With Covid-19 incapacitating startling numbers of U.S. service members and modern weapons proving increasingly lethal, the American military is relying ever more frequently on intelligent robots to conduct hazardous combat operations. Such devices, known in the military as “autonomous weapons systems,” include robotic sentries, battlefield-surveillance drones, and autonomous submarines. So far, in other words, robotic devices are merely replacing standard weaponry on conventional battlefields. Now, however, in a giant leap of faith, the Pentagon is seeking to take this process to an entirely new level — by replacing not just ordinary soldiers and their weapons, but potentially admirals and generals with robotic systems.

Admittedly, those systems are still in the development stage, but the Pentagon is now rushing their future deployment as a matter of national urgency. Every component of a modern general staff — including battle planning, intelligence-gathering, logistics, communications, and decision-making — is, according to the Pentagon’s latest plans, to be turned over to complex arrangements of sensors, computers, and software. All these will then be integrated into a “system of systems,” now dubbed the Joint All-Domain Command-and-Control, or JADC2 (since acronyms remain the essence of military life). Eventually, that amalgam of systems may indeed assume most of the functions currently performed by American generals and their senior staff officers.

The notion of using machines to make command-level decisions is not, of course, an entirely new one. It has, in truth, been a long time coming. During the Cold War, following the introduction of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with extremely short flight times, both military strategists and science-fiction writers began to imagine mechanical systems that would control such nuclear weaponry in the event of human incapacity.

In Stanley Kubrick’s satiric 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove, for example, the fictional Russian leader Dimitri Kissov reveals that the Soviet Union has installed a “doomsday machine” capable of obliterating all human life that would detonate automatically should the country come under attack by American nuclear forces. Efforts by crazed anti-Soviet U.S. Air Force officers to provoke a war with Moscow then succeed in triggering that machine and so bring about human annihilation. In reality, fearing that they might experience a surprise attack of just this sort, the Soviets later did install a semi-automatic retaliatory system they dubbed “Perimeter,” designed to launch Soviet ICBMs in the event that sensors detected nuclear explosions and all communications from Moscow had been silenced. Some analysts believe that an upgraded version of Perimeter is still in operation, leaving us in an all-too-real version of a Strangelovian world.

In yet another sci-fi version of such automated command systems, the 1983 film WarGames, starring Matthew Broderick as a teenage hacker, portrayed a supercomputer called the War Operations Plan Response, or WOPR (pronounced “whopper”) installed at the North American Aerospace Command (NORAD) headquarters in Colorado. When the Broderick character hacks into it and starts playing what he believes is a game called “World War III,” the computer concludes an actual Soviet attack is underway and launches a nuclear retaliatory response. Although fictitious, the movie accurately depicts many aspects of the U.S. nuclear command-control-and-communications (NC3) system, which was then and still remains highly automated.

Such devices, both real and imagined, were relatively primitive by today’s standards, being capable solely of determining that a nuclear attack was under way and ordering a catastrophic response. Now, as a result of vast improvements in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, machines can collect and assess massive amounts of sensor data, swiftly detect key trends and patterns, and potentially issue orders to combat units as to where to attack and when.

Time compression and human fallibility The substitution of intelligent machines for humans at senior command levels is becoming essential, U.S. strategists argue, because an exponential growth in sensor information combined with the increasing speed of warfare is making it nearly impossible for humans to keep track of crucial battlefield developments. If future scenarios prove accurate, battles that once unfolded over days or weeks could transpire in the space of hours, or even minutes, while battlefield information will be pouring in as multitudinous data points, overwhelming staff officers. Only advanced computers, it is claimed, could process so much information and make informed combat decisions within the necessary timeframe.

Such time compression and the expansion of sensor data may apply to any form of combat, but especially to the most terrifying of them all, nuclear war. When ICBMs were the principal means of such combat, decisionmakers had up to 30 minutes between the time a missile was launched and the moment of detonation in which to determine whether a potential attack was real or merely a false satellite reading (as did sometimes occur during the Cold War). Now, that may not sound like much time, but with the recent introduction of hypersonic missiles, such assessment times could shrink to as little as five minutes. Under such circumstances, it’s a lot to expect even the most alert decision-makers to reach an informed judgment on the nature of a potential attack. Hence the appeal (to some) of automated decision-making systems.

“Attack-time compression has placed America’s senior leadership in a situation where the existing NC3 system may not act rapidly enough,” military analysts Adam Lowther and Curtis McGiffin argued at War on the Rocks, a security-oriented website. “Thus, it may be necessary to develop a system based on artificial intelligence, with predetermined response decisions, that detects, decides, and directs strategic forces with such speed that the attack-time compression challenge does not place the United States in an impossible position.”

This notion, that an artificial intelligence-powered device — in essence, a more intelligent version of the doomsday machine or the WOPR — should be empowered to assess enemy behavior and then, on the basis of “predetermined response options,” decide humanity’s fate, has naturally produced some unease in the community of military analysts (as it should for the rest of us as well). Nevertheless, American strategists continue to argue that battlefield assessment and decision-making — for both conventional and nuclear warfare — should increasingly be delegated to machines.

“AI-powered intelligence systems may provide the ability to integrate and sort through large troves of data from different sources and geographic locations to identify patterns and highlight useful information,” the Congressional Research Service noted in a November 2019 summary of Pentagon thinking. “As the complexity of AI systems matures,” it added, “AI algorithms may also be capable of providing commanders with a menu of viable courses of action based on real-time analysis of the battlespace, in turn enabling faster adaptation to complex events.”

The key wording there is “a menu of viable courses of action based on real-time analysis of the battlespace.” This might leave the impression that human generals and admirals (not to speak of their commander-in-chief) will still be making the ultimate life-and-death decisions for both their own forces and the planet. Given such anticipated attack-time compression in future high-intensity combat with China and/or Russia, however, humans may no longer have the time or ability to analyze the battlespace themselves and so will come to rely on AI algorithms for such assessments. As a result, human commanders may simply find themselves endorsing decisions made by machines — and so, in the end, become superfluous.

Creating robot generals Despite whatever misgivings they may have about their future job security, America’s top generals are moving swiftly to develop and deploy that JADC2 automated command mechanism. Overseen by the Air Force, it’s proving to be a computer-driven amalgam of devices for collecting real-time intelligence on enemy forces from vast numbers of sensor devices (satellites, ground radars, electronic listening posts, and so on), processing that data into actionable combat information, and providing precise attack instructions to every combat unit and weapons system engaged in a conflict — whether belonging to the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, or the newly formed Space Force and Cyber Command.

What, exactly, the JADC2 will consist of is not widely known, partly because many of its component systems are still shrouded in secrecy and partly because much of the essential technology is still in the development stage. Delegated with responsibility for overseeing the project, the Air Force is working with Lockheed Martin and other large defense contractors to design and develop key elements of the system.

One such building block is its Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS), a data-collection and distribution system intended to provide fighter pilots with up-to-the-minute data on enemy positions and help guide their combat moves. Another key component is the Army’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System (IBCS), designed to connect radar systems to anti-aircraft and missile-defense launchers and provide them with precise firing instructions. Over time, the Air Force and its multiple contractors will seek to integrate ABMS and IBCS into a giant network of systems connecting every sensor, shooter, and commander in the country’s armed forces — a military “internet of things,” as some have put it.

To test this concept and provide an example of how it might operate in the future, the Army conducted a live-fire artillery exercise this August in Germany using components (or facsimiles) of the future JADC2 system. In the first stage of the test, satellite images of (presumed) Russian troop positions were sent to an Army ground terminal, where an AI software program called Prometheus combed through the data to select enemy targets. Next, another AI program called SHOT computed the optimal match of available Army weaponry to those intended targets and sent this information, along with precise firing coordinates, to the Army’s Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System (AFATDS) for immediate action, where human commanders could choose to implement it or not. In the exercise, those human commanders had the mental space to give the matter a moment’s thought; in a shooting war, they might just leave everything to the machines, as the system’s designers clearly intend them to do.

In the future, the Army is planning even more ambitious tests of this evolving technology under an initiative called Project Convergence. From what’s been said publicly about it, Convergence will undertake ever more complex exercises involving satellites, Air Force fighters equipped with the ABMS system, Army helicopters, drones, artillery pieces, and tactical vehicles. Eventually, all of this will form the underlying “architecture” of the JADC2, linking every military sensor system to every combat unit and weapons system — leaving the generals with little to do but sit by and watch.

Why robot generals could get it wrong Given the complexity of modern warfare and the challenge of time compression in future combat, the urge of American strategists to replace human commanders with robotic ones is certainly understandable. Robot generals and admirals might theoretically be able to process staggering amounts of information in brief periods of time, while keeping track of both friendly and enemy forces and devising optimal ways to counter enemy moves on a future battlefield. But there are many good reasons to doubt the reliability of robot decision-makers and the wisdom of using them in place of human officers.

To begin with, many of these technologies are still in their infancy, and almost all are prone to malfunctions that can neither be easily anticipated nor understood. And don’t forget that even advanced algorithms can be fooled, or “spoofed,” by skilled professionals.

In addition, unlike humans, AI-enabled decision-making systems will lack an ability to assess intent or context. Does a sudden enemy troop deployment, for example, indicate an imminent attack, a bluff, or just a normal rotation of forces? Human analysts can use their understanding of the current political moment and the actors involved to help guide their assessment of the situation. Machines lack that ability and may assume the worst, initiating military action that could have been avoided.

Such a problem will only be compounded by the “training” such decision-making algorithms will undergo as they are adapted to military situations. Just as facial recognition software has proved to be tainted by an over-reliance on images of white males in the training process — making them less adept at recognizing, say, African-American women — military decision-making algorithms are likely to be distorted by an over-reliance on the combat-oriented scenarios selected by American military professionals for training purposes. “Worst-case thinking” is a natural inclination of such officers — after all, who wants to be caught unprepared for a possible enemy surprise attack? — and such biases will undoubtedly become part of the “menus of viable courses of action” provided by decision-making robots.

Once integrated into decision-making algorithms, such biases could, in turn, prove exceedingly dangerous in any future encounters between U.S. and Russian troops in Europe or American and Chinese forces in Asia. A clash of this sort might, after all, arise at any time, thanks to some misunderstanding or local incident that rapidly gains momentum — a sudden clash between U.S. and Chinese warships off Taiwan, for example, or between American and Russian patrols in one of the Baltic states. Neither side may have intended to ignite a full-scale conflict and leaders on both sides might normally move to negotiate a cease-fire. But remember, these will no longer simply be human conflicts. In the wake of such an incident, the JADC2 could detect some enemy move that it determines poses an imminent risk to allied forces and so immediately launch an all-out attack by American planes, missiles, and artillery, escalating the conflict and foreclosing any chance of an early negotiated settlement.

Such prospects become truly frightening when what’s at stake is the onset of nuclear war. It’s hard to imagine any conflict among the major powers starting out as a nuclear war, but it’s far easier to envision a scenario in which the great powers — after having become embroiled in a conventional conflict — reach a point where one side or the other considers the use of atomic arms to stave off defeat. American military doctrine, in fact, has always held out the possibility of using so-called tactical nuclear weapons in response to a massive Soviet (now Russian) assault in Europe. Russian military doctrine, it is widely assumed, incorporates similar options. Under such circumstances, a future JADC2 could misinterpret enemy moves as signaling preparation for a nuclear launch and order a pre-emptive strike by U.S. nuclear forces, thereby igniting World War III.

War is a nasty, brutal activity and, given almost two decades of failed conflicts that have gone under the label of “the war on terror,” causing thousands of American casualties (both physical and mental), it’s easy to understand why robot enthusiasts are so eager to see another kind of mentality take over American war-making. As a start, they contend, especially in a pandemic world, that it’s only humane to replace human soldiers on the battlefield with robots and so diminish human casualties (at least among combatants). This claim does not, of course, address the argument that robot soldiers and drone aircraft lack the ability to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants on the battlefield and so cannot be trusted to comply with the laws of war or international humanitarian law — which, at least theoretically, protect civilians from unnecessary harm — and so should be banned.

Fraught as all of that may be on future battlefields, replacing generals and admirals with robots is another matter altogether. Not only do legal and moral arguments arise with a vengeance, as the survival of major civilian populations could be put at risk by computer-derived combat decisions, but there’s no guarantee that American GIs would suffer fewer casualties in the battles that ensued. Maybe it’s time, then, for Congress to ask some tough questions about the advisability of automating combat decision-making before this country pours billions of additional taxpayer dollars into an enterprise that could, in fact, lead to the end of the world as we know it. Maybe it’s time as well for the leaders of China, Russia, and this country to limit or ban the deployment of hypersonic missiles and other weaponry that will compress life-and-death decisions for humanity into just a few minutes, thereby justifying the automation of such fateful judgments.

Michael T. Klare writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. He is the author of 15 books, the latest of which is All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change.

Copyright ©2020 Michael T. Klare — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 25 August 2020

Word Count: 2,659

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Almost 3,000 Americans died on Sept. 11, 2001. That day led to the militarization of local police, the hardening of the southern border, the erosion of civil liberties and the destruction of a country that did us no harm. Republican voters said it was worth it, and for the most part, everyone else agreed. After all, nearly 3,000 died in a single day.

Everyone else has since reconsidered, but not Republicans. According to a Pew survey taken 15 years after the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which killed nearly 4,500 Americans and countless Iraqis (no one truly knows how many), most Republicans (61 percent) said it was the right thing to do.

In 2018, when the poll was taken, you might have been in a generous mood and thought to yourself: well, I get it. They’re wrong, but they’re wrong for the right reasons. After all, nearly 3,000 Americans are still dead. Turns out they were wrong for the wrong reasons. The worst reasons.

According to a CBS News poll released over the weekend, fifty-seven percent of Republicans say the number of Americans dead from the Covid-19 pandemic is “acceptable.” The death toll is over 180,600 people, per Worldometer. That’s more than 60 times the number of people murdered on 9/11.

That 180,689 in 2020 is “acceptable,” while 2,977 in 2001 wasn’t, tells you something about a majority of Republicans: Loyalty and patriotism are less important, or not important at all, compared to partisanship. More precisely, that “acceptable” depends on who the enemy is.

In 2001, it was “Muslims.” “They” killed “us.” The Iraq invasion was “our” revenge. In 2020, it’s other Americans. “They” are trying to destroy “our” country. That “they” are dying is quite all right.

It isn’t just “they,” of course. The new coronavirus is moving rapidly into rural states, where the president’s support is strongest, and it’s set to decimate areas that are aging faster than the national average while having less access to hospitals, urgent care and emergency services.

Reuters reported today that new pandemic cases have jumped by 15 percent in Oklahoma, 14 percent in South Dakota, and 9 percent in Missouri in the last week. The head of the White House coronavirus task force told CNN Sunday the pandemic is “extraordinarily widespread” in red states.

Dr. Deborah Birx said: “To everybody who lives in a rural area, you are not immune or protected from this virus.” I’m guessing Birx was pushing back against the mistaken notion that the pandemic is a city thing, not a country thing. But even if Republicans living in rural areas finally figure out that they’re just as susceptible to disease and death as Black and brown people are, they’ll still insist that Donald Trump is doing a fine job, and that even if a few of their kin are killed off, it won’t be the president’s fault.

What this tells you is that partisanship trumps patriotism. What this tells you moreover is never ever — ever — underestimate the power of masochism. Four and a half thousand soldiers died seeking vengeance against make-believe “Islamofascists.” That was the right thing to do. Dying to stop make-believe “Antifa” from destroying America is just as right.

I could be wrong, of course, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to anticipate a majority of Republican voters, perhaps 57 percent, flipping their view by the time of Joe Biden’s inauguration (if he wins, which is still a big if). They will accuse Biden before he even takes office of failing to contain the pandemic. They will say one death is too many.

Remember that most Republicans said the economy was terrible while Barack Obama was in power. A majority of Republicans changed their minds before Trump’s swearing in. The economy had not changed in a month. What changed was who was in charge.

And they will do this even as they mount resistance to the new president’s order to mandate wearing face masks in public. (Biden has promised to do this if that’s what public health scientists recommend.) They will defy the order in the name of “individual liberty” and rebellion against “the tyranny” of “big government.” And they will defy the order even if doing so kills them, adding a death toll that Republican voters themselves say is evidence of the new Democratic president destroying America.

Remember that red states could have expanded Medicaid, as a provision of the Affordable Care Act, and they could have done so in accordance with an old Republican plan for universal health care (Obamacare was hatched by conservative intellectuals in the 1980s). But most didn’t because it was the enemy’s idea. Yes, many Republicans died sooner than they might have, but so what? Better dead than tread.

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 August 2020

Word Count: 790

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The announcement of a ceasefire by the rival factions in the Libyan conflict sparked cautious optimism, amid fears that its implementation could be stalled due to the likely emergence of differences over details.

The head of the Presidential Council of the Government of National Accord, Fayez al-Sarraj, and the Speaker of the Libya House of Representatives, Aguila Saleh, issued two statements on Friday, declaring a ceasefire across the whole of the Libyan territory.

The two statements included a call for “the resumption of oil production and export, and blocking its revenues in a special account at the Libyan Foreign Bank, which will not be touched until a political settlement is reached in accordance with the outcomes of the Berlin Conference, and with the guarantee of the UN mission and the international community.”

The two statements reflected consensus on a number of points, including the issue of oil revenues and making Sirte and Jufra regions a demilitarised zone. But divergences on some details regarding the contested regions, which were the focus of escalation during the last period, may impede the implementation of the agreement.

Political analyst Jalal Harchaoui, a researcher specialising in Libyan affairs at the Clingendael Institute for International Relations in The Hague, wondered if “this declaration was fully achievable.” He believes that “its implementation is likely to be difficult,” noting that there are several regional powers that may play a destabilising role in the agreement.

It is clear that there are concerns about the commitment of the Tripoli government (the Government of National Accord) to the ceasefire, as it might simply take it as a truce to give Turkey time to rearrange its cards in Libya, and to fragment the regional position rejecting Ankara’s interventions. This is why a complete ceasefire would be the appropriate formula for any agreement that may occur.

According to observers, Turkey’s experiences of ceasefires in Syria confirm that Ankara is good at using them to manoeuvre. Besides, it wants to resort to a temporary truce in order to absorb regional and international anger.

Some analysts view the Tripoli government’s approval of the ceasefire with suspicion. They attribute its acceptance of the ceasefire to the pressures it is experiencing, whether externally or internally, especially the financial crunch caused by the stoppage in oil exports.

Observers say that the devil lies in the details of implementing the ceasefire and the necessary security arrangements regarding the demilitarised zone, and in how to prepare for parliamentary and presidential elections next March.

Al-Sarraj stressed that “achieving an actual ceasefire requires that the areas of Sirte and Jufra become demilitarised, and that the police forces of both sides agree on security arrangements inside the two areas.” Aguila Saleh, however, did not even mention Jufra and only suggested that “the city of Sirte be the temporary seat for the new Presidential Council, bringing all Libyans together and closer, provided that an official police force from various regions would secure the city, in preparation for the unification of state institutions as a basic consensual stage of the process of construction, provided that military arrangements are completed according to the UN-sponsored negotiation track (5 + 5), whose outputs will be binding once they are agreed upon and officially announced.”

While Aguila Saleh stressed the need for the police forces to be “official security forces,” that is to say, they must have national police badge numbers since before 2011, observers do not rule out that the Government of National Accord would not hesitate to provide militia elements who recently underwent some training in policing in order to prepare them for this particular task and offer them as regular police forces.

It is unlikely that the army, which has not commented on the agreement, will agree to withdraw from Sirte and Jufra before receiving guarantees that GNA mercenaries and militias will not be part of the forces which will secure the demilitarised zone. There are expectations, however, that the army will demand to leave negotiations regarding Sirte and Jufra till last and not start with them as the Islamists and Turkey want.

Aguila Saleh’s statement reflects an endeavour to transform the city of Sirte into a political capital that does not belong to any of Libya’s three historical regions: Tripoli, Barga and Fezzan. However, it is unlikely that the GNA, and behind it Ankara and Washington, will be open to the idea, given that Tripoli believes that the central region belongs to it and will not easily let go of it, especially since most of the oil fields and terminals are concentrated there.

The Libya Revival bloc led by the Parliament’s envoy to the European Union and the African Union had proposed to United Nations Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, an initiative aiming “to declare the city of Sirte a demilitarized zone under the control of the United Nations, and to freeze all battle fronts in order to avoid the risk of an imminent regional clash between the two largest armies in our region, namely the Turkish army and the Egyptian army.”

Since the Libyan Army’s withdrawal from Tripoli, Turkey has been threatening to launch a war to seize Sirte, Jufra and the oil terminals, which was met with a clear Egyptian threat to counter any attack on them.

Several Western powers were receptive to Friday’s developments as they feared a conflagration in Libya would force them to take sides in the conflict. They find the ceasefire agreement a convenient solution to satisfy the GNA and Turkey without having to openly broach the thorny topic of Syrian mercenaries in Tripoli for the moment, and without having to put pressure on Khalifa Haftar after his approval of resuming oil production and export a few days ago.

Mona el-Mahrouki is a Tunisian writer.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 24 August 2020

Word Count: 948

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On August 26, 2020, Alice in Wonderland will get some company. She will be joined in New York City’s Central Park by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Sojourner Truth, the first statues there of women who, unlike Alice, actually existed. The monument is a gift to the park from Monumental Women, a non-profit organization formed in 2014. The group has raised the $1.5 million necessary to commission, install, and maintain the new “Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument” and so achieve its goal of “breaking the bronze ceiling” in Central Park.

Preparations for its unveiling on the centennial anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which granted suffrage (that is, the right to vote) to women, are in full swing. Celebratory articles have been written. The ceremony will be live-streamed. Viola Davis, Meryl Streep, Zoe Saldana, Rita Moreno, and America Ferrera have recorded monologues in English and Spanish as Stanton, Anthony, and Truth. The Pioneers Monument, breaking what had been a moratorium, is the first new statue placed in Central Park in decades.

As statues topple across the country, the Pioneers Monument is a test case for the future of public art in America. On the surface, it’s exactly what protesters have been demanding: a more diverse set of honorees who better reflect our country’s history and experience. But critics fear that the monument actually reinforces the dominant narrative of white feminism and, in the process, obscures both historical pain and continuing injustice.

Ain’t I a woman? In 2017, Monumental Women asked artists to propose a monument with statues of white suffragists Anthony and Stanton while “honoring the memory” of other voting-rights activists. In 2018, they announced their selection of Meredith Bergmann’s design in which Anthony stood beside Stanton who was seated at a writing desk from which unfurled a scroll listing the names of other voting rights activists.

Famed feminist Gloria Steinem soon suggested that the design made it look as if Anthony and Stanton were actually “standing on the names of these other women.” Similar critical responses followed and, in early 2019, the group reacted by redesigning the monument. The scroll was gone, but Anthony and Stanton remained.

The response: increasing outrage from critics over what the New York Times’ Brent Staples called the monument’s “lily-white version of history.” The proposed monument, wrote another critic in a similar vein, “manages to recapitulate the marginalization Black women experienced during the suffrage movement,” as when white organizers forced Black activists to walk at the back of a 1913 women’s march on Washington. Historian Martha Jones in an op-ed in the Washington Post criticized the way the planned monument promoted the “myth” that the fight for women’s rights was led by Anthony’s and Stanton’s “narrow, often racist vision,” and called for adding escaped slave, abolitionist, and women’s rights promoter Sojourner Truth.

Although the New York City Public Design Commission had approved the design with just Anthony and Stanton, Monumental Women did indeed rework the monument, adding a portrait of Truth in June 2019. The sculptor would later make additional smaller changes in response to further criticism about her depiction of Truth, including changing the positioning of her hands and body to make her a more active participant in the scene. (In an earlier version, she was seated farther from Stanton’s table, her hands resting quietly as if she were merely listening to the white suffragists.)

Their changes didn’t satisfy everyone. More than 20 leading scholars of race and women’s suffrage, for instance, sent a letter to Monumental Women, asking it to do a better job showing the racial tensions between the activists. Their letter acknowledged that Truth had indeed been a guest in Stanton’s home during a May 1867 Equal Rights Association meeting. They noted, however, that this was before white suffragists fully grasped the conflict between the fight for the right of women to vote and the one for the political participation of African Americans, newly freed by the Civil War, in the American democratic system. Stanton and Anthony came to believe that, of the two struggles, (white) women’s votes should take precedence, though they ultimately lost when Congress passed the 15th Amendment in 1870, extending the vote to Black men.

The tensions between race and women’s rights arose again when, in 1919, Congress finally passed the 19th Amendment, intending to give women the right to vote. Its ratification, however, was delayed largely because Southern states feared the very idea of granting the vote to Black women. During the summer of 1920, realizing that they still needed to convince one more Southern state to ratify the amendment, white suffragists began a campaign to remind white southerners that the Jim Crow laws already on their books to keep Black men from voting would do the same for Black women. Tennessee then voted to ratify.

The white suffragists would prove all too accurate. When southern Black women tried to exercise their new right to vote, they would be foiled by discriminatory literacy tests, poll taxes, or just plain violence. In 1926, for instance, Indiana Little, a teacher in Birmingham, Alabama, led a march of hundreds of African Americans on the city’s voter registration office. They were not, however, permitted to register and Little was both beaten and sexually assaulted by a police officer. (Meanwhile, Native American women remained without American citizenship, much less the right to vote, until 1924.)

For Black women, according to Martha Jones, author of the forthcoming book Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, the 1965 Voting Rights Act would prove to be the “15th and 19th Amendments rolled into one.” It would give teeth to what had been merely a promise when it came to granting them the vote. And they would prove a crucial part of the fight to make it a reality. Amelia Boynton Robinson, the first Black woman in Alabama to run for Congress (her campaign motto: “A voteless people is a hopeless people”), even turned her husband’s memorial service into Selma’s first mass meeting for voting rights. She then became a key organizer of the 1965 march from Selma to the state capital, Montgomery, during which an Alabama state trooper beat her brutally as she tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. A widely published photograph of her lying on the ground, bloody and unconscious, would form part of the campaign that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act a few months later.

Glamour shots in bronze With its gentle portraits of Stanton, Anthony, and Truth, the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument is far from that image of a bloodied protester. In following the model of the very kind of traditional monument it means to replace, it leaves out the pain and the struggle of the women’s movement.

It didn’t have to be that way. In 2015, one of Monumental Women’s leaders told the New York Times that they wanted a memorial that wouldn’t be “old-fashioned.” Nonetheless, the design they ultimately selected, with its realistic, larger-than-life portrait statues on a pedestal, would prove to be in precisely that traditional style.

The group has claimed that just such a stylistic compromise was necessary because the New York Parks Department refused to allow an “overtly modern” monument in Central Park. (That department disagrees that it should be blamed for the monument’s style. Its press officer told me that they “encourage innovative contemporary art” and pointed to a number of examples of modern, abstract monuments that “grace our parks” in Queens, Manhattan, Staten Island, and Brooklyn.) The Pioneers Monument sits on a leafy promenade nicknamed “Literary Walk” because of its statues of authors like William Shakespeare and Robert Burns. It fits in perfectly there, and would go hardly less well with the future “National Garden of American Heroes” President Trump demanded in response to Black Lives Matter protests. In his executive order to make it so, he specified that the statues in his garden must be realistic, “not abstract or modernist.”

Monumental Women’s style choice conveys important messages. For one, monuments traditionally show the people they honor in the most flattering form imaginable and this one is no exception. Bergmann has sculpted the women as attractively as possible (while being more or less faithful to the historical record). If the monument represents the moment in 1857 when the three women were together, Truth would have been 70 years old and Anthony, the youngest, in her late 40s. Yet all three are shown with unwrinkled faces, smooth hands, and firm necks. Stanton’s hair falls in perfect curls. While they may not look exactly young, neither are they aging. Think of the monument as the equivalent of Glamour Shots in bronze.

As historian Lyra Monteiro, known for her critique of the way playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda erased the slave past in his Broadway hit “Hamilton” — even as he filled the roles of the founding fathers with actors of color — pointed out to me, the monument makes the three women into feminists of a type acceptable even to conservative viewers. Besides portraying them as conventionally attractive, the sculpture uses symbols that emphasize the more traditional feminine aspects of their lives: Truth’s lap full of knitting; Stanton’s delicate, spindly furniture; and Anthony’s handbag. Who could doubt that their armpit hair is also under control?

The women’s faces are, by the way, remarkably emotionless, which is unsurprising for a monument in the traditional style. Since Greco-Roman antiquity, heroic statuary has famously sported faces of almost preternatural calm. Such expressions, however, only contribute to what Monteiro called the concealment of “the struggle” that marked feminism from its first moments.

Sojourner Truth, for instance, was known for speeches like “Ain’t I a Woman?” in which she drew deep and emotional reactions from listeners by describing the sufferings she experienced before escaping from slavery. The triumphalist calm of the Pioneers Monument avoids those emotions and so belongs to a long tradition in American statuary that celebrates revolutionary deeds as, in Monteiro’s words, “very old and very, very done.” Such monuments ask viewers to offer thanks for victory instead of spurring them on to continue the fight.

Monteiro also points out that the choice of commemorating universal suffrage is telling in itself. No matter how many fierce debates it once inspired, the idea that women should have the right to vote is today uncontroversial. But other women’s rights issues remain hotly debated. Imagine statuary celebrating the fight for the right to abortion or to use the bathroom of your choice.

As an example of monuments that energize viewers in an ongoing fight instead of tranquilizing them into thinking victory has been won, Monteiro pointed to Mexico City’s antimonumentos (anti-monuments), large if unofficial displays aimed at calling out government negligence. A typical one, made of metal and portraying the international symbol for women with a raised fist at its center, installed during a 2019 protest march in one of that city’s main squares, bears an inscription indicating that protestors were not going to shut up when it came to the gender-based violence that then continues unchecked in their country. City officials have let such antimonumentos remain in place, undoubtedly fearing negative publicity from their removal. So they continue to act as reminders that the government’s actions are both questionable and being scrutinized.

The triumphalism of the Pioneers Monument suggests that the problem of women’s rights is oh-so-settled. But of course, in the age of Donald Trump in particular, the kinds of oppressions that Truth, Stanton, and Anthony fought couldn’t be more current. Many feminists of color feel that white feminists still tend to ignore racial issues and seldom have the urge to share leadership in activism.

And today, despite Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s recent choice of Kamala Harris as his running mate, the voting rights of women of color remain imperiled. Since a 2013 Supreme Court decision struck down one of the Voting Rights Act’s key protections, minority voters have found it ever more difficult to exercise their theoretical right to vote amid growing efforts by Republican officials to suppress minority (and so Democratic) votes more generally. The fight for women’s votes is hardly over, no matter what the Pioneers Monument might have to say about it.

Todd Fine, a preservation activist, told me that he wishes Monumental Women had focused their discussions on what a truly diverse community might have wanted for such a commemoration rather than responding to bursts of criticism with modest tweaks of their proposed statue.

One explanation for the group’s resistance to change is that it is led by exactly the type of well-off, educated, white women whose right to vote hasn’t been in question since 1920. In the same period that they were reacting to criticism of their proposed monument’s exclusion of women of color, I found that Monumental Women’s tax filings reveal that they added three women of color to their board of directors. Diversification of leadership is certainly a positive step, but the organization’s president and other officers remain the same. And at least two of the new directors had already raised funds for the planned Stanton and Anthony monument, writing and speaking positively about the organization and its goals, and so could be expected to be at best modest critics of its path.

Historic lies and scented candles One reaction to the debate around the Pioneers Monument is to think that Monumental Women simply didn’t make the best decision about whom to honor or how to do it. But historian Sally Roesch Wagner has no doubt that searching for the right honoree is itself not the right way to go. She told me that, when it comes to the feminist movement, monuments to individuals are “a standing historic lie” because women’s rights have been won “by a steady history of millions of women and men… working together at the best of times, separately at the worst.” Wagner believes that to honor individuals for such achievements today is to disempower the movement itself.

Early feminists horrified the public. The Pioneers Monument is designed to soothe. It invites you to light a scented candle rather than to burn your bra. Bronze is long-lasting, but perhaps it’s no longer the best material for monuments. In a moment when a previously almost unimaginable American president is defending traditional Confederate monuments in a big way, perhaps something else is needed.

The playwright Ming Peiffer will premier “Finish the Fight,” an online theatrical work, as August ends. She aims to let us listen to some of the Black, Asian, Latinx, and Native American activists whose roles in the fight for the vote have been forgotten. Perhaps in 2020, the best monuments to the fight for women’s rights — for all our rights — may look nothing like what most of us would imagine.

Erin L. Thompson writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is a professor of art crime at John Jay College (CUNY). An expert on the deliberate destruction of art, she is the author of the forthcoming Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments (Norton, 2021). Follow her on Twitter @artcrimeprof.

Copyright ©2020 Erin L. Thompson — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 24 August 2020

Word Count: 2,468

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Joe Biden’s best mode is righteous indignation. That was true as a US senator, as a vice president and now as the Democratic nominee for president. “I give you my word: If you entrust me with the presidency, I will draw on the best of us, not the worst,” he said in last night’s acceptance speech. “I will be an ally of the light, not the darkness.”

Darkness and light are indeed the choices ahead of us. Donald Trump is bringing the country to the brink of ruin with his treacherous response to the Covid-19 pandemic that has killed over 177,000 Americans, infected 5.7 million others, and unemployed scores of millions. If he wins, expect more devastation — more corruption, joblessness, sickness and death. I haven’t even mentioned the broad attrition of our liberties. As one former administration official put it, if Trump wins, expect “shock and awe.”

The problem with this binary — the opposition of darkness and light — is that most Americans are preconditioned by Hollywood and rose-tinted interpretations of US history to believe that light will win in the end. Indeed, the Democratic National Convention, in order to gin up enthusiasm for the nominee and dispel voter apathy and cynicism, especially among youth, inadvertently reinforced that conditioning.

While citizens must believe in their abilities to defeat tyranny, they must not maintain the fairy-tale illusion that everything’s going to work out fine in the end. We can’t allow ourselves to trust that the system is fair and that all we need to do is ensure that enough people get out and vote. We need to imagine the worst-case scenario, and come up with a practical plan. We need to get out in front of the president, accuse him now of trying to steal the election. This is not panic or paranoia in the slightest. If you must, think of it this way:

Do you trust Trump to accept defeat? I didn’t think so.

Before Joe Biden gave the best speech of his life Thursday night, the president phoned into Sean Hannity’s show on Fox. He said he was going to send “sheriffs” and “law enforcement” out to the polls to make sure only Americans vote. Millions and millions of mail-in ballots are going out to people, he said in effect, and no one’s ever heard of such a thing! The implication here is there’s a massive underhanded conspiracy afoot. He was laying the rhetorical groundwork for calling Joe Biden’s victory fraudulent.

The best ending to this story is Donald Trump refusing to accept defeat, but walking away nonetheless, nursing his wounds by telling himself lies. The worst ending is Trump manufacturing a national emergency for which he must invoke national emergency powers.

“China attacked our elections!” Trump could say, triggering the US Justice Department to investigate “voter fraud.” While an investigation is pending, the election would be thrown to either the Supreme Court or the House, where factors could culminate in Biden’s defeat.

Timothy Wirth and Tom Rogers gamed out one scenario. Rosa Brooks’ group gamed out others. Each scenario except a landslide win for Biden resulted in street violence, which could reinforce Trump’s emergency powers.

About those emergency powers. They are potentially limitless. Elizabeth Goitein is the co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s national security program. She told CBS News recently that “presidential emergency action documents” (PEADs) were developed during the Cold War in the event of a Soviet nuclear strike. They are secret, Goitein said. Not even the Congress knows what they are.

“From public sources, we know that at least in the past these documents have purported to do things that are not permitted by the Constitution — things like martial law and the suspension of habeas corpus and the roundup and detention of people not suspected of any crime.”

It’s not hard to imagine Trump’s secret police force deployed as it was in Portland recently.

PEADs were secret because past presidents didn’t want to frighten people. Trump, however, has talked publicly of possessing “secret powers” that are “total.” “I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about,” he said in March.

A month later, he said: “When somebody is the President of the United States, the authority is total, and that’s the way it’s got to be — it’s total.” Wirth and Rogers said US Attorney General Bill Barr is believed to be developing a legal opinion arguing that “the president can exercise emergency powers in certain national security situations, while stating that the courts, being extremely reluctant to intervene in the sphere of a national security emergency, would allow the president to proceed unchecked.”

If you trust your assessment of Trump’s trustworthiness, you know the worst-case scenario is not beyond imagining. It might not be likely, but it’s plausible, and as such, we need a plan. Just in case. Congressional Democrats need one. The Biden campaign needs one. Defenders of democracy need one.

More importantly, however, we need to talk about the worst-case scenario, openly and honestly, without paranoia but without expecting an ideal outcome. Do you trust Trump to accept defeat? Then get ready.

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 August 2020

Word Count: 856

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You have noticed that Donald Trump surrounds himself with crimes and criminals. His first campaign manager was arrested for battery. His second was convicted and jailed for crimes related to Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. His third campaign manager, Steven Bannon, was detained and indicted this morning on a charge of defrauding donors to his charity. (This is, of course, just a trio from the orchestra of reprobates found among Trump’s “friends.”)

According to a press release by US attorneys in New York City, “Bannon and another organizer of the campaign, Air Force veteran Brian Kolfage, claimed that they would not take any compensation as part of the campaign, called We Build The Wall, but that was a lie. Bannon, prosecutors alleged, received more than $1 million through a non-profit he controlled, and Kolfage received more than $350,000,” the Washington Post reported.

Bannon’s indictment came a few days after we learned that the US Senate Intelligence Committee referred him to the US Department of Justice for possible criminal investigation. The panel released Tuesday its fifth and final bipartisan report with facts pretty much confirming that Trump, when a candidate, cheated by asking for and getting help from Vladimir Putin’s operation to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. According to reporting by the Post, the committee “reserved its harshest allegations for the president’s former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, former campaign co-chair Sam Clovis and private security contractor Erik Prince, saying it had reason to believe all three had lied to congressional investigators — a potential felony.”

As this was happening, a judge this morning rejected Trump’s bid to block Manhattan’s district attorney from accessing his federal tax returns. The court dismissed Trump’s claim that Cyrus Vance “had embarked on a politically motivated fishing expedition, saying in his decision that ‘established judicial process’ did not ‘automatically transform into an incidence of incapacitating harassment and ill-will merely because the proceedings potentially may implicate the president,’” the New York Times said. The president is almost certain to appeal the case all the way to the Supreme Court.

I have no idea if Bannon is going to talk. I have no idea if the president is going to protect him the way he protected Roger Stone (Trump commuted his sentence). I am not a legal expert. I have no prosecutorial insight to offer. I’m here to point things out for the benefit of normal people trying to make sense of politics.

If you put all this and more together, you have to ask yourself honestly: what is the real reason the president wants reelection? It’s not because he likes the job. It’s not because he likes governing. I’m not even sure he likes the attention. It’s looking more like a way to stay out of jail.

Barack Obama spoke last night at the (virtual) Democratic National Convention. He talked about what he always talks about, wrote Jonathan Bernstein: “the challenges of American democracy, the collective enterprise of overcoming those challenges, and how the long struggle for equality by Black Americans is central to all of that.”

But he left his most acute criticism for his successor’s work ethic. “I did hope, for the sake of our country, that Donald Trump might show some interest in taking the job seriously; that he might come to feel the weight of the office and discover some reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care,” Obama said.

But he never did. For close to four years now, he’s shown no interest in putting in the work; no interest in finding common ground; no interest in using the awesome power of his office to help anyone but himself and his friends; no interest in treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves.

Setting aside Trump’s legal problems, that’s one way of looking at it. Centering on his legal problems, however, makes his work ethic seem secondary to criming and doing everything he can to prevent others from holding him responsible for those crimes.

No one knows what’s in his tax returns, but given the years’ long defense, using every tool available to the person running the United States government, it must be something big. It’s only a matter of time before the truth comes to light. It might be true that presidents can’t be indicted. Presidents aren’t presidents for life, though.

A new Justice Department won’t sit on criminal referrals the way US Attorney General Bill Barr is. Nor is a new attorney general going to protect a former president’s tax returns. At some point Donald Trump is likely to face ruin, and everything he’s doing now might be interpreted as desperate efforts to delay and bargain with the inevitable.

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 August 2020

Word Count: 798

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Seventeen years ago, against the advice of my parents, I decided to become a public school teacher. Once I did, both my mother and father, educators themselves, warned me that choosing to teach was to invite attacks from those who viewed the profession with derision and contempt. They advised me to stay strong and push through when budgets were cut, my intellect questioned, or my dedication to my students exploited. Nobody, however, warned me that someday I might have to defend myself against those who asked me to step back into my classroom and risk my own life, the lives of my students and their families, of my friends, my husband, and my child in the middle of a global pandemic. And nobody told me that I’d be worrying about whether or not our nation’s public schools, already under siege, would survive the chaos of Covid-19.

Pushing students back into school buildings right now simply telegraphs an even larger desire in this society to return to business as usual. We want our schools to open because we want a sense of normalcy in a time of the deepest uncertainty. We want to pretend that schools (like bars) will deliver us from the stresses created by a massive public health crisis. We want to believe that if we simply put our children back in their classrooms, the economy will recover and life as we used to know it will resume.

In reality, the coronavirus is — or at least should be — teaching us that there can be no going back to that past. As the first students and teachers start to return to school buildings, images of crowded hallways, unmasked kids, and reports of school-induced Covid-19 outbreaks have already revealed the depths to which we seem willing to plunge when it comes to the safety and well-being of our children.

So let’s just call the situation what it is: a misguided attempt to prop up an economy failing at near Great Depression levels because federal, state, and local governments have been remarkably unwilling to make public policy grounded in evidence-based science. In other words, we’re living in a nation struggling to come to terms with the deadly repercussions of a social safety net gutted even before the virus reached our shores and decisions guided by the most self-interested kind of politics rather than the public good.

A return to school? For teachers like me, with the privilege of not having to work a second or third job, summer can be a time to reflect on the previous school year and prepare for the next. I take classes, read, develop new curriculum, and spend time with family and friends. Summer has been a time to catch up with all the pieces of my life I’ve neglected during the school year and recharge my physical and emotional batteries. Like many other public school teachers I know, I step away in order to step back in.

Not this summer, though. In these months, there’s been no reprieve. In Portland, Oregon, where I live, the confluence of the historic Black Lives Matter uprising, a subsequent invasion by the president’s federal agents, the hovering menace and tragic devastation of the coronavirus, and rising rates of homelessness and joblessness have contributed to a seismic disruption of the routines and structures of our community. A feeling of uncertainty and anxiety now permeates every facet of daily life. Like so many, I’ve been parenting full time without relief since March, acutely aware of the absence of the usual indispensable web of teachers, caregivers, coaches, camp counselors, family, and friends who have helped me raise my child so that I can help raise the children of others.

The dislocation from my community and the isolation caused by the breakdown of normal social ties, as well as my daughter’s and my lack of access to school, has had a profound effect on our lives. And yet, knowing all that, feeling it all so deeply, I would still never advocate sending our children back to school in person as Covid-19 still rages out of control.

Without a concerted effort to stop the spread of the virus — as cases in this country soar past five million and deaths top 170,000 — including masking mandates, widespread testing, effective contact tracing, enough funding to change the physical layout of classrooms and school buildings, a radical reduction in class sizes, and proper personal protective equipment for all school employees, returning to school becomes folly on a grand scale. Of course, an effort like that would require a kind of social cohesion, innovation, and focused allocation of resources that, by definition, is nonexistent in the age of Trump.

Sacrificing the vulnerable In late July, when it was announced that school districts across the state of Oregon would open fully online again this fall, I felt two things: enormous relief and profound grief. The experience of virtual schooling in the spring had resulted in many families suffering due to a lack of access to the social, emotional, and educational resources of school. No one understands that reality better than the teachers who have dedicated our waking hours to supporting those students and the parents who have watched them suffer.

As refreshing as it should be to hear politicians across the political spectrum communicating their worries about a widening achievement gap and the ways in which the most vulnerable American children will fall behind if they don’t experience in-person schooling, their concerns ring hollow. Our most vulnerable children are historically the least served by our schools and the most likely to get sick if they go back. Having never prioritized the needs of those very students, their families, and the communities they live in, those politicians have the audacity to demand that schools open now.

Truly caring for the health and well-being of such students during the pandemic would mean extending unemployment benefits, providing rental assistance, and enacting universal health care. The answer is hardly sending vulnerable kids into a building where they could possibly become infected and carry the virus back to communities that have already been disproportionately affected by Covid-19.

Take the example of my school, which has an air ventilation system that’s been on the fritz for more than a decade, insufficient soap or even places to wash your hands, and windows that don’t open. In other words, perfect conditions for spreading a virus. Even if I were given a face shield and ample hand sanitizer, I’d still be stuck in classrooms with far too many students and inadequate air flow. And those are just the physical concerns.

What very few people seem to be considering, no less discussing, is the long-term psychological trauma associated with the spread of the virus. What if I unknowingly infected my students or their family members? What if I brought the virus home to my family and friends? What if I contracted the virus from a student and died? No educator I know believes that online teaching will better serve our students, but stepping back into in-person learning while the virus is still out of control in America will clearly only contribute to its further spread.

Schools are unable to shoulder the burden of this crisis. Politicizing the return to school and pitting parents against teachers — as if many teachers weren’t themselves parents — is a devious way of once again scapegoating those very schools for perennial failures of funding, leadership, and policy. Forty years of the neoliberal version of austerity and divestment from public schools by both Democratic and Republican administrations have ensured that, unlike in many of the wealthiest nations on this planet, public schools in the U.S. don’t have the necessary institutional support, infrastructure, or resources to envision and carry out a safe and effective return to school.

To put all this in perspective, in its budget proposal for 2021, the Trump administration requested $66.6 billion for the Department of Education, $6.1 billion less than in 2020. In contrast, Congress just passed the National Defense Authorization Act authorizing $740 billion in spending for the Defense Department. Even with the proposed allocation of an additional $70 billion dollars for schools in the Republican-backed HEALS Act, the now-stalled second attempt to respond to the spreading pandemic, two-thirds of those funds would only be available to school districts that hold in-person classes. And because a majority of school funding is tied to local and state tax revenues, badly hit by an economy hobbled by the virus, schools will actually be operating on even smaller budgets this year.

Grassroots privatization It’s as if they want us to fail. Perhaps the most powerful foe of public education in the Trump administration, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, even threatened to withhold federal funding if local school districts decided to resume school totally online this fall. After she was reminded that she didn’t have the authority to do so, she pivoted instead to asking parents to consider other options for their children. That request amounted to encouraging them to pull their children from public schools (depriving them of essential funding) and instead seek out vouchers for private or charter schools.

DeVos didn’t just stop there. In an attempt to redirect funds allocated to low-income students by the CARES Act, Congress’s initial response to the pandemic, she ruled that school districts deciding to use that money for programs that might benefit all students (instead of just low-income students) must also pay for “equitable services” for all private schools in the district. This would potentially siphon up to $1.5 billion dollars of CARES Act money from public to private schools. Such schools have already benefited from Paycheck Protection Program loans that were distributed as part of the CARES Act. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to know that they stand to receive yet more money if anything like the present version of the Senate’s HEALS Act ever passes. It’s easy to see who wins and who loses in such an equation.

The fear and anxiety prompted by uncertainty about how public schools will function in the chaos of this moment is giving way to grassroots decision-making that will adversely affect such basic institutions for the foreseeable future and may even contribute to even more segregated schools. People like me — white, highly educated, and accustomed to having options — are scrambling to figure out individual solutions to problems that would best be solved by community organizing.

Some families are indeed choosing to pull their children out of public schools, enrolling them in online academies, private schools, or simply homeschooling their kids. Others are forming small instructional pods, or micro schools, and hiring private teachers or tutors to educate their kids.

The twisted irony of these developments is that many white people who support the Black Lives Matter movement are making decisions for their own children that will adversely affect Black students for years to come. Declining enrollment and white divestment in public schools will bring about funding shortages and educational disparities sure to undermine whatever gains those protests achieve.

The inevitable result will be more segregated schools, while the gap between the haves and the have-nots only widens. Ultimately, privatization on the smallest scale plays into the desire of those like DeVos who seek to undermine and, in the end, even potentially dismantle public education in favor of private schools and charter schools, which, unsurprisingly enough, were first formed to perpetuate school segregation.

The survival of public schools Public schools are deeply imperfect institutions. Historically, they’ve perpetuated racial inequities and solidified economic and social disparities. In many ways, they’ve failed all our children on almost every conceivable level. Their funding models are little short of criminal and the lack of resources across the system should have been (but generally wasn’t) considered unconscionable long before the coronavirus struck.

Yet institutions are made up of people and, many of them, myself included, believe that a free public education accessible to all is a foundation for hope in the future. In the end, schools may still prove to be our last best chance for salvaging what’s left of our fractured nation and the promise of democracy. Abandon them now, when they’re under threat at the federal, state, and grassroots level, and you imperil the fate of the nation.

Needed today are creative solutions that put the focus on the most vulnerable of our children. Perhaps enlisting our nation’s retirees, many of whom are currently isolated at home, to help small groups of students, or launching a civilian corps of the currently unemployed, paid to step in to rebuild critical public school infrastructure or provide supplementary support and tutoring for kids who might otherwise be left behind, would help. I know there are creative solutions out there that don’t just benefit the most privileged among us, that could, in fact, focus on the most marginalized students. Now is the time to be creative, not to withdraw from the system. Now is the time to pool resources, while amplifying the voices of students, parents, and families historically not invited into such conversations.

Long-term divestment in public education has brought America’s schools to a dangerous crossroads, where mistrust of science and expert advice is threatening the very fabric of this nation. The only way out of this mess is to reverse the tide. Do we really want to be governed by fear and self-imposed scarcity? Do we really want the gears of institutional racism to grind on, whether virtually or in person? It’s time to act more collectively, to truly put the “public” back in public schools. It’s time to set partisanship aside to protect all our children as we navigate the unknown and unknowable.

As I prepare for an academic year unlike any other, I expect to watch with terror as many of our nation’s schools, woefully unprepared, open in the midst of a pandemic. Exhausted and heartbroken, I will worry nonstop about the students and teachers walking through those doors.

Belle Chesler writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is a visual arts teacher at a public school in Beaverton, Oregon.

Copyright ©2020 Belle Chesler — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 August 2020

Word Count: 2,325

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Adam Jentleson used to be deputy chief of staff for US Senator Harry Reid. He wrote an op-ed for the New York Times Tuesday outlining concerns familiar to Editorial Board readers. Our nightmare won’t end with Donald Trump’s end. “If Mr. Biden wins, there will be a temptation to embrace a big lie: Mr. Trump was the problem, and with him gone, the Republican Party can return to normal,” Jentleson wrote. “But today’s Republican Party won’t moderate itself, because Trumpism is its natural state. Democrats should avoid the temptation to expect Republican cooperation in governing this country.”

I think Jentleson is putting things mildly. About 40 percent of the electorate approves of the president, whether he’s engaged in sabotage, corruption or negligent homicide. Those people will be with us after the election. If Joe Biden becomes president, he will no doubt order a national face-mask mandate in a bid to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus. The Republican Party will in turn mount resistance to the new president the way they did to Barack Obama, even though the effort will surely leave in its wake dead Republican voters aplenty. As I wrote Tuesday, “they will fight ‘big government tyranny’ even if that fight leads to self-destruction.” The question is whether the Democrats, in seeking good-faith governing partners, are going to play along.

If anyone doubts the futility of finding good-faith governing partners in the ranks of the Republican Party, let them consider Tuesday’s release of a nearly 1,000-page bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee (the fifth of five installments). Here’s how Patrick Tucker, an editor at the national security publication Defense One, led his reporting: “President Donald Trump’s friend and campaign advisor Roger Stone was in active discussion with Wikileaks to learn about future Russian information dumps and to help the Trump campaign,” he wrote. “Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort was also in conversations with Kremlin-backed oligarchs and Russian intelligence officers, and was trading inside campaign information in an effort to draw down his personal financial debt. It’s a picture of a campaign willfully soliciting help from a hostile foreign power and providing valuable intelligence. (Italics mine.)

The report concludes explicitly “no collusion” between Trump and Russian agents, but the actual facts of the actual report actually contradict that conclusion, according to Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes. Before outlining instances in which it kinda sorta really does look a lot like collusion, Wittes writes: “What Senate Republicans are saying about their own report comes perilously close to simple lying.”

In a press release, the Senate’s current majority leader appears to be all-in on the big lie. “Their report reaffirms Special Counsel Mueller’s finding that President Trump did not collude with Russia,” said Mitch McConnell, “These serious threats need to unite our nation. We can’t afford for them to just further divide us. That is exactly what our adversaries want.”

Let’s leave aside for the moment a few things. One, that McConnell is gaslighting the hell out of us. Two, that the president cheated once. Three, that he cheated twice when he extorted Ukraine’s president into an international criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people (for the second time). Four, that his goons (namely, Rudy Giuliani) continue seeking “dirt” on Biden from Vladimir Putin’s patsies in the Ukrainian government even after the president was impeached for doing just that. Five, that Trump retweeted that “dirt” on Sunday. Six, that the Senate Republicans decided against removing him from office despite knowing what he was doing, therefore establishing a precedent by which future presidents can safely commit treason.

Let’s leave one through six aside for a moment to focus on this latest report so we can ask: Can the Democrats trust the Republicans to govern in the country’s best interest when they have shown they can’t be trusted to say what’s in their own report about the president’s collusion with a foreign dictator who continues to mount a cyber-offensive to impact the outcome of this year’s election?

No can do, I think we can safely say.

It’s time to zap the filibuster among other reforms that would reshape the electorate as well as the structure of government, but a President Biden and his Democrats must do more. They must insist on the investigation and prosecution of a former president. Trust cannot be reestablished without reestablishing justice and accountability first.

For those worried about the precedent this would create, it’s already created. US Attorney General Bill Barr appointed prosecutor John Durham, a US attorney from Connecticut, to investigate the investigation of Trump’s collusion with the Russians. His mandate, wrote The Globalist’s Frank Vogl is to find “evidence” supporting the president’s claim of the “Russia hoax.”

“The Durham report could call for indictments against former Justice Department, FBI and other intelligence agency officials,” Vogl wrote. “Perhaps, it could even include people who served in Obama’s White House. The aim is crude: To demonstrate that the Obama-Biden Administration was crooked.”

The aim could be much more than that. Twice in two days, Trump said he’s owed a third term: “Considering we caught President Obama and sleepy Joe Biden spying on our campaign — treason — we’ll probably be entitled to another four more years.”

For those worried about an investigation being partisan, consider this. Sixty-six percent of Americans said in May that they’d take a coronavirus vaccine if one were available today. That dropped 10 points a month later, almost certainly due to the president’s propaganda. The Republicans can be expected to carry on that theme long after Trump, as they foment resistance to a new administration.

In the process of seeking partisan advantage, they will endanger the entire populace. They do not have incentive to change right now. They will not have incentive to change in the future.

Put a former president in jail, however, and they will.

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 August 2020

Word Count: 971

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TUNIS — As US presidential candidate Joe Biden continues to lead in the polls, foreign powers are preparing for a change in leadership style and policy orientation in the White House.

If some like Iran are pinning their hopes on a change of US leadership, others are fretting over the prospect.

Among those most concerned about a potential change of course in Washington is Turkey, whose President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has remained on relatively good terms with current US President Donald Trump and had a rocky relationship with the former vice-president.

Whereas Trump has offered little resistance to Erdogan’s foreign policy goals or human rights record, Biden has been a steadfast critic of the Turkish leader, challenging him on everything from his hostility to the Kurds to his contentious role in the Eastern Mediterranean.

As vice-president, Biden often angered the Turkish government by highlighting its clampdown on free expression and voicing support for Kurdish nationalist movements that Erdogan branded as “terrorist” groups and worked tirelessly to squash.

In 2014, Biden even sparked a diplomatic row between the US and Turkey when he publicly suggested that Ankara had helped facilitate the rise of ISIS in Syria (comments he later apologised for.)

While the presumptive Democratic nominee has since been more cautious, he has nevertheless continued to be a thorn in Erdogan’s side, pushing for more aggressive US action to tame Turkey’s ambitions at home and in the region.

A new polemic has erupted in recent days over an interview Biden gave with the New York Times editorial board nine months ago during which  he described the Turkish leader as an “autocrat” and said the US should support Turkish “opposition leadership” in their bid to defeat him.

“I’m still of the view that if we were to engage more directly like I was doing with them, that we can support those elements of the Turkish leadership that still exist and get more from them and embolden them to be able to take on and defeat Erdogan,” Biden told the reporters in November 2019. “Not by a coup, not by a coup, but by the electoral process.”

Predictably, Biden’s remarks drew furious backlash from the Turkish political establishment at the time, and they are coming under further scrutiny as the US election draws nearer.

On Sunday, Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin issued a harsh rebuke of the former vice-president’s remarks, writing on Twitter that Biden’s analysis of Turkey “was based on pure ignorance, arrogance and hypocrisy” and that “the days of ordering Turkey around are over.”

“If you still think you can try, be our guest. You will pay the price,” Kalin wrote.

Turkish government-controlled media also honed in on Biden’s remarks, warning that they “obviously do not portend sunny skies for Turkish-American relations in the event he is elected President.”

“Such overtly hostile comments towards Turkey’s democratically elected leadership creates questions about Biden’s knowledge and his capacity to make intelligent judgements on key issues,” Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency said.

While there are a range of reasons Turkey would be loath to see a Biden presidency, his firm support for the Kurds, both inside and outside Turkey, is Ankara’s greatest concern, argues foreign affairs writer Bobby Ghosh.

“It is the Democratic candidate’s longstanding sympathy for the Kurds, in Iraq and Syria, that will cause Ankara the greatest anxiety, should he become president,” wrote Ghosh in Bloomberg. “…An American president sympathetic to Kurdish nationalism would represent a serious headache not only for Turkey, but for all countries with Kurdish minorities, such as Iraq, Syria and Iran.”

Trump, who has fostered relatively warm ties with Ankara during his time in office, has exploited the discord between Ankara and his Democratic rival ahead of a tough November election, recently suggesting that Biden would likely be outmatched as president by strong foreign leaders such as Erdogan.

“Let’s face it, Joe’s shot,” Trump said during a Fox News interview on Monday. “You’re dealing with people that are very sharp. You’re dealing with world-class chess players in the leaders of these countries. I know them all. We do very well with all of them,” he added, singling out Erdogan.

While Trump’s popularity has taken a hit due to the US’s coronavirus crisis and economic downturn, he has gained some ground in recent months and is taking steps to prevent mail-in voting options that are likely to favour Biden.

Biden currently leads Trump by some 4% of registered voters nationwide, according to a recent CNN poll, and holds a narrow advantage in key battleground states that will likely decide the election.

If Biden wins the presidency, Turkey would likely face greater US pressure, but it remains to be seen how far the former vice-president would go to realise the foreign policy vision he has long advocated.

Stephen Quillen is an Arab Weekly correspondent in Tunis.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 August 2020

Word Count: 796

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There was bellyaching among some progressives at the sight of John Kasich at last night’s opening of the Democratic National Convention. But the appearance of a former Republican governor of Ohio, who is renown for his “moderate” politics, was important. The goal wasn’t persuading the president’s supporters to come over to Joe Biden’s side. It was giving license to white Republicans who do not want to vote for an authoritarian but who fear “the radical left” that it’s all right to vote for this Democrat.

“I’m sure there are Republicans and independents who couldn’t imagine crossing over to support a Democrat,” Kasich said Monday evening. “They fear Joe may turn sharp left and leave them behind. I don’t believe that. Because I know the measure of the man — reasonable, faithful, respectful. And you know, no one pushes Joe around.”

I thought the bellyaching was understandable. Donald Trump imperils not only the republic but actual human lives. (As of this writing, more than 174,000 Americans have died from the new coronavirus.) If white Republicans haven’t figured that out, there’s no point in courting them.

This critique, while understandable, underestimates something that should never be underestimated in this country: the power of white solidarity, the social phenomenon permitting white people to rationalize terrible behavior on the part of other white people, reassuring each other that they are good, decent citizens even as they demonstrate and benefit from white supremacy.

White Republicans are sensitive to anti-racism like all white people are, but probably more so. They fear the “radical left” is going to usurp their privilege. For this reason, Kasich’s appearance was vital. He was, in a sense, Biden’s wypipo-whisperer.

Liberals and leftists will chafe at the idea, but the Democrats must make room. We cannot allow disillusioned white Republicans to return to the GOP fold when the current president is no longer in office. Liberals and leftists, however, need not soften the “sharp left,” as Kasich did. They only need to make clear to white Republicans who do not want to vote for authoritarian candidates that huge numbers of other white people are predisposed to authoritarianism.

Liberals and leftists must make clear that huge numbers of white Americans would be fine with this statement: “We are going to win four more years,” the president said Monday. “Then after that we’ll go for another four years, because they spied on my campaign. We should get a redo of four years.”

Let’s be clear. These disillusioned white Republicans, demographically known as independents, are educated, middle class, upwardly mobile, property-owning, and suburban. They are culturally distinct from the “non-college whites” in the Rust Belt and white evangelical Protestants in the south and midwest, two cohorts making up the lion’s share of the president’s support. (They have a lot more in common with the petty bourgeoisie, the pillar of Trumpism, but have better taste and more fashion sense.)

They’d normally vote for Republicans, because Republicans protect their money, or check the Democrats from drifting “too far left” (whatever that might mean). They have lived their whole lives blissfully ignorant of, or sufficiently motivated to ignore, the forces of anti-democracy awaiting for a demagogue to awaken. These voters must never be allowed to forget the dangers posed by millions of white Americans.

In particular, they must understand that white evangelical Protestants (WEPs) not only oppose abortion. They oppose democracy. They are classic examples of what’s called “the authoritarian personality”: submissive to authority, punitive toward minorities and cultural difference, and rigidly adherent to tradition (e.g., the “nuclear family), according to Threat to Democracy by political psychologist Fathali Moghaddam, which explores the appeal of authoritarianism in the post-2016 age.

Importantly, people with authoritarian personalities are obedient to leadership, “including when they are ordered to do harm to others.” They can’t tolerate nuance, ambiguity and uncertainty. “They are categorical thinkers,” Moghaddam wrote. The world is broken down between us and them, black and white, good and evil. Their “antiscientific attitude” dismisses science and fact if they “do not correspond to what the potential or actual dictator presents as the truth. Historically, this has resulted in great catastrophes.”

These people are not going away after the election. They constitute about 40 percent of the electorate, the same number that right now approves of the current president no matter what he does or does not do, whether that’s treason or negligent homicide. They will populate the Republican resistance to a Democratic administration that must mandate and enforce face masks during a pandemic. They will fight the mandate under the guise of “individual liberty” just as they will refuse to inoculate themselves against Covid-19 long after a viable vaccine has been developed.

Authoritarian personalities already dominate politics in southern and midwestern states, where they have already endangered their own children and the elderly in order to “own the libs.” They will fight “big government tyranny” even if that fight leads to self-destruction.

Disillusioned white Republicans ultimately make a familiar mistake. They worry about “the left” the way real leftists worry about liberals (they see liberals as squishes, politically). Both end up overlooking the suicidal power of the authoritarian right. Both need to make room for each other in the middle — in the Democratic Party.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 August 2020

Word Count: 871

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