Joe Biden won Michigan on Tuesday night. Six states voted in all, but Michigan was the big one. That’s where Bernie Sanders took a stand. It’s where he defeated in 2016 the “Democratic establishment.” If he could hold it, and hold its white working class, Sanders could prove everyone wrong — again. His revolution was alive and really real.

It wasn’t real. Not really. Not now, and not then.

Turns out lots of Michiganders who voted four years ago for Sanders voted in 2020 for the former vice president. At the same time, people who voted for Hillary Clinton last time voted for Joe Biden this time. Put all these together and what do you see? Sanders didn’t win Michigan last time due to who he was. He won due to who he wasn’t.

Most presidential candidates want you to vote for them, not necessarily against their opponents. The independent senator from Vermont has been unique in this respect. Negative partisanship, as political scientists call it, was baked into his rhetoric and his platform from the beginning. Vote for me, he said, because I’m not Hillary Clinton, because I’m not the Democratic Party, and because I’m not the neoliberal 1 percent.

That gambit, as I have said, was aided by Russian Crypto-Czar Vladimir Putin. He, too, wanted American citizens to vote against a candidate most threatening to his influence on global affairs. The Kremlin, therefore, mounted a covert cyberwar by which Russian saboteurs successfully moved American public opinion in three states — including Michigan — against the former secretary of state. One consequence of the effort was electing Donald Trump. Another was paving the way for Bernie Sanders’ second run.

(If he decides to keep running, which is evidently the case, Sanders will continue to receive Russian aid and comfort for the balance of the primary season and the whole of the general election. Being a sore loser is one thing. Being a bottomless supply of scorn and resentment for an enemy bent on keeping Trump in power is quite another.)

If the “anti-establishment candidate” lost, does that mean the “pro-establishment candidate” won? Biden certainly represents the establishment in that he’s been a Democrat since forever. Some in the pundit corps are, moreover, framing his primary victories as the establishment’s revenge. But this view is so narrow as to distort the political factor most influential in choosing him: Donald Trump is the president.

If the “pro-establishment candidate” won, does that mean the party isn’t moving radically to the left. The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin is right in saying “the entire narrative of the Democratic Party going crazy left was wrong.” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough is also right. He said: “This Democratic Party is far more moderate and pragmatic than most presidential candidates, political pundits, and Twitter influencers believed for years.”

But both are wrong, too. Exit polls show Democratic voters want things like universal health care, higher wages, affordable housing and the rest. They want, in other words, what Bernie Sanders was selling them. They just don’t want to buy it from Sanders. Why? Because those things, as of right now, are less important than defeating Trump.

At the same time, hell yes the party is more conservative than we thought. Michigan’s upper peninsula went entirely to Sanders last time. It went entirely to Biden this time. That suggests Sanders won in 2016 not only because he was not Hillary Clinton. He won because he’s not a woman, especially that woman. The white working class, which populates the upper peninsula, is open clearly to progressive policies of one sort or another, but less open to a woman seeking the presidential power to realize them.

Sanders is not a stand-in for leftism. Plenty of leftists gladly voted for Biden. They want to beat the president, too. At the same time, the people who were supposed to turn out for Sanders — the youth vote — didn’t. Therefore, take the concern-trolling about unity with a grain of salt. There’s plenty of party unity thanks to animosity toward Trump. Yes, Biden should court young voters, but he needn’t fear their retribution. If they didn’t show for Sanders, they’re not going to show for Trump.

If Democrat voters picked Biden because they want to beat Trump, does that mean they don’t care what Biden himself is offering? I’m sure there’s some truth to that. But his being a Democrat means he doesn’t have to explain what he stands for, as Sanders did. Biden is furthermore unlike any presumptive Democratic nominee I have ever seen.

He’s less candidate than vessel into which the party will pour its ambitions. I think legendary broadcaster Dan Rather was right when he said: “Joe Biden is being characterized as a ‘moderate,’ but if elected I think it might turn out that he ends up presiding over one of the most progressive administrations in American history. It’s where his party is going, and on many issues where the country is going as well.”

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 March 2020
Word Count: 827
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The president shook hands today with supporters in Orlando, according to the AP. This wouldn’t be newsworthy in normal times. We don’t live in normal times, though. We live in time in which a new coronavirus is spreading across the world, shutting down cities in China and Italy, panicking global markets and vaporizing wealth.

We live in a time, moreover, in which the president of the United States looks dimly on administration officials acting professionally, behaving morally, and obeying the law. Donald Trump has purged senior-level offices of people who knew what they were doing and replaced them with ignoble apes who know little except loyalty to Trump.

Even so, why would the president shake hands with people? The Washington Post and others have reported he was advised not to. (Skin-to-skin contact is how viruses and other critters jump from person to person.) I guess you could say he’s just ignoring their advice. But that presupposes that he understands what health experts are telling him about the new coronavirus. It presupposes that he believes he needs to understand. He doesn’t.

I know this sounds speculative. (OK, I concede; it is.) I don’t have sources at hand other than my own experience to draw on. But other people who are living in, or who have endured before finally escaping, authoritarian climates know what I am talking about. Estranged adult children, wronged women, and people of color living in a white supremacist society — these Americans see Trump in a clear light. They always have. And they wonder how it’s possible for everyone else not to see what they are seeing.

Here is what they see: the president doesn’t need to understand the new coronavirus, because understanding it isn’t going to influence him one way or another from doing whatever he wants to do (for instance, shaking hands with faithful supporters). He’s going to do whatever he wants to do, because there is no authority higher than, or independent from, his ego and self-interest. While other people concern themselves with, say, obeying the law, he does no such thing. He can’t break the law. He is the law.

The president doesn’t need to pay heed to advisers telling him for God’s sake don’t touch anyone! because paying heed to the advice of those who know what they are talking about would be an act of deference impossible for someone who does not recognize the legitimacy of things (viruses) and people (experts) who are not him. Even if this president got sick from the new coronavirus, he’d deny his diseased reality. Being sick is impossible for Donald Trump. Being sick would mean the president isn’t perfect.

Some expressed shock last week when the president said he’d rather not help sick people quarantined on a cruise ship. He said he’d rather not let them off the boat, because once they were allowed off, they’d be included in the official number of sick people. “I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship. … I’d rather have them stay on [the ship], personally.”

Some were shocked, because, you know, it was a terrible thing to say about people in need of help. But shock also presupposes that this president is violating some kind of unwritten rule of partisanship in which normal political conflict is set aside during times of crisis. This president, however, is no mere partisan. Neither are his Republican confederates. He is an authoritarian, a fascist, a white supremacist — many names meaning the same thing to people who are enduring it or who have escaped it.

In authoritarian countries, reality is less problematic than individuals talking about it as if reality itself had greater authority over people’s choices than the authoritarian regimes running those counties. In China, the ruling Communist Party suppressed knowledge of the coronavirus outbreak, because word getting out would make the party look bad. In the US, the president suppressed administration efforts to address and contain the new virus, because word getting out would make him look bad.

As I said, people who live in authoritarian climates, or who have escaped them, have always seen Trump in a clear light. The same can’t be said of the political class, the press corps and Wall Street. They kept seeing Trump as just another partisan. They kept thinking he’d stop being divisive when the moment called for unity. Or worse, they kept thinking they could control him — a least be immune to his misbehavior.

They were wrong. They are wrong.

That says more about them than it does Trump.

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 March 2020
Word Count: 767
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When news broke this morning, I wasn’t surprised. I was sad, though. Elizabeth Warren really is the kind of American we need as a president. I’ve never seen so much corruption, so much inequality, so much betrayal of my country. But various forces — knowable and unknowable — prevented her from ascending. She dropped out today.

Again, not surprising. She hadn’t performed well during the early nominating states. She came in third Tuesday in her own state of Massachusetts behind Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden. The Democratic Party is consolidating rapidly around the former vice president. It’s pushing a factional senator back to the margins where he belongs. Half of her supporters are ready to break for Biden. Half of them are ready to rally around Sanders. (I’m guessing about the proportions.) There’s no way forward for the working man’s superwoman. She’s indeed right for the time. The time sadly wasn’t right for her.

You don’t know what you can’t know until the moment has arrived in which it’s possible to know. And even then, you might not realize it until after the fact. That’s rule of thumb seems applicable to Warren. Some say her best shot at the presidency was in 2016. She could have beaten Sanders and then Hillary Clinton, they say. I suppose there’s something to that. I know I would have voted for her. But no one can claim that with any certainty. Even if someone could, it makes no difference now.

That she dropped out after Super Tuesday, rather than beforehand, is worth pondering a bit. She must have known there was an even chance of losing her home state. Losing your home state is humiliating. Most candidates, seeing there’s a chance, would pull out in a heartbeat. Perhaps she believed she could win other states to compensate. Polling didn’t suggest that, though. Even if she did win other states, coming in third is just humiliating. Warren is no dummy. Why didn’t she drop out before it was too late?

I think she was taking one for the team.

Her supporters hate it when I say this — it sounds like I’m blaming her for Sanders’ struggle — but the fact is that Warren probably took a sizable share of Sanders’ votes in states like Maine, Minnesota, and Massachusetts, all states Biden triumphed in. In other words, Warren stayed in long enough to help the party’s elder statesman.

You don’t stay in a race you’re losing. You don’t stay in a race you know is going to humiliate you. You don’t — unless it’s in the service of the greater common good. The future of the republic depends on defeating President Donald Trump. Biden is seen as the best chance of beating a criminal authoritarian threat to American freedom. Warren is a superwoman. It makes total sense that she’d sacrifice herself for that.

This is probably as close as Warren will get to appearing to take a side, though. As I said, half of her supporters are pragmatic enough to go wherever the mainstream is going (Biden) while the other half is ideologically inclined to rally around a foundering Sanders’ campaign. There will be intense pressure to endorse one. She probably won’t.

That she probably won’t — and that she sacrificed herself for her country — indicates to me that there isn’t as much of a gulf between the left-flank of the Democratic Party and the so-called establishment as we are made to believe. It indicates something else, too. Unlike Sanders, Warren has always understood that structural reform — anti-corruption, greater equality and getting the government to serve normal people — isn’t going to come from attacking the party. It’s going to come from working within it.

I’m convinced sexism played a huge role in bringing down Warren’s campaign. But I’m equally convinced that sex — meaning, the female sex—is what will save us in the end. Warren wasn’t just building a presidential campaign. She was building a coalition, a women’s movement, by going woman to woman — girl to girl — creating from the ground up networks of like-minded Americans who believe our nation is stronger together.

Though they are cut from the same cloth, Warren never demagogued the way Sanders does. She faced skepticism of her many — many — policy proposals head on. She didn’t, as Sanders nearly always does, lump critics with enemies later to be destroyed. Her greatest strength was getting skeptics to see her point of view by way of reasoning, evidence, perseverance and patience. She’s no radical. She a small-r republican liberal.

Biden is likely going to win. Sanders is likely going to lose. Neither indicates that the Democratic establishment struck back nor that the progressive movement, such as it is, was defeated. Both however are vestiges of the past, not harbingers of the future.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 05 March 2020
Word Count: 794
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The campaign press corps is again using the word “comeback” to describe Joe Biden’s super performance on Super Tuesday. This, as you know, is wrong. Biden was always the favorite of the Democratic Party’s base. The Democratic Party’s base is black. That black Democrats in southern states voted for Biden was entirely predictable. That it was entirely predictable means no self-respecting journalist should be surprised.

But acting surprised in the absence of good reason for being surprised has injurious outcomes. It gives citizens the false impression that early nominating states have more clout than they do. It shrouds the role of delegates in the party’s nomination process — meaning the number of delegates won, not states won, is the only thing that matters. Worse, it overlooks the intense anti-Donald Trump feeling among Democrats of color. Voting for Biden wasn’t an expression of their policy views. It’s an act of survival.

Politico’s Jack Shafer tweeted last night, as the results were coming in, that “African Americans seem to be spurning democratic socialism.” That’s not quite right. The question isn’t whether black Americans embrace universal health care, higher wages, affordable housing, quality education and so on. Black history is a history of fighting, bleeding and dying for these and similar things. The question isn’t about policy. It’s about politics. Black politics in this country has always stood against tyranny.

For the first time in my life, affluent white suburban voters are practicing black politics.

Indeed, the best way to misunderstand Super Tuesday’s results is analyzing them from Shafer’s white-centered perspective. From that viewpoint, which is also practiced by the Bernie Sanders campaign, it’s plausible the Democratic establishment coordinated with Wall Street potentates to rig the primary process in favor of the former vice president. Plausible yes, but clearly wrong — unless you’re willing to say the 62 percent of southern black voters who went for Biden are representative of the party’s elite.

But even a class perspective, as Sanders’ would prefer, conceals what’s really going on. Super Tuesday confirmed a timeless truth obscured quadrennially by journalists acting surprised when there’s no good reason for being surprised. The white working class — households earning less annually than $50,000 — doesn’t want a socialist revolution in America any more than it wants a fascist takeover. Like their black counterparts, most white working class voters chose Biden. They bet on a “winner” as an act of survival.

This isn’t to say some white working class voters didn’t choose Sanders. Some did. Nor is this to say no black voters chose Sanders. Some did. Those who did, however, were probably young — and there’s your problem. Young people just don’t vote at anywhere close to the same rates as older people do. Of all voters in 14 states on Super Tuesday, only 13 percent were under 30. That number rises 10 points for ages 30 to 44. It’s more than double for 65 and over. Thirty-five percent were between the ages of 45 and 64.

Sanders has always been a factional candidate. A gambler, too. He bet on changing the electorate in order to bend the Democratic Party to his will. (Remember, he’s an independent senator.) If he could do that, he figured, he could defeat the incumbent.

But doing that required driving out more young voters than any candidate has ever driven out in the modern history of presidential campaigns. (No one — no one — ever won relying on the youth vote.) He needed to drive out that many because he needed to replace regular Democratic voters he’d chase away during the primary season and “moderate” white voters he’d chase away during the general election in the fall.

Super Tuesday confirmed those voters aren’t there. At the very least, he can’t depend on them. Not being a member of the Democratic Party was always a major liability for Sanders. So was running for president in a year in which Hillary Clinton was not.

We’re hearing a lot about “Bernie or Bust” post-Super Tuesday. This is natural. Feelings are raw. Paranoia is high. Most Sanders voters will settle down over time. Those who don’t are small in number (though very loud). They are joined by Republican or Russian operatives sowing division and distrust among Democrats. Don’t concern yourself too much with them. Focus instead on the job ahead.

There’s still a ways to go. In theory, Sanders could gain on Biden. But it’s hard to see that happening. The party is consolidating around its elder statesman, pushing Sanders to where he began, on the fringes of the party. Democratic superdelegates will go to Biden, not Sanders. Biden will get most, or all, of the delegates released by candidates who have stopped running. (Mike Bloomberg dropped out this morning.)

Joe Biden didn’t make a comeback.

He never went anywhere from which to return.

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 March 2020
Word Count: 800
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Today is Super Tuesday. Can I get an amen?

After more than a year of being bombarded with campaign propaganda, voters head to the polls to choose a Democratic candidate. The results can’t come fast enough. We don’t live in normal times. The sooner the party settles on a nominee, the better.

In normal times, partisanship is vigorous, but not so much that it prevails during periods of emergency. In normal times, loyal partisans set aside normal politics and join forces with natural adversaries for the benefit of the greater common good.

Disloyal partisans, however, don’t do that. Instead of suspending ordinary partisan conflict during extraordinary crisis, they seek ways of exploiting crisis in the interest of gaining political advantage. Take what happened during the 2007-2008 panic.

President George W. Bush asked House Republicans to support a bill that would bail out Wall Street in order to prevent an economic collapse the size of the Great Depression. “If money isn’t loosened up, this sucker could go down,” Bush said.

John Boehner, then House minority leader, said no can do. His conference refused. Moreover, his Republicans would, under the Tea Party banner, spend the next two years attacking the Democrats after they backed Bush and saved the US economy. The result was a takeover of the House and total obstruction of President Barack Obama.

Disloyal partisans don’t think of themselves as disloyal, because their greatest loyalty is partisan, not patriotic. Today’s GOP can’t be faulted too much for that, though. The party has warred against the very notion of a greater common good for half a century.

It was Margaret Thatcher who said back in 1987: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no governments can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first” (my italics).

Republicans used to make exceptions to that rule when it came to the economy, natural disasters and public health. But since the twin shocks of the financial crisis and the election of the first black president, the exceptions have rapidly narrowed.

After Hurricane Sandy slammed into New Jersey, New York and New England in 2012, devastating the local economies here, Senate Republicans, led by Ted Cruz of Texas, fought against emergency legislation providing disaster relief. No society meant no common good meant no help for fellow Americans. But when Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in 2017, Cruz changed his mind. There was such a thing as society after all.

There may still be an exception when it comes to the new coronavirus. Obviously, Republican voters get sick too. But even that window appears to be closing. The president isn’t so much concerned with containing what is now a pandemic. His greater concern is the outbreak might make his reelection all that much harder.

Donald Trump pressured the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates. He was hoping that would goose markets spiraling downward out of fear of the coronavirus’s spread. The gambit isn’t working. “Stocks are tanking,” Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal said today.

If he can’t goose the markets, the president can satisfy supporters in other ways. He can use the pandemic as a rationale for implementing fascist policies he already wanted but hadn’t had a convincing enough rationale to implement them with.

Trump wants to shut down travel from Muslim-majority countries. The pandemic gives the administration reason for expanding the “Muslim ban.” He wants to divert money allocated for other things to complete a border wall. The pandemic gives the administration reason for taking billions from the Pentagon. He wants to close the border entirely. The White House cited the coronavirus as reason for doing just that.

Discriminating against a religion is an abomination. So is spending money any which way he wants. The Congress has the power of the purse, not the presidency. But Trump can do these things and more because Senate Republicans betrayed their loyalty to the US Constitution when they acquitted him of crimes against America.

That’s to be expected, I suppose, from a Republican Party that refuses to recognize the political legitimacy of American citizens who are not members of the Republican Party. The common good is not common — unless you’re a Republican. The common good is not good — unless you’re a Republican. If you’re sick or jobless or struggling to recover from a natural disaster, you’re on your own — unless you’re a Republican.

Super Tuesday’s results can’t come fast enough. We don’t live in normal times.

The sooner the Democrats settle on a nominee, the better.

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 March 2020
Word Count: 760
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You’ve heard by now that Joe Biden made a comeback over the weekend. The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, CNN, Reuters, USA Today, Fox News—all the big media went with headlines over the last 24 hours using a variation of “comeback.”

Wrong, all of them.

The former vice president did not come back because he had not gone anywhere from which to return. Biden was always the favorite of the Democratic Party’s base. The Democratic Party’s base is black. That black Democrats in South Carolina voted for Biden was predictable. That it was predictable means no one should be surprised.

And yet here we are, talking about Biden as if gee golly he rose from the dead.

Fact: delegates are all that matter. They matter more than “winning” or “losing” states. Sanders has 58. Biden has 54. Pete Buttigieg has 26 (which will probably go to Biden now that Hizzoner has dropped out). Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar have eight and seven, respectively. A candidate needs nearly 2,000 delegates to win the nomination.

Which is to say, all commentary hyperventilating about Sanders has been premature at the very least. We already knew Sanders was going to perform in caucuses (Iowa and Nevada). We already knew he was going to perform in states without sizable minority populations (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada). We already knew he has struggled to gain traction among Democrats of color. In short, everything is going as expected.

That everything is going as expected, however, makes for boring copy. If the campaign press corps has a bias, it is against tedium. No self-interested reporter wants to spend days on end on the campaign trail chasing down outcomes informed people can foresee. She looks for ways to heighten drama, deepen uncertainty and tell a story.

Storytelling didn’t used to dominate. There was a time when news-gathering prevailed. Since Teddy White’s The Making of the President (1960), however, and since creative writing workshops churned out more writers than there are teaching jobs and book contracts to employ them, storytelling has become an indisputable good. The New York Times’ Dean Baquet once said presidential campaigns can’t be understood without it.

That’s wrong. What’s more, that’s dangerous. The campaign press corps isn’t telling a story so much as it is inventing one that satisfies its desire for drama, conflict, tension, uncertainty, etc. As I wrote last month, talking about something in the absence of something actually creates something. Reporters claim to be reporting what they find in the field. Often, however, they end up fabricating it, and injuring the citizenry.

That might otherwise be benign, but it can be destructive. Consider that some pundits, evidently in good faith, are calling on the former vice president to drop out of the race. After all, they say, he came in third in Iowa, fourth in New Hampshire.

Biden is not going to drop, nor should he. But he does feel the effect of all the talk of Sanders’ imaginary momentum. His numbers are sliding, even in South Carolina. This is in spite of the fact that South Carolina and other diverse states would, if they came earlier, virtually guarantee Biden’s bid to be Donald Trump’s Democratic challenger.

(Biden’s numbers didn’t slide that much, apparently.)

While reporters talk excitedly about Biden winning his first primary in decades of trying, an important fact is underappreciated. Yes, Biden won South Carolina. He won by a huge margin among black voters — 61 percent to Sanders’ 17. But there’s more, (per the Washington Post).

Around 528,000 South Carolinians turned out in the 2020 Democratic primary, a remarkable show of voter engagement compared to four years ago. Former vice president Joe Biden ran up his totals in black communities but also won areas dominated by groups he has struggled to connect with, notably white and higher income voters. These areas showed some of the largest turnout increases in the state. Overall, South Carolina’s vote total was a massive increase over the 373,000 turnout for 2016 and nearly matched the votes cast in Obama’s 2008 primary win. (My italics.)

It’s no surprise that Biden won. That his victory came close to Obama’s?

Holy moly!

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 March 2020
Word Count: 695
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The president spoke to the nation Wednesday about the spread of the coronavirus. It didn’t go well, just as it never goes well when Donald Trump must be presidential. It’s worth quoting Bloomberg Opinion’s Jonathan Bernstein at length. Today, he wrote:

It’s quite rare when the president appears to know what he’s talking about. That’s clear from the daily gusts of bluster coming out of the White House. This is, as you will recall, the same president who says he knows more about more things than anyone who’s ever known anything. He knows more than the generals. He knows more than the financiers. He knows more than the scientists. Only God Himself knows more.

And maybe not even Him.

That the president does not know much in general about anything, and that he does not know much in particular about the coronavirus (or influenza, for that matter), is of little consequence to most of the people who support him. The right-flank of the Republican Party was a hothouse of anti-intellectualism and hostility toward the authority of evidence and reason long before it took over the center of the party. In speaking utter gibberish yesterday to a citizenry hungry for facts and steady leadership, Trump was putting a capstone on historical trends already in motion.

Most people don’t understand that. What they know, if they are paying attention, is that a few wacko birds, to use John McCain’s famous phrase, are the problem, as if they were more marginal than they actually are. What most people don’t understand is that paranoia among Republicans is a feature, not a bug. When the world is sorted between friends and enemies, there is no legitimate authority that’s independent of those camps. Facts are true when they favor us. They are false when they don’t.

This is why it makes sense to the president and his followers that the stock market slump was not caused by fear of an outbreak of the coronavirus. It was the Democrats’ fault; they are trying to undermine Trump. This is why is makes sense to the president and his followers that “the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump,” as Rush Limbaugh said. Forget that people are getting sick. Forget that people are scared. Your disease is making Trump look bad.

(There is no bottom, by the way. If the Rapture happened today, and took all evangelical Christians to Heaven, where they can’t vote for Trump, Limbaugh would say God’s love and salvation was being weaponized to bring down the president.)

There’s something else most people don’t understand. None of what I’m talking about is partisanship. If it were, we could reasonably expect some elected Republicans, especially the president’s hardliners, to snap out of it. We could expect them to say to themselves, OK, enough is enough. People could die. We need to set aside politics and empower experts and medical authorities to do what needs doing for everyone’s sake.

That’s asking too much of the paranoids now constituting the heart of the Republican Party. To expect them to defer to the authority of evidence and reason is to expect them to defer to the authority of something other than their egos and self-interest.

They can’t do that because nothing exists independent of their egos and self-interests. The president does not believe he’s above the law. He is the law. The president does not believe he represents the state. He is the state. The president does not believe he must act for everyone’s sake, because what’s good for him is good for everyone.

The history of fascism is a history of regimes bumbling into disaster. That’s probably what we are going to see in the weeks and months ahead. Will people snap out of it?

Don’t hold your breath.

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 February 2020
Word Count: 790
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Yesterday, someone alleged that I was “vehemently anti-Bernie.” The context was a comment I made about youth voting. I said no one ever won the presidency counting on young voters turning out. My critic demurred, but he went farther. “Why should anyone take your pessimistic (anti-Bernie bias) rewrite (opinion) of history seriously? The youth vote for [Barack] Obama was unprecedented and he (checks notes) won.”

Don’t get me wrong. My critic is entitled to his opinion. If he thinks I’m “vehemently anti-Bernie,” more power to him. I bring this up because I think it’s a convenient illustration of something I want to talk about today, which is that my politics is black.

The history of African-American politics is the history of republican liberalism in this country. What black people have achieved is what the founders wanted Americans to achieve, and, yes, that’s in spite of their owning black people. Small-r republican liberalism demands representative government, individual liberty, equal protection under the law, and the cultivation of the common good. It honors freedom but demands responsibility. Citizens are not taxpayers. They are not consumers. They are citizens — the greatest gift of self-empowerment God ever bestowed on humanity.

Black history, in my view, is a history of making good on the Constitution’s preamble. “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” It’s all right here. Democracy and brotherhood, equal justice and equal peace, security and prosperity — all the ideological hallmarks of black political thought and republican liberalism.

Black politics is hopeful because it must be in order to survive being cheated, robbed, humiliated or murdered in America. There is no sane person who ever gave up on hope. There is no moral conviction that is hopeless. You must believe tomorrow can be better even though you have every reason to believe it won’t be. You must believe this not for yourself, but for your children (your “Posterity”). Nihilism is a white luxury. (Blackconservatism comes close, though; it believes white people are immutably racist.)

Because black politics must be hopeful in order to survive — as well as thrive — hope is therefore pragmatic. It isn’t pie in the sky. It isn’t Pollyanna. It isn’t the bright side. It sees clearly. It must, because America is no place for false hope. While white people entertained themselves after 2008 with the idea of a “post-racial” America, no black person did. Yet Obama’s victory was indisputable evidence of its future possibility.

Black history, moreover, is a history of (often violent) white forces trying to stop the preamble, as well as the Declaration of Independence and the 14 Amendment, from becoming a permanent reality. To put this another way, black history is a history of white supremacy and white violence. Yet another way: black politics is anti-fascism.

Too few white Americans, in my estimation, understand that white supremacy, white nationalism, ethnonationalism, or whatever you want to call it is just another name for fascism. Too few white people understand that the “white” in white supremacy changes according to the contingencies of history. In this country, Italians weren’t white a century ago. Neither were the Irish. In Germany, Slavs weren’t white during the Nazi era. Neither were the Jews. Neither were homosexuals or the mentally ill.

Too few white Americans understand many conservative policies are fascist. For instance, policies forcing citizens to work in order to demonstrate that they are deserving of public assistance. The Nazis practiced an extreme version of the same belief. Arbeit macht frei (“Labor makes you free”) was displayed prominently over the gates of some of their prison camps. But free from what? From being who you are. You get public assistance after you stop being yourself. Impossible, of course, and that’s the point of such policies — to make the outcomes of sadist policies seem like a moral failing.

Most of Bernie Sanders’ most vocal supporters are white, and it puzzles them why black Americans are not backing the Vermont senator. From their perspective, black Americans would benefit the most from universal health care, greater job security, and higher taxation on the economic elites cheating black Americans out of their wealth.

They are right, of course, but that’s beside the point. The question isn’t whether black Americans want these things. (Black Americans have fought, bled and died for these and similar things.) The question is whether they can trust Sanders. More importantly, the question is whether they can trust white Americans to underwrite black American investment in Sanders. They say he will win by bringing out the youth vote. Will he?

My critic thinks so. Obama did it. Sanders can, too.

Obama didn’t. He supplemented his win with young voters. But his win didn’t depend on them. Things are different for Sanders. According to a new study, he’s probably going to push a lot of voters away. To win, he must get new voters, young ones, and to do that, he must drive out a percentage of young voters no one has ever driven out.

I’m not vehemently anti-Bernie. I’m not anti-Bernie. I’m Bernie-skeptical, though.

My politics is black. Yours* should be, too.

(*My apologies to my readers whose politics is already black!)

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 26 February 2020
Word Count: 903
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I would rather not defend Bernie Sanders. So I’m not going to. Not yet.

Yes, the Vermont senator’s victory in Nevada was clear. He has the most delegates going into Saturday’s primary in South Carolina. But I refuse to talk about him as if he has a lock on the nomination. He needs nearly 2,000 delegates to win. He now has 34.

I do not know what I cannot know until the time in which knowing is possible. We are not there yet. Therefore, I’m not going to talk about Sanders as the frontrunner until the moment in which it’s possible to discern a frontrunner. I’m not going to talk about “momentum” until it’s possible to discern momentum. I’m not going to talk about “moderate” voters balking at “socialist” policies. There are no moderates and his policies aren’t socialist. Anyway, the time hasn’t arrived. No one knows anything.

Yes, there are pundits aplenty who are paid top dollar to state authoritatively that America will never elect a “socialist” president. Sure, they have some reasons to be skeptical. But being skeptical about a thing and knowing a thing are two separate things until the moment in which knowing a thing has arrived. And it hasn’t.

Many of the same people declared that America would never elect a lying, thieving, philandering sadist who now beclowns himself and the country daily. This isn’t to say they’re wrong about Sanders — I do not know because I cannot. This is to say they were wrong about Trump — I can know that. Isn’t it strange to trust them a second time?

If Sanders does win the nomination but loses the general election, these same pundits will declare authoritatively that they were right. They told ya so. But that is more coincidence than causality. They could not have known Sanders would lose (in this hypothetical) until he lost. (They can’t have known until the moment in which knowing is possible.) Presidential elections are the product of a multiverse of social factors. Claiming they were right about the outcome is rationalizing after the fact.

Here’s something normal people should keep in mind.

American politics tends to turn in 40- or 50-year cycles. That’s when the political parties organize themselves around a loose ideological consensus. From the 1930s to the 1970s, that consensus was liberal. The federal government was an increasingly active presence in the lives of ordinary Americans. It was a period of “positive liberty” during which the Democrats were the majority party. The Republican Party didn’t like it (conservative Republicans called liberal Democrats socialists), but it accepted it.

From the 1970s to the present day, the consensus was conservative. The federal government played an increasingly inactive, or hostile, role in the lives of ordinary Americans. It was a time of “negative liberty,” as the political scientists say. This era favored the Republican Party. The Democrats accepted it in order to play ball.

The presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump will probably be seen years from now as a period in which the last ideological consensus shattered and a new one emerged. I don’t know what it will be. (No one can know until the moment in which it’s possible to know has arrived.) I can say it won’t be “conservative.” It might be fascist. It might democratic socialist. It might be a return of majoritarian liberalism.

Most people saying Sanders can’t win came of age during the last ideological consensus. That’s when totalitarianism loomed large in the background and when American capitalism was the savior of the world after the Soviet collapse. People over the age of, say, 55—the oldest Gen Xers on up—still feel the sting of being called a socialist. People under 55, however, feel little or no sting at all. Indeed, for many of the youngest voters, opposition to “socialism” is opposition to public policies they want.

Sanders’ critics point to his Medicare for all plan as reason he can’t win. They say he can’t explain how he’ll pay for it. That may deter some from voting for him, but a vast number of others don’t care about the math. What they care about is Sanders fighting for them. Is that lying? Maybe. Is that buying votes? I suppose. His critics are free to claim such things. But they are not free to say they know he can’t win. They can’t.

All this is premature. Sanders has 34 delegates. Four Democrats have 46 between them. South Carolina will tell us how much black support Bernie Sanders has, and that will tell us more about his chances on March 3 (Super Tuesday). We do not know what we cannot know until the moment has arrived in which it’s possible to know.

Let’s stop pretending until then.

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: 25 February 2020
Word Count: 794
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If you watched the Democratic debate last night, as I did, you witnessed a first-degree murder along with millions of other eyewitnesses. Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden, with help from Bernie Sanders, cut Michael Bloomberg into pieces before eating him.

It was good to see, not so much because Bloomberg is the wrong choice for the Democratic Party, but because the media mogul, whose products I quite like, has never been tested. It was good to see, moreover, because the debate audience saw what happens to a billionaire exploiting a political system vulnerable to his vast wealth.

They got to see that system’s deep ironies, too. Even as Warren ate a forkful of Bloomberg, rolling it around her mouth, savoring the flavor and sighing with satisfaction, three House Democrats endorsed Bloomberg after receiving donations.

I think Warren and Bloomberg have something in common other than the relationship between chewer and chewee. Together, they are the only candidates, as I see it, who are explicitly anti-Donald Trump. Indeed, all of them are Democrats (Sanders is an independent running for the party’s nomination), but that’s not the same thing.

Bloomberg, for all his flaws, and there are many, has won respect for being strategically cold-blooded. In terms of policy, he’s quite good with respect to gun control, climate change and the commonwealth. But that’s not how he’s pitching himself. He’s a single-issue candidate, and that issue is defeating the president.

A cold-blooded focus isn’t enough, however. Bloomberg, who’s worth something like $56 billion, has virtually limitless resources. His team can spend all of its time attacking the president instead of fundraising. Resources like that go a long, long way in an information environment like ours in which there are a thousand ways of reaching voters — TV, social media, YouTube “influencers,” Twitter memes, etc.

Yes, he’s buying his way into Democrats’ heart and minds, and they might be OK with that, because the moral imperative to defeat an authoritarian wipes out all others.

Warren’s anti-Trumpism is less obvious. She isn’t a single-issue candidate. (“I got a plan for that” is her signature response to nearly all press inquiries.) But she does have something neither Bloomberg nor Sanders nor the others have. Her message, her personality, her rhetoric and her policies are all centered on the act of fighting.

This was on display last night. She told Bloomberg the Democratic Party can’t have its own version of Donald Trump. She told Sanders that Democratic voters won’t gamble on his “revolution.” She told the debate audience, vote for me and I’ll fight for you. Translation: I will fight the president and the Republican Party, and we will win.

As hard as it may be for some liberal to accept, this is what most Democrats want to hear. Climate change, immigration, corruption — no one thinks these are unimportant. But they do not elicit urgency the way Trump does. Sure, Warren rubbed her belly after dining on Bloomberg’s 78-year-old liver, but the two have much in common.

Up to this point, I have not been explicit about who I think would be a decent Democratic president. I have instead exhorted liberals to just pick a candidate, for Christ’s sake. Let’s just move on to overthrowing the fascist president already. I still believe that, just as I still believe Democratic Party unity is more important than who the actual nominee is. But none of that speaks to my own preference for a nominee.

Warren is my preference.

Indeed, I don’t understand why voters would choose Sanders when Warren is available. Ideologically, they are cut from the same cloth. The only difference is fundamental — Warren wants to fight for the little guy by fighting against power, corruption and authoritarian creep. She does not want, to paraphrase Pete Buttigieg, to “burn the house down.” She does not want, as she said, to gamble on a so-called revolution.

She also lives her values. Meanwhile, Sanders leaves open the use of superdelegates to win the nomination after condemning them in 2016. He says he won’t release his full medical records after a heart attack and after condemning Hillary Clinton in 2016 for not releasing the transcripts to highly paid Wall Street speeches. None of this is to mention his thuggish habit of polarizing would-be allies, suggesting a critic of his policies is just one more person to be added to the list of enemies to be destroyed.

Warren doesn’t do that. She’s a fighter, not a divider.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 February 2020
Word Count: 745
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