I’ll say this for Bernie Sanders. His was the only campaign to contact me. I live in New Haven. Connecticut’s primary is in June. The Democratic nomination is, by that time, all over but the shouting. It’s nice that Sanders didn’t take us Nutmeggers for granted.

That said, I couldn’t help noticing something about his campaign’s last text message to me. “This pandemic has underscored the essential need for Medicare for All, which Bernie has been fighting for his entire adult life,” it said. “Are you in for Bernie?”

This is plain-vanilla campaign rhetoric. Normally there wouldn’t be anything noteworthy here. But we don’t live in normal times. When I got this message Monday, my first thought: Most Democrats like his policy proposals. They just don’t like him.

It seems he finally figured that out. Sanders dropped out of the running Wednesday. He will endorse Joe Biden. He will probably campaign for him. Biden, in return, will most likely dovetail, or absorb entirely, many or most of Sanders’ ideas in a bid to bring around Sanders’ supporters. Biden will do what party nominees do — open the door to unity, offer a carrot or two, build as wide a coalition as possible, and then move on.

To be sure, some so-called Berniebros will never walk through the door. Some of them are already saying they’d rather vote for Donald Trump. Some of them even have a financial incentive to accelerate the president’s carnage in the false hope that doing so will hasten the coming revolution. This is ridiculous but to be expected. Some people’s wounds will never heal. Some people make a living pretending to be oh-so-wounded.

Will they do to Biden what they did to Hillary Clinton? Maybe. But bear in mind the single biggest difference between 2016 and 2020. This time, there’s an incumbent. Last time, there wasn’t. In that difference, you’ll find Democrats behaving quite differently.

Democrats were eager to search for the soul of the Democratic Party four years ago. Very few if any Democratic voters desire soul-searching this time around. The stakes are too clear, because the stakes are so high. Democratic voters were willing to give Berniebros a hearing last time. Very few if any are willing to repeat the exercise.

Will they be loud? Indeed! The volume will be deafening thanks in part to Russian saboteurs and Republican operatives hoping to shatter Democratic unity. The president will accuse Biden of corruption (because his son worked for a Ukrainian gas company) and the Kremlin will magnify that allegation, and all the while Berniebros will second-guess the wisdom of nominating a former vice president with baggage.

Let ’em. Joe Biden isn’t Hillary Clinton, and that’s another fundamental difference. As hard as it is to say, the presumptive Democratic nominee will benefit from the sexism that kneecapped the former secretary of state. White working class bigots who voted for Sanders in the previous Democratic primary won’t hesitate to vote for Biden. They won’t have to choose between Trump, or a third-party spoiler, or that woman.

That most Democrats liked Sanders’ policies more than they liked him personally should tell us something. Character matters. Civic virtue matters. This isn’t to say Sanders isn’t virtuous. It is to say he didn’t foreground virtue as much as he did a revolutionary spirit. He didn’t think modeling virtuous behavior was needed. What was needed was knocking down impediments to freedom, equality and justice for all.

(And yelling. What was needed was lots of yelling.)

Again, most Democrats don’t disagree. But I suspect they want more than good ideas. Berniebros are quick to make fun of Democrats for choosing a nominee for “no reason” other than that he’s not Donald Trump. But Biden does stand for something, in addition to the many liberal policy proposals he brings to the table. He stands for — indeed, models — the kind of civic virtue most Americans expect from a president.

At the very least, Biden would be a perfectly fine, ordinary, though perhaps boring president who strives to treat Americans equally, so that when a viral pandemic strikes one part of the country especially hard, he won’t exploit the moment to reward friends and punish enemies, or personally profit at the expense of mass suffering and death.

But a President Biden would do more than the very least. Political scientist Josh Chafetz wrote this morning that “it’s entirely possible that a Biden presidency could lead to a more actual, lasting progressive policy movement than a Sanders presidency would have.” Even if a Sanders presidency would have had more progressive goals, he said, a Biden presidency would likely lead to more progressive and enduring results.

I think that’s right. Biden would be receptive to the party’s left flank while at the same time continuing to model anti-Trump civic virtues needed to win over legislators. He would, I hope, govern from the moral high ground — consensus-seeking, solutions-oriented, with an eye on the common good with protections for the least among us.

That’s not transformational. That’s not revolutionary. That’s not yelling.

But that’s not nothing 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: 09 April 2020

Word Count: 847

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You may have noticed a contradiction among members of the president’s most loyal voting bloc, white evangelical Christians. On the one hand, their leaders are not taking the coronavirus pandemic seriously. Pastors continue to hold Sunday services, many in the thousands, thus exposing their congregations, which include the sick and elderly, to a contagion that has killed 13,000 people in this country, 2,000 yesterday alone.

On the other hand, their leaders are taking the disease outbreak very seriously, seeing it as an outcome of mankind’s sinful ways, and thus encouragement to seek salvation through Jesus Christ. Rev. Franklin Graham spelled this out Saturday on Fox News:

This is a result of a fallen world, a world that has turned its back on God. So I would encourage people to pray and let’s ask God for help. I don’t think that God planned for this … It’s because of the sin that’s in the world. Man has turned his back against God. We have sinned against Him. We need to ask for God’s forgiveness.

In plain English, here’s the contradiction: the viral rampage is serious enough to fall to your knees in penitence, but not serious enough to cease attending church, where you are most likely to contract it among throngs of worshipers. If you don’t go to church Sunday, does that mean you’ve sinned against God? If you get sick, does that mean you’ve sinned against God? Are you damned if you do and damned if you don’t?

The answer is yes.

Now the popular thing for me to do at this point in the argument is to say damn the religion. Being put between a rock and hard place is why all religions, and all genuine commitments to God, are the world’s bane. This is not only popular in certain liberal-progressive-leftist quarters; it’s expected. A person of faith can’t be totally with it.

There are counterarguments aplenty, but here’s mine. Being put between a rock and a hard place is not what an all-knowing and all-loving God would ever do. No God I am bound to respect using the gifts of reason and empathy endowed to me would force my fellow human beings to choose between offending God and death by disease. By extension, no God I am bound to respect would ever threaten people with an eternity of pain and suffering for one brief lifetime, however “sinful” it was. Rev. Graham says humanity turned against God. More likely, his spiteful God turned against humanity.

This counterargument is doubly moral. I am making not only a claim on a situation Graham’s vindictive God put me in (a low-stakes version of Sophie’s choice); I am making a claim on the nature of God itself. I am making a claim on a God I believe should exist given the powers of consciousness and compassion I was born with as a human being. (I’m not really sure if I’m a theist or not; just roll with it, please.)

My counterargument is therefore better than the kind popularized by militant atheists like Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and Sam Harris. They say they are making anti-religious arguments, but in choosing to dismiss believers rather than holding them to their respective standards of morality, their arguments are in fact deeply anti-moral.

This is important to note for reasons that might not be obvious. By making anti-moral arguments against believers, militant atheists — and the liberal-progressive-leftist quarters that can’t quite take people of faith seriously — make room for Graham and other white evangelical leaders to appear deeply moral when they are in fact not.

You can’t be moral when you refuse to think through the ramifications of holding Sunday services in the middle of a global pandemic, thus endangering the sick and elderly as well as the young and healthy. You can’t be moral when you rationalize bad decisions using your earned, or unearned, reputation among religious Americans.

More importantly, and this is my big point, you can’t claim to be a follower of Jesus. Despite everything you think you know about him, Jesus was first of all an empiricist. He could not have been anything less, because empiricism lies at the heart of the Golden Rule. To do unto others what I would have done unto me, which is the center of Christ’s teachings, I must work toward an honest grasp of reality, a fact-based sense of truth and falsehood, an acceptance of human limits without despair, and a trust in the shared state of our fleeting existence. We, all of us, are equal in the eyes of God.

This isn’t new. Indeed, this argument is ancient.

But it’s hard to see through the fog of militant (and fashionable) atheism claiming to know the truth and white evangelical Christians claiming to know the true God.

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 April 2020

Word Count: 799

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JB Pritzker appeared on PBS Newshour last night. The Democratic governor of Illinois said the White House had arranged for personal protective equipment (PPE) to be flown in from China to meet shortages in the US. On its arrival, Pritzker said, the PPE will be turned over to private firms. States like his, which are experiencing the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, are expected to bid against each other for access to it.

The US Supreme Court overruled Monday a lower court’s decision to extend the period in Wisconsin to count absentee ballots. State law requires votes tallied by Election Day (today), but the lower court made an exception for the pandemic. The high court said no exceptions. As a consequence, many votes will be invalidated.

How are these two events related? At first, it seems they aren’t. But if you look closely, what they share in a wholesale rejection of the common good, a refusal to recognize the social contractual bonds that hold together a political community — a nation, a union. On the one hand, profit is privileged above human life and liberty. On the other, power is privileged above equality and democratic participation in the American franchise. Both, I think, are expressions of what I’ve come to consider a soft civil war.

I say “soft” because it’s entirely one-sided. (Feel free to pick your own nomenclature.) For all the outrage vented by leftists, liberals and Democrats, there’s still a sense, an unfounded faith, that everything will get better once Donald Trump is gone. But there’s more at work than false hope. There’s a sense — a blind faith — that history is working against the Republican Party, that the invisible hand of “progress” is pushing us steadily toward justice, with or without human agency. For this reason, I think, Democrats can’t quite bring themselves to see what’s happening before their eyes.

Brian Schatz, a liberal senator from Hawaii, was correct in saying, after the US Supreme Court handed down its ruling Monday, that “they are throwing away ballots. They are literally going to not count votes. We Democrats need to understand the magnitude of the Republicans enterprise here.” But he stopped short, and said only that, “They are systematically going to try to make it less easy, and less safe, to vote.”

Well, what does that mean when the highest court in the land makes citizens choose between good health and the right to vote? Let’s take it to its logical conclusion. What does it mean when a party has successfully created legal conditions with which to enforce minority rule in a majoritarian republic? For one thing, it’s sabotage of the common good. For another, it’s a deep betrayal of our national values, myths and interests. For yet another, it signals a civil-war posture. Democracy be damned.

The New York Times published a map last week showing parts of the country in which people are continuing to travel during the epidemic and parts of the country in which people are sheltering at home. The entire map is a variation of yellow and green, indicating state governors understand the importance of the common good in a time of a nationwide crisis. The more people do their part as individuals, the better off everyone will be.

I say the entire map but with a huge exception—the southeast quarter of the US. That’s the section of the country in which state governors have been either slow to react to the pandemic or have been hostile to those calling for greater commitments to public health. And it so happens that’s the part of the country that does not, historically speaking, care about the common good, because the common good is democratic.

Colin Woodard, in his book American Nations, divides that quarter in three. Each part represents the politics of the white Europeans who settled them. In what he calls “Tidewater”: “17th-century gentry recreated semi-feudal manorial society of English countryside. Conservative; respect for authority and tradition, not equality or political participation.” In “Greater Appalachia”: “Settlers from war-ravaged Ulster, northern England, lowland Scotland. Deep commitment to personal sovereignty and individual liberty; intense suspicion of external authority. In “Deep South”: “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” (stresses mine).

Assuming Woodard’s thesis is correct — that our politics can be explained to a degree by settlement patterns established centuries ago — it’s clear why the southeast isn’t doing its part in a viral pandemic. It won’t, even if that means people die. It won’t, because serving the common good is undermining their respective political orders.

Americans in other parts of the country, especially white liberals in big cities, might not have noticed the soft civil war. White people have more access to better health care. White people are not generally blocked from voting. White people might have continued believing the Republicans when they said states rights means the federal government shouldn’t get involved in local matters. Then the GOP tipped its hand.

In 2017, the Republicans passed a law cutting taxes for the very rich and very large corporations but paid for it by extracting wealth from rich states. Rich states, mostly blue, had already been sending more money to the treasury than poor, mostly red, states. By repealing deductions for state and local taxes, the Republicans in effect said blue states have no sovereignty they are bound to recognize. A federal government under GOP control will take your money as quickly as it throws away your votes.

When does a civil war turn from soft to hard? When the other side sees it.

So far, the national Democrats won’t.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 07 April 2020

Word Count: 953

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Political and social scientists have an interest in appearing aloof from the subjects of their research. So they, like their journalistic counterparts, created a vocabulary for talking about their work. Three words are now so ubiquitous as to be invisible. The US is “divided” and “polarization” is extreme due the historic forces of “partisanship.”

The problem, of course, is this vocabulary does more to misinform than it does inform. The major parties are in fact unequal in their influence. The Republicans can and will use democratic institutions to sabotage the American republic. The Democrats, meanwhile, mostly try defending these institutions, nurturing them when they can. The public, however, often doesn’t see the difference. As you often hear me say, most people most of the time have something better to do than pay attention to politics.

Most of the time. That changes in times of war — and during a global outbreak of the new coronavirus, which can cause a deadly disease called COVID-19. The US is today expected to surpass 10,000 deaths since the pandemic first started. The president, meanwhile, has abdicated his responsibility to defend and protect the public. He’s either left governors to their own devices or he’s undermined their efforts. He holds daily White House briefings giving the illusion of leadership without its substance.

That might be enough for just enough Americans, but Donald Trump’s fortunes tend to suffer when two variables collide in an instant. One, when the public is highly engaged, as it is now. Two, when the topic of discussion is falsifiable — when Trump’s claims can be proven right or proven wrong — as when he says people should try hydroxychloroquine, a drug once used to treat malaria that might treat COVID-19.

Most people most of the time are disengaged. Most of Trump’s statements might be true or might be false. These are normal variables. But when the president of the United States encourages Americans to take a pill to counteract the effects of a lethal virus, that’s singularity. Either he’s right or he’s wrong. We all of us will see clearly which is which. Lots of people will recover and live, or they will suffer and die.

Fact is, hydroxychloroquine (as well as chloroquine) can kill you. Poison Control: “Two old drugs used for malaria, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, are being studied for their potential to treat coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19). Side effects from these drugs can be very serious and include irregular heart rhythms that can result in death.”

Don’t believe it? An item from Live Science: “An Arizona man is dead and his wife is hospitalized after both of them self-medicated with chloroquine phosphate, a chemical used to treat fish for parasites, in an effort to ward off the novel coronavirus.”

The couple, both in their 60s, listened to President Donald Trump tout chloroquine, a decades-old antimalarial drug, as a very promising treatment for COVID-19 in a recent press conference. The woman, who asked not to be named, said she was familiar with the chemical because she used it to treat her koi fish (my stresses).

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House’s pandemic point man, keeps saying that hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine might be beneficial but we can’t yet know. The president, meanwhile, keeps ignoring his public health advisor, or kneecapping him. “What do you have to lose?” he asked last week. “Take it. I really think they should take it. But it’s their choice. And it’s their doctor’s choice … Try it, if you’d like.”

What do “divided,” “polarization” and “partisanship” mean when a president suggests taking a experimental drug that might harm or kill you? It could mean that even death itself — the ultimate truth — is subject to Trump’s fatalist demagoguery. Lots of Americans will take chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine believing he really means well. Lots of Americans will find a scapegoat to blame for their dearly departed.

It could mean those words do more to conceal empirical reality than reveal it. Most Americans are now highly engaged. The president is therefore highly exposed. With lives on the line, now’s not the time for a vocabulary of professional disinterestedness. We need more than ever a vocabulary spelling out for all who’s doing what to whom.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 06 April 2020

Word Count: 702

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One thousand Americans died yesterday from the coronavirus. One thousand Americans died the day before. One thousand Americans are probably going to die today. This is the reality governors are witnessing in their states. This is a hard fact they know well. In the face of the sheer scale of death, it’s a fact they won’t forget.

Jared Kushner knows better, though. The president’s “senior advisor” doubts whether governors know what they need. He doubts whether they know the inventory of medical supplies they already have. He doubts whether governors understand what he understands well, which, per the New York Times, is “how to make the government effective.”

Young Master Jared doubts their abilities so much he took time out of his busy day to explain how the government is supposed to work. During a White House press briefing Thursday, the multimillionaire real estate magnate, who never worked in a public capacity before his father-in-law won the presidency four years ago, said:

 

The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to be state stockpiles that they then use. … Some governors you speak to … they don’t know what’s in their state. Don’t ask us for things when you don’t know what you have in your own state. Just because you’re scared, you ask your medical professionals and they don’t know. You have to take inventory of what you have in your own state and then you have to be able to show that there’s a real need (my stress).

Never mind the bodies piling up. Never mind the fear and panic. He knows better. The pandemic, Kushner said, has revealed which leaders are “better managers than others.” Put slightly differently, don’t blame us for all the people dying. First blame yourselves.

I’m not going to talk about the staggering level of arrogance that goes into telling governors facing mass death that they don’t know what they are talking about. Michelle Goldberg has done that heavy lifting. In “Jared Kushner Is Going to Get Us All Killed,” the Times columnist revealed the 39-year-old’s public health bona fides:

 

Kushner has succeeded at exactly three things in his life. He was born to the right parents, married well and learned how to influence his father-in-law. Most of his other endeavors — his biggest real estate deal, his foray into newspaper ownership, his attempt to broker a peace deal [in the Middle East] — have been failures.

Which is to say, he has no public health bona fides.

I am, however, going to expand on Goldberg’s foray into political psychology, which I think is the best way of understanding what the hell is going on. To be sure, Kushner’s arrogance is blinding. To be sure, his very presence in the White House offends the American creed of hard work, fair play and merit. But there’s more here, I think, than rank nepotism and hubris. Kushner is a classic example of a political paranoid.

I know what you’re thinking. Kushner might be egotistical and breathtaking in his incompetence, but he’s not crazy. He’s not Joe McCarthy or Robert Welch, men who really believed communists lurked behind every bush and tree. He’s different from state legislators banning Sharia Law without fully understanding what it is. Paranoids feared that Barack Obama was a secret Muslim bent on destroying America. Sure, Kushner and his wife are complicit in the smear, but they didn’t really believe it.

This, however, is a one-dimensional view of political paranoia. Crazies believing crazy stuff is hardly worth bothering with. The problem, as Richard Hofstadter saw it in his classic essay, “The Paranoid Style in Politics,” is when non-crazies believe crazy stuff. “The idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds,” Hofstadter wrote in 1963. “It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.”

Paranoids aren’t irrational. Just the opposite. Paranoids are hyperrational, as Alan Wolfe noted in a 2013 reassessment of Hofstadter’s essay. That’s what makes them so dangerous. Their mode of thinking is clinical — and cold-blooded. It will not take into account non-rational human values, like compassion. It looks at a pandemic, with its attendant body count, and sees not a human tragedy but a management failure.

The reason paranoids refuse to account for non-rational human values is pretty simple, as I see it. It’s fear. They can’t trust. They can’t risk trusting. They can’t risk trusting what might happen after exposing themselves to opposing people and ideas.

They can’t trust themselves to decide what’s right for them or for the greater good. They can’t risk listening to public health officials. Listening might lead to changing their minds, and that’s impossible. To change one’s mind is to betray one’s tribe.

Which is the only thing paranoids trust.

Kushner won’t believe governors know what they are talking about when they say they need more ventilators and other things needed during a disease outbreak because believing they know what they are talking about is a leap of faith he will never take. “You have to be able to show that there’s a real need.” Meanwhile, 1,000 died yesterday. One thousand died the day before. One thousand are probably going to die today.

His incompetence won’t kill us. His paranoid mind will.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 April 2020

Word Count: 906

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I said during Donald Trump’s impeachment trial that the Republicans were acting less like a party and more like a separatist movement. A Republican president who breaks the law, as Trump did when he blocked congressionally appropriated aid to Ukraine, is not only above it; he is it. A law-breaking Democratic president, on the other hand, “deserves the full-force of Congressional investigation, prosecution and removal.”

 

The common view is that the Republicans are so partisan they are willing to follow Trump to hell. But that explanation is unsatisfying. Partisanship is one thing. Surrendering to the enemy is another. That, to me, explains why Ted Cruz said, “If we call John Bolton, I promise you, we are calling Hunter Biden.” Cruz isn’t voicing ordinary partisanship so much as the political desperation of a suicide bomber.

I said yesterday the Republican Party is best understood as an insurrection. Perhaps “separatist movement” is a better phrase. That would communicate the binary thinking of the Republican value system. There are two, separate but not equal.

I think that theory holds up now that we’re in the middle of a global pandemic. Many Republicans still behave as if the virus that has now killed 5,000 Americans is part of a secret conspiracy to bring down Trump. Some GOP governors behave as if doing the right thing (shutting down state economies) is a sign of disloyalty. The president himself still behaves as if now’s a good time to reward friends and punish enemies.

One thousand Americans died Wednesday. One thousand more could die today. Six and a half million filed for unemployment insurance benefits in one week, on top of 3.3 million last week. Yet leading Republicans, like Senator Ron Johnson, are urging people to go back to work. And leading Republicans, like Senator Tom Cotton, are calling for revenge on China. All the while, Trump appears poised to divvy up the spoils of last week’s passage of the $2 trillion economic stimulus so friendly states like Florida get all the help they need while unfriendly states like New York get jack.

The legislation, called the CARES Act, sets aside half a trillion dollars in corporate loans. (That’s on top of $4 trillion in unlimited “quantitative easing” and direct borrowing by and from the Fed.) A provision requires the president to designate an inspector general to oversee accountability of the fund. But in a signing statement, the president said he will do no such thing. After all, acquittal means a president is no longer constitutionally bound to take care that the law is faithfully executed. Well, a GOP president, anyway. Separate but not equal means Democrats go to the wall.

The GOP is acting like a separatist movement.

The rich get richer. The rest get whatever’s coming to them.

Too much? I don’t see why. This state of affairs has been crescendoing for some time. I had occasion recently to reread Sam Tanenhaus’ canonical piece in The New Republic. Published more than a decade ago, parts of “Conservatism Is Dead” read like they were written last month. Here’s how the former New York Times Book Review editor characterized the debate among conservatives in the years after World War II:

 

On one side are those who have upheld the Burkean ideal of replenishing civil society by adjusting to changing conditions. On the other are those committed to a revanchist counterrevolution, the restoration of America’s pre-welfare state ancien regime. And, time and again, the counterrevolutionaries have won. The result is that modern American conservatism has dedicated itself not to fortifying and replenishing civil society but rather to weakening it through a politics of civil warfare (my stress).

What has been the target of such a strategy? Well, everything these “revanchist counterrevolutionaries” were against, Tanenhaus said in plain English: “Many have observed that movement politics most clearly defines itself not by what it yearns to conserve but by what it longs to destroy — ‘statist’ social programs; ‘socialized medicine’; ‘big labor’; ‘activist’ Supreme Court justices, the ‘media elite’; ‘tenured radicals’ on university faculties; ‘experts’ in and out of government (again, my stress).

What did they stand for? Tanenhaus said “movement conservatives” always struggled with that question. But if Trump’s election is any indication — if Trump’s acquittal is any indication — conservatives, such as they are, no longer struggle. Why bother? To be against “the enemy” is enough, even if the enemy is American civil society itself.

To be sure, as Michael Harriot reminds us, that enemy has been Americans on the margins of civil society, specifically Americans of color. The margins are growing, though. Unemployment numbers are worse than they were in the Great Depression. Americans might die from the novel coronavirus in greater numbers than all the men who died fighting in World War II. In normal times, white Americans might not have noticed the Republican Party’s separatist movement. Normal times are history now.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 April 2020

Word Count: 814

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I was telling someone yesterday I’m worried about sounding too cold-blooded here at the Editorial Board. There’s enough literal death happening, given we’re in the middle of an Old Testament plague. I don’t need to pile on with a fatalist tone, I said. I should express more optimism, because Americans need hope in times like this, right?

Well, yes, but Americans must also contend with White House press corps that will not recognize empirical observable reality. It will not, or cannot, come to a moral conclusion about a president who will not, or cannot, put the nation’s interests above his. In the past, I said this isn’t just amoral. It’s anti-moral. It’s hostile to morality.

Until that changes, here I am, saying what needs saying, in plain English, so normal people can see what they need to see. The result, unfortunately, might sound fatalist.

There’s something else going on, though. When it comes to the presidency of Donald Trump, or any presidency, the press corps behaves as if the office contains a great mystery ordinary mortals can’t possibly understand. Reporters act as if the Oval Office itself were a kind of sanctum sanctorum, a holy place in which every decision has world-changing significance and every word uttered rings with multiverses of meaning.

This is not what you’d expect from highly educated and, for the most part, highly affluent professionals who dedicate their lives to gathering facts and seeking the truth without fear and favor. But then again, why not expect that? History is rife with characters who denied empirical observable reality in light of The Truth. History is rife with celebrants who turned anything, even the presidency, into a fetish of the occult.

There is, in fact, no mystery. The president really is preventing governors from getting enough coronavirus testing in order to keep low the official number of sick and dead. The president really is trying to keep the stock market from crashing more than it already has, therefore jeopardizing his chances of getting reelected this year, by shoveling billions in cash into the economy. The president really does not value human life. He does, however, value what human life can do for him. As Sarah Kendzior wrote: “Everything to Mr. Trump is transactional, and you — all of you — are the transaction.”

To be sure, none of this is kind. None of this is charitable. All of this, however, is based on empirical observable reality, variations of which have been repeated ad nauseam for four years. As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes wrote Tuesday: “HE WILL NOT CHANGE AND IS FUNDAMENTALLY INCAPABLE OF DOING THE JOB. That’s the story. I know it’s fun to watch the bouncing ball, but it doesn’t change. That’s it” (his emphasis).

Hayes was commenting on a press briefing in which the president said his “goal” was keeping the body count from the COVID-19 outbreak from surpassing 240,000. That “goal” would exceed the number of Americans who died fighting in the Korean and Vietnam Wars combined. That “goal” would rival the number of Americans who died fighting in World War II’s European and Pacific theaters. That “goal” was not the most important fact, evidently. The New York Times’ Peter Baker could not help but notice “Trump sounding different today. Scale of death appears to have changed his tone, at least.”

Tone is what Hayes means by “bouncing ball.” Two weeks ago, Trump declared a national emergency. The press corps reported en masse the president’s new “somber” tone. Then came the week in which he moved to “reopen” the country despite the mounting death toll. That was nuts, but not disqualifying. Reporters continued to believe he’d act presidential and when he did, it was not a bug but a feature — not of his administration but of their faith in the power and the glory of the presidency.

“Fetish” is the right word to describe the press corps’ approach to the office. A fetish is a thing, or idea, that represents something that it is not. A hand is a hand, but a hand fetish has more to it than a hand. The hand represents something the fetishist projects onto it. Trump’s tone may represent something the press corps projects onto him.

That something may be natural fear that our leader is terrible and that lots of people are going to die from a global pandemic in which the US is now the epicenter. Maybe reporters, who understand the dire circumstances we face, are trying to will him into taking appropriate action and proper responsibility. But then again, maybe not.

It may be the press corps can’t believe an American president would undermine the nation’s effort to combat a disease. It may be reporters can’t believe a president would favor friends and punish enemies in the middle of an Old Testament plague. It may be they can’t believe what their own eyes are telling them and trust instead their true faith in the mysteries of a sanctum sanctorum only they have the power to understand.

History is rife with celebrants who turned anything into a fetish of the occult.

Now may be no different.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 April 2020

Word Count: 855

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There’s a fake argument circulating that goes something like this: The president isn’t to blame for the coronavirus pandemic that has now killed more Americans than were murdered on Sept. 11, 2001. Instead, the Democrats are to blame. They distracted Donald Trump with their pointless impeachment and failed attempt to remove him.

The “lost month,” as the New York Times called it, wasn’t the result of indifference, paranoia and/or dereliction of duty on the part of the chief executive, but instead the result of petty partisanship and senseless hate of a president fighting for the American people.

Or something like that. It’s hard to say. These talking points are never well-thought out. Just speaking them, as if they were spells and incantations, is what matters to the sycophants, golems and ghouls the president enjoys surrounding himself with.

In any case, we know the truth.

US intelligence officials briefed Trump in early January, warning that a contagion was coming the likes of which we have never seen before. The president did nothing. Senators from both parties were briefed in early February. They urged Trump to ask for emergency funding to counteract COVID-19’s spread. The president did nothing.

On Saturday, the US death toll reached 2,000. Three days later, it reached 3,000. Sept. 11, 2001, had 2,977 victims. At this rate the body count might actually eclipse the number of Americans who died fighting in World War II (about 300,000). Indeed, that seems likely. The White House’s point-person, Dr. Deborah Birx, told the Today show Monday we can expect as many as 200,000 dead “if we do things almost perfectly.”

The fake argument gets something right, though. It gets right the connection between the president’s acquittal and his malign negligence. Think about it for a minute.

He was acquitted of treason (extorting a foreign leader so he’d interfere with an election). He was acquitted of sabotage (undermining the constitutional authority of the Congress.) Thanks to the GOP, there’s virtually nothing Trump has to do to honor his oath to defend the US from all enemies. There’s nothing he has to do to “take care” that our laws are faithfully executed. Nothing, because who’s going to make him?

Well, public opinion might. That can be addressed by signing into law (so far) three rounds of stimulus that will shovel mountains of cash into the economy, buoying Wall Street confidence and keeping high the Dow and S&P 500. That can also be addressed by preventing the public from knowing how many people are dead from COVID-19.

If that means malicious lying, so be it. If that means prohibiting hospitals from getting tests, ventilators and personal protective equipment (PPE), so be it. If that means subverting states’ rights and sovereignty, so be it. If that means mass death, so be it. Trump was acquitted of putting his interests above the nation’s. Why stop now?

The Times reported a phone call Monday in which the governors, Republican and Democrats, confirmed two vital facts. One, that the federal government has been outbidding states with vendors selling tests, ventilators and PPE. Two, and at the same time, the federal government has not provided states with enough tests, ventilators and PPE. “I haven’t heard about testing being a problem,” Trump said, which is code for, “I don’t want to hear about testing being a problem so I literally won’t hear it.”

Yes, Trump will block the states from getting coronavirus testing in order to keep the national number of dead artificially low. Yes, that’s a terrible thing to presume of one’s president, but seriously. What did you expect? Is any of this all that surprising?

This is the same president who ordered the confiscation of babies from immigrant mothers; who banned Muslims from entering the US from certain countries; who attacked civil liberties and undermined impartial justice; who inspired acts of antisemitism, racism and mass murder; who stole daily from public coffers; and who got away with treason, complaining all the while that he doesn’t get enough credit.

The only people left in America capable of surprise are those who voted for his promise to punish people for the fun it. The only people left in America capable of surprise are those who don’t think it’s fun anymore, not when they are getting punished. They might say what a Trump voter said about a year ago: “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

Don’t think Trump is in trouble with his base, though. It’s as masochistic as it is sadistic. The GOP itself has a high tolerance for high frequency death, even if Republicans are among the dead. After all, gun massacres happen in red states, too. Instead of tightening their gun laws, however, they seek to loosen them more.

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: 31 March 2020

Word Count: 803

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So much for “reopening” the country.

The president spent all of last week talking up the need to rescind the administration’s “social distancing” guidelines so the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic would not be worse than the disease itself. He said restrictions would end by Easter.

Donald Trump’s decision to move ahead despite the outbreak’s mounting death toll came on a single day, according to Bloomberg News, after “he watched a sermon delivered by a prominent evangelical preacher to an empty megachurch. It gained momentum as Trump listened to advice from conservative economists who warned of near-apocalyptic financial damage, a view reinforced by a free-fall in markets.”

Then, late last night, the administration announced the guidelines would be in effect through April. That suggested that “the adults in the rooms” won an internal debate. It suggested that public health officials, who know what they are talking about, were able to convince the president, who does not know what he’s talking about, of the error of his ways. It suggested that in the end, science and pragmatism prevailed over politics.

They didn’t.

By spending the week talking about possibly lifting restrictions, the president accomplished a slew of things — all of them cynical, nihilistic and baldly political.

He continued his war against the press. The more reporters asked how he could even think of lifting restrictions before the pandemics peak, the less time they had to ask why his administration dilly-dallied for a month, the less time they had to ask why he didn’t heed warnings of a coming contagion, the less time they had to ask why the president turned down Congressional funding, all making its spread far deadlier.

He signaled to white evangelical Christians that not even an act of God would stop him from representing their interests. Son-in-law Jared Kushner, who does not know what he’s talking about, apparently told his father-in-law, “four days after the stay-at-home advice,” that “reopening” by Easter Sunday would be meaningful to his base.

The president also succeeded in persuading some Americans he has more authority than he actually has. No president can “reopen” a country amid a national pandemic. The US is federalist system of government, not a unitary system, like France. Governors are free to follow, or not follow, Center for Disease Control’s public health guidelines. Guidelines are not federal regulations or federal law. They cannot be enforced legally.

So “reopening” the country was always a farce.

Trump did the same thing over the weekend when he said he was “considering” quarantining New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, the pandemic’s regional epicenter. A US president can do no such thing unless he’s prepared to send military troops to establish checkpoints. He wasn’t, of course, but that didn’t stop him from claiming that he “changed his mind,” as if he ever had that option to begin with.

By claiming powers he does not have, Trump created rhetorical conditions in which governors can appear at odds with his constitutional authority, even as they work to protect their constituents. In such conditions, Trump can blame individual governors, Republican or Democrat, for the coming recession. He can use this inter-governmental conflict to hide his administration’s efforts to undermine state-level containment.

States need ventilators. The administration isn’t helping; it is in fact outbidding them, according to the governors of Massachusetts and Michigan, a Republican and a Democrat, respectively. One gets the feeling they are not entitled to aid. One gets the feeling they must first kiss Trump’s ring. “I want them to be appreciative,” he said.

If that sounds like quid pro quo, that’s because it is. If that sounds like the same thing Trump did to Ukraine’s president, that’s because it is. And you’re not alone. CNN’s Ronald Brownstein asked Friday: “Trump says the quiet part out loud: after signaling he’d only help governors who praise him, he says so explicitly. Isn’t this essentially what he said to Ukraine: play ball politically or you won’t get your aid?” Yes, it is.

My senator, Connecticut’s Chris Murphy, echoed that on Twitter:

“Mr. President, Michigan needs masks and tests. People are going to die if we don’t get them.”

“I would like you to do me a favor, though.”

Americans are notorious for their short memories. For this reason, we have been looking at the coronavirus pandemic as a matter of public health or economics or both. It’s more than that, though. It’s a continuation of our ongoing constitutional crisis.

A president who has been acquitted of betraying his country after extorting a foreign leader into sabotaging our national elections is just the kind of president who would betray his fellow Americans when the mood strikes him. Who’s going to stop him?

That said, the comparison isn’t quite fair. After all, no one died from Trump’s betrayal. The COVID-19 death toll now stands at nearly 2,500. The CDC expects 200,000 dead and more. We have not been thinking of constitutional crises in terms of body count.

We should, though. Treason kills, too.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 30 March 2020

Word Count: 835

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I consider myself a leftist. That may come as a surprise. I have written a lot here at the Editorial Board in support of a revival of small-r republican liberalism. I’ve also been quite critical of leftism in general and of Bernie Sanders in particular. Fact is, though, I’d love to see virtually all of the Vermont senator’s proposals become law. My beef with Sanders is more a matter of style and principle than of policy and programming.

My other beef is with a particular kind of leftist, the very loud ones who put all politics in huge boxes — good and bad. Little about politics, especially legislative outcomes, can be put into boxes clearly labeled and clearly understood. Good people vote for bad things for good reasons. Bad people vote good things for bad reasons. Not only do some leftists project their views loudly; they project silly visions of magical thinking.

When word came that the president would support legislation that would send every American a check for a thousand dollars and more, the Loud Leftists jumped at the chance to accuse the Democratic Party, which has spurned their candidate, of being “outflanked” by the Republican Party. Here was proof, they said, that the Democrats really are the party of the rich. The Republicans were moving in a socialist direction.

Or something like that. I suppose someone somewhere has probably articulated this view in full voice. I’m not inclined to search for it, though. It’s too ridiculous. The George W. Bush administration cut stimulus checks to blunt the impact of a Great Recession about to steamroll the country. Are Loud Leftists prepared to declare the man who lied to America to launch endless war a Sanders forerunner? I hope not.

What the Trump administration is set to do is obviously much larger in scale, but the objective is the same — to stabilize an economy reeling from a global crisis. But “government intervention” in the economy is not the same thing as socialism. (It’s also not, for the love of God, the same as Universal Basic Income. Checks from the latest round of stimulus funding will last a few months. UBI is about long-term stability.)

Indeed, seeing them as equal is accepting as true propaganda conservatives have used since the Cold War. “Government intervention” was reserved for liberals who favored a social safety net. Any “government intervention,” to Cold War conservatives, was equal to totalitarianism. The question, as we face a plague none has ever faced, shouldn’t be whether to “intervene,” but whether it leads to republican outcomes.

The Loud Leftists were at it again after the Senate passed this week a stimulus package worth $2 trillion. They focused on the corporate giveaways (or “welfare”) that really do stink to high heaven. Here was proof, once again, that the Democrats were rolling over for Trump, thus being complicit in turning the reins of government over to the rich.

Yet they ignore, or seem to ignore, what the Democrats got in return. More money for unemployment insurance. More money for health care. More money for hospitals. More money for cities and states. More in direct cash payments to individuals. In short, billions and billions of dollars for their priorities during a national crisis.

You could say, as the Loud Leftists say, that the Democrats are guilty of bailing out corporations who already don’t pay much, or any, federal income tax. But you could say that that’s what they were willing to accept to get what they wanted. The same, of course, could be said of the Republicans. To get “government handouts” for the rich, the Republicans were eager to eat “government handouts” for workaday Americans.

The truth of the matter is clear in the sheer size of the legislation. It started at $850 billion when the White House was negotiating with Senate Republican only. Trump had to get through Nancy Pelosi, however, and that’s when the price tag more than doubled. The president could have enforced a cap on spending, but he didn’t, and neither did anyone else. The mode of bargaining wasn’t either/or. It was and/also.

Again, none of this is socialist, per se, but we keep talking about it as if it were, because we keep thinking about 21st-century politics in 20th-century terms. We continue using old conservative rhetoric from the Cold War to describe our current reality. I don’t think we are moving in the direction of socialism as much as we are in the direction of corporatism, which, when you think about it, makes a kind of sense.

All things being equal, you can imagine a long-term future in which the monopolistic corporations have become so dependent on the federal government for shareholder-value maximization that they lose control of it, so much so that they grow weak and vulnerable to the whims and whimsies of a fascist president much like the current one.

All things being equal, you can imagine a long-term future, as Mihail Manoilescu did in 1938, with The Century of Corporatism, in which the state is total, and capital’s influence has been squeezed out and its influence diminished, as the country moves down a path toward an inevitable historical endpoint in which “the Social left” rises in triumph.

All things being equal, you can imagine America becoming China.

This leftist is too American for that.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 27 March 2020

Word Count: 890

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