When the pundit corps expressed worry, wrongly, about Bernie Sanders and the rise of quote-unquote socialism in the Democratic Party, Congressman Jim Clyburn said son, please. Black voters know white voters better than white voters know themselves. By the time the primaries are done with Iowa and New Hampshire, Black pragmatists in South Carolina are going to seal Joe Biden’s fate. Clyburn was right. First, Biden won the nomination. Then he won more votes than any candidate in US history.

Though we owe Clyburn a debt, no one’s perfect. Within a day or so of Election Day, the House Whip was out front again. Why did the Democrats lose seats in the House instead of gaining them, as expected? I think, more than anyone else, Clyburn can be blamed for the conventional wisdom that arose that day. The reason, he said, was quote-unquote socialism and all the messaging that arose from it. Largely thanks to Clyburn, the Democrats are now acting like losers, instead of the winners they are.

Then something peculiar happened. The same man who blamed quote-unquote socialism for the loss of House seats was talking up the champion of quote-unquote socialism. On CNN, Clyburn actually said that, “There are a lot of young people out there and some not-so-young people, like Bernie Sanders. I wish he would come into the administration. Bernie has a way of getting people to understand certain things.”

What’s going on here? On the one hand, you could say Clyburn meant it when he blamed quote-unquote socialism for the unexpected loss of House seats, but carved out an exception for an old friend even though he’s a quote-unquote socialist. On the other hand, maybe Clyburn didn’t mean it. Maybe he was searching for answers to hard questions like everyone does after an election.

Maybe he was just being competitive. The party’s progressive wing is rising. An oldster like Clyburn might not get what all the youngsters are talking about, but recognizes rivals when he sees them. The apparent conflict between competing wings of the Democratic Party, then, is probably not over quote-unquote socialism. It is probably over normal intra-party politics.

Remember that the Democrats were united against Donald Trump. It’s natural, then, for unity to loosen up after a giant is slain. (Republican incumbents are indeed giants.) It’s natural, moreover, for the various factions that united against a common foe to start jockeying for position postmortem, doing whatever they can, for as long as they can, to influence legislative affairs and achieve their respective goals.

Sanders is not going to be in Biden’s administration, because his place in the Senate is too valuable. But it’s nonetheless normal for him to say, as he did last month, that he and his progressive supporters are going to hold the Biden administration “accountable.”

It’s healthy for Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others to say, as they did this week, that they oppose the appointment of “deficit hawks.” They are reminding the president-elect that he owes “the left,” and that “the left” has expectations.

Healthy intra-party politics can become unhealthy. The Democrats are, however, a long way from where the Republicans were a decade ago when billionaire donors really did build an “alt-right” hierarchy of power to primary conventional Republicans out of existence.

They are a long way from where the GOP is now — when people like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich accuse Georgia Democrats of voter fraud while worrying that such claims might deter Republican voters from turning out for that state’s runoff elections next month. (The outcomes will determine which party controls the Senate.)

I’m not saying the Democrats won’t ever cannibalize themselves. I’m saying that reports of their self-cannibalization are, thus far, greatly exaggerated.

It probably won’t ever happen, though. Consider the different ways the parties handle disagreement. For the Democrats, disagreement is expected. Independence of thought is valued. The party is a big tent. Lots of competing opinions, lots of competing goals. The trick is finding ways to balance them and move all factions forward at the same time.

For the Republicans, disagreement is unexpected. Independence of thought is suspect. It suggests disloyalty. Loyalty matters above all. When Republicans disagree publicly, that’s newsworthy. It signals weakness. When Democrats disagree publicly, that’s newsworthy, too. But it’s not weakness that’s being signaled. It’s strength.

Republicans self-destruct at the sight of dissent. The Democrats, however, don’t.

The Washington press corps, alas, doesn’t quite get this. It doesn’t fit into its amoral and two-dimensional view that the parties are equally bad and equally good. For this reason, lots of normal people, even liberals, end up accusing the Democrats of being terrible communicators. “Why can’t they get on message?” is a question I hear often. Even some Democrats appear to accept the charge as true, judging themselves not according to their considerable strength, but according to the Republicans’ weakness.

The result is making something healthy and normal, like intra-party rivalries, seem unhealthy and dangerous, like the rise of quote-unquote socialism. After four years of nonstop lying, the least the Democrats can do is speak truthfully about themselves.

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 November 2020

Word Count: 848

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The US government “ascertained” Joe Biden’s victory on Monday night. That means the president-elect can get on with the business of building a new administration. The move came after Emily Murphy, the head of the General Services Administration, found the political cover she needed to authorize his transition team.

Donald Trump has not yet conceded, but in permitting a peaceful transfer, a source told the Washington Post, “He basically just conceded. That’s as close to a concession as you will probably get.”

It’s Murphy’s “political cover” that we should be talking about. I don’t mean that she should have done what she was supposed to have done according to her sworn oath and without fear of betraying her patron in the White House. I’m referring, instead, to an argument already underway over whether “the system worked.”

On the one hand are the alarmists, like me — Trump is attempting a coup d’etat!

On the other hand are the skeptics. In this, the LA Times’ David Lauter is representative: “So far, predictions of [election] catastrophe have fallen flat: No violence, no huge lines, no big problems with USPS, nor mass numbers of voters with ballot errors. No efforts by GOP legislatures to interfere. Just Rudy with hair dye dripping down his face. Whimper, not bang.”

I’m not going to conclude which one is correct. I am going to argue that the answer to question of whether “the system worked” is probably going to be found somewhere in Murphy’s understanding of “political cover.” Different people can define “the system” in different ways, of course, but everyone should agree that Murphy, as head of the GSA, is one of its critical cogs.

We must look, therefore, at the forces culminating in her decision — on Friday, she said that partisan loyalties were no longer sustainable. I can’t touch on them all, obviously, but I can single out one: federalism. That’s the idea that shaped the founders’ thinking, and therefore, their framing of our system of government.

The best way of preventing tyrants from accumulating the power they desire, the founders believed, was building a structure by which power is decentralized and redundant. Most recall the separation of powers at the federal level — the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Some forget power is also split 50 ways, with each of the states having power, each county within each of the states having power, and each municipality within each county within each of the states having power. All of this is highly inefficient, but inefficiency was the point. The United States is sovereign, but so are its moral, legal and constitutional components.

I think federalism was central to the creation of Murphy’s “political cover.” The president’s legal scheme for usurping the will of the people was running out of gas last week. That much was apparent. In state courts, the evidentiary standard is by necessity higher than it is in the court of public opinion. Baseless assertions are punishable by law.

Even as Trump’s attorneys alleged widespread systemic voter fraud in front of television cameras (primarily Fox), they could not make the same allegations in front of judges. Over time, one lawsuit after another was getting tossed out of court. By the middle of the week, Trump knew that gambit was doomed. That’s why he changed tactics. He tried getting election officials and state lawmakers to crown him king.

That, too, ran into trouble. State election officials are bound by state law. (It is a felony in Michigan, for instance, for a member of the state board of canvassers to refuse to certify votes.) State legislators are doubly bound, you could say — by the law and by politics. Trump wanted GOP lawmakers in Michigan to assign their own slate of electors in order to usurp the will of the people. But that risked legal jeopardy. More importantly, that risked a fruitless court battle with a Democratic administration with the legal authority to assign electors (who were also bound by the law). Trump wasn’t just asking them to side with him. He was asking them to commit political suicide.

The outcome in Michigan has been clear since last week. A group of CEOs said Monday morning Trump must end his 16-day stand-off with the republic. So did a group of GOP national security types. So did a handful of Republican Senators. By Monday afternoon, Michigan certified its votes. That gave Biden the electoral votes he needed. (Pennsylvania and Nevada certified their votes today). That gave Murphy the cover she needed. That is, federalism did — it established a reality the Republicans, including Murphy, could no longer deny. She “ascertained” Biden’s victory that night.

Federalism didn’t save us by itself. If Biden’s margins of victory had been narrower in Michigan, and elsewhere, I have no doubt the Republicans would have stood by while the president and his attorneys found perfectly legal ways of stealing the election. To the extent that federalism saved us, it was subordinate to the integrity of principled leaders (like Georgia’s beleaguered Republican secretary of state) and to the historic turnout on the part of American citizens who took matters into their own hands.

We must have faith in democratic institutions. Our “system,” even if it “worked,” is in desperate need of reform. For now, however, let’s celebrate having faith in ourselves.

 

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: 24 November 2020

Word Count: 885

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There’s a presumption at work among members of the Washington press corps that needs rethinking. That presumption is this: the Republicans, especially those in the Senate, fear the wrath of voters who have balled up their identities with the rise and fall of Donald Trump. For this reason, all the Republicans, with rare exception, stand in silence while the president prosecutes what must be called an attempted coup d’etat.

This presumption is part of a larger generational context in which political, economic and financial incentives are pursued amorally, wherever they might lead, even if they end up tearing into this or that social, ethical or democratic norm.

Shareholder value must be maximized. Profits must be realized. Voters must be obeyed. They must, even if they poison the water, ruin livelihoods or bring America to the brink of despotism.

This presumption is usually hard to spot. It’s found in and among the many rational-sounding reasons Republicans give for their continued support of the president. Sure, they might be complicit in the sabotage of the incoming administration, but what can they do? They must hold on to Trump’s voters in order to hold onto the Senate. (Two run-off elections in Georgia will determine which party controls the upper chamber.)

Importantly, these incentives are so fierce, they appear to give Republicans no choice.

The problem isn’t that incentives impact elected officials. Of course, they do. The problem is that reporters allow these incentives to seem monolithic — as if there were not, in fact, many equally important incentives to consider. The impression is one of Republicans merely doing what constituents demand. If it were up to them, they say, they would oppose Trump. It’s not up to them, so they don’t.

According to CNN’s Carl Bernstein, many Republicans Senators “have repeatedly expressed extreme contempt for Trump and his fitness to be” president. All of them are said to be scared to death.

Presumably, this is why Bernstein outed 21 of them on CNN’s “New Day.” They are too scared to stand up to Trump. The current crisis is too dire to keep their names hidden. So:

The 21 GOP Senators who have privately expressed their disdain (to Bernstein) for Trump are: (Rob) Portman, (Lamar) Alexander, (Ben) Sasse, (Roy) Blunt, (Susan) Collins, (Lisa) Murkowski, (John) Cornyn, (John) Thune, (Mitt) Romney, (Mike) Braun, (Todd) Young, Tim Scott, Rick Scott, (Marco) Rubio, (Chuck) Grassley, (Richard) Burr, (Pat) Toomey, (Martha) McSally, (Jerry) Moran, (Pat) Roberts, (and Richard) Shelby.

I think Bernstein hoped outing them would put more pressure on them to act in the best interest of the republic. But he may be giving more credit than is due. To repeat, there are many incentives to consider when it comes to the behavior of elected officials. Another incentive is the oath of office by which they vowed to defend and protect the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic.

Trump cheated to win in 2016. He cheated again when he involved a foreign leader in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people. The case for the president’s removal was as clear as the outcome of the 2020 election. Very. Yet all the above Republicans acquitted Trump of treason.

But they were said to be afraid. They had to stand by him. OK, fine, but acquitting a traitor demands more than taking the GOP’s word for it. What’s so scary that they’re willing to, as political scientist Steven White said this morning, “debase themselves” for “a man who will throw them under the bus the second it seems beneficial to him.”

Dissent’s Richard Yeselson’s answer nailed it: “(It’s) always fascinating … how little ‘courage’ is really required. Nobody is going to the Gulag, nobody need rise up in the Warsaw Ghetto. Republicans are terrified of tweets, and afraid of, at worst, losing office. They are the most craven, contemptible governing class imaginable.”

So the problem is one of choices. The Republicans do not fear Trump. They fear losing power. They are, in intent and in effect, choosing power over principles, power over promises, and power over patriotism.

They could choose to explain for the good of the country that Trump should get out of the way. But they are choosing not to. We are left, then, with a reasonable conclusion: they believe sticking with Trump gives them an advantage over people who believe some things matter more than power.

Sticking with Trump gives them an advantage over those of us who believe in democracy. They say they are afraid in order to gain advantage over people of good faith who fall for it.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 November 2020

Word Count: 764

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I think some Republicans are beginning to sweat. Not like Rudy Giuliani sweltered during yesterday’s loony presser. (Whether it was spray-on hair dye or mascara running down his cheeks seems to be subject to debate.) But perspiration always starts slow. The more the president denies defeat, the more some Republicans will sweat bullets.

To be clear, I have no doubt, had Joe Biden’s margin of victory been narrower, that the Republicans would have stood by while Donald Trump successfully stole the election. He has followed a predictable plan: claim voter fraud, litigate outcomes in court, and, now, get Republican state electors to declare him His Holiness, the God-Emperor of the United States.

All of this will fail, but failing isn’t the point. The Republicans have demonstrated a dangerous tolerance for sedition. (That’s to be expected, I suppose, given GOP Senators acquitted Trump of treason, freeing him to commit it again.)

You could say, as Edward Foley did in the Washington Post, that democracy dies when “the losing party won’t accept defeat.” You could also say, with more accuracy and more urgency, that the losing party is killing something it no longer controls.

The Republicans now have a taste for coup d’etat. Every serious citizen is right to expect them to try again.

They must first get through this period, which will probably determine which future road the Republicans take. If Trump gets out of the way, they can move forward with preparations to sandbag Biden with their reputations for love of country and loyalty to the republic intact.

If the president doesn’t get out of the way, however, those preparations could, and should, unfold under a cloud of suspicion. Most people still don’t fully appreciate the depths of Trump’s sedition or the GOP’s complicity in it. The more he stays put, though, the more the press corps is going to raise public awareness.

Each day sees word-choice getting more forceful and strident. The Post: “Trump uses power of presidency to try to overturn the election and stay in office.”

Here’s the AP’s tweeted nut graf: “President Donald Trump is trying to turn America’s free and fair election into a muddled mess of misinformation, specious legal claims and baseless attacks on the underpinnings of the nation’s democracy.”

These are going to hurt.

Stuart Stevens, a former GOP strategist, said: “If pressuring state legislators to throw out an election and appoint loyal electors isn’t a high crime, what is? Does the Constitution mean nothing?”

Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein said: “Trump has now gone from legitimately contesting the election to illegitimately attempting to steal it, and in the process he’s undermining confidence in democracy. People are threatening election officials trying to do their jobs, and Trump is putting pressure on Republican elected officials to join his unconstitutional scheming.”

Larry Sabato, a nonpartisan pollster, said: “Yep, it’s #sedition. Let’s hope the Secret Service and military leaders have a serious, detailed plan to remove all trespassers from the White House at noon on January 20.” (Fact: The Pentagon has made clear there is no plan to get involved.)

Importantly, the above are not marginal. Indeed, these are white men whose privilege, influence and status would probably insulate them from any fascist takeover. Yet here they are, rightly screaming from the ramparts. It’s not hard to imagine the press corps amplifying screams like theirs.

The last thing the GOP wants is for them to be so loud they play in Peoria. If most Americans start seeing the Republicans through the lens of betrayal, if they start seeing the party as a separatist movement (that’s what it is), even the milquetoastiest of Democrats, like Joe Manchin, will be forced to go to the wall.

Then there’s “moderates” like Mitt Romney. The Utah senator and former Republican presidential nominee understands his fellow Republicans are playing with fire. If the Republicans don’t hustle the president out the door, and soon, he’s going to enmesh the party in a fight with patriotism itself — a fight that Romney knows it cannot win.

Bear in mind, he tacitly compared Trump to Richard Nixon in last night’s statement:

 

Having failed to make even a plausible case of widespread fraud or conspiracy before any court of law, the President has now resorted to overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election. It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting President.

If Trump were more of a team player, he’d recognize he’s put the Republicans in a good place. Millions of Americans already doubt Biden won. The Republican Senate, therefore, can proceed with sabotaging his administration under the guise of God and country but also in the spirit of exacting revenge for a former president done wrong.

But Trump isn’t a team player. He’s demanding state lawmakers humiliate themselves in his name, and so far, they are obliging. He’s reaching for loonier and loonier conspiracy theories, anything to prevent leaving office.

The Republicans meanwhile remain idle. If they allow Trump to pit the party against patriotism, watch out.

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 November 2020

Word Count: 847

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The president lost the election. He’s losing his legal fight. He’s now trying to get obscure local election officials to overrule the sovereignty of the citizenry. It’s a last-ditch effort on Donald Trump’s part, but also a clear sign that democracy isn’t the point for the president or the GOP. It’s an obstacle to power they must overcome.

According to the Washington Post, the president on Tuesday called a Republican member of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers. Monica Palmer said he called after she and another Republican member changed their minds, deciding to certify votes in their jurisdiction. (They had initially refused to.) Importantly, the president’s phone call came before Palmer and William Hartmann changed their minds again. They filed affidavits Wednesday alleging they were “improperly pressured” to certify votes.

Bear in mind none of this matters. The president may have told Palmer and Hartmann to “rescind” their votes, but Michigan law prohibits it. The move is, moreover, part of an unprecedented effort by Trump to delay or undermine a peaceful transition of power, said University of Kentucky law professor Joshua Douglas. “It would be the end of democracy as we know it,” he told the AP. “This is just not a thing that can happen.”

What’s curious is that Michigan would go blue even if the president’s gambit succeeded. President-elect Joe Biden’s vote margin there is in the tens of thousands. What did Trump hope to accomplish by improperly pressuring obscure local election officials? If democracy isn’t the point, and winning Michigan isn’t the point, what is? I think the point can be seen in Palmer and Hartmann’s term “improperly pressured.”

True improper pressure is the president of the United States calling an obscure local election official to say she and the other guy made the wrong choice, now go out there and humiliate yourselves in my name even if there’s no chance of winning Michigan. False improper pressure is local citizens like Ned Staebler who, during a public hearing of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers, said Palmer and Hartmann were choosing to disenfranchise Black Detroiters, a cardinal sin for which they will burn in Hell.

Palmer told the Post:

Last night was heartbreaking. I sat in that chair for two hours listening to people attack me” as a racist who was attempting to disenfranchise Detroit residents. She said her intentions were the opposite—but her efforts have been lost in a sea of invective that night that included death threats against her and her family.

Free speech isn’t a threat unless it’s literal. Otherwise, it’s protected. People seeking to invalidate democracy often make free speech seem threatening, though. “I sat in that chair for two hours listening to people attack me.” That’s what Palmer and Hartmann mean by “improperly pressured.” Outrage poured down on them for refusing to certify the vote. The public pressured them. Democracy urged them. Nothing’s improper there.

Then they changed their minds a second time. That’s where true improper pressure comes in. Not only did the president appear to tell them to “rescind” their decisions; Palmer received death threats after voting to allow Wayne County to turn blue. Kayla Ruble says she saw the texts threatening Palmer.

Palmer told Ruble they came from the right and the left, but that’s not credible. (She said “leftist” threats came from “Antifa from Grosse Pointe”). More likely, she got death threats from Trump supporters aiming to punish her for disloyalty to Trump despite loyalty making no difference.

Like Palmer, Tricia Raffensperger, wife of the Georgia secretary of state, is also getting death threats. Fox’s Atlanta affiliate reported some of them: “You better not botch this recount. Your life depends on it.” “Your husband deserves to face a firing squad.” “The Raffenspergers should be put on trial for treason and face execution.”

Back in Michigan, white vigilantes arrested in connection with a scheme to kidnap the governor had a Plan B, according to prosecutors. ABC’s Chicago affiliate reported Wednesday it “involved a takeover of the Michigan capitol building by 200 combatants who would stage a week-long series of televised executions of public officials.”

If democracy isn’t the point, and winning Michigan isn’t the point, what is? The point, I think, is simple once you think about it. It’s subordination to the collective. Palmer succumbed to democratic pressure. She betrayed the group. She must be punished. Humiliation or death, the goal is the same.

The call of the tribe is so strong you’re willing to slander democracy — “I sat in that chair for two hours listening to people attack me.” Individuals don’t matter. Neither does democracy. Not till they threaten the collective. Then they justify an equal, opposite, and seditious reaction.

Put like this, it’s clear Trump isn’t just a loser. He’s the leader of an insurgency in the making.

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: 19 November 2020

Word Count: 803

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My bullhorn is rather small, but I’ll do what I can to amplify Ned Staebler. He’s one of four members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers. Two Republican members, William Hartmann and Monica Palmer, voted Tuesday against certifying the votes of Wayne County, citing irregularities in Detroit. The board was deadlocked, 2-2.

It was a stunt, purely performative. A state agency was prepared to step in. If that didn’t work, a state judge would have decided. Given the facts of the case, Michigan was going blue no matter what. (Joe Biden’s margin of victory over Donald Trump was in the tens of thousands.) But trying to undermine the sovereignty of the people is nearly as bad as successfully undermining it.

I’ll explain why Ned Staebler’s statement last night is important to America politics, but first you have to read what he said:

I’m not going to try and change your minds. I just want to let you know that the Trump stink, the stain of racism that you, William Hartmann and Monica Palmer, have covered yourself in is going to follow you throughout history. Your grandchildren are going to think of you like Bull Connor or George Wallace.

Monica Palmer and William Hartmann will forever be known … as two racists who did something so unprecedented that they disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of Black voters in the city of Detroit, because they were ordered to. Probably, I know, Monica, you think Q told you to do it or some other crazy stuff like that.

But just know when you try to sleep tonight that millions of people around the world now on Twitter know the name Monica Palmer and William Hartmann as two people who are completely racist and without an understanding of what integrity means or a shred of human decency. The law isn’t on your side. History won’t be on your side. Your conscience will not be on your side and, Lord knows, when you go to meet your Maker, your soul is going to be very, very warm.

Palmer and Hartmann changed their minds within hours after a world of hurt came down. I don’t know if Staebler did that. (I’d like to think so.) In any case, it’s important to bear in mind that Staebler’s jeremiad came after having outlined the many ways Hartmann and Palmer were wrong.

He marshaled an impressive array of concrete facts, applied sound reasoning to it, and came to the moral conclusion that Hartman and Palmer are not only wrong; they were choosing to be wrong, because being wrong benefited their presidential candidate even though it was injurious to the republic.

Only after making his case did Staebler launch into hortatory. Only after seeing they were immutable did Staebler give up engaging them. “I’m not going to try and change your minds.” Indeed, there was no point. It was time to lay down the tools of rational evidence-based persuasion and take up arms of political rhetoric. It was time to stop discussing the results of their behavior and start discussing their intentions: the political sabotage of “hundreds of thousands of Black voters in the city of Detroit.”

I’m making a big deal of where reasoned argument ends and political rhetoric begins, because the Democrats, including Joe Biden, seem unwilling to step over the gap.

Lindsey Graham interfered with Georgia’s recount. (He asked its secretary of state if he could toss out legal ballots, a possible federal crime.) GOP electors in Nevada are suing to have Trump declared the winner there or have the state’s votes “annulled.” Along with shenanigans in Wayne County, Michigan, this is a picture of systemic rot.

Trump isn’t the problem. Elected Republicans aren’t the problem. The entire GOP is acting like a separatist movement more than a legitimate political party. Yet all Chuck Schumer can say is there’s “no excuse” for discrediting “our democratic elections.”

It’s time to emulate Ned Staebler. Stop trying to change Republican minds. Stop saying they are harming democracy. (We know this.) Start doubting their intentions. Are they loyal to the United States or not?

Tribalists tend to respond to tribalist claims. The biggest tribe is the American republic. We must demand the GOP pick a side. As Dave Painchaud put it:

It’s important to recognize that confrontation is not generally the way to go. There’s really only one exception: fascism. You can’t negotiate with that. Fascism requires a ruthless response. It’s an awful thing, but it’s undeniably true.

 

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: 18 November 2020

Word Count: 747

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On Monday, the New York Times ran an article as significant as it was generally overlooked. It was a short interview with Matthew Sheffield, a key architect of the right-wing media apparatus that not only spreads “alternative facts” but maintains an “alternative reality” that millions of Americans inhabit.

“I basically built the infrastructure for a lot of conservative online people and personally taught a lot of them what they know.” Sheffield is now something of an apostate. He appears to be reckoning with what he hath wrought.

In an interview I encourage you to read in full, he gives a Reader’s Digest version of about 1,000 editions of the Editorial Board. It’s an impressive feat of brevity.

Almost all right-wing support in the United States comes from a view that Christians are under attack by secular liberals. This point is so important and so little understood. Logic doesn’t matter. Fact-checking doesn’t matter. What matters is if I can use this information to show that liberals are evil. Many of them are not interested in reporting the world as it is, but rather to shape the world like they want it to be (my emphasis).

Where to begin? First, perhaps, is the central role of nihilism. Everything is as good or bad as everything else, and nothing matters — unless it can be used against the enemy. Reasonable people engaging in the democratic process in good faith will always be at a disadvantage when facing people who care about nothing but power.

Deferring to the authority of facts and reason is itself democracy in practice. Denying the authority of facts and reason, however, is itself something else in practice. It’s authoritarianism.

Second, the conundrum of liberalism. Why are white evangelical Protestants (WEPs) and white conservative Catholics (WCCs) hostile to the LGBTQ community? Why do they believe equal accommodation laws violate their religious freedom?

Liberals often tell themselves the reason for such hostility is fear — specifically that they fear what they do not understand. The solution, therefore, is education. Once WEPs and WCCs understand that a lesbian, say, isn’t a monster, they will accept her as a political equal.

What liberals do not understand is the more they communicate factually and logically, the more these people feel persecuted; the more persecuted they feel, the more they go to war. (Put another way, the more good faith goes in, the more bad faith comes out.)

Liberals fail to understand that WEPs and WCCs understand everything they need to know, which is everyone who is not a WEP or a WCC is the enemy. When it comes to the enemy, nothing matters, except the cold-blooded prosecution of power.

When liberals answer power with facts, they lose. They must answer it with more power.

Third, political equality is a perversion of God’s law. Liberal appeals to political equality, therefore, fall on deaf ears — if you’re lucky. Mostly, they arouse enmity, because asking WEPs and WCCs to accept as true the equality between men and women is asking them to profane God. The old orders of power (God over Man, men over women, white over black, etc.) are God’s law, and they are defended in His name. Asking WEPs and WCCs to recognize the equality of a transgender woman, say, is a double perversion since any deviation from man-wife norms is a literal abomination.

Fourth, the appeal of Donald Trump. Forget about religion for a minute to remind yourself who the president is. He doesn’t care about anything but himself. WEPs and WCCs think anyone who isn’t a WEP or a WCC is the enemy. Put these together, and you have what is, for all intents and purposes, a cult-like movement comprising millions of Americans who already felt the slow muddle of modernity was Christian genocide not otherwise specified.

These people do not want a freely elected president. They desire a king to rule them in this world just as they desire a king (Jesus Christ, King of Kings) to rule them in the next. Individual liberty isn’t important. Morality isn’t either. What’s important is obedience to the group, which is to say, to the collective.

Perhaps the biggest mistake liberals make, when faced with authoritarian religious movements, is pushing all religion away from public discourse. But secularism isn’t the absence of religion. It is the creation of democratic space for them to compete so that none is dominant.

Put another way, liberals have long thought religion is the problem. It’s probably the solution. WEPs and WCCs will never recognize anything other than The One True Faith. But just as you can’t answer power with facts, you can’t answer religion with squishy amorality. Democracy, after all, is a faith, too.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 17 November 2020

Word Count: 783

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I get why some people do not get why 72 million Americans voted for Donald Trump. The covid pandemic has killed nearly a quarter million people in this country. It has brought the US economy to the brink of collapse. The president is a lying, thieving, philandering sadist.

How could so many Americans say: “Yeah, I’m good with that”?

I get why that’s hard to believe, but the thing we have to do, if we hope to move our country forward, is get over this disbelief. It’s time to believe millions favor or tolerate organic homegrown fascism. It’s time to believe millions voted against their material self-interests. It’s time to believe they will kill themselves before admitting a mistake.

America is no more exceptional than any other nation. We can and will eat ourselves. I don’t mean to sound hopeless. I mean we can’t solve the problem till we see it clearly.

There’s probably no better illustration of this than Jodi Doering’s interview on CNN this morning. Doering is a nurse in South Dakota. These days, she sees a lot of death. She sees patients denying the reality of the covid even as they are immobile and dying from it.

People are still looking for something else, and they want a magic answer, and they won’t want to believe that covid is real. … It wasn’t one particular patient. It’s a culmination of so many people. Their last dying words are, “This can’t be happening. This is not real.” When they should be spending time Facetiming with their families, they’re filled with anger and hatred. It made me really sad. I just can’t believe those are going to be their last thoughts and words. … (italics are mine)

In the bigger picture, when you’re trying to reason with people, “Can I call your family, your kids, your wife, your friend, your brother,” and they say, “No, because I’m going to be fine,” (and they’re dying), “it just makes you sad and mad and frustrated, and then you know you’re going to come back and do it over again.

When people would rather believe they’re dying from lung cancer than from the covid — that’s what Doering reported to CNN — what can you do as a nurse? Nothing, except get “sad and mad and frustrated.”

What can you do as a citizen? Well, pretty much the same thing. You cannot expect cooperation from people who believe cooperation is defeat, who will hurt themselves to hurt you, and who deny reality as they lay dying. You cannot expect a free and equal exchange from them. You can’t expect democracy from them.

All you can do is persuade as many people as you can to take the side of reason. That’s what Joe Biden did when he won more votes than anyone ever. That doesn’t mean the nation is ready for healing. It only means for now that all’s not lost.

It’s hard seeing fellow citizens as dangerous. That difficulty amounts to an incentive to find a reason, any reason, to explain why they’re killing themselves. Some might say, “They must have been duped — by Fox News, by Russian disinformation, or by Donald Trump.” Or: “These people are idiots. They don’t know what’s good for them. They can’t make rational choices.” There’s something to these, but only something.

The best explanation is the plainest. This is who they are. To look for other answers, as Jodi Doering said, is to look for “magic answers.” They are choosing their fates. Dying isn’t even the hard part. (Lung cancer is OK.) The hard part is conceding to the truth.

We have to rearrange our expectations. During the election, it was believed that voters would move toward Biden the more the covid and its economic fallout moved into their communities. It was believed imminent sickness, joblessness and/or death would open people’s eyes. Turns out, it had the opposite effect.

According to last week’s analysis of election results by Buzzfeed, “COVID-19 deaths and unemployment had surprisingly little influence over the swings that happened at the county level. If anything, Trump did better in counties where more people have died of COVID-19.”

We have to rethink our political thinking, too. It’s often presumed Americans resist wearing face masks and other pandemic precautions due to the depth of their faith in individual liberty. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem gave voice to this when she said recently, “My people are happy, and they’re happy, because they’re free.” Our heritage is rife heroes choosing death over tyranny. “Live free or die,” for instance. See also: “Don’t tread on me.”

But nowhere is there a hero choosing death over democracy.

We must reconsider the credit we give. In places like South Dakota, individual liberty is being perverted in the interest of the group, of the tribe, of the collective, so that individual life, far from being sacred, is expendable. This is the collectivism we must face. This is the alternative to democracy we must fight.

Winning the presidency means there’s still hope. There’s work to be done but we must first believe the unbelievable.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 November 2020

Word Count: 851

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Please pay less attention to the loser and more to what’s been accomplished. Joe Biden won the White House. He reclaimed the upper-Midwest. He flipped two red states. (Arizona was called this morning; Georgia is headed for a recount, but Biden is leading.) The Democrats held the House. The party netted one Senate seat. (They won two, lost one.) There’s a chance, a slim chance, but still a chance, to take the Senate seats after a couple of Georgia run-offs in January. This is not a picture of failure.

True, it wasn’t the blue wave many hoped for. (I hoped for it.) Republican resilience in the House was a bit surprising. Maine reelecting Susan Collins was very disappointing. The Democrats did not take the Senate and with that go dreams of reforming the court system.

More disappointing, perhaps, was the president winning 10 million more votes this year than he did four years ago. For those hoping the whole of the county would reject Donald Trump, that was the most painful fact of all. “Post-Racial America” was never a real thing, but it felt good to believe in it. It’s impossible to believe in it now.

Let’s not let failing to meet high expectations define political reality, though. Losing House seats is not and never was about the left versus the center, no matter how much that insufferable simp Chris Cillizza insists it is. Moderate Democrats lost swing districts because swing districts swing, not because progressive Democrats half way across the country take progressive positions for progressive constituents. This isn’t to say moderates should be progressive. It’s to say swing districts are hard to hold. That a Republican was at the top of the ticket probably explains GOP gains in the House.

Not taking the Senate can probably be explained by incumbency and “undervoting.” Undervoting is when people who rarely vote, or who have never voted, decide to vote for president but no one else. In the case of the Democrats, people came off the sidelines to vote against Trump but skipped everyone else down ballot.

Incumbency was probably the countervailing force for the GOP. That wasn’t enough to save Martha McSally in Arizona and Cory Gardner in Colorado, but it was enough to save Collins in Maine, Lindsey Graham in South Carolina and Thom Tillis in North Carolina.

Republican incumbency explains, to a degree, why Trump got 10 million more votes this year than he did four years ago. Reagan got more votes the second time in 1984. So did George W. Bush in 2004. Incumbency is an advantage to all presidents, but it’s a titanic advantage for GOP presidents. That Biden knock one off is underappreciated. That he did it by winning (so far) more than 5 million more votes, besting every candidate in the history of candidates, is doubly underappreciated.

To be sure, Trump is bad and 72 million people voted for bad, but let’s maintain some perspective please.

If you really want to understand why so many voted for Trump, find a person who grew up in Trump Country but who now lives in or around a city. That person will tell you, I have zero doubt, that the reason 72 million voters chose Trump is rooted in the reason they no longer live in Trump Country. Intelligence, ingenuity, creativity, a sense of adventure — these are not recognized, valued or celebrated there. They are discouraged, even punished. Individualism isn’t honored. It’s despised. Power is top down. It is not shared.

This person didn’t flee. This person was driven out. This person lives in or around a city, because cities are where one goes to be free. “You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers,” said Gene Wilder’s character in Blazing Saddles. “These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know, morons.”

People who grew up in Trump Country but who now live in and around cities know something else: that the people they live, work and play with really don’t understand Trump voters and that that’s OK. It’s OK not to understand people who not only don’t make sense but insist that not making sense makes sense.

It’s OK not to understand people who deny the authority of facts, knowledge and reason; who refuse the reality of climate change; who liken differences of opinion to treachery; who see diversity as oppression; who believe only they are the “real Americans”; who equate minor personal inconvenience with tyranny; who feel equality is theft; who sacrifice themselves to the covid pandemic to score political points; and who betray their country by refusing to recognize the legitimacy of lawful democratic outcomes.

It’s OK. If people living in Trump Country desire a king to rule them, let them. In the end, there are more of us than there are of them. This year’s election made that very clear. Trump punched the cities. Cities punched back. And cities won. As long as people who live in and around cities understand this, we have nothing to fear.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 13 November 2020

Word Count: 842

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It says something about our politics when the loser gets more attention than the winner. It’s been 10 days since Election Day. It’s been five since learning Joe Biden won. For all that time, most of our focus has been on whether Donald Trump will concede instead of what election results mean to the future of the United States.

Something none of us has had time to talk about while wondering if the president were mounting a coup was this plain fact: Trump won the white vote, and lost.

Again, with feeling — he won the white vote, and he still lost. It wasn’t close either. The president won 58 percent of white voters, a demographic that constituted 67 percent of all voters, according to Edison Research exit polling for the Times and other news outlets. Yet the president-elect flipped states in the upper-Midwest. He flipped two red states (Arizona and Georgia). He won more votes than any challenger since Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. He won 5 million more than Trump. (I think he’ll double that.) The counting continues.

Bottom line: Donald Trump bet everything on racism, and he lost.

Virtually no one is talking about this. All of our attention, mine included, is on Trump. It’s understandable! None of us has experienced what’s now happening. No president has refused to concede. No political party, to my knowledge, has gotten behind a president’s refusal to admit defeat. No one has had to imagine the dread of witnessing two people claiming the title of president of the United States. And yet here we are.

That dread, thank God, seems to be waning by the minute. The president knows he lost. The Republicans know he lost. Trump knows the Republicans know he lost. All that remains, it seems, is figuring out a way to save face amid 72 million Americans who voted for him. (That’s the highest ever vote share behind Biden’s).

Saving face, for Trump, means never ever — ever — admitting defeat but leaving in a loud huff anyway. Will he run again in 2024? No one knows. More certain is the Republican Party has no incentive to reform itself. Victory requires even more stoking of even more white rage against the slow muddle of American modernity toward greater equality and justice.

Which is why we should appreciate this moment for what it is. As a reminder of where we started, allow me to quote at length from Jamelle Bouie. He’s at the New York Times now, but in 2016, he was at Slate. In a post-election piece called “White Won,” Bouie wrote:

 More than anything, Trump promises a restoration of white authority. After eight years of a black president — after eight years in which cosmopolitan America asserted its power and its influence, eight years in which women leaned in and blacks declared that their lives mattered — millions of white Americans said enough. They had their fill of this world and wanted the old one back (my italics here). And although it’s tempting to treat this as a function of some colorblind anti-elitism, that cannot explain the unity of white voters in this election. Trump didn’t just win working-class whites — he won the college-educated and the affluent. He even won young whites. Seventeen months after he announced his candidacy, millions of white Americans flocked to the ballot box to put Trump into the White House. And they did so as a white herrenvolk, racialized and radicalized by Trump.

Bouie put 2016 in the stream of history. He thought, as I thought, the major parties agreed there was no going back to the politics of explicit white supremacy. Racism didn’t go away, of course, after the civil rights triumphs of the 1960s. It didn’t go away after the triumph of 2008. There was a sense, however, that a multiracial democratic republic had become a permanent fixture. “I thought this meant we had a consensus,” Bouie wrote, with a heavy heart. “It appears, instead, that we had a detente.”

Perhaps it was, but the results of the 2020 election give us reason to reconsider. It’s true the president won the lion’s share of the white vote. But the other 41 percent of the white vote teamed up with huge majorities of Black voters and voters of color, overwhelming polling places, running up the popular vote to heights never before seen, making a statement that no one is seeing but should.

Cosmopolitan America did assert its power and its influence in 2008. Having gotten its fill of the old weird racism, it did it again. It decided nothing was going to stop it from taking back the country. You don’t need a detente when you’ve demonstrated the power to continue winning.

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: 12 November 2020

Word Count: 785

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