Whether you consider the appalling death toll or the equally unacceptable rising numbers of Covid-19 cases, the United States has one of the worst records worldwide when it comes to the pandemic. Nevertheless, the president has continued to behave just as he promised he would in March when there had been only 40 deaths from the virus here and he said, “I don’t take responsibility at all.”

In April, when 50,000 Americans had died, he praised himself and his administration, insisting, “I think we’ve done a great job.” In May, as deaths continued to mount nationwide, he insisted, “We have met the moment and we have prevailed.” In June, he swore the virus was “dying out,” contradicting the views and data of his just-swept-into-the-closet coronavirus task force. In July, he cast the blame for the ongoing disaster on state governors, who, he told the nation, had handled the virus “poorly,” adding, “I supplied everybody.” It was the governors, he assured the public, who had failed to acquire and distribute key supplies, including protective gear and testing supplies.

All told, he’s been a perfect model in deflecting all responsibility, even as the death toll soared over 150,000 with more than four million cases reported nationwide and no end in sight, even as he assured the coronavirus of a splendid future in the U.S. by insisting that all schools reopen this fall (and that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention back him on that).

In other words, Donald Trump and his team have given lack of accountability a new meaning in America. Their refusal to accept the slightest responsibility for Covid-19’s rampage through this country may seem startling (or simply like our new reality) in a land that has traditionally defined itself as dedicated to democratic governance, and the rule of law. It has long seen itself as committed to transparency and justice, through investigations, reports, and checks and balances, notably via the courts and Congress, designed to ensure that its politicians and officials be held responsible for their actions. The essence of democracy — the election — was also the essence of accountability, something whose results Donald Trump recently tried to throw into doubt when it comes to the contest this November.

Still, the loss of accountability isn’t simply a phenomenon of the Trump years. Its erosion has been coming for a long time at what, in retrospect, should seem an alarmingly inexorable pace.

In August 2020, it should be obvious that America, a still titanic (if fading) power, has largely thrown accountability overboard. With that in mind, here’s a little history of how it happened.

The war on terror As contemporary historians and political analysts tell it, the decision to go to war in Iraq in the spring of 2003, which cost more than 8,000 American lives and led to more than 200,000 Iraqi deaths, military and civilian, was more than avoidable. It was the result of lies and doctored information engineered to get the U.S. involved in a crucial part of what would soon enough become its “forever wars” across the Greater Middle East and Africa.

As Robert Draper recently reminded us, those in the administration of President George W. Bush who contested information about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq were ignored or silenced. Worse yet, torture was used to extract a false confession from senior al-Qaeda member Ibn Sheikh al-Libi regarding the terror organization’s supposed attempts to acquire such weaponry there. Al-Libi’s testimony, later recanted, was used as yet another pretext to launch an invasion that top American officials had long been determined to set in motion.

And it wasn’t just a deceitful decision. It was a thoroughly disastrous one as well. There is today something like a consensus among policy analysts that it was possibly the “biggest mistake in American military history” or, as former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) put it four years after the invasion, “the worst foreign policy mistake in U.S. history,” supplanting the Vietnam War in the minds of many.

And that raises an obvious question: Who was held accountable for that still unending disaster? Who was charged with the crime of willfully and intentionally taking the nation to war — and a failed war at that — based on manufactured facts? In numerous books, the grim realities of that moment have been laid out clearly. When it comes to any kind of public censure, or trial, or even an official statement of wrongdoing, none was ever forthcoming.

Nor was there any accountability for the policy and practice of torture, “legally” sanctioned then, that took the country back to practices more common in the Middle Ages. (It’s worth noting as well that John Yoo, who wrote the memos authorizing such torture then, is now helping the Trump administration find ways to continue evading checks on the presidency.)

More than a decade ago at TomDispatch, I wrote about how the Bush administration supported such acts at the highest levels. As a result, in the early years of the war on terror, in 20 CIA “black sites,” located in eight countries, the U.S. government used torture, as a Senate Select Intelligence Committee Report of December 2014 would detail, to elicit information and misinformation from dozens of “high-value detainees.”

It should go without saying that torture violates just about every precept of the modern rule of law: the renunciation of adjudication in favor of brutality, the use of dungeon-like chambers and medieval equipment rather than the expertise of intelligence professionals gathering information, and of course the rejection of any conviction that civility and rights are valuable.

Among his first acts on entering the Oval Office, Barack Obama pledged that the United States under his leadership would “not torture.” Nonetheless, the lawyers who wrote the memos legally approving those policies were never held accountable, nor were the Bush administration officials who signed off on them (and had such techniques demonstrated to them in the White House); nor, of course, were the actual torturers and the doctors who advised them in any way censured or criminally charged in American courts.

Indeed, many of their careers only advanced as they took jobs like a federal judge, a professor at a prestigious law school, or a well-remunerated author. When suggestions for leveling criminal charges or holding congressional hearings and investigations were raised, the Obama administration decided not to proceed. Attorney General Eric Holder claimed that “the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt,” while President Obama insisted that the administration should “look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” Accountability was once again abandoned.

And looming over the war on terror, the invasion of Iraq, and those torture policies was a refusal to hold any agency, administration, or anyone at all responsible for failing to stop 9/11 from happening in the first place. The 9/11 Commission Report might have been an initial step in that process, but as journalist Philip Shenon put it in his book The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, the report “skirt[ed] judgements about people who almost certainly had some blame for failing to prevent September 11.”

Evasion elsewhere It wasn’t only in relation to the war on terror that accountability vanished. The government responded to the 2007-2008 banking crisis with a similar determination to avoid it. At that time, the men who ran the nation’s largest banks had played upon the greed of investors to leverage mortgage investments until, lacking government bailouts, their companies would have gone under. In response, both the Bush and Obama administrations bandaged the losses with federal funds. Yet when it came to a classic dive into irresponsible and even illegal financial behavior, they offered stern warnings and nothing else.

Accountability had been similarly elusive for corporate crimes for decades. Take, for instance, the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill that covered 1,300 miles of Alaskan coastline with oil, while killing thousands of birds, otters, seals, and whales. Lawsuits brought by that state did result in payments of more than $1 billion after the federal government indicted ExxonMobil for violating the Clean Water Act. However, only the captain of the ship, whom many experts felt had been scapegoated, was convicted of a criminal offense.

A separate lawsuit filed on behalf of local fishermen, native Alaskans, and landowners fared less well. In our post-9/11 era of unaccountability, the penalties that had been leveled against the oil company were reconsidered. In 2008, the Supreme Court reduced a $5 billion punitive damages award by 89% to $507.5 million dollars. And in 2017, in the early months of the Trump administration, 26 years of litigation came to an abrupt end when a federal court in Alaska decided not to pursue a final ExxonMobil payment of $100 million for damages from the spill.

As it turns out, (lack of) accountability is increasingly not just a matter of the law but of politics, as the Mueller investigation of Russian interference in the presidential election of 2016 highlighted. No matter how much information Mueller and his team collected demonstrating violations of both law and policy in future president Donald Trump’s dealings with Russia, or how much information a series of career diplomats and national security officials provided on his quid pro quo approach to Ukrainian officials, escaping blame, not to mention impeachment, has proven all too easy for the president.

As Attorney General Barr told the nation, misrepresenting the essence of the Mueller report, the investigation “did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” More accurately, the report concluded that the evidence “does not exonerate” the president.

Subsequently, nine individuals, seven of them members of the Trump team, were found guilty and 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies were indicted (though charges against two of the companies have been dropped by Barr’s Department of Justice). And while five of those convicted went to jail, Donald Trump commuted the sentence of his close associate Roger Stone. Meanwhile, the prosecution of his first National Security Advisor Michael Flynn is still in turmoil after the Department of Justice directed and a federal appeals court ordered the case to be dropped. As the Flynn episode demonstrates, even when individuals were held accountable, the president and his administration have, in essence, refused to accept the judgments of the courts.

In other words, the mechanisms for shining a light on government wrongdoing are being systematically undermined and abolished. In that spirit, in April and May at the behest of the president, numerous inspectors general, tasked by law with investigating and reporting on wrongdoing in their agencies, were fired, including those for the State Department and the Intelligence Community, as well as the acting inspectors general for the departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, and Transportation.

In the age of Trump we’re reaching the end of the line when it comes to accountability in the halls of government. Increasingly, it’s no longer an American concept.

Once upon a time It hasn’t always been this way. In the past, when government policy or the officials making it have gone rogue, broken the law, and conspired against the basic tenets of American democracy, they have, at times, paid the price. Nearly a century ago, for instance, President Warren Harding’s Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall went to prison for accepting bribes from oil companies in the Teapot Dome Scandal. In fact, the list of former government officials who have been convicted and served time in jail is long.

Fifty years later, in the Watergate scandal of Richard Nixon’s presidency, 69 individuals, including several top government officials, were indicted and 48 of them found guilty of burglarizing documents from and wiretapping Democratic Party headquarters, among other things. The trail of illegality and cover-up went right up to the office of the president, ending in impeachment proceedings, which led President Nixon to resign.

During the years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, misuse of power was punished as well. Fourteen people in or close to his administration were convicted for their participation in the Iran-Contra scandal in which the government secretly sold weapons to Iran, an act proscribed by law, with plans to use the funds from those sales to support American-backed Contra rebels in Nicaragua (also in violation of U.S. law). True, of the 14 charged and 11 convicted, only one actually served his sentence in prison. Nonetheless, the convictions stood as a testament to a public acknowledgement of governmental wrongdoing.

Perhaps the saddest part of all is that the Trump administration has not just refused to take responsibility for anything whatsoever, but has blamed others, even those on the front lines of pandemic defense, for things that it did. Since Covid-19 struck American shores and the president and his officials failed to respond, resulting in a catastrophically high — and climbing — death toll, accountability has been harnessed to political whims in a new way. The president has, for instance, blamed President Obama whose pandemic office was dismantled by Trump’s own national security advisor John Bolton.

Until recently, President Trump refused to wear a mask in public and insisted — until belatedly canceling the Republican National Convention in Jacksonville, Florida, still rife with the pandemic — on holding a maskless, unsocial-distanced indoor rally in Tulsa despite overwhelming evidence that indoor transmission is the predominant means by which Covid-19 spreads. In doing so, he also encouraged irresponsible behavior at a local level, while supporting governors ready to imprudently reopen their state economies far too quickly and so condemn Americans there to an explosion of new cases.

It’s possible that this abdication of leadership, leading to a disastrously rising death rate, will, in the end, help Americans turn the corner from unaccountability to accountability — and not just for the disastrous Covid-19 response. Recent street protests from Portland to Manhattan, Chicago to Kansas City, are a sign that accountability is long overdue, not just for the current era, but for this century of American life.

In March, journalist Peter Bergen was the first person to call for a 9/11-style commission to investigate the government’s response to the coronavirus, “if only to make sure the nation is prepared for the next pandemic.” Recently, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein and Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, both from California, also proposed a Covid-19 Commission “not as a political exercise to cast blame, but to learn from our mistakes so we can prevent the problems we now face from being tragically repeated… An honest analysis is the only way to adequately prepare for the next novel virus or another disaster.”

Of course, no such thing is imaginable until Donald Trump is out of office and the Senate in Democratic hands, which does look possible. In the meantime, in its own deadly fashion, the pandemic crisis may actually help turn the tide and bring accountability back to American shores. If more than 150,000 deaths, countless numbers of them preventable, don’t offer a compelling reason to hold our public officials responsible, then what would?

Whatever the punishments, however symbolic or cosmetic, crimes of this sort need to be exposed for what they are and those who carried them out officially identified and held to account. This has nothing to do with retribution. It is not about exacting punishment. It’s about shining a beam of light on deeds that have been harmful beyond imagination and must never be repeated. We as a nation need to remind ourselves of what morality, justice, and the responsible use of power can mean. The country has to be given a chance to restore its long-faded commitment to accountable government. And perhaps we should acknowledge one more crucial thing: that this may prove to be our last chance.

Karen J. Greenberg writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law, the host of the Vital Interests Podcast, an International Security Fellow at New America, and the author of Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State and editor of Reimagining the National Security State: Liberalism on the Brink. Julia Tedesco helped with research for this article.

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

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Released: 03 August 2020

Word Count: 2,632

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I felt some pangs of regret after saying Thursday that a third of America would cheer, or shrug, if the other two-thirds were wiped out by Covid-19. My point was that we should vote like our lives depend on it (they do!), but no one likes hearing such ugliness about other Americans. An outraged subscriber alleged I was being “deeply cynical.”

 “Instead of talking about the work that needs to be done, you are sabotaging us.”

As I was thinking this through, Vanity Fair published an investigation by Katherine Eban establishing a timeline of the Trump administration’s pandemic response. In the early stages, the White House task force, led by the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, decided a national approach was best. “Simply working together as a nation on it ‘would have put us in a fundamentally different place,’” said Eban’s source.

By early April, things changed. Donald Trump, fearing its effect on the economy and Wall Street, minimized the reality of the virus while accusing his enemies and the press corps of hyping its dangers to wound him. Kushner’s team, along with GOP leaders and their media allies, followed suit. “Against that background, the prospect of launching a large-scale national plan was losing favor, said one public health expert.”

Over time, Kushner’s team convinced itself that the pandemic was not affecting Republican voters. A national approach, therefore, wasn’t needed. Trump downplayed the body count even as he accused Democratic governors of failing to stop its rise. (Ohio and Massachusetts, among the early pandemic states, have GOP governors, but I digress.)

 “Because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. ‘The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,’ said the expert” (emphasis is mine).

During this period, it bears remembering, the president pushed the US Congress to stabilize the economy by shoving billions into it. While GOP allies got preferential access to $2.2 trillion in stimulus, cities and states run by Democrats got nothing — despite being on the front lines of a national pandemic. Democrats in the US House have since passed a bill to replace lost revenues, and then some, but the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, maintains there will be no “blue-state bailout.” The Senate’s latest proposal, which is standing idle while senators are away for August recess, has no appropriations for cities and states, even deep-red Republican ones.

What does this mean? While the president chose to let Americans who live in blue states get sick and die, Congressional Republicans chose to starve those same cities and states of resources amid their struggle to save lives. Given that elected officials, from the president on down, tend to reflect the will of their supporters, it’s safe to say, in light of Trump’s 91 percent approval rating among Republicans (per Gallup), that about a third of America approves of the GOP’s informal policy of negligent homicide. It may sound cynical, but the truth is, the pleasure of other people’s pain often drives politics.

Paying so much attention to sadism runs the risk of ignoring its opposite: masochism. Some Republican voters are willing to hurt themselves, with exquisite pleasure, if hurting themselves exquisitely hurts their enemies. (A textbook example is Republican governors rejecting Obamacare’s health-insurance subsidies in order to undermine a Black president.)

Even as the pandemic is rampaging through Republican-controlled states, setting records in Florida and Texas, many Republicans will never blame Trump, because if he’s wrong, the enemy is right, and the enemy can never be right.

Not all Republicans, though. As small numbers defect due to Trump’s failed leadership, they leave behind individuals still taking immense pleasure in losing themselves to the “collective power structure,” as an EB subscriber described it to me. “All they want is to continue feeling the way being part of a collective power structure makes them feel. The way Trump makes them feel.”

As the group shrinks, so does that pleasure, until one day, however Trump leaves office, MAGA addicts will “crash, many with their entire senses of self having been stripped away. It’s not their ‘evil’ that worries me most. It’s their anguish, and how they will respond to that anguish.” 

The collective trauma that’s coming from millions being forced to go cold turkey? And the fact that nearly every one of us on Team Blue is out of empathy for anyone who supported him? That is what should scare the shit out of everyone.

 

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: 31 July 2020

Word Count: 764

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The Washington Post’s George Will gave voice to an opinion I’ve heard a lot lately — Joe Biden’s victory over the president would mark the end of our “long national nightmare.” The thing about this opinion is that it sounds right. The other thing about this opinion is that sounding right makes it doubly wrong. The nightmare is not going to be over, and everyone thinking it’s going to be over will be complicit in its long-term viability.

Setting aside the problem of presuming Donald Trump is going to lose based on recent polling, and setting aside the problem of presuming the election is going to be fair, consider this: his aggregate approval across-the-board has been and remains about 40-43 percent. That’s not high, but it’s still a lot, especially when you look at the same metric among Republican voters, which is in the high eighties, low nineties. What this tells you is lots of people in this country either like or condone authoritarianism. The old saying in Europe is that a third of it aims to murder a third of it while the other third watches. That might not describe the US exactly, but I’d say we’re headed there.

For this reason, the Republican Party — even if a tidal wave crashes on Trump — is not going to snap out of it and mend its way. That’s a tale told by individuals wanting to believe cold-blooded partisans are not as cold-blooded as they thought. Or by alienated conservatives wanting to believe in good faith that their old party can be redeemed. (Recent Bulwark pieces by Charlie Sykes [“Burn It All Down?”] and Mona Charen [“The GOP Needs to Hit Rock Bottom”] represent nicely this magical school of thought.)

Why seek redemption when over a third of the United States approves of enriching the very rich, criminalizing the weak and disenfranchising the rest? A defeated GOP will almost certainly grow more extreme, as members who managed to survive an anti-Trump landslide will be from safe districts. If the president wins, well, the party will take that to mean it’s all right to go full-fascist. Either way, soul-searching is unlikely.

I don’t see how the “long national nightmare” will be over when 40-43 percent of the country, for the last three and half years and more, has consistently and unwaveringly supported the president’s words and deeds, no matter how despicable they are, or saw loyal opposition from the Democratic Party as so dangerous they abandoned their previous claims to the union. These people want a president to kidnap kids from their immigrant moms. They want a president to banish Muslims. They want a president to privilege white orthodox Christianity. They want a president to punish Black people and LGBTQ people for being who they are. They want a president to deploy secret police to crush dissent. And they hate their “enemies” so much they are willing to overlook a president’s treason. These people will still be here after Election Day.

That’s why the Democrats, if and when they have unified control of government, must change the rules of normal politics. Losing isn’t going to change the Republican Party. Changing the electorate, however, will.

To that end, the Democratic Party must pass sweeping voting rights legislation; kill off the Senate filibuster; push to turn Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., into states; grant full citizenship to all immigrants; defund and reorganize the US Department of Homeland Security; in addition to a host of other measures that would force the Republican Party to act reasonably, because without acting reasonably, the GOP won’t have another reasonable shot at power.

But to do that, the rest of us must remember the unpleasant truth about our fellow Americans, which is that more than a third of them would cheer, or shrug, if the coronavirus pandemic wiped out the other two-thirds. They are the “real Americans,” after all. What obligations do they have to unreal Americans? (Some of them would even catch the virus on purpose in order to hasten that end!)

When they vote, most people believe mistakenly that the political opposition can be reasoned with. These people need to vote like their lives depend on it, because their lives depend on it.

Sadly, most Americans will forget the truth, even if they vote for own their lives on Election Day, and they will forget the truth because they desire forgetting. This goes double for white Americans who feel the pain of being reminded of their whiteness by a president who appeals to white supremacy.

Once he’s gone, white people’s pain will be gone, and once white people’s pain is gone, white people will experience the privileged pleasure of forgetting, and in doing so, permit the nightmare to live on.

It doesn’t have to be that way, though.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 30 July 2020

Word Count: 799

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The Wall Street Journal ran an item this morning touching on something I have been thinking about lately: the role of stupidity in our national discourse, and the apparent requirement that the citizenry respect stupidity no matter how dangerous it is.

The subject of the piece was face masks, and why some Americans refuse to wear one. It is beyond dispute that wearing a mask in public is the simplest, cheapest, and easiest means of preventing the coronavirus from spreading. The virus is airborne, meaning it survives in droplets of water so small they float in the air. Sneezing, laughing or just talking loudly, especially indoors with inadequate ventilation — that’s how the novel virus goes from one person to another. If we’d all been wearing one since March, we might not see over 150,000 deaths and over 4 million infections. Wearing a mask should be a no-brainer. As Jennifer Calfas’ reporting shows us, however, it is not.

 It’s a joke,” said Joseph Lee, a 62-year-old in White Bear Lake, Minn. who wore a mask once to comply with rules to get a haircut. “All [mask wearing] does, I think, is give people a false sense of hope.”

Aside from being wrong, if we’re all gonna die, let’s all die with our eyes open?

When asked if the president’s recommendation last week to wear a mask had any impact, Cody Adams, “a 34-year-old pipe welder based in Arkansas,” said no can do.

“It hasn’t swayed my opinion.”

The dumbest reason comes from Peggy Hall. The Orange County, California, resident “who has decried face mask requirements there and elsewhere” actually said out loud:

“The beautiful thing about our country is freedom does come first, and public health comes a distant, distant second, third, fourth, maybe 20th.”

To be sure, as Calfas reports, this is a minority. A recent poll by the Journal and NBC News found that most Americans, most of the time, wear a mask in public no matter their political affiliation, suggesting that good sense can still trump nonsense. Only about 11 percent “rarely or never wear” one, which might be comforting in any social context other than public health. If I’m not mistaken, even a small minority refusing to wear a mask could mean the pandemic won’t end for years until there’s a vaccine. Meanwhile, more people die, more get sick, and mass disruption continues apace.

It’s for this reason we need to talk about the role of stupidity in our national discourse. We should not aim to insult, demean or marginalize anyone. Stupid people are human beings deserving of equal rights and equal justice. We should, however, redefine and reestablish the boundaries of acceptable public opinion. Stupid people deserve equal treatment, but it’s deadly — literally — to give stupid ideas equal respect. (Stupidity, moreover, is not in the eye of the beholder when the medical, scientific and good-government consensus is that wearing masks is good, not wearing masks is bad.)

Of course, redefining and reestablishing the boundaries of acceptable public discourse is at the heart of the controversy over so-called cancel culture. In truth, no one is getting canceled (anyway, not in the way “cancel culture” critics claim). And in truth, the people most likely to complain about getting “canceled” often have access to public platforms so gigantic as to undermine the very premise of their arguments.

Take John Kass, for instance. A columnist for the Chicago Tribune, he wrote recently a piece about George Soros and “lawlessness” in cities run by Democrats. Soros is a frequent subject of anti-Jewish conspiracy theory. Outraged by its antisemitism, some said the column is a firing offense. This week, Kass defended himself against “the angry left-handed broom of America’s cultural revolution [using] fear to sweep through our civic, corporate and personal life.” A column about being a victim of censorship becomes incoherent the moment it’s published. Yet we accept this stupidity, give it respect, and encourage it though it can and does poison our discourse and enable evil.

As I noted recently, “cancel culture” critics aren’t defending speech. They are instead blurring lines. They make it appear as if demands for redefining and reestablishing the boundaries of acceptable public opinion seem as authoritarian as the authoritarian president who really is dispatching his paramilitaries to harass and intimidate social reformers in cities nationwide under the guise of “protecting” federal property. Voters who don’t want to vote for a fascist president might vote for him anyway to “protect” against “the angry left-handed broom of America’s cultural revolution.” Stupidity, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice.”

Bonhoeffer really did get canceled. A Lutheran minister in Germany, he opposed Hitler’s rise and the eventual attempt to exterminate Jews from Europe. The Nazi regime accused him of conspiring to assassinate Hitler, and hanged him just before the war’s end. This is what he said about stupidity. (Here I want to thank Editorial Board subscriber Jim Prevatt for bringing this to my attention):

“One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.

“Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.

“For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 29 July 2020

Word Count: 991

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I don’t trust you.

Don’t take it personally. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a friend or a stranger. I don’t care about your identity or your politics, where you work or if you work, whether you wear a mask or carry a gun.

I don’t trust you because you are, for the time being, a potential carrier of a deadly virus. You don’t have any symptoms? Maybe you’re an asymptomatic superspreader. Show me your negative test results and I’ll still have my doubts. I have no idea what you’ve been up to between taking the test and receiving the results. And can we really trust that the test is accurate?

Frankly, you shouldn’t trust me for the same reasons. I’m not even sure that I can trust myself. Didn’t I just touch my face at the supermarket after palpating the avocados?

I’m learning to live with this mistrust. I’m keeping my distance from other people. I’m wearing my mask. I’m washing my hands. I’m staying far away from bars.

I’m not sure, however, that society can live with this level. Let’s face it: trust makes the world go around. Protests break out when our faith in people or institutions is violated: when we can’t trust the police (#BlackLivesMatter), can’t trust male colleagues (#MeToo), can’t trust the economic system to operate with a modicum of fairness (#OccupyWallStreet), or can’t trust our government to do, well, anything properly (#notmypresident).

Now, throw a silent, hidden killer into this combustible mix of mistrust, anger, and dismay. It’s enough to tear a country apart, to set neighbor against neighbor and governor against governor, to precipitate a civil war between the masked and the unmasked.

Such problems only multiply at the global level where mistrust already permeates the system — military conflicts, trade wars, tussles over migration and corruption. Of course, there’s also been enough trust to keep the global economy going, diplomats negotiating, international organizations functioning, and the planet from spinning out of control. But the pandemic may just tip this known world off its axis.

I’m well aware of the ongoing debate between the “not much” and “everything” factions. Once a vaccine knocks it out of our system, the coronavirus might not have much lasting effect on our world. Even without a vaccine, people can’t wait to get back to normal life by jumping into pools, heading to the movie theater, attending parties — even in the United States where cases continue to rise dramatically. The flu epidemic of 1918-1919, which is believed to have killed at least 50 million people, didn’t fundamentally change everyday life, aside from giving a boost to both alternative and socialized medicine. That flu passed out of mind and into history and so, of course, might Covid-19.

Or, just as the Black Death in the fourteenth century separated the medieval world from all that followed, this pandemic might draw a thick before-and-after line through our history. Let’s imagine that this novel virus keeps circulating and recirculating, that no one acquires permanent immunity, that it becomes a nasty new addition to the cold season except that it just happens to kill a couple of people out of every hundred who get it. This new normal would certainly be better than if Ebola, with a 50% case fatality rate if untreated, became a perennial risk everywhere. But even with a fatality rate in the low single digits, Covid-19 would necessarily change everything.

The media is full of speculation about what a periodic pandemic future will look like. The end of theater and spectator sports. The institutionalization of distance learning. The death of offices and brick-and-mortar retail.

But let’s take a look beyond that — at the even bigger picture. Let’s consider for a moment the impact of this new, industrial-strength mistrust on international relations.

The future of the nation-state Let’s say you live in a country where the government responded quickly and competently to Covid-19. Let’s say that your government established a reliable testing, contact tracing, and quarantine system. It either closed down the economy for a painful but short period or its system of testing was so good that it didn’t even need to shut everything down. Right now, your life is returning to some semblance of normal.

Lucky you.

The rest of us live in the United States. Or Brazil. Or Russia. Or India. In these countries, the governments have proven incapable of fulfilling the most important function of the state: protecting the lives of their citizens. While most of Europe and much of East Asia have suppressed the pandemic sufficiently to restart their economies, Covid-19 continues to rage out of control in those parts of the world that, not coincidentally, are also headed by democratically elected right-wing autocrats.

In these incompetently run countries, citizens have very good reason to mistrust their governments. In the United States, for instance, the Trump administration botched testing, failed to coordinate lockdowns, removed oversight from the bailouts, and pushed to reopen the economy over the objections of public-health experts. In the latest sign of early-onset dementia for the Trump administration, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany declared this month that “science should not stand in the way” of reopening schools in the fall.

Voters, of course, could boot Trump out in November and, assuming he actually leaves the White House, restore some measure of sanity to public affairs. But the pandemic is contributing to an already overwhelming erosion of confidence in national institutions. Even before the virus struck, in its 2018 Trust Barometer the public relations firm Edelman registered an unprecedented drop in public trust connected to… what else?… the election of Trump. “The collapse of trust in the U.S. is driven by a staggering lack of faith in government, which fell 14 points to 33% among the general population,” the report noted. “The remaining institutions of business, media, and NGOs also experienced declines of 10 to 20 points.”

And you won’t be surprised to learn that the situation hadn’t shown signs of improvement by 2020, with American citizens even more mistrustful of their country’s institutions than their counterparts in Brazil, Italy, and India.

That institutional loss of faith reflects a longer-term trend. According to Gallup’s latest survey, only 11% of Americans now trust Congress, 23% big business and newspapers, 24% the criminal justice system, 29% the public school system, 36% the medical system, and 38% the presidency. The only institution a significant majority of Americans trust — and consider this an irony, given America’s endless twenty-first-century wars — is the military (73%). The truly scary part is that those numbers have held steady, with minor variations, for the last decade across two very different administrations.

How low does a country’s trust index have to go before it ceases being a country? Commentators have already spent a decade discussing the polarization of the American electorate. Much ink has been spilled over the impact of social media in creating political echo chambers. It’s been 25 years since political scientist Robert Putnam observed that Americans were “bowling alone” (that is, no longer participating in group activities or community affairs in the way previous generations did).

The coronavirus has generally proven a major force multiplier of such trends by making spontaneous meetings of unlike-minded people ever less likely. I suspect I’m typical. I’m giving a wide berth to pedestrians, bicyclists, and other joggers when I go out for my runs. I’m not visiting cafes. I’m not talking to people in line at the supermarket. Sure, I’m on Zoom a lot, but it’s almost always with people I already know and agree with.

Under these circumstances, how will we overcome the enormous gaps of perception now evident in this country to achieve anything like the deeper basic understandings that a nation-state requires? Or will Americans lose faith entirely in elections, newspaper stories, hospitals, and public transportation, and so cease being a citizenry altogether?

Trust is the fuel that makes such institutions run. And it looks as though we passed Peak Trust long ago and may be on a Covid-19 sled heading downhill fast.

Globalization unravels The global economy also runs on trust: in financial transactions, the safety of workplace conditions, the long-distance transport of goods, and the consumer’s expectation that the purchased product will work as advertised.

To cause a breakdown in the global assembly line, Covid-19 didn’t have to introduce doubt into every step in this supply chain (though it would, in the end, do something like that). It only had to sever one link: the workplace. When the Chinese government shut down factories in early 2020 to contain the pandemic — leading to a 17% decline in exports in January and February compared to the previous year — companies around the world suddenly faced critical shortages of auto parts, smartphone components, and other key goods.

The workplace proved a weak link in the global supply chain for another reason: cost. Labor has traditionally been the chief expense in manufacturing, which, from the 1990s on, led corporations to outsource work to cheaper locations like Mexico, China, and Vietnam. Since then, however, the global assembly line has changed and, as the McKinsey consulting firm explains, “over 80% of today’s global goods trade is [no longer] from a low-wage country to a high-wage country.”

Labor’s centrality to the location of manufacturing had been further eroded by the growth of automation, which, according to economists, tends to surge during downturns. As it happens, both artificial intelligence and robotization were already on the rise even before the pandemic hit. By 2030, up to 20 million jobs worldwide will be filled by robots. The World Bank estimates that they will eventually replace an astounding 85% of the jobs in Ethiopia, 77% in China, and 72% in Thailand.

Then there are the environmental costs of that same global assembly line. Moving freight contributes 7% to 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, with air transport being the most carbon intensive way to go. (Add to that, of course, the carbon footprint of the factories themselves.)

If all that doesn’t change the minds of CEOs about the benefits of globalization, then national security considerations might. The pandemic exposed how vulnerable countries are in terms of key commodities. Because China is responsible for producing more respirators, surgical masks, and protective garments than the rest of the world combined, countries began to panic when Covid-19 first hit because they no longer had sufficient national capacity to produce the basic tools to address the spreading pandemic themselves. The same applied to essential drugs. The United States stopped producing penicillin, for instance, in 2004.

The threat of infection, the spread of automation, the environmental impact, the risk of foreign control: the global assembly line just doesn’t seem to make much sense any more. Why not relocate manufacturing back home to a “dark factory” that’s fully automated, doesn’t need lights, heating, or air conditioning, and is practically pandemic-proof?

The current pandemic won’t spell the end of globalization, of course. Corporations, as the McKinsey report points out, will still find compelling reasons to relocate manufacturing and services overseas, including “access to skilled labor or natural resources, proximity to consumers, and the quality of infrastructure.” Consumers will still want pineapples in winter and cheap smart phones. But capitalists eyeing the bottom line, in combination with Trump-style nationalists insisting that capital return home, will increasingly disassemble what we all took for granted as globalization.

The world economy won’t simply disappear. After all, agriculture has persisted in the modern era. It just employs an ever-diminishing segment of the workforce. The same will likely happen to global trade in a pandemic age. In the early part of the last century, surplus labor no longer needed on the farms migrated to the cities to work in factories. The question now is: What will happen to all those workers no longer needed in the global assembly line?

Neither the international community nor the free market has a ready answer, but authoritarian populists do: stop all those displaced workers from migrating.

Wall world From the moment he descended that Trump Tower escalator into the presidential race, Donald Trump’s effort to seal off the U.S. border with Mexico has been his signature policy position. That “big, fat, beautiful wall” of his may be simplistic, anti-immigrant, xenophobic, and mistrustful of the world — and may never really be completed — but unfortunately, he’s been anything but alone in his obsession with walls.

Israel pioneered modern wall building in the mid-1990s by sealing off Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, followed by a 440-mile-long barrier to wall off the West Bank. In 2005, responding to a wave of migrants escaping wars and poverty in North Africa and the Middle East, Hungary built new bulwarks along its southern borders to keep out the desperate. Bulgaria, Greece, Slovenia, and Croatia have done the same. India has fenced off the Kashmir region from Pakistan. Saudi Arabia has constructed a 600-mile barrier along its border with Iraq.

In 1989, there were about a dozen major walls separating countries, including the soon-to-fall Berlin Wall. Today, that number has grown to 70.

In this context, the novel coronavirus proved a godsend to nationalists the world over who believe that if good fences make good neighbors, a great wall is best of all. More than 135 countries added new restrictions at their borders after the outbreak. Europe reestablished its internal Schengen area borders for the first time in 25 years and closed its external ones as well. Some countries — Japan and New Zealand, in particular — practically walled themselves off.

Even as the pandemic fades in certain parts of the world, many of those new border restrictions remain in place. If you want to travel to Europe this summer, you can only do so if you’re from one of a dozen countries on a European Union-approved list (and that doesn’t include Americans). New Zealand has had only a handful of cases over the last few months (with a high of four new cases on June 27th), but its borders remain closed to virtually everyone. Even a “travel bubble” with nearby Australia is off the table for now. Japan has banned entry to people from 129 countries, including the United States, but there’s an exemption for U.S. soldiers traveling to American military bases. A recent outbreak of coronavirus at such garrisons on the island of Okinawa may well prompt Tokyo to tighten its already strict rules further.

And such border restrictions are potentially just the beginning. So far, the pandemic has unleashed an everyone-for-themselves spirit — from export restrictions on essential goods to a feverish competition to develop a vaccine first. The United Nations has made various pleas for greater international cooperation, its secretary general even urging a “global ceasefire” among warring parties. The World Health Organization (WHO) attempted to organize a global response to the virus at its annual meeting. However, the Trump administration promptly announced that it would be pulling out of the WHO, very few combatants observed a Covid-19 ceasefire, and there is no coordinated international response to the pandemic outside of the community of scientists sharing research.

So, is this to be the future: each country transformed into a gated community? How long can a sense of internationalism survive in Wall World?

Rebuilding trust Conservatives used to make fun of the left for its penchant for relativism, for arguing that everything depends on context. “If you ask me what the biggest problem in America is, I’m not going to tell you debt, deficits, statistics, economics,” former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan said in 2011, “I’ll tell you it’s moral relativism.” Once upon a time, the rightwing railed against deconstructionists who emphasized interpretation over facts.

What, then, to make of the Republican Party today? So many of its leaders, including the president, don’t believe in the science behind either climate change or Covid-19. Many of them embrace the most lunatic conspiracy theories and some current congressional candidates even believe, by way of the far-right conspiracy theory QAnon, that a cabal of satanic child molesters in Hollywood, the Democratic Party, and various international organizations controls the world. In July, Donald Trump achieved the dubious milestone of telling more than 20,000 lies during his tenure as president. In other words, speaking of relativism, the Republican Party has put its trust in a man untethered from reality.

And then along came that pandemic like lighter fluid to a brushfire. The resulting conflagration of mistrust threatens to spread out of control until nothing is left, not the nation-state, not the global economy, not the international community.

In this pandemic era, a fire somewhere is a fire everywhere, for the virus cares nothing about borders. But the key to restoring trust must begin where the trust deficit has grown largest and that certainly is the United States. Not only have Americans lost faith in their own institutions, so, it seems, has everyone else. Since 2016, there has been a 50% drop in the world’s trust in the United States, the largest decline ever in the US News and World Report’s Best Countries survey.

And the reason the United States has the worst record dealing with the coronavirus is quite simple: Donald Trump. He is the leader of an ever-diminishing proportion of the public that continues to believe the coronavirus is a hoax or refuses to comply with basic precautions to prevent its spread. A scofflaw president who refuses to mandate the use of facemasks (even after officially donning one for his Twitter feed) inspires a scofflaw minority that puts the majority at risk.

Restoring trust in this country’s public health system and governance must begin with a competent system of testing, contact tracing, and quarantine. Yet the Trump administration still refuses to take this necessary step. Senate Republicans have pushed for $25 billion to help establish testing and tracing systems at the state level, but the president actually wants to eliminate even this modest amount from the budget (along with additional funds for government agencies tasked with addressing the pandemic).

Americans increasingly mistrust their institutions because growing numbers of us believe that we derive ever fewer benefits from them. The Trump administration has typically done its best to make matters disastrously worse, only recently, amid the pandemic and with millions unemployed, demanding that the Supreme Court gut the health insurance provided by the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act. The bulk of the stimulus funds passed by Congress went to wealthy individuals and corporations — and the president’s men didn’t even exercise due diligence to prevent nearly $1.4 billion in stimulus checks from being mailed to dead people.

The next administration (assuming there is one) will have a massive clean-up job restoring faith of any sort in such an unequal, broken system. After addressing the acute crisis of the pandemic, it will have to demonstrate that the rule of law is again functioning. The most dramatic proof would, of course, be to throw the book at Donald Trump and his closest enablers. They have violated so many laws that trust in the legal system will be further weakened unless they’re tried and punished for their crimes, including their willingness to sacrifice American lives in staggering numbers in pursuit of The Donald’s reelection.

In 1996, Bill Clinton spoke of building a bridge to the twenty-first century. Two decades into this century, Donald Trump has effectively torn down that bridge and replaced it with a (still largely unbuilt) wall reminiscent of the fortifications of the Middle Ages. Covid-19 has only reinforced the insular paranoia of this president and his followers. The path back to trust, at both a domestic and international level, will be difficult. There will be monsters to battle along the way. But in the end, it’s possible for us to take this country back, create a just and sustainable global economy, and rebuild the international community.

You and I can do this. Together.

Trust me.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Feffer — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 July 2020

Word Count: 3,312

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The Washington press corps is highly attuned to matters of decorum, language and nuance, and for the most part, I think that’s a good thing. Washington is a place where powerful people say one thing but mean another, and our democracy benefits generally when reporters compete with each other to get as close to the truth as possible.

Such a cast of mind is unhelpful, however, when it comes to the current president. Donald Trump has repeatedly bait-and-switched White House correspondents, one day seeming to take the coronavirus pandemic seriously, the next undermining that apparent seriousness with tales of woe, accusations of unfairness and breathtaking paranoia. By my count, we have seen at least three cycles this year in which the president exploded stories of his newfound “tone” within a few days or even hours.

Last week, the president seemed to concede without taking responsibility the severity of the pandemic. His office released pictures of him wearing a face mask. Yet he retweeted this morning a video in which a “doctor” accuses Dr. Anthony Fauci, the administration’s top infectious disease expert, of covering up a known “cure” for Covid-19 — hydroxychloroquine — in a conspiracy to bring down the president.

It’s no mystery why Trump retweeted a video of a quack. He’s metabolically incapable of admitting error. The pandemic’s not his fault — look! A “doctor” said so! But why did he put on a show of being serious last week? To con the press corps, that much is true. The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker and Philip Rucker, however, discovered another reason.

 Senior advisers began presenting Trump with maps and data showing spikes in coronavirus cases among “our people” in Republican states, a senior administration official said. They also shared projections predicting that virus surges could soon hit politically important states in the Midwest — including Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, the official said. This new approach seemed to resonate, as he hewed closely to pre-scripted remarks in a trio of coronavirus briefings last week.

The idea here is that the president would be doing much better in polls leading up to Election Day if he had “at least pantomimed a sense of command over the crisis or conveyed compassion for the millions of Americans hurt by it.” He couldn’t do even that. He can’t admit error. Knowing this, advisers said he should try faking it, because the coronavirus is killing more than Democrats. It’s killing “our people,” too. This, according to Parker’s and Rucker’s reporting, is what inspired last week’s “new tone.”

Assuming that’s true, and that’s a big assumption, I know, but assuming it is, what conclusion might we draw from a president reversing course, saying one thing one day, then something else entirely the next, undermining attempts to take “command over the crisis or conveyed compassion for the millions of Americans hurt by it”? One, that he can’t say “my bad.” But two, that he believes “our people” will believe him, no matter what he says, which is another way of expressing contempt for Republicans.

If nothing else, the president knows his audience. Like all good showmen, he gives it what it wants. What his audience wants is the advancement of a worldview in which the United States is not a single nation, but an assemblage of states, or regions, half of which refuse to be dominated by the other half, and therefore must be punished. If believing lies and falsehoods is means of advancing that worldview, and creating a legal and political structure in which a white minority rules over the rest, so be it.

But this confederate worldview has a major weakness. It is immanently incapable of facing a national crisis. First, because a crisis cannot be “national” until it comes for “our people.” (“We” are the “real Americans.” A virus killing “them” is fine.) Second, because when it does come, crises take collective effort. That means trusting half the states who refuse to be dominated. That means recognizing the enemy as a political equal. Trump’s audience must decide which is more important: politics or health. And that requires choosing which to believe: the president’s lies or the reality of the virus.

Trump has no moral core. He presumes no one else does, either. He’s banking on his audience taking his side over the side of Covid-19, even as it kills them. He doesn’t have to admit error when he can fool some people all the time. And to be fair to the president, which I don’t like doing, I can’t say I blame him for thinking so. If he can keep duping the Washington press corps, he can keep duping “our people,” too.

 

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 July 2020

Word Count: 774

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The Senate Republicans are no longer dithering. Along with the White House, they have decided to split the difference. They aren’t demanding a payroll tax cut, as the president preferred, but neither are they demanding a continuation of $600-a-week in unemployment benefits, as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell preferred. Instead, they are going to push for reducing that benefit to about $200 a week.

This is bad policy and bad politics, as my friend Marty Longman wrote last week. Two hundred bucks weekly is better than a payroll tax cut. No one would see that (especially if they’re unemployed). But people would see less money coming in amid a pandemic, recession and housing crisis just getting started. (Evictions are set to soar next month.) In the Washington Monthly, Marty said the “compromise” is an “example of the way ideology twists the Republican Party in knots. They wind up worried that they’re disincentivizing work when no one can find work. Then they settle on paying people for nothing because they prefer that to creating a government job.”

Conservative ideology does indeed turn the GOP into knots, but I suspect there’s more going on. At one time in our past, it would have made perfect sense to say, as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin did last week: “We’re not going to use taxpayer money to pay people more to stay home.” While that rhetoric may still persuade some, it by no means persuades most. To put a finer point on it, rhetoric used by Republicans to justify anti-government economics no longer appeals to a majority of white voters, because a majority of white voters, in the era of Donald Trump, realize we’re all in this together. Without a collective effort, our republic may never return to good health.

This transformation, if it is happening (a big if, I concede), can’t be overstated. At some point during the 1980s and the presidency of Ronald Reagan, a majority of white Americans began to think of themselves as consumers and taxpayers, instead of free and responsible citizens. At that point, the conservative movement, which began two decades prior to Reagan’s election, was no longer a movement. It became the conservative political regime of low taxation and low regulation we live in today.

Thinking of themselves as consumers and taxpayers — instead of citizens endowed from birth with rights, liberties and responsibilities — lent itself to thinking about the federal government as separate from the citizenry. “Government” was something done to people. It wasn’t of, by and for them.

Though we needed it for national defense and rule enforcement, we didn’t need it otherwise. “Government” was a byword for coercion and a catalyst for keeping it small. Keeping it small, for the white people thinking of themselves consumers and taxpayers, meant low taxes and low regulation.

Thinking of themselves as consumers and taxpayers affected profoundly the way a majority of white Americans thought about work. If you got more from the federal government than you got out of individual work, you didn’t have the incentive necessary for the maintenance of a free society. You had instead the incentive to stay on “welfare,” requiring more from the people who did work, who were not fellow citizens but consumers and taxpayers bearing undue burdens on the road to serfdom.

In truth, poor people pay far more of their income in taxes than you and I do. Anyway, the government doesn’t tax you. We tax ourselves using government as the instrument of collective taxation. We are citizens who consume and who pay taxes. Indeed, but as citizens, we are much more than consumers and taxpayers, because as a citizenry, we are the ultimate sovereign. When the government gives taxpayer money to people in need, due to some kind of national emergency, we are giving money to ourselves.

Conservative ideology always seemed principled (some of it was, I suppose), but for the most part, it was a fancy way of dividing and conquering a majority of Americans using old-fashioned bigotry. “Taxpayer” really meant “white” while “welfare” really meant “Black.” “Coercion” was interpreted to mean forcing white people to pay the expenses of Black people, who were presumed poor (or criminal) and untaxed. If Mnuchin had said, “We’re not going to use taxpayer money to pay people more to stay home” in 1996, his meaning would have been perfectly clear. Now? I’m not sure.

The confluence of national and constitutional crises seems to be forcing some people, perhaps most people, to rethink how they think about themselves. Consumers and taxpayers are not enough to save a republic from a president who committed treason before walking away from his responsibility of leading a nation out of harm’s way.

Only a citizenry can do that.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 27 July 2020

Word Count: 789

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The goal, when you think about it, seems pretty simple: juice up the economy enough before the election so that the president looks like a strong leader who took decisive action in the face of a deadly new coronavirus pandemic that has hobbled the national economy. You’d think the Senate Republicans would be all-in. You’d be wrong, though.

Instead, they’re dithering. (The AP’s Lisa Mascaro incorrectly called it a “GOP revolt.”) Donald Trump is demanding a payroll tax cut for some reason. (That’s unhelpful when you don’t have a job.) Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell favors extending the $600-a-week in unemployment insurance. Texas’ Ted Cruz hates that because that might be a buck or two more than people earn. Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, meanwhile, opposes all forms of fiscal spending, citing his growing concern for the national debt.

You’d think the goal is pretty simple, but that presumes the incumbent has a better than even chance of winning reelection in the next four months. Recent polling in critical states like Florida suggest he doesn’t. They show him trailing Joe Biden by double digits. What we are seeing is not a “revolt” by any stretch. It’s the challenge of political calculation resulting in indecision. The Republicans can’t decide which is the better course: injecting trillions into the economy to save Trump (assuming that it would) or redigging ideological trenches in anticipation of a Democratic president.

I don’t know which way this is going to break any more than you do. What I do know, however, is the importance of vigorously debating Republican bad faith. There are many good people of good faith truly concerned about our debts, but none of those people are currently in the Senate or in the national ranks of the GOP. Debts and deficits, history shows, only matter to elected Republicans when Democrats are in charge. As long as a Republican is president, the party is more than willing to spend freely, because they are spending freely on things they like. The conservatism put into practice by national Republicans calling themselves “conservative” is fraudulent.

Bad faith is more than intent to deceive. In Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, UConn philosopher Lewis Gordon said that,

It is a denial of human reality, an effort to evade freedom, a flight from responsibility, a choice against choice, an assertion of being the only point of view on the world, an assertion of being the world, an effort to deny having a point of view, a flight from displeasing truths to pleasing falsehoods, a form of misanthropy, an act of believing what one does not believe, a form of spirit of seriousness, sincerity, an effort to disarm evidence, a form of sedimented or institutional version of all of these, and a flight from and war against social reality.

Bad faith, as philosopher Jason Stanley said, is one of the many variants of fascism.

Put more simply, it is not mere hypocrisy. It is the intent to harm.

If the Senate Republicans were truly concerned about debts, they would have repealed their 2017 rewrite of the US tax code in order to pay for half of last spring’s $2.2 trillion stimulus legislation that is going to run out by the end of this month (starting today). They didn’t, because they don’t believe in fiscal responsibility — in which budgets are meaningful instruments and revenues matter as much as expenses. They decided to put all that money on a credit card for the next Democratic president to deal with. (This is why Ron Johnson is suddenly voicing concern for debts and deficits.) They did that in order to prevent their greedy billionaire donors from having to foot the bill.

If the Senate Republicans were truly concerned about individual dependence on government subsidies (as Ted Cruz says he is), they would lambaste states like Alabama and Kentucky, which take in more money from Washington than they give in return, while states like New York and Connecticut do the opposite. Cruz does no such thing, because federal subsidies give red states license to keep their tax bases low, benefiting rich residents, while starving public services of resources and accusing poor residents who need those services of being dependent on “government handouts.”

If the Senate Republicans were truly concerned about state’s rights, as they said they were when they said Obamacare imposed the federal government’s will on state sovereignty, they would right now be excoriating the president for deploying paramilitary forces to gas, apprehend and terrorize local residents in Portland and (soon) other cities for the “crime” of demonstrating their constitutional rights. Instead, they are looking the other way or worse: accusing peaceful protesters of rioting. Why? Because the people being harmed are probably Democrats who don’t matter anyway.

Even when conservatism is practiced in good faith, as some people believe to be the case when the Trump administration decided to let the states handle the pandemic, rather than imposing the will of the federal government on the states, it turns out catastrophic. According to the New York Times, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, was explicitly ideological when explaining the administration’s approach: “Only in Washington, D.C., do they think that they have the answer for all of America.” The result has been four million infections and over 147,000 dead with no end in sight. Conservatism can be compassionate in theory. In practice, however, it’s harmful.

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 July 2020

Word Count: 900

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In two weeks, my partner and I were supposed to leave San Francisco for Reno, Nevada, where we’d be spending the next three months focused on the 2020 presidential election. As we did in 2018, we’d be working with UNITE-HERE, the hospitality industry union, only this time on the campaign to drive Donald Trump from office.

Now, however, we’re not so sure we ought to go. According to information prepared for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Nevada is among the states in the “red zone” when it comes to both confirmed cases of, and positive tests for, Covid-19. I’m 68. My partner’s five years older, with a history of pneumonia. We’re both active and fit (when I’m not tripping over curbs), but our ages make us more likely, if we catch the coronavirus, to get seriously ill or even die. That gives a person pause.

Then there’s the fact that Joe Biden seems to have a double-digit lead over Trump nationally and at least an eight-point lead in Nevada, according to the latest polls. If things looked closer, I would cheerfully take some serious risks to dislodge that man in the White House. But does it make sense to do so if Biden is already likely to win there? Or, to put it in coronavirus-speak, would our work be essential to dumping Trump?

Essential work? This minor personal conundrum got me thinking about how the pandemic has exposed certain deep and unexamined assumptions about the nature and value of work in the United States.

In the ethics classes I teach undergraduates at a college here in San Francisco, we often talk about work. Ethics is, after all, about how we ought to live our lives — and work, paid or unpaid, constitutes a big part of most of those lives. Inevitably, the conversation comes around to compensation: How much do people deserve for different kinds of work? Students tend to measure fair compensation on two scales. How many years of training and/or dollars of tuition did a worker have to invest to become “qualified” for the job? And how important is that worker’s labor to the rest of society?

Even before the coronavirus hit, students would often settle on medical doctors as belonging at the top of either scale. Physicians’ work is the most important, they’d argue, because they keep us alive. “Hmm…” I’d say. “How many of you went to the doctor today?” Usually not a hand would be raised. “How many of you ate something today?” All hands would go up, as students looked around the room at one another. “Maybe,” I’d suggest, “a functioning society depends more on the farmworkers who plant and harvest food than on the doctors you normally might see for a checkup once a year. Not to mention the people who process and pack what we eat.”

I’d also point out that the workers who pick or process our food are not really unskilled. Their work, like a surgeon’s, depends on deft, quick hand movements, honed through years of practice.

Sometimes, in these discussions, I’d propose a different metric for compensation: maybe we should reserve the highest pay for people whose jobs are both essential and dangerous. Before the pandemic, that category would not have included many healthcare workers and certainly not most doctors. Even then, however, it would have encompassed farmworkers and people laboring in meat processing plants. As we’ve seen, in these months it is precisely such people — often immigrants, documented or otherwise — who have also borne some of the worst risks of virus exposure at work.

By the end of April, when it was already clear that meatpacking plants were major sites of Covid-19 infection, the president invoked the Defense Production Act to keep them open anyway. This not only meant that workers afraid to enter them could not file for unemployment payments, but that even if the owners of such dangerous workplaces wanted to shut them down, they were forbidden to do so. By mid-June, more than 24,000 meatpackers had tested positive for the virus. And just how much do these essential and deeply endangered workers earn? According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about $28,450 a year — better than minimum wage, that is, but hardly living high on the hog (even when that’s what they’re handling).

You might think that farmworkers would be more protected from the virus than meatpackers, perhaps because they work outdoors. But as the New York Times has reported: “Fruit and vegetable pickers toil close to each other in fields, ride buses shoulder-to-shoulder, and sleep in cramped apartments or trailers with other laborers or several generations of their families.”

Not surprisingly, then, the coronavirus has, as the Times report puts it, “ravaged” migrant farm worker communities in Florida and is starting to do the same across the country all the way to eastern Oregon. Those workers, who risk their lives through exposure not only to a pandemic but to more ordinary dangers like herbicides and pesticides so we can eat, make even less than meatpackers: on average, under $26,000 a year.

When the president uses the Defense Production Act to ensure that food workers remain in their jobs, it reveals just how important their labor truly is to the rest of us. Similarly, as shutdown orders have kept home those who can afford to stay in, or who have no choice because they no longer have jobs to go to, the pandemic has revealed the crucial nature of the labor of a large group of workers already at home (or in other people’s homes or eldercare facilities): those who care for children and those who look after older people and people with disabilities who need the assistance of health aides.

This work, historically done by women, has generally been unpaid when the worker is a family member and poorly paid when done by a professional. Childcare workers, for example, earn less than $24,000 a year on average; home healthcare aides, just over that amount.

Women’s work Speaking of women’s work, I suspect that the coronavirus and the attendant economic crisis are likely to affect women’s lives in ways that will last at least a generation, if not beyond.

Middle-class feminists of the 1970s came of age in a United States where it was expected that they would marry and spend their days caring for a house, a husband, and their children. Men were the makers. Women were the “homemakers.” Their work was considered — even by Marxist economists — “non-productive,” because it did not seem to contribute to the real economy, the place where myriad widgets are produced, transported, and sold. It was seldom recognized how essential this unpaid labor in the realm of social reproduction was to a functioning economy. Without it, paid workers would not have been fed, cared for, and emotionally repaired so that they could return to another day of widget-making. Future workers would not be socialized for a life of production or reproduction, as their gender dictated.

Today, with so many women in the paid workforce, much of this work of social reproduction has been outsourced by those who can afford it to nannies, day-care workers, healthcare aides, house cleaners, or the workers who measure and pack the ingredients for meal kits to be prepared by other working women when they get home.

We didn’t know it at the time, but the post-World War II period, when boomers like me grew up, was unique in U.S. history. For a brief quarter-century, even working-class families could aspire to an arrangement in which men went to work and women kept house. A combination of strong unions, a post-war economic boom, and a so-called breadwinner minimum wage kept salaries high enough to support families with only one adult in the paid labor force. Returning soldiers went to college and bought houses through the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, also known as the G.I. Bill. New Deal programs like social security and unemployment insurance helped pad out home economies.

By the mid-1970s, however, this golden age for men, if not women, was fading. (Of course, for many African Americans and other marginalized groups, it had always only been an age of fool’s gold.) Real wages stagnated and began their long, steady decline. Today’s federal minimum wage, at $7.25 per hour, has remained unchanged since 2009 (something that can hardly be said about the wealth of the 1%). Far from supporting a family of four, in most parts of the country, it won’t even keep a single person afloat.

Elected president in 1980, Ronald Reagan announced in his first inaugural address, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” He then set about dismantling President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty programs, attacking the unions that had been the underpinning for white working-class prosperity, and generally starving the beast of government. We’re still living with the legacies of that credo in, for example, the housing crisis he first touched off by deregulating savings and loan institutions and disempowering the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

It’s no accident that, just as real wages were falling, presidential administrations of both parties began touting the virtues of paid work for women — at least if those women had children and no husband. Aid to Families with Dependent Children (“welfare”) was another New Deal program, originally designed to provide cash assistance to widowed women raising kids on their own at a time when little paid employment was available to white women.

In the 1960s, groups like the National Welfare Rights Organization began advocating that similar benefits be extended to Black women raising children. (As a welfare rights advocate once asked me, “Why is it fine for a woman to look to a man to help her children, but not to The Man?”) Not surprisingly, it wasn’t until Black and Latina women began receiving the same entitlements as their white sisters that welfare became a “problem” in need of “reform.”

By the mid-1990s, the fact that some Black women were receiving money from the government while not doing paid labor for an employer had been successfully reframed as a national crisis. Under Democratic President Bill Clinton, Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act of 1996, a bill that then was called “welfare reform.” After that, if women wanted help from The Man, they had to work for it — not by taking care of their own children, but by taking care of their children and holding down minimum-wage jobs.

Are the kids all right? It’s more than a little ironic, then, that the granddaughters of feminists who argued that women should have a choice about whether or not to pursue a career came to confront an economy in which women, at least ones not from wealthy families, had little choice about working for pay.

The pandemic may change that, however — and not in a good way. One of the unfulfilled demands of liberal 1970s feminism was universal free childcare. An impossible dream, right? How could any country afford such a thing?

Wait a minute, though. What about Sweden? They have universal free childcare. That’s why a Swedish friend of mine, a human rights lawyer, and her American husband who had a rare tenure track university job in San Francisco, chose to take their two children back to Sweden. Raising children is so much easier there. In the early days of second-wave feminism, some big employers even built daycare centers for their employees with children. Those days, sadly, are long gone.

Now, in the Covid-19 moment, employers are beginning to recognize the non-pandemic benefits of having employees work at home. (Why not make workers provide their own office furniture? It’s a lot easier to justify if they’re working at home. And why pay rent on all that real estate when so many fewer people are in the office?) While companies will profit from reduced infrastructure costs and in some cases possibly even reduced pay for employees who relocate to cheaper areas, workers with children are going to face a dilemma. With no childcare available in the foreseeable future and school re-openings dicey propositions (no matter what the president threatens), someone is going to have to watch the kids. Someone — probably in the case of heterosexual couples, the person who is already earning less — is going to be under pressure to reduce or give up paid labor to do the age-old unpaid (but essential) work of raising the next generation. I wonder who that someone is going to be and, without those paychecks, I also wonder how much families are going to suffer economically in increasingly tough times.

Grateful to have a job? Recently, in yet another Zoom meeting, a fellow university instructor (who’d just been interrupted to help a child find a crucial toy) was discussing the administration’s efforts to squeeze concessions out of faculty and staff. I was startled to hear her add, “Of course, I’m grateful they gave me the job.” This got me thinking about jobs and gratitude — and which direction thankfulness ought to flow. It seems to me that the pandemic and the epidemic of unemployment following in its wake have reinforced a common but false belief shared by many workers: the idea that we should be grateful to our employers for giving us jobs.

We’re so often told that corporations and the great men behind them are Job Creators. From the fountain of their beneficence flows the dignity of work and all the benefits a job confers. Indeed, as this fairy tale goes, businesses don’t primarily produce widgets or apps or even returns for shareholders. Their real product is jobs. Like many of capitalism’s lies, the idea that workers should thank their employers reverses the real story: without workers, there would be no apps, no widgets, no shareholder returns. It’s our effort, our skill, our diligence that gives work its dignity. It may be an old saying, but no less true for that: labor creates all wealth. Wealth does not create anything — neither widgets, nor jobs.

I’m grateful to the universe that I have work that allows me to talk with young people about their deepest values at a moment in their lives when they’re just figuring out what they value, but I am not grateful to my university employer for my underpaid, undervalued job. The gratitude should run in the other direction. Without faculty, staff, and students there would be no university. It’s our labor that creates wealth, in this case a (minor) wealth of knowledge.

As of July 16th, in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis, 32 million Americans are receiving some kind of unemployment benefit. That number doesn’t even reflect the people involuntarily working reduced hours, or those who haven’t been able to apply for benefits. One thing is easy enough to predict: employers will take advantage of people’s desperate need for money to demand ever more labor for ever less pay. Until an effective vaccine for the coronavirus becomes available, expect to see the emergence of a three-tier system of worker immiseration: low-paid essential workers who must leave home to do their jobs, putting themselves in significant danger in the process, while we all depend on them for sustenance; better paid people who toil at home, but whose employers will expect their hours of availability to expand to fill the waking day; and low-paid or unpaid domestic laborers, most of them women, who keep everyone else fed, clothed, and comforted.

Even when the pandemic finally ends, there’s a danger that some modified version of this new system of labor exploitation might prove too profitable for employers to abandon. On the other hand, hitting the national pause button, however painfully, could give the rest of us a chance to rethink a lot of things, including the place of work, paid and unpaid, in our lives.

So, will my partner and I head for Reno in a couple of weeks? Certainly, the job of ousting Donald Trump is essential. I’m just not sure that a couple of old white ladies are essential workers in the time of Covid-19.

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

Copyright ©2020 Rebecca Gordon — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 July 2020

Word Count: 2,687

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The president announced Wednesday that his administration will send federal agents to Chicago, Albuquerque and other cities to “help combat rising crime,” according to the AP. “There has been a radical movement to defund, dismantle and dissolve our police departments,” Donald Trump said at the White House. He blamed that for “a shocking explosion of shootings, killings, murders and heinous crimes of violence.”

Crime has indeed risen recently but the reasons are associated with the Covid-19 pandemic, soaring unemployment, social unrest and even the weather. (Summer heat often correlates with homicide rates, for instance.) Make no mistake, however. Mass protests demanding justice for the murder of George Floyd did not cause an increase in crime. Calls for reforming police departments across the country did not cause it either. Moreover, cities are not hotbeds of rioting, looting, disorder and discord. With exceptions here and there, the country’s crime rate has been falling for two decades.

The president is doing what authoritarians do. He’s creating a problem, hyping the sense of imminent doom based on the thinnest of rationales, in order to solve the “problem” using means totally unacceptable under normal circumstances. In another time, it would have been scandalous to dispatch federal agents to “combat rising crime,” because that’s not the federal government’s proper role. Doing that, even suggesting that, violates our common understanding of the principles of federalism, state sovereignty and local control, values the Republicans used to say they cherished. Trump is creating an image of American cities that is so dire and so dangerous that the conservative principles of the past must be set aside to restore “law and order.”

It seems the president believes he’s suffering politically. The pandemic is eating into his base. The economy, once the stimulus money runs out at month’s end, is careening toward a cliff. Senate Republicans, who acquitted him of treason, now seem to be hedging. Maine’s Susan Collins, in a tight race, won’t endorse him. Her colleagues seem to think he’s in trouble, too. They are make-believing concern for debts and deficits in anticipation of a Democratic president. States like Texas seem competitive, forcing his campaign to buy television ads there. Trump does not have a good political answer to these political problems. So he’s doing what authoritarians do: solving a political problem using the power of the state. In a sense, he’s militarizing politics.

I’ve called these federal agents “secret police,” and I still think that’s accurate, but another term, perhaps a more accurate term, to describe nameless and badge-less federal agents representing Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement is “paramilitary.” The “para” is important. These people are not regular military. They did not sign up voluntarily to serve their country. They did not answer the call of duty and do not live by a code of conduct. They do not believe in honor or sacrifice. They do not believe they are accountable to the Congress. Those are traditional military values.

The president’s paramilitary is loyal to one thing, above even patriotism. That’s Donald Trump. Jenn Budd is a former Border Patrol agent who’s now a civil rights activist. Early this year, she reported a conversation she had with a former senior CBP official: “Border Patrol believes it is not required to answer to local police, FBI, CIA or any other law enforcement agency,” Budd tweeted on Feb. 12. “They claim to be the ‘premiere’ law enforcement agency, superior to all others. They say they will become a ‘national police force’ to be used by a president to enforce laws even among citizens.”

In a republic, partisans compete according to an agreed-to set of rules by means of persuasion. If I persuade a majority to vote for me, I win. If I can’t, I lose, and live to fight another day. In an autocracy, persuasion is a dead end, because what I want, few others want. So I rewrite the rules in my favor or, the easier way, I use force. Most American cities are run by Democrats. If I can’t beat my opponents fair and square, I can send in the paramilitary in order to occupy “the battle space” under the guise of maintaining order as well as combating the crime of voter fraud. With just enough paramilitary action, a president suffering politically can have a good Election Day.

It’s common for political parties to have paramilitary wings, which make up for the absence of electoral power with violence. Sinn Féin, for instance, is a legitimate party in Ireland. The Irish Republican Army was its illegitimate paramilitary. (Sinn Féin denied officially for decades any connection to the IRA.) And it’s common for those paramilitary wings to be loosely organized, consisting of people inside and outside the government, but who are all dedicated to the purpose of serving a party or individual. Pashtun warlords wield more than kalashnikovs. They wield Afghani bureaucrats, too.

It’s uncommon in the United States, but we are getting there. In addition to the US Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Border Patrol and other agencies, the president has influence over hundreds of small informal citizen militias armed to the teeth thanks to the Republicans pushing guns into all quarters of civic life. Given all this, it’s starting to appear as if the Grand Old Party has its own paramilitary wing.

If you can’t beat ’em, beat ’em.

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 July 2020

Word Count: 894

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