A reliable feature of American fascism is taking something that’s completely normal and making it look completely abnormal or worse: immoral, alien, deviant, corrupt, criminal or even treasonous. Take for instance free speech on college campuses.

There you will find young people disagreeing passionately about X, Y and Z. In disagreeing passionately, they are using free speech against free speech, which is what anyone would expect in a liberal democracy and its independent institutions in which freedom of thought and freedom of conscience are of paramount importance.

Fascists don’t like free speech, but they can’t attack it openly for fear of giving the game away. So they attack it indirectly by alleging that young people disagreeing passionately about X, Y and Z are actually suppressing free speech. Or they take a position that’s beyond the pale — like, say, the earth being center of the solar system — and accuse dissenters of using “dehumanizing and totally unacceptable” rhetoric.

Their goals are various and sundry, but in the end, fascist political figures seek to dismantle the good-faith communal bonds on which an open democratic society must depend, and replace them with power and bad faith, but most of all loyalty to the leader. As long as communal bonds endure, free individuals can govern themselves. As long as free individuals can govern themselves, fascist politics can’t take hold. So fascists make normal things seem abnormal and normalize what’s beyond the pale.

Fascism doesn’t work the way we tend to think it does. As novelist Umberto Eco, who had been an unwilling member of Mussolini’s National Fascist Party, wrote: “It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, ‘I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.’ Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises.”

By Ur-Fascism, Eco meant Eternal Fascism. It’s never going to go away completely, and it promises to come back. I think that’s a constructive concept and history with which to understand recent developments coming out of president’s reelection campaign.

Axios reported Tuesday that Donald Trump’s allies are seeking to raise a couple of million dollars to undermine the legitimacy of the press. The plan is targeting “people producing the news” by slipping “damaging information about reporters and editors to ‘friendly media outlets,’ such as Breitbart, and traditional media.”

This isn’t new.

The Washington press corps has been a frequent target of the Republican Party since forever, but especially since the early 1990s when former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (who was taking a page from Spiro Agnew’s playbook) advised colleagues to doubt publicly the legitimacy of the press. Remember: bias isn’t the point of the Republican complaint. The point is suppression of a free press and free speech. That Trump’s allies plan to spread disinformation about members of the Washington press corps is the logical next step in the evolution from implicit to explicit fascist politics.

Citizenship hasn’t been the party’s focus for as long, but it’s now of superlative importance. We can see this in the administration’s approach to a time-honored tradition in the armed forced: immigrants can become members of the political community if they sacrifice for it. Last summer, the Pentagon began discharging immigrant recruits who had been promised a pathway to citizenship.

It gets worse.

In July, US Citizenship and Immigration Services said it was considering a rule change so that immigrant spouses and children of military personnel would not be shielded from deportation during overseas service. (Imagine coming back to find your family missing.) The USCIS also said last week that children born overseas to “active service members” — everyone from grunts to spies to foreign diplomats — would not be automatically eligible for citizenship. That rule change would affect about 25 people a year, according to the New York Times, leading critics to ask: Why change it? Good question.

Why erode, undermine, and compromise the meaning, value and ideal of citizenship when it’s only going to affect a few? For that matter, why attack other normal things, like free speech and a free press? My suggestion is that we try to understand what the Republican Party has become. Normal politics no longer works for it. It must do something else if it wants to prevail in the 21st century. It’s no longer committed to liberal democracy and individual liberty. Instead, it has become a collectivist ethno-nationalist enterprise, which is to say Republican politics is now fascist politics.

Free speech, a free press and citizenship serve individuals seeking the actualize the ideal of self-government. What’s that to a fascist prizing loyalty above all? What’s that to a fascist whose demands are so totalizing nothing can exist outside the party.

Ur-Fascism doesn’t rule. And it won’t ever. Not as long as we take Eco’s advice: “Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances — every day.”

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 ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 04 September 2019
Word Count: 828
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I’m choosy about topics. I avoid things that are self-evident in what they teach us about us.

But there are times when I have to set aside that standard to say what’s so obvious to everyone but so in need of being said. For instance, that it’s wrong for the president to cancel a trip to Poland — in order to memorialize World War II dead — so he can play golf; that it’s wrong to say he’s canceling his trip so he can monitor Hurricane Dorian but, actually, so he can play golf; that it’s wrong for the president to play golf on his own properties hundreds of times since taking office; that it’s just so wrong for the president to have played golf on his own properties hundreds of times while having spent his pre-presidential days savaging the previous president for playing golf.

The moral wrongs are myriad: hypocrisy, fraudulence but especially plain-old corruption. Donald Trump told the vice president that instead of staying in Dublin during his overseas trip to Europe that Mike Pence should stay at Trump’s golfing resort on the other side of the country. Why? It’s so obvious I’m a bit embarrassed pointing it out to you: he’s bilking the American people. It has cost the Secret Service alone more than half a million dollars just to rent golf carts at his properties.

It’s also completely obvious that Trump doesn’t care about these myriad moral wrongs, because, to him, morality is for suckers. This president wears his belief in social Darwinism on his sleeve. He glorifies the notion that the strong must eat the weak for the benefit of the human species, and that any counterargument is just another form of fraud. The difference, in the president’s mind, is that at least he’s honest about it.

Survival of the fittest, which is what social Darwinism is, is surely what motivated the administration’s recent decision to deport immigrants, some of them children, with cancer and other life-threatening diseases. (About a thousand people a year are given “deferred action” as a form of humanitarian relief.) It doesn’t matter that they’ll suffer after leaving. What matters is that they don’t belong here. If they die as a result, well, so be it. As Fox News’ Tucker Carlson once said, in a different context: “You’ve got to be honest about what it means to lead a country — it means killing people.”

Survival of the fittest is surely what motivated the administration’s decision to deport Jimmy Aldaoud. Aldaoud was born on a refugee camp in Greece where his parents fled to escape religious persecution in Iraq. (They were Chaldean Christians, an oppressed minority in the Middle East.) He arrived in the United States when he was about 1 year old. He was a diabetic and a paranoid schizophrenic. A minor criminal record — e.g., disorderly conduct — was probably attributable to that mental disorder. (The government said Aldaoud’s criminal record was the reason for his removal order.)

Though he lived in Michigan nearly his entire life, spoke no Arabic and did not know Iraq from Mars, the administration deported him. He was a pauper living on the streets of Baghdad when he died. He could not find insulin. Aldaoud was 41. The administration knew all this. Everyone involved did. It deported him anyway. The administration’s actions were the near moral equivalent of premeditated murder.

The administration has allowed Aldaoud’s body to be brought back to Michigan to be buried alongside his mother. It wasn’t OK for Aldaoud to be here while he was alive. It’s OK now because he’s dead. “You’ve got to be honest about what it means to lead a country — it means killing people,” Carlson once said. Dying is what the weak do.

The president isn’t strong. That’s obvious. (He certainly isn’t the fittest. That’s obvious, too!) Also obvious is that social Darwinism is how terrible people rationalize doing terrible things. Not so obvious, perhaps, is the social Darwinists are in on the con.

If they really believed the strong must survive for the benefit of the species, they would not back down from deporting sick immigrant children. But that’s precisely what the administration did Monday. It would “reopen the process that helped some seriously ill migrants to defer deportation while receiving life-saving care” per NBC News.

Trump’s belief system isn’t worth defending, not when push comes to shove, and that’s because it’s nothing of the sort. When you don’t believe in anything except power, there’s nothing to stand on when motivated opponents who do believe in something, like protecting the weak and caring for the sick, bring their power down on you.

There’s a lesson here for me, perhaps for you, too. Call out immorality. Every time.

Even when it’s obvious.

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 ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 September 2019
Word Count: 792
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I’m going to say something that sounds terrible, really terrible, just awful, but sometimes the whole truth of a moment, the deep immorality of an era, overcomes social mores and taboos. I’d rather not say this, and I apologize in advance. But:

I’m glad David Koch is dead.

I’m glad he’s dead, because few have done more to pave the way for Donald Trump and the revival of fascist politics in America. I’m glad he’s dead, because few have done more to sabotage liberal democracy and self-government. I’m glad he’s dead, because few have done more to burn the world, leaving our children a devastated planet.

Most of all, I’m glad David Koch is dead because few men have done more to normalize, solemnize, and institutionalize the destructive moral program of greed is good. David Koch and brother Charles Koch have spent billions and billions to shape this country in the belief that life is a zero-sum game in which you win or lose, and any value placed in community, the common good, and in the American public is a sucker’s bet.

Thanks to David Koch, the Republican Party went from “we’re broke” to “build a wall.” It went from adulating freedom and individualism to fetishizing blood and soil. The Republican Party, thanks to billionaires like David Koch, went from public policies cloaked in covert racism that covertly sought to kill human beings it did not like, to policies that are overtly racist and overtly seek to kill human beings it does not like.

I know that I shouldn’t be speaking ill of the dead. It would nicer to keep quiet. But that would mean giving David Koch the benefit of the doubt in the aftermath of his timely death. Evil men don’t deserve memorials. They don’t deserve silence either.

As I’ve noted before, the Tea Party movement, as it was called often, was in retrospect a nascent fascist political movement that exploited the rights, privileges, laws and norms of liberal democracy to sabotage our country from the inside, and that set a course for an administration that’s currently jailing children indefinitely while also inspiring Nazi-style “magahats” to murder people deemed unwelcome in America.

The Tea Party was not in fact motivated by the rule of law, limited government and fiscal responsibility. It was motivated by the election of the country’s first African-American president and the social change his rise to power represented to white so-called “conservatives” who refused to recognize the legitimacy of racial minorities.

As Theda Skocpol and her Harvard colleagues wrote in the months after 2010, opposition to Obamacare wasn’t so much opposition to “government-run health care” as much as it was opposition to “‘handouts’ to ‘undeserving’ groups, the definition of which seems heavily influenced by racial and ethnic stereotypes,” they wrote.

Race, or rather white supremacy and later white nationalism, motivated the Tea Party. Whatever libertarian gloss that the Koch Brothers’ billions added to the mix in effect made a nascent fascist political movement more palatable to regular Republicans and the press corps. To the extent that they did not fuel the movement, they certainly enabled it, first with money, tons of money, and second by rationalizing its goals.

But the Koch Brothers did fuel the movement, not just with money, but ideologically. As I said, David and Charles Koch advanced over four decades the idea that life is a zero-sum game in which the strong prey on the weak. This is the dark side of libertarianism. Their investments in Americans for Prosperity and the American Legislative Exchange Council, two groups that shaped and reshaped politics during the Obama administration, were the institutional expressions of that eat-or-be-eaten worldview. Donald Trump shares the precise same worldview. Morality, to this president, is a con. Morality is what the weak do to prevent being eaten by the strong.

In Donald Trump, and in the nascent fascist political movement before him, the Koch Brothers’ libertarian focus on the individual, which was already hostile to democracy and defense of the common good, melded with a fascist focus on the in-group. Now, instead of individuals eating or being eaten, as Ayn Rand preferred, whole groups of Americans sought other groups to stomp into oblivion before celebrating in triumph.

To be sure, David Koch denied involvement with a nascent fascist political movement. “I’ve never been to a Tea Party event,” he told New York Magazine in 2010. “No one representing the Tea Party has ever even approached me.” But that’s merely plausible deniability. There is an unbroken ideological chain connecting the Koch Brothers, the Tea Party, and the current resurgence of anti-democratic and anti-republican politics.

David Koch’s death won’t change anything. Whatever gladness I feel has limits. But presuming we have a future, his death gives me reason to hope for a better 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 ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 26 August 2019
Word Count: 801
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You may know about the New York Times’ 1619 Project, a major endeavor published last weekend to reframe the citizenry’s understanding of the role of slavery in the founding of America. You may also know about the white conservative reaction to the project. Perhaps the most fascinating take came from the Cato Institute’s Ilya Shapiro:

“A project intended to delegitimize mankind’s grandest, experiment in human liberty & self-governance is divisive, yes. I know it’s unwoke of me to say so, but so be it. I’ll take reality, warts and all, over grievance-mongering.”

I’m not going to defend the Times, because I think the scholarship, commentary and reporting speak for themselves. (I will single out for praise, though, Kurt Streeter’s piece about the NBA’s very slow evolution into a black business enterprise.) I’m not going to critique the white conservative reaction either. That, too, speaks for itself.

I do want to point out what these white conservatives (all men, of course) who are expressing anger with the 1619 Project are saying: they love their country. But their love seems provisional to me, like it depended on clear terms and conditions that if unmet will trigger some kind of escape clause. Love, when real, doesn’t work that way.

Moreover, they seem unwilling to recognize the deep abiding patriotism of black Americans. Love, when real, is unconditional. It can endure anything. But these men can’t endure even the truth. Maybe they’re less upset about the 1619 Project than they are about the probability that black Americans love America better than they do.

Take Shapiro’s claim that the Times, in speaking the truth about slavery, and in saying that the African-American experience is central to comprehending America, is an effort to “delegitimize” the US. That’s so interesting. I mean, it’s false. In no way does a country’s history delegitimize it. That’s just silly, and Shapiro should know better.

I also mean that nothing in the 1619 Project says America is not “mankind’s grandest, experiment in human liberty & self-governance.” It does say that that was true in the beginning only for property-owning (rich) white Protestant men. It does say that the country was built on the perverse paradox of being founded on human equality as well as human slavery. It does say that slavery, as well as the racism it was justified with, have continued to shape our ways of thinking. Only with time has America come closer to “mankind’s grandest, experiment in human liberty & self-governance.”

The fact that America is an ongoing experiment, not a state of being perfected at the beginning, is lost on some conservatives. And because it’s lost, they can’t and won’t tolerate the truth. Because they can’t and won’t tolerate the truth, they search for other motives for truth-telling, malevolent motives that are cynically political, having nothing to do with the altruism of correcting an error in our understanding of our history.

That wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t so sad.

Again, these white conservative men profess love for America, but when pressed, it’s clear they don’t love their country. Not as it was. Not as it is. Not as it may be in the future. And not when the truth does not satisfy clear terms and conditions. They love something else, something unreal. And that’s what’s really being delegitimized — an infatuation with a myth, a fable, a tall-tale that makes them feel oh-so-good.

And even that wouldn’t be so bad if clinging to the myth of America, rather than the fact of it, did not also deny the deep abiding love felt by the people who fought so hard and died so much to be thought of as real Americans. As Adam Serwer said, in a different context, a peculiar irony of our history is that “the American creed has no more devoted adherents than those who have been historically denied its promises, and no more fair-weather friends than those who have taken them for granted.”

I’m not suggesting Shapiro and others are taking the American creed for granted. But I am suggesting their patriotism is built on sand. And perhaps they well know it. Indeed, it would be hard not to when compared to black Americans treated so badly and for so long in this country, and who still love America, and make it 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 ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 August 2019
Word Count: 720
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Donald Trump is concerned about the economy turning sour before the election. He should be. Very. Ten-year Treasury bonds are now yielding less than two-year bonds. That doesn’t happen in good times when 10-year T-notes are yielding more. This “inverted yield curve,” as it’s called, means what should be right-side up is upside down. When that happens, a recession could be on us within a year or so.

But I think we should be mindful of what Trump is really worried about. He’s not worried about the real impact a recession would have on real people. He’s worried about the effectiveness of his lies. Of course, all incumbents worry about economic factors beyond their control affecting reelection prospects. But more than any other president, Trump cares about appearances in toto. Maintaining appearances is maintaining “unreality,” to use Jason Stanley’s term. If the economy contracts, bye-bye unreality. And bye-bye unreality could mean bye-bye President Donald Trump.

Remember: actual policies don’t matter to this president. If they actually mattered, he wouldn’t prosecute a foolish trade war with China. If policies actually mattered, he’d recognize the suffering he’s causing farmers, and stop. But the trade war was never about outcomes. Its outcomes, therefore, don’t matter. The trade war is and always has been about appearances, specifically the appearance of getting tough on “globalists.”

Even when it’s clear that tariffs are boxing farmers out of the world’s largest food market, Trump can lie and deny. He continues saying that China is paying the US Treasury when in fact US consumers are paying more to Chinese importers for Chinese goods. That US farmers continue to support him politically only launders his lies. And trade wars are messy enough that the president can do what he’s best at. When he doesn’t like the message, he never rethinks, because rethinking would mean acting responsibly. When he doesn’t like the message, Trump kills the messenger.

When he can’t kill the messenger, he looks for a scapegoat. As I said, he can’t and won’t be responsible for his own policies, and he can’t and won’t be responsible for his own policies because actual policies don’t matter to him. He’s already blamed Jerome Powell for slowing economic growth though the Federal Reserve chairman has made money as cheap as it’s ever been. If a recession hits, Powell won’t be able to do much to counteract it, because interest rates are already at or close to zero. That’s fine for the president, though. Policies don’t matter. Powell’s future impotence would give Trump all the more reason to blame him, thus maintaining his “unreality.”

But there are only so many scapegoats. Depending on a recession’s severity, most of the people are going to look to Trump as someone with solutions or someone to blame. It’s debatable whether Republicans vote for their economic interests, but we do know Trump’s approval rating was never as low as it was during the government shutdown earlier this year. The president dug a hole but kept on digging until in the end popular recognition that the shutdown was his fault forced him to quit. It was then that Trump’s “unreality” stopped working for him. It was then that he lost.

We normally think of presidents and the economy in plain political terms. When times are good, people praise the president (whoever it is). When times are bad, people blame him. I think this is good enough but we’re missing something if we stop there.

Trump wouldn’t be in trouble only because of a recession. Republican voters, which are his only supporters right now, may not vote according to their economic interests. (As I said, farmers say they still support him.) Trump would be in big trouble, however, if the recession damaged his credibility among Republicans, a reputation built not on outcomes, which don’t matter, but on “unreality.” A recession would end his lies.

That could be the end of 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 ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 August 2019
Word Count: 653
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I continue to believe too many people outside the world of white evangelical Christianity give too much credit to actors inside that world. Normal people, let’s call them, continue to look at this world believing they understand it, probably because they hold in common a variation of the Christian faith or because they read about the teachings of Jesus, which are essentially the teaching of equality and human rights.

Normal people, including virtually everyone in the Washington press corps, continue to look at white evangelical Christians as if they are just one of a multitude of groups within the constitutional order of a liberal democracy that fights hard to advance its principles and protect its interests. And indeed, leading figures of evangelical Christianity have spent years and years building an organizational structure that gives exactly that impression: that all they are doing is what everyone else is doing.

But they are not doing what everyone else is doing any more than Patrick Crusius was doing what the average gun owner does. Though gun owners may hold opinions you might disagree with, most are mindful of rules and procedure. They believe they have the right to bear arms. They fight to exercise that liberty. But most do not believe they have the right to take matters into their own hands.

Patrick Crusius, however, felt “the Mexican invasion” posed a threat to America so great it demanded extraordinary political action in El Paso. His goal wasn’t legitimate politics. His goal was murder.

I do not mean to suggest that the political goals for white evangelical Christians is murder. I do mean to suggest the goal is not what normal people tend to believe it is.

Normal people, working inside the normal American system, fight hard for something. They see an objective — say, tax cuts or a new law protecting the quality of drinking water — and they work toward that end. White evangelical Christians do not fight for things. They fight against things. I’m not talking about fighting against, for instance, tax increases. I’m talking about fighting against a human being’s right to be what that human being wants to be in this life. White evangelical Christians fight against that right, because they deny that some human beings are as human as they are.

Democracy demands recognition of the legitimacy of everyone who participates in a political community. White evangelical Christians, however, do not recognize the legitimacy of various out-groups. They do not recognize various out-groups as consisting of human beings. Out-groups, by dint of being out-groups, consist not of people but aliens, criminals, perversions, animals, or some species of subhumanity.

These out-groups include women defying the authority of the “natural” hierarchy of the sexes. (They use birth control or seek abortions.) These out-groups include anyone on the LGBTQ-plus continuum defying the authority of the “natural” binary of straight cisgender men and women. These out-groups include brown people defying the authority of the federal government. White evangelical Christians do not demand punishment for these people breaking the laws of Man and God. They demand punishment for these people being who they are. They derive pleasure from the punishment of sin. Being punished for being trans, for instance, is divine justice.

They are not doing what everyone else is doing, because their goals are not rooted in democratic legitimacy or even devotion to Christ’s teachings, which, as I said, are essentially the teaching of equality and human rights. Their goals are rooted in sadism — in the pleasure, sanctified by God, that’s derived from the suffering of others. And their goals are rooted in the resentment that the sadism historically afforded to them, and that was once codified into law or at least socially acceptable, no longer is. Normal people should stop giving white evangelical Christians the benefit of the doubt.

Ralph Reed is one of the leaders who helped build an organizational structure over decades that gives the impression to normal people that white evangelical Christians are doing what everyone else is doing in American politics. Reed told the Washington Post recently that white evangelical Christian voters support Donald Trump’s bid for reelection because, he said, they believe the president will fight for them no matter what.

Trump looked to many like a protector, a brash culture warrior who would take their side. “He said, ‘I’m gonna fight for you. I’m gonna defend you,’” said Ralph Reed, the chair of the Faith and Freedom Coalition in Georgia, which will distribute millions of voter-guide pamphlets at churches to drive evangelical turnout in 2020.

He gets it.

Yes, he does.

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 ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 14 August 2019
Word Count: 764
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There’s a good reason why moral clarity is getting so much attention on social media. Demand for it outstrips supply. That’s why Beto O’Rourke’s outrage over coverage of the El Paso massacre was so refreshing. Jesus Christ, he said, of course the president is a racist. Of course, he inspired mass murder. Stop putting all of that on me, he said. Look around. You reporters already know the answer. Why keep asking the same question?

Moral clarity is in short supply in part because the Washington press corps tends to be nihilistic. When everything is as good or bad as everything else, nothing really matters. If nothing matters, there’s no reason not to — in fact it’s much easier to — give Donald Trump a never-ending benefit of the doubt. Sure, he’s lied more than 10,000 times. Sure, he established his power by denying the legitimacy of America’s first black president. But no one’s perfect. Others lie. Others pander. Nothing matters.

But moral clarity is in such short supply in part because the Republican Party wants it to be that way, and makes it so. The party’s ability to persuade people to accept its version of reality is key to its political success. It’s in fact to their advantage if people can’t quite figure out what’s what on their own, and if they depend on the party to tell them “the truth.” That’s why the GOP is hostile toward science, universities, free speech, free press and the whole truth. These threaten to undermine their power.

If the president is going to get blamed for a mass murder, Republicans believe, the Democrats ought to be blamed too. So they will search for a reason to blame them for the very thing they are being blamed for. The Republicans will do this not because they believe in right and wrong — remember: nothing matters — but because the Democrats must be wrong, because they are Democrats.

Eventually, the Republicans will find a reason, even if it’s absurd. Absurdity, however, is merely relative in an amoral world in which everything is as good or bad as everything else, and nothing matters.

Patrick Crusius, the El Paso killer, was clear about his motives. He posted a document echoing Trump’s rhetoric about invading hordes of immigrants that, if permitted to continue and proliferate, would replace “real Americans” with something altogether horrible. So he set out to do something about it. To wonder, as the Washington press corps has, if a president who has maligned immigrants, racial minorities and Muslims inspired an act of mass murder is to behold the sky above and wonder if it’s blue.

Connor Betts, the Dayton killer, had motives far less clear—if he had any discernible motives at all. He reportedly made a list of women he wanted to rape. He reportedly made a list of people he wanted to murder. He also evidently claimed to be a “leftist” on Twitter, even declaring a preference for Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. None of this coheres into a recognizable political ideology in the way that Patrick Crusius’ white supremacy does. Even so, some of these facts were cherry-picked by the president’s defenders. If Trump is to blame for one mass murder, then the Democrats — one of them anyway, it doesn’t really matter who — are to blame for the other.

One outcome of such nihilism is simple cynicism. “Don’t blame us for being awful. They’re are awful, too.” Another is fraudulent civility. “No one knows why bad people do bad things. Let’s stop playing politics and try to get along.” In both scenarios, everyone shares the blame, no one is held responsible, and as a result, nothing matters. Except for all the dead bodies. It’s not really surprising, once you think about it, that Beto O’Rourke’s outrage over the nihilist press coverage in El Paso went viral.

Americans are starved for moral clarity. They are starved for the truth.

The Republican are less inclined to do something about their bigotry problem than they are in finding ways to suppress complaints about their bigotry problem, and they are willing to do that by accusing their enemies of — wait for it! — bigotry. US Senator Ted Cruz wants to declare anti-fascism a form of domestic terrorism even though that makes no sense at all. Anti-fascist activists (or antifa, as they’re called) are against fascism, which is precisely the racist ideology that animated Patrick Crusius.

Instead of doing the moral work of figuring out what speech is dangerous — like the president’s demagoguery — and what speech is central to democracy — like calling out the president’s demagoguery — Cruz and his Republican allies would rather outlaw political dissent altogether in the name of national security. That would in turn deepen people’s dependence on the GOP to tell them what to believe while weakening people’s ties to the Democrats, which again is all the better for the Republicans.

Truly, nothing matters — if the Republicans get their way.

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 ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 06 August 2019
Word Count: 823
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The president condemned white supremacy after the bloody massacres in El Paso and Dayton. Does anyone believe him? I hope not. Donald Trump long stopped deserving the benefit of the doubt. Continuing to give him that is enabling his toxic bad faith.

“Our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy. Hatred warps the mind, ravages the heart and devours the soul,” the president said this morning.

I’m not buying it. Neither should you.

The president has told thousands of lies since taking office. This is a fact. He also plays coy when it comes to the racist ideology that lifted him to the land’s highest office. If under pressure from his party and the press corps, he’ll deliver a scripted condemnation. He’ll sound very sober and very serious on TV. That will be enough for the Republican Party, but also for a political press too amoral to judge for itself.

Later, he’ll say there are good and bad people on all sides, undermining whatever good faith he earned with his formal statement. But by then, his party and the press corps will have moved on. Few will be listening, except enemies and the white supremacists operating in the shadows who are already highly attuned to the president’s rhetoric. They know Trump didn’t mean a word of his condemnation. They know he said it because he was goaded into saying it. They know he’s really one of them.

The president also said this weekend’s double massacre is more about mental illness than it is about guns and gun violence. That’s another whopping lie. More guns means more death. It’s as simple as that. Saying it’s about mental health is cover for the Republicans, especially those in the Senate. The Democratic House already passed gun-control legislation. Senate Republicans facing reelection do not want to be forced into voting against the NRA. Trump is helping them by focusing on mental health.

The temptation among liberals and leftists might be to accept this framing—mental illness v. gun control—as if is were true. I’m not suggesting there’s no truth in it. I’m suggesting, actually outright saying, that that’s playing by Trump’s rules. Liberals and leftists should make the whole truth more obvious. By their inaction, Trump and the Republicans are telling us they want people to die, especially people they dislike. Why would they want people they dislike to die? Because they’re American fascists.

The president spent last week maligning cities as cesspools of crime, corruption and much worse. During the entire time, the Republican Party establishment was silent. In doing so, the president was following the same playbook other fascists have used successfully. Rural Germans were for Hitler — the real German nation. Rural Germans worked hard, worshipped God and loved their country. City residents, on the other hand, were corrupt politically as well as genetically. Under Jewish influence, people of different religions and ethnicities mingled together, even had sex with each other, and in the process not only desecrated a pure Aryan race but threatened to replace it.

Sound familiar? It should.

El Paso and Dayton, it will be noted, are cities. So is Pittsburgh and so is Charleston. So is Las Vegas and so is Parkland (Greater Miami). In these cities are liberals and Jews and other “cosmopolitans” as well as racial and sexual minorities—all of them lazy, criminal, decadent and/or diseased. Real Americans pay taxes. Urban Americans are dependent on the state. We are “real.” They are “dangerous,” and they must be dealt with. Fascists don’t hate cities because cities are liberal economic success stories.

They hate cities, because they’re cities.

They kill, because they want to kill.

Hitler didn’t just demagogue the German people into accepting his racist and antisemitic worldview. He beat it into them. He organized a militia called the Sturmabteilung, or brownshirts, at first to provide security. But as the paramilitary grew, it became a means by which Hitler terrorized the population, especially in cities where Jews and other “undesirables” were targets. Brownshirts rioted, vandalized, assaulted and murdered in cold blood until there was no political resistance left.

Trump and the Republican Party don’t need a party-aligned paramilitary group to advance their interests. They don’t need actual brownshirts to terrorize the population. All they need to achieve both is send the right signals to the right people who are already embedded with one kind of white supremacist group or another. When these “lone wolves” hear the president talking about infested cities, invading and diseased immigrants and the like, they are ready, willing and able. It’s unorganized, unattached to the GOP and untraceable but very effective. Some call it “stochastic terrorism.”

All of this may sound shocking. I have qualms typing these words.

But if Trump and the Republicans are not American fascists who want to see people die, they should prove it. As it is, they are asking us to trust them, and like I said, this president has long since stopped deserving the benefit if the doubt. Given the GOP’s years of inaction and indifference to mass death and suffering, it seems entirely reasonable to conclude they are not just for gun rights. They are for people dying.

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 ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 05 August 2019
Word Count: 865
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There was a mini-scandal on Twitter Wednesday so small it might not matter, but I think it does. It speaks to an issue I’ve raised before, which is that very smart people overrate their ability to identify obvious idiocy and thus make the mistake of looking for concrete reasons why the president attacks major cities like Baltimore.

Donald Trump does not attack cities, because, as smarty Will Wilkinson said, they are proof that “the liberal experiment works—that people of diverse origins and faiths prosper together in free and open societies.” He attacks them because they’re cities.

The fascist mind is dumb.

It all started when Jonathan Weisman, a Times’ politics editor, posted this:

“Saying @RashidaTlaib (D-Detroit) and @IlhanMN (D-Minneapolis) are from the Midwest is like saying Lloyd Doggett (D-Austin) is from Texas or @repjohnlewis (D-Atlanta) is from the Deep South. C’mon.”

He deleted that tweet before posting a mea culpa of a sort: “Earlier this morning I tried to make a point about regional differences in politics between urban and rural areas. I deleted the tweets because I realize I did not adequately make my point.”

Actually, he did make his point adequately. He was inferring that people of color in the Deep South or the Midwest don’t count. Because they don’t count, Democratic presidential candidates need not bother with them while courting their white counterparts. Weisman’s whitewashing drew the ire of what seemed like the entire black commentariat. It was a deluge of outrage forcing Weisman to say sorry.

Greg Sargent did not defend Weisman, but the Post columnist did try to suss out the greater political context of Weisman’s post, which he said is the urban-rural divide in the country that some say explains white working class resentment for being left behind in an economy rigged by global elites living in cosmopolitan cities. He said:

“Cities are both home to elites and places of terrible urban poverty — decline and suffering coexist with rebirth and human flourishing.

“But they are in some ways multicultural and economic success stories.

“That’s what Trump’s reacting to.”

I have no doubt Sargent is right that there is a real urban-rural divide. The social science seems pretty convincing. According to Mark Muro, a senior policy wonk at the Brookings Institution, the president’s “Baltimore bile speaks to racial animosity but also to the deep grievances of rural and small-town interests of his base that are increasingly being left behind by successful, dynamic, and diverse cities.”

But I doubt something.

I doubt Trump voters are animated by a resentment caused by economic conditions. The president’s base is middle class, not working class, if we define class by annual income, not education. People who are truly working class, including lots of white people, didn’t vote for Trump. They voted, as they have historically, for the Democrat. To the extent that Trump voters feel resentment that’s economically based, it’s the resentment of a petite bourgeoisie for not being able to be more bourgie.

So to say that Trump voters are motivated by resentment as a result of economic conditions may be to give more credence to their claims than those claims actually deserve. The president is not attacking cities because they are “multicultural and economic success stories.” He attacks them for reasons far dumber than that.

It seems clear, to me anyway, that Trump voter resentment is not caused by economic conditions as much as it’s caused by plain-old politics. They believe cities are taking advantage of them—and they won’t stop believing that even if a Democratic president somehow improved their rural economies. That’s because evidence and reason have nothing to do with it. These people believe cities are bad. Therefore, cities are bad.

They believe cities are taking advantage of them, because the Republican Party has for decades been telling them we are real Americans while they who live in urban centers are atheist, criminal, lazy, parasitic, or even diseased. Meanwhile, “real Americans” are pure, hard-working, law-abiding, tax-paying and virtuous. “We” are the makers in other words. “They” are the takers. The more very smart people find an empirical reason for such fascist thinking, the more they legitimize fascist politics.

According to Jason Stanley’s now seminal How Fascism Works, cities are a classic fascist target. Fascism—or white nationalism or white supremacy or whatever you want to call it—rejects pluralism and tolerance, two keystones of urban life. He wrote:

“Everyone in the chosen nation shares a religion and a way of life, a set of customs. … Fascist politics targets financial elites, “cosmopolitans,” liberals, and religious, ethnic and sexual minorities … characteristically urban populations. Cities therefore usefully serve as a proxy target for the classic enemies of fascist politics.”

As I said, evidence and reason don’t matter. Fact is, blue states and their big cities actually subsidize red states and their rural economies. The former sends more in federal tax dollars to Washington than the latter, and the latter receives more in federal tax dollars than the former. If anyone is a taker it’s “real Americans.”

Understanding this is important to the 2020 election but also to its press coverage. If Weisman is any indication, the media’s narrative is: What economic policies can Democrats propose that will entice Trump voters to support them? That question, however, is based on a yuge assumption—that their claims are based in reality.

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 ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 August 2019
Word Count: 895
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Mitch McConnell is mad.

He’s mad that people called him names last weekend. His feelings are hurt.

But he’s not mad just for himself.

He’s mad for his beloved country. People should be able to disagree in America, he said Monday on the Senate floor, without the insults and the name-calling.

“Here we are in 2019,” he said. “The Russians seek to provoke fear and division in our country. American pundits calling an American official treasonous because of a policy disagreement, if anything, is an asset to the Russians. It is disgusting behavior.”

There you have it.

When you call the Senate Majority Leader “Moscow Mitch,” as MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough did, or “a Russian asset,” as the Post’s Dana Milbank did, you’re doing the bidding of Russian Mafia Boss Vladimir Putin. It’s unreasonable and it’s un-American.

It doesn’t matter that the Russians targeted elections systems in all 50 states, according to a bipartisan Senate report released July 25. It doesn’t matter that Robert Mueller said other countries are copying the Russian playbook. (The Post reported last week that Iran is now in the propaganda business.) It doesn’t matter that on the same day Mueller told us this McConnell blocked a bipartisan bill aimed at securing election systems. It doesn’t matter that McConnell really is enabling enemy sabotage of our sovereignty, and thus helping to foment a crisis of legitimacy.

What matters is the insults and the name-calling. “Moscow Mitch” is a “smear,” McConnell said. Calling him “a Russian asset” is “modern-day McCarthyism,” he said. And that, he said, is just what the Russians would do. Blocking a bipartisan bill to protect and secure elections systems in all 50 states was merely a “routine occurrence,” McConnell declared. None of that makes “Republicans traitors or un-American.”

Actually, it does.

That McConnell was visibly upset as he spoke should tell us the “insults” and “name-calling” are having their intended emotional effect. The truth, as they say—it hurts.

Don’t stop though.

Don’t stop saying what needs saying. The temptation, among liberals and Democrats anyway, is that we should rise above to encourage McConnell to follow suit. If we’re going to hold the Republicans to a higher calling, we must do the same. I understand the impulse, I really do, but make no mistake: that’s just what McConnell hopes for. Meanwhile, he’ll sabotage our country, over and over, and not lose a second’s sleep.

You see, McConnell isn’t a hypocrite. I know—he looks like one! Sure, he shattered the norm of presidents getting their jurisprudential due, and now he’s trying to shame two milquetoast pundits for speaking plainly about his treachery. No, no. It doesn’t work like that. Once you betray American political norms, there’s no going back.

But again, he’s no hypocrite.

Hypocrites are people who believe in something higher than power and fail to live up to it. Hypocrites can be shamed into doing the right. Not so with Moscow Mitch. He does not believe in anything that does not begin and end with his tribe. There is no there there. There’s only power. Only when he’s losing does he trot out norms he’s already shattered in a cynical attempt to shame critics for naming the whole truth.

Honesty, I would never have written any of this five years ago. I knew McConnell abused the Senate filibuster. I knew he sandbagged Barack Obama’s constitutional right to nominate judges and justices. I knew his prime directive was making Obama a one-term president. I hated everything about McConnell, but I never thought he was acting out of bounds. I thought he was terrible but I never thought he was traitorous.

Things changed after 2016.

Things changed after McConnell knew the Russians were helping Donald Trump but did everything he could to prevent the public from knowing; after the Russians succeeded by moving public opinion in key states against Hillary Clinton; after an illegitimate president placed two justices on the Supreme Court; after the Senate stopped being a law-making body and started being a judge-making body to establish, serve and protect minority rule in a liberal democracy; and after the GOP made normal the treasonous act of accepting aid from enemies overseas in order to win at home.

McConnell is now shedding crocodile tears, pained as he is by the “insults” and the “name-calling.” I feel no sympathy. I feel no impulse to give him the benefit of the doubt. I feel no obligation to hold myself to a higher standard. What I feel is a white-hot patriotic rage. What I feel is what you are no doubt feeling. McConnell is mad.

But we’re madder. And we’re right to be.

 

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 August 2019
Word Count: 776
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