A typical thing to say about presidential debates is they don’t matter. That, however, was before the first between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. That one, and I’m still not sure why, did matter. It clearly moved polling in the Democratic candidate’s direction.

So I’m a little hesitant to say the second debate won’t matter. I’m tempted to agree with the conventional wisdom. Trump didn’t piss himself. He started out composed! Biden was OK. He had a couple of great soundbites. Put it all together, see it from the perspective of the median white voter, and it’s probably true the whole thing was a wash. It won’t impact the election one way or another, which means, on balance, Biden won. (There really isn’t any such thing as winning or losing debates but stay with me.)

The pundit corps, which includes me, has a habit of generalizing the particular and particularizing the general in ways normal people don’t. While the pundits were busy lamenting the first debate as a “shitshow” and national disgrace, I kept seeing normal people bringing up one concrete detail that left a lasting impression on them. That was the president’s visible contempt for Hunter Biden’s history of substance abuse. It was coupled, moreover, with Joe Biden’s unconditional love for his troubled son.

Again, I don’t know exactly what about the first debate caused Biden’s margin over the president to grow. No one can really say for sure. Cause-and-effect is not possible to identify in public polling. But the margin did widen. That’s a fact.

Trump’s disdain for ordinary human frailty was a part of that. I can’t help thinking (hoping?) even hard-shelled Republican supporters were put off by the sight of such naked disgust for a problem lots and lots of people face, especially amid the scourge of opioid addiction.

The pundit corps was, last night, and is, this morning, noting the differences between the first and second debate, in particular the president did not beclown himself quite so heroically, which, by the magic of punditry, means he did just as well as Biden. Meanwhile, the concrete detail I’m seeing popping up is Trump’s indifference to the suffering of 500-some children in government custody after being taken from their immigrant parents as part of the administration’s sadistic policy of deterrence.

Such indifference is appalling — to liberals and others who have living, beating hearts. But I don’t think Trump’s remarks, however soulless they in fact are, are going to move public polling.

(Some apparently believe Trump said “good” in response to the fact that these children are still not reunited with their parents. He didn’t. He said “go ahead” to moderator Kristen Welker. Rendered in mush-mouth, it sounded like “good.”)

What about the second debate would move polling the way the first debate did? Again, contempt. Not for Trump’s enemies, though. When he said immigrants have low IQs, that was shocking, but not to his supporters. That might have been worth cheering. No, what’s going to shock Republican voters is when Trump expresses contempt for them. That’s what happened during the first debate.

Contempt for the former vice president’s son was contempt for anyone overcoming addiction, which includes lots and lots of Republicans. Last night, he did it again, coming off as scornful of people struggling financially. If I’m right, this detail, as small as it is, will have some effect.

Now, I’m guessing that wasn’t his intention. His intention was pointing out Biden’s “kitchen-table” trope in order to say he’s just another politician saying one thing, meaning another.

“It’s not about his family and my family,” Biden said,

It’s about your family, and your family’s hurting badly. If you’re a middle-class family, you’re getting hurt badly right now. You’re sitting at the kitchen table this morning deciding, ‘Well, we can’t get new tires. They’re bald, because we have to wait another month or so.’ Or, ‘Are we going to be able to pay the mortgage?’ Or, ‘Who’s going to tell her she can’t go back to community college?’ They’re the decisions you’re making. We should be talking about your families, but that’s the last thing he wants to talk about.

To which, Trump said:

 That’s a typical political statement. Let’s get off this China thing, and then he [says], ‘The family around the table, everything.’ Just a typical politician when I see that. I’m not a typical politician. That’s why I got elected. Let’s get off the subject of China. Let’s talk about sitting around the table. Come on, Joe. You could do better.

Again, Trump’s target here is Biden’s rhetoric. Biden’s using “a typical political statement” to dodge facts (which aren’t fact; they’re lies, but go with it.) That alone might have scored points, but the way Trump did it, with a genuine feeling of sheer disgust that the transcript fails to capture, gave the impression that this might be the way the president really feels about real people really struggling to make ends meet.

Even if the trope isn’t real (it’s rhetorical), the hardship is! Yet hardship seems so beside the point to him it’s not worth validating, even with empty words.

I’m very trope-conscious. That’s part of my job. But Trump managed to shock me. Most normal people, including lots of Republicans, are not trope-conscious. How did they feel?

We’ll find out soon enough.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 October 2020

Word Count: 890

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For some time now, I’ve wanted to send Donald Trump to Hell. I mean this literally, not as a figure of speech. I want him to inhabit the palpable, sensory Hell that religions have long conjured up with scenes of sulfur, damnation, and screams of perpetual pain from those who once caused grievous harm to their fellow humans.

The more Trump has abused his power and position in this world and the more he’s escaped any retribution for his crimes, the more obsessed I’ve become with visualizing ways for him to pay in some version of the afterlife.

As I mulled over the treatment he deserved for the havoc he continues to wreak on the lives of countless others here in the United States and across the globe, I turned almost automatically to the work of Dante Alighieri, the Italian poet whose Divina Commedia minutely recreated in a verse called terza rima what awaited the readers of his time once they died. Dante (1265-1321) laid out his otherworldly landscape in three volumes — Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso — that have rightly been considered among the towering and influential literary achievements of humanity.

There was nothing abstract about the Hell he created. Dante pictured himself personally taking a voyage into the hereafter to meet men and women, both of his time and from the past, who were being rewarded for their virtue or eternally castigated for their offenses. Of that journey through purgatorial fires and heavenly wonders, guided by his dead childhood sweetheart Beatrice, it was the Florentine writer’s descent into the saturated circles of Hell that most fascinated and enthralled readers throughout the centuries. We listen to stories of the wicked as they express their remorse and experience the excruciatingly sophisticated torments he dreamt up as suitable reprisals for the damage they did during their earthly existence.

Witnessing the infernal realities President Trump has unleashed on America, I can’t help wondering where Dante would have placed our miscreant-in-chief in his afterlife of horror. In the end, perhaps not surprisingly, I realized one obvious thing: the 45th president has such a multitude of transgressions to his name that he fits almost every category and canto that Dante invented for the sinners of his age.

As I pondered what the Italian author would have made of Trump and his certainty that he was above the laws of society and nature, I was invaded by Dante’s divinatory and lyrical voice. It came to me as if in a hallucination. Listening carefully, I managed to record the words with which that visionary poet of yesteryear would describe a man who, until recently, believed himself invincible and invulnerable, how he would be judged and condemned once his life was over.

Here, then, is my version of Dante’s prophecy — my way, that is, of finally consigning Donald Trump to Hell for forever and a day.

Dante greets Trump at the gates of Hell and explains what his punishment is to be

My name, sir, is Dante Alighieri. Among the innumerable dead that inhabit these shores, I have been chosen to speak to you because an expert on the afterlife was needed to describe what awaits your soul when it passes, as all souls must, into this land of shadows. I was chosen, whether as an honor or not, to imagine your fate once you wind your way toward us.

Having accepted this task, I was tempted, sir, as I watched your every act in that life before death, to make this easier for myself and simply conjure up the circles of Hell I had already described in my terza rima. I would then have guided you down my cascade of verses, step by step, into the depths of darkness I had designed for others.

Were you not the selfish embodiment of so many sins I dealt with in my Commedia? Lust and adultery, yes! Gluttony, yes; greed and avarice, oh yes; wrath and fury, certainly; violence, fraud, and usury, yes again! Divisiveness and treachery, even heresy — you who did not believe in God and yet used the Bible as a prop — yes, one more time!

Did you not practice all those iniquities, a slave to your loveless appetites? Do you not deserve to be called to account in ways I once envisioned: buffeted by vicious winds, drowning in storms of putrefaction, choking under gurgling waters of belligerence, immersed in the boiling blood that echoes rage, thirsting across a burning plain, steeped in the excrement of flattery and seduction, clawed to pieces by the night demons of corruption, or feeling that throat and tongue of yours that tore so many citizens apart mutilated and hacked to bits? Would it not be fair that, like other perjurers and impostors, you be bloated with disease? Would it not make sense that you be trapped in ice or flames, endlessly chewed by the jaws of eternity, like those who committed treason against country and friends in my time?

And yet, in the end, I rejected all of that. After all, I was selected not to repeat myself but because I was trusted to be creative and find an appropriately new reckoning for you — something, said the authorities in charge of this place, less savage and fierce, more educational, even therapeutic. Thus have times changed since I wrote that poem of mine!

My mission, it seems, was not to insert you in rings of an already conceived Hell of terrifying revenge. So I began to seek inspiration from my fellow sufferers so many centuries later and there, indeed, they were — your multitudes of victims, the ones who need to heal, the ones you never wanted to see or mourn, whose pain you never shared, who now want to greet you, sir, in a new way.

Perhaps you haven’t noticed yet, but I have. They’ve been lining up since the moment they arrived. Now, they’re here by my side, counting the days until your time is up and you must face them. And so I decided that they would be given a chance to do exactly that, one by one, through all eternity.

After all, each of them was devastated because of you: a father who died of the pandemic you did less than nothing to prevent; a little boy shot with a gun you did not ban; a worker overcome by toxic fumes whose release your administration ensured; the protesters killed by a white supremacist inflamed by your rhetoric; a Black man who expired thanks to police violence you refuse to condemn; a migrant who succumbed to the desert heat on the other side of the wall that you stole taxpayer money to (only partially) build. And let us not forget that female Kurdish fighter slaughtered because you betrayed her people.

On and on I could go, naming the wrongfully dead, the untimely dead, the avoidable dead, now all huddled around me, otherwise unrepresented and forgotten but awaiting your arrival for their moment of truth. Each of them will have to be patient, since according to my plan, every single casualty of yours will be afforded whatever time he or she desires to relive a life and recount its last moments. You will be forced, sir, to listen to their stories again and again until you finally learn how to make their sorrow your own, until their tragedies truly lodge in the entrails of your mind, as long as it takes you to truly ask for forgiveness.

Trump tries to find a way out of Hell Your first reaction will undoubtedly be to indulge in the fantasy that, just as you swore the pandemic would be magically dispatched, so this new predicament will miraculously melt into nothingness. When you open your eyes, however, and still find yourself here, your urge will be to call on all your old tricks, those of the ultimate con man, to avoid sinking deeper into the moral abyss I’ve prepared for you.

Just as you’ve bribed, bought, and inveigled your way out of scandals and bankruptcies, so you’ll believe you can bluster and wriggle your way out of this moment, too. You’ll try to pretend you’re just hosting one more (ir)reality TV show where this Dante fellow can be turned into another of your apprentices, competing for your largesse and approval.

And when none of that works, you’ll make believe that you have indeed atoned for your terrible deeds and fall again into the lies and macho bravado that were your second skin. You’ll swear that you have repented so you can escape this confinement, these rooms where you have become the prey rather than the predator. You will present yourself as a savior, boast of having singlehandedly concocted a vaccine against accountability, discovered a manly cure for the terrors of Hell. You’ll dream — I know you will — of reappearing victorious and, of course, maskless on that White House balcony.

This time, though, it just won’t work, not here in this transparent abode of death. And yet you will certainly try to hurry the process up because you’ll know — I’ve already decided that much — that those you ruined while you were still alive are only the start of your journey, not the end. You will become all too aware, while you spend hours, days, years, decades with the men, women, and children you consigned to an early mortality and permanent grief, that a multitude of others will be arriving, all those who will perish in the future due to your neglect and malevolence.

They will, I assure you, snake endlessly into your mind, accumulating through many tomorrows, all those who are yet to die but will do so prematurely as the brutality you worshipped and fueled takes its toll, as the earth, heavens, and waters you ravaged exact heat waves of revenge — hurricanes and droughts and famines and floods, ever more victims with each minute that slithers by, including the women who will die in botched back-alley abortions because of your judicial nominations. The decades to come are already preparing to welcome the legions of your dead.

That is the despair I imagine for you now that I am no longer the man bitterly exiled from his beloved Florence. The centuries spent in the afterlife have evidently softened me into compassion for those who have sinned. Beatrice, the love of my life, would have admired my transformation, the one that, as you are ground down and down, will also allow you to be lifted up and up until you really do repent, until you beg for an absolution, which (if you are truly sincere) will be granted.

Even so, even as I speak and divine, I find myself eaten by a worm of doubt. This, I am being told, has been tried before. The mists of time are filled with men who, like you, thought they were gods and who, upon their demise, were led howling into rooms overflowing with the lives they broke, with the irreparable damage they wrought. And these criminals — Benito Mussolini, Mao Zedong, Augusto Pinochet, Napoleon Bonaparte, Andrew Jackson, Saddam Hussein, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin (oh, the list is endless!) — never left the twisted mirror of their own penitential rooms.

They are still stagnating in them. That’s what’s being whispered in my ear, that the redemptive prophecy of Dante Alighieri will never come true for you, Donald Trump. Perhaps like those other accursed malefactors, you will refuse responsibility. Perhaps you will continue to claim that you are the real victim. Perhaps you will prove as incorrigible and defective and stubbornly blind as they continue to be. Perhaps there is an evil in you and the universe that will never completely abate, a cruelty that has no end. Perhaps when pain is infinite, it is impossible to erase.

I fear, then, that it may be unkind to promise any kind of justice when there will be none for those who stand in line hoping to meet their tormentor on the other side of death. Why, I ask myself, resurrect the dead if it be only to dash their hopes again and again?

What forever means And yet, what else can I do but complete the task given to me? Of all poets, I was chosen because of the Divina Commedia that I wrote when I was alive and banished from Florence, because I descended into the Inferno and climbed the mount of Purgatory and caught a glimpse of what the sun and stars of Paradise looked like. I was chosen from the fields of the dead to prepare these words for you as a warning or a plea or a searing indictment, an assignment I accepted and cannot now renounce.

What’s left to me, then, but to conclude these words by responding to the one objection you might legitimately raise to my picture of your fate in the afterlife? I imagine you crying out — “But Dante Alighieri,” you will say, “the future you’ve painted will take forever.”

And I will answer: yes, Donald J. Trump, it will indeed take forever, but forever is all you have, all any of us have, after all.

Ariel Dorfman writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the author of Death and the Maiden. His most recent books are Cautivos, a novel about Cervantes in jail, and The Rabbits Rebellion, a story for adults and children. He lives with his wife Angélica in Chile and in Durham, North Carolina, where he is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University.

Copyright ©2020 Ariel Dorfman — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 October 2020

Word Count: 2,188

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I don’t get annoyed by politicians. Not usually. I understand they must say and do things normal people would never say and do. I don’t hold them to standards I’d normally hold normal people to. Dianne Feinstein, however, is an exception.

The ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee used precious minutes of her closing remarks last week to thank Republican Chairman Lindsey Graham for his “professionalism” during hearings for Amy Coney Barrett, the president’s third life-time appointment to the US Supreme Court. That might not have been so bad if she had not also hugged him, giving the impression that comity, decorum and normalcy still prevail in an otherwise toxic environment in which the GOP has all but declared war on the Democrats.

To hug Graham is to be complicit in one’s assault and battery.

I wasn’t alone. Others were peeved aplenty with her playing along with a plan to enshrine minority rule in a democratic republic. Doubtless this is why Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reportedly gave her a talking to later. And this talking to is almost certainly why all the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, including Feinstein, boycotted this morning’s vote to advance Barrett to the full Senate.

I was annoyed but whatevs. The outcome is action by Senate Democrats that’s been absent. Barrett’s confirmation is illegitimate. Boycotting the vote makes that crystal clear.

To other Democrats. That’s important to understanding this properly. The Senate Democrats cannot stop their counterparts. (They don’t have the numbers.) All they can do is take the bully pulpit to warn of dangers posed to Obamacare, Social Security and other popular government programs by a 6-3 conservative super-majority on the high court.

Otherwise, a vociferous minority party can only make clear to other party members that what’s happening is so abnormal, no outside democratic boundaries, and so treacherous that it cannot be tolerated much less recognized. It cannot be allowed to be seen as legitimate.

The Senate Democrats can’t stop the Senate Republicans. They probably won’t convince Republican voters. But they can convince their own people.

This pulling back serves two purposes, one practical and one ideological.

First, denying Barrett legitimacy means the entire Supreme Court will function under a cloud of suspicion. (This is something many argued was the case from the beginning of Donald Trump’s term given the aid and comfort provided by enemies to the United States. A cheating president is an illegitimate president, as are his judicial appointees, but I digress.)

Refusing to recognize Barrett’s confirmation gives room to a President Biden, should that happen, to explore reforms to the court and the court system. The Republicans will oppose anything he proposes. That’s a given. What’s key is holding on to every single Democratic supporter.

Biden can’t let opposition to reform appear bipartisan. If it’s just the Republicans complaining, he’s free to move forward. (This scenario presumes, of course, that voters will flip control of the Senate; it also presumes that the Senate Democrats, once in control, will nix the filibuster.)

Second, pulling back and denying legitimacy to what are, arguably, treasonous acts indicate ideological and generational shifts going on generally. For all the Democratic praise given to Ronald Reagan, as an example of everything Donald Trump is not, that president’s “conservative consensus” is the one we still live in (and are moving out of, as I see it).

Liberals could quibble with conservatives but they could not quibble with Reagan’s titanic popularity, as evidenced by back-to-back landslide victories. It is no stretch to say that, since 1980, Democrats — who otherwise espoused liberal tendencies — recognized as valid, and therefore respected, their counterparts’ conservatism such that Republican demands were not the end of Democratic thinking but the beginning.

Nancy Pelosi illustrated what I see as the Democrats’ final departure from the Reagan regime during an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. The House Speaker told the news anchor something I don’t think any Democrat has said to someone of his stature.

He was trying to pin her down, using conventional Republican talking points connected to the stalled stimulus negotiations. Pelosi not only refused to play along; she refused to recognize the validity of the GOP’s perspective.

“With all due respect, and we’ve known each other a long time, you really don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. The GOP has acted in bad faith for years. They prevailed over the Democrats by exploiting their liberal tendency to see good faith when there’s none. The first thing you do in an abusive relationship isn’t leaving. It’s denying the legitimacy of abuse.

In an upcoming segment of “60 Minutes,” Biden is reportedly going to propose “a national commission — a bipartisan commission.

I will ask them to, over 180 days, come back to me with recommendations as to how to reform the court system.

This worries liberals for good reason. They fear “bipartisan” will give Republicans room to sabotage him. I’d normally agree except for the changes I have outlined above. “Bipartisan” during Reagan’s conservative consensus over the last 40 years nearly always gave Republicans the advantage. That consensus, however, is crumbling, first slowly, then rapidly, then all at once.

Biden might mean “bipartisan” as we currently understand it. He might just as well mean “bipartisan” on his terms. Remember, he doesn’t need, nor is he going to get, Republican support. What he needs is the full backing of every member of his party.

Moreover, he didn’t say the commission would get back to him as to “whether” or “if” he should pursue court reforms. He said “how.” That indicates intention. That indicates major changes ahead beyond the election.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 October 2020

Word Count: 938

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All presidents rankle when the Washington press corps pays attention to things the president and his administration would rather it did not pay attention to. What sets Donald Trump apart, it goes without saying, is his churlish tendency to feel like a victim, as if reporters reporting the news is some kind of conspiracy against him.

On Tuesday, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf accused the Washington Post’s Maria Sacchetti of shilling for Joe Biden. In covering news of a new Center for Countering Human Trafficking, Wolf said, she “chose to ignore the human trafficking survivors who came to DC to tell their stories. Instead, she wrote on COVID, because it fits her media narrative. Anything it takes to bury the good news DHS is doing.”

Jake Tapper, the CNN anchor turning into a dutiful gatekeeper of the public square, defended Sacchetti and in the process all members of the press corps. Tapper said:

COVID is not a ‘narrative.’ It’s literally the most tangible threat to the safety and security of the American people right now, more than 220,000 of whom have died.

Tapper’s intentions, if I’m reading this right, were modest. He was merely defending his peers in the profession from partisan hacks like Wolf, and he was correct in doing so. But I think Tapper’s intentions — anyway, our intentions — should be broader.

If it’s true the covid is “the most tangible threat to the safety and security of the American people right now,” it should follow, given we all face the same threat, that it will take committed and collective action in the form of a government response to defeat it.

Conversely, anyone denying the reality of all of us being in this together, or anyone undermining the government’s response to the pandemic, should be seen, as is typical in times of war, as insufficiently committed to the cause of defeating a mortal enemy. Moreover, they might be — they should be — seen as disloyal, or perhaps even in league with the opposition.

Put another way, Chad Wolf, in drawing attention away from “the most tangible threat” to our safety and security, betrays the American people and creates conditions for a moment when treason is an option for those ideologically driven to sabotage.

Tapper defended a colleague. Good for him. What he should be doing, and we should all be doing, is seriously questioning Chad Wolf’s patriotism.

Questioning someone’s patriotism is tacky, to say the least, but remember: Some white people in this country believe deep down that they reside in a nation-within-a-nation where “real Americans” are chosen by God to rule in God’s name. This confederacy of the mind and spirit exists. (It has existed since the founding.) Its devotees are prepared to go to the wall to keep and tighten their grip on a government they believe belongs to them.

A massive government response to a virus affecting everyone is itself a declaration of war that must be faced with equal and opposite aggression. This is why a band of white domestic terrorists conspired recently to kidnap (and probably murder) Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. That a similar plan to kidnap the mayor of Wichita, Kansas, was foiled is not a sign of copycatism. It’s a harbinger of things to come.

Violence is only the most obvious form of betrayal. Mitch McConnell has told White House negotiators to back off stimulus talks. The reason, according to a pundits corps bent on seeing good faith where there is none, is because some Republicans “simply don’t think government spending would help the economy” or they think they will be “vulnerable to attacks as insufficiently conservative.” (None of that applied when Senate Republicans OK’d $2.2 trillion in relief aid.)

No, McConnell is sandbagging stimulus now, because he thinks Trump won’t be reelected. With the backing of plutocrats already pushing policymakers to privilege the economy over “the sanctity of life,” the Republicans are preparing to sabotage Biden the way they did Barack Obama a decade ago, and in the process produce “hundreds of thousands of excess deaths.”

The Republicans will pretend mass death and mass poverty are outcomes in keeping with republican democracy. That this is a transparent lie might be obvious if people like Jake Tapper allow it to be. My fear is they won’t. My fear is the press corps will balance Democratic loyalty with Republican disloyalty, thus making treason optional.

Tapper understands the covid is “the most tangible threat to the safety and security of the American people.” Let’s hope he also understands the virus isn’t the only one.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 21 October 2020

Word Count: 761

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It’s understood the president has not done nearly enough to combat the spread of the new coronavirus. It’s understood he’s gotten in the way of states trying to protect residents.

What’s not understood, however, is the United States government, under Donald Trump’s leadership, seems to be conducting a science experiment on the American people without telling us — one informed by ideology, not medicine.

All things being equal, a second term for the president will not only coincide with a permanent pandemic; it will cause hundreds of thousands of more people to die.

On Monday, the Washington Post ran an investigation finding the administration surrendered to a disease that has killed so far more than 225,000 Americans and infected nearly 8.5 million more, according to Worldometer. Indeed, the White House has changed tracks under Scott Atlas, the radiologist turned White House pandemic advisor.

Appealing to Trump’s desire to look like he’s working without actually doing any work, Atlas has, according to the Post, “advocated allowing infections to spread naturally among most of the population while protecting the most vulnerable and those in nursing homes until the United States reaches herd immunity, which experts say would cause excess deaths, according to three current and former senior administration officials.”

After consolidating power with the help of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and Vice President Mike Pence, Atlas has undermined the authority of Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. (The president, subsequently, has been growing increasingly critical of Fauci.)

Masks and social distancing don’t work, Atlas said in public. All state and local restrictions should be lifted. Atlas has, moreover, blocked money appropriated by the US Congress for testing. He has sandbagged the government’s effort to monitor the disease’s spread. His goal appears to be quite clear: allowing about 60-70 percent of the population to be infected, resulting in, according to one expert, “hundreds of thousands of excess deaths.” (The current percentage of recovered people with covid antibodies is around 10 percent.)

It happens this goal is shared by signatories of the so-called Great Barrington Declaration, “a scientific treatise that calls for allowing the coronavirus to spread naturally in order to achieve herd immunity,” according to the New York Times. The statement arose from a gathering held in Great Barrington, Mass., hosted “by the American Institute for Economic Research, a think tank dedicated to free-market principles that partners with the Charles Koch Institute, founded by the billionaire industrialist to provide support to libertarian-leaning causes and organizations.”

Jay Bhattacharya is a signatory. He’s also Atlas’ colleague at Stanford. During the spring, they bonded over “shared concern that lockdowns were creating economic and societal devastation.” Atlas denied advocating the Great Barrington Declaration, but it nonetheless lines up with what he’s doing as the White House pandemic advisor.

He nonetheless arranged for a meeting with US Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar. “On Oct. 5, the day after the declaration was made public, the three authors — Dr. Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard — arrived in Washington at the invitation of Dr. Atlas” to meet with Azar, according to the Times.

Azar later Tweeted: “We heard strong reinforcement of the Trump Administration’s strategy of aggressively protecting the vulnerable while opening schools and the workplace.” (The “declaration” calls for protections only for the sick and elderly.)

I say “it happens” these things line up, but it’s no accident. Two doctors — one now inside of the Trump administration who is echoing another on the outside — say they are deeply concerned about “economic and societal devastation” while at the same time being in league with Charles Koch and his political network, which birthed the so-called Tea Party.

A decade ago, they fought and nearly defeated expanded health coverage in the form of Obamacare on grounds that it threatened “economic freedom.” This time, they aren’t fighting public policy. They are fighting science itself. They are fighting in order to prove their belief that the absence of government is liberty, that the road to serfdom is paved with “big government” intentions.

They will prove they’re right even if that means duping the American people into being unknowing guinea pigs, even if that means the possibility of “hundreds of thousands of excess deaths.”

Charles Koch is universally accepted among respectable white people as having views consistent with democratic politics. That was always dangerously wrong. I hope the pandemic makes clear the “economic freedom” of the kind Koch espouses — as do Scott Atlas and Jay Bhattacharya, evidently — is inherently at odds with the diverse interests of a democratic community.

Democracy is not a goal. For Koch, it’s an obstacle to achieving one’s goal, which includes tightening one’s grip on the government while appearing to champion liberty. A pandemic of this size requires a massive government response, which requires a government on the side of normal people and the common good. The only way Charles Koch is going to give up that kind of power is over his dead body.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 October 2020

Word Count: 836

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“Look, folks, the air quality is in the red zone today. The EPA says that means people with lung or heart issues should avoid prolonged activity outdoors.”

That was J.R. de Vera, one of two directors of UNITE-HERE!’s independent expenditure campaign to elect Biden and Harris in Reno, Nevada. UNITE-HERE! is a union representing 300,000 workers in the hospitality industry — that world of hotels and bars, restaurants and caterers. Ninety percent of its members are now laid off because of Trump’s bungling of the Covid-19 pandemic and many are glad for the chance to help get him out of the White House.

“So some of you will want to stay in your hotel rooms and make phone calls today,” JR continues. Fifty faces fall in the 50 little Zoom boxes on my laptop screen. Canvassers would much rather be talking to voters at their doors than calling them on a phone bank. Still, here in the burning, smoking West, the union is as committed to its own people’s health and safety as it is to dragging Donald Trump out of office. So, for many of them, phone calls it will be.

My own job doesn’t change much from day to day. Though I live in San Francisco, I’ve come to Reno to do back-room logistics work in the union campaign’s cavernous warehouse of an office: ordering supplies, processing reimbursements, and occasionally helping the data team make maps of the areas our canvassers will walk.

Our field campaign is just one of several the union is running in key states. We’re also in Arizona and Florida and, only last week, we began door-to-door canvassing in Philadelphia. Social media, TV ads, bulk mail, and phone calls are all crucial elements in any modern electoral campaign, but none of them is a substitute for face-to-face conversations with voters.

We’ve been in Reno since early August, building what was, until last week, the only field campaign in the state supporting Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. (Just recently, our success in campaigning safely has encouraged the Democratic Party to start its own ground game here and elsewhere.) We know exactly how many doors we have to knock on, how many Biden voters we have to identify, how many of them we have to convince to make a concrete voting plan, and how many we have to get out to vote during Nevada’s two-week early voting period to win here.

We’re running a much larger campaign in Clark County, where close to three-quarters of Nevada’s population lives (mostly in Las Vegas). Washoe County, home of the twin cities of Reno and Sparks, is the next largest population center with 16% of Nevadans. The remaining 14 counties, collectively known as “the Rurals,” account for the rest. Washoe and Clark are barely blue; the Rurals decidedly red.

In 2018, UNITE-HERE!’s ground campaign helped ensure that Jacky Rosen would flip a previously Republican Senate seat, and we helped elect Democrat Steve Sisolak as governor. He’s proved a valuable union ally, signing the Adolfo Fernandez Act, a first-in-the-nation law protecting workers and businesses in Nevada from the worst effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Defying a threatened Trump campaign lawsuit (later dismissed by a judge), Sisolak also signed an election reform bill that allows every active Nevada voter to receive a mail-in ballot. Largely as a result of the union’s work in 2018, this state now boasts an all-female Democratic senatorial delegation, a Democratic governor, and a female and Democratic majority in the state legislature. Elections, as pundits of all stripes have been known to say, have consequences.

Door-to-door on planet A

“¿Se puede, o no se puede?”

“¡Sí, se puede!”

(“Can we do it?” “Yes, we can!”)

Each morning’s online canvass dispatch meeting starts with that call-and-response followed by a rousing handclap. Then we talk about where people will be walking that day and often listen to one of the canvassers’ personal stories, explaining why he or she is committed to this campaign. Next, we take a look at the day’s forecast for heat and air quality as vast parts of the West Coast burn, while smoke and ash travel enormous distances. Temperatures here were in the low 100s in August (often hovering around 115 degrees in Las Vegas). And the air? Let’s just say that there have been days when I’ve wished breathing were optional.

Climate-change activists rightly point out that “there’s no Planet B” for the human race, but some days it seems as if our canvassers are already working on a fiery Planet A that is rapidly becoming unlivable. California’s wildfires — including its first-ever “gigafire” — have consumed more than four million acres in the last two months, sending plumes of ash to record heights, and dumping a staggering amount of smoke into the Reno-Sparks basin. Things are a little better at the moment, but for weeks I couldn’t see the desert mountains that surround the area. Some days I couldn’t even make out the Grand Sierra Reno casino, a quarter mile from the highway on which I drive to work each morning.

For our canvassers — almost every one a laid-off waiter, bartender, hotel housekeeper, or casino worker — the climate emergency and the Covid-19 pandemic are literally in their faces as they don their N95 masks to walk the streets of Reno. It’s the same for the voters they meet at their doors. Each evening, canvassers report (on Zoom, of course) what those voters are saying and, for the first time I can remember, they are now talking about the climate. They’re angry at a president who pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord and they’re scared about what a potentially searing future holds for their children and grandchildren. They may not have read Joe Biden’s position on clean energy and environmental justice, but they know that Donald Trump has no such plan.

Braving guns, germs, and smoke In his classic book Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond suggested that the three variables in his title helped in large part to explain how European societies and the United States came to control much of the planet in the twentieth century. As it happens, our door-to-door canvassers confront a similar triad of obstacles right here in Reno, Nevada (if you replace that final “steel” with “smoke.”)

Guns and other threats Nevada is an open-carry state and gun ownership is common here. It’s not unusual to see someone walking around a supermarket with a holstered pistol on his hip. A 2015 state law ended most gun registration requirements and another allows people visiting from elsewhere to buy rifles without a permit. So gun sightings are everyday events.

Still, it can be startling, if you’re not used to it, to have a voter answer the door with a pistol all too visible, even if securely holstered. And occasionally, our canvassers have even watched those guns leave their holsters when the person at the door realizes why they’re there (which is when the campaign gets the police involved). Canvassers are trained to observe very clear protocols, including immediately leaving an area if they experience any kind of verbal or physical threat.

African American and Latinx canvassers who’ve campaigned before in Reno say that, in 2020, Trump supporters seem even more emboldened than in the past to shout racist insults at them. More than once, neighbors have called the police on our folks, essentially accusing them of canvassing-while-black-or-brown. Two days before I wrote this piece, the police pulled over one young Latino door-knocker because neighbors had called to complain that he was walking up and down the street waving a gun. (The “gun” in question was undoubtedly the electronic tablet he was carrying to record the results of conversations with voters.) The officer apologized.

Which reminds me of another apology offered recently. A woman approached an African-American canvasser, demanding to know what in the world he was doing in her neighborhood. On learning his mission, she offered an apology as insulting as her original question. “We’re not used to seeing people like you around here,” she explained.

Germs Until the pandemic, my partner and I had planned to work together with UNITE-HERE! in Reno during this election, as we did in 2018. But she’s five years older than I am, and her history of pneumonia means that catching Covid-19 could be especially devastating for her. So she’s stayed in San Francisco, helping out the union’s national phone bank effort instead.

In fact, we didn’t really expect that there would be a ground campaign this year, given the difficulties presented by the novel coronavirus. But the union was determined to eke out that small but genuine addition to the vote that a field campaign can produce. So they put in place stringent health protocols for all of us: masks and a minimum of six feet of distance between everyone at all times; no visits to bars, restaurants, or casinos, including during off hours; temperature checks for everyone entering the office; and the immediate reporting of any potential Covid-19 symptoms to our health and safety officer. Before the union rented blocks of rooms at two extended-stay hotels, our head of operations checked their mask protocols for employees and guests and examined their ventilation systems to make sure that the air conditioners vented directly outdoors and not into a common air system for the whole building.

To date, not one of our 57 canvassers has tested positive, a record we intend to maintain as we add another 17 full-timers to our team next week.

One other feature of our coronavirus protocol: we don’t talk to any voter who won’t put on a mask. I was skeptical that canvassers would be able to get voters to mask up, even with the individually wrapped surgical masks we’re offering anyone who doesn’t have one on or handy. However, it turns out that, in this bizarre election year, people are eager to talk, to vent their feelings and be heard. So many of the people we’re canvassing have suffered so much this year that they’re surprised and pleased when someone shows up at their door wondering how they’re doing.

And the answer to that question for so many potential voters is not well — with jobs lost, housing threatened, children struggling with online school, and hunger pangs an increasingly everyday part of life. So yes, a surprising number of people, either already masked or quite willing to put one on, want to talk to us about an election that they generally see as the most important of their lifetime.

Smoke And did I mention that it’s been smoky here? It can make your eyes water, your throat burn, and the urge to cough overwhelm you. In fact, the symptoms of smoke exposure are eerily similar to the ones for Covid-19. More than one smoke-affected canvasser has spent at least five days isolated in a hotel room, waiting for negative coronavirus test results.

The White House website proudly quotes the president on his administration’s testing record: “We do tremendous testing. We have the best testing in the world.” Washoe County health officials are doing what they can, but if this is the best in the world, then the world is in worse shape than we thought.

The power of a personal story So why, given the genuine risk and obstacles they face, do UNITE-HERE!’s canvassers knock on doors six days a week to elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris? Their answers are a perfect embodiment of the feminist dictum “the personal is political.” Every one of them has a story about why she or he is here. More than one grew up homeless and never want another child to live that way. One is a DACA recipient who knows that a reelected Donald Trump will continue his crusade to end that amnesty for undocumented people brought to the United States as children. Through their participation in union activism, many have come to understand that workers really can beat the boss when they organize — and Trump, they say, is the biggest boss of all.

Through years of political campaigning, the union’s leaders have learned that voters may think about issues, but they’re moved to vote by what they feel about them. The goal of every conversation at those doors right now is to make a brief but profound personal connection with the voter, to get each of them to feel just how important it is to vote this year. Canvassers do this by asking how a voter is doing in these difficult times and listening — genuinely listening — and responding to whatever answer they get. And they do it by being vulnerable enough to share the personal stories that lie behind their presence at the voter’s front door.

One canvasser lost his home at the age of seven, when his parents separated. He and his mother ended up staying in shelters and camping for months in a garden shed on a friend’s property. One day recently he knocked on a door and found a Trump supporter on the other side of it. He noticed a shed near the house, pointed to it, and told the man about living in something similar as a child. That Trumpster started to cry. He began talking about how he’d had just the same experience and the way, as a teenager, he’d had to hold his family together when his heroin-addicted parents couldn’t cope. He’d never talked to any of his present-day friends about how he grew up and, in the course of that conversation, came to agree with our canvasser that Donald Trump wasn’t likely to improve life for people like them. He was, he said, changing his vote to Biden right then and there. (And that canvasser will be back to make sure he actually votes.)

Harvard University Professor Marshall Ganz pioneered the “public narrative,” the practice of organizing by storytelling. It’s found at the heart of many organizing efforts these days. The 2008 Obama campaign, for example, trained thousands of volunteers to tell their stories to potential voters. The It Gets Better Project has collected more than 50,000 personal messages from older queer people to LGBTQ youth who might be considering suicide or other kinds of self-harm — assuring them that their own lives did, indeed, get better.

Being the sort of political junkie who devours the news daily, I was skeptical about the power of this approach, though I probably shouldn’t have been. After all, how many times did I ask my mother or father to “tell me a story” when I was a kid? What are our lives but stories? Human beings are narrative animals and, however rational, however versed in the issues we may sometimes be, we still live through stories.

Data can give me information on issues I care about, but it can’t tell me what issues I should care about. In the end, I’m concerned about racial and gender justice as well as the climate emergency because of the way each of them affects people and other creatures with whom I feel connected.

A campaign within a campaign Perhaps the most inspiring aspect of UNITE-HERE!’s electoral campaign is the union’s commitment to developing every canvasser’s leadership skills. The goal is more than winning what’s undoubtedly the most important election of our lifetime. It’s also to send back to every hotel, restaurant, casino, and airport catering service leaders who can continue to organize and advocate for their working-class sisters and brothers. This means implementing an individual development plan for each canvasser.

Team leaders work with all of them to hone their stories into tools that can be used in an honest and generous way to create a genuine connection with voters. They help those canvassers think about what else they want to learn to do, while developing opportunities for them to master technical tools like computer spreadsheets and databases.

There’s a special emphasis on offering such opportunities to women and people of color who make up the vast majority of the union’s membership. Precious hours of campaign time are also devoted to workshops on how to understand and confront systemic racism and combat sexual harassment, subjects President Trump is acquainted with in the most repulsively personal way. The union believes its success depends as much on fostering a culture of respect as on the hard-nosed negotiating it’s also famous for.

After months of pandemic lockdown and almost four years of what has objectively been the worst, most corrupt, most incompetent, and possibly even most destructive presidency in the nation’s history, it’s a relief to be able to do something useful again. And sentimental as it may sound, it’s an honor to be able to do it with this particular group of brave and committed people. Sí, se puede. Yes, we can.

Rebecca Gordon writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She teaches at the University of San Francisco, is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes, and is now at work on a new Dispatch book on the history of torture in the United States.

Copyright ©2020 Rebecca Gordon — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 October 2020

Word Count: 2,800

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You could say conspiracy theories are like herpes. Akin to the sexually transmitted disease, belief in nefarious forces determining the fate of humanity has been around human beings as long as human beings have been around, and they will continue to be around long after the living are dead. There’s no cure. You can’t get rid of them once infected. The trick is making sure they don’t flare up, causing needless pain and injury to an open society. It’s pushing them back to the margins of life where they belong.

In a free republic, that trick is made trickier due to concerns for free speech. At what point do the protected rights of individuals to say whatever they want to say, even if it’s politically dangerous, conflict with the government’s interest in protecting the integrity of public discourse? That debate is ongoing.

For now, I want to point out the citizenry may be leaving the government behind, such that the government need never catch up. The Trump presidency, I contend, seems to have made two things clear. One, counter-speech is free speech. Two, free speech demands accountability. In other words, civil society seems to be exiling “irrationalism” to the political wilderness.

The president and his confederates are wrongly outraged by the general tendency in public discourse 15 days before Election Day to ignore or dismiss the “Hunter Biden email scandal.” Aided and abetted by the same Russian operatives who sabotaged Hillary Clinton’s 2016 candidacy, Trump seems as frustrated by the gambit’s ineffectiveness as he is by the reluctance of the campaign press corps to launder a slough of slander.

The more frustrated he gets, the more he flails, reaching for just about anything, even the QAnon conspiracy theory alleging that “Trump is a messianic figure battling devil-worshipping, child-molesting Democrats,” according to USA Today.

The more he reaches for piles of lies, the less the president is taken seriously.

Lies, you could say, are like herpes, too. They will always be with us in some form or another. Before pushing them back, however, we should examine the reason why Trump’s and Russia’s lies worked in the first place: they did not, for a lot of people, look like lies.

To the Washington press corps — specifically, to respectable white people — they looked as if they reflected just another stage in the evolution of “conservatism.” As long as radicals seemed legitimate in the eyes of reporters and editors, as long as fascists seemed only to pursue a purer form of “conservatism” (think: “alt-right”), they were free to smuggle lies into the public square where they hid them in plain sight.

I take umbrage with the conventional wisdom that Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, Stephen Miller and other fascists “infiltrated” conservative circles in the run-up to the 2016 election. “Infiltrated” connotes naivete, as if “conservative” GOP actors were not already receptive to the dog-whistle rhetoric and reactionary fears that already constituted the gestalt of the Republican Party.

They did not take over the party. They were welcomed into it. They, like Trump, are and were not a bug. They are and were a feature. And now that the lies are known as lies — now that they’re no longer working; indeed, they’re backfiring — the “conservatives” must keep lying in order to save face.

US Sen. John Cornyn is up for reelection. He said over the weekend that he broke with Trump over the border wall, budgets and other issues but kept quiet. He told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram Editorial Board: “I think what we found is that we’re not going to change President Trump. He is who he is. You either love him or hate him, and there’s not much in between. What I tried to do is not get into public confrontations and fights with him because, as I’ve observed, those usually don’t end too well.”

This is the same “conservative” senator who voted to acquit the president of spear-heading a real criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people. Friends, you decide whether he’s telling the truth or lying in the hopes that respectable white people — that is, the Washington and Texas press corps — will keep giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Which brings me back to free speech. The more a free and open civil society tolerates lying at this scale — the more the press corps accepts the GOP’s bad faith as good faith — the less free and open civil society becomes. All things being equal, voters appear ready to correct their mistake four years ago.

We will have learned nothing, however, if we do not push lies, propaganda and conspiracy theories back to where they belong.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 October 2020

Word Count: 774

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The so-called Age of Trump is also an age of instantly forgotten bestselling books, especially ones purporting to provide the inside scoop on what goes on within Donald Trump’s haphazard and continuously shifting orbit. With metronomic regularity, such gossipy volumes appear, make a splash, and almost as quickly vanish, leaving a mark no more lasting than a trout breaking the surface in a pond.

Remember when Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House was all the rage? It’s now available in hardcover for $0.99 from online used booksellers. James Comey’s Higher Loyalty also sells for a penny less than a buck.

An additional forty-six cents will get you Omarosa Manigault Newman’s “insider’s account” of her short-lived tenure in that very White House. For the same price, you can acquire Sean Spicer’s memoir as Trump’s press secretary, Anthony Scaramucci’s rendering of his tumultuous 11-day stint as White House communications director, and Corey Lewandowski’s “inside story” of the 2016 presidential campaign.

Bibliophiles intent on assembling a complete library of Trumpiana will not have long to wait before the tell-all accounts of John Bolton, Michael Cohen, Mary Trump, and that journalistic amaneusis Bob Woodward will surely be available at similar bargain basement prices.

All that said, even in these dismal times genuinely important books do occasionally make their appearance. My friend and colleague Stephen Wertheim is about to publish one. It’s called Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy and if you’ll forgive me for being direct, you really ought to read it. Let me explain why.

The “turn” Wertheim and I are co-founders of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a small Washington, D.C.-based think tank. That Quincy refers to John Quincy Adams who, as secretary of state nearly two centuries ago, warned his fellow citizens against venturing abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” Were the United States to do so, Adams predicted, its defining trait — its very essence — “would insensibly change from liberty to force.” By resorting to force, America “might become the dictatress of the world,” he wrote, but “she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.” While his gendered punchline might rankle contemporary sensibilities, it remains apt.

A privileged man of his times, Adams took it for granted that a WASP male elite was meant to run the country. Women were to occupy their own separate sphere. And while he would eventually become an ardent opponent of slavery, in 1821 race did not rank high on his agenda either. His immediate priority as secretary of state was to situate the young republic globally so that Americans might enjoy both safety and prosperity. That meant avoiding unnecessary trouble. We had already had our revolution. In his view, it wasn’t this country’s purpose to promote revolution elsewhere or to dictate history’s future course.

Adams was to secretaries of state what Tom Brady is to NFL quarterbacks: the Greatest Of All Time. As the consensus GOAT in the estimation of diplomatic historians, he brought to maturity a pragmatic tradition of statecraft originated by a prior generation of New Englanders and various slaveholding Virginians with names like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. That tradition emphasized opportunistically ruthless expansionism on this continent, avid commercial engagement, and the avoidance of great power rivalries abroad. Adhering to such a template, the United States had, by the beginning of the twentieth century, become the wealthiest, most secure nation on the planet — at which point Europeans spoiled the party.

The disastrous consequences of one European world war fought between 1914 and 1918 and the onset of a second in 1939 rendered that pragmatic tradition untenable — so at least a subsequent generation of WASPs concluded. This is where Wertheim takes up the story. Prompted by the German army’s lightning victory in the battle of France in May and June 1940, members of that WASP elite set about creating — and promoting — an alternative policy paradigm, one he describes as pursuing “dominance in the name of internationalism,” with U.S. military supremacy deemed “the prerequisite of a decent world.”

The new elite that devised this paradigm did not consist of lawyers from Massachusetts or planters from Virginia. Its key members held tenured positions at Yale and Princeton, wrote columns for leading New York newspapers, staffed Henry Luce’s Time-Life press empire, and distributed philanthropic largesse to fund worthy causes (grasping the baton of global primacy being anything but least among them). Most importantly, just about every member of this Eastern establishment cadre was also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). As such, they had a direct line to the State Department, which in those days actually played a large role in formulating basic foreign policy.

While Tomorrow, The World is not a long book — fewer than 200 pages of text — it is a tour de force. In it, Wertheim describes the new narrative framework that the foreign-policy elite formulated in the months following the fall of France. He shows how Americans with an antipathy for war now found themselves castigated as “isolationists,” a derogatory term created to suggest provincialism or selfishness. Those favoring armed intervention, meanwhile, became “internationalists,” a term connoting enlightenment and generosity. Even today, members of the foreign-policy establishment pledge undying fealty to the same narrative framework, which still warns against the bugaboo of “isolationism” that threatens to prevent high-minded policymakers from exercising “global leadership.”

Wertheim persuasively describes the “turn” toward militarized globalism engineered from above by that self-selected, unelected crew. Crucially, their efforts achieved success prior to Pearl Harbor. The Japanese attack of December 7, 1941, may have thrust the United States into the ongoing world war, but the essential transformation of policy had already occurred, even if ordinary Americans had yet to be notified as to what it meant. Its future implications — permanently high levels of military spending, a vast network of foreign bases stretching across the globe, a penchant for armed intervention abroad, a sprawling “national security” apparatus, and a politically subversive arms industry — would only become apparent in the years ahead.

While Wertheim is not the first to expose isolationism as a carefully constructed myth, he does so with devastating effect. Most of all, he helps his readers understand that “so long as the phantom of isolationism is held to be the most grievous sin, all is permitted.”

Contained within that all is a cavalcade of forceful actions and grotesque miscalculations, successes and failures, notable achievements and immense tragedies both during World War II and in the decades that followed. While beyond the scope of Wertheim’s book, casting the Cold War as a de facto extension of the war against Nazi Germany, with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin as a stand-in for Adolf Hitler, represented an equally significant triumph for the foreign policy establishment.

At the outset of World War II, ominous changes in the global distribution of power prompted a basic reorientation of U.S. policy. Today, fundamental alterations in the global distribution of power — did someone say “the rise of China”? — are once again occurring right before our eyes. Yet the foreign-policy establishment’s response is simply to double down.

So, even now, staggering levels of military spending, a vast network of foreign bases, a penchant for armed intervention abroad, a sprawling “national security” apparatus, and a politically subversive arms industry remain the taken-for-granted signatures of U.S. policy. And even now, the establishment employs the specter of isolationism as a convenient mechanism for self-forgiveness and expedient amnesia, as well as a means to enforce discipline.

Frozen compass The fall of France was indeed an epic disaster. Yet implicit in Tomorrow, The World is this question: If the disaster that befell Europe in 1940 could prompt the United States to abandon a hitherto successful policy paradigm, then why have the serial disasters befalling the nation in the present century not produced a comparable willingness to reexamine an approach to policy that is obviously failing today?

To pose that question is to posit an equivalence between the French army’s sudden collapse in the face of the Wehrmacht’s assault and the accumulation of U.S. military disappointments dating from 9/11. From a tactical or operational perspective, many will find such a comparison unpersuasive. After all, the present-day armed forces of the United States have not succumbed to outright defeat, nor is the government of the United States petitioning for a cessation of hostilities as the French authorities did in 1940.

Yet what matters in war are political outcomes. Time and again since 9/11, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, or lesser theaters of conflict, the United States has failed to achieve the political purposes for which it went to war. From a strategic and political perspective, therefore, the comparison with France is instructive, even if failure need not entail abject surrender.

The French people and other supporters of the 1930s European status quo (including Americans who bothered to pay attention) were counting on that country’s soldiers to thwart further Nazi aggression once and for all. Defeat came as a profound shock. Similarly, after the Cold War, most Americans (and various beneficiaries of a supposed Pax Americana) counted on U.S. troops to maintain an agreeable and orderly global status quo. Instead, the profound shock of 9/11 induced Washington to embark upon what became a series of “endless wars” that U.S. forces proved incapable of bringing to a successful conclusion.

Crucially, however, no reevaluation of U.S. policy comparable to the “turn” that Wertheim describes has occurred. An exceedingly generous reading of President Trump’s promise to put “America First” might credit him with attempting such a turn. In practice, however, his incompetence and inconsistency, not to mention his naked dishonesty, produced a series of bizarre and random zigzags. Threats of “fire and fury” alternated with expressions of high regard for dictators (“we fell in love”). Troop withdrawals were announced and then modified or forgotten. Trump abandoned a global environmental agreement, massively rolled back environmental regulations domestically, and then took credit for providing Americans with “the very cleanest air and cleanest water on the planet.” Little of this was to be taken seriously.

Trump’s legacy as a statesman will undoubtedly amount to the diplomatic equivalent of Mulligan stew. Examine the contents closely enough and you’ll be able to find just about anything. Yet taken as a whole, the concoction falls well short of being nutritious, much less appetizing.

On the eve of the upcoming presidential election, the entire national security apparatus and its supporters assume that Trump’s departure from office will restore some version of normalcy. Every component of that apparatus from the Pentagon and the State Department to the CIA and the Council on Foreign Relations to the editorial boards of the New York Times and Washington Post yearns for that moment.

To a very considerable degree, a Biden presidency will satisfy that yearning. Nothing if not a creature of the establishment, Biden himself will conform to its requirements. For proof, look no further than his vote in favor of invading Iraq in 2003. (No isolationist he.) Count on a Biden administration, therefore, to perpetuate the entire obsolete retinue of standard practices.

As Peter Beinart puts it, “When it comes to defense, a Biden presidency is likely to look very much like an Obama presidency, and that’s going to look not so different from a Trump presidency when you really look at the numbers.” Biden will increase the Pentagon budget, keep U.S. troops in the Middle East, and get tough with China. The United States will remain the world’s number-one arms merchant, accelerate efforts to militarize outer space, and continue the ongoing modernization of the entire U.S. nuclear strike force. Biden will stack his team with CFR notables looking for jobs on the “inside.”

Above all, Biden will recite with practiced sincerity the mantras of American exceptionalism as a summons to exercise global leadership. “The triumph of democracy and liberalism over fascism and autocracy created the free world. But this contest does not just define our past. It will define our future, as well.” Those uplifting sentiments are, of course, his from a recent Foreign Affairs essay.

So if you liked U.S. national security policy before Trump mucked things up, then Biden is probably your kind of guy. Install him in the Oval Office and the mindless pursuit of “dominance in the name of internationalism” will resume. And the United States will revert to the policies that prevailed during the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama — policies, we should note, that paved the way for Donald Trump to win the White House.

The voices that count What explains the persistence of this pattern despite an abundance of evidence showing that it’s not working to the benefit of the American people? Why is it so difficult to shed a policy paradigm that dates from Hitler’s assault on France, now a full 80 years in the past?

I hope that in a subsequent book Stephen Wertheim will address that essential question. In the meantime, however, allow me to make a stab at offering the most preliminary of answers.

Setting aside factors like bureaucratic inertia and the machinations of the military-industrial complex — the Pentagon, arms manufacturers, and their advocates in Congress share an obvious interest in discovering new “threats” — one likely explanation relates to a policy elite increasingly unable to distinguish between self-interest and the national interest. As secretary of state, John Quincy Adams never confused the two. His latter-day successors have done far less well.

As an actual basis for policy, the turn that Stephen Wertheim describes in Tomorrow, The World has proven to be nowhere near as enlightened or farseeing as its architects imagined or its latter day proponents still purport to believe it to be. The paradigm produced in 1940-1941 was, at best, merely serviceable. It responded to the nightmarish needs of that moment. It justified U.S. participation in efforts to defeat Nazi Germany, a necessary undertaking.

After 1945, except as a device for affirming the authority of foreign-policy elites, the pursuit of “dominance in the name of internationalism” proved to be problematic. Yet even as conditions changed, basic U.S. policy stayed the same: high levels of military spending, a network of foreign bases, a penchant for armed intervention abroad, a sprawling “national security” apparatus, and a politically subversive arms industry. Even after the Cold War and 9/11, these remain remarkably sacrosanct.

My own retrospective judgment of the Cold War tends toward an attitude of: well, I guess it could have been worse. When it comes to the U.S. response to 9/11, however, it’s difficult to imagine what worse could have been.

Within the present-day foreign-policy establishment, however, a different interpretation prevails: the long, twilight struggle of the Cold War ended in a world historic victory, unsullied by any unfortunate post-9/11 missteps. The effect of this perspective is to affirm the wisdom of American statecraft now eight decades old and therefore justify its perpetuation long after both Hitler and Stalin, not to mention Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, are dead and gone.

This paradigm persists for one reason only: it ensures that statecraft will remain a realm that resolutely excludes the popular will. Elites decide, while the job of ordinary Americans is to foot the bill. In that regard, the allocation of privileges and obligations now 80 years old still prevails today.

Only by genuinely democratizing the formulation of foreign policy will real change become possible. The turn in U.S. policy described in Tomorrow, The World came from the top. The turn needed today will have to come from below and will require Americans to rid themselves of their habit of deference when it comes to determining what this nation’s role in the world will be. Those on top will do all in their power to avert any such loss of status.

The United States today suffers from illnesses both literal and metaphorical. Restoring the nation to good health and repairing our democracy must necessarily rate as paramount concerns. While Americans cannot ignore the world beyond their borders, the last thing they need is to embark upon a fresh round of searching for distant monsters to destroy. Heeding the counsel of John Quincy Adams might just offer an essential first step toward recovery.

Andrew Bacevich writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His most recent book is The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory.

Copyright ©2020 Andrew Bacevich — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 October 2020

Word Count: 2,702

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Two things bear repeating before I get to the point. One, the president is not going to play fair. This election is not a contest in which we can honestly say, “May the best man win.” If there’s a way to cheat, Donald Trump will find it.

Two, the weeks between Election Day and Inauguration Day are going to be scary. The president is already extorting the electorate into choosing him — or else. If he doesn’t win, we can expect white-power terrorists to react. What’s certain, unfortunately, is there will be blood.

That said, I want to take a moment to express hope. Polling is very encouraging. Joe Biden is leading the president nationally by double digits in some surveys. That’s where you want to be to avoid the effects of GOP voter suppression. That’s where you want to be to counteract the inequities of the Electoral College.

Also encouraging has been enthusiasm for early voting. In George and Texas, we’re seeing huge lines. Voters are waiting to cast ballots for up to 10 hours. While wait-times are a national disgrace, the fact that people are determined should be seen a source of national strength.

Truly, the people are the only way of getting rid of a tyrant. And the people are showing up.

To be honest, I had lost some faith. Not all, but some. Like others, 2016 gave me a lingering case of PTSD. The choice seemed so simple. I found myself reading a lot about propaganda, disinformation, conspiracy theories and the like. I concluded some Americans were not only duped; they desired being lied to. It made them feel good.

“Democracies can accommodate quite a lot of irrationalism,” wrote David Runciman. “What is not clear is whether they can accommodate it when it emanates from the center.” Runciman went on to say that,

 

“There will always be fringe figures in any democratic society who believe the nonsense they read and decide to take matters into their own hands. It is shocking when it happens, but democracies can cope. Pedophilia and pizza parlors will be told apart eventually, and the contagion from that kind of paranoia can be contained. Much harder to know is what happens when the contagion of conspiracy theorizing spreads out from the heart of government” (my italics).

It was harder to know, in January 2017, what happens when “conspiracy theorizing spreads out from the heart of government.” (That’s when Runciman was writing for the special “post-truth” edition of The Chronicle Review.) In not knowing, in the early weeks of Trump’s presidency, there was opportunity aplenty for abject despair. But now, as a new Election Day approaches, and as polling indicates an electorate poised to correct its previous mistake, we see something like affirmation of Runciman’s claim.

The people understand Trump’s the-Deep-State’s-out-to-get-me shtick. His paranoia can be contained. Democracy can cope with irrationalism emanating from the center. It can cope not because the institutions are strong. It can cope because the people are.

Last night, during NBC’s live town hall, the president refused to disavow QAnon. (That’s the conspiracy theory holding that Democrats are satanist child sex predators; it’s a 21st-century update of the ancient “blood libel” slander against Jews.) Trump refused to disavow it the way he refused to disavow any number of horrible things over the course of his term.

But while in the past, this seemed like a source of strength (he can say anything and never face consequences!), this time it seemed like a source of weakness. Under Savannah Guthrie’s withering questioning, and set side-by-side with Biden’s calm, mild and policy-oriented town hall, the president seemed to unravel. He is the center of American power, as all presidents are. But his center did not hold.

Let’s hope the darkness is lifting. The popularity of conspiracy theories is cyclical in American history. It rises with rising tensions rooted in crisis. The influx of Catholic immigrants aroused the Know Nothings in the 1850s. The Cold War, and the fear of a nuclear Soviet Union, gave fruit to McCarthyism in the 1950s. Each period tapped into a “persistent psychic phenomenon,” wrote Richard Hofstadter in 1964, which is “more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population.”

In each period this psychic phenomenon eventually burns itself out. Then it crawls underground. Fortunately for us, this paranoid style, like Trump’s style, seems to be going out of style.

Let’s hope that by 2021, conspiracy theories passing for credible become passé. Then we can, at last, get down to the business of solving our collective problems.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 October 2020

Word Count: 761

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There’s something we would all agree on if we were honest with ourselves. The confirmation of Appellate Judge Amy Coney Barrett, the president’s third life-time appointment to the United States Supreme Court, is itself an act of betrayal. The Republicans played by one set of rules to block Barack Obama’s final nominee. They rewrote the rules for Donald Trump.

With Barrett, the Republicans will have a third branch of government with which to veto the people’s will. They will have enshrined autocratic rule over a system of republican government premised on democratic rule. You might cheer. You might say huzzah! You must concede, however. This is treason.

Treason, though subliminal throughout Senate confirmation hearings, was apparent once you saw the indicators. Chief among them was the nominee herself. Barrett made news this week in ways no past nominee made news. She refused to commit to moral, legal and constitutional positions every past nominee committed to or was presumed to be committed to — it went without saying in a free republic. Not Amy Coney Barrett, though.

Can the president pardon himself? She wouldn’t say. Can the president delay national elections? She wouldn’t say. Is voter intimidation illegal? She wouldn’t say. (Fact check: Yes, it is.) Would she recuse herself if the president threw the election to the Supreme Court? She wouldn’t say. Is Medicare constitutional? She wouldn’t say.

These were the softest of softball questions. In the context of the American tradition, in which powers are separated, and individuals protected from government power by way of guaranteed civil liberties, these were like asking if the sky were blue. But this nominee, knowing her chief obstacle to the court isn’t the Senate Democrats, who are outnumbered, but a president with an id of onion skin, dodged super-easy questions every predecessor would have answered freely.

In the process, she achieved two things. She raised doubts about her own commitment to a democratic political order. And she made negotiable something that should be the highest taboo: betrayal of the country.

Barrett isn’t alone. She operates within a GOP apparatus that is itself bent toward treason. Bloomberg reported Wednesday that Senate Republicans are now preparing to sabotage the next administration.

Should he defeat Trump, Joe Biden has said he will ask the US Congress for trillions to combat the pandemic and revive an economy on the brink of collapse.

A GOP strategist said the Republicans are “carefully laying the groundwork to restrain a Biden administration on federal spending and the budget deficit by talking up concerns about the price tag for another round of virus relief. The thinking, the strategist said, is that it would be very hard politically to agree on spending trillions more now and then in January suddenly embrace fiscal restraint.”

Put another way, the Republicans are hoping they can do to Biden what they did to Barack Obama. When they took the House in 2010, they doubled down on austerity, claiming the country was too broke to counteract the fallout from the 2007-2008 financial and housing panic. The Republicans, in other words, hurt the economy in order to hurt Obama. It didn’t work. He was reelected in 2012. But Obama was one of the lucky ones.

Millions of Americans, including Republican voters aplenty, felt more economic pain than they might have had the GOP acted out of love for the whole country. Treason is what you do when democracy itself is an obstacle to winning.

While treason may yield short term gains, it can’t long term. Your sins will find you out. Rudy Giuliani supplied the New York Post this week with a hard drive containing apparently forged documents. The tabloid claimed they proved Joe Biden as vice president protected his son from prosecution by Ukraine’s chief prosecutor. The report repeated a widely debunked claim Biden pushed the prosecutor out.

Fact is, Biden was pushing the prosecutor to investigate the gas firm his son worked for, as part of a global anti-corruption effort. Meanwhile, the documents, according to the New York Times, might be traced back to the same Russians who hacked the DNC in 2016. If so, the president’s personal attorney and, therefore, the president himself, might be involved in yet another international criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people.

Yet this time, it didn’t work. The New York Post’s report was widely panned, and even Facebook and Twitter, understanding the national security stakes, restricted its circulation. Meanwhile, early voting is shattering records, suggesting a landslide victory for Biden, even as the GOP Senate hurries up to confirm Amy Coney Barrett before it’s too late.

Nothing can be done for it. She will be confirmed. The court will be a 6-3 Republican supermajority. That’s what’s possible when treason is optional.

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: 15 October 2020

Word Count: 790

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