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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 30 October 2020

Word Count: 802

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These past few months, it’s grown ever harder to recognize life in America. Thanks to Covid-19, basic day-to-day existence has changed in complicated, often confusing ways. Just putting food on the table has become a challenge for many. Getting doctors’ appointments and medical care can take months. Many schools are offering on-line only instruction and good luck trying to get a driver’s license or a passport renewed in person or setting up an interview for Social Security benefits. The backlog of appointments is daunting.

Meanwhile, where actual in-person government services are on tap, websites warn you of long lines and advise those with appointments to bring an umbrella, a chair, and something to eat and drink, as the Department of Motor Vehicles in Hudson, New York, instructed me to do over the summer. According to a September 2020 Yelp report, approximately 164,000 businesses have closed nationwide due to the pandemic, an estimated 60% of them for good. CNBC reports that 7.5 million businesses may still be at risk of closing. Meanwhile, more than 225,000 Americans have died of the coronavirus and, as a winter spike begins, it’s estimated that up to 410,000 could be dead by year’s end.

Then there are the signs of increasing poverty. Food banks have seen vast rises in demand, according to Feeding America, a network of 200 food banks and 60,000 food pantries and meal programs. According to a study done by Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy, between February and September, the monthly poverty rate increased from 15% to 16.7%, despite cash infusions from Congress’s CARES Act. That report also concluded that the CARES program, while putting a lid on the rise in the monthly poverty rate for a time, “was not successful at preventing a rise in deep poverty.” And now, of course, Congress seems likely to offer nothing else.

The rate of unemployment is down from a high of 14% in April, but still twice what it was in January 2020 and seemingly stabilizing at a disturbing 8%. Meanwhile, schools and universities are struggling to stay viable. Thirty-four percent of universities are now online and only 4% are conducting fully in-person classes. The policy of stores limiting purchases in the spring and summer is still a fresh memory.

And what about freedom of movement? Dozens of countries, including most of the European Union, Latin America, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, have barred entry to American tourists and travelers, given this country’s devastatingly high rate of infection. Canada and Mexico just re-upped their bans on U.S. travelers, too. In a sense, the pandemic has indeed helped build a “great, great wall” around America, one that won’t let any of us out.

In fact, Americans are not being welcomed, even by one another. Inside our borders, states are requiring those arriving from other states with high percentages of Covid-19 cases to quarantine themselves for 14 days on arrival (though enforcing such mandates is difficult indeed). New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s list of places subject to such a travel advisory now includes 43 of the 49 other states.

And as we are reminded on a daily basis in the run-up to Election Day, early voters, especially in heavily minority districts, are being forced to wait long hours in endless lines in states where the pandemic is beginning to spike. In some places, local officials clearly set up the conditions for this as a deterrent to those they would prefer not to see at the polls. In Georgia, where a governor was intent on reducing the numbers of polling places to reduce turnout in African-American neighborhoods, the waiting time recently was, on average, 11 hours. Early voting lines in New York City “stretched for blocks” in multiple venues.

To top it all off, political and racial violence in the country is climbing, often thanks to uniformed law enforcement officers. From George Floyd’s death to federal officials in unmarked vehicles dragging protesters off the streets of Portland, Oregon, to federal law enforcement officers using rubber bullets and tear gas on a gathering crowd of protestors to clear a path to a local church for President Trump, such cases have made the headlines. Meanwhile, officials across the country are ominously preparing to counter violence on Election Day.

In the face of such challenges and deprivations, Americans, for the most part, are learning to adapt to the consequences of the pandemic, while just hoping that someday it will pass, that someday things will return to normal. As early as March 2020, a Pew poll had already detected a significant uptick in symptoms of anxiety nationwide. The percentage of such individuals had doubled, with young people and those experiencing financial difficulties driving the rise.

The American Psychological Association (APA) considers the pandemic not just an epidemiological but a “psychological crisis.” The website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a paper written by two APA authors suggesting that Covid-19 is already taking “a tremendous psychological toll” on the country.

Failing, American-style All in all, we find ourselves in a daunting new world, but don’t just blame it on the pandemic. This country was living in a state of denial before Covid-19 hit. The truth is that Americans have been in trouble for a surprisingly long time. The pandemic might have swept away that sense of denial and left us facing a new American reality, as that virus exposed previously ignored vulnerabilities for all to see.

So, expect one thing: that the indicators of America’s decline will far surpass the problems that can be solved by addressing the pandemic’s spread. When Covid-19 is brought under some control, the larger social system may unfortunately remain in tatters, in need of life support, posing new challenges for the country as a whole.

Several observers, witnessing such potentially long-lasting changes to the fabric of American life, have described the United States as resembling a failed state in its reaction to the pandemic. They point not just to the effects of staggering levels of inequality (on the rise for decades) or to a long-term unwillingness to invest in the kind of infrastructure that could keep what’s still the wealthiest country on our planet strong, but to entrenched poverty and the fracturing of work life. Long before the pandemic hit, the Trump administration reflected this downhill slope.

As George Packer recently wrote in the Atlantic, the reaction to the coronavirus crisis here has been more “like Pakistan or Belarus — like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering… Every morning in the endless month of March,” he added, “Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state,” unable to get the equipment, supplies, tests, or medical help they needed to fight the pandemic.

Looking beyond Covid-19 to the Trump administration’s irresponsible handling of climate change and nuclear weapons, TomDispatch’s Tom Engelhardt has also labeled the country a “failed state,” one that now occupies a singular category (which he called “Fourth World”) among the planet’s countries.

There is no codified definition of a failed state, but there is general agreement that such a country has become unable or unwilling to care for its citizens. Safety and sustenance are at risk and stability in multiple sectors of life has become unpredictable. In 2003, future U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice attempted to craft a workable definition of the term in a report for the Brookings Institution, calling on President George W. Bush to address the underlying causes of failed states. “Failed states,” she wrote, “are countries in which the central government does not exert effective control over, nor is it able to deliver vital services to significant parts of its own territory due to conflict, ineffective governance, or state collapse.”

From the Proud Boys to the Wolverine Watchmen, it has become strikingly clear that, in this pandemic year, the U.S. is indeed becoming an increasingly riven, disturbed land and that nothing, including the election of Joe Biden, will simply make that reality disappear without immense effort.

In the twenty-first century, in fact, the United States has visibly been inching ever closer to failed-state status. In 2006, the Fund for Peace, an organization whose mission is global conflict reduction, human security, and economic development, launched a yearly Failed States Index (FSI), changing its name in 2014 to the Fragile State Index. For the last decade, for instance, Yemen has been among the top 10 most fragile states and, for the last two years, number one. Since 2013, Finland has been at the other end of the scale, number 178, the least failed state on the planet.

What’s interesting, however, is the path the United States has travelled over that same decade, dropping a noteworthy 10 places. Until the Trump years, it consistently stood at number 158 or 159 among the 178 nations on the chart. In the 2018 report, however, it took a turn for the worse. In the 2020 report (based on pre-pandemic numbers), it had dropped to 149, reflecting in particular losses in what FSI calls “cohesion,” based on rising nationalist rhetoric among increasingly riven elites and unequal access to resources in a country where economic inequality was already at staggering levels.

Just imagine, then, what the 2021 Index will likely report next April. At present, when it comes to FSI’s rankings, the United States is in the third of five groupings of countries, behind the Scandinavian countries, most of the other nations of Europe, and Singapore. Given today’s realities, it is poised to fall even further.

The election moment Elections are a crucial factor in separating successful from failing states; fair elections, that is, ones that people in a country trust. As Pauline Baker, the director of the Fund for Peace, points out, “Elections are an essential part of democratization, but they can also be conflict-inducing if they are held too soon, are blatantly manipulated, lack transparency, or are marred by violence.”

All you have to do is think about Donald Trump’s endless claims — that this year’s election will be “rigged,” that mail-in ballots will be a fraud, that he won’t necessarily leave office even if the tallies are against him, and so on — to know that a particularly heavy burden has been placed on the results of November 3rd. Add to that burden threats to the election’s viability via disinformation from foreign agents and hackers, Republican Party attempts at voter suppression, and threats of violence by so-called poll watchers.

Meanwhile, an embattled Supreme Court has been issuing decisions on matters like “faithless electors,” extended voting, and absentee ballots. The record so far has been mixed at best. On the one hand, the justices have voted to keep intact the Electoral College rule that requires electors to honor their pledges to vote according to whatever the voters have decided. They also nixed an attempt by the Republican National Committee to enforce a Rhode Island rule that mail-in voters, under pandemic conditions, must have their ballots signed by either two witnesses or a notary public. And most recently, the Court voted 4-4 to uphold Pennsylvania’s decision to extend the absentee ballot deadline.

For the most part, however, its decisions have gone the other way, upholding more restrictive voting policies in 8 out of 11 cases. In July, for example, the court ruled against a decision in Alabama that had eased restrictions on absentee ballot submissions. That same week, it refused to reinstate an order in Texas allowing all voters to cast mail-in ballots due to the pandemic. Meanwhile, it seems that Pennsylvania Republicans are again trying to narrow the time frame on absentee ballots, announcing that they have returned to the Court for a further decision on the matter in light of Justice Amy Barrett’s certain confirmation.

The point is, this election should matter, both the form it takes and its outcome. If trust in the process of voting goes by the wayside, then the image of the United States as a failing, even a failed state will be hard to dispute. And if there is violence at the polls, or after the vote takes place, then we’ll sense an even deeper failure.

While some may view the coming election as a precipitous cliff, with dangers lurking everywhere, I also see it as an opportunity, which is why the tsunami of early voting, often involving hours of waiting, is an encouraging sign. Despite the abyss that we face after four years of chaos and cruelty, this country still has a chance to prove that we are not a failing state and to reclaim our trust in our government, our protections, and one another. Only then will we be able to begin to repair the economic damage, the rank divisiveness, and the unequal allocation of resources that has fueled our disastrous pandemic response and, with it, a further erosion of trust in government.

Maybe we need to accept the challenge of proving in this election that one of the world’s longest-standing democracies can rise to the occasion and vote to uphold the foundation of its system, elections themselves. Maybe, using this very election, we can harness the civic pride that could lead to a successful restoration of our basic beliefs in constitutional principles and the rule of law. The chance to vote, no matter how long the lines and the wait, might be just the opportunity we need.

Karen J. Greenberg writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law, the host of the Vital Interests Podcast, the editor-in-chief of the CNS Soufan Group Morning Brief, and the author of Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State and editor of Reimagining the National Security State: Liberalism on the Brink. Julia Tedesco helped with research for this article.

Copyright ©2020 Karen J. Greenberg — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 29 October 2020

Word Count: 2,237

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 29 October 2020

Word Count: 771

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Regular readers of the Editorial Board are familiar with the layered complexity of our moment. The crisis we face isn’t only political. It isn’t just economic. It isn’t about public health alone. It’s also an information crisis. Too many people in too many places in this country believe fantastical lies as if they were true.

The Russians did a pretty good job, but 2016 was nothing compared to what Fox and others do to Americans every day. Victory for Joe Biden won’t change this. It will probably make matters worse. The key, I think, is raising awareness of what’s happening, how and why.

Alexander Nazaryan is a Yahoo News correspondent whom God has unfairly blessed with a scintillating combo of political shrewdness and literary sensitivity. On Tuesday, he described on Twitter the main method by which Fox and others bully their way into the American political consciousness:

Conservative media routinely manufactures scandals — John Kerry’s service in Vietnam, Hillary Clinton’s email server, Hunter Biden’s emails — then browbeats mainstream media into not covering those ‘scandals’ to [a] sufficient degree.

It’s bad-faith politics and huge disservice to voters.

That, however, is only half of it. With respect to Nazaryan (whose writing I encourage you to seek out and savor), we need to see the fullness of what Fox and others are doing to America. We need to see that it’s lying at a scale with the intent to injure. That it aims to poison the citizenry’s understanding of public affairs. That it creates conditions in which the truth itself is partisan. That it provides Americans with an escape from their civic and social responsibilities. That it fabricates the illusion of freedom when there’s really barbarism.

Most of all, we need to see when “mainstream media” play along, they are enabling the above. They are, in a very real sense, complicit in our betrayal.

The following are 5 Big Lies that members of the Washington press corps accept as true or habitually repeat uncritically in their reporting. In the process, they launder these lies, give them credibility and legitimacy, and mask their illicit and injurious origins. Fact-checking, while entirely admirable, is entirely insufficient to holding the powerful to account. To do that truly, the press corps must stop appeasing the bullshit.

1. Originalism

This is the idea that US Supreme Court justices should interpret federal law and the US Constitution “as written,” not as they might wish they were written. It’s a lie. First, “interpret” does not mean “see what you want to see.” It means “interpret” areas of law that, as written, are unclear. Second, and more importantly, the Constitution is not a simple document. It’s as full of contradictions as America is. It is also a document that’s been rewritten over the course of our history. When someone says “interpret as written,” does that mean in 1789, when slavery was OK, or 1865, when it was abolished? Once you see the lie, you wonder why the Republicans keep telling it.

2. Pro-gun

The Republicans are not “pro-gun.” They are pro-intimidation. They are pro-anarchy. They are pro-vigilante justice. While the Second Amendment is (arguably) about the right to self-defense — as written, it’s about militias and national defense — it does not in any way, shape or form empower one class of people over and at the expense of another class. As it is, Republican jurists have repeatedly seen what they want to see so that the desire for peace and security is second fiddle to the desire for unlimited firepower. It’s no coincidence the Republicans went gun-nuts after the election of the first Black president. Democracy is no longer a means to power. It is now an obstacle.

3. The sanctity of life

This is the idea that “life” is so precious abortion must be outlawed. In fact, “the sanctity of life” is conditional. It doesn’t apply to capital punishment. It doesn’t apply to the sick, hungry and poor. It doesn’t apply to the 550-some kids taken from their immigrant mothers. And, most importantly, it does not apply to “the unborn” when it’s politically inconvenient. Anti-abortionist get mad when “fetal tissue” — actually, stem cells — is used in science. But they were OK when “fetal tissue” saved Donald Trump. Set aside all these conditions, however, and “the sanctity of life” is totally meaningful.

4. States rights

This is another one of those principles that’s always true for Republicans except when it’s not. States have the right to control their destinies when the federal government is trying to force states to treat non-white human beings as human beings entitled to the blessings of citizenship. But those rights are conditional when it comes time to cut taxes for the obscenely rich and pay for it by stealing from states that did not support a Republican president. Republican justices, meanwhile, always stand for states rights — unless they dampen the fun of undercutting Democratic voters. In 2000, they ordered Florida to stop counting Florida’s votes. A recent ruling has the makings of a repeat.

5. Censorship

Specifically, I’m thinking of the idea that Twitter and other social media platforms censor “conservative” voices. First, Twitter is a private entity. It has the right to refuse to post whatever it does not want for whatever reason it wants. (It does owe anyone a reason, though.) Second, private entities do not “censor.” Only governments do that. Third, if I, as a private citizen, don’t like what you’re saying, I can tell you freely to shut the hell up. That’s a reaction to your free speech in the form of my free speech. Even if I use violence to silence you, that’s not censorship either. That’s a crime punishable by law. The Republicans do not stand for free speech. They stand against yours.

These are five examples. There are lies aplenty. Though varied, they share a common purpose: creating a system that’s separate but not equal, a lawful republic in which the very rich are free to choose while the rest of us are held responsible for their choices.

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 October 2020

Word Count: 1,006

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The U.S. Supreme Court loses something it can hardly get back now that Amy Coney Barrett has been foisted upon it by President Donald Trump and Senate Republicans. It loses even the patina of neutrality that Chief Justice John Roberts has tried to cover it with ever since the Federalist Society, Donald Trump, and those same Republicans stole the seat left vacant by the death of Antonin Scalia. It loses even the appearance of propriety, and the presumption of good faith, that it has almost always had, even in other times where its ideology swung wildly out of proportion to the politics and priorities of the nation it purports to serve. It loses more of its credibility, if not whatever moral authority it had left, and becomes just another collection of political functionaries all vying to extend or retract the law as they see fit.

That’s a loss we all should mourn no matter who we are voting for this election season. It’s a loss our parents could not have fathomed. The court now is populated by three types of Republican appointees. There are two radicals, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who must be cackling at the prospects of the gun rights they’ll now be able to recognize and the voting rights they’ll now be able to ignore. There are the two political functionaries, Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Barrett, who will be relentlessly tilting the scales of justice toward Republicans and against Democrats for the next half century. And there are the two “adults,” the Chief Justice and Justice Neil Gorsuch, neither of whom for all their courtesies will be remembered as moderate interpreters of law.

The ascension of Barrett means the court’s “center” moves now from Roberts to Gorsuch and that means it moves even more to the right. It means a court as far to the right as it has been in a century. This is what Sen. Mitch McConnell was crowing about Sunday, the skin on his hands as blackened as his soul, when he boasted about Barrett’s confirmation as a move his political adversaries won’t soon be able to overcome. The quiet parts aloud, right? McConnell knows, like the rest of us should, that Amy Coney Barrett wasn’t selected by Donald Trump to be an honest broker of the law.

And she won’t be. There is no reason — none — for anyone to think that Barrett is going to be a fair and neutral arbiter of the relentless political causes and cases she’ll face. There is no reason — none — for criminal defendants or immigration advocates or civil rights attorneys or those who believe in gun regulations or reproductive rights or the Affordable Care Act or stout First Amendment walls between church and state to believe they have a fair shot for her vote. This is so not just because Barrett wouldn’t have passed muster with the Federalist Society if she were wobbly about the far-right ideology she’s espoused all her professional life. It’s also so because of what Barrett said, and didn’t say, during her confirmation hearing.

By accepting the nomination in these dubious circumstances, Justice Barrett, too, loses something she can never replace. Not just her self-respect, which she relinquished minute-by-minute during her desultory confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Not just her independence, which she waived Monday night by appearing with the president at the White House in what amounted to a campaign commercial for a beleaguered candidate. Sworn in by Justice Thomas, whose wife is a conservative activist, Barrett told the crowd of assembled Republicans that she would rule without fear or favor. She spoke these words after favoring her benefactor with her presence a week before Election Day.

She also spoke these words within an hour or so after the Court itself, in a dubious 5-3 ruling, sided with Wisconsin Republicans who had asked the justices to overturn a trial judge’s decision that extended the state’s deadline for receiving absentee ballots to six days after the ruling. This means, during a pandemic, that legitimate votes will not be counted, which is bad enough. What’s worse was the concurrence by Justice Kavanaugh, who indicated that he at least is amenable to having the court stop the counting of ballots on election night. Over and over again this election season, the court’s conservatives have sided with Republicans in election-related litigation. That imbalance will grow measurably worse with Barrett on board.

Barrett’s relentless willingness to serve as a prop for the Trump campaign — two COVID-19 super-spreader events in less than one month’s time — justifies the loss of respect the rest of us ought to have for her and the court itself. No matter how long she lasts on the court, and no matter how much the court’s makeup changes around her, she’ll always be recognized by half the country as an illegitimate justice, a judge whose confirmation was rushed through at the last minute by an unpopular president and a Senate majority on the verge of losing its power. She should have just said no. At a minimum she should have at least said no to the rallies she attended both before and after her confirmation.

Barrett has no one but herself to blame for this sad reality. She could have changed the narrative of her own story earlier this month if she had told the Judiciary Committee, and the rest of the world, that she would recuse herself from any litigation that arises from the 2020 election. Litigation, in other words, that the president said publicly that he needed her to weigh in on, on the side of Republicans, when he nominated her. Any judge below the level of the Supreme Court would be required, by ethics if not by law, to immediately recuse in such circumstances (it’s always about the quid pro quo when it comes to Trump, isn’t it?). Any judge worthy of our respect as a Supreme Court justice would have said so during her confirmation hearing.

But Barrett said nothing — or at least nothing meaningful given the fact that she could well be the swing vote next week that hands the election to the man who just handed her a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court. Barrett pledged only to consider the question were it to come before her as a Justice. Perhaps she remembered how angry her benefactor got when Neil Gorsuch, in a similar situation three years ago, took a bolder stand on behalf of judicial independence. The president reportedly even considered rescinding Gorsuch’s nomination. Amy Coney Barrett, groomed for this starring role, would have none of that. So we got empty platitudes. That’s not my idea of an independent judge.

But Barrett doesn’t care what I think, or what you think, or what anyone else thinks beyond those who have helped her rocket to the high court at age 48. Her confirmation secure, she didn’t even try to lift her hearing above the soiled political farce it became. If she had been honorably nominated, and then honorably vetted by a Judiciary Committee, she likely would have received bipartisan support for her nomination despite her reactionary legal views. But clearly no one cares about such hollow courtesies now. Barrett sullies the court just as Trump has sullied her and she’ll sully American law in thousands of decisions from now until our grandchildren and great-grandchildren are picking up the pieces of her shabby work.

When I was just starting out in the law, Justice Thurgood Marshall retired and was replaced by Clarence Thomas, a justice who has spent the past 29 years trying to undo Marshall’s work on the court. Now Amy Coney Barrett takes over for the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and gives every indication that she’s ready, willing, and able to spend the next 40 years undoing Ginsburg’s work. What a shame for all those who once saw the court as a bastion of light, not darkness. I keep hearing that Donald Trump ultimately ruins everything he touches. He and Mitch McConnell have now ruined the Supreme Court, too. That’s both an American tragedy and an open and obvious challenge to Senate Democrats if they win next week.

Andrew Cohen, a lawyer and journalist, is the Legal Affairs Correspondent for The Washington Spectator.

Copyright ©2020 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 October 2020

Word Count: 1,364

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The homestretch of the interminable 2020 election is underway. For those who see the presidential contest as a horse race, which includes most of the American press, neither the Trump nor Biden camp appears to have benefited much from its convention, the poll numbers having stayed more or less consistent since July or earlier. How and why as many as 48 percent of eligible voters surveyed consider it acceptable that this individual should continue as president is a question that occupies a lot of my thinking, and one that I’ll try to address in this piece.

People on both sides of this deeply divided country view this election as a fight for the soul of the nation, but any similarity between the opposing camps ends there. President Trump has openly adopted the trappings and the reality of the authoritarian leaders whose respect he covets. He has embraced white supremacists and sided with law enforcement in the debate over recurrent police violence against Black people, while the Democrats have called for inclusivity and racial justice and have nominated the first woman of color to serve on the national ticket of a major party.

Where president Trump has withdrawn from the Paris accord, rolled back regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, and lifted restrictions on polluters across the corporate spectrum, the Democrats have signaled that climate change will be a priority in their agenda and have committed to develop alternative energy options and to reengage with the international community.

You can continue down the list of challenges we face in the United States, challenges that in most instances are also faced by other nations, and on issue after issue, Trump and the status quo business lobby in Congress stake out positions that favor the wealthy over the poor, white over Black, men over women, and profits over nature.

Democrats, in general, present a vision of a country undergoing profound change, driven by demographic shifts, technological innovation, the emergence of women in the workforce, the demands for economic justice and racial equity, and the need to be both better stewards of the environment and better global citizens.

Their positions on the issues resonate with as many as 65 to 70 percent of the electorate, yet for the third time in the 21st century, the Democrats are struggling to avoid losing a national election in which they win the popular vote but lose to the confounding math of the Electoral College.

Most recently in 2016, Hillary Clinton, with overwhelming support from the coastal states and their urban voters, earned nearly three million more votes than her Republican opponent, Donald Trump. Yet she lost in a lopsided tally of 304–227 in the Electoral College, a system held over from the slaveholding days of the 18th century that disproportionately rewards winner-take-all state vote tallies and gives swing states more of a say in the outcome.

It should be noted that many of the current alignments in American politics predate Donald Trump. With the exception of Virginia, the slavery states and the states that permitted slavery in the 1850s are the same states that voted Republican in 2012, more than a century and a half later. From voter suppression and the shredding of the safety net to the tolerance and even encouragement of bias throughout American life, the current Republican Party largely updates the Confederacy.

Democrats no longer count on New Deal coalition And while most Democrats will be reluctant to acknowledge it, the party that delivered the New Deal began to stray from its support of the working-class base as early as the 1970s, when several new cultural and generational trends emerged. It was a time when labor unions were still a major force in American political and economic life and largely reflected the anti-Communist politics of the Cold War years. Their members, many from patriotic immigrant families, were torn over the Vietnam conflict and were reluctant to accept that the United States could be so wrong.

Many rank-and-file Democrats came from traditional households and did not easily adapt to the call for women’s equality. And they bristled when activists in the emerging environmental movement argued that their employment in industry was harmful to the planet.

At the end of the decade, inflation surged into double digits and 52 Americans were held hostage by Iran in a highly public and humiliating affront to American power. In 1980, when a genial, B-list Hollywood actor ran for president on the Republican ticket with vague but seductive promises of a foreign policy based on “peace through strength,” many voters who had historically supported the Democrats — and indeed had reached the middle class largely on the strength of Democratic programs — switched over to vote for Reagan.

The Democratic coalition, with its roots in the Roosevelt era, was broken, and the Reagan Democrat was born.

The jovial new president signaled to the business community that making money was cool again, that taxes on the rich would be lowered and regulations on business would be lifted. Cronyism and corruption proliferated. The 1980s was the decade of indulgence, and for many, the guilt over the prosecution of an unjust war was set aside. Reagan built his 1984 reelection campaign around the slogan “It’s morning again in America,” a theme that the 2016 Trump campaign reprised with its derivative “Make America Great Again.”

Race and religion shape our politics Republicans may not govern as well as Democrats, but they play the political game better (or more ruthlessly), and they certainly do capitalism better. During the Reagan years, the unsustainable gap between rich and poor in America accelerated, and antagonism toward the aspirations of women and Blacks and gays was tacitly encouraged. Most of the labor movement had remained with the Democrats, and the business community and the Reagan administration worked together with notable success to diminish the power and size of the unions. And the Republican courtship of the Religious Right had begun to pay dividends, foreshadowing a time, decades later, when conservative evangelicals would find themselves trying to explain their alignment with a reality-TV host and conflict-saturated real estate mogul who was more at home in Sodom and Gomorrah than the olive gardens of Gethsemane.

Although triumphalist Republicans would try to tell a different story, it was also the beginning of the decline of the Republic, a downward slide that has led us, in the words of the journalist Lou Dubose, to “the squalid, systemic partisan corruption that metastasized into what today is the party of Donald Trump.”

Toward the latter part of the 20th century, facing divided legislatures, increasing deficits, and slowing growth, Democrats found it increasingly difficult to replicate the sweeping social reforms of the New Deal and the Great Society (programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) and relied largely on incrementalism — income supplements, help for single mothers, college debt relief — to address social problems.

The Clinton administration, in the 1990s, did try for universal health care with its ambitious “Health Security” plan, an attempt at forging a middle path between market forces and regulatory reforms. But despite strong public sentiment for affordable health care, the plan — and its principal spokesperson, Hillary Clinton — were attacked by Republicans and the business community for ushering “too much bureaucracy” and being a “big government” solution. Divided over concerns that the plan did not go far enough, the left provided only lackluster support, and the proposal went down to defeat.

In the postwar years, when the economy was booming, it was possible to ask the middle class to absorb new taxes to pay for benefits for those who needed them most. But later in the century, the global economy cut into the American share, and other factors — above all, the damaging tax cuts Republicans delivered to corporations and the wealthy — helped to derail the American dream.

Republicans have overtly appealed to the racial grievances of white voters since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. In the conventional narrative, their focus has been on the Southern states, provoking a historic realignment premised on white supremacy and producing conservative majorities that voted seamlessly Republican until the Obama campaign in 2008. But in reality, Republicans have long been stoking fears about integration and incipient “urban problems” in comfortable white suburbs throughout the country.

Democrats, for the most part, have advanced the goals of the civil rights agenda — of the 53 African Americans currently in the U.S. Congress (including two delegates), 52 are Democrats and one is a Republican. Though the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act would not have passed without the support of Republicans in the Senate, today the party in both practice and policy is more polarizing on issues of race than at any time in the modern era.

Trump is by far the most unfettered, unapologetic racist since Andrew Johnson to have occupied the White House. Yet his approval ratings have remained consistent, reflecting the profound racial divisions that persist, and Republicans in office refrain from holding him accountable. Conservatives in the Trump era know they are staring into the face of history. The Republican Party understands that changing demographics will overwhelm its efforts to fend off progress, and it has resorted to extraordinary antidemocratic measures to delay this reckoning.

Republicans in the Trump era have launched an attack on immigrants (many of whom were American citizens or were here legally), accusing them of taking American jobs and obscuring the private sector’s role in transferring jobs to low-wage markets overseas. Few recall that it was the policies of the Reagan and Bush Senior years that led to the financial meltdown of the Savings and Loan era, and the utter lack of enforcement during Bush W. that chiefly paved the way for the massive economic dislocations of 2007–08.

Republicans attack the right to vote The right has also built a massive voter-suppression apparatus, based on false claims of voter fraud. These initiatives are aimed at poor people, minorities, students, and ethnic populations who might be expected to vote Democratic.

Officials in Republican-controlled states have re-drawn the boundaries of political districts in ways that violate fundamental constitutional prohibitions against discrimination. They have instituted burdensome voter ID requirements; they’ve reduced the number of polling places in minority and other high-turnout Democratic districts; they’ve reduced the number of days during which voters may cast their ballots, making it harder for working people to vote. And they were abetted by a disastrous Supreme Court decision, Shelby County v. Holder, in which the conservative majority cut the heart out of the Voting Rights Act and signaled to local Republican jurisdictions that they could suppress the vote with impunity.

Even against this backdrop, Trump has shamelessly used the bully pulpit to sow doubt about the integrity of our election system, laying the foundation for a challenge to the legitimacy of the outcome should he lose.

One of the most notable through lines during the Trump years has been the continued success of the right in making its victims its most ardent supporters. Not for the first time, Republicans advanced a tax bill that hugely favors their rich and connected patrons and disingenuously promoted it as a middle-class tax-relief act.

The economist Steven Pressman, writing in The Washington Spectator, has observed that as the 2017 tax bill made its way through Congress, President Trump claimed “his tax giveaway to corporations and the wealthy would trickle down. Everyone would gain. Firms would invest in efficient equipment and in their workers. Household income would rise $4,000, to $9,000. None of this happened. The standard trickle-down Republican hokum, peddled since the 1980s, had the same effect as in the past — the rich gained enormously.”

Trump attacked existing trade deals and wildly exaggerated his negotiating talents. With great fanfare, he replaced Nafta (our trade regime with Mexico and Canada) with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a warmed-over, rebranded version of its predecessor that was long on rhetoric and short on substance. His only apparent tactic on trade and foreign policy negotiations is to alternate between lavish expressions of admiration and eviscerating ridicule on Twitter, a strategy that may work on reality TV and even in New York real estate but has failed to produce progress in crucial talks with China and has led, unsurprisingly, to further deterioration in relations with North Korea.

“People voted for Donald Trump feeling they had nothing to lose after decades of income stagnation,” Pressman points out. “But lose we did. America lost respect around the world. Many lives have been lost to Covid-19, due to a deadly combination of incompetence and self-serving behavior. And even before the coronavirus hit, income gains during the Trump administration headed toward Wall Street: U.S. workers saw few benefits. Significantly, the president’s two signature economic policies, protectionism and tax reform, abetted this demoralizing outcome.”

Yet still, the base clamors for more. Trump partisans are a mix of white working- and middle-class voters who are estranged from costal elites and resentful at the perception of preferential treatment afforded minorities (try explaining that nuance of American political life to the Black parents of a child hurt or killed by police violence or a random shooting incident). They include the hugely influential religious fundamentalists and values-based coalitions, who have settled on an “imperfect vessel” as the explanation for their hypocritical embrace of the most morally compromised president in U.S. history. And they include the political agnostic who simply wants to pay fewer taxes and make more money.

Widespread concern over response to Covid-19 But very few people anticipated the virus, and it’s the virus — more than any convincing argument, more than any solid evidence, more than direct experience with the impact of the damaging lies this president and his unapologetic allies in Congress and right-wing media have repeatedly told — that will decide the outcome of this election.

Millions of Americans are sick, and tens of thousands are dying, significantly because of Trump’s incompetence and single-minded focus on his own political and financial self-interest. Somehow, the same people who dismiss the rape charges against Trump, who know he underpaid his taxes and broke the law in his business dealings but have been willing to overlook it, who understand he is the furthest distance from being a good Christian a person can be but still make excuses for him; these same people sense that he mishandled the virus and lied about it — is still lying about it — and it bothers them.

The charge of collusion with Russia during the 2016 election and Trump’s repeated denials further underscore the chasm between the president’s lies and political truth. Even after an independent investigation authorized by his own Justice Department reaffirmed the Trump campaign’s dealings with Russia, resulting in jail terms for key campaign operatives, Trump and his visibly compromised attorney general continued to distort and contest the evidence.

Now a Republican-led Senate committee has released a bombshell report concluding, in the words of The New York Times, “the Russian government disrupted an American election (in 2016) to help Mr. Trump become president, Russian intelligence services viewed members of the Trump campaign as easily manipulated, and some of Mr. Trump’s advisers were eager for the help from an American adversary.” While the fallout from these bipartisan findings has yet to filter into the campaign debate, the case against Trump’s reelection was bolstered.

Trump campaign operatives, however, seem undeterred. The fine investigative journalist Anne Nelson revealed in The Washington Spectator that in May, when Covid-related deaths were nearing 74,000, members of the president’s reelection campaign team recruited a few compliant doctors with questionable credentials to argue publicly against the use of masks and lockdowns and to offer spirited claims that, contrary to numerous studies, the extremely dangerous hydroxychloroquine was an effective remedy.

They staged a press conference on the steps of the Supreme Court, attended largely by a few straggling tourists, but the video was aired on Breitbart News, where it reached 185,000 viewers. Over its six hours on Facebook, the video was the second-most-engaged post on the platform, with 14 million views. A few hours after the presentation, President Trump tweeted to his 84.5 million followers, and Donald Trump Jr. told his 5.3 million followers to watch the video.

Social media, however, is growing wise to the prevaricator in chief. Nelson reports that Facebook took the group’s video down a few hours after it was posted, and Twitter and YouTube followed suit, “all three on the grounds that the video violated their Covid-19 misinformation policies.”

There is still a long road to travel before the election in November. Given the administration’s fatal mismanagement of its response to the virus, and an economy in shambles, with no particular policy achievements to point to and without a discernible agenda for Trump’s second term, Republicans are fanning racial fears and counting on conservative media to distract voters from the overwhelming documentation of the president’s moral deficiencies and political failures.

The 2020 elections will turn, in part, on whether local precincts can offset Republican efforts to disrupt the vote and whether Democrats can inspire Black voters and women and wavering independents to go to the polls based on more than just their disgust with Trump. Will Democrats succeed in offering voters a promising path out of the mess Trump has created? And will very narrow slices of the electorate, who live and vote in bellwether districts that disproportionately affect the national race, look beyond Trump’s self-serving lies and conclude, after nearly four years of this unscrupulous peacock, that our country cannot survive four more?

Hamilton Fish is the editor and publisher of The Washington Spectator.

Copyright ©2020 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 October 2020

Word Count: 2,916

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I’m going to assume for a moment that Joe Biden wins the election in order to say something related to Amy Coney Barrett, the newest justice to sit on the US Supreme Court, giving the Republicans the 6-3 supermajority they have desired for decades.

I’m going to assume Biden wins in order to offer a prediction: that at some point in the future, we’ll look back to see what the biggest story of the 2020 election was. That story, I suggest, is the Republican Party, seizing a golden opportunity, trading short-term control of one branch of the federal government for long-term control of another.

That story is of a Republican Party buying power with the bodies of dead Americans.

The price came not only in the form of a sacrificial president who could not govern his way out of a brown paper bag. The price came in the form of blood and treasure. At the same time that the Republicans were high-fiving each other in the White House Rose Garden, more than 231,000 were dead from the coronavirus pandemic.

On Monday, as they profaned a solemn swearing-in, legislation that could have brought relief to millions sat in the US Senate. It was ignored. Meanwhile, 52 “constitutional conservatives” celebrated their dominion over the land over laughs and drinks.

The Senate Republicans, I hope it will be clear in the coming months, made a choice. They could help Donald Trump win reelection by passing a stimulus bill worth more than $2.2 trillion in order help Americans struggling in a time of the covid. Or they could sacrifice him to take control the high court while at the same time redigging ideological trenches.

Joe Biden, as they knew, would be asking for trillions. They were prepared to worry about the debt. Susan Demas, top editor of the Michigan Advance, said today: “Austerity during a pandemic is a death sentence for thousands.” Months from now, we might look back to see that Demas was understating things.

Rich Lowry, the editor of the National Review, said in his latest that voting for Trump this year was for conservative voters like raising a middle finger to democratic liberalism, or as he put it, “the whip hand in American culture.” He was wrong. Conservatives don’t need to vote for Trump to do that. The middle finger was raised on Monday, Oct. 26, 2020, when the Republican Party gave up all pretense to being committed to the republic, and put everything into domination by force of law.

Saying Lowry was wrong gives him too much credit, though. It’s been obvious for years that, in practice, “conservatism” never meant what people like Lowry said it meant. It has always been a middle finger to the slow, mixed up and complicated drift of modernity. “Conservatism” doesn’t stand for things. It stands against things, especially when those things threaten the old orders of power.

When Republicans say that Barrett interprets “the Constitution as written,” they’re saying she makes space for things American democracy has rejected. They’re saying long-term control of a minoritarian institution means a political minority can impose its political will on everyone else and, thanks to life-time appointments, never face consequences.

Liberals used to think of the Supreme Court as a friend. It was, after all, the court that decided Brown, Griswold, Roe, Obergefell, and other cases that stood against bigotry and discrimination and stood for democracy and freedom. That court, in the minds of liberals, stood on “the right side of history.” That court, liberals now understand, is gone.

Professor Garrett Epps, for the Washington Monthly, wrote this about Barrett’s confirmation:

As this vile mummery played out, I mourned — not for the first time — the idea of a Court that was property of the nation, not of party; that sought justice, not ideological advantage; that earned a nation’s respect, not its gaping horror.

We shall not look upon its like again.

Which brings me back to my thought experiment. Most people don’t know what to do about the court, whether to expand it, rotate justices, limit their terms, or strip its power. What people should know, when it’s made clear, is the choice the Republicans made to arrive at this point.

They didn’t choose the public, the common good, or even due process. They didn’t even choose, assuming Biden wins, to support their own president. They chose to smash and grab — smash all the rules and grab power, while hoping no one notices until months from now when it’s too late to do anything.

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: 27 October 2020

Word Count: 756

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It was July 2017, a few weeks before the “Unite the Right” Charlottesville riots, when white men marched through the streets of that Virginia city protesting the planned takedown of a confederate statue and chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” I was sitting at a coffee shop in my quiet town of Poulsbo in Washington State. I had set aside an hour away from my kids to do some necessary writing, while my husband, then second-in-command on a Navy ballistic missile submarine, sat suspended somewhere in the depths of the Pacific Ocean.

Our toddler and infant were home with a babysitter, offering me a rare chance to write, peacefully, amid the stressors of my life. I had a clinical social-work internship then, counseling war-traumatized veterans, and had spent months single-mothering while my spouse was at sea. To my surprise, I was suddenly jolted from my daydreams by chanting men. Glancing out the window at the usually placid waterfront of our town, I caught sight of a group of surprisingly large white men wearing animal skin loincloths, vests, and horned hats. They were also holding torches and — I kid you not — spears. They were loudly chanting, “Poulsbo! Poulsbo! Poulsbo!” And that was when I suddenly remembered that this was our annual Viking Fest in which groups of Washington residents from near and far celebrated the town’s Norwegian founders.

Cars parked more than a mile down our modest streets suggested that such gatherings were anything but local. This would be my second Viking Fest and I would be struck once again by how little I learned about how the town was actually founded, the values it stood for, and which of them might have survived to today. Poulsbo, after all, now existed in a largely militarized area, including a local submarine base, with white, privileged officer families — those fortunate enough, at least, to be dual-income ones like mine or have trust funds — purchasing and reselling homes every few years as the U.S. military moved them around the country and the world.

Even in 2017, longtime residents were starting to move away to escape the smoke that snaked into the community earlier each year from ever-fiercer wildfires in ever-longer fire seasons, part of our new climate-changed reality. Meanwhile, Poulsbo’s picturesque gingerbread house-style buildings were being replaced by larger condo complexes, as developers moved ever deeper into the town’s hillside forests that would undoubtedly someday burn.

Viking Fest, with its spectacle of white men banging spears and shouting aggressively, set my heart racing with an unnamed fear. It was, after all, a moment when the recently elected Donald Trump was already demonstrating that practically no behavior, including in Charlottesville soon (“You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides”), should be considered beyond bounds. Later, talking with another military wife, a rare woman of color visiting that town, about the Viking shout-a-thon, amid an almost all-white crowd of officers and their families watching the event, she said, “It’s like there’s no point. It’s like a celebration of white people!”

Who are they and what do they stand for? Looking back now, it’s hard not to see that evening’s loud and prideful display of white masculinity, which merely disturbed the peace for stressed-out moms like me, as a harbinger of more sinister things to come. Shouting male nationalist groups like the Proud Boys that President Trump told to “stand by” at his first debate with Joe Biden and the Wolverine Watchmen, some of whom have allegedly been linked to a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, are increasingly commonplace in the news.

As a military wife who has made five different moves over the last 10 years, I’m particularly aware of how racially and ethnically diverse this country and its military actually are. Under the circumstances, it’s remarkable that much of white America lacks any understanding of just how threatening displays like Viking Fest must look to the rare person of color who happens upon them.

It should certainly be obvious in October 2020 how destructive to our democracy fraternal, pro-Trump groups have become during Donald Trump’s presidency. Take those Proud Boys. Among the founding principles their website offers are a vague set of notions that include “reinstating a spirit of Western chauvinism,” “anti-political correctness,” “venerating the housewife,” “pro-gun rights” (in a pandemic-ridden country where, between March and July alone, an estimated three million more guns were purchased than usual), and — get this — “anti-racism.” For the Proud Boys to say that they reject racism and venerate housewives did little more than provide them with a veneer of social acceptability, even as they planned armed counter-rallies in progressive cities like Providence and Portland with the explicit purpose of inciting violence among Black Lives Matter protesters and their allies.

Other influences, like the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, are even more direct. For example, that site urged its followers to cyber-bully American University’s first black female student government president, Taylor Dumpson after nooses began appearing on that school’s campus in 2017. In April 2016, its founder Andrew Anglin had written, “Jews, Blacks, and lesbians will be leaving America if Trump gets elected — and he’s happy about it. This alone is enough reason to put your entire heart and soul into supporting this man.”

One thing is certain: all that matters as markers of humanity to the man who inspires and, however implicitly, endorses such groups, President Donald Trump, is white skin and political support. The other night at his town hall with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie, a would-be supporter presented herself as the granddaughter of immigrants who had fled religious persecution in Eastern Europe. She asked the president about his plans to protect DACA recipients from having to return to their countries. The president responded: “DACA is somewhat different from Dreamers. You understand that… Where do you come from, by the way, originally? Where?” After the woman responded that her grandparents came from Russia and Poland, he stated, “That’s very good.” He then went on to discuss his border wall with Mexico; that is, keeping the wrong kind of immigrants out.

The military as a recruiting ground for the far right If there is any concept that these groups threatening to disrupt our democracy stand for, it’s a version of individual freedom — like not wearing masks — that’s akin to driving drunk and without putting on a seat belt, rather than waiting for a sober friend to drive you home. Yes, it’s more comfortable not to wear a mask or a seatbelt. The short-term benefits, like physical comfort, are tangible, as is perhaps the exhilarating sense that you can do anything you want with your body. (Ask most anti-maskers about abortion rights, however, and you’ll get quite a different perspective on the degree to which our bodies should be our own.)

Yet the most current scientific evidence is that if all Americans wore masks (and social-distanced) right now, it would potentially save tens of thousands of lives. In the age of Covid-19, however, concerns over public health restrictions to prevent the spread of the virus, including lockdowns of gyms, bars, and other public facilities, have become political firestorms. Such mandated lockdowns were the main reason various gunmen collaborated with the Wolverine Watchmen in a plot — fortunately foiled — to kidnap the governor of Michigan and considered a similar plot against Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia.

Perhaps not coincidentally, people of color — Blacks and Latinos — die from Covid-19 at a rate about a third higher than their share of the population. In other words, it couldn’t be clearer whose bodily freedoms are really considered at stake in these far-right struggles and whose are expendable.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of these groups is that they take a significant part of their manpower and know-how from the United States military with the tacit support of a Republican Senate. As a military spouse as well as the co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, it’s been no secret to me that our military’s support for bigotry of all kinds is endemic. Racist and sexist remarks are commonplace both on the boats where my husband has served and in gatherings with officer colleagues and their families. Little more than brief reprimands (if that) are handed out in return.

In a country where gun ownership and firearms training are seen by the far right as inalienable, all-American freedoms, the military is a ripe breeding ground for disaffected men looking for individual empowerment, a sense of belonging, and just such training. In fact, a recent New York Times investigation claims that veterans and active-duty military members make up more than a fifth of the membership of America’s 300 anti-government, pro-Trump “militia” groups. According to a 2019 survey by the Military Times, about a quarter of active-duty service members reported witnessing signs of white nationalist ideology among their fellow soldiers, including racist and anti-Semitic slurs and homemade explosives shaped like swastikas.

Nothing is more disturbing, when it comes to white nationalist-style hate, than the way the Republicans in Congress have implicitly sanctioned it. In 2019, after the Democratic-controlled House introduced a clause into the Defense Authorization Act to have recruits screened for white nationalist ideology, the Republican Senate nixed the provision. What more need be said?

How did an institution that should be about service to the nation become a petri dish for people who stand for nothing of collective significance? Even one of the favorite and abiding principles of far-right actors (and many Republicans in Congress), the right to bear arms, seems eerily decontextualized from history in a country that leads the world by far in armed citizens (many with distinctly military-style weaponry).

Let’s remember that this right was grounded in the idea of organizing the revolutionary army against a colonial power that taxed people without representing them and forcibly billeted its military in their homes. The colonists, while rife with their own history of human-rights violations, were not a bunch of disaffected, irrationally angry individual crusaders with an urge to use weapons to threaten civilians.

Two and a half centuries later, the party that regularly signals its support for the far right’s armed tactics still controls the presidency, the upper chamber of Congress, and will soon control the Supreme Court as well. And yet it and its right-wing supporters eternally act as if they were the victims in our world and, from that position of victimization, are now threatening others (and not just Gretchen Whitmer either.)

Many among them still see themselves as subjugated by this country’s ruling elite, which may represent a kind of projection or, psychologically speaking, seeing in others the thoughts and feelings one actually harbors in oneself. And as a therapist who has worked with significant numbers of veterans and military service members, I can warn them: don’t do it. As I know from some military service members who have told me of their time in distant lands, when they used guns against civilians, it shook to the core their belief in the principle of service to country, leaving them distrustful of the homeland they had been fighting for.

Of course, an increasingly armed far right has responded by creating a world of symbols that are deeply comforting to them. Yet do they really stand for anything?

I was recently appalled by a bumper sticker on a minivan featuring two large guns and three smaller ones aligned together like those stickers that show heterosexual nuclear families. Its tagline: “My guns are my family.” At the wheel was a young woman with several children. I balk similarly at pictures on people’s lawns that feature Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” flag — how did he get a separate flag? — and the word “Jesus” in all-capital letters.

Guns and small children? A separate Trump state and Jesus? Never before has sociologist Émile Durkheim’s idea that religious groups are less in need of a cohesive ideology than symbols to which they can all bow down in unison made more sense to me. Amid such incoherence (and symbolic violence), such an inability to justify their place in this democracy, it might be fairest to say that, as this election campaign heads toward its chaotic climax, Trump and the far right worship little more than one another.

“At least he hasn’t started another war” In October, the United States passed its 19-year mark in its second Afghan War of the last four decades. In many ways, that war and the dregs of the conflict in Iraq, which the U.S. invaded in the spring of 2003, have become as empty as the war that far-right groups wage in the United States. The hundreds of thousands of dead civilians, the flourishing of terrorist groups far deadlier and angrier than those the U.S. originally sought to defeat, the degradation of basic human rights including the rights to life and health — the carnage has been significant indeed. As these wars enter or near their third decade, I often hear friends say about President Trump, “At least he hasn’t started another war.”

Oh, but he has! This time, though, the war is at home. Even the Wolverine Watchmen and their co-collaborators in recent kidnapping plots saw themselves as initiating a civil war, or a boogaloo (to use far-right terminology). Not since the Jim Crow South years have we had to worry about people’s physical safety as they approach the polls to cast their vote — and the “Four More Years” folks and other gun-toting Trump supporters have, I fear, just gotten started. Never would it have been thinkable for a sitting president to overlook, or even implicitly endorse, plots to kidnap and possibly kill elected officials, but Trump has even gone so far as to respond to his supporters at a recent rally in Michigan chanting “Lock her up!” by saying “Lock them all up!” (a play both on his Hillary Clinton chants in the last election and on Governor Whitmer’s pandemic lockdown orders).

Twenty years later, our healthcare resources (never sufficient) are further depleted. A pandemic is again spiking across the country. Those who run for office and try to govern with dignity are being challenged in all too threatening ways. Think of it, whether in political or health terms, as our new war zone. I hope that those who appear to vote in person under pandemic conditions and increasing threats of voter intimidation will not come under attack next by far-right groups. To anyone who is listening in elected office anywhere in America: I hope you have a plan for a peaceful transition of power, since the “law-and-order” president is, of course, anything but that when it comes to sustaining our democracy, rather than his presidency.

Andrea Mazzarino writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She co-founded Brown University’s Costs of War Project. She has held various clinical, research, and advocacy positions, including at a Veterans Affairs PTSD Outpatient Clinic, with Human Rights Watch, and at a community mental health agency. She is the co-editor of War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Copyright ©2020 Andrea Mazzarino — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 27 October 2020

Word Count: 2,461

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I appreciate what Stuart Stevens did last week in a piece for The Bulwark. The former Republican strategist sensed dread among anti-Trump voters, especially dread of being blind-sided like last time. “We are right,” he wrote. “They are wrong. This is our moment. This is our destiny. Walk with confidence. Do not falter. Victory will be ours.”

I appreciate, too, the qualifications he put on that. “That sounds terribly overconfident and a lot of Democrats can’t shake the nagging sense that overconfidence was one of the horsemen of the Trump 2016 apocalypse. But this is actually a misreading of history. It wasn’t overconfidence that hurt Hillary Clinton. It was lack of urgency.”

Again, I appreciate the gesture. I do. We all need encouragement now and then. But the above, too, is a misreading. Apathy alone didn’t sink Clinton. So did cheating.

Candidate Donald Trump got a leg up from foreign espionage. President Donald Trump is getting the same. The Kremlin, via Facebook, moved just enough white people in just enough states to kneecap Clinton. Iran and probably China have joined the fun.

The GOP, meanwhile, acts as if treason is jake as long as it helps the party.

Even if Stevens is right in saying voter apathy lifted Trump, Joe Biden needs more than urgency. The former vice president needs every single one of us to shut up already about the polls and do what needs to be done — put together an overwhelming show of force by an overwhelming democratic majority. Urgency, in other words, isn’t action. Only action demonstrates the will to power. Biden is winning when he wins. Period.

Biden can’t simply win, though. He must win by a landslide. He must amass a super-majority on par with Ronald Reagan’s in 1980. If the result is close, apparent defeat won’t prevent Trump from throwing the election to the US Supreme Court. But every justice, even Amy Coney Barrett, will think twice if a super-majority makes itself clear.

A super-majority is, furthermore, the best way to flip the US Senate.

If the Republicans retain control, very little needing fixing is going to get fixed. There will be no reforming the court system, for one thing. There will be no reforming a political system currently rewarding GOP fascism.

More immediately important, there will be no combating the fallout from the covid pandemic. This crisis is so big, it’s going to take trillions in government spending.

The Senate Republicans, however, have already signaled readiness to sabotage the economy in order to sabotage a President Biden. Winning a super-majority is probably the best way of throwing the bums out.

It may sound like I’m giving voice to the skeptics of polling. They say opinion surveys were “wrong” last time, so why trust them this time? I’m not a skeptic, though. I trust polling quite a lot. What I am skeptical of is the principle hidden in the binary between voter apathy and voter urgency. That principle holds that voting is somehow optional.

That voting is optional is why cheating worked in 2016. That voting is optional is why authoritarians of the past and present find the legal and moral space to devise mechanisms to prevent voting. It would be hard to imagine either if people were as passionate about voting as they are about, say, bargain shopping or the Super Bowl. It would be hard to imagine if voting itself, not Trump, were the source of our urgency.

That we respect voting as optional is why we respect irresponsible voting behavior. There is no point in voting for a third-party candidate. There is no point in voting for a write-in candidate. Indeed, doing so can harm democracy, as it did in 2016. And yet we honor people like Mitt Romney and Larry Hogan who refuse to commit, as if they were acting bravely.

They were not. They were acting cowardly. They were presented with a choice and failed to make one. We should condemn that. Instead, we praise it. In doing so, we collectively encourage the citizenry to throw away its collective sovereignty.

Instead of voting for its own sake in 2016, we find ourselves four years later voting not so much out of a sense of urgency but sheer panic. While some, like Stuart Stevens, are patting themselves on the back for a premature job well done, I’m not. All of this could have been prevented if all of us sincerely believed in voting and acted accordingly.

As a consequence, Biden can’t merely beat Trump. To save democracy, he has to crush him.

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: 26 October 2020

Word Count: 762

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Donald Trump isn’t just inside the heads of his Trumpster base; he’s long been a consuming obsession among those yearning for his defeat in November. With barely more than a week to go before the election of our lifetime, those given to nail biting as a response to anxiety have by now gnawed ourselves down to the quick. And many have found other ways to manage (or mismanage) their apprehensions through compulsive rituals, which only ratchet up the angst of the moment, among them nonstop poll tracking, endless “what if” doomsday-scenario conversations with friends, and repeated refrigerator raids.

As one of those doomsday types, let me briefly suggest a few of the commonplace dystopian possibilities for November. Trump gets the majority of the votes cast in person on November 3rd. A Pew Research Center survey found that 60% of those supporting the president intend to vote that way on Election Day compared to 23% of Biden supporters; and a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll likewise revealed a sizable difference between Republicans and Democrats, though not as large. He does, however, lose handily after all mail-in and absentee ballots are counted. Once every ballot is finally tabulated, Biden prevails in the popular vote and ekes out a win in the Electoral College. The president, however, having convinced his faithful that voting by mail will result in industrial-scale fraud (unless he wins, of course), proclaims that he — and “the American people” — have been robbed by the establishment. On cue, outraged Trumpsters, some of them armed, take to the streets. Chaos, even violence, ensues. The president’s army of lawyers frenetically file court briefs contesting the election results and feverishly await a future Supreme Court decision, Mitch McConnell having helpfully rammed through Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to produce a 6-3 conservative majority (including three Trump-appointed Supremes) that will likely favor him in any disputed election case.

Or the vote tally shows that Trump didn’t prevail in pivotal states, but in state legislatures with Republican majorities, local GOP leaders appoint electors from their party anyway, defying the popular will without violating Article II, Section I, of the Constitution, which doesn’t flat-out prohibit such a stratagem. That was one possibility Barton Gellman explored in his bombshell Atlantic piece on the gambits Trump could use to snatch victory (of a sort) from the jaws of a Biden victory. Then there are the sundry wag-the-dog plots, including a desperate Trump trying to generate a pre-election rally-around-the-flag effect by starting a war with Iran — precisely what, in 2011, he predicted Barack Obama would do to boost his chances for reelection.

And that, of course, is just part of a long list of nightmarish possibilities. Whatever your most dreaded outcome, dwelling on it doesn’t make for happiness or even ephemeral relief. Ultimately, it’s not under your control. Besides, no one knows what will happen, and some prominent pundits have dismissed such apocalyptic soothsaying with assurances that the system will work the way it’s supposed to and foil Trumpian malfeasance. Here’s hoping.

In the meantime, let’s summon what passes for optimism these days. Imagine that none of the alarmist denouements materializes. Biden wins the popular vote tally and the Electoral College. The GOP’s leaders discover that they do, in fact, have backbones (or at least the instinct for political survival), refusing to echo Trump’s rants about rigging. The president rages but then does go, unquietly, into the night.

Most of my friends on the left assume that a new dawn would then emerge. In some respects, it indeed will. Biden won’t be a serial liar. That’s no small matter. By the middle of this year, Trump had made false or misleading pronouncements of one sort or another more than 20,000 times since becoming president. Nor will we have a president who winks and nods at far-right groups or racist “militias,” nor one who blasts a governor — instead of expressing shock and solidarity — soon after the FBI foils a plot by right-wing extremists to kidnap her for taking steps to suppress the coronavirus. We won’t have a president who repeatedly intimates that he will remain in office even if he loses the election. We won’t have a president who can’t bring himself to appeal to Americans to display their patriotism through the simple act of donning masks to protect others (and themselves) from Covid-19. And we won’t have a president who lacks the compassion to express sorrow over the 225,000 Americans (and rising) who have been killed by that disease, or enough respect for science and professional expertise, to say nothing of humility, to refrain from declaring, as his own experts squirm, that warm weather will cause the virus to vanish miraculously or that injections of disinfectant will destroy it.

And these, of course, won’t be minor victories. Still, Joe Biden’s arrival in the Oval Office won’t alter one mega-fact: Donald Trump will hand him a monstrous economic mess. Worse, in the almost three months between November 3rd and January 20th, rest assured that he will dedicate himself to making it even bigger.

The motivation? Sheer spite for having been put in the position — we know that he will never accept any responsibility for his defeat — of facing what, for him, may be more unbearable than death itself: losing. The gargantuan challenge of putting the economy back on the rails while also battling the pandemic would be hard enough for any new president without the lame-duck commander-in-chief and Senate Republicans sabotaging his efforts before he even begins. The long stretch between Election Day and Inauguration Day will provide Donald Trump ample time to take his revenge on a people who will have forsaken, in his opinion, the best president ever.

More on Trump’s vengeance, but first, let’s take stock of what awaits Biden should he win in November.

Our Covid-ravaged economy To say that we are, in some respects, experiencing the biggest economic disaster since the Great Depression of the 1930s is anything but hyperbole. The statistics make that clear. The economy had contracted at a staggering annual rate of 31.4% during the second quarter of this pandemic year. During the 2007-2009 Great Recession, unemployment, at its height, was 10%. This year’s high point, in April, was 14.7%. Over the spring, 40 million jobs disappeared, eviscerating all gains made during the two pre-pandemic years.

There were, however, some relatively recent signs of a rebound. The Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank’s survey of economic forecasters, released in mid-August, yielded an estimate of a 19.1% expansion for the third quarter of 2020. But that optimism came in the wake of Congress passing the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, on March 27th, which pumped about $2.2 trillion into the economy. The slowdown in job growth between July and September suggests that its salutary effects may be petering out. Even with that uptick, the economy remains in far worse shape than before the virus started romping through the landscape.

However, while useful, aggregate figures obscure stark variations in how the pain produced by a Covid-19 economy has been felt across different parts of American society. No, we aren’t all in this together, if by “together” you mean anything remotely resembling equalized distress. A Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) release, for instance, reveals that September’s 7.9% nationwide unemployment rate hit some groups far harder than others.

The jobless rate for whites dropped to 7%, but for Hispanics it was 10.3%, for African Americans 12.1%. Furthermore, high-skill, high-wage workers have gotten off far more lightly than those whose jobs can’t be done from home, including restaurant servers and cooks, construction workers, meatpackers, housecleaners, agricultural laborers, subway, bus, and taxi drivers, first responders, and retail and hotel staff, among others. For workers like them, essential public health precautions, whether “social distancing” or stay-at-home decrees, haven’t just been an inconvenience. They have proven economically devastating. These are the Americans who are struggling hardest to buy food and pay the rent.

More than 25 million of them fall in the lowest 20% of the earnings scale and — no surprise here — have, at best, the most meager savings. According to the Fed’s calculations, of the bottom 25% of Americans, only 11% have what they require for at least six months of basic expenses and less than 17% for at least three. Yes, unemployment insurance helps, but depending on the state, it covers just 30% to 50% of lost wages. Moreover, there’s no telling when, or whether, such workers will be rehired or find new jobs that pay at least as much. The data on long-term unemployment isn’t encouraging. The BLS reports that, in September, 2.4 million workers had been unemployed for 27 weeks or more, another 4.9 million for 15 to 27 weeks.

These disparities and the steps the Fed has taken, including keeping interest rates low and buying treasury bills, mortgage-backed securities, and corporate bonds, help explain why high stock prices and massive economic suffering have coexisted, however incongruously, during the pandemic. The problem with bull markets, however, is that they don’t bring direct gains to the chunk of American society that’s been hurt the most.

Nearly half of American households own no stock at all, according to the Federal Reserve Bank, even if you count pension and 401k plans or Individual Retirement Accounts — and for black and Hispanic families the numbers are 69% and 72%, respectively. Furthermore, the wealthiest 10% of households own 84% of all stock.

Trump preens when the stock market soars, as he did on April 10th, when 16 million Americans had just filed for unemployment. Tweets trumpeting “the biggest Stock Market increase since 1974” were cold comfort for Americans who could no longer count on paychecks.

The signs of suffering Even such numbers don’t fully reveal the ways in which prolonged joblessness has upended lives. To get a glimpse of that, consider how low-income workers, contending with extended unemployment, have struggled to pay for two basic necessities: housing and food.

Reuters reported in late July that Americans already owed $21.5 billion in back rent. Worse yet, 17.3 million of the country’s 44 million renter households couldn’t afford to pay the landlord and faced possible eviction. A fifth of all renters had made only partial payments that month or hadn’t paid anything. Again, not surprisingly, some were in more trouble than others. In September, 12% of whites owed back rent compared to 25% of African Americans, 24% of Asians, and 22% of Latinos. A May Census Bureau survey revealed that nearly 45% of African Americans and Hispanics but “only” 20% of whites had little or no confidence in their ability to make their June rent payments. (Households with kids were in an even bigger bind.)

The rent crunch also varied depending on a worker’s education, a reliable predictor of earnings. Workers with high school diplomas earned only 60% as much as workers who had graduated from college and only 50% of those with a master’s degree. And the more education workers had, the less likely they were to be laid off. Between February and August, 2.5% of employees with college degrees lost their jobs compared to nearly 11% of those who hadn’t attended college.

Those, then, are the Americans most likely to be at risk of eviction. Yes, the federal government, states, and cities have issued rent moratoriums, but the protections in them varied considerably and, by August, they had ended in 24 of the 43 states that enacted them; nor did they release renters from future obligations to pay what they owe, sometimes with penalties. In addition, eviction stays haven’t stopped landlords nationwide from taking thousands of delinquent renters to court and even, depending on state laws, seeking to evict them. The courts are clogged with such cases. Eventually, millions of renters could face what a BBC report called a potential “avalanche” of evictions.

Nor have homeowners been safe. The CARES Act did include provisions to protect some of them, offering those with federal-backed mortgages the possibility of six-month payment deferrals, potential six-month extensions of that, and the possibility of negotiating affordable payment plans thereafter. In many cases, however, that “forbearance” initiative hasn’t worked as intended. Often, homeowners didn’t know about it or weren’t aware that they had to file a formal request with their lenders to qualify or got the run around when they tried to do so. Still, mortgage forbearance helped millions, but it expires in March 2021 when many homeowners could still be jobless or have new jobs that don’t pay as well. Just how desperate such people will be depends, of course, on how strongly Covid-19 resurges, what future shutdowns it produces, and when it will truly subside.

Meanwhile, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association, the residential mortgage delinquency rate hit 8.22% as the second quarter of 2020 ended, the highest since 2014. Meanwhile, between June and July, mortgage payments overdue 90 or more days increased by 20% to a total unseen since 2010. True, we’re not yet headed for defaults and foreclosures on the scale of the Great Recession of 2007-2008, but that’s a very high bar.

As for hunger, a September Census Bureau survey reports that 10.5% of adults, or 23 million people, stated that household members weren’t getting enough to eat. That’s a sharp increase from the 3.7% in a Department of Agriculture survey for 2019. In July, the Wall Street Journal reported, 12% of adults said their families didn’t have enough food (compared to 10% in May). A fifth of them lacked the money to feed their kids adequately, a three-percent increase from May. Recent food-insecurity estimates for households with children range from 27.5% to 29.5%.

Meanwhile, enrollments in the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (known until 2008 as the Food Stamp Program) grew by 17% between February and May, forcing the government to increase its funding. Food banks, overwhelmed by demand, are pleading for money and volunteers. In August, a mile-long line of cars formed outside a food bank in Dallas, one of many such poignant scenes in cities across the country since the pandemic struck.

What happens after the election? For those who have lost their jobs, the CARES Act provided $600 a week to supplement unemployment benefits, as well as a one-time payment of $1,250 per adult and $2,400 for married couples. That stipend, though, ended on July 31st when the Republican Senate balked at renewing it. In August, by executive order, the president directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to step in with three weeks of $300 payments, which were extended for another three. That, however, was half what they would have received had the CARES supplement been extended and, by October, most states had used up the Trump allotments.

In the ongoing congressional negotiations over prolonging supplemental benefits and other assistance, President Trump engaged, only to disengage. With a September ABC News/IPSOS voter survey showing that just 35% of the public approved of his handling of the pandemic, and Joe Biden having opened a double-digit lead in many polls, the president suddenly offered a $1.8 trillion version of the CARES Act, only to encounter massive blowback from his own party.

And that’s where we are as the election looms. If Trump loses (and accepts the loss), he will hand Joe Biden an economic disaster of the first order that he’s made infinitely worse by belittling mask-wearing and social distancing, disregarding and undercutting his administration’s own medical experts, peddling absurd nostrums, and offering rosy but baseless prognostications. And between November 3rd, Election Day, and January 20th, Inauguration Day, expect — hard as it might be to imagine — an angrier, more vengeful Trump.

For now, as his prospects for victory seem to dim, he has good reason to push for, or at least be seen as favoring, additional aid, but here’s a guarantee: if he loses in November, he won’t just moan about election rigging, he’ll also lose all interest in providing more help to millions of Americans at the edge of penury and despair. Vindictiveness, not sympathy, will be his response, even to his base, for whom he clearly has a barely secret disdain. So accept this guarantee, as well: between those two dates, whatever he does will be meant to undermine the incoming Biden administration. That includes working to make the climb as steep as possible for the rival he’s depicted as a semi-senile incompetent. He will want only one thing: to see his successor fail.

Once Trump formally hands over the presidency — assuming his every maneuver to retain power flops — he’ll work to portray any measure the new administration adopts to corral the virus he helped let loose and to aid those in need as profligacy, and as “socialism” and governmental overreach imperiling freedom. Last guarantee: he won’t waste a minute getting his wrecking operation underway, while “his” party will posture as the paragon of financial rectitude. It won’t matter that Republican administrations have racked up the biggest budget deficits in our history. They, too, will ferociously resist Biden’s efforts to help millions of struggling Americans.

And think of all of this, assuming Biden wins, as the “good news.”

Rajan Menon writes regularly for TomDispatch (where article originated). He is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New York, senior research fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His latest book is The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention.

Copyright ©2020 Rajan Menon — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 26 October 2020

Word Count: 2,847

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