The avalanche of analyses of how President-elect Joe Biden will address the many Middle Eastern wars, confrontations, and other issues in which the US is entangled will remain entertaining speculation unless they do three things that every American government in the past half a century has failed to do: grasp the underlying (and worsening) realities on the ground in the Middle East, acknowledge their actual causes, and craft foreign policies that serve the US itself, the people of the region, and the wider cause of world peace and stability.

We hear often that Biden’s 40 years of foreign policy experience give him an edge over other American officials who try to navigate our region. Those 40 years are most useful for him if he looks back and tracks how and why the current conditions and trends across the Middle East have changed so much, even since Biden was vice president four years ago.

Issues like Israel-Palestine, Iran, Turkey, Russia, aggressive Saudi-UAE policies, sectarian conflicts, and other current realities are best dealt with on the understanding that they are mostly consequences of deeper drivers of change in the region.

An honest and comprehensive analysis of how the Middle East has reached its current violent condition would help interested policy-makers anywhere in the region or the world craft policies that actually make a difference in people’s lives. This is especially true of Middle Easterners whose thirst for dignity, development, and stability remains largely unquenched — and widely ignored by Middle Eastern and foreign leaders alike.

Now that Biden is heading back to the White House, here is my six-point list of the most important and consistent drivers of Middle Eastern events in recent history. All six remain active dynamics, not historical issues. In chronological order, they are:

1. Uninterrupted foreign military intervention in the Middle East since Napoleon, two-and-a-quarter centuries ago, stokes both internal turmoil and popular anger against foreign powers. Such militarism has significantly increased since the end of the Cold War 30 years ago, and now includes regional militarism (most notably by Turkey, Iran, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Israel) alongside international powers like the USA, Russia, France, and the UK.

Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Palestine, and Libya are showcases of the destruction and mass human suffering this causes, and this legacy continues and even expands these days. Replacing military action with diplomacy and economic development drives would be a sensible policy option across the board.

2. The Palestinian-Zionist and wider Arab-Israeli conflict has now entered its second century, and remains the most radicalising and destabilising political force within the Middle East. It helped trigger the advent of Arab military regimes in the 1940s to 70s, all of which ravaged and bankrupted their own societies, cemented inefficient and repressive regimes, increased anti-western sentiments, and expanded regional conflicts, including new Iranian-Israeli-Arab tensions.

It is a serious element in citizens’ lack of respect for their rulers across many Arab lands, especially as a few Arab leaders decide to normalise relations with Israel while it continues its colonisation of Arab lands. Resolving the Arab-Israeli and Palestinian-Zionist conflict equitably, according to the wishes and needs of the people of the region, rather than a handful of autocrats, is a major priority for anyone seeking to promote stability and dignity across the region for all its people.

3. The foreign militarism and Arab-Israeli conflict together generated a modern legacy of Arab authoritarian and autocratic regimes, all of which needed foreign support to survive. The cruel and incompetent regimes were also developmental failures that ravaged national economies and ultimately drove masses of the brightest Arab (and some Iranian, Turkish and even Israeli) men and women to emigrate. Middle Eastern autocracy must be removed if we wish to end our region’s wars and despair.

4. Due to the three factors above, the Arab region’s 440 million people today are mostly economically poor and vulnerable and politically marginalised and powerless. The steady pauperisation of the Arab middle classes since the 1990s has aggravated all the current destructive trends, including sectarian and ethnic conflicts, mass civilian uprisings, and large-scale emigration, displacement, and refugeehood by millions of desperate families.

It also hardens already vicious authoritarian regimes who reply to citizens’ expressions of discontent and demand for rights with greater state violence, arrests, and intimidation of peaceful protesters.

5. These trends have seen the Arab region and parts of Iran and Israel in recent years break out in sustained citizen protests against their increasingly autocratic leaderships.

The Arab region in particular has witnessed ongoing protests in a dozen countries since 2010; only Tunisia has transitioned to a pluralistic democracy, and Sudan is in the midst of a delicate three-year transition. Polling evidence confirms large scale, chronic citizen discontent with state institutions such as parliaments, the media, and the executive and judicial branches. Citizens and their ruling governmental authorities are increasingly distant from each other, which makes some states more brittle.

6. The Arab countries and people suffer the ultimate indignity of being subjected to the forces mentioned above: some have started to unravel as sovereign states, in at least two key dimensions. First, many have lost control over most of their borders and lands such as in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Israeli-occupied Palestine, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Iraqi Kurdistan and southern Sudan, to mention only the most flagrant. As non-state actors take control of some autonomous regions beyond the control of the central government, foreign powers also wage war at will in the country, directly or through local proxies.

Second, they cannot make fully sovereign decisions related to their national security. Most Arab countries, for example, must get the approval of Israel to buy advanced American weapons. Some must get the approval of Iran, Turkey, or Russia for their military or diplomatic moves. These and other examples represent a de-sovereignisation of important dimensions of national life in Arab countries — probably a priority issue to grasp by anyone seeking engagement in the region.

So the Biden administration and other foreign powers who look at the turbulent Middle East would do well to pause for a moment from their focus on Iran’s nuclear industry, terrorism, non-state militia expansions, refugee flows, and other important realities, and instead try to grasp how we reached this situation, and how we can get out of it. This is all the more important because the six drivers I outlined above continue to devastate our countries, where conditions will worsen more due to the Covid-19 pandemic, low oil price, and economic stagnation.

Rami G. Khouri is Director of Global Engagement and senior public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. Follow him on Twitter: @ramikhouri

This article originally appeared in The New Arab.

Copyright ©2020 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 November 2020

Word Count: 1,079

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 17 November 2020

Word Count: 783

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In the two weeks since Election 2020, the country has oscillated between joy and anger, hope and dread in an era of polarization sharpened by the forces of racism, nativism, and hate. Still, truth be told, though the divisive tone of this moment may only be sharpening, division in the United States of America is not a new phenomenon.

Over the past days, I’ve found myself returning to the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who, in 1967, just a year before his own assassination, gave a speech prophetically entitled “The Other America” in which he vividly described a reality that feels all too of this moment rather than that one:

There are literally two Americas. One America is beautiful… and overflowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of opportunity. This America is the habitat of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies; and culture and education for their minds; and freedom and human dignity for their spirits…

But tragically and unfortunately, there is another America. This other America has a daily ugliness about it that constantly transforms the ebulliency of hope into the fatigue of despair. In this America millions of work-starved men walk the streets daily in search for jobs that do not exist. In this America millions of people find themselves living in rat-infested, vermin-filled slums. In this America people are poor by the millions. They find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.

In Dr. King’s day, that other America was, for a time, laid bare to the nation through mass social unrest and political change, through the bold actions of the freedom fighters who won the Voting Rights Act and then just kept on fighting, as well as governmental programs like the “War on Poverty.” And yet, despite the significant gains then, for many decades since, inequality in this country has been on the rise to previously unimaginable levels, while poverty remained locked in and largely ignored.

Today, in the early winter of an uncurbed pandemic and the economic crisis that accompanies it, there are 140 million poor or low-income Americans, disproportionately people of color, but reaching into every community in this country: 24 million Blacks, 38 million Latinos, eight million Asians, two million Native peoples, and 66 million whites. More than a third of the potential electorate, in other words, has been relegated to poverty and precariousness and yet how little of the political discourse in recent elections was directed at those who were poor or one storm, fire, job loss, eviction, or healthcare crisis away from poverty and economic chaos. In the distorted mirror of public policy, those 140 million people have remained essentially invisible. As in the 1960s and other times in our history, however, the poor are no longer waiting for recognition from Washington. Instead, every indication is that they’re beginning to organize themselves, taking decisive action to alter the scales of political power.

For years, I’ve traveled this country, working to build a movement to end poverty. In a nation that has so often boasted about being the wealthiest and freest in history, I’ve regularly witnessed painful divisions caused by hunger, homelessness, sickness, degradation, and so much more. In Lowndes County, Alabama, for instance, I organized with people who lived day in, day out with raw sewage in their yards and dangerous mold in their homes. On Apache land in Oak Flats, Arizona, I stood with native leaders struggling to cope with generations of loss and plunder, most recently at the hands of a multinational copper mining company. In Gray’s Harbor, Washington, I visited millennials living in homeless encampments under constant siege by militia groups and the police. And the list, sadly, only goes on.

As the future administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris heads for the White House (no matter the recalcitrant loser still ensconced there), the rest of us must equip ourselves with both courage and caution, living as we do in a divided nation, in — to be exact — two very different Americas. Keep in mind that these are not the insulated, readymade Americas of MSNBC and Fox News, of Republicans and Democrats, of conservatives and liberals. All of us live in a land where there are two Americas, one of unimaginable wealth, the other of miserable poverty; an America of the promised good life and one of almost guaranteed premature death.

Unleashing the power of poor and low-income voters One enduring narrative from the 2016 election is that poor and low-income voters won Donald Trump the White House, even if the numbers don’t bear it out. Hillary Clinton won by 12 points among voters who made less than $30,000 a year and by 9 points among voters who made less than $49,999; the median household income of Trump voters then was $72,000.

Four years later, initial estimates suggest that this trend has only intensified: Joe Biden attracted more poor and low-income voters than President Trump both in the aggregate and in key states like Michigan. Trump, on the other hand, gained among voters with annual family incomes of more than $100,000. Last week, the director of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab noted that this “appears to be the biggest demographic shift I’m seeing. And you can tie that to [Trump’s] tax cuts [for the wealthy] and lower regulations.”

In 2016, there were 64 million eligible poor and low-income voters, 32 million of whom did not vote. In 2020, it’s becoming clear that poor and low-income voters helped decide the election’s outcome by opting for a candidate who signaled support for key antipoverty issues like raising the minimum wage, expanding health care, and protecting the environment. In down-ballot races, every congressional member who endorsed Medicare for All won reelection, even in swing states. Imagine then how many dispossessed and disenfranchised voters might have turned out if more candidates had actually been speaking to the most pressing issues of their lives?

Seventy-two percent of Americans said that they would prefer a government-run healthcare plan and more than 70% supported raising the minimum wage, including 62% of Republicans. Even in districts that went for Trump, voters passed ballot measures that, only a few years ago, would have been unheard of. In Mississippi, people voted to decriminalize medical marijuana, while in Florida a referendum for a $15 minimum wage got more votes than either of the two presidential candidates.

If nothing else, Election 2020 revealed a deeply divided nation — two Americas, not one — though that dividing line marked anything but an even or obvious split. A startling number of Americans are trapped in wretched conditions and hungry for a clean break with the status quo. On the other hand, the rampant voter suppression and racialized gerrymandering of the last decade of American politics suggests that extremists from the wealthier America will go to remarkable lengths to undercut the power of those at the bottom of this society. They have proven ready to use every tool and scare tactic of racist division and subterfuge imaginable to stop poor Black, Latino, Asian, Indigenous, and white potential voters from building new and transformative alliances, including a new electorate.

It’s time to move beyond the defeatist myth of the Solid South or even the dulling comfort of a Midwestern “blue wall.” Across the South and the Midwest, there are voter-suppression states still to win, not for a party, but for a fusion movement of the many. The same could be true for the coasts and the Southwest, where there remains a sleeping giant of poor and low-income people yet to be pulled into political action. If this country is ever going to be built back better, to borrow Joe Biden’s campaign pledge, it’s time to turn to its abandoned corners; to, that is, the other America of Martin Luther King that still haunts us, whether we know it or not.

Fusion politics in the other America When Dr. King gave his “Other America” speech, he was preparing for what would become the last political project of his life: the Poor People’s Campaign. At a time when the nation appeared to be fraying at the seams, he grasped that a giant social leap forward was still possible. In fact, he envisioned a protracted struggle that might catapult this country into a new era of human rights and revolution not through sanguine calls for unity, but via a rousing fusion of poor and dispossessed people from all walks of life. And that, as he imagined it, would also involve a recognition that systemic racism and other forms of hate and prejudice were crucial to the maintenance of the two Americas and had to be challenged head-on.

The idea of such fusion politics echoed earlier chapters of political reckoning and transformation in this country. From the post-Civil War era of Reconstruction into the 1890s, newly emancipated Blacks built unprecedented, if fragile, alliances with poor whites to seize governing power. Across a new South, fusion parties expanded voting rights, access to public education, labor protections, fair taxation, and more. In North Carolina in 1868, for instance, legislators went so far as to rewrite the state constitution to codify for the first time the right of all citizens to “life, liberty, and the enjoyment of the fruits of their own labor.”

For nearly 30 years, I’ve been part of a modern version of fusion organizing, even as I studied earlier examples of it — and this country’s history is rich with them. Indeed, the modern Poor People’s Campaign that I co-chair is itself inspired by such past fusion movements, including the version of politics I was first introduced to by multiracial welfare rights and homeless organizing in the 1980s and 1990s.

Organizations like the National Welfare Rights Union and the National Union of the Homeless first grew in response to the neoliberal politics of President Ronald Reagan and his attacks on the poor, especially the Black poor, or, as he put it, “welfare queens.” In response to such myths and deep, divisive cuts, out of shelters and from the streets, poor people began to organize projects of mutual aid and solidarity, including “unions” of the homeless.

By the 1980s, the National Union of the Homeless had been created and had upwards of 30,000 members in 25 cities. Meanwhile, organizers across the country soon escalated their efforts with waves of coordinated and nonviolent takeovers of vacant federally owned buildings at a time when the government had abdicated its responsibility to protect and provide for its poorest citizens. Those poor and homeless leaders also helped the Homeless Union secure guarantees from the federal government both for more subsidized housing and for protections of the right of the homeless to vote.

Today, in the middle of an economic crisis that could, in the end, rival the Great Depression, I’m reminded not just of those moments that first involved me but of the fusion movements of the early 1930s. After all, in those years, shanty towns called “Hoovervilles” — given that Herbert Hoover was still president — cropped up in cities across the country.

Not unlike the tent cities of the Homeless Union and the Welfare Rights Movement in the 1980s and the ones appearing today, those Hoovervilles were where masses of the unemployed and homeless gathered to survive the worst of that depression and strategize on how to resist its misery. Multiracial Unemployed Councils organized and fought for relief for workers without jobs then, preventing thousands of evictions and utility shutoffs.

Meanwhile, in the abandoned fields of the Southern Delta from Arkansas to Mississippi, groups like the Southern Tenant Farmers Union pioneered the dangerous work of organizing Black and white tenant farmers and sharecroppers. When the New Deal coalition bet its future on compromise with white Southern extremists, members of that union were among the last guardians of the rights of poor agrarian workers. Their lonely clarity on the significance of fusion politics in the South stood in stark contrast to the rise of an unmitigated politics of white reaction there.

Today, as top Democrats like Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer claim the legacy of Great Depression-era President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, remember the fusion organizing that helped bring him to power and pushed him to enact change. I’m thinking in particular of the more than 40,000 unemployed veterans of World War I who arrived in Washington D.C. in 1932 to demand the early payment of promised bonuses, previously only considered redeemable after 1945. That Bonus Army, as the veterans called it, collected many of the fraying threads of the American tapestry, making camp, sometimes with wives and children, on seized public land just across the Potomac River from the capital’s federal office buildings, while holding regular nonviolent marches and rallies.

Eventually, President Herbert Hoover ordered the U.S. Army to tear down the camp in a violent fashion. The mistreatment of those poor and war-weary veterans in the process proved to be a lightning rod for the public and so Hoover lost to FDR in the presidential election later that year, setting the stage for a decade defined by militant organizing and major shifts in national policy.

The mandate of the poor today There are already those in the media and politics who are counseling restraint and a return to the pre-Trump days, as if he were the cause, not the consequence, of a nation desperately divided. This would be nothing less than a disaster, given that the fissures in our democracy so desperately need mending not with nice words but with a new governing contract with the American people.

The battleground states that won Joe Biden the presidency have also been battlegrounds in the most recent war against the poor. In Michigan, hit first and worst by deindustrialization, millions have struggled with a failing water system and a jobs crisis. In Wisconsin, where unions have been under attack for years and austerity has become the norm, both budgets and social welfare policies have been slashed by legislatures. In Pennsylvania, rural hospitals have been closing at an alarming rate and, even before the pandemic hit, the poorest large city in the country, Philadelphia, had already become a checkerboard of disinvestment and gentrification. In Georgia, 1.3 million renters — 45% of the households in that state — were at risk of eviction this year. And in Arizona, the climate crisis and Covid-19 have ravaged entire communities, including the members of Indigenous nations who recently turned out to vote in record numbers.

The people of these states and 15 more helped elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and count on one thing: with their votes, they were calling for more than just an end to Trumpism. They were demanding that a new era of change begin for the poor and marginalized. The first priority in such an era should, of course, be to pass a comprehensive relief bill to control the pandemic and buoy the millions of Americans now facing a cold, dark winter of deprivation. The House and the Senate have a moral responsibility to get this done as soon as the new administration takes office, if not before (though tell that to Mitch McConnell). The first 100 days of the Biden administration should then be focused, at least in part, on launching a historic investment in securing permanent protections for the poor, including expanded voting rights, universal healthcare, affordable housing, a living wage, and a guaranteed adequate annual income, not to speak of divestment from the war economy and a swift transition to a green economy.

That should be the mandate of our next government. And that’s why we, the overflowing millions, must harness the fusion politics that was so crucial to the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and organize in the best tradition of our predecessors. Real social progress rarely comes slowly and steadily, but in leaps and bounds. The predictable stalemate of the next administration and its Republican opposition can’t be broken by grand speeches in the House or Senate. It can only be broken by a vast social movement capable of awakening the moral imagination of the nation.

It’s time to get to work.

Liz Theoharis writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is a theologian, ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist. Director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, she is the author of Always With Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor.

Copyright ©2020 Liz Theoharis — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 17 November 2020

Word Count: 2,705

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But nowhere is there a hero choosing death over democracy.

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

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

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 November 2020

Word Count: 851

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Imagine for a moment that Hillary Clinton had won the presidential election in 2016.

Imagine, in other words, that the “blue wall” of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania had held firm four years ago. Claiming election fraud, Donald Trump would have insisted on a recount and Election Day would then, too, have stretched into election week and election month. Eventually, Trump would have given up, though not without insisting that the “deep state” had stolen his victory.

Once in office, Clinton would have set to work building on the Obama legacy. The United States would have remained in the Paris climate accord, the Iran nuclear agreement would still be in force, and perhaps a more robust health-care plan might even be in place. Competent civil servants would have taken charge of federal agencies, a tax cut for the wealthy wouldn’t have gone into effect, and the Democrats would have been well positioned in 2020 to reelect the first woman president and build a stronger congressional majority.

America wouldn’t have gone down the rabbit hole of Trumpism. Civic discourse wouldn’t have been coarsened. The country wouldn’t now be in such complete and utter…

Hey, wake up!

If Hillary had somehow managed to eke out a victory in 2016, she would soon enough have faced a Republican Party as hostile to compromise as the one that hamstrung Barack Obama. Opposition from Congress and Republican-controlled states, combined with her own centrist instincts, would have kept the country mired in a failing status quo: an increasingly unequal economy, crumbling infrastructure, a growing carbon footprint, a morbidly obese Pentagon, and other signs of a declining superpower that we’ve come to know so well.

Now, imagine what would have happened when the pandemic struck in 2020. Clinton would have responded more competently than The Donald because virtually anyone over the age of 12 would have been better suited to handle the emergency than he was. Indeed, if the United States had managed Covid-19 with anything faintly approaching the competency of, say, Germany under Angela Merkel, the country would have had, by my calculations, 2.6 million infections and about 45,000 deaths on the eve of the 2020 elections.

That obviously would be better than the 10 million infections and more than 245,000 deaths the United States is currently experiencing.

Keep in mind, however, that Americans wouldn’t have known just how bad the situation could have been. Quite the opposite: having set up a bully pulpit in an alt-right Fox News-style media conglomerate after his loss in 2016, Donald Trump would have led the charge on Clinton’s “mismanagement” of the pandemic and her direct responsibility for all those deaths. He would have assured us that the resulting economic downturn, with striking numbers of Americans left unemployed, could have been avoided, and that he as president would have prevented both those deaths and business cutbacks by immediately closing all borders and deporting any suspicious foreigners. He would have labeled the president “Killer Clinton” and, given the misogyny of significant parts of the American electorate, the name would have stuck.

In 2020, Donald Trump would have run on a platform of making America great again and won in a landslide.

Don’t, however, think of this as just some passing exercise in alternative history. Substitute “Joe Biden” for “Hillary Clinton” in the passages you’ve just read and you’ll have a grim but plausible prediction of what could happen over the next four years.

On the road to 2024 Hillary Clinton would have faced challenges of every sort if she’d won the presidency in 2016. They nonetheless pale in comparison to what now awaits Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

The Republicans are already gunning for the new president. They’re blocking the transition process to handicap the incoming administration. President Trump has forbidden federal agencies from even cooperating with the Biden-Harris team. The 2020 presidential election forms part of the Republican Party’s denialism trifecta: the pandemic, climate change, and now Biden’s victory are all simply liberal “myths.”

The Republican Party will either control the Senate — pending the outcome of two run-off races in Georgia — or, at least, be able to disrupt any major pieces of legislation. The Biden administration will be hard-pressed to roll back the tax cuts the Republicans handed out to the wealthy in 2017, pass a major green infrastructure bill, or expand affordable health care.

When Biden tries to implement a nationally cohesive program to combat Covid-19 through more testing, tracing, and investment in medical equipment, he’s guaranteed to face resistance from a number of Republican governors who have refused even to mandate the wearing of masks. And then there are all those Republican-appointed judges just itching to rule on any legal challenges to Biden’s executive orders, not to speak of a Supreme Court now located in the bleachers beyond right field that will serve as an even greater constraint on an activist agenda.

And those are just the political obstacles. The pandemic is clearly spiraling out of control. The economy has yet to crawl out of its hole. And Donald Trump has a couple of more months to scorch the earth before his army of incompetents are driven out of Washington, D.C.

Then there are the 71 million Americans who just voted for him despite his criminal conduct, gross mismanagement, and near-psychotic view of the world. Short of a nationwide deprogramming campaign, the adherents of the Trump cult will continue to cling to their religion (and their guns). In the Biden years, they’re sure to form an industrial-strength Tea Party opposed to any move the federal government makes. And let’s be clear: their resistance will not be exactly Gandhian in nature.

At the same time, it’s essential to separate their illegitimate complaints laced with racism and misogyny from their all-too-legitimate grievances concerning the American economy. Much of Trump’s base sees that economy, quite correctly, as unfair and the elite as not sharing the wealth. Unless the Democrats succeed in proving themselves to be the party of the 99% and successfully show how the Republicans are the 1% club — by, for instance, publicizing the true impact of Trump’s tax cuts for the rich — the Biden administration will fall victim to charges of elitism, which is a political death sentence these days.

Everything that Hillary Clinton faced during her hypothetical first term in office will apply to Joe Biden in his very real first term. Trump will never give up on the fantasy that the 2020 election was stolen from him. He’ll continue to rally his followers through social media as well as Breitbart and the One America News Network. Even if he doesn’t have the fire in his 78-year-old belly to run in 2024, other true believers will eagerly pick up his torch, whether from his own family or a pool of loyalists that includes Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, and Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton.

No matter how well President Biden does in dealing with Covid-19 and how quickly a vaccine comes on line, he’ll be saddled with the responsibility for everyone who dies in the pandemic from January 20th on. Ditto with future economic problems, no matter that they were quite literally dropped in his lap as he entered the Oval Office. All the faults that Trump’s followers refused to see in their own candidate will suddenly be magnified in their vision of Biden.

Trump, in their eyes, was a man who could do no wrong. Biden will be the man who can do no right. A significant percentage of those 71 million Americans will want to make sure that Biden, too, is a one-term president.

Unfortunately, several international examples can serve as models.

The Liberal interregnum Beware the right-wing revolutionary movement thwarted.

Donald Trump promised to turn the world upside down: to throw out the Washington elite, radically shrink government, close off borders, bolster white privilege, and restore American unilateralism. As a platform, it wasn’t much more than the photo negative of Barack Obama’s agenda, but it was a clarion call to shake things up that thrilled his followers.

Thanks to a mixture of bureaucratic inertia, liberal resistance, and his own managerial ineptitude, Trump failed to carry out his revolution — and now the elite has struck back. The newspapers are full of columnists, Democrats and former Republicans alike, delirious with anti-Trump triumphalism: “Loser!,” “You’re Fired!,” “Our Long National Nightmare Is Over.” The Dow Jones is celebrating and Hollywood has popped the bubbly, while the foreign-policy mandarins are looking forward to the return of predictability and their version of stability. Even the Pentagon, particularly after the shocking post-election dismissal of Defense Secretary Mark Esper, will be relieved to see the end of the Disrupter-in-Chief.

But the celebrations may prove premature. Just consider recent examples of right-wing populist revolutions elsewhere that were stopped in their tracks by elections.

The Trumpian Viktor Orban was the prime minister of Hungary from 1998 to 2002. His time in office was marked by corruption scandals, tax cuts, and efforts to concentrate power in the hands of the executive. In the 2002 elections, a coalition of the Socialist and Liberal parties ousted him and, governing for eight years, seemed to have put Orban’s brand of authoritarian politics in an early grave.

In the 2010 elections, however, he returned from the political dead and has since transformed his country from a bastion of liberalism into an autocratic, intolerant, uber-Christian friend of Vladimir Putin. In the process, the Socialists became synonymous with a corrupt, economically unjust status quo and the Liberals simply disappeared as a party.

Nor is the Hungarian experience unique. In Poland, the Law and Justice Party has moved the country’s politics steadily rightward since achieving a parliamentary majority in 2015. But it, too, had an earlier experience (from 2005 to 2007) as part of a governing coalition. In between, the more liberal Civic Platform Party took charge, but did little to improve the livelihoods of the bulk of working Poles, ultimately driving ever more voters into the arms of the right-wing Law and Justice Party. In its second crack at power, those right-wing nationalists did indeed push through a number of economic reforms that began to redistribute wealth in a way that fulfilled their populist promise.

In Japan, right-wing Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had a brief opportunity to govern in 2006-2007, only to return in 2012 after a failed effort by the opposition Democratic Party to reform Japanese politics. As the country’s longest-serving prime minister — Abe stepped down for health reasons in August — he succeeded in making Japan “great” again as an inward-looking, jingoistic power.

Right-wing nationalists certainly learned something about wielding power from their first experiences of leadership, while their liberal successors, by failing to offer fully transformational politics, prepared the ground for the return of the right. After a period of tumultuous rule, most people don’t want to jump from a bucking bronco onto another wild horse. So the prospect of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris appointing a competent cabinet and returning to the status quo ante by, among other things, rejoining the World Health Organization, signing onto the Paris climate accords, and welcoming back the Dreamers seems reassuring to many Americans. It won’t, however, be faintly enough to drive a stake through the heart of Trumpism.

Apocalypse later? In “The View from 2016,” an essay I wrote for TomDispatch in 2007, I predicted that Barack Obama would win the 2008 election and serve two terms, but also that his administration would make only half-hearted gestures at reform — abiding by the Kyoto protocol on climate change, but not committing to deeper cuts in carbon emissions; canceling a few weapons systems, but not transforming the military-industrial complex; tweaking the global war on terror, but not ending it; and so on.

Apocalypse, I concluded,

comes in many different forms. There are the dramatic effects of sword and fire and famine. And then there’s the apocalypse of muddling through. That’s what happens when you just carry on with the same old, same old and before you know it, poof, end of the world. It’s an apocalypse that’s neither too cold nor too hot, neither too hard nor too soft. It’s the apocalypse of the middle, the Goldilocks apocalypse.

In 2016, a hungry bear named Donald Trump emerged from the woods and took out Goldilocks. (Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

After four years of bracing for a more conventional apocalypse precipitated perhaps by Trump’s itchy nuclear trigger finger, we’re back in Goldilocks territory. More than half the country craves a return to normalcy by dumping Donald Trump and then defeating Covid-19. Under the circumstances, it’s easy enough to forget that the pre-Trump normal wasn’t actually very good. The world was already in the midst of a climate crisis. The global economy was providing anything but a fair shake to everyone and so generating a politics of resentment that propelled Trump and his cohort to power. Countries continued to spend almost $2 trillion a year collectively on war and preparations for it, leaving societies ill-equipped to handle an onrushing pandemic’s war on the health of humanity.

Joe Biden should learn this key takeaway from the Obama years: muddling through not only speeds us toward a Goldilocks apocalypse but makes it so much more likely that another bear will come out of the woods to “reclaim” its house.

Let’s face it: Biden and Harris are card-carrying members of an elite that’s enamored of the Goldilocks middle ground. The only way they could pivot from that position would be by implementing a full-blown green economic renewal that benefitted America’s blue-collar workers while satisfying environmentalists as well. The blue bloods of the Republican Party will inevitably call such a jobs approach “socialism.” The next administration has to push forward nevertheless, appealing over the heads of the Republican leadership to a base that desperately wants prosperity for all.

Remember: other bears are lurking out there and they seem to have acquired a certain taste for cautious politicians. Sure, a few disgruntled ursine types will go into hibernation after the 2020 election. But when the hoopla dies down, others will venture out, angry, resentful, and looking for their next big meal.

 

John Feffer writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest novel is Frostlands, a Dispatch Books original and volume two of his Splinterlands series. He is the author of the just-published book The Pandemic Pivot (Seven Stories Press).

Copyright ©2020 John Feffer — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 November 2020

Word Count: 2,362

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 13 November 2020

Word Count: 842

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 12 November 2020

Word Count: 785

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I saw them for only a few seconds. One glimpse and they were gone. The young woman wore a brown headwrap, a yellow short-sleeved shirt, and a long pink, red, and blue floral-patterned skirt. She held the reins of the donkey pulling her rust-pink cart. Across her lap lay an infant. Perched beside her at the edge of the metal wagon was a young girl who couldn’t have been more than eight. Some firewood, rugs, woven mats, rolled-up clothing or sheets, a dark green plastic tub, and an oversized plastic jerry can were lashed to the bed of the cart. Three goats tied to the rear of it ambled along behind.

They found themselves, as I did, on a hot, dusty road slowly being choked by families who had hastily hitched up their donkeys and piled whatever they could — kindling, sleeping mats, cooking pots — into sun-bleached carts or bush taxis. And they were the lucky ones. Many had simply set out on foot. Young boys tended small herds of recalcitrant goats. Women toted dazed toddlers.  In the rare shade of a roadside tree, a family had stopped and a middle-aged man hung his head, holding it in one hand.

Earlier this year, I traveled that ochre-dirt road in Burkina Faso, a tiny landlocked nation in the African Sahel once known for having the largest film festival on the continent. Now, it’s the site of an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe. Those people were streaming down the main road from Barsalogho about 100 miles north of the capital, Ouagadougou, toward Kaya, a market town whose population has almost doubled this year, due to the displaced. Across the country’s northern stretches, other Burkinabe (as citizens are known) were making similar journeys toward towns offering only the most uncertain kinds of refuge. They were victims of a war without a name, a battle between Islamist militants who murder and massacre without compunction and armed forces that kill more civilians than militants.

I’ve witnessed variations of this wretched scene before — exhausted, upended families evicted by machete-wielding militiamen or Kalashnikov-carrying government troops, or the mercenaries of a warlord; dust-caked traumatized people plodding down lonesome highways, fleeing artillery strikes, smoldering villages, or towns dotted with moldering corpses. Sometimes motorbikes pull the carts. Sometimes, young girls carry the jerry cans on their heads. Sometimes, people flee with nothing more than what they’re wearing. Sometimes, they cross national borders and become refugees or, as in Burkina Faso, become internally displaced persons, or IDPs, in their own homeland. Whatever the particulars, such scenes are increasingly commonplace in our world and so, in the worst possible way, unremarkable. And though you would hardly know it in the United States, that’s what also makes them, collectively, one of the signature stories of our time.

At least 100 million people have been forced to flee their homes due to violence, persecution, or other forms of public disorder over the last decade, according to UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency. That’s about one in every 97 people on the planet, roughly one percent of humanity. If such war victims had been given their own state to homestead, it would be the 14th largest nation, population-wise, in the world.

By the end of June, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, an additional 4.8 million people had been uprooted by conflict, with the most devastating increases in Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burkina Faso. Yet, as dismal as these numbers may be, they’re set to be dwarfed by people displaced by another signature story of our time: climate change.

Already, shocking numbers have been put to flight by fires, derechos, and super storms, and so much worse is yet to come, according to experts. A recent forecast suggests that, by the year 2050, the number of people driven from their homes by ecological catastrophes could be 900% greater than the 100 million forced to flee conflicts over the last decade.

Worse than World War II Women, children, and men driven from their homes by conflict have been a defining feature of modern warfare. For almost a century now, combat correspondents have witnessed such scenes again and again. “Newly routed civilians, now homeless like the others with no idea of where they would next sleep or eat, with all their future lives an uncertainty, trudged back from the fighting zone,” the legendary Eric Sevareid reported, while covering Italy for CBS News during World War II. “A dust-covered girl clung desperately to a heavy, squirming burlap sack. The pig inside was squealing faintly. Tears made streaks down the girl’s face. No one moved to help her…”

The Second World War was a cataclysmic conflagration involving 70 nations and 70 million combatants. Fighting stretched across three continents in unparalleled destructive fury, including terror bombing, countless massacres, two atomic attacks, and the killing of 60 million people, most of them civilians, including six million Jews in a genocide known as the Holocaust. Another 60 million were displaced, more than the population of Italy (then the ninth-largest country in the world). An unprecedented global war causing unimaginable suffering, it nonetheless left far fewer people homeless than the 79.5 million displaced by conflicts and crises as 2019 ended.

How can violence-displaced people already exceed World War II’s total by almost 20 million (without even counting the nearly five million more added in the first half of 2020)?

The answer: these days, you can’t go home again.

In May 1945, the war in Europe came to an end. By the beginning of September, the war in the Pacific was over, too. A month later, most of Europe’s displaced — including more than two million refugees from the Soviet Union, 1.5 million French, 586,000 Italians, 274,000 Dutch, and hundreds of thousands of Belgians, Yugoslavs, Czechs, Poles, and others — had already returned home. A little more than a million people, mostly Eastern Europeans, still found themselves stranded in camps overseen by occupying forces and the United Nations.

Today, according to UNHCR, ever fewer war refugees and IDPs are able to rebuild their lives. In the 1990s, an average of 1.5 million refugees were able to return home annually. For the last 10 years, that number has dropped to around 385,000. Today, about 77% of the world’s refugees are trapped in long-term displacement situations thanks to forever wars like the conflict in Afghanistan that, in its multiple iterations, is now in its sixth decade.

War on (of and for) terror One of the most dramatic drivers of displacement over the last 20 years, according to researchers from Brown University’s Costs of War project, has been that conflict in Afghanistan and the seven other “most violent wars the U.S. military has launched or participated in since 2001.” In the wake of the killing of 2,974 people by al-Qaeda militants that September 11th and the decision of George W. Bush’s administration to launch a Global War on Terror, conflicts the United States initiated, escalated, or participated in — specifically, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen — have displaced between 37 million and 59 million people.

While U.S. troops have also seen combat in Burkina Faso and Washington has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars of “security assistance” into that country, its displaced aren’t even counted in the Costs of War tally. And yet there’s a clear link between the U.S.-backed overthrow of Libya’s autocrat, Muammar Qaddafi, in 2011 and Burkina Faso’s desperate state today. “Ever since the West assassinated Qaddafi, and I’m conscious of using that particular word, Libya has been completely destabilized,” Chérif Sy, Burkina Faso’s defense minister, explained in a 2019 interview. “While at the same time it was the country with the most guns. It has become an arms cache for the region.”

Those arms helped destabilize neighboring Mali and led to a 2012 coup by a U.S.-trained officer. Two years later, another U.S.-trained officer seized power in Burkina Faso during a popular uprising. This year, yet another U.S.-trained officer overthrew yet another government in Mali. All the while, terrorist attacks have been ravaging the region. “The Sahel has seen the most dramatic escalation of violence since mid-2017,” according to a July report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research institution.

In 2005, Burkina Faso didn’t even warrant mention in the “Africa Overview” section of the State Department’s annual report on terrorism. Still, more than 15 separate American security assistance programs were brought to bear there — about $100 million in the last two years alone. Meanwhile, militant Islamist violence in the country has skyrocketed from just three attacks in 2015 to 516 in the 12 months from mid-2019 to mid-2020, according to the Pentagon’s Africa Center.

Compounding crises to come The violence in Burkina Faso has led to a cascade of compounding crises. Around one million Burkinabe are now displaced, a 1,500% increase since last January, and the number only keeps rising. So do the attacks and the fatalities. And this is just the beginning, since Burkina Faso finds itself on the frontlines of yet another crisis, a global disaster that’s expected to generate levels of displacement that will dwarf today’s historic figures.

Burkina Faso has been battered by desertification and environmental degradation since at least the 1960s. In 1973, a drought led to the deaths of 100,000 people there and in five other nations of the Sahel. Severe drought and hunger struck again in the mid-1980s and aid agencies began privately warning that those living in the north of the country would need to move southward as farming became ever less feasible. By the early 2000s, despite persistent droughts, the cattle population of the country had doubled, leading to increasing ethnic conflict between Mossi farmers and Fulani cattle herders. The war now tearing the country apart largely divides along those same ethnic lines.

In 2010, Bassiaka Dao, the president of the confederation of farmers in Burkina Faso, told the United Nations news agency, IRIN, that the impacts of climate change had been noticeable for years and were getting worse. As the decade wore on, rising temperatures and new rainfall patterns — droughts followed by flash floods — increasingly drove farmers from their villages, while desertification swelled the populations of urban centers.

In a report published earlier this year, William Chemaly of the Global Protection Cluster, a network of nongovernmental organizations, international aid groups, and United Nations agencies, noted that in Burkina Faso “climate change is crippling livelihoods, exacerbating food insecurity, and intensifying armed conflict and violent extremism.”

Sitting at the edge of the Sahara Desert, the country has long faced ecological adversity that’s only worsening as the frontlines of climate change steadily spread across the planet. Forecasts now warn of increasing ecological disasters and resource wars supercharging the already surging phenomenon of global displacement. According to a recent report by the Institute for Economics and Peace, a think tank that produces annual global terrorism and peace indexes, two billion people already face uncertain access to sufficient food — a number set to jump to 3.5 billion by 2050. Another one billion “live in countries that do not have the current resilience to deal with the ecological changes they are expected to face in the future.” The report warns that the global climate crisis may displace as many as 1.2 billion people by 2050.

On the road to Kaya I don’t know what happened to the mother and two children I spotted on the road to Kaya. If they ended up like the scores of people I spoke with in that market town, now bulging with displaced people, they’re facing a difficult time. Rents are high, jobs scarce, government assistance all but nil. People there are living on the edge of catastrophe, dependent on relatives and the kindness of new neighbors with little to spare themselves. Some, driven by want, are even heading back into the conflict zone, risking death to gather firewood.

Kaya can’t deal with the massive influx of people forced from their homes by Islamist militants. Burkina Faso can’t deal with the one million people already displaced by conflict. And the world can’t deal with the almost 80 million people already driven from their homes by violence. So how will we cope with 1.2 billion people — nearly the population of China or India — likely to be displaced by climate driven-conflicts, water wars, increasing ecological devastation, and other unnatural disasters in the next 30 years?

In the decades ahead, ever more of us will find ourselves on roads like the one to Kaya, running from the devastation of raging wildfires or uncontrolled floodwaters, successive hurricanes or supercharged cyclones, withering droughts, spiraling conflicts, or the next life-altering pandemic. As a reporter, I’ve already been on that road. Pray you’re the one speeding by in the four-wheel-drive vehicle and not the one choking in the dust, driving the donkey cart.

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch, where this article originated. He is a fellow at the Type Media Center and is the author most recently of Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan and of the bestselling Kill Anything That Moves. This article was reported in partnership with Brown University’s Costs of War Project and Type Investigations.

Copyright ©2020 Nick Turse — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 12 November 2020

Word Count: 2,140

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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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