CNN’s Jake Tapper is a highly conventional and thus highly respected news anchor. The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro is a venomous toad beneath contempt and unworthy of recognition. In setting them side-by-side, I risk tarnishing Tapper’s good name, but it’s worth it to make a point about the press corps’ coverage of Tuesday’s debate.

Shapiro, a right-wing propagandist, is at home in the gutter. His intentions are so malicious, indeed so transparently malicious, I’m not going to bother proving it. (Google him if you must, but such an effort, though small, gives him more benefit-of-the-doubt than he deserves.) Tapper’s aren’t, of course. They are meant in good faith.

But both deployed the same journalistic strategy last night. While the former used “balance” to communicate a high-minded, even-handed though ultimately mild disgust with the current state of American politics, the latter used “balance” to hide his poisonous bad faith.

Tapper: “The American people lost tonight.”

Shapiro: “I just know we all lost.”

By pretending not to know who won the first of three scheduled debates, the toad was making it seem like the president’s attempt to bite out the heart of the republic was too close to call, thus in keeping with partisan politics-as-usual.

Tapper wasn’t the only member of the Washington press corps to whitewash rightwing propaganda and thus make it respectable. Oliver Darcy rounded up some of the headlines from last night:

CNN: ‘Pure chaos at the first debate’

NYT: ‘Sharp Personal Attacks and Name Calling in Chaotic First Debate’

HuffPost: ‘ROUND 1: MAYHEM’

BuzzFeed: ‘DEBATE NIGHT: THE GREAT AMERICAN SHITSHOW.’

“Shitshow,” indeed, evolved into the evening’s theme. CNN’s Dana Bash used the colorful phrase on live TV. The New York Times’ Alex Burns used it on the paper’s daily podcast.

“Shitshow” seemed to capture two things valuable to members of the press corps: a measure of fairness to the candidates even with disapproval demanded by news consumers putting more and more pressure on elite reporters to speak truth to power.

It was neither. Moreover, it was harmful to the republic. By characterizing the debate as a “shitshow” in which Donald Trump and Joe Biden were equally bad and equally good, reporters were refusing to see, and therefore failing to report, what was really going on. The candidates were involved in unrelated projects.

Biden was debating the president with the goal of persuading a majority of voters to come around to his side. That’s pretty standard stuff.

Trump wasn’t playing democracy, though. His goal was attacking Biden — and attacking the very concept of “fact,” “reason,” “evidence,” “coherence,” and “debate.” The point was dominating his opponent, and therefore the television audience, with cascading falsehoods and lies. In other words, “shitshow” was his goal.

Only the Washington Post got it right: “Trump plunges debate into fiery squabbling.”

The Washington press corps has neither the skills, nor the tools, nor the value system to properly handle a president who is a near-total inhabitant of an unreality of his own making. It does what it knows how to do. It checks facts.

Fact-checking, to be sure, has some utility, but only some. It reaches people receptive to facts. It cannot, and will not, reach people who project onto the world a compulsive fetish for dominance or who are indifferent to the social contract of our common understanding.

People who believe lies are not going to change their minds when corrected. They’ll just find other lies to believe in, other lies for the fact-checkers to chase. Reporters are trapped in an abusive relationship proportional to their unwillingness to confront their abuser.

Fortunately, Joe Biden modeled a way forward. His performance demonstrated ways to save a liberal democracy from the mistake of electing a demi-despotic goon.

One was mockery. Biden called Trump “Putin’s puppy” and a “clown” who “doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Mockery stabs at Trump’s soft spot — his weakness.

Another was rejection. Half a dozen times, Biden refused to acknowledge Trump and instead looked into the television camera. In doing so, Biden appealed to viewers directly while shrinking Trump’s presence down to the size of a toddler’s meltdown.

Another was contempt. Even when candidates in fact don’t respect each other, they pretend to. Biden isn’t pretending. “You’re the worst president America has ever had.” Yet another was more direct (and, I think, something new): “Will you shut up, man?”

In telling an authoritarian to can it, Biden gave voice, without I presume knowing it, to a thorny question in political thought. At what point do citizens of a free and open society stop tolerating people using the blessings and privilege of liberal democracy to destroy liberal democracy itself?

As Karl Popper once said: “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

The British philosopher went to say in 1945 that brute force was justified if it came to that. I don’t think we’re there yet (I hope we’re never there), because we haven’t yet tried telling fascists to “shut up we’re tired of your bullshit!”

Debating a fascist means giving a fascist tools to destroy. That’s one of the paradoxes of liberalism. Biden should bail on the remaining debates, but won’t. He already promised.

If we’re lucky, though, we’ll see more ways of dealing with fascism.

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 September 2020

Word Count: 903

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We’re familiar with the explanations. Why did just under half of the electorate take a chance on a lying, thieving, philandering sadist like Donald Trump? Most respectable white people dutifully cite economics. Inequality is wide. Wages are stagnant. The white working class got hammered by globalization.

Others, like me, cite racism. America’s birther-in-chief minced Republican rivals with a rhetoric of unrepentant white-power demagoguery.

While both lines of reasoning are compelling, I’ve always felt something fundamental was in plain sight but missing from our larger, collective understanding. Cast your mind back to those moments after Barack Obama won his historic election but before the US Congress bailed out the biggest of the Too-Big-To-Fail banks.

Wall Street had manufactured more wealth than God has seen by lending and lending and lending some more, and got in life-threatening trouble as a result. Then they held the country hostage, in effect, saying, “Bail us out or the economy gets it.” Afterwards, the banks got even bigger and bankers got even richer, handing themselves bonuses while normal people struggled to hold on to their jobs, their homes and their basic human dignity. Recall that before the “Tea Party” emerged as a nascent fascist movement, many of us, even pundits on the left, thought, “Yeah, these people are pissed for a very good reason.”

Between 2009 and 2011, Obama signed into law society-changing legislation that came very close to reaching the heights of the New Deal and Great Society. Even admirers like me, however, must concede Obama’s major mistake. His administration did not investigate and prosecute the super-white 1 percent that hijacked America and held it for ransom.

It is a plain fact no one was brought to justice for the panic of 2007-2008 that sparked a decade-long recession from which some people never recovered. From that we can suppose reasonably that lots of Americans just gave up. They lost faith in public morality. What was the point of working hard, playing by the rules, and striving for a better future when no one in power is held accountable?

By the time of Hillary Clinton, who was (wrongly) perceived as a symbol of an establishment gone rotten, Trump, the flawed independent “billionaire,” looked like a chance worth taking.

I’m not blaming Obama or Clinton for 62,984,828 Americans being partial or impartial to the president’s lying, thieving, philandering sadism. These voters made their choice and should be held accountable. (I am also, for the time being, presuming good faith when I have in the past presumed none from these voters.) It is, however, important to understand that voter behavior is contingent. It springs from a particular time and place. The present, moreover, is a product of the past.

Clinton ran for president during a time when powerful political elites such as herself — and, importantly, her husband — were seen as complicit or willfully blind to profound nihilism and systemic corruption. So if nothing really matters, why not vote for a combed-over schlub with a God-complex?

The schlub was the true fraud, of course. Anyone paying close attention knew this. Most, however, couldn’t hear about his life of criminality through the din of “but her emails!” To the extent Trump’s supporters understood clearly his bone marrow-deep corruption, it was probably to his political benefit, as the “billionaire” seemed like the glamorous playboy who figured out “the system” and beat it.

Since white supremacy was Trump’s primary mode of political communication, he seemed to be saying he would be a champion who’d make white people winners again (“Make America Great Again!”) after eight years of losing (after a Black man’s tenure as president, that is). Corruption didn’t seem so bad as long as Donald Trump seemed successfully corrupt.

This is why the reporting on Sunday and Monday by the New York Times is devastating. Not the part about his being a tax cheat. That’s not going to affect supporters who have traded public morality — working hard, playing by the rules, and striving for a better future — for the promise of winning if they stick with Trump.

What’s going to affect them most is the fact that Donald Trump is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad businessman, that his properties are bleeding red ink, that he owes more money than he can possibly pay back, and that his personal finances are a house of cards.

In this sense (the sense of being in indebted), Trump is quite normal. But his supporters don’t want normal. They want the Übermensch they had been promised, the one they are still waiting for in many respects. If he’s normal, what’s the point of sticking with him?

To be sure, the president’s allies in the US Congress and on Fox are busy attacking the Times for its reporting. They are going to do everything they can to prevent GOP voters from knowing the truth about the president. But the truth works in subtle ways, as does doubt.

Loyalty to Trump depends on perceptions of super-strength. As he once said, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

That assumes he’d be shooting bullets. There’s a good reason why he’s worked hard to keep his tax returns secret, though. Truth is, he is shooting blanks.

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 September 2020

Word Count: 878

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I have read a lot over the last four years about the history of fascism. I understand more clearly America’s influence on its leading European practitioners. I understand more clearly its roots in the blood-soaked earth of the United States.

However, I don’t understand why we keep talking about chattel slavery, the three-fifths compromise, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow apartheid, “separate but equal” and others tyrannical aspects of anti-Black racism, but don’t talk about the obvious. Such sadism was socially acceptable more or less due to the appeasements of homegrown fascists.

The other thing I don’t understand is why we continue talking about Donald Trump — and American-style fascism’s current heyday — as if they were a deviation from the “conservative” regime established by Ronald Reagan. To anyone paying attention over the past 40 years, especially anyone on the receiving end of anti-Black violence, the truth was clear.

“In America, Negroes do not have to be told what fascism is in action,” the poet Langston Hughes said in the 1930s. “We know.”

Barry Goldwater is, moreover, usually held up as a conservative icon who embodied a mid-20th century break from the explicit fascism the Old Right. But, according to Sarah Churchwell, that story is probably revisionist history. He “was described more than once during his presidential run in 1964, by both his supporters and his critics, as an ‘America First’ politician.”

We usually think of fascism as an inconceivable evil that has happened, or is happening, to foreign peoples. (It can’t happen here, because America is the exception to the rule of nations in world history that end up eating themselves.) It’s probably more accurate, and more honest, to say, however, that it has happened here, indeed, has been happening here (this is Churchwell’s original illuminating thesis).

The question should not be whether. It should be to what degree it cyclically claims purchase on our national politics and on the minds of decision-makers. During the 1920s and 1930s, it was above-ground. During the postwar years (1950 and 1960s), it went underground, because it had to. We had stomped the Nazis, then faced a new menace.

Now, after the Soviet collapse, and in the shadow of China’s rise, native fascism is visible again, and once more it seeks to reverse history, to create two separate and unequal Americas in which democracy is the exclusive preserve of a privileged few.

It’s by now conventional wisdom, at least among radicalized members of the anti-Trump majority that seems to be amassing in the days and weeks before the election, that the decision before voters is between democracy and authoritarianism. That’s not quite right.

If the president wins, democracy will still exist in the United States, just as it exists now in nations around the world that have elected authoritarian leaders. It might exist, moreover, as it did in the beginning when popular sovereignty wasn’t popular in America, and custom and law constrained the people’s will for the benefit of not just a white minority of men, but a super-white minority (poor white men were barred from voting).

The question isn’t whether America will be a democracy after November. The question is to what degree. Will it be a liberal democracy of, by and for a diverse people or once again an illiberal democracy of, by and for the super-whites?

The Republicans understand this quite well, I think, as they break faith with the majority to install a zealot to the US Supreme Court who will reliably rule in the party’s favor. I think Joe Biden and the Democrats understand this quite well, too, but don’t talk about Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s inevitable confirmation as such. They are instead pursuing a more immediate, and more immediately understood, line of attack in which a sharp right turn on the high court endangers, first and second, a health care law protecting 20 million Americans and a legal precedent (Roe) protecting the rights of half the populace.

The rest of us, however, should understand what’s going on. The GOP is rushing to larder the judiciary with partisans. Long after American-style fascism has gone back underground, whenever that might happen, it will have been institutionalized.

Separate but unequal may end up being constitutional again as it characterizes a society divided between, to paraphrase political scientist Frank Wilhoit, those who are protected by the law but not bound by it, and those who are not protected by the law but bound by it.

In other words, between the rulers and the ruled.

The super-whites sound invulnerable, but they’re not. As Vice President Henry Wallace wrote in 1944, “American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists [corporate monopolies], the deliberate poisoners of public information [Facebook], and those who stand for the KKK type of demagoguery [Fox]” (all quotes in this essay come from Churchwell’s essay in The New York Review).

The super-whites, in other words, are only as strong as their enablers and collaborators. Moreover, their power is proportional to liberal willingness to appease them. In the past, white liberals sacrificed Black bodies to reach peace. It was in their political interest to do so. Black bodies now animate the center of a major political party. There is little if any incentive this time around to appease the super-whites.

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: 28 September 2020

Word Count: 885

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Since at least Robert Taft’s heyday, the Republican Party has faced a conundrum. Things sounding just great to Republicans tend to sound just terrible to everyone else. Tax cuts for the rich. Contempt for the poor. Corporations permitted to do anything for profit. Control of women. Control of Black people, people of color and LGBTQ people. Control of civil society generally, even how Americans worship. In other words, the conservation of a white-Christian-man-on-top brand of partisan politics.

When your real interests are those of a small homogeneous minority (think of them as not just white men but super-white men), the trick is making them sound like the interests of a large heterogeneous majority. And for the most part, since 1968, the Republicans have succeeded by inflaming white race hatreds. To end there would be overlooking the party’s broader rhetorical success, though. White supremacy is only part of it.

The GOP is masterful at hiding its true goals behind neutral values and principles. When you want to control women and LGBTQ people, appeal to “family values.” When you want to control Black people and people of color, appeal to “law and order.” When you want to punish the poor for their poverty, appeal to “the American work ethic.” When you want to empower corporations, appeal to “market efficiency.”

And do all that while claiming to be in the service of liberty, God and country.

To take a specific example, the super-whites wanted to depose President Clinton. Not because he did anything wrong, though it’s certainly debatable whether he did. They tried deposing him, because they wanted to depose him.

Yes, this is a logical tautology, but that’s how super-white thinking works. You don’t do X, because Y. You do X, because X. Reasons are not causes. They are effects. You find an excuse, a rationale, then do it.

In Clinton’s case, the excuse was morality, the rule of law, or whatever. It didn’t matter what. What mattered was whether it obscured from majority view the super-whites’ real goal. If they don’t cover their tracks, they risk losing the American people’s trust. Without trust, they can no longer manipulate the American people.

In the case of Clinton, they failed ultimately. They succeeded, however (perhaps more than they ever could have hoped they would), in the case of Merrick Garland. The super-whites wanted to stop Barack Obama from getting a third justice on the US Supreme Court. That was the goal. They couldn’t say that, though, because a majority of Americans weren’t going to wholly accept a naked power play.

So the super-whites invented a “rule” of out thin air. The president shouldn’t get a confirmation during an election year. The American people should decide. Anything short of that is anti-democratic. Mitch McConnell would in fact block Garland no matter what. (He was going to do X, because X.) But to win, he needed a Y.

He was so successful a majority now thinks he and Donald Trump should wait, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement should be decided by the election’s winner, according to a Reuters poll.

It should be clear McConnell and the super-whites are not hypocrites even though they’re going to confirm a new justice during an election year when they said last time that the American people should get to decide. Remember, they don’t do X, because Y. They do X, because X. Reasons are not causes. They are effects. The super-whites don’t believe anything has higher value than defeating their enemies.

Strictly speaking, McConnell and the Republicans are not hypocrites. Strictly speaking, they’re liars. True lovers of citizenship, liberty and democracy should not give them the time of day. Debating whether they’re hypocrites overlooks a record of contempt for our trust.

They lied when they said Bill Clinton should be removed because Y. They lied when they said Merrick Garland should be blocked because Y. They lied when they said Trump should not be impeached and removed because Y. They did what they did, because they wanted to do what they did, not because of some higher principle. And they are lying again in the wake of Trump’s vow to accept the election’s outcome only if he wins.

Senate Republicans (the whitest of super-whites) have been scrambling all week to reassure “white normies” who don’t want to be seen supporting a criminal extortionist president that everything’s OK. The peaceful transference of power will happen no matter what. The super-whites are asking us to trust them. They won’t turn their backs on America if Trump decides the power transfer should be bloody.

Their assurances, however, should be seen as weak and insincere. They should be seen as more cover for the super-whites’ goals, which could end up being treasonous.

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 September 2020

Word Count: 790

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In conversations about Donald Trump’s contempt for the rule of law, civic-republican institutions and democratic norms, you have probably run into the following. The president’s term ends January 20, 2021. If by then the election has no clear winner, and that could be the case, the constitutional order of succession goes to US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Don’t you worry.

Similarly, in conversations about the role of the US Supreme Court, if it ends up deciding the election, you have probably heard the following. Whoever the new justice is, he or she won’t be involved in the court’s ruling, because professional legal ethics require recusing himself or herself. Don’t you worry.

I say worry. I say there’s no reason for such uncritical faith. Indeed, insisting otherwise is making the problem worse.

The president has melded his reelection campaign to the United States government. They are no longer, in effect, separate entities.

Trump has demonstrated in miniature (think: Portland and Washington DC’s Lafayette Square) what his secret police force is capable of. He and Republican campaign operatives are negotiating with swing state Republicans to appoint loyal electors ready to ignore the popular will in his favor.

As for the Supreme Court, he could not be clearer about his expectation that loyal jurists hand down victory. I haven’t even mentioned his putting conditions on something that cannot be conditional in a free, fair and open society.

“Well, we’re going to have to see what happens,” the president said Wednesday when asked if he’d commit to the tradition of a peaceful transfer of power. “You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster. … I understand that, but people are rioting. … Get rid of the ballots, and you’ll have a very — we’ll have a very peaceful, there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation. The ballots are out of control. You know it. And you know who knows it better than anybody else? The Democrats know it better than anybody else” (italics mine).

What should be happening is not. Respectable white people in the Washington press corps (“white normies,” as Liberal Currents’ Paul Crider called them) and the GOP (people out of power, like George W. Bush) should be taking to the air to explain to fence-sitting white voters that Trump is planning to rig the election via electors, via justices, or via extortion. When a sitting president says maybe he’ll sorta kinda promise a peaceful transfer of power, what he’s really saying is I win or something really bad happens.

It’s important to remember two things at this point. One, the number of white-wing vigilantes prepped to strike. Two, the degree the US government is Trumpified. The adults are purged. Much that remains are opportunists, degenerates and loyalists.

There’s no good reason to think he’ll leave on his own. There’s no good reason to believe a new Supreme Court justice will recuse himself or herself.

What should be happening is not. The press and pundit corps continue covering this election as if the president’s authoritarian behavior were a bug, not a feature of his dangerous politics.

Even Jonathan Bernstein could not help writing a column this morning arguing that polls point in the direction of a unified government under Joe Biden, except for this colossal asterisk: “(All this assumes that Trump’s attempts to overturn the election results if he loses — which he mused about again on Wednesday — are unsuccessful. Yes, we’ve reached the point where such disclaimers are necessary. No, that isn’t good news for US democracy.)”

Putting conditions of the peaceful transfer of power (indeed, threatening voters with extortion) is not a moment for polite disclaimers. It’s the body of the story itself. Everything else should be secondary. (In fairness to Bernstein, he did warn of democracy crashing under this president.)

An overwhelming blue wave might be enough to defeat him (presuming the results of the vote are clear, and that the impact will felt by Republican leaders fearing for their political lives, not the president himself). But the only way to mitigate, though, alas, not prevent, a bloody transfer of power is a collective effort to discredit Trump.

His source of strength is respectable white people continuing to believe him. These voters must be made to see that they are being threatened, that they are being lied to, and that a vote for a Democrat is a vote for individual liberty.

A free, fair and open society cannot stop murderous lone wolves — America knows this better than any country — but murderous lone wolves tend to take respectable white opinion seriously enough that it can dampen rages for extra-legal means of getting what they want politically.

What’s preventing this from happening, I now believe, isn’t cynicism, greed or even cowardice so much as the uncritical and categorical faith that everything’s going to be all right. Faith in everything being all right is blinding good people from seeing the reality they must first see in order to take difficult, responsible and patriotic action.

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 September 2020

Word Count: 842

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I said Tuesday I thought the Republicans would wait until the lame-duck period of the 116th Congress to follow through with confirming a new US Supreme Court justice. I was mistaken, evidently. According to the Washington Post, Lindsey Graham, the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wants the process wrapped up by October’s end. The president, meanwhile, told reporters Tuesday he needed nine justices to handle “the unsolicited millions of ballots” expected to come in, by which he meant a loyal court majority to hand him victory after he alleges fraud in the form of very cool and very legal absentee votes, a necessity stemming from his failure to protect the country from a lethal virus that has killed more than 205,500 Americans, per Worldometer.

Now comes news this morning that the Trump campaign is “discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority.” According to The Atlantic’s peerless Barton Gellman:

With a justification based on claims of rampant fraud, Trump would ask state legislators to set aside the popular vote and exercise their power to choose a slate of electors directly. The longer Trump succeeds in keeping the vote count in doubt, the more pressure legislators will feel to act before the safe-harbor deadline expires.

This is the clearest picture of what many of us suspected might happen. We already knew the weeks and months between Election Day and Inauguration Day would be the tenderest and scariest any of us has witnessed, a period of deep uncertainty, insecurity, lawlessness and violence; that the US Department of Justice designated cities like New York and Seattle “anarchist jurisdictions”; that Attorney General William Barr urged federal prosecutors to charge dissenters with “sedition”; that the president and his Fox confederates are prepping heavily armed white-wing vigilantes to terrorize Trump’s opponents; and, that mass protest against Trump’s power-grab would be called an insurgency “proving” accusations of voter fraud and justifying a government crackdown.

There will be blood. This we knew. We didn’t know the ace in the president’s pocket — a future 6-3 supermajority ready to legalize a coup d’etat.

This is a time for respectable white people to stop wondering who’s to blame for “division,” “polarization” and “dysfunction” in Washington, and instead do what Bob Woodard did recently — come to a firm, final moral conclusion. Donald Trump and the Republicans are not trying to persuade a majority of the electorate to take their side in accordance with American custom, principle and law. They are instead trying to take power by force, using democratic institutions — the Electoral College in particular — to smash the republic itself in order to remake it in their authoritarian image.

This is a time to understand that every accusation is a confession of what they have already done, that every allegation is a projection of what they are prepared to do. This morning, when Ohio representative Jim Jordan said Joe Biden and the Democrats are trying to steal the election, what he was really saying was the GOP is trying to steal the election.

If the president gets away with swing-state electors handing him the election, he will spark mass protests the size and scale of which this country has never seen. Trump and his Republican confederates will accuse the protesters — all of them, even veterans, kids and grandmas — of being criminal or something terrible justifying a reaction they already want to take against public demonstrations challenging Trump’s legitimacy.

Inevitably, they will allege “insurrection,” because insurrection is precisely what they are doing. They are advancing an insurrection step-by-step in coordination with a hostile foreign power that is radicalizing Americans by the millions.

Russia is now to the Republican Party what the United States was in the 1980s to Contra rebels. But instead of successfully destabilizing a democracy just getting started, as the US did to Nicaragua, the Kremlin is successfully destabilizing the world’s oldest democracy.

When you ram through a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land, when you rig a presidential election, when you piss on the bedrock American principle of the consent of the governed, you’re really not entitled anymore to the benefit of the doubt. You’re not entitled to deference or trust. You’re not entitled to anything.

You have irreversibly broken faith with the American people. When you treat Americans like enemies, eventually Americans start reciprocating in kind, degree and intensity, which is exactly what the president and the GOP cannot see coming at the moment. They are too blinded by the prospect of seizing what they have coveted.

True, they may be on the brink of victory. In that victory, however, lie the seeds of future doom.

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 September 2020

Word Count: 783

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US Senator Mitt Romney said this morning he’d consider voting for the president’s soon-to-be-announced US Supreme Court nominee. Precisely, he said he’d consider doing it this year. Some had hoped the moderate Republican from Utah would hold the line. After all, he voted to convict Donald Trump of two impeachment charges. With today’s news, however, those hopes are gone.

The question, as I said Monday, wasn’t if the GOP would gain a 6-3 advantage on the high court. The real question was when: before Election Day or afterward, during the lame-duck session of the US Congress.

My guess is the lame duck. The president likely wants a loyal nominee installed before the presidential election in case the Supreme Court ends up deciding it. But Mitch McConnell likely prefers giving Republican voters, especially white evangelical Protestants and white conservative Catholics, more enticement to get out and vote for Trump. It doesn’t matter whether he thinks Trump will win. What matters is having means, motive and opportunity. The lame duck gives democracy’s grave digger all three.

The other question was how the Democrats, especially white liberal voters, are going to react to defeat. That, however, is less important than whether there’s a reaction at all and how intense it will be.

Historically, white liberals have had too much faith in the high court, and the reason for that, to put it plainly, was success. They still demarcate our political history into a series of landmark court victories by which justice prevailed and the republic was redeemed. Black rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, the rights to speech and assembly — these and more, in the white liberal imagination, were the winners while oppressors of the weak were the losers. The moral universe bends toward justice, Theodore Parker said.

Absolutely. Except when it bends toward evil.

Liberal voters of all persuasions have also been historically quite conservative in that how political goals are achieved is as important as, or more important than, the goals themselves. Liberals, far more than authoritarian Republicans (for whom nothing is more important than winning), tend to value something other than winning. That might be historical, legal or institutional precedent, ramifications for future generations or basic concerns about morality, equity and the common good.

Liberals typically will not take their own side in a fight, to paraphrase Robert Frost, unless circumstances force them to recognize an opponent who can no longer be tolerated. McConnell, though he is going to win in the near-term, may not understand, or care to understand, that the Republicans have been fighting a one-sided war that’s about to change radically.

About to change radically — if white liberals, especially, understand the stakes. They used to believe partisanship was always bad. It should be avoided in the interest of preserving electoral gains, protecting liberal principles and defending the integrity of the democratic process. I hope they now understand, in light of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, that partisanship isn’t the problem. It’s the solution.

Only with partisanship can the Democrats change a system currently giving the GOP the power to sabotage it. Only with partisanship can the Democrats liberate Americans under siege from a lethal virus, rescue the economy from collapse, restore public trust in the parties, institutions and the rule of law, and stop the highest court from bestowing legal rights and privileges to a white autocratic minority to the injury of a diverse egalitarian majority.

The choice ahead for the Democrats, with respect to the Supreme Court, isn’t between partisanship and nonpartisanship. It’s between good and evil partisanship.

For the time being, I’m not as concerned about how Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and congressional Democrats will react to losing this Supreme Court confirmation as much as I am about their reacting in the most aggravated and dialectical terms possible.

A president helped into office by a hostile foreign power is about to get a third chance at shaping American jurisprudence for two generations. The Democrats can quibble later about how. They must not quibble now about whether they should crush the Republicans in the name of God and country.

Yes, there’s much to say about expanding the number of Supreme Court justices, expanding the number of lower courts, repealing lifetime appointments, or (my favorite) stripping justices of the power to decide which cases to hear. All of that is worth debating, but it’s not possible to debate any of that if white liberal voters, especially, do not recognize first that Republicans can no longer be trusted to act in good faith; and second, that the GOP’s power is proportional to white liberalism’s otherwise healthy reluctance to use power.

They’ve been punching us in the face for years. The time has come to start punching back.

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: 22 September 2020

Word Count: 787

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It may not look like it (I do my best to hide it), but I normally struggle to gather my thoughts to write Monday mornings. There’s just something about taking two days off. It requires more oomph to get the mind up and running again. Given the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Friday evening, today’s struggle is going to be harder.

First, I should counsel skepticism. Be careful when reading about the politics of her replacement, especially as it pertains to the presidential election. It’s not clear it will make a difference. It’s not clear it won’t. Whether it does is going to take time, more than most reporters have patience for. You can expect to see “game changer” and other colorful turns of phrase suggesting a dramatic upheaval to an otherwise relatively stable election. Understand, though, that that’s not established, and can’t be. Not yet.

Expect also to see verbiage masking who’s doing what to whom. The press corps “must demarcate unblurred lines of accountability,” but is already failing, wrote CJR’s brilliant young critic Jon Allsop.

Recognizing [Mitch] McConnell’s unique hypocrisy will be essential to this, as will avoiding language that gamifies the nomination process as entertainment; or that casts Republican dirty tricks in passive, impersonal terms (‘political struggle,’ ‘partisan brawl’); or that suggests Democrats are the real radicals if and when they raise court reforms as a possible response to said dirty tricks.

Second, I should caution against cynicism. McConnell, the Senate majority leader, said in 2016 that he could not in good conscience allow a vote for Merrick Garland, Barack Obama’s nominee, to go to the floor during an election year. The American people had to have a say, he said. He made up that “rule” to get something he wanted (Neil Gorsuch on the US Supreme Court). He’s throwing out that “rule” to get something similar. Within hours of news of Ginsburg’s death, McConnell said the Senate would confirm Donald Trump’s nominee. (More on why he didn’t say when in a moment.)

The Democrats, led by Chuck Schumer, are rightly crying foul. They are holding the Republicans to their own standard. In truth, McConnell isn’t being hypocritical. He’s just being a hard-shelled partisan. Most normal people are not, and won’t be, that cold-blooded, though. The Democrats know it.

It’s tempting to be cynical and say that complaining about McConnell’s disgusting hypocrisy is useless. (“It won’t work. Don’t bother.”) But he’s not the Democrats’ true audience. Their true audience is normal people recoiling from McConnell’s naked power-lust. It’s people who might be a majority supporting court reforms.

Schumer, who is normally and infuriatingly squishy, said Saturday nothing is off the table, a strong signal that if McConnell and the Republicans proceed, there will be a price to pay if the Democrats take the Senate.

That isn’t the Democrats’ immediate concern. Right now, they are trying to force vulnerable Republican senators to break with McConnell. So far, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowsky of Alaska have said they’re against confirmation hearings before Election Day. If they get two more on board (perhaps Cory Gardner of Colorado or Mitt Romney of Utah), the Democrats will have won a small victory, but they will not yet have won the battle. (They will have at least prevented the awful potential of five friendly justices deciding the outcome of the election should Donald Trump throw it to the court.)

Remember McConnell is a turtle-necked nihilist. Nothing but power matters to him. If he can’t get a justice before the election, he’ll get one afterward. Not even Collins and Murkowsky have ruled out confirmation during a lame-duck session of the Congress. Yes, McConnell would do this even if Trump lost. He’s that terrible.

This is where I must talk to you straight. The question isn’t whether the Democrats can stop the Republicans from installing a new justice, giving the Supreme Court a 6-3 conservative super-majority (meaning Gorsuch would be the swing vote, which means there won’t be any swing votes). The likelihood of that happening is probably zero.

McConnell has the means and the will to make it happen. The real questions, the ones we should put our energies into answering, is first, how much can the Democrats slow down this process, which I have already discussed; and second, how are they going to respond to losing?

I don’t know for sure, but I suspect the base of the party, especially women fearing the fate of Roe, will not accept the same-old gee-whiz reaction. Actually, don’t believe me. ActBlue, a Democratic fund-raiser, raised $100 million between the time of Ginsburg’s death and 2 p.m. Sunday.

Before Bret Kavanaugh, liberals were horribly complacent about the court. Post-Kavanaugh, not so much.

In any case, the Democrats must take the Senate. With the Congress unified, they could enact reforms restraining the court’s conservatives. Without control, though, they can do little but watch the republic burn.

I’m struggling to make sense of politics this Monday after Ginsburg’s passing. But it’s pretty clear, even to me, that the Senate is more important to the fate of the nation than even the fight over her replacement.

The Democrats must slow down losing to buy enough time for Joe Biden to move a majority of Americans in his direction, so that the party can win in the future.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 21 September 2020

Word Count: 890

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Joe Biden was on a CNN town hall Thursday night. The Democratic nominee’s performance was fine. Nothing special. Good enough. Relative to the president’s performance two days prior, however, Biden’s was virtuosic.

As you’ll recall, Donald Trump is a lying, thieving, philandering sadist. That didn’t change Tuesday night when he fumbled through an ABC News town hall. Compared to that, all Biden needed to do is comb his hair, brush his teeth, stand up straight and act a little bit presidential.

Biden did more than that, obviously. The former vice president touched a nerve sending quick shots of pain through the body politic. I hope we remember them as we entered the final weeks. He brought up recent comments by the US attorney general, who said lock downs ordered to stop the spread of the new coronavirus were “like house arrest.”

“Other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history,” Bill Barr said Wednesday.

Biden demurred. “What Bill Barr recently said is outrageous. … I will tell you what takes away your freedom: not being able to see your kid, not being able to go to the football game or baseball game, not seeing your mom or dad sick in the hospital, not being able to do the things, that’s what is costing us our freedom.”

Biden went on to say our collective loss of liberty is the result of a president who knew how bad the pandemic was going to be “in clear terms” but failed “to deal with this virus.”

I don’t think most people knew the nerve was hurting until Biden touched it. I don’t think Biden himself knew. Most people are just enduring a pandemic that has killed more than 202,000 Americans (per Worldometer, as of this writing), infected more than 6.8 million others and brought the US economy to the brink of collapse. But this moment, amid an objectively so-so performance, was like that feeling of lightning flashing down your arm. You knew you were in pain. You didn’t know how much till now.

Trump hasn’t just failed to protect us. He’s failed to protect our liberty, too.

Hold that truth firmly in your minds as you face a barrage of breathtaking propaganda for which every accusation against Biden and the Democrats is either a confession of what the president and his GOP confederates are doing, or a projection of what they would like to do.

In that world, up is down, left is right, wrong is right. When it comes to understanding Trump’s campaign rhetoric, presume first that it’s a lie, and second that whatever degree of truth it contains is upside down, backward and prolapsed.

On this score, John Avlon did yeoman’s work. The CNN analyst recently compiled a list of things the president and his confederates accuse Biden and “the left” of being while showing the accusations are precisely what the president and his confederates are. They accuse liberals of being “snowflakes.” Trump and his supporters are world-historical snowflakes. They accuse the Democrats of practicing “identity politics.” They’d be nothing without white identity politics. They accuse Democrats of wasteful spending. Trump and the GOP have spent our way to historic levels of national debt.

They accuse liberals of warping the US Constitution yet they stand by a president acquitted of attempting to defraud the American people. Treason, in other words.

When they demand “law enforcement,” they are really demanding punishment of their imagined enemies. When they demand “traditional values,” they are really demanding control over their women. When they demand “freedom,” they are really demanding conformity to group identity, which equates morality to obedience to white authority. When they demand “patriotism,” they are really demanding an envisioned nation-within-a-nation, handpicked by God, achieve dominion over America in God’s name.

Most important, they accuse “radicals” of being violent when the obvious source of violence is from right-wing actors who believe accusations against Biden and “the left” justify any and all reactions, including violent ones. This is why it’s a mistake to see hypocrisy where there’s actual motivating reasoning. It doesn’t matter that they are in fact what they accuse others of being.

To them, what matters is creating excuses to act as they wish. Upside down, backward and prolapsed — if you do not understand that, you are allowing yourself to be duped, and in the process surrendering your liberty.

Fortunately, I think most Americans know who the real tyrants are. I think most of us understand how much pain we are in. If we don’t, perhaps Biden’s performance helped. There’s nothing like lightning shooting down your arm to wake you up.

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 September 2020

Word Count: 779

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On Aug. 21, people gathered around the Washington County School District building in St. George, Utah. They came by the hundreds to protest the governor’s mandate requiring schoolchildren to wear face masks. According to local newspaper The Spectrum, a protester said during a closing prayer that “safety is not as important as our freedom and liberty.” He went on: “Forcing masks on our children is child abuse.”

Another protester “compared mask-wearing to the death of George Floyd.”

“When George Floyd was saying ‘I can’t breathe’ and then he died, and now we’re wearing a mask, and we say ‘I can’t breathe,’ but we’re being forced to wear it anyway,” St. George resident Shauna Kinville told KTVX, a Salt Lake City TV station. Video of KTVX’s report went viral this week after Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher shared it.

It was in microcosm something we should expect in macrocosm if we’re lucky enough to see Joe Biden win the presidency. The Democratic nominee has promised to impose a nationwide mask mandate to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus, which has now killed more than 201,000 Americans (as of this writing), infected more than 6.8 million more, and injured scores of thousands of businesses and communities around the country.

The pandemic is deadliest in rural and southern counties, places most likely to benefit from a nationwide mask mandate but least likely to obey one.

Should Biden win, we can expect a St. George anti-mask protest writ large in the coming years. It will probably follow a playbook similar to the one used a decade ago by the so-called “Tea Party,” by which small reactionary groups, funded by billionaires and organized by professional GOP operatives, present themselves as a grassroots revolt against centralized government tyranny.

The press corps will probably play along, covering it the way it did the last “insurrection” — as if red-blooded Americans, dedicated to the cause of liberty and driven by the principle of rugged individualism, are taking back their country from eastern elites in the name of freedom and God. (Instead of the “Tea Party,” it might be the “Q Party,” after the QAnon conspiracy theory). From these political conditions, we can anticipate a permanent pandemic.

Scholars will play a role, too. Indeed, they already are. The Brookings Institution and other social scientists are studying why some Americans refuse to wear masks even though masks are the best way of avoiding contagion. (The virus is airborne, living in water droplets so small they hang in the air.) Already scholars are coming to the wrong conclusion: that the American frontier mentality, and the individualism at the root of the innovation and self-reliance that constitute our national character, trumps the government’s interest in public health.

“Safety is not as important as our freedom and liberty,” the St. George protester said. Some academics, like Boston University’s Martin Fiszbein, have argued for the reevaluation of rugged individualism, a principle he calls “dangerous” in the face of public health crises demanding collective action.

America does not have too much rugged individualism. It has too little. The more we think rugged individualism is the problem, the bigger the real problem will be. People who refuse to wear masks are not reflecting the American frontier mentality. They are not rejecting commonsense out of the nobility of self-reliance.

They are not harming themselves, literally, due to outrage against government overreach. They are acting in the interest of the groups they identify with. More importantly, they are acting out of fear of being punished by their group. They’re not individualists. They’re collectivists.

If we keep saying that individualism is why some Americans won’t wear masks, we can expect to occupy a hell more hellish than the one we already occupy, in which mass death is now normal because there’s no apparent way to resolve the conflict between gun rights and public safety. We should not, and cannot, allow conventional wisdom to gel in which the demands of individuals grind endlessly against the demands of public health.

We must speak the truth. The tension isn’t between individualism and collective action. It’s between two collectivisms. One good and one very, very bad.

In one kind, individuals defend, maintain and expand liberty by way of accepting responsibility for and working toward a collective good. In the time of the ’rona, we are all in this together. We rise and fall, as one.

In the other, individuals subordinate their interests and surrender liberty to group identity. (The group is not “America,” because the United States is not where “real Americans” live.)

They claim to be rugged individualists, but they know individualism is punishable. One kind of collectivism rewards moral courage. The other kind, on the other hand, rewards moral cowardice.

We need an individualism that’s as moral as it is rugged. We need individuals rugged enough to make a hard moral choice between two visions of our country’s future. About half the country seems prepared to make that choice. That, alas, isn’t enough.

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 September 2020

Word Count: 830

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