steps toward preventing a pandemic from killing more Americans than all those who died on September 11, 2001, and the wars in Vietnam and Korean, combined. Trump’s and the people’s freedoms are inversely proportional. The more for him, the less for everyone else.

In a way, it makes sense. Trump built his real estate empire by perfecting corruption. As president, he is cheating the American people by stealing their liberty — their freedom of action, even their right to choose — then encouraging confederates into goading state governments into playing along in a scheme resulting in millions being forced to make an impossible choice.

The old conservative meaning of freedom appeared to stand in contrast to totalitarianism.

This new confederate meaning of freedom, however, does not.

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 April 2020

Word Count: 754

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Democratic leaders don’t typically borrow from the playbook of GOP politics, but in light of last weekend’s “engineered protests,” I think they should make an exception.

The Washington Post reported Sunday far-right militias, led by three brothers, have used Facebook to organize “anti-quarantine protests” at state capitols around the country. Tens of thousands have joined their Facebook group, giving the impression that a “populist libertarianism” sentiment is emerging more than opinion surveys would suggest.

This activity is being amplified by the president, who appeared last week on Twitter to encourage armed resistance to state-based initiatives aimed at containing the novel coronavirus pandemic with orders to stay home. The “protests” were in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and others swing states Donald Trump needs to win reelection.

Meanwhile, the Pew Center, which is the gold standard for measuring public opinion, released a new survey in which 66 percent of Americans fear their state governments will lift restrictions “too quickly.” Sixty-five percent said “Trump’s initial response” to the COVID-19 pandemic was “too slow.” Moreover, 73 percent said the worst is yet to come. (Implicit is the widespread doubt of Washington’s ability to face the challenge.)

Someone here represents America’s majority view, and it’s not the people ginning up outrage on social media and make-believing revolution for the benefit of television cameras on the steps of state capitol buildings. Indeed, the majority view isn’t getting the attention it deserves, because the majority is doing what it believes must be done in times of severe crisis: working together, as a nation, to combat a collective peril.

The majority view, in other words, is silent. That’s why I think Democratic leaders should invoke Richard Nixon. In 1969, he coined the term “silent majority” to claim a mandate from “middle Americans” who did not demonstrate in huge numbers against his prosecution of the Vietnam War but instead supported his wartime policies.

To be sure, “silent majority” is what fascists have said for decades when they need to contravene a rapidly changing view on, say, an overseas war going south. “Silent majority” is what a literal minority invokes to smash a literal majority in the face. Even so, Nixon’s words should resonate right now when 41,000 Americans are dead from COVID-19. Nixon said, “If a vocal minority, however fervent its cause, prevails over reason and the will of the majority, this nation has no future as a free society.” Individuals can’t be truly free. In the collective, however, can be found the meaning of freedom.

In this sense, the protesters have it backwards. They believe (or pretend to believe; more on that in a moment) that government coercion is the opposite of individual freedom. Stay-at-home orders infringe their liberty. If they want to risk getting sick — or dying — that’s their right. No government has the authority to tell them otherwise.

This thinking ignores the fact that one person’s right to liberty ends with another person’s right to security, and that all governments are charged with balancing all of those rights for everyone’s sake. (Whether a government is striking the right balance is usually reflected by the majority view.) For this reason, coercion is not the opposite of freedom during a pandemic. Coercion, at least for now, is in the service of freedom. Only when everyone is acting in everyone else’s interest can this crisis be overcome.

But let’s not give these people too much credit, shall we? As the Post reported, “protest” organizers were not acting in good faith. They were pretending to believe what they say they believe. Organizers knew unwitting participants (some of whom no doubt were acting in good faith) would get sick, or die, therefore spreading the disease. Death, even their own, is an acceptable consequence of meeting their political goals.

These “protest” organizers call themselves “patriots.” Fair enough. Equally fair, however, is calling them insurgents, or even domestic terrorists, willing to commit suicide by way of infecting themselves and others to destabilize public trust as well as the political union of these United States. They say they stand for liberty. They really stand for disloyalty, disunion and death. Americans invoking patriotism but disobeying stay-at-home orders do so with the moral justification of a suicide bomber.

If “protesters” risked harm to themselves only, it might be appropriate to characterize them as a kind of “death cult.” (It might be funny, in a grim way, to joke about “culling the herd.”) But these people do not only put themselves as risk. The World Health Organization warned today the pandemic has yet to peak. “Protesters,” therefore, threaten us all. As Nixon said: “If a vocal minority, however fervent its cause, prevails over reason and the will of the majority, this nation has no future as a free society.”

You are the real “silent majority.”

Don’t forget it.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 April 2020

Word Count: 800

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I hope it’s clear by now that Donald Trump won the last election by riding a wave of grievance and rage on the part of the petty bourgeoisie, not the white working class. The real white working class, the one that does not enjoy the power and privilege of press representation, shares with the lower-middle class a lack of a college education. Other than a few other cultural similarities, however, that’s pretty much all they share.

Unlike the real white working class, the petty bourgeoisie resents earning as much or more than college educated types while also feeling inferior, dispossessed and weak. The real white working class, meanwhile, earns less and usually votes Democratic, because Democratic policies really do serve their political and economic interests.

Sam Francis understood well the resentments of the petty bourgeoisie. The white supremacist advisor to Pat Buchanan’s campaigns is an Ur-source of Trumpism.

He insisted that the cosmopolitan elite threatened the traditional values cherished by most Americans: “morality and religion, family, nation, local community, and at times racial integrity and identity.” These were sacred principles for members of a new “post-bourgeois proletariat” drawn from the working class and the lower ranks of the middle class. Lacking the skills prized by technocrats, but not far enough down the social ladder to win the attention of reformers, these white voters considered themselves victims of a coalition between the top and bottom against the middle.

Francis didn’t live to see Trump’s victory. (He died in 2005; Pat Buchanan’s campaign was a model for Trump’s 2016 campaign.) And from what I can tell from Timothy Shenk’s now-classic piece (quoted above), Francis was just terrible. But it’s worth asking if he was right. Francis said the petty bourgeoisie needed a champion, a man to fight against “the managerial elite” (think: “globalists,” bankers, Jews, etc.) as well as hordes of minorities and immigrants trying to take away what is rightfully theirs. Four years into this presidency, did Donald Trump make Sam Francis’ dream come true?

On the contrary.

The petty bourgeoisie seeks refuge in the Republican Party from their feelings of inferiority, dispossession and weakness compared to college educated Americans more adept at living, working and thriving in the 21st century. But “seek” is not find. Instead, they find the illusion of refuge, a fabricated solace bent on exploiting votes for the sake of enriching the very same “managerial elites” they despise. This would be abundantly clear to the petty bourgeoisie if it weren’t for their white supremacy.

Nowhere is that betrayal so evident, I think, than in the president’s push to “reopen” the economy before the worst is over in a pandemic that has killed, as of this writing, nearly 38,000 Americans in five weeks. The president and his media confederates are trying to convince the petty bourgeoisie that harm to the economy, as a result of a pandemic that has vaporized 16 million jobs, is worse than harm to human beings. They are trying to convince them that a few million deaths is a small price to pay for avoiding an economic depression that will surely tank Donald Trump’s presidency.

In a very real sense, the president and the Republicans are like the managers of Carnival’s Grand Princess, and the petty bourgeoisie are the ocean liner’s captive passengers. According to Businessweek, company executives knew the ship was lousy with coronavirus. They knew Carnival would face wrongful death lawsuits. Yet they decided to let passengers party on as usual. About 1,500 have gotten COVID-19 since early March, and dozens have died. Dead people seem to be a cost of doing business.

The president needs Americans to go back to work in order to jumpstart a depressed economy threatening his reelection. Governors privileging human lives over business output won’t play along, of course, but governors privileging Republican power will. Just as Carnival executives kept the party going knowing that passengers would die, some governors will return to normal life in the hope that doing so will gin up the economy in time for Election Day, after which workers can die at their convenience. It won’t matter by then. Dead people seem to be the cost of doing presidential politics.

Will the petty bourgeoisie recognize the president’s betrayal?

On the contrary.

The president spent the past two weeks talking up the need to “reopen” America, even declaring the total authority to overrule state governors in pursuit of that goal. Then last night, the White House issued the plan. It was anti-climactic. After weeks of table-pounding on Trump’s part, the plan ceded almost all authority to governors. It was a textbook example of this president being all bark, no bite, and categorically weak.

The petty bourgeoisie will love it. They are weak. Trump is weak. But they will never admit either. It’s their bond. The refuge they seek in the president and the Republican Party might be illusory, but it is part of their identity. This president doesn’t just (appear to) represent their interests. He represents who they are. The hair, the makeup and the gilded Greek columns are fake, but fake doesn’t matter. It’s worth dying for.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 17 April 2020

Word Count: 855

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Let’s not give these people too much benefit of the doubt, shall we? Thousands of demonstrators rallied at Michigan’s Capitol in Lansing Wednesday to protest Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home order. “Conservatives, including state lawmakers, argued it went too far and was inconsistent,” according to the Washington Post.

The evidence?

 

“Confused shoppers found they could buy liquor and lottery tickets … but couldn’t visit the vegetable seed aisle … The order required large stores to shut down plant nurseries and rope off sections where carpet, flooring and paint were sold, provisions that conservatives found both arbitrary and harmful to business owners.

Michigan’s order does appear to be rather strict. But most people most of the time are willing to temporarily tolerate bureaucratic oddities — like not being able to purchase paint — in the name of public health and the greater good. Some people, however, will not recognize their civic duties. They will exploit oddities to grind yet another ax.

More significantly, some people will never recognize good faith in their political enemies even when good faith can be measured in bodies. Michigan has the third-highest death toll in the US right now from a viral pandemic that has killed more than 28,500 Americans in just over a month. Whitmer isn’t ordering people to stay home to violate lives and liberty. She’s ordering them to stay home to protect lives and liberty.

I’m guessing most Michiganders get it. The death toll itself is proof they can trust their governor to act in their best interest. Some minds, however, are hardwired to distrust the evidence of their eyes. For some people, it’s just not possible to trust anything — or anyone — that’s not on their side. They can’t, because, to them, there is no such thing as truth independent of self-interest. They can’t believe anyone would act in the interest of the common good, so when someone does, it’s cause for deep suspicion.

I agree with Charlie Sykes, who said this morning that protest, even mindless protest, is embedded in our nation’s psyche. “The Michigan protest had a sort of Zombie Tea Party vibe, a grassroots-like movement complete with a full-throated Don’t Tread On Me ethos,” he said. “And that ethos has deep roots, not just in conservative politics, but also in the national character, so don’t be too quick to simply dismiss it.” We shouldn’t dismiss it, but we also shouldn’t give it too much benefit of the doubt.

The paranoid mind tends to express itself with a kind of chronic intellectual dishonesty. If demonstrators were truly protesting overreach or unfair rules, they wouldn’t also be flying Confederate flags and chanting “Lock her up!”

If they were honest about protesting Whitmer — because they don’t like her, which is totally fair — they wouldn’t bother rationalizing their grievance with absurd anecdotes about confused shopping. The paranoid mind is socially aware enough to know it can’t attack the enemy for no good reason. So it invents one, regardless of whether it has bearing in real reality.

The flip-side of intellectual dishonesty is anti-intellectualism, which was the beating heart of yesterday’s protest. Whitmer and her public-health managerial elite can’t possibly know what they say they know about the coronavirus for reasons that don’t matter because those reasons have no bearing in real reality. What matters, to the paranoid, is that Whitmer is a Democrat acting in service of the common good, something they are hardwired to misunderstand as dispossession and tyranny.

Those reasons don’t matter to the paranoid, so they shouldn’t matter to everyone else. Unfortunately, intellectuals like Sykes end up making them matter when they use fancy phrases like “populist libertarianism,” as if the paranoid worldview were not a closed circuit of rage and resentment hostile to the very idea of republican governance.

Worse is when public intellectuals weaponize the paranoid complaint against fellow intellectuals with the singular goal of one-upping rivals instead of being wrong or right. Anti-intellectualism usually means anti-expert. But there are plenty of otherwise respectable intellectuals who care less about morality than they do about winning.

There is a simple way to test whether Gretchen Whitmer is trustworthy — if protesters get sick after getting out of their cars, shaking hands, hugging and (for God’s sake!) handing out candy to kids. If none of them dies, she’s wrong. It’s one dies, she’s right. The ultimate truth — death — won’t change the paranoid’s mind, though. There is no such thing as truth independent of self-interest. We shouldn’t dismiss paranoids.

But we shouldn’t give them too much benefit of the doubt, either.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 April 2020

Word Count: 755

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Something I have learned is the difference between presidential elections and politics. To be sure, our national discourse treats them as if they were synonymous. But once you pay close attention to the nature of elections — they tend to be more fantasy than reality — you understand more fully that meaningful shifts in the political landscape usually don’t line up with an electorate’s decision-making once every four years.

Our national discourse isn’t the only reason we usually think of presidential elections and politics as the same thing. Many of us, not just celebrants of Marxist electoral theory, possess a deep sense of “progress” — that American history itself, often aligned with the will of God, marches inexorably forward with or without human agency in the direction of greater freedom, justice, equality and prosperity for all Americans.

Most of us surely felt this way after the historic election of our first black president. Slavery and apartheid had been America’s great crime against humanity, but here was the same racist nation electing a biracial cosmopolitan as leader of the free world. Before 2008, “progress” might have felt abstract. Afterward, it felt so real that many, or most, white Americans came to believe that we entered an epoch of “post-racialism.”

That was wrong, obviously. Meaningful shifts in the political landscape usually don’t line up with presidential elections. America was no more “post-racial” after 2008 than it was “post-racial” after 2016 with the election of Donald Trump. Socially accepted sadism hadn’t disappeared. It was present the whole time. The sense of “progress” embedded in our culture, however, prevented many white Americans from seeing it.

Progress doesn’t line up with elections, but it does happen. Whether it’s good is a different question. Our history can be seen as a series of “political regimes” in which one party and its argument for the proper role of government in our daily lives prevails with a majority of voters for about four or five decades. The catalyst for regime change is usually a national crisis that can’t, or won’t, be resolved by the prevailing regime.

Herbert Hoover and the Republicans represented the political consensus in the run up to the market crash of 1929. The decade-long Great Depression ended it. Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats were preeminent through World War II and most of the Vietnam War. The backlash against that conflict and against civil rights advances — in addition the 1970s oil shocks — ended that one. Our current consensus of low taxation and low regulation began with Jimmy Carter, but it’s usually attributed to Ronald Reagan, who has been for the last half century the patron saint of US conservatism.

It’s tempting to see the current crisis as the beginning of the end of the Reagan-Bush regime. The new coronavirus has killed more than 26,000 people in this country and will likely lead to thousands more deaths. Its economic impact threatens to push unemployment up to 20 percent (that’s firmly in Great Depression territory). Farmers are plowing under crops and dumping milk while people are going hungry. Experts are warning of the need for “social distancing” practices for at least two more years, which, when you think about it, means we could be living abnormally for such a long time that the very notion of normal will eventually become a distance memory.

There’s another sign of regime change. What was politically impossible is all of a sudden politically expedient. For instance: Criminal justice reformers have for years been advocating for releasing prisoners convicted of minor crimes, such as the sale of marijuana. GOP lawmakers always balked, saying releasing them before they repaid debts to society would give people free license to commit future crimes. Yet, in the thick of a pandemic, states are releasing non-violent felons in droves. Just like that.

A host of progressive policy ideas are quickly worth talking about in Washington. Permanent paid medical leave, employment guarantees, universal basic income, higher minimum wages, universal health care, comprehensive immigration reform, even climate change regulation — the list goes on and on. In the past, the GOP and the business class said we can’t do this. It would hurt the economy! But we may soon be getting to the point where we can say: if we don’t do this, that will hurt the economy!

The pandemic probably does signal the Reagan-Bush regime is winding down. Does that mean it will come to a hard stop in 2020? Don’t bet on it. Transitions between regimes can be so long it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins until years after the fact. My guess is the beginning of the end of the Reagan-Bush regime was evident in the 2007-2008 panic. The end of the end might be the close of Trump’s first term or his second. What’s certain is that progress doesn’t happen on its own.

If you want the regime to end now, you have to force it.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 April 2020

Word Count: 821

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Please do not give congressional Republicans credit for standing up for the United States Constitution. Actions speak louder than words. If they believed what they say about limited government, checks and balances, the separation of powers, and the rest, every one of them would have voted to impeach, convict and remove the president. All but two kissed Donald Trump’s gold ring. (All but one, in fact: Mitt Romney; Justin Amash, a representative from Michigan, is now a Republican-turned-Independent.)

Liz Cheney, a representative from Wyoming, corrected Trump by way of Twitter this morning. She said he was wrong to say, as he did yesterday, that he has total authority as the president. She then proceeded to quote the 10th Amendment, which says any powers not delegated to the United States are reserved to the states “or to the people.” Some might ask if she’s finally seen the light. Answer: nah. Cheney had her chance to show loyalty to the Constitution. She had it. She failed. There’s no going back now.

This should be a familiar song-and-dance. When a Democrat resides in the White House, the Republicans become “constitutional warriors,” proclaiming themselves to be “constitutional conservatives” defending a “constitutional republic” from all manner of “government tyranny,” even if that means turning down free federal dollars to expand access to health care, all in the name of states rights and sovereignty.

But when a Republican resides in the White House, it’s all good. Deficits don’t matter, the whole idea of budgets doesn’t matter, “government interference” in the economy (read: banks and corporations) doesn’t matter, and even “government handouts” don’t matter. When Washington serves the rich and the powerful, that’s democracy! When Washington serves normal people and the common good, that’s totalitarianism!

If a Republican president accidentally reveals the charade — or, you know, if he willfully commits treason by extorting a foreign nation into sabotaging US elections — well, that’s not occasion for prosecuting to the fullest extent of the law and Constitution. That’s occasion for throwing all that away, then pretending to have done no such thing. The Republicans sing hosannas to limited government, checks and balances, the separation of powers while allowing a GOP president to run those principles down.

I suspect that the Republicans’ mode of betrayal — of their own conservative principles and of their fellow Americans — was never entirely clear until the start of the Trump administration. I suspect that many, though not most, Democrats and independents were still able to give conservatives the benefit of the doubt when they said they opposed, say, the expansion of the Affordable Care Act on grounds that it violated states rights and sovereignty. And even if they didn’t give conservatives the benefit of the doubt, what did it matter? Red states are red. Blue states are blue. Who cares?

I suspect that changed in 2017 when Trump and the Republicans raised taxes on rich blues states while cutting taxes for the very rich and very large corporations. Rich blue states had already been sending more in tax money to Washington than they were getting in return. Now Republicans were making it so rich blue states were subsidizing poor red states even more. (The mechanism was capping deductions for state and local taxes.) The new tax law not only revealed Republican betrayal of their own principles; it revealed the Republican “soft civil war” against a majority of the American people.

Most people in this country live and work on the coasts or in cities — areas where state and local taxes are higher than average to maintain a standard of living electorates in those areas demand from their respective governments. These are the same places feeling the brunt of the new coronavirus pandemic, places that no longer feel they can turn to the president for help in fighting a disease that has killed more than 23,500 people in a little over a month. Majorities of Americans now see that neither the president nor his party can be trusted, because when trusted, people end up dead.

And broke. After passing a $2 trillion stimulus package, $500 billion of which was set aside as a corporate slush fund, the Republicans insisted not one dollar can be used by cities and states to make up for economic activity lost in the pandemic. According to the Washington Post, every city surveyed, large and small, is going to run budget shortfalls caused directly by the cost of fighting the pandemic, leading to layoffs of school teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other public servants. This is so injurious and humiliating to the 93 million people who live in cities that a government official refused to be named when confirming this facet of the law to the Post: “A senior Treasury official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the planning, confirmed Monday the dollars ‘cannot be used to cover general budget shortfalls.’”

It’s one thing to see thousands die due to a president’s gross criminal negligence. It’s another to have to pay for all those deaths and keep paying. That might be enough for states with a majority of Americans in them to start thinking about doing their own thing in their own ways; enough for states like California, Oregon and Washington to form their own pact in a concerted effort to return to life to normal; and enough for states in the Northeast, led by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, to follow suit.

A soft civil war remains soft as long as one side doesn’t recognize what’s going on.

That’s changing. And that’s the last thing the Republicans want.

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 April 2020

Word Count: 928

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The president has been talking nonstop about the need to “reopen” the economy. Yes, we’re midway through a deadly pandemic. Yes, the new coronavirus has killed more than 22,000 Americans in a month. Yes, “reopening” the economy is unwise to anyone who is not Donald Trump. Getting reelected is his top priority, not your good health.

Sadly, the press corps has been repeating news of his pending decision to “reopen” the economy without scrutinizing the implicit claim at the heart of Trump’s decision: that the president has the constitutional authority and power to “reopen” an economy and thus to force state governors with differing and competing objectives to comply.

Before I go on, let’s be clear that the rhetoric of “reopening” makes little sense. The economy never closed. It can’t therefore be “reopened.” To be sure, the Trump administration issued guidelines for implementing “social distancing” for the purpose of slowing the spread of the new coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19. But these public-health guidelines from the CDC are not the same thing as “closing” the economy. Easing them, or lifting them, is not the same thing as “reopening” the economy. If Trump had ordered a lock-down across all 50 states, there’d be substance behind the rhetoric of “reopening.” But he hasn’t done even that, to the dismay of governors from both parties, because getting reelected is his top priority, not you.

If the president had ordered a lock-down across all 50 states, he would have damaged the economy (for the right reasons), but he would also have been responsible for the damage (again, for the right reasons). If there’s one constant in this random, arbitrary and chaotic presidency, it’s that Donald Trump is never responsible for anything.

Fortunately, for him, our system of government was designed to divide authority (and therefore responsibility) between and among Washington and the states. That gives Trump a context in which he can make-believe presidenting without actually being presidential, all the while blaming governors for outcomes largely of his own creation.

Unfortunately, for us, Trump has as much disrespect for our federalist tradition as he does willingness to exploit it by whatever means necessary to maintain power. One means is getting the press corps to uncritically repeat news of his pending decision to “reopen” a national economy comprising 50 states with 50 governors from both parties, most of whom privilege public health over Trump’s reelection. In other words, by declaring, implicitly at first and then explicitly, powers he does not in fact have.

This morning, the president said:

For the purpose of creating conflict and confusion, some in the Fake News Media are saying that it is the Governors decision to open up the states, not that of the President of the United States & the Federal Government. Let it be fully understood that this is incorrect. … It is the decision of the President, and for many good reasons.

With that being said, the Administration and I are working closely with the Governors, and this will continue. A decision by me, in conjunction with the Governors and input from others, will be made shortly! (my emphasis)

Make no mistake. This is a staggering statement.

Trump is saying in the clearest terms possible that a president has more authority in a state than that state’s governor. He’s implying, though not saying, that a governor must comply with his “order” to “reopen” that state’s economy. Again, “reopening” is a canard. He can’t reopen what never closed. And even if “reopening” the economy were a goal, lifting “social distancing” guidelines isn’t going to achieve it. What’s at stake here, in addition to public health (forcing governors to “reopen” in the middle of a pandemic will get people killed), is the very thing making us the United States.

Making this doubly staggering is that Trump is a Republican, whose party for the last half century glorified the rights and sovereignty of the states in order to slow, or prevent, the federal government’s “interference” with their sociopolitical orders. States then were protecting apartheid. States now are protecting public health. Yet the GOP president, pursuing his own self-interest, seems ready to nullify their sovereignty.

Usurping the power of state governors (specifically, declaring to have the legitimate authority to usurp state governors) is a natural outcome, I think, of Trump’s acquittal. When the Senate found him not guilty of betraying our country, and of denying the constitutional authority of the Congress, it set the stage for conflict with governors. The president isn’t above the law. He is the law. There are no states. He is the state.

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 April 2020

Word Count: 767

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Yesterday, I told you not to worry (too much) about the so-called Berniebros. These are the loudest, most extreme supporters of the Vermont senator, many of whom have huge platforms. Unlike Sanders, they oppose Joe Biden, the next Democratic nominee. Some have said they’ll vote for Donald Trump.

I told you not to worry (too much), because they won’t have the influence they had in 2016. Voters behave differently when there’s an incumbent. Democratic voters are in no mood for soul-searching. They won’t have to wrestle with their ambivalence for Hillary Clinton. It’s doubtful, I think, that Berniebros can crack Democratic unity.

However, the question of whether they have any influence, or much of any influence, is separate from the question I want to ask in today’s edition. Who’s side are they on? I don’t mean whether they are on Biden’s side or the president’s. I don’t mean whether they are voting Democratic or Republican? I mean the most fundamental of loyalties.

Let’s put the question in a context. The attorney general of the United States appeared on Fox News last night. He said the investigation into the Russian attack on the 2016 election, headed by former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, was “without any basis.” The inquiry, which jailed many of the president’s former aides, and revealed the extent of the Kremlin’s secret cyberwar, was an effort “to sabotage the presidency” of Donald Trump. Barr added that it was “one of the greatest travesties in American history.”

Barr has pretty much forfeited whatever remaining credibility he ever had. But even this could be interpreted as ordinary election-year pablum. Barr could be trying to rally the base or give fence-sitting Republicans, dismayed by the president’s complicity in foreign espionage, a reason to come home. It wasn’t Trump; it was agents of the “Deep State” scheming to ruin his tenure. You’re still a good American if you vote for Trump.

Then Barr said something else. He said China posed a “larger threat” to the United States than Russia. China, he said, is mounting a “full-court blitzkrieg” against us.

In fairness to Barr, China is a problem. But China did not wage cyberwarfare against us. China did not try to move American public opinion against the Democratic nominee. China did not conspire with Wikileaks and (apparently) former Republican members of the US Congress. Perhaps China will this year, but that does not detract from the fact that every US intelligence agency has told the Congress for four years that Russia has been and continues undermining the public’s faith in the republic.

If it’s laughable (and it is) that China is a “larger threat” than Russia, why would the attorney general of the United States, the man in charge of counterintelligence at the FBI, contravene the collective assessment of the entire intelligence community? For that matter, why would he suggest that Robert Mueller — a decorated combat veteran who rebuilt the FBI after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and a registered Republican — conspired with insurgents to harm Trump and injure the United States?

Perhaps there are many answers, but here’s one that rings true to me. Barr does not want us to pay attention to Russia, or understand fully the havoc it wrought last time around. That way, Vladimir Putin’s agents can repeat their past success. At the very least, the nation’s top law enforcement officer seems guilty of gross negligence, which, if it isn’t treason, is a disgusting and impeachable violation of the US Constitution.

The left has always struggled with Russia’s 2016 meddling, because it ran afoul of its narrative about Hillary Clinton. She and everything she represents — particularly the neoliberal international order — is why Trump won, not Russia. My guess is most leftists have come around, accepting the truth’s nuance and complexity, but nuance and complexity are bad for business when your business is attacking Democrats.

It’s important to sort out who I’m talking about. I’m not talking about socialists, real or imagined. I’m not talking about social democrats or people who are just sick and tired of politics as usual. I’m not talking about leftists deeply concerned, or genuinely skeptical, of American adventurism abroad. I’m talking about Berniebros, what I have called the Loud Leftists, people so anti-American they will burn everything down, because burning everything down, they believe, will hasten the coming revolution.

It’s important also to note that these fellow travelers have historical antecedents. The arch-conservatives of the 1970s, towering figures like Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol who defined, along with William Buckley, conservatism for two generations, were former leftists. Some of them, like Ronald Radosh and Whitaker Chambers, were so-called red-diaper babies and card-carrying members of the Communist Party USA.

Unlike the Berniebros, Podhoretz and others were fiercely loyal to America, so much so they were willing to overlook, or rationalize as necessary, atrocities committed by the US for the purpose of containing the “Communist contagion.” Unlike Podhoretz and the others, the Berniebros are fiercely disloyal to America, so much so they are willing to overlook, or rationalize as necessary, the republic’s slow dissolution at the hands of government leaders appearing in league with our former Cold War enemy.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 10 April 2020

Word Count: 863

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