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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In other words, between the rulers and the ruled.

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

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

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 September 2020

Word Count: 885

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On August 26th, during the Republican National Convention, Vice President Mike Pence closed out his acceptance speech with a biblical sleight of hand. Speaking before a crowd at the Fort McHenry National Monument in Baltimore, he exclaimed,

 Let’s fix our eyes on Old Glory and all she represents. Let’s fix our eyes on this land of heroes and let their courage inspire.

In doing so, he essentially rewrote a passage from the New Testament’s Book of Hebrews:

 Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross.

There’s nothing new, of course, about an American politician melding religion and politics on the campaign trail. Still, Pence’s decision to replace Jesus with the Stars and Stripes raised eyebrows across a range of religious and political persuasions. Indeed, the melding of Old Glory and Christ provided the latest evidence of the rising influence of Christian nationalism in the age of Trump.

It’s no longer hard to find evidence of just how deeply Christian nationalism influences our politics and policymaking. During the pandemic, the Bible has repeatedly been used (and distorted) to justify Covid-19 denialism and government inaction, not to speak of outright repression. In late March, as cities were locking down and public health officials were recommending strict quarantine measures, one of Donald Trump’s first acts was to gather his followers at the White House for what was billed as a “National Day of Prayer” to give Americans the strength to press on through death and difficulty.

Later in the spring, protests against pandemic shutdowns, funded with dark money from the likes of the Koch Brothers, demanded that states reopen for business and social distancing guidelines be loosened. (Forget about masking of any sort.) At them, printed protest signs said things like: “Even Pharaoh Freed Slaves in a Plague” and “Texas will not take the Mark of the Beast.” And even as faith communities struggled admirably to adjust to zoom worship services, as well as remote pastoral care and memorials, President Trump continued to fan the flames of religious division, declaring in-person worship “essential,” no matter that legal experts questioned his authority to do so.

And speaking of his version of Christian nationalism, no one should forget the June spectacle in Lafayette Square near the White House, when Trump had racial-justice protestors tear-gassed so he could stroll to nearby St. John’s Church and pose proudly on its steps displaying a borrowed bible. Though he flashed it to the photographers, who can doubt how little time he’s spent within its pages. (Selling those same pages is another matter entirely. After all, a Bible he signed in the wake of that Lafayette Square event is now on sale for nearly $40,000.)

The battle for the Bible in American history To understand how power is wielded in America by wealthy politicians and their coteries of extremists in 2020, you have to consider the role of religion in our national life. An epic battle for the Bible is now underway in a country that has been largely ceded to white evangelical Christian nationalists. Through a well-funded network of churches and nonprofits, universities, and think tanks, and with direct lines to the nation’s highest political officials, they’ve had carte-blanche to set the terms of what passes for religious debate in this country and dictate what morality even means in our society.

Under Trump, such religious nationalism has reached a fever pitch as a reactionary movement that includes technocratic billionaires, televangelists, and armed militias has taken root with a simple enough message: God loves white Christian America, favors small government and big business, and rewards individualism and entrepreneurship. Meanwhile, the poor, people of color, and immigrants are blamed for society’s problems even as the rich get richer in what’s still the wealthiest country in the history of the world.

The dangers posed by today’s Christian nationalists are all too real, but the battle for the Bible itself is not new in America. In the 1700s and 1800s, slaveholders quoted the book of Philemon and lines from St. Paul’s epistles to claim that slavery was ordained by God. They also ripped the pages of Exodus from bibles they gave to the enslaved.  During the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century, churches and politicians alike preached a “prosperity gospel” that extolled the virtues of industrial capitalism.

Decades later, segregationists continued to use stray biblical verses to rubberstamp Jim Crow practices, while in the late 1970s the Moral Majority helped to mainstream a new generation of Christian extremists into national politics. In my own youth, I remember politicians quoting Thessalonians in the lead up to the passage of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act as proof that God believes in work-requirements for public assistance programs.

Students of religion and history know that, although such theological battles have often tipped disastrously toward the forces of violence, deprivation, and hate, Christian religious thinking has also been a key ingredient in positive social change in this country. Escaped slave Harriet “Moses” Tubman understood the Underground Railroad as a Christian project of liberation, while escaped slave Frederick Douglass fought for abolition through churches across the north in the pre-Civil War years. A century later, near the end of his life, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. explained how, to achieve his universal dream of justice, a beloved community of God would be built through a “freedom church of the poor.”

After all, in every chapter of American history, abolitionists, workers, labor organizers, civil rights leaders, and other representatives of the oppressed have struggled for a better nation not just in streets and workplaces, but in the pulpit, too. In the wreckage of the present Trumpian moment, with a fascistic, white nationalism increasingly ascendant, people of conscience would do well to follow suit.

The “psychological bird” of bad religion In my book Always with Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor, I focus on a reality that has long preoccupied me: how, in this country, the Bible has so often been manipulated to obscure its potentially emancipatory power; in particular, the way in which what theologian Jim Wallis has called the most famous biblical passage on the poor (from the Gospel of Matthew) — “the poor will be always with us” — has been misused.

Since I was a young girl, scarcely a week has passed in which I haven’t heard someone quoting Matthew as an explanation for why poverty is eternal and its mitigation reserved at best for charity or philanthropy (but certainly not for government). The logic of such thinking runs through so many of our religious institutions including what’s now known as “evangelical Christianity,” but also our legislatures, courts, military, schools, and more. It hasn’t just shaped the minds of young Christians but has helped to spiritualize (and cement in place) poverty, while implicitly or even explicitly justifying ever greater inequality in this society.

Today, the idea that poverty is the result of bad behavior, laziness, or sin rather than decisions made by those with power is distinctly ascendant in Donald Trump’s and Mitch McConnell’s Washington. Biblical passages like that one in Matthew have become another ideological tool brandished by reactionaries and the wealthy to deflect attention from this country’s systemic failures.

Consider, for example, the historic development of what’s often known as the “Bible Belt” (or alternatively the “Poverty Belt”). It sweeps across the South, from North Carolina to Mississippi, Tennessee to Alabama, home to poor people of every race. It represents the deepest, most contiguous area of poverty in the United States made possible in part by heretical theology, biblical misinterpretation, and Christian nationalism.

The convergence of poverty and religion in the Bible Belt has a long history, stretching back to the earliest settler-colonists in the slave era. It echoed through the system of Jim Crow that had the region in its grip until the Civil Rights years and the modern political concept of “the solid South” (once Democratic, now Republican). Within its bounds lies a brutal legacy of divide and conquer that, to this day, politicizes the Bible by claiming that poverty results from sins against God and teaches poor white people in particular that, although they may themselves have little or nothing, they are at least “better” than people of color.

At the end of the bloody march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, Martin Luther King explained the age-old politics of division in the region this way:

 If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow… And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man… And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, their last outpost of psychological oblivion.

That “psychological bird” was seasoned and cooked in a volatile mix of racist pseudo-science, economic orthodoxy, and bad religion. In fact, it retained its enormous power in large part by using the Bible and a version of Christianity to validate plunder and human suffering on a staggering scale. De jure Jim Crow may no longer exist, but its history haunts America to this day, and the Bible continues to be weaponized to validate anti-poor, white racist political power.

As jobs and opportunity continue to vanish in twenty-first-century America and churches stand among the last truly functional institutions in many communities, the Bible, however interpreted, still influences daily life for millions. How it’s understood and preached affects the political and moral direction of the country. Consider that those Bible Belt states — where Christian nationalism (which regularly displays its own upside-down version of the Bible) now reigns supreme — account for more than 193 electoral college votes and so will play a key role in determining the fate of Donald Trump and Mike Pence in November.

I had my own experience with that version of biblical and theological interpretation and its growing role in our national politics in June 2019 during a hearing of the Budget Committee of the House of Representatives. Its subject was poverty in America and the economic realities of struggling families. A racially and geographically diverse group of leaders of the Poor People’s Campaign (of which I’m the co-chair) were invited to testify on those realities. Alongside us that day were two Black pastors invited by Republican congressmen to stand as examples of how faith and hard work is the only recipe for a good and stable life for the impoverished.

We had come to present what we’ve called the Poor People’s Moral Budget, a study showing that the United States does have the money to end poverty, hunger, homelessness, and more, just not the political will to do so. In response, members of the committee turned to the same tired stereotypes about why so many of us in such a wealthy country are poor. Some cited the supposed failure of the 1960s War on Poverty as evidence that programs of social uplift just don’t work, while ignoring the dramatic way politicians had undercut those initiatives in the years that followed. Like those pastors, others replied with tales of their own success rising out of economic hardship via bootstrap individualism and they plugged Christian charity as the way to alleviate poverty. I listened to them all as they essentially promoted a heretical theology that claimed people suffer from poverty largely because they’re estranged from God and lack a deep enough faith in Jesus.

That day, the walls of that House committee room rang with empty words twisting what the Bible actually says about the poor. One Republican representative typically remarked that, although he was familiar with the Bible, he had never found anyplace in it “where Jesus tells Caesar to care for the poor.” Another all-too-typically suggested that Christian charity, not government-sponsored programs, is the key to alleviating poverty.

Someone less familiar with the arguments of such politicians might have been surprised to hear so many of them seeking theological cover. As a biblical scholar and a student of the history of social movements, I know well how religious texts actually instruct us to care for the poor and dispossessed. As a long-time organizer, I’ve learned that those in power now regularly, even desperately, seek to abuse and distort the liberating potential of our religious traditions.

Indeed, in response to that representative, Reverend William Barber, my Poor People’s Campaign co-chair, and I pointed out how interesting it was that he identified himself with Caesar (not necessarily the most flattering comparison imaginable, especially as biblical Christianity polemicizes against Caesar and the Roman empire). Then I detailed for him many of the passages and commandments in the Bible that urge us to organize society around the needs of the poor, forgive debts, pay workers a living wage, rather than favoring either the rich or “Caesar.” That, of course, is indeed the formula of the Trump era (where, in the last six pandemic months, the 643 wealthiest Americans raked in an extra $845 billion, raising their combined wealth by 29%). I also pointed out that the most effective poverty-reduction programs like Head Start are federally funded, neither philanthropic nor a matter of Christian charity.

Good news from the poor In the Poor People’s Campaign, we often start our organizing meetings by showing a series of color-coded maps of the country. The first has the states that have passed voter suppression laws since 2013; the next, those with the highest poverty rates; then, those that have not expanded Medicaid but have passed anti-LGBTQ laws. And so it goes. Our final map displays the states densest with self-identified evangelical Protestants.

I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that those maps overlap almost perfectly, chiefly in the Bible Belt, but also in the Midwest, the Mid-Atlantic states, and even in parts of the Northeast and West. The point is to show how inextricably connected the battle for voting rights, healthcare, and other critical resources is to the battle for the Bible. The stakes are measured in the health of the entire nation, because the same politicians who manipulate the Bible and the right to vote to win elections then pass immoral budgets and policies.

When Vice President Pence altered that line from the Book of Hebrews, he was charging headfirst onto that very blood-soaked battlefield with a desecrated Bible in hand. The question is: why should he and other Christian nationalists have the power to define Christianity? If they are so intent on “fixing their eyes on Old Glory,” shouldn’t they also fix their eyes on what Jesus actually said?

The Greek word evangelia, out of which “evangelical” comes, means bringing good news to those made poor by systems of exploitation. The Bible’s good news, also defined as gospel, talks again and again about captives being freed, slaves released, and all who are oppressed being taken care of. It’s said that were you to cut out every one of its pages that mentions poverty, the Bible would fall apart. And when you actually read the words on those pages, you see that the gospel doesn’t talk about the inevitability of poverty or the need for charity, but the responsibilities of the ruling authorities to all people and the possibility of abundance for all.

At a time when 43.5% of Americans are poor or one fire, storm, health-care crisis, pandemic, eviction, or job loss from poverty, it couldn’t be more important for Americans to begin to reckon with this reality and our moral obligation to end it. Instead, politicians pass voter suppression laws, kick kids off food programs, and allow the poisoning of our water, air, and land, while Christian nationalist religious leaders bless such policies and cherry-pick biblical verses to justify them as all-American. Consider such a reality not simply a matter of a religious but a political, economic, and moral crisis that, in the midst of a pandemic, is pushing this country ever closer to the brink of spiritual death.

If America is still worth saving, this is no longer a battle anyone should sit out.

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

Copyright ©2020 Liz Theoharis — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 September 2020

Word Count: 2,732

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Until recently deemed irrevocably in Donald Trump’s column, Ohio has been thrown into play as November’s election hurtles near.

A series of opinion polls since the spring have put Trump neck and neck with Joe Biden. Analysts say that makes Ohio a mineshaft canary for the president’s reelection, regardless of whether he ultimately carries the state.

“A close outcome in Ohio means that Trump has lost enough support in the Midwest that he will lose the states he really needs,” says Kyle Kondik, an expert on Ohio politics and elections.

That both parties wrote off the state as a battleground this year seemed logical. After all, Republicans hold the governor’s mansion, the legislature, every senior elected state office, one U.S. Senate seat, and all but two of 16 U.S. congressional districts.

Trump won the state last time by eight points, more than double Barack Obama’s margin of victory four years earlier. Hillary Clinton won all the state’s major cities except Dayton, which she lost by a hair. But Trump carried all but eight of Ohio’s 88 counties, and overwhelmingly in the more rural ones.

The results in 2016 painted Ohio’s political map as a strawberry tart sprinkled with a handful of blueberries. But things may have changed. If the state really is up for grabs, it is owed to a congealing and unstable brew of defecting conservatives, disgusted suburbanites, and pacified progressives.

Last November, the Spectator alerted readers to the real possibility of a Democratic comeback in Ohio and nearby states, the prospects for which would improve if the party’s primaries produced a moderate like Biden.

Despite some defections, polling suggests most rural voters and working-class white voters remain with the president. But urban liberals, many of whom stayed home four years ago to spite Clinton, appear ready to turn out for Biden. Suburban voters, especially women put off by Trump as a person, may tip the balance.

“Joe Biden might not have been their first choice, but maybe he was their third choice, and that’s good enough for them,” says Bill Wood, a magazine editor and founding member of a progressive political group in the booming Columbus suburb of Westerville. “There couldn’t be bigger difference between the two parties.”

While losing the national popular vote by three million ballots, Trump gained the White House with the electoral votes of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. He carried each state, whose demographics and voter concerns resemble Ohio’s, by less than a percentage point.

An August poll of polls by FiveThirtyEight, a statistical analytics firm, showed Biden ahead in Ohio by the thinnest of margins. In comparison, the website had Biden leading in Michigan by more than seven points; in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania by more than six.

Many expect those three Midwestern states, and perhaps a few others, to decide November’s contest.

“Ohio is going to vote to the right of the nation again,” says Kondik, the elections expert. “If it is close either way, that suggests that Trump is losing.”

Although many see this November’s vote as a referendum on Trump, the state Republican Party has troubles of its own, after years of complete political control.

Governor Mike DeWine remains popular for his handling of the pandemic. But the party was rocked in July when Larry Householder, the powerful speaker of the state legislature, was indicted on charges of taking $60 million in bribes to pass legislation favoring a utility.

“People are questioning the current direction of the Republican Party and are open to voting for the alternative,” Wood says. “We see it in people we talk to, neighbors who have been reliably Republican in the past. It will have a very significant effect in towns that are traditionally Republican.”

A late-July survey by the Bliss Institute, a think tank at the University of Akron, put Biden four points ahead, 46 to 42, just outside the margin of error.

“Without a doubt, Ohio is a battleground,” says political scientist David Cohen, the institute’s acting director.

One newspaper’s illustration of the survey results shows Biden’s support cutting across Ohio like a multihued sash — from the deep-blue Cleveland area in the northeast to the robin-egg tint in the erstwhile Republican redoubt of metropolitan Cincinnati in the south.

“The suburbs are now pretty rapidly changing from being a strength of Republicanism to being a bastion of the Democrats,” Cohen says. “Educated women, especially in the suburbs, are disgusted by Trump’s language. It’s not only in Ohio: people across the country are tired of the craziness.”

Barb Lewis, a conservative Republican county commissioner in the suburbs north of Columbus, agrees.

“We’re seeing a huge gender gap,” Lewis says of the more prosperous and growing communities in her Delaware County. “There certainly is a reticence among people because of the president’s personal style.”

But Lewis, a political scientist who taught election campaigns at Ohio State University, says those suburbanites’ disdain of Trump as a person could be overcome by support for the conservative judges he’s appointed and economic policies he’s favored. Fear of crime and protest violence — in Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Kenosha, Wisconsin — could erode white suburban support for racial equality efforts, a major Democratic theme.

“When their personal safety is at stake, they will vote for whoever will protect them,” Lewis says. Not surprisingly, an ad blitz by the Trump campaign played to those worries, warning viewers that “you won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”

Both Biden and Kamala Harris have been criticized by more left-leaning Democrats and independents for their records of being tough on crime. That may help them fend off Trump’s demagogic attacks.

But Lewis says that many voters in her suburban world may still vote for Trump but be unwilling to talk about it with anyone but their closest family and friends. “If they say they are for Trump, then they will have to defend it immediately,” she says.

Clinton garnered some 300,000 fewer votes in Ohio in 2016 than Obama did in 2012. Trump, in turn, bested Mitt Romney’s turnout by nearly a quarter-million votes.

Trump excited white rural and working-class urban voters. Many others who lean Democratic either voted for him or stayed home to spite Clinton, figuring she would easily win.

With November’s vote a clear referendum on Trump — and Sanders publicly supporting Biden — the rifts in the Democratic ranks have been healed for now, analysts and Democratic operatives say.

“I see some semblance of getting in line and behind the ticket,” says Chris Redfern, who resigned his nine-year chairmanship of the state’s squabbling Democratic Party after Republicans swept state elections in 2014. “This thing is baked. I don’t know many undecided voters. Biden wins.”

Most white working-class voters, who exit polls suggest make up more than half of the electorate, will likely stick with Trump, says Dave Betras, a longtime Democratic operative in Mahoning County, which anchors Ohio’s battered steel industry.

Clinton barely won the county, which includes the once reliably blue and union city of Youngstown, while Trump surged. Signs supporting Trump, many of them handmade, flourish in yards across the region this summer, Betras said, eclipsing the few backing Biden.

“I’ve never seen anyone defy political gravity like he does,” Betras says. “He’s the smartest stupid person I know. He has a talent and a knack to feel the mood. He seems to know what feeds the bad angels on people’s backs.”

“They say they know he’s crazy,” Betras says of Trump backers he knows. “They don’t care.”

Maybe they don’t. But Chris Gibbs, a longtime Republican stalwart in southwestern Ohio, does.

Gibbs, a 62-year-old former Republican county chairman and election board president, says he reluctantly jumped aboard the train after Trump won the 2016 nomination. Though disgruntled by trade tensions that sapped grain exports, Gibbs consoled himself with Trump’s judicial appointments and regulatory rollbacks.

He finally stepped off the train, Gibbs says, when Trump kowtowed to Vladimir Putin at their 2018 Helsinki summit.

“The Republican Party was a welcoming place, where disparate views were brought together,” Gibbs said of his old political home. “Everyone had the opportunity to be heard. Today’s Republican Party has no resemblance to that. It’s a populist cult that’s all about tearing down.”

Now Gibbs and a handful of other conservatives have founded Operation Grant, a local affiliate of the Lincoln Project, the movement of never-Trump conservatives that has been churning out damning ads against Trump.

He and his fellow Ohio deserters — all locally prominent Republicans — have no illusions about swaying a majority of their party against Trump. John Kasich, the conservative and once-popular former Ohio governor who has endorsed Biden, is widely vilified by Ohio Republicans.

Gibbs and his colleagues just hope to convince enough Republicans to make a difference.

“To me, this is a matter of conscience,” says Phil Heimlich, a Cincinnati lawyer who has served as a Republican city and county commissioner.

“There are a significant number of Republicans in this state who are fed up with Trump,” says Heimlich. “These are the people we are trying to reach. We’re saying to them, let’s put country first and party second. The man is a danger to the country and a threat to democracy.”

For his part, Gibbs points to polling that suggests Trump’s support in rural voters has been cut from about 30 points to nine.

“There is still strong support of the president. These are conservative people,” Gibbs say of his neighbors in Shelby County, a rural county north of Dayton that gave Trump 78 percent of the vote. “But everybody has their internal red lines. We are trying to get the word out in rural communities that it is OK to change your mind. . . . You can stand up.”

As a staff correspondent for the Houston Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, and other newspapers, Dudley Althaus has spent his career reporting on politics and other issues in Texas, the U.S.-Mexico border, and across Latin America.

Copyright ©2020 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 September 2020

Word Count: 1,617

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 25 September 2020

Word Count: 790

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 24 September 2020

Word Count: 842

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Whether you’re reading this with your morning coffee, just after lunch, or on the late shift in the wee small hours of the morning, it’s 100 seconds to midnight. That’s just over a minute and a half. And that should be completely unnerving. It’s the closest to that witching hour we’ve ever been.

Since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has adjusted its Doomsday Clock to provide humanity with an expert estimate of just how close all of us are to an apocalyptic “midnight” — that is, nuclear annihilation. A century ago, there was, of course, no need for such a measure. Back then, the largest explosion ever caused by humans had likely occurred in Halifax, Canada, in 1917, when a munitions ship collided with another vessel, in that city’s harbor. That tragic blast killed nearly 2,000, wounded another 9,000, and left 6,000 homeless, but it didn’t imperil the planet. The largest explosions after that occurred on July 16, 1945, in a test of a new type of weapon, an atomic bomb, in New Mexico and then on August 6, 1945, when the United States unleashed such a bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Since then, our species has been precariously perched at the edge of auto-extermination.

No one knows precisely how many people were killed by the world’s first nuclear attack. Around 70,000, nearly all of them civilians, were vaporized, crushed, burned, or irradiated to death almost immediately. Another 50,000 probably died soon after. As many as 280,000 were dead, many of radiation sickness, by the end of the year. (An atomic strike on the city of Nagasaki, three days later, is thought to have killed as many as 70,000.) In the wake of the first nuclear attack, little was clear. “What happened at Hiroshima is not yet known,” the New York Times reported that August 7th and the U.S. government sought to keep it that way, portraying nuclear weapons as nothing more than super-charged conventional munitions, while downplaying the horrifying effects of radiation. Despite the heroic efforts of several reporters just after the blast, it wasn’t until a year later that Americans — and then the rest of the world — began to truly grasp the effects of such new weaponry and what it would mean for humanity from that moment onward.

We know about what happened at Hiroshima largely thanks to one man, John Hersey. He was a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and former correspondent for TIME and LIFE magazines. He had covered World War II in Europe and the Pacific, where he was commended by the secretary of the Navy for helping evacuate wounded American troops on the Japanese-held island of Guadalcanal. And we now know just how Hersey got the story of Hiroshima — a 30,000-word reportorial masterpiece that appeared in the August 1946 issue of the New Yorker magazine, describing the experiences of six survivors of that atomic blast — thanks to a meticulously researched and elegantly written new book by Lesley Blume, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World.

Only the essentials When I pack up my bags for a war zone, I carry what I consider to be the essentials for someone reporting on an armed conflict. A water bottle with a built-in filter. Trauma packs with a blood-clotting agent. A first-aid kit. A multitool. A satellite phone. Sometimes I forgo one or more of these items, but there’s always been a single, solitary staple, a necessity whose appearance has changed over the years, but whose presence in my rucksack has not.

Once, this item was intact, almost pristine. But after the better part of a decade covering conflicts in South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya, and Burkina Faso, it’s a complete wreck. Still, I carry it. In part, it’s become (and I’m only slightly embarrassed to say it) something of a talisman for me. But mostly, it’s because what’s between the figurative covers of that now-coverless, thoroughly mutilated copy of John Hersey’s Hiroshima — the New Yorker article in paperback form — is as terrifyingly brilliant as the day I bought it at the Strand bookstore in New York City for 48 cents.

I know Hiroshima well. I’ve read it cover-to-cover dozens of times. Or sometimes on a plane or a helicopter or a river barge, in a hotel room or sitting by the side of a road, I’ll flip it open and take in a random 10 or 20 pages. I always marveled at how skillfully Hersey constructed the narrative with overlapping personal accounts that make the horrific handiwork of that weapon with the power of the gods accessible on a human level; how he explained something new to this world, atomic terror, in terms that readers could immediately grasp; how he translated destruction on a previously unimaginable scale into a cautionary tale as old as the genre itself, but with an urgency that hasn’t faded or been matched. I simply never knew how he did it until Lesley Blume pulled back the curtain.

Fallout, which was published last month — the 75th anniversary of America’s attack on Hiroshima — offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse of just how Hersey and William Shawn, then the managing editor of the New Yorker, were able to truly break the story of an attack that had been covered on the front pages of the world’s leading newspapers a year earlier and, in the process, produced one of the all-time great pieces of journalism. It’s an important reminder that the biggest stories may be hiding in plain sight; that breaking news coverage is essential but may not convey the full magnitude of an event; and that a writer may be far better served by laying out a detailed, chronological account in spartan prose, even when the story is so horrific it seems to demand a polemic.

Hersey begins Hiroshima in an understated fashion, noting exactly what each of the six survivors he chronicles was doing at the moment their lives changed forever. “Not everyone could comprehend how the atomic bomb worked or visualize an all-out, end-of-days nuclear world war,” Blume observes. “But practically anyone could comprehend a story about a handful of regular people — mothers, fathers, grade school children, doctors, clerks — going about their daily routines when catastrophe struck.”

As she points out, Hersey’s authorial voice is never raised and so the atomic horrors — victims whose eyeballs had melted and run down their cheeks, others whose skin hung from their bodies or slipped off their hands like gloves — speak for themselves. It’s a feat made all the more astonishing when one considers, as Blume reveals, that its author, who had witnessed combat and widespread devastation from conventional bombing during World War II, was so terrified and tormented by what he saw in Hiroshima months after the attack that he feared he would be unable to complete his assignment.

Incredibly, Hersey got the story of Hiroshima with official sanction, reporting under the scrutiny of the office of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, General Douglas MacArthur, the head of the American occupation of defeated Japan. His prior reportage on the U.S. military, including a book focused on MacArthur that he later called “too adulatory,” helped secure his access. More amazing still, the New Yorker — fearing possible repercussions under the recently passed Atomic Energy Act — submitted a final draft of the article for review to Lieutenant General Lesley Groves, who had overseen the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb, served as its chief booster, and went so far as to claim that radiation poisoning “is a very pleasant way to die.”

Whatever concessions the New Yorker may have made to him have been lost in the sands of time, but Groves did sign off on the article, overlooking, as Blume notes, “Hersey’s most unsettling revelations: the fact that the United States had unleashed destruction and suffering upon a largely civilian population on a scale unprecedented in human history and then tried to cover up the human cost of its new weapon.”

The impact on the U.S. government would be swift. The article was a sensation and immediately lauded as the best reporting to come out of World War II. It quickly became one of the most reprinted news pieces of all time and led to widespread reappraisals by newspapers and readers alike of just what America had done to Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It also managed to shine a remarkably bright light on the perils of nuclear weapons, writ large. “Hersey’s story,” as Blume astutely notes, “was the first truly effective, internationally heeded warning about the existential threat that nuclear arms posed to civilization.”

Wanted: a Hersey for our time It’s been 74 years since Hiroshima hit the newsstands. A Cold War and nuclear arms race followed as those weapons spread across the planet. And this January, as a devastating pandemic was beginning to follow suit, all of us found ourselves just 100 seconds away from total annihilation due to the plethora of nuclear weapons on this earth, failures of U.S.-Russian cooperation on arms control and disarmament, the Trump administration’s trashing of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and America’s efforts to develop and deploy yet more advanced nukes, as well as two other factors that have sped up that apocalyptic Doomsday Clock: climate change and cyber-based disinformation.

The latter, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is corrupting our “information ecosphere,” undermining democracy as well as trust among nations, and so creating hair-trigger conditions in international relations. The former is transforming the planet’s actual ecosystem and placing humanity in another kind of ultimate peril. “Dangerous rivalry and hostility among the superpowers increases the likelihood of nuclear blunder,” former California Governor Jerry Brown, the executive chair of the Bulletin, said earlier this year. “Climate change just compounds the crisis. If there’s ever a time to wake up, it’s now.”

Over the last three-plus years, however, President Donald Trump has seemingly threatened at least three nations with nuclear annihilation, including a U.S. ally. In addition to menacing North Korea with the possibility of unleashing “fire and fury” and his talk of ushering in “the end” of Iran, he even claimed to have “plans” to exterminate most of the population of Afghanistan. The “method of war” he suggested employing could kill an estimated 20 million or more Afghans, almost all of them civilians. John Hersey, who died in 1993 at the age of 78, wouldn’t have had a moment’s doubt about what he meant.

Trump’s nuclear threats may never come to fruition, but his administration, while putting significant effort into deep-sixing nuclear pacts, has also more than done its part to accelerate climate change, thinning rules designed to keep the planet as habitable as possible for humans. A recent New York Times analysis, for example, tallied almost 70 environmental rules and regulations — governing planet-warming carbon dioxide and methane emissions, clean air, water, and toxic chemicals — that have been rescinded, reversed, or revoked, with more than 30 additional rollbacks still in progress.

President Trump has not, however, been a total outlier when it comes to promoting environmental degradation. American presidents have been presiding over the destruction of the natural environment since the founding of the republic. Signed into law in 1862 by Abraham Lincoln, the Homestead Act, for instance, transformed countless American lives, providing free land for the masses. But it also transferred 270 million acres of wilderness, or 10% of the United States, into private hands for “improvements.”

More recently, Ronald Reagan launched attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency through deregulation and budget cuts, while George W. Bush’s administration worked to undermine science-based policies, specifically through the denial of anthropogenic climate change. The difference, of course, was that Lincoln couldn’t have conceptualized the effects of global warming (even if the first study of the “greenhouse effect” was published during his lifetime), whereas the science was already clear enough in the Reagan and Bush years, and brutally self-apparent in the age of Trump, as each of them pursued policies that would push us precious seconds closer to Armageddon.

The tale of how John Hersey got his story is a great triumph of Lesley Blume’s Fallout, but what came after may be an even more compelling facet of the book. Hersey gave the United States an image problem — and far worse. “The transition from global savior to genocidal superpower was an unwelcome reversal,” she observes. Worse yet for the U.S. government, the article left many Americans reevaluating their country and themselves. It’s beyond rare for a journalist to prompt true soul-searching or provide a moral mirror for a nation. In an interview in his later years, Hersey, who generally avoided publicity, suggested that the testimony of survivors of the atomic blasts — like those he spotlighted — had helped to prevent nuclear war.

“We know what an atomic apocalypse would look like because John Hersey showed us,” writes Blume. Unfortunately, while there have been many noteworthy, powerful works on climate change, we’re still waiting for the one that packs the punch of “Hiroshima.” And so, humanity awaits that once-in-a-century article, as nuclear weapons, climate change, and cyber-based disinformation keep us just 100 clicks short of doomsday.

Hersey provided a template. Blume has lifted the veil on how he did it. Now someone needs to step up and write the world-changing piece of reportage that will shock our consciences and provide a little more breathing room between this vanishing moment and our ever-looming midnight.

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch (where this article originated) and a fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author most recently of Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan and of the bestselling Kill Anything That Moves.

Copyright ©2020 Nick Turse — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 24 September 2020

Word Count: 2,243

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 September 2020

Word Count: 783

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CAIRO – The Mediterranean countries allied under the cover of the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum have moved to a more realistic stage after announcing the transformation of this project into a regional organisation that aims to counter Turkish harassment and officially turn Egypt into the natural gas capital of the region.

On Tuesday, representatives of Egypt, Greece, Italy, Cyprus, Jordan and Israel concluded, in Cairo, an agreement to officially convert the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum into a regional organisation. The Palestinian representative missed the meeting which was held via video conferencing.

This move represents an important development for Cairo in its multifaceted dispute with Ankara. Through this step, Egypt has achieved a strategic goal that enables it to become a regional energy centre and a major gas capital in the eastern Mediterranean, and gives it advantages due to its good infrastructure in this field.

Observers said that the members of the fledgling organisation will strengthen their cooperation through developing projects to connect their electricity grids via underwater cables in the Mediterranean extending from Egypt to some European countries, projects that strengthen the idea of cooperation in all forms of available energy such that the deficit in one type of energy experienced by one member country could be compensated by the abundance of the same energy in another member country.

But this move also constitutes a blow to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ambitions in the Mediterranean. Turkey has been trying to disrupt this cooperation by all means and methods, such as signing two naval and security memoranda of understanding with the Libyan Government of National Accord months ago to use them as a pretext for gas exploration operations in the eastern Mediterranean.

The Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum, which was established in January of last year, has become the first international organisation that brings together gas producers, consumers, and transit countries in the world into one entity, unlike many similar international bodies whose membership is limited to exporting or importing countries.

This shared vision gives influence to all actors and those involved in the production and trade of natural gas in the eastern Mediterranean region, in order to coordinate policies aimed at developing a sustainable regional market for gas and to address the ambitions of some countries that see that they have a right to the natural riches of the Mediterranean but without respecting international laws and regional agreements.

Political experts and decision-making circles believe that the fledgling organisation will contribute to supporting and financing the existing and new infrastructure for gas, such as pipelines and export facilities in member states, reducing the cost of production and transportation, and ensuring a steady supply of gas at competitive prices to markets at the heart of Europe and elsewhere from the eastern Mediterranean.

The forum is credited with establishing an advisory committee for the gas industry last November as a permanent dialogue platform between governments and stakeholders, including investors, gas dealers and financing institutions.

The step establishes important pillars for peace and stability in the eastern Mediterranean region, and collectively would repel Turkey’s aggression in case it violates the rights of any of the member states, as Turkey continues its provocations against both Greece and Cyprus, as well as its many skirmishes with France.

Supporters consider the organisation to be a significant historical development that would consolidate the values of peace and cooperation in a tense region, through the efforts of the forum to make energy resources a motive for ending conflicts in the region, especially the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the Turkish-Greek conflict.

The forum also opens promising prospects for cooperation to countries wishing to deal with its assets and objectives in a flexible manner and without infringing on the rights of others or appropriating their wealth.

East Med Gas Forum supporters assert that the most important characteristic of the forum, compared to many similar organisations, is that it is open to any country or regional or international organisation to join, as long as the prospective member adopts the values and objectives of the forum and wants to participate in cooperation for the well-being of the entire region, without resorting to force.

It is expected that the forum will draw great international interest in the foreseeable future, especially from the Mediterranean countries that have not joined yet, such as Lebanon, Syria and Libya, and perhaps Spain, Portugal and Algeria, and from world importers of gas, such as India, China and Japan, and even Turkey may find itself forced to join at a later stage and submit to its conditions.

France had already requested to join the forum earlier this year, and the United States has become a permanent observer, which gives the forum important international weight.

French and American energy giants, such as Total, Noble Energy and ExxonMobil, have already obtained licenses to extract gas in the countries of the region, which makes Paris and Washington very likely to resort to their military capabilities in the Mediterranean to defend the interests of these companies should the need for such a step arise in the future.

Some observers point out that transforming the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum into a full-fledged international organisation represents a strong blow to the ambitions of Turkey and its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in eastern Mediterranean gas. Turkey had already received such a blow with the signing on August 6 of a borders demarcation agreement between Egypt and Greece. Before that, Italy and Greece had already signed a similar agreement.

Observers add that there is a tangible shift in the US position towards Turkish policy in the eastern Mediterranean, based on the resumption of arms exports to Cyprus, and the signs of a deal whereby oil production and exports will be resumed in Libya, in exchange for pressure on Turkey in Libya.

Transforming the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum into an international organisation formally protects the interests of its member states, and contributes to the vigorous pursuit of economic integration between them, based on gas and electricity production and trade projects.

The success of the new organisation depends on future developments in the political and geopolitical situations in the eastern Mediterranean, which are experiencing a high degree of uncertainty and instability at the moment, as a result of deep disagreements and chronic conflicts in the region.

This in turn raises major questions about the opportunities available to the East Med Gas Forum countries to make the best use of the promising gas discoveries and reserves. It also raises important questions about the possibility that the institutionalisation of the forum would lead to further escalating the conflicts with Turkey.

Furthermore, the current conditions of the natural gas market in the European Union and global gas prices represent a major challenge for the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Organization, as international gas prices have recently dropped, due to the slowdown in global demand.

In the event of a normal return to production in global markets, the forum countries will be forced to enter into intense competition with Russian, American and Qatari gas exports, which is the second big challenge that represents a major test of the forum’s effectiveness and its ability to develop a creative vision that enables it to compete internationally.

Dr Ahmed Qandil is an Egyptian researcher in Asian affairs.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 September 2020

Word Count: 1,196

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Two numbers reveal everything you need to know about the U.S. economy over the past two decades. Between 1999 and 2018, the S&P 500 grew 6 percent annually, after accounting for dividends (2 percent annual gain) and inflation (2 percent annual loss). Stock prices more than doubled in value over this time period. Wall Street boomed.

Over the same time period, Main Street saw 0 percent gains. Workers got shut out. According to official government statistics, median household income rose a tiny fraction of one percentage point annually, after adjusting for inflation, and less than 3 percent in total. But this overstates how poorly average Americans have fared. A 2013 change in how the government collected its data led to a 3 percent increase in reported income. That means middle-class incomes actually changed little over two decades — even as more household members were working and people were working more jobs and more hours.

These two numbers (6 percent annual growth in the S&P and 0 percent net growth in median household income) are connected. Average incomes stagnated because corporations absconded with all economic gains; their profits then increased stock prices. The two numbers also delivered a dire political outcome. A third-rate real estate developer with a history of racism and misogyny became president because Americans sought change and thought Trump understood this, that he would help Main Street.

People voted for Donald Trump feeling they had nothing to lose after decades of income stagnation.

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.

Donald Trump frequently complains about the U.S. trade deficit — the United States buys more from other nations than they buy from us. For him, this means U.S. jobs get sent abroad, hurting the U.S. economy. We are losers.

But the president gets things backward. U.S. trade deficits stem from an economy that is doing relatively better than its main trading partners. Low U.S. unemployment leads to more consumer spending and increased imports. High unemployment abroad leads foreign consumers to spend less. As they buy fewer U.S.-made goods, we export less.

China is an exception here and accounts for a majority of the U.S. trade deficit. This is because China doesn’t play by the rules. It steals intellectual property and protects Chinese firms from foreign competition. Cheap labor, and less spending on worker protection, lets China provide inexpensive parts to multinational firms. This puts downward pressure on U.S. wages as workers are threatened with having their jobs move to China.

President Obama developed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (which, in fairness, received uneven support here at home and a general thumbs-down from labor) to pressure China to end its trade restrictions and recognize intellectual property, using the combined force of China’s main trading partners as a cudgel. President Trump withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership upon taking office. China persevered with its trade policies. President Trump failed to change anything. The U.S. trade deficit with China in goods barely changed: from $347 billion in 2016 (pre-Trump) it fell to $346 billion in 2019.

Then there was Nafta — according to Trump, the worst trade deal ever and the cause of the U.S. trade deficit with Canada and Mexico. On July 1, Trump’s deal, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, replaced Nafta. Yet this new North American trade deal differs little from Nafta. To the extent it does, it provides greater incentives for U.S. manufacturers to shed American jobs and move them to Mexico. So much for helping Main Street.

Trump has done even worse when it comes to taxation. He ran for president promising “the largest tax reductions… for the middle class” and a 35 percent tax cut for a middle-class family with two children. Actually, his 2017 tax bill did little for average Americans. Small tax breaks for some middle-income households will disappear over the next few years. Yet large corporations and the rich received huge tax cuts. After-tax corporate profits reached record levels.

As the tax bill made its way through Congress in 2017, the president claimed that 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 bigly.

Businesses’ investment grew more slowly in 2018 and 2019 than in 2016 and 2017. This is not surprising, as the new tax law provides huge incentives for companies to invest overseas rather than in the United States. Foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies are now taxed at half the 21 percent corporate rate that applies to domestic profits.

Firms didn’t spend more money training their workers. Instead, record corporate profits were used to buy back outstanding shares of stock, with the goal of raising stock prices. Median household income rose $553 the year that Trump’s tax cut took effect — far from what was promised, and below the $847 increase in 2017 and the $978 gain in pre-Trump 2016.

President Trump was also wrong when he claimed his tax bill would be revenue neutral because the enormous economic growth it unleashed (5 percent or more) would generate enough tax revenue to pay for it. The economy grew at a rate of 2.5 percent in 2018 and 2019, a bit more than the 2 percent growth the two years prior to the tax cut, but half the promised 5 percent minimum. The result was a government budget $200 billion deeper in red ink each year.

Budget deficits are desirable sometimes. If consumers and companies can’t or won’t spend, the government must step in; otherwise, goods won’t be sold and workers will get laid off. At other times budget deficits are harmful. The 2017 tax cut was a huge mistake because it didn’t boost the economy and because workers on Main Street got nothing. It was an even bigger mistake because budget surpluses (or small deficits) during good economic times make it is easier to run large deficits in difficult times. The lost revenues could have supported the millions of Americans forced to stay at home in order to reduce coronavirus infections and save lives.

Covid-19 has led to massive job and income losses and rising household indebtedness. Wall Street panicked. From mid-February to mid-March, stock prices tumbled, reversing their entire gain during the Trump administration.

President Trump panicked in turn. Rather than addressing the pandemic, he pushed to reopen the economy, caring more about falling stock prices and how they might impact his election prospects than about American lives. Instead of listening to public health experts, he politicized the coronavirus. Initially he denied the problem, claiming it would disappear by April. He promoted phony cures that “someone” told him would work. He proudly pranced about without a face mask and held rallies without social distancing, scorning the two best ways to stop the coronavirus from spreading.

The latter action put Trump’s own supporters at risk. If they caught Covid-19 at a Trump rally, they would lose weeks of work while in quarantine, even if they had no symptoms, and months of work if they did. Covid-19 would spread to friends and family, putting lives at risk.

We can estimate the lives lost from not taking simple precautions and from reopening the U.S. economy too soon. Had the U.S. and Canadian Covid-19 death rate been the same, 96,000 fewer Americans would have died from Covid-19 (as of August 22). This is more than half of all U.S. Covid-19 deaths. If trends continue, by November more than 130,000 Americans will have died because the United States has not done as well as Canada. The rich can escape to their country estates, working safely from home and/or living off their wealth. Those getting ill and dying reside on Main Street.

Steven Pressman is professor of economics at Colorado State University, author of Fifty Major Economists, 3rd edition (Routledge, 2013), and president of the Association for Social Economics.

Copyright ©2020 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 September 2020

Word Count: 1,362

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

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

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

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

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

Absolutely. Except when it bends toward evil.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 September 2020

Word Count: 787

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