What’s it going to take for the Democrats in the US Congress to see the danger? How often must the Republicans spurn, violate or profane the core values going into being an American for the Democrats to call them out? When will they stop taking it in the face and give it in kind?

This isn’t a matter of pride. This is a matter of cold-blooded partisanship. The Democrats keep looking at the Republicans as if any minute they’re going to snap out of it. They must start treating the GOP as an insurgency.

The closest any Democrat, not to say leading Democrat, has gotten to naming correctly the Republican Party’s near-wholesale defiance of the people’s sovereignty comes from Pennsylvania’s attorney general. In a brief sent to the US Supreme Court, Josh Shapiro said,

Texas’s effort to get this court to pick the next president has no basis in law or fact. … (It) should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated (bold mine).

Shapiro is talking about a lawsuit filed this week by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton alleging that millions of votes in four swing states were cast illegally and unconstitutionally on account of mail-in provisions made during the covid pandemic. The suit asks the high court to invalidate all of those votes, thus handing Donald Trump reelection.

The suit won the support of attorneys general from 17 Republican-controlled states. Yesterday, it got the backing of 106 members of the Republican House conference, a majority. Shapiro, a Democrat, is joined by 20 states, including GOP-run Georgia, in asking the high court to dismiss the case with prejudice, because all of it — and I mean all of it — is predicated on a towering mountain of fantastic lies.

Naturally, the press corps’ is focused on the chances of the case being heard. They’re slim. All nine justices have rejected a similar earlier case brought by Pennsylvania Republicans. Paxton’s lawsuit is a last-ditch effort by the losing candidate and his allies to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. It is a coup d’etat destined to fail, though Trump appointed three of the court’s justices.

That’s why the Democrats aren’t worried. The Republicans are merely demonstrating loyalty, they think. This is just another round of performative partisanship. They trust the Republicans will get back to business after Inauguration Day. And that’s where they make their first mistake.

Remember that America is a covenant. It’s a moral agreement made collectively as a political community, a social contract based on shared values and shared purpose. There’s lots of room for disagreement, but one thing’s permanent. The people’s sovereignty is supreme. If you agree to that, you’re welcome to participate. Put quite another way, you can’t disagree — not if you want to be considered an American.

That the Republican coup is going to fail is beside the point. The point is that 18 state leaders and 106 US representatives have issued a declaration, one that should carry as much moral and political weight as their oaths of office. They no longer agree with the superlative principle constituting the foundation of our republic.

They have declared where they stand, and where they stand is against America. Yes, the Republicans are performing partisanship. But that performance has led them to the edge of treason.

Remember, too, that these Republican leaders come from states currently being savaged by the covid. They did not take seriously the spread of the new coronavirus, because taking it seriously would have enraged the GOP president. Cumulatively, more than 3,000 Americans died Wednesday. More than 3,000 died Thursday. More than 3,000 will die today.

According to USA Today, more Americans have now died from the covid than all who died fighting in World War II! Moreover, more than 3,000 people are expected to die each day for the next 60 to 90 days, even if a vaccine is available. And yet the Republicans continue to do little or nothing about it.

Two things are true at the same time. The Republicans stand against America. The Republicans are sacrificing themselves to stand against America.

Together, these facts should illustrate the reality we are facing, a reality that the Democrats won’t call by name. The Republican Party is now an insurgency, one that has many heavily armed domestic terrorists prepared to act at the slightest word from the president. If the party does not get what it wants, it stands ready to blow up itself and the rest of us.

The Democrats, meanwhile, act as if eventually they can negotiate with these “suicide bombers.” They can’t. Indeed, they mustn’t. Compromise begets more of the same. They don’t want to force the Republicans to choose a side. This isn’t, the Democrats say, about “us versus them.”

The problem is the Republicans have already chosen.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 December 2020

Word Count: 816

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Gird your loins for a piece inspired by Ted Cruz. Yeah, you’d think I’d know better. In my defense, however, this piece isn’t really about the most hated member of the United States Senate. It’s about truth and what it means to be a man in the age of the covid.

Our story began last week when Cruz posted to Twitter a picture of himself holding up the head and rack of a recently shot eight-point buck. “A beautiful day in South Texas,” he wrote. Replies were a mix of admiration and disdain. The photo captures almost perfectly a kind of conventional wisdom benefiting Cruz so long as it isn’t scrutinized all too seriously. Real men hunt. Republicans hunt. Ergo, real men are Republicans.

This conventional wisdom, understandably, attracts critics. They point out that Cruz is a product of the Ivy League two times over, that he’s an attorney, that he’s argued cases before the United States Supreme Court. If anything he is of the political elite, not against those whom he claims to oppose in the name of the common men who constitute the Republican Party. The conclusion drawn by skeptics is that Cruz’s image of rugged authenticity is hypocritical, because it’s entirely “performative.”

You could say that. You could also say the whole notion of authenticity is kind of phony. Once you start questioning its bases, you realize it’s relative. Moreover, you could say hunters pose often with the animals they shoot. Pictures are demonstrations of pride, but also boasting. In that sense, Cruz’s tweet is within established norms. Sure, he isn’t normal. He’s a senator. But he’s not doing anything out of the ordinary.

Cruz’s critics are right. He is, indeed, performing. But they’re right for the wrong reasons. They are paying attention to a member of the political elite pretending, in his picture, to be a regular Joe. In doing so, however, they’re overlooking something obvious. Two things, actually. One, Cruz is a member of the political elite. Two, the elites hunt. Historically, that was part of what being elite meant. You didn’t hunt for food. Commoners did that. You hunted for one reason: You enjoyed killing things.

Fact is, unless you are literally living off the land, no one needs to hunt. To be sure, poverty and hunger are still social and political problems, but no one seriously thinks the solution, or even a solution, is to go hunting. This is why hunting is unpopular. (I mean so unpopular as to be taboo in some quarters.) No one feeds themselves by way of hunting. Hunting, therefore, is a pastime. It’s a pastime predicated on killing things.

Killing things isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Given the present state of humankind’s relationship to nature, hunting can solve an intractable problem. Wolves used to hunt deer in Connecticut. Then we got rid of them. The deer are now so abundant, there isn’t enough food for them, or they commit nighttime vehicular suicide. Deer don’t have natural enemies anymore. Human beings are now a kind of artificial predator.

What’s bad is telling ourselves reasons for hunting that hide the real reasons for hunting. It’s not for food. It’s not because of “tradition.” It’s not anything noble. The only reason is to kill something. You get a rise out of pulling the trigger. My sense is that when hunting was popular — when there was less incentive to justify it — people understood this truth without being conscious of it. The power to kill is pleasurable.

It’s also a truth you keep to yourself. There’s something shameful about taking a picture of yourself with your latest kill while saying that the only reason you killed it was because killing it was fun. Sure, that might be the truth of things, but you didn’t just come out and say it! Better to have a convenient and acceptable explanation. I didn’t kill this deer, because I wanted to. I killed it, um, because it’s protein, yeah, that’s it!

Which brings me back, unfortunately, to Ted Cruz. He doesn’t care about shame. He doesn’t care about values, norms, any of the “good-sounding” reasons — protein, yeah, that’s it! — that justify killing things. Commoners explain themselves. Normal people feel shame. Members of the political elite do not, because they are the political elite.

Cruz is performing. But it isn’t regular Joe stuff. What he’s performing is a hard truth in this age of the covid. Three thousand Americans died yesterday from the disease. Three thousand more are going to die today. Yet Cruz and his party do nothing. They are, in fact, cheered on. What’s he telling us? It must be this. I can kill with impunity. I could kill you. I’d never pay a price. I’d be rewarded. That’s what it means to be a real man.

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 December 2020

Word Count: 801

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As you know, the Rev. Raphael Warnock is running to represent the state of Georgia in the US Senate against incumbent Republican Kelly Leoffler. Their runoff next month, as well as the one between Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican David Perdue, is the site of intense national focus. If the Democrats take both seats, they win control of the upper chamber. This more than anything explains the extreme online reaction Tuesday to a short tweet by Warnock. “I am a pro-choice pastor,” he wrote. To wit:

Charlie Kirk: “You cannot be pro-abortion and also be a Christian.” Erick Erickson: “So not really a follower of the actual Jesus, but the one you’ve conjured in your head. Got it.” Graham Allen: “If you are ‘pro-choice’ pastor, you are not only NOT pastor. You are a crappy Christian!” Ben Shapiro: “I am the square root of a negative number.”

It should be said this is Warnock’s opinion. People are entitled to theirs. A difference of opinion, however, isn’t why Erickson and his ghouls are reacting so strongly. They are trying to discredit his religion. They are trying to delegitimize his faith. And they are doing this because Warlock, as the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr., once preached, speaks with righteous authority. If you can take that away, you have taken away Warnock’s mightiest political asset.

A political defense is, therefore, appropriate. One of the best political defenses comes from the Rev. Dave Barnhart, an ordained elder of the United Methodist Church who heads something called the house churches of Saint Junia in Birmingham, Ala. Some time ago he wrote the following, which has been widely shared by liberal Christians.

“The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn.

He went on.

It’s almost as if, by being born, they have died. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.

But Rev. Warnock’s opinion deserves a religious defense — a liberal and conservative religious defense. The former comes from the African-American church, where most people actually oppose abortion. However, they do not, and will not, take a position by which they are seen to be telling Black women what to do with their bodies. Black history is a history of state claims on Black bodies. The Black church, I think, is manifesting the moral equality at the center of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. Would you accept authority over your body in defiance of your own? Of course you wouldn’t.

For a conservative religious defense, allow me to draw on my own experience. I was once part of an obscure (white) evangelical Protestant sect called — deep breath — Christians Gathered Unto the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ. I don’t recall anyone mentioning abortion, but I do recall vividly that the order of power was sacred. God over Man. Men over women. And parents over children.

I vividly recall the importance of parental authority, because it was literally beaten into me. Dissent was intolerable even in diapers. Equally intolerable? The rights of “the unborn” above the rights of parents. You can totally be a pro-choice pastor. You can be pro-choice and religiously conservative.

In everything, there was extreme skepticism of “this world,” which is Satan’s. That meant some of my family members refused to put up Christmas trees. It was too pagan for one thing. For another, it needlessly risked their mortal souls. Why tempt God’s wrath with the appearance of worshipping a false deity? (Bring that up the next time someone rails against the “war on Christmas.”) I think of this when it comes to “the unborn.” They’re mentioned only twice, in Psalms, both with reference to future generations. Nothing, however, about inchoate human beings. You could say, with legitimate Biblical authority, that the movement for life is a movement for idolatry. You could also say, with religiously conservative fury, that it’s time to get back to Biblical basics: prisoners and immigrants, widows and orphans, the sick and the poor.

My point isn’t to endorse a religiously conservative view. Indeed, I dislike it. My point is that Erickson and his ghouls aren’t as religiously conservative as they would like us to believe. They are, of course, politically conservative. Fascist, I would say, and there’s the rub. Deep in the heart of the world’s fascist politics is a crippling anxiety about the place of women in society, especially women’s bodies being out of the control of men.

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 December 2020

Word Count: 909

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Liberal democracy is not a good thing for political parties of the right. While it can deliver for most people most of the time, liberal democracy can’t for the Republican Party or its counterparts around the globe. Elite members of such political parties have everything they need politically, because they are rich, very rich or very obscenely rich.

They don’t need democratic politics the way you and I need democratic politics, because god-like wealth, status and power have already brought them superlative levels of freedom. What they need, or what they tell themselves they need, is for liberal democracy to get out of the way so they can become even more very obscenely rich.

Democracy won’t get out of the way, so political parties of the right have devised ways of making their goals appear as if they’re everyone’s. They must because their real goals are gothic: minimal if any taxation on their money, especially dynastic money, and minimal if any regulation of the means of adding more to the pile.

Most people most of the time don’t care about that, because they have some measure of caring for their fellow human beings. Indeed, they sympathize with the poor and resent the rich. There’s only one thing the conservative rich can possibly do. They lie — and lie and lie.

While the conservative rich really do believe they are better than everyone else — they have “good genes,” after all — they can’t say that. That gets them in trouble. While they really do believe morality is a ploy by the weak (you and me) to defend themselves against the strong (them), they can’t say that. That gets them in trouble. So they spend as much time masking their true intentions as they do gobbling up as much as they can in the barbarous belief that human beings can’t behave better than wild animals.

When an anonymous billionaire was asked in July if it’s fair to get richer while the covid pandemic kills Americans and leaves devastation in its wake, he said: “I don’t know. Is war fair? Do people die in a war? Yes. You’ve got a virus that is affecting people. It’s pretty clear who it affects. (He meant people who are old and sick.) So nature is saying, ‘I’m going to pick on you.’ Is it fair? Is it right? No. But that’s life.”

This is social Darwinism, among a repertoire of lies the conservative rich have told us for decades. Their extraordinary wealth, and consequently their extraordinary power, aren’t just natural; they are preferable to the impure hand of government taxing and regulating what they say should not be taxed and regulated, because doing so threatens the economy, a system in which all of us have stake. This lie appeared noble, tied to our collective fate. It was, however, gothic. It was predicated on mass suffering.

It was also very useful during the 40 years that liberal democracy seemed intractable. The conservative rich had to pretend. They had to act as if they cared about equality. They had to make like they loved America. They had to — until Donald Trump came along.

Trump told “the truth.” Might equals right, and anyone telling you otherwise is trying to scam you. He was popular with the white working class. The Russians attacked Hillary Clinton but it didn’t cost him. The best part? He could show utter contempt for his own supporters (Mexico’s gonna pay for the wall ha ha!) and they totally fell for it! With his rise came the luxury of not having to fake it anymore.

For the last four years, the Republicans haven’t bothered appeasing liberal democracy with all the many lies they honed to perfection over the years. National character? Didn’t matter. States rights? Didn’t matter. Norms and institutions? Didn’t matter. Civil society? Didn’t matter. “Big government”? Didn’t matter. Budgets and spending? Didn’t matter. Patriotism? Even that didn’t matter.

Everything the conservative rich told us they cared about was stripped away. Their true goals — tax cuts, business deregulation, control of judges — were revealed. The GOP showed its true face.

And it continues to.

The president isn’t winding down his term. He’s “broadening” a “pressure campaign” to subvert the election and the will of the people. Trump twice called last week the speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. That’s the third time he has intervened personally in an attempt to stay in office. Federal law requires the US Congress to recognize the election’s outcome, but so far all but 25 Republicans refuse to say Joe Biden won.

How far they are willing to go along with Trump depends on how much they see the need to appease liberal democracy.

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 December 2020

Word Count: 782

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There’s one thing I can rely on when I write about the president, the Republicans and their treasonable rhetoric and behavior. Like clockwork, a liberal reader will respond, saying isn’t, in fact, treason. It’s something else, perhaps disloyalty or sedition. The US Constitution is clear about treason’s meaning. I should be more careful with my words.

Fair enough, but also fair is saying liberals are quick to doubt themselves. They are ready to compromise even when the Republicans hold compromise in contempt. They are prepared to appease authoritarians, because mild appeasement costs less than bold confrontation. To liberals, partisanship is the problem, not the solution. They refuse, therefore, even when refusing means failing to take their own side in a good fight.

If anyone represents the liberal view in this regard, it’s Barack Obama. The former president said recently that, to effect real change, activists must meet people “where they are.” That might be fine and dandy when it comes to police reform, but what if “where they are” is taking the side of a president seeking to overturn a lawful election? What if “where they are” is the Republicans saying and doing things with the express intent of harming the republic, because harming the republic tightens their grip on power?

What if Republican dominance is predicated on betrayal? Partisanship is, therefore, not the problem. Asymmetry is. Symmetrical partisanship is the solution.

Donald Trump has moved from demanding in secret that election officials break the law to doing so out in the open. He’s violating his oath of office, profaning the rule of law and pissing on the spirit of the Constitution. The Democrats could try impeaching and removing him again. But, in my view, they don’t have to go that far.

What they should do is point out the obvious for everyone’s sake — that the president’s words and deeds are treasonable. Anyone standing by his side is complicit. To my knowledge, no Democrat in the US Congress has dared use the T-word. It’s long past time to dare.

Mounting a rhetorical offensive won’t be easy. For one thing, the Democrats are usually on the receiving end of such accusations. Because many Democrats have experienced the pain of being accused of disloyalty, they’ll likely hesitate to accuse Republicans of the same.

For another, the Democrats will worry about members of the Washington press corps reporting “both sides.” The president has frequently accused the Democrats of treason. They don’t want to be seen as meeting tit with tat.

This more than anything else is why some liberals are making a fetish of treason’s constitutional definition. If Republican behavior does not rise to the highest possible standard, why should the Democrats join the Republicans in the partisan gutter? What’s the point given that Joe Biden will be inaugurated in 44 days anyway?

First, this isn’t the gutter. This is the most basic principle of being an American. Elections are sacred or we invite a master to rule us.

Second, while the Republicans are busy siding with Trump, real people are dying. Nearly 290,000 are dead from the covid plague. The death toll may be 345,000, according to a New York Times analysis.

Twelve million people are about to lose unemployment insurance. Trump doesn’t care. The GOP seems indifferent. The republic’s injury isn’t just constitutional, legal or even moral. It’s literal. (Only 25 Republicans in Congress say Biden won the election according to the Washington Post.)

Third, on a more practical note, the Democrats, in failing to accuse the Republicans of disloyalty, are failing to give Americans a choice: Power over country or country over power? Are you partisan for a party or partisan for the country? The Republicans have chosen the former two for the last four years. They hope everyone forgets that after Trump is gone. They hope to return to principle in order to oppose Joe Biden. The Democrats, however, have a role to play — the role of never letting anyone forget.

The Democrats keep appeasing authoritarianism, because it’s cheaper than facing it head-on. Under a fascist president, the Republicans altogether stopped appeasing democracy. They faced it head-on without cost.

Indeed, they got most everything they wanted without having to continue with a phony flag-hugging charade. Their true nature was revealed, true character exposed. Now they want their principles back.

They can’t have them.

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 December 2020

Word Count: 724

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I really don’t want to, but apparently we need to talk about “defund the police.” It’s a slogan that might have faded on its own in the aftermath of a national election. Thanks to Jim Clyburn, it didn’t. The House Whip blamed it, as well as quote-unquote socialism, for the Democrats losing seats in the House (but keeping their majority). Coupled with the party not doing as well in the Senate as they were expected to, the conventional wisdom in Washington is now that the Democrats lost despite winning.

If that weren’t maddening enough, then came Barack Obama. The former president has written a book that’s naturally getting a lot of attention. Understandably, given that the conventional wisdom in Washington is that the Democrat lost despite winning, interviewers want to know what he thinks. Here’s his advice to activists:

If you believe that we should be able to reform the criminal justice system so that it’s not biased and treats everybody fairly, I guess you can use a snappy slogan like ‘Defund the police,’ but you lost a big audience the minute you say it, which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done.

But if you instead say, “Let’s reform the police department so that everybody’s being treated fairly, you know, divert young people from getting into crime … [then] suddenly, a whole bunch of folks who might not otherwise listen to you are listening to you. And if you want to get something done in a democracy, in a country as big and diverse as ours, then you’ve got to be able to meet people where they are.

The idea here is that meeting people where they are is where you begin political change. Perhaps that explains the sudden media interest in “Blue MAGA.” Instead of red hats demanding that we “Make America Great Again,” there are now blue hats declaring that we “Made America Great Already” when voters ousted Donald Trump and elected Joe Biden. That, too, is a game of addition and not subtraction. It’s also really stupid.

“Blue MAGA,” if you’ll pardon the apparent tangent, might be the best way possible to illustrate the core difference between the parties, a difference that still confounds members of the press corps, because it belies their insistence that the parties are two sides of the same partisan coin. While one is all-in for wearing hats, the other isn’t. The Republicans are a party of authoritarian collectivism. The Democrats are a party of liberal individualism. One is better than the other. Both hats are dumb, though.

The above paragraph isn’t a tangent when you place it in the context of Obama’s advice to activists demanding reforms to local police departments. Where people are can be a really, really bad place. We should not accept where they are uncritically. If where they are is fascism, or blind institutional faith in police authority, or wearing new hats piggybacking on old hats, maybe starting where they are is a bad idea. It might be better to move them to a better place, and then begin. It seems to be telling, with reference to “Blue MAGA,” that Biden supporters say “we don’t need another cult.”

“Defund the police” has moved people to a better place. The movement is slow and incremental and insufficient, and it’s never going to completely drain cop shops of all their resources, but it is nevertheless progressing. Specifically, the slogan has moved Democrats.

Obama is talking about national politics. “Defund the police” is about local politics. It was never intended to move Republicans, because Republicans will never listen no matter how faithfully reformers try to meet them where they are. Reformers, instead, have targeted Democrats, because it’s the Democrats who govern most of the country’s cities.

Democrats don’t want to take action against local police departments. Inertia is where they are. They must be forced. “Defund the police” is doing just that.

What bugs me most about Clyburn’s and Obama’s criticism is that it gets us all talking about language (which is relative) instead of talking about action (which is concrete). It focuses attention on marketing instead of policy. It actually encourages self-doubt and paralysis.

If progress depends on meeting people where they already are, instead of moving them to where you want them to be, there’s little point to raising hell. And if there’s little point, then why bother? Better to believe that everything will work itself out in the end — or that everyone is corrupt and nothing really matters.

True, local activists might make life less comfortable for national Democrats. But tough shit.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 04 December 2020

Word Count: 775

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It’s not that Gabriel Sterling is wrong. It’s that he, and by extension other lifelong conservative Republicans, especially in the South, don’t seem to understand why he’s right. When you spend four decades inflaming white hatred of pretty much anything that does not fit into the dream of “a suburban utopia” of the 1950s, you can’t expect the people boiling over with rage to all of a sudden stop when it’s convenient to.

“It has to stop,” said the deputy to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Wednesday. “Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language. Senators, you have not condemned this language or these actions. This has to stop. We need you to step up and if you’re going to take a position of leadership, show some.”

Sterling, of course, was referring to the fact that Joe Biden won Georgia and that Donald Trump has thus far refused to accept defeat. Instead of deescalating, Trump and his minions are escalating. Some called for a former administration official to be “taken out at dawn and shot.” Some called for execution by firing squad of Trump’s enemies. Some called on him to suspend the US Constitution and impose martial law. Sterling, Raffensperger and a young voting machine technician received death threats. (The tech is presumably Black given he was threatened with a noose; Raffensperger’s wife, meanwhile, was evidently threatened with rape on her personal cell phone.)

“It has to stop,” Sterling said with barely concealed fury. “This is elections. This is the backbone of democracy. And all of you who have not said a damn word are complicit in this. It’s too much. Yes. Fight for every legal vote. Go through your due process. We encourage you. Use your First Amendment. That’s fine. Death threats, physical threats, intimidation, it’s too much. It’s not right. They’ve lost the moral high ground.”

I’ll get back to the moral high ground, and why Gabriel Sterling isn’t on it, in a moment. Meanwhile, nothing’s going to stop. Trump is raking in tens of millions from gullible supporters who believe everything coming out his mouth and the talking mouths on Fox. (The president posted to Facebook on Wednesday a 46-minute video that was so densely packed with lies that CNN would not air even a clip of it.)

Death threats, physical threats, and intimidation have never been too much for Trump, and will never be, given that he’s said to be preparing for a rematch four years from now.

David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler aren’t going to say anything either. Both Republican senators face tough runoffs next month. They need as many of the president’s seething supporters as they can in light of Stacey Abrams’ jaw-dropping success in Georgia.

They have no incentive to turn the heat down, every incentive to keep it fired. If fellow Republicans are subjected to death threats, well, so be it. “This is elections,” Sterling said. For conservative Republicans, that means war. And all’s fair, they are wont to say.

But also potentially deadly. That’s what conservative Republicans don’t seem to understand. Party elites are comfortable doing whatever it takes to win, even if that means standing by while a Republican president commits treason before committing “homicidal neglect.” (That’s how CNN’s Carl Bernstein describes Trump’s handling of the covid plague.) Republican elites don’t mind inciting violence if that’s what it takes to bend popular will toward unpopular objectives like tax cuts for the very, very rich.

That might not be so bad if the rich knew when to quit. They don’t, though. They’re too greedy. As Franklin Foer said in July:

Never content with the last tax cut or the last burst of deregulation, American plutocrats keep pushing for more. With each success, their economic agenda becomes more radical and less salable. To compensate for its unpopularity, the Republicans must resort to ever greater doses of toxic emotionalism.

The natural dark side to Republican patricians who can’t stop, won’t stop being greedy is Republican plebeians who can’t stop, won’t stop being violent.

The bigger problem for party elites, tactically speaking, is that their traditional play isn’t working. In the past, they could gin up white hatred, drive out the vote, secure victory, and then put out “toxic emotionalism” with doses of sobriety. That, however, required the patricians to be united. These days, they can’t speak with one voice, because the incentives are at cross purposes.

On the one hand are elites asking for calm. On the other are elites arousing anti-elite hatred of the elites who are asking for calm. Sterling is right, but doesn’t seem to know why: “Someone’s going to get killed.”

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 December 2020

Word Count: 777

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“Virtue-signaling” is the idea that people say they believe something but don’t really believe it. They’re saying it to seem impressive to people they desire to impress. Everyone does this to some degree, and everyone deserves some degree of takedown. But if anyone has a corner on the market of “virtue-signaling,” it’s the Republicans.

Behind religion, the most common theme of “virtue-signaling” is masculinity. This can be expressed in humiliating ways — as when candidate Donald Trump called Heidi Cruz ugly only to see her husband, Ted Cruz, lick his shoes for a single term. This can be expressed in more oblique ways, too — as when David Perdue mocked his Senate challenger Jon Ossoff for enjoying a vegan burger. Meat is macho. Plants are not.

The goal should be familiar. It’s one-upping the other guy, making him seem less than he is. The problem, of course, is this can be done all day, every day. There’s no end to it, no bottom, no boundaries, no limits.

For this reason, liberals, feminists and the otherwise woke tend to think reacting to the politics of masculinity is a time-suck. Pick it apart as just another articulation of the prevailing patriarchy or don’t bother.

The problem is it doesn’t work. Where you see a sober assessment and deconstruction of social phenomena that are millennia old, the machos see weakness. It’s not weakness, but that’s what they see, and on seeing it, they just can’t help themselves. They are aroused like wolves are aroused by the sight of weakness in the caribou herd. (I believe in the power of persuasion, but I also concede there are limits to its power.)

In reality, you’re offering an opinion. In fantasy, you are asking them to pounce. It should be clear the point isn’t manliness. It’s politics. It’s dominance. We should talk about it.

We should talk about the difference between manliness and political dominance, just as we should talk about the difference between religion and political power. They can be the same thing for Republicans and their ilk. They almost always are. But they don’t have to be. Recognizing that manliness and dominance don’t have to be the same makes room for ways of beating them with something other than the appearance of anti-manliness.

Feminism isn’t going anywhere. But let’s explore a complement: the utility of creating, or reviving, a good kind of manliness to compete with the bad kind.

What would good manliness look like? First, a caveat. I’m just a normal person, same as you. It seems to me smart, though, to start with the word. “Manliness” finds its root in Latin. “Vir” meant “man.” From “vir” comes the permutations of “virtue.” Among patricians of ancient Rome, “virtue” connoted generosity, fidelity, duty and, especially willingness to subordinate one’s self-interest to the interest of the Republic. They did not believe in equality any more than the American founders did. But republican virtue, and the politics arising from that age-old moral principle, greatly influenced both.

Few in ancient Rome had the means of seriously questioning patrician dominance. Perhaps that’s why their idea of manliness had nothing to do with it. We don’t have to accept that, though. Indeed, Joe Biden didn’t. The president-elect, in a speech last summer, defined the presidency so that republican virtue was at the heart of it. It’s “a duty of care,” he said, “all of us, not just our voters, not just our donors, but all of us.”

Then he placed this old-fashioned republican manliness in a religious and patriotic context: “The President held up a Bible at St. John’s Church yesterday. If he opened it instead of brandishing it, he could have learned something: That we are all called to love one another as we love ourselves. That’s hard work. But it’s the work of America.”

Biden never got credit for being manly, because manliness is always defined by the right flank of US politics. But manliness is exactly what he was talking about. The difference is he wasn’t “virtue-signaling.” He was, instead, putting virtue into practice.

To be sure, I’m opening the door to paternalism. I haven’t addressed the harmful tendency of some men to infantilize women, like they can’t take care of themselves. But I don’t see old-fashioned republican manliness being necessarily at odds with gender equity. They can be complementary—if men remember humility.

The Golden Rule doesn’t mean just giving care. It means receiving it, too. Lots of men are just terrible at that, because lots of us think we’re too strong to need it. We do. We do.

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 December 2020

Word Count: 762

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Bear in mind that when white evangelical Protestants (WEPs) talk about “religious liberty,” they are talking about much more than that. They are talking about political power — who controls it, who’s subject to it, how and why. This isn’t to separate good religion from bad politics. As I said Monday, these are not easily disentangled. This is to say, however, that bad politics often follows, and is subordinate to, bad religion.

For many liberals and leftists, the solution is hostility toward all religion. If we can push religion out of the public square, they say, we can minimize its influence on politics. The First Amendment’s establishment clause demands religion’s absence from public affairs. While this seems principled, it’s counter-productive.

The more liberals and leftists push religion to the margins of politics, the more conservative religionists push back, arming themselves with the cudgel of “religious freedom.”

Because many liberals and leftists refuse to weigh the moral differences between good religion and bad religion (they are often so hostile toward it they don’t care enough to make such judgments), they don’t have an answer to claims of “religious freedom” other than returning to some kind of high-minded appeal to religious tolerance. That, of course, fails amid religionists bent on turning America into a Neo-Eden. A free republic cannot, and must not, tolerate the intolerant. Democracy is doomed if so.

The answer isn’t intolerance of religion. The answer is intolerance of bad religion, a belief system that drives political efforts to sabotage the republic itself. America, as President-Elect Joe Biden said last week, “is a covenant.” It is a community, a union, collective effort to recognize a non-negotiable, which is the moral assertion, not the fact, that all people are equal — that human beings are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

A good religion is compatible with republican virtue. A bad religion isn’t. It cannot tolerate equality. Indeed, it makes every effort to destroy it. It’s “God’s will.”

This isn’t to say extreme religions are necessarily bad ones. I come from a family of religious anarchists. Christians Gathered Unto the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ—“Plymouth Brethren” for short—are what polite people might call a cult. It isn’t. It’s a small, exclusive sect (in my case) of evangelical Protestantism whose central purpose was reliving worship as practiced by the early (Jewish) Christians. It opposes all forms of church hierarchy and power. The Bible is the sole source of authority. Salvation requires no mediator. “This world” is Satan’s. The Lord’s is the next.

The “gospel hall” consists mostly of small farmers or the self-employed. They eke out a living without jeopardizing their twice-born souls. Extreme as it is, it’s totally compatible with republican virtue. Why? All these people ever wanted was to be left the hell alone.

One does not really leave such things even after one has left. This is why, though I’m now a Unitarian Universalist, I think of myself as a “secular Christian.” And this is why I take a dim view of white evangelical Protestant leaders going to war with state governments trying to protect them, and everyone else, from dying from the covid.

A quarter million are dead. Mandates demand equal sacrifice to achieve equal protection. But some WEP leaders are hostile toward mandates, because they are hostile toward equality itself, which is to say, they’re against republican virtue but for libertine vice.

From an extreme religious point of view, and the exclusive Plymouth Brethren are a superlative case in point, it does not matter that liquor stores and strip clubs are open while churches remain closed in some states. All that matters, when you really think about it, is being able to worship God freely, and no one is saying you can’t.

WEP leaders, however, are making church closures sound like violations of their First Amendment rights. They are hyping “the problem” so much that one WEP leader has even reclassified his church as a “strip club” in order to skirt California’s covid mandates. (How deep into bad religion must you be for this to be a good idea?)

The Plymouth Brethren, for all their many faults, never make a fetish of buildings or anything in “this world,” which is Satan’s. (Wherever two or three Christians gathered “in his name,” there is the Lord; hence the sect’s very long formal name.)

In saying they can’t worship without their buildings, WEP leaders are confessing to what would normally be a serious sin: idolatry. Of course, buildings aren’t the point. Power is, specifically dominance. That’s the Biggest and Most Golden of all the Golden Calves ever.

Liberals and leftists don’t speak in such terms. They should. The best way to defeat bad religion, even if you’re not religious, is by taking sides with a good one.

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 December 2020

Word Count: 811

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Most Americans get their information about politics from the press corps. Members of the press corps prefer simple binaries in communicating to its audience. Therefore, most people tend to think politics has two sides. There’s a multiverse of sides, though. Only after opening one’s mind to the possibilities does politics actually make sense.

Take, for instance, “messaging.” Here’s a commonplace critique of the Democratic Party — why can’t they speak forcefully? For one reason, they are not Republicans. The GOP is more or less streamlined, racially, economically and religiously. When one Republican speaks, he (most of them are indeed men) tends to speak for all. The Democrats, however, are a Big Tent. When one of them speaks, they do not, and cannot, speak for all. The party is racially, economically and religiously diverse.

When the Republicans talk about faith, they can be explicit. That’s the entitlement of a religiously conservative political minority that (now) controls and benefits from the country’s counter-majoritarian institutions (the Senate, the Supreme Court, the Electoral College, etc.). When the Democrats talk about faith, they are not explicit, because they won’t risk alienating one of the many forms of religious adherence that constitute the Democratic Party’s base. Remember the Democrats have religious conservatives in their ranks. The Republicans, however, don’t have religious liberals. They speak with one voice whereas the Democrats, as it were, speak in tongues.

When you put a thing that’s in focus next to a thing that’s not in focus, the thing that’s in focus will naturally get more attention than the thing that’s not. Moreover, the thing that’s in focus, by dint of getting more attention, ends up defining the thing that’s not. To wit: When the Republicans talk about faith, they attract the press corps’ attention, because their expression is explicit. The Democrats don’t, because theirs is not.

Moreover, the Republican notion of what counts as religion, generally, overrides the Democratic notion of the same. One of the insidious outcomes of this binary way of thinking is the mistaken belief that the Democrats don’t know how to talk to religious Americans. Another is that religious Americans are exclusively found among the Republicans. The GOP is the party of religion, the Democrats of something else.

That the Republicans prefer this binary way of thinking should not be surprising. It is, and has always been, to their advantage. What is surprising, however, is the critics of the Democratic Party echoing those preferences.

Here’s Matt Taibbi, of Rolling Stone, shortly after Election Day: “The lack of a religious tradition, even among parents, has created a new kind of Democratic voter who has embraced politics as a replacement for their spiritual beliefs,” he said. “They are talking about things, whether it’s Black Lives Matter or environmentalism, they sound like religious people when they speak.”

Taibbi is almost certainly projecting here. He’s a product of bourgeois affirmation and comfort, and of elite institutions on the east coast. He’s also hostile toward faith. He moves among like-minded leftists who view religion, as Karl Marx did, as the opium of the people. When he says the Democrats don’t have a “religious tradition,” that’s a good thing. What’s bad is treating politics as a replacement for “spiritual beliefs.”

In the process, however, Taibbi ends up giving credence to the Republican allegation that the Democrats worship at the altar of partisan power. He seems to think he’s helping liberate the minds of the people but, being as captive to binary thinking as the press corps is, he’s mostly confusing them.

To reiterate: there’s a multiverse of sides. Only after opening one’s mind to the possibilities does politics actually make sense.

Here’s what makes sense. One, the Democrats are a party of religious people. It includes Christians and Jews, Muslims and Hindus, religious conservatives and religious liberals. Saying they don’t know how to talk to religious people suggests that you don’t know the party — or, like Taibbi, that you define “religion” from the right.

Two, the right’s definition of religion is too narrow for a party as diverse as the Democrats are. Religion can be just God Talk, but it can also be belief in humanity’s ability and duty to make America a better place for all people, and then committing to collective actions realizing that belief. It can be, in other words, something like Black Lives Matter and environmentalism.

Taibbi is right in saying some Democrats lack a “religion tradition.” He’s wrong, however, in saying politics is a replacement for “spiritual belief.” That, after all, is the root of all Democrats’ faith in democracy.

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 November 2020

Word Count: 762

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