John Kasich is a decent enough person, though his position on abortion is monstrous. The former Republican governor of Ohio did his part over the summer to help Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by speaking at the Democratic National Convention.

Kasich gave Republicans permission to vote for a Democrat. For that, we should thank him.

But Kasich is still a Republican. He thinks liberalism is the flip side of conservatism. It isn’t. Seeing “both sides,” however, is convenient to a Washington press corps’ need for partisan balance.

The Republican misunderstanding of liberalism tends to be, as a result, everyone else’s misunderstanding. It was, therefore, conventional when Kasich said Biden should “make it clear to the far left that they almost cost him this election.”

His comment was in the context of a presidential campaign during which liberals and progressive (Kasich’s “far left”) were debating the relative merits and demerits of court-packing, defunding police departments, “socialism” and other policies and ideas.

For Kasich, these explained the surge of Republicans voting for the incumbent. It is imperative, therefore, for the president-elect to make clear he’s not a Trojan Horse.

A few things. One, Biden has said and keeps saying he’s his own man. I don’t know why we should not take him as his word. Two, Biden owes the “far left” as he owes Black voters. Indeed, these camps overlap, depending on the issue. Tom Bonier said, for instance, that “defund the police” did not harm Biden in states with big urban cores, like Pennsylvania and Georgia. It helped. Finally, why should Biden enable smears against him? Pushing back against the left gives credence to accusations that he’s being controlled by the left, which convinces Republicans to vote against him.

Kasich sounded moderate when he said that, “Now is the time for Democrats … to begin to listen to what the other half of the country has to say.” But in that centrism is an assumption about liberalism that undercuts the truth about it.

While Republicans really do fight in their self-interest, liberals don’t. They really do fight in everyone’s interest, because liberals believe in something the Republicans don’t.

Once you recognize the centrality of political equality to the Democratic scheme of things, you see that listening “to what the other half of the country has to say” is an exercise in redundancy. More than that, it gives advantage to the GOP project against equality.

Equality is the root of Democratic policies seeking to create conditions by which the greatest number of Americans are liberated to a degree they can achieve the greatest good on their own. Medicare for all. Progressive taxation. Equal justice. Climate change. The pandemic. Policy after policy strives to make room for most of everyone’s interests, though perhaps not the sum total of everyone’s interests.

You don’t need to exhort Biden and the Democrats to “reach out to almost half of the electorate,” as Adam Bjorndahl, associate professor of philosophy at Carnegie Mellon, did. You might sound reasonable in doing so. You might even sound like an advocate for compromise. But what you are really doing is defining liberalism from the right-flank of history.

You’re also misunderstanding why Republicans oppose equality. The GOP, more than corporate power, represents ordered power. God over Man. Men over women. Parents over children. White over black. This hierarchy is not just preferable, it’s natural. It’s God’s will. Efforts by women to be treated equally to men, for instance, are not only offensive, they’re perverse. They can’t be tolerated.

In a very real sense, equality is theft to the conservative mind. And theft, as you know, is punishable by law. Nearly everything about the Republican Party’s project finds its source in defense of the hierarchy of power. Equality is not an objective worth sacrificing for. It’s a crime.

Defeating equality, however, is worth sacrificing for, even your life. Hence the reason Trump won 72 million votes amid a pandemic that has killed nearly a quarter million Americans. Hence the reason why Republican-led states rejected Obamacare. Sure, the law would have liberated millions from the oppression of being chained to a desk job, but that meant helping people who didn’t “deserve” it. And by “deserve,” of course, I’m talking about Black people and people of color. Any law putting them on equal footing with white people is to be opposed wholesale, even if such opposition leads to death.

I get the impulse. “Now is the time for every Biden supporter to reach out to one person who voted for Trump,” wrote Ian Bremmer the other day. “Empathize with them. Tell them you know how they feel (you do, from 2016). Come up with one issue you can agree on.”

All that’s jim-dandy. It might work in part. But you can’t help people who won’t help themselves. You can’t reach out to people who slap your hand away. You can’t compromise with people who will kill themselves to defeat you.

All you can do is achieve liberal goals, and hope they snap out of it later.

 

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 November 2020

Word Count: 841

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Despite being polarized, Americans really do agree on the fundamentals. Is the president above the law? No. Does every citizen have a right to vote? Yes. Should powers be separated? Yes. Are checks and balances good? Yes. Should people be free to worship as they wish? Yes. Are the people the ultimate sovereign? Yes. And so on.

Theory isn’t the same as practice, obviously, but even so, there’s only one correct answer to fundamental political questions. If there were other correct answers — if these questions hinged on differences of opinion — we would not be members of a political community whose outlines were established long ago. We would be part of another kind of political community, one none of us would recognize as familiar, legitimate or good. Our nation would be something else. It would not be America.

These fundamentals, and the outlines of our political community that were derived from them, constitute a contract among and between citizens and noncitizens. We agree to them, consciously or subliminally, because if we did not, we wouldn’t participate in the union we all actually participate in. We’d be in something else that does not exist.

In the run-up to Election Day, CNN’s Jake Tapper urged counting of every vote. He was not violating the norms of journalism. He was not taking a position. With respect to voting, there’s no position to take. Counting every vote is what we do. If we do not count every vote, we are not America. Very few things in this country are either-or, right or wrong, but fundamental questions are. They are, because they must be. They must be, because we want them to be. We want them to be, because we are America.

The president and the Republican leaders are failing the test of fundamentals. Should they recognize as legitimate the outcome of a lawful democratic process? The only answer is yes. That’s the only correct answer, because either the American people are sovereign or they are not. If they are not, we do not live in a representative democracy. Anything less than yes indicates unwillingness to participate in the union as it stands. Anything less than an immediate yes indicates a certain softness of dedication to the US Constitution and the republic.

Yet Donald Trump, and now Mitch McConnell and the rest of the Republican Party, are refusing to recognize Joe Biden’s victory.

I’m told this is theater. I’m told this is about fundraising. Campaign debts must be paid, after all. I trust some of this is true. I also trust history, though. No president has ever denied the reality of his defeat. (Biden has now eclipsed Ronald Reagan’s share of the popular vote, 50.8 percent to 50.7. It is the highest for a challenger since Franklin Roosevelt beat Herbert Hoover in 1932. And the counting continues.) No president has ever refused to concede in the face of a mathematical certainty. To my knowledge, no political party has ever gotten behind an incumbent’s effort to steal an election.

That effort will fail. (I say “will” but honestly I’m as full of dread as you are.) The president’s legal scheme has so far floundered. Every one of his suits has been thrown out, because there’s no evidence of voter fraud on the scale he’s alleging. On the off-chance of one of these lawsuits getting to the US Supreme Court, I’m guessing the conservative justices there will buy themselves legitimacy by dismissing the case outright. Accusations can work in politics, less in court. As GOP Sen. John Cornyn said: “In the end, they’re going to have to come up with some facts and evidence.”

But even in failure, the president and the Republicans will have accomplished something. (It will benefit the GOP, of course, not the president; Trump will face legal scrutiny the minute he’s out of office.) They will have succeeded in three things. One, establishing doubt in Biden’s legitimacy. Two, establishing the groundwork for obstructing his agenda. More important, though, is three. They will have deepened an assumption already at work in the background of Republican discourse. Democrats don’t count. Anything they do, whether criticizing Republicans or beating them by a landslide in national elections, deserves any reaction up to and including murder.

In a very real sense, the Republicans are constituting a nation inside this nation, a confederacy of the mind and spirit to be made real so “real Americans” chosen by God can dominate the whole in God’s name. They are constituting a separate and unequal system inside the one everyone else recognizes as legitimate, in which a small minority is privileged over a majority bound by law but not protected by it. They are, ultimately, on the path toward suicide. When parasites kill their hosts, they kill themselves, too.

The most extreme view among pundits is that the Republicans won’t recognize Joe Biden’s legitimacy. That’s not extreme enough. They are creating a beachhead inside the United States from which to continue covert civil warfare against the United States.

The Republicans are committing treason literally, yet they’re being afforded respect, as if accepting the outcome of a lawful democratic process were a matter of opinion. Wrong. There’s only one correct answer to that fundamental question. Anything less than fully accepting the people’s will is desiring an America that will never exist.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 10 November 2020

Word Count: 887

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I don’t think I have ever seen what I saw over the weekend. Americans were dancing in the streets. That’s usually a metaphor, not a literal fact. But after the big news outlets called the race Saturday for Joe Biden, cities around the country spasmed with joy, as if something pent up inside was released all at once. It was like V-E Day.

I confess that, despite knowing the inevitable was coming, I felt release, too. I did not know what I could not know until the moment of knowing arrived. And knowing never felt so good!

But V-E Day is probably a wrong comparison. It was more like an democratic uprising, a civic revolution of sorts. A new electorate arose to reject the rot and stink of the past and take the United States in a fresh direction. The president-elect seemed to feel what I’m talking about.

During his speech Saturday, he not only said “systemic racism”; he not only thanked Black voters explicitly. When Biden said — “When this campaign was at its lowest ebb, the African-American community stood up again for me. You’ve always had my back, and I’ll have yours” — he actually pounded the podium!

Americans tend to be pretty provincial. We don’t usually care about politics beyond our shores. If we did, we might see similarities between the Arab Spring of 2013 and the spring of 2020. That’s when Black Lives Matter merged its energy with anti-Trump energy to protest the murder of George Floyd.

Just as freedom fighters pulled down statues of despots in Egypt and other Middle East countries, Americans pulled down statues memorializing the Confederacy and symbols of the old white order. You can’t know until knowing is possible. It’s now possible to say this was our American Spring.

That combined energy was pivotal, according to data scientist Tom Bonier. He said voter registration among Black voters bottomed out by May and June. The reason was the pandemic. Then, on May 25, Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd. Protests in his name, Bonier said, “created a huge Democratic voter registration spike.”

Far from being a liability, Black Lives Matter — and its proposal to “defund the police” — was an asset among Georgia’s urban Black voters. Bonier added: “The movement had 13-point net favorability in Georgia, and Biden won among those voters by landslide margins.”

Biden has already won more votes than any candidate. He’s on track, however, to winning as many as 10 million more than Trump. It should now be a plain fact that Black Lives Matter is the foundation of the biggest coalition ever, which is to say, the base of a truly new electorate of a kind that emerges once every 40 or 50 years.

When he pounded the podium, Biden was pounding with the weight of history. The last time a political party lost after only four years in the White House was 1980. (That was Jimmy Carter’s one and only term.) That was the last time a truly new electorate emerged to define our politics for decades.

The American Spring pulled down more than vestiges of the Confederacy. It pulled down the last of Ronald Reagan’s conservative regime.

Old regimes die hard, though. The president refuses to acknowledge that he’s been deposed. His party is choosing loyalty to him over loyalty to the republic. The head of the US General Services Administration denied Biden the authority he needs to start building a new administration. Ted Cruz, who wants to be president, said the US Supreme Court should overrule voters. Lindsey Graham said Trump should not concede for fear of there never again being another GOP president. Newt Gingrich, who more than anyone represents the old regime’s rot and stink, said the election was “corrupt, stolen” and “financed by people like George Soros.” Trump, meanwhile, is planning more “campaign rallies.” (The campaign is now ended, hence the quotes.)

This is more than an attempt to deny Biden’s legitimacy. It’s an attempt to deny the legitimacy of democracy. It’s frankly treasonous. They may end up walking away from Trump, but the Republicans will never walk away from their impulse to sabotage the republic. They are laying the groundwork for undermining Biden the way they undermined Barack Obama.

While the old electorate saw Republican obstruction as legitimate, my hope is this new electorate, the one that will shape the way of things for years to come, does no such thing. My biggest hope is that this electorate sees the nature of the Republican project for what it is — a plot against a renewed America.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 November 2020

Word Count: 761

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The counting continues this morning, and the former vice president came another step closer to being the president-elect. Joe Biden overtook Donald Trump’s lead in Pennsylvania. There are now, as of this writing, about 300,000 outstanding votes there. The current president has no path without the Keystone State. With that many votes remaining, Biden will almost certainly be declared the winner some time today.

The counting will continue even after the major outlets call the race. You should pay attention. Biden isn’t only going to win the Electoral College. He isn’t only going to win the popular vote. He’s going to knock off an incumbent whose own share of the popular vote increased over 2016. (He won 62,984,828 votes, or 46.1 percent; so far, he’s won 69,772,933, or 47.7 percent.)

Incumbents almost always win. Moreover, Donald Trump did not run for reelection on any issue or problem. Only himself. Put all the above together to appreciate how special Biden’s accomplishment is. As I said Thursday, this isn’t just a victory. It’s an outright rejection of the last four years. (I would add, moreover, that it’s a rejection of forty years of Republican orthodoxy.)

That rejection should include the myriad myths, falsehoods and lies the pundit corps has told itself about the nature of the two parties, the incumbent’s strengths, and the condition of the electorate. Pundits can be trusted to tell themselves “teleological tales,” to borrow Alex Ross’ term in writing about a subject completely different from politics.

Pundits — even critical, responsible, and neutral ones — tend to interpret elections starting with outcomes and looking back, thereby creating political reality where there is none as well as misleading voters and risking injurious choices. Here are a few myths, past and present, that Biden’s election put the lie to, or that will almost certainly gain new life as the pundit corps tells itself, and the public, tall tales.

1. Packing the courts I’m already hearing pundits say the Democrats didn’t win the US Senate because voters didn’t want them to pack the US Supreme Court. There’s just no way of proving that. More likely is that political polarization wasn’t as strong as many, including me, expected. In Maine, for instance, Susan Collins won reelection, because lots of Republican voters chose her over her opponent, but also voted against Trump. That’s split-ticket voting, which was thought to be extinct. It isn’t. And here we are. (Control of the Senate, by the way, is still in the air. There are going to be two run-off senate elections in Georgia. The outcome will determine Mitch McConnell’s fate.)

2. Realignment This is the idea that the coalitions constituting each party are changing. That much is true, but contrary to the conventional wisdom in Washington, the change is far from symmetrical. The press and pundit corps presumed during Trump’s term that the Republicans traded white suburbanites for the white working class in the Midwest. The Democrats, meanwhile, were said to have traded the white working class for racially diverse voters in the South and Southwest. 2020 shows this was wrong.

Biden won back Wisconsin, Michigan and (soon) Pennsylvania. Arizona and Georgia are on track. (North Carolina seems a longer shot.) This should scramble the conventional wisdom. It should lead to the following: while the GOP coalition is getting smaller, whiter and more regionally and ideologically homogeneous, the Democratic coalition is getting bigger, more racially diverse and more regionally and ideologically heterogeneous. The parties are different. The parties have always been different.

3. Liberal east coast elites The founding myths of Trumpism is the working class in the “heartland” lost faith in the Democratic Party, because liberal east coast elites are more concerned about “political correctness” than about the forces of globalization hammering “working” Americans. Even Andrew Yang repeated the myth Thursday:

In their minds the Democratic party unfortunately has taken on this role of the coastal urban elites who are more concerned about policing various cultural issues than improving their way of life.

I’m really tired of hearing this. Biden won the east and the west, according to exit polling. He split with Trump the south and the midwest. He won the cities. He won the suburbs. He earned 45 percent of rural areas. You could say the Democratic Party under Biden is a bunch of “liberal east coast elites.” But you must also say that those “liberal east coast elites” are popular with a majority of voters around the country. That’s silly, of course, because the myth is silly. American politics is complex.

4. The white working class All the talk about Trump’s appeal among white working class voters was based on an error. That error was defining white working class by education levels. Fact is, this cohort earned upper middle-class incomes, making Trumpism a revolt of the petty bourgeoisie not the white working class. Most of the real white working class, households earning less than $50,000, voted for Clinton. They voted for Biden this time around, too.

As for Trump, he won voters making more than $100,000 a year, as he did last time. He is a populist, but it’s populism based largely on white supremacy, not economics. The pundit corps did not or would not see the difference. The result has been four years of maddening political discourse based on a demonstrable falsehood.

The real working class, as a whole, is racially diverse, but very Black. And it was Black voters in the Midwest, the South and everywhere else who delivered for Joe Biden.

5. “Socialism” The Democratic Party is a big tent. It now has conservatives (real ones), moderates, independents, liberals, progressives, and self-described socialists. For this reason, it will always be vulnerable to bad actors who define it by its leftmost flank. The problem, for Democrats, isn’t the accusation. It’s complicity in making the accusation stick.

The party could lose as many as 10 House seats in swing districts while keeping its majority. Already, Democrats are blaming “socialism.” So are some pundits who really ought to know better but don’t, because it’s convenient not to. Fact is, Trump is to blame. He was at the top of the ticket.

But by running away from “socialism,” they are giving credence to the accusation, making it more real and more powerful than it is. “Joe Biden is a moderate who could not have won without the ‘woke left’ [that] centrist candidates and pundits keep openly despising,” wrote Issac Bailey. “They claim to want ideological diversity, except when the ‘woke left’ demands to be heard.”

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 06 November 2020

Word Count: 1,090

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The vote counting continues. The former vice president is in the lead after taking Wisconsin and Michigan Wednesday. Joe Biden needs one or two more states to win. (There’s some dispute over Arizona; the AP, Fox and Bloomberg called it for Biden but other outlets have not yet.) The Democratic tally is growing in Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. I’m told Biden’s odds are good in all. If he wins them, he will have flipped five states Donald Trump won. The way I see it, that’s a blue wave.

The president, meanwhile, is betting on a court fight. But as Bloomberg’s Ryan Teague Beckwith noted this morning: “The Trump team is fighting in too many states with too many arguments and not enough evidence, and it needs to win every one of them to pull this off.”

My friend Seth Cotlar, a historian of white-wing politics, was less polite:

Trump is dealing with state election officials the same way he deals with contractors he’s stiffed. Just scream BS accusations at them and sue the hell out of them and hope they relent. It’s not gonna work in this context [of state election law].

All of which is to say, it’s happening. We must be patient. But it’s happening.

What’s always been certain is Biden winning the popular vote. What’s surprising is his winning more votes than anyone. I mean, like, ever. He’s at more than 71.7 million votes, as of this writing. That breaks Barack Obama’s record in 2008.

The number is going to go higher as votes come in from California and other western strongholds. Some estimate that his final tally, when it’s all over but the shouting, could top 80 million. That plus the Electoral College victory equals not just a landslide defeat of one lying, thieving, philandering sadist. It’s a wholesale rejection of Republican orthodoxy.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan won 50.7 percent of the popular vote. Biden could eclipse 52. Reagan built an enduring conservative coalition on the ashes of the mid-20th century liberalism. The future is unwritten, but it may be that Biden builds a new liberal coalition on the ashes Trump left behind.

No one said the country was “closely divided” after Reagan stomped Jimmy Carter. No one said that after he stomped Walter Mondale four years later. Everyone agreed, even the Democrats who controlled the US Congress, that he and the Republican Party were establishing a coalition that would define politics for a generation. For this reason, congressional Democrats played ball. They wanted a seat at the table.

Importantly, Reagan saw the opposition as having the right to sit at it. Today’s Republicans long ago stopped recognizing the political legitimacy of the Democrats. They forfeited conservatism. Despite Biden appearing to have stomped Donald Trump, they are preparing to sabotage him.

This is important to point out for obvious reasons. Biden will have a popular mandate. There is no doubt. When Republicans obstruct Biden, and they will the way they did Obama, they will be obstructing America. But a less obvious reason for pointing this out is this. The conventional wisdom continues to insist that the country is divided symmetrically.

Chris Hayes wrote Wednesday:

 It’s a closely divided country. No political coalition can maintain dominance indefinitely, because the coalitions shift in response to events and competition. With all that said, the Democratic presidential candidate has gotten more votes in seven out of the last eight elections (emphasis are mine).

In fact, the country isn’t divided. The electorate is. But the electorate isn’t 50-50, not when one of the candidates nets a record-shattering number of votes. Biden is on track to win the biggest coalition this country has ever seen. He’s on track to best the multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious coalition of his former boss.

Continuing to insist uncritically that the United States is divided down the middle not only blurs the line between country and electorate. It minimizes Joe Biden’s and his coalition’s achievement. The majority has ruled. There is now a consensus. The incumbent should have one term. America should be a democratic republic, not a white-wing autocracy.

Some ask why 40 percent of the country voted for dictatorship. It’s simple. Democracy empowers people who 40 percent — representing 67 million voters — don’t like. As I argued Monday, it brought us Barack Obama. It will bring us Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. If you can’t accept that, if you can’t accept the political legitimacy of non-white people in positions of power, you’re probably willing to do anything to “right that wrong,” even if that means killing yourself.

Yes, we came very close to seeing the reelection of a chaotic tyrant. More importantly, however, is a massive majority saw the danger and put a stop to it. I don’t see that attitude changing.

You don’t forget when millions of Americans vote for your and their own death by covid. If the Republicans don’t play ball with Biden the way the Democrats once played ball with Reagan, they will be found out, and they will be punished on the next Election 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 ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 05 November 2020

Word Count: 845

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I had a bad night, too. This morning was better. I had a good cry. That always helps. Then I thought about things. That also helps. It remains to be seen whether Joe Biden wins, but one thing seems certain: fascism will be with us for a long time to come.

Perhaps I was misled. Or allowed myself to be misled. I wanted to believe. I wanted to believe polling showing Biden ahead of Donald Trump even deep in the heart of Texas. I wanted to believe last night would provide clarity. The coming days and nights are going to be tender and frightening. There will be blood. Most of that could have been avoided with a decisive victory. That ideal, however, is now gone. Time to face the real.

Here’s the real. Votes are still being counted in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia. A lot of Democratic voters cast absentee ballots. Votes that are still being counted, therefore, are probably for Biden. Trump, meanwhile, has no wiggle room. If Biden wins just Michigan and Wisconsin, and that seems where the vote tally is headed, he can lose the rest. He wins the Electoral College by a hair.

The problem is that “by a hair” means the president will mount legal challenges. An additional problem is Trump declaring victory before all the votes have been counted. Moreover, his made-up allegations of “voter fraud” are being heard by federal judges, including six “conservatives” on the US Supreme Court. They could rule that voting be stopped, or certified before being completed, to protect “vote integrity.” That would be the worst-case scenario. That would be a mortal wound for republican democracy.

Votes are still being counted with respect to the US Senate, too. Democrats knocked off two Republicans (one in Colorado, one in Arizona) while a Republican knocked off one Democrat (the honorable Doug Jones of Alabama). Two Georgia races appear to be in the air. So seem races in North Carolina and Maine. The Democrats need two more to take majority control if Biden wins. They will need three more if Biden loses. These too will probably be subject to legal challenges. Best to settle in for the long autumn.

The other fight will play out in the streets. That’s where the human toll will be. The more votes that come in, the bigger Biden’s lead will be. And the bigger his lead is, the more the president will cry foul. That, in turn, will inspire anti-Trump activists to protest with the goal of pressing the Democrats to carry on the fight. And that, in turn, will inspire heavily armed white-wing vigilantes, who already believe Trump when he says the election is being rigged against him, to take matters into their own hands.

The messiness we’re seeing was predicted. A study group commissioned by Michael Bloomberg warned of a “red mirage” before a “blue shift” — the appearance of Trump’s victory followed by days of vote-counting culminating with Biden’s. During that period, the study group said, the president would probably declare victory prematurely (he did) or mount legal challenges to the ongoing vote count (he will). He’d continue to sow division and incite violence. This prediction, in other words, is what to expect. It may end up being more prescient than all the polling giving you and me false hope.

That hope, for me, was a dramatic and total repudiation of the last four decades of conservative orthodoxy. I was hoping 2020 would be to Joe Biden what 1980 was to Ronald Reagan. I was wrong, but then again, maybe that already happened. Today’s GOP is hardly conservative. Mitch McConnell, who won last night, condoned democracy’s hijacking: “I’m not troubled at all by the president suggesting that,” he said of Trump declaring victory. The election will go to the courts, he said, where the newest Justice Amy Coney Barrett is expected to return on the GOP’s investment.

That remains to be seen. For now, let’s mourn the fact that millions of Americans do not see the error they made four years ago. Let’s grieve the fact that millions of Americans prefer an authoritarian kleptocracy to a republican democracy. That said, let’s not have any more bad nights. No more crying. No more despair. This was never going to be easy. Last night reminded us of that. Maybe we should be grateful.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 04 November 2020

Word Count: 730

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During class Monday, one of my Wesleyan students said I sounded pessimistic. We were gaming out a variety of outcomes that might arise from today’s election. I guess I was focusing too much on the negative — too much on the president’s crazy-making — because she said, “It sounds like you’re not hopeful about Biden’s chances of winning.”

It was a teachable moment. For me. Maybe for you, too.

I have spent over the last four years a lot of time talking about bad things. I have done that, I suppose, because most Americans — most white Americans, to be very specific — have an unthinking faith in the republic. They have the privilege of standing aside instead of participating in politics. Too many white Americans think of themselves exclusively as sports fans, professionals or wypipo. Too few see themselves inclusively as citizens. Amid so much spectating, the fascists stepped right in.

The solution is for a sovereign citizenry to stop watching and start fighting for the country it wants to see.

In this sense, I’m hopeful. Donald Trump’s election has activated white Americans morally in ways I have not seen in my lifetime. During the Obama years, they could tell themselves they helped redeem America by electing the first Black president. During those eight years in Black power, white Americans did not quite believe Black Lives Matters. How bad could it be? Obama’s president.

Then came Trump. Then came George Floyd. Then came the covid. In just four years — in just the past nine months of the pandemic — most white Americans have come to see we can’t live as we have been. Rugged individualism is now a lethal fetish. To survive, we must be in this together.

In these four years, we have seen a widening divide within liberalism. On the one hand is the old school of neutrality. On the other is the new school of equality. Here’s how the late philosopher Ronald Dworkin put it in 1983.

 The first “takes as fundamental the idea that government must not take sides on moral issues, and it supports only such egalitarian measures as can be shown to be the result of that principle. Liberalism based on equality takes as fundamental that government treat its citizens as equals, and insists on moral neutrality only to the degree that equality requires it” (emphases mine).

The neutral kind was preferable among white liberals during the Cold War. It shielded them against right-wing accusations of Big-C Communism whenever they used the government to solve social problems. It continued to be preferable after Ronald Reagan’s back-to-back landslide victories. It was OK to be a liberal in a sea of conservatism as long as one’s liberalism was more or less in line with the prevailing ideology, that is to say, as long as it focused on individual freedom from government.

The problem, of course, was that commitments to neutrality meant liberals had no moral answer to the conservative project of starving the government so that it could not be used to address social problems. The only useful answer to the conservative moral argument against government was a liberal moral argument for it. For the most part, most white liberals, over the last four decades, chose to stand aside and spectate.

Black liberals, however, did no such thing. They knew, as their intellectual forebears knew, that true equality, and therefore true freedom, would never come without a moral argument as robust as the enemy’s. Since the enemy always cast doubt on whether Black lives matter, anything short of a moral argument was complicity in one’s oppression.

Liberals Black and white had common goals during the last quarter of the 20th century but there was always tension between the need for neutrality and the demand for equality. With the turning of the generations, equality eventually overtook neutrality among white mainstream liberals. Now, as Reagan’s conservative regime devolved into fascism, the only liberals left insisting on neutrality are the signatories of letters published in Harper’s demanding the right not to be criticized.

Like most people paying careful attention to politics, I expect Joe Biden to win. I think, moreover, that his victory will be unambiguous. It may not be clear today. That may take a few days. But I think that’s where we’re headed. (May God make it so.)

But even if Biden loses, even if Trump steals this election, becoming the first president in American history to lose the popular vote in back-to-back elections, ushering in what I fear will be a period of permanent political violence and death by covid, I will still be hopeful. I have faith in the American people. I have faith in a citizenry that understands that it can’t, and that it won’t, stand aside. It may lose, but not for long.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 November 2020

Word Count: 796

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The president told on himself over the weekend. The conventional wisdom holds in Washington that he beat Hillary Clinton over issues of global trade, immigration and “economic anxiety.” That was always suspect but then he went and let the cat out of the bag.

“What did Obama do?” Donald Trump said. “And then I did the opposite.”

2016 was not about trade, immigration or economics. Those were cover for righting some kind of wrong felt by just enough white people in just enough states just below the level of consciousness. That “injustice” was the free election of the first Black president, and the diverse future Barack Obama’s victory foretold to people who would not, and never will, accept as legitimate a president who is not a super-white man.

2020 isn’t about trade, immigration, or economics either. The president isn’t even giving lip-service to the custom of campaigning for anything other than himself and the tidings he represents. But while Trump’s argument four years ago was explicitly racist, this time it’s explicitly anti-democratic.

Reelect me, the president seems to be saying, and I’ll turn the United States into an autocratic client state. And just as millions of Americans understood perfectly in 2016 that he was selling Obama’s erasure, they understand perfectly this time around that he’s selling democracy’s.

Conventional wisdom in Washington still has not caught up to the fact that voters by the millions did not feel “left behind” due to forces of globalization. They felt left behind due to the success of a racially diverse coalition that elected a Black president. Democratic institutions didn’t fail them economically. They failed them politically. They did not stop Barack Obama.

Every step Donald Trump takes to undercut those institutions is, therefore, a step toward preventing that from ever happening again. The history of white identity is the history of the United States. If the rule of law and the US Constitution do not help “take back our country,” then what’s their point?

To the extent political reporters understood this, they understood only the part about white-power racism. (They understood the GOP’s rhetorical challenge of appealing to the electorate without alienating its racist “base.”) But they did not understand the ideological link between Obama and republican democracy. They did not understand that opposition to a Black president greatly exceeded politics as usual. The press corps rarely understood the readiness of his enemies to sabotage the American people if need be. They failed to see that, for the GOP, democracy itself was the problem.

Now that Obama’s vice president is on the cusp of what appears to be victory, you’d have to be blind not to see it. Trump is running on naked right-wing authoritarianism. Millions are going to vote for him, because they don’t trust republican democracy to stop the future. A governing philosophy, meanwhile, has vanished. Not even “states rights” are sacred anymore.

The Texas Republican Party, in a bid to invalidate 100,000 votes in and around Houston, has filed suit in federal court to overturn a decision by the Texas Supreme Court. All that’s left after four decades of a conservative political regime is a pathetic grasping for power.

Even Politico’s Tim Alberta, who can usually be trusted to accept GOP bad faith as good faith, is seeing things with fresh eyes. He said:

The Republican Party of 2020: Suppressing the vote, jailing the opposition, firing the scientists, intimidating the dissidents, and making America great again.

All presidential elections are important, but some are more important than others. If Trump loses, expect to see a violent reaction in certain pockets of the country that exceeds the bloodshed we’ve already seen. (Indeed, if he loses, expect to see some kind of revival of the spirit of the “Tea Party.”)

But if the president wins — either fairly or by “going in with our lawyers” after Election Day — the forces that have been building since 2008 are going to slough off whatever restraints they feel currently.

In defeat, violence will spasm but it will probably exhaust itself. In victory, however, it will endure. Violence will become a permanent feature of our politics, like a pandemic.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 November 2020

Word Count: 691

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I’m tired. I’m sure you are, too. The upside is there’s only five days to go until Election Day. The downside is those five days are going to age all of us by a decade. Making the hours crawl by even more is a series of federal court cases making it clear that Republican jurists are inventing law to stop citizens from voting or to invalidate their votes. There may be a time, perhaps sooner than you think, for unorthodox politics.

When it comes to legal theory, I defer to authorities. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is how I see things. “Conservative” federal jurists (note the quotes) are sticking their noses where they don’t belong. It’s one thing for them to overturn a state law violating the US Constitution. It’s another to overturn a state Supreme Court’s interpretation of state law according to that state’s constitution. That’s what happened with Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Minnesota. “Conservative” jurists, including five sitting on the US Supreme Court, overruled court-ordered extensions of mail-in deadlines.

My friend, if this looks like a betrayal of conservatism, that’s because it is.

It gets worse. Justices appeared to accept as true a jaw-dropping lie, which is that tinkering with election deadlines somehow compromises the integrity of the vote. The extensions, of course, are entirely reasonable. We are smack in the middle of a covid pandemic. More than 234,000 Americans are dead. Infections are spiking, especially in rural and swing states. (There were 88,521 new cases Thursday alone, according to data from Johns Hopkins.)

Easing deadlines is what you’d expect from state officials honoring the letter and the spirit of their state constitutions. Yet Justice Neil Gorsuch questioned whether the pandemic were a true “natural disaster” (a criteria for extensions). Justice Samuel Alito said Pennsylvania’s election will be “conducted under a cloud.”

Officials should, therefore, throw away votes received after Election Day.

What’s going on seems pretty straightforward. The president has been yammering nonstop about “voter fraud.” It’s the only thing, Donald Trump says, that will make him lose to Joe Biden. The only outcome he will accept, therefore, is victory. This is not only extortion (vote for me or say goodbye to a peaceful transfer of power), it is extortion based on a whopper. Voter fraud on the scale he suggests is fictional. When it happens, it’s in dribs and drabs, not anywhere close to wholesale. (When it happens, it’s often Republican voters committing the crime.) And yet the president keeps lying, and now, evidently, Republican jurists are listening.

By accepting as true a categorical falsehood, they make the lie real. (Their rulings, after all, constitute the common law.) By overturning a state court’s interpretation of state law, they push the Big Lie all the way down to the level of local affairs. Dear Leader’s Big Lie is everyone else’s Big Reality.

My friend, if this looks like what authoritarians do, that’s because it is.

Some might look at this and despair. Don’t. There’s plenty we can do.

This is a time for unorthodox politics, creative thinking, and moral guts. For me, I’d suggest Democratic secretaries of states (the elected officials ultimately responsible for elections in their states) ignore federal court orders. Keep counting votes pursuant to state election law or state court rulings. Count the votes as a form of civil disobedience. Count the votes as an expression of patriotism. Count the votes in order to honor the obligations of elected officials to state residents. Count the votes in defense of states rights.

North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Minnesota all have Democratic secretaries of state. They should all risk being held in contempt. Our republican democracy demands no less.

I’m not encouraging lawlessness. I’ll cite Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” In it, he said:

In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

My suggestion is, in reality, expressing the highest respect of a state’s sovereignty, too. Remember the Republican jurists aren’t just stomping federalism. They are making state elected officials complicit in the disenfranchisement of their constituents. State residents, if they choose to, would be right in punishing the complicit.

If you’re going to err in a republican democracy, do you err on the side of judges or the side of the people? That’s a moral as well as a legal question. The answer should be plain.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 30 October 2020

Word Count: 802

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I’m told that, compared to the Detroit Free Press, The Detroit News is second rate. So perhaps it’s not the best example of the point I want to make. Even so, the paper’s editorial in today’s edition provides an occasion for saying the following: not voting is immoral.

You can choose — or you can have the choice made for you. You are not alone. You are among equals. Others are depending on you to engage the national political community. Not voting may seem principled, but it’s not. It’s an act of barbarism.

The News’s editorial, like all editorials, is the voice of the newspaper as a state and local institution and bedrock of Michigan’s civil society. Today’s editorial, overseen by Editorial Page Editor Nolan Finley, refused to endorse Donald Trump or Joe Biden. It refused to make a choice. Worse, it made that refusal appear as if it were noble. The headline: “For president, we can’t lend our name to men whose values we don’t share.”

No doubt there were political calculations. The News is quite conservative. Finley is very conservative. The odds of the incumbent winning, which would be the preferred outcome, appear to be fading. Meanwhile, the future for Michigan Democrats seems downright rosy. The News is a business. It has a reputation to keep. A conservative daily paper deciding against deciding is probably a convenient way of saving face.

But you can’t base an editorial on the need for a local institution to avoid humiliation. It has to be positive. It has to be about values — at least the appearance thereof. In this, Finley has a lot going for him. Even if the News’ editorial is really about saving face, it can appear noble. American political culture, which elevates the individual above the community, which honors rights before it honors civic duties, respects the refusal to choose. After all, if you dislike both candidates, how can you vote in good conscience?

There’s the problem. Voting isn’t done in isolation. It’s social behavior as much as it is a political behavior. America isn’t an abstraction. It’s a real political community of shared values (equality, for instance). Each and every one of us, citizen as well as non-citizen, is a member of this American community. It is indebted to us. We are indebted to it. The individual and the community are themselves equal. They are one. You recognize that fundamental or you don’t. If you don’t recognize a citizen’s minimal obligation to a free republic, well, I think it’s fair to doubt your commitment to it.

You might disagree, but you can’t say not voting is socially or politically responsible. You can’t say voting for third-party or write-in candidates is responsible either. Given the context of an authoritarian president threatening our security and well-being, with 233,000 covid-related deaths and counting, you must concede the danger posed by the 43 percent of “undecided voters,” according to a Morning Consult poll, who might vote for someone other than Trump and Biden. In this context, votes for third parties are votes for the incumbent, but with the benefit of appearing independent and virtuous.

That’s worse than not voting. Not voting is refusing to participate. It’s telling the rest of us your dedication to democracy is soft. Voting third party is participation, but it’s participation in the form of political sabotage. Worse, it’s done “nicely.” It’s done “in good conscience.” It’s sabotage with gas-lighting piled on top.

It’s destructive behavior that denies being destructive while accusing others of infringing individual liberty. Not voting and voting third-party/write-in reinforce each other to work against equality, indeed hold it for ransom. These are not acts of virtue. They are acts of barbarism.

Making all this worse is the attitude we must take to convince benighted citizens not to sabotage their own community. That attitude, infuriatingly, takes a tone of polite persuasion rather than empurpled contempt, which is what they deserve.

Amitai Etzioni, the famed communitarian philosopher, took out an half-page ad in Sunday’s Times to plead with “progressive non-voters” to vote for Biden, not Trump or a third-party. “A few thousand votes for Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the 2000 election,” Etzioni wrote:

 

In 2016, 12 percent of Sanders supporters voted for Trump — enough to ensure his election. Your vote matters more than ever. Thanks for giving me a hearing.

(Full disclosure: I voted for Nader in Ohio in 2000! I will never ever ever vote third-party again.)

Like I said, Etzioni is polite, but politeness can’t stand up to a political culture that gives the appearance of morality to immoral acts. We need a different course.

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: 29 October 2020

Word Count: 771

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