The president delivered a breathtaking speech last week at the foot of Mount Rushmore that most people did not hear. He spoke on a Friday. It was, moreover, a Friday before the Fourth of July. Most people had something better to do than listen to Donald Trump use language amounting to an unofficial declaration of a civil war.

It wasn’t for you, anyway. It was for them. By “them,” I mean people who inhabit a wholly imagined nation-within-a-nation, a confederacy of the mind and the spirit, in which “real Americans” are oppressed by the slow roll of majority opinion and whose freedom to humiliate others is violated by the founding ideals of equality and justice. This “nation,” for those who are geographically minded, is predominantly southern, but, like the Confederate flag, is seen wherever “real Americans” hang their hats.

This is my way of understanding properly the president’s speech and its appeal to the hardest of his hardcore supporters. Liberals, socialists, city-dwellers, intellectuals, atheists, LGBTQ people, Black people and Americans of color — they are all the same essentially as our-way-of-life-threatening foreigners. They live here but don’t belong here. They are an enemy that must be destroyed by any means, including betrayal, sabotage and collusion with foreign conspirators. The target of their fury has indeed shifted from “illegal” immigrants in 2016 to citizens in 2020. Is anyone truly surprised?

I don’t think the president has any doubt about losing virtually all nonwhite voters this year, so he does his best to prevent white voters from bolting, especially white voters who did not watch his speech, because they had better things to do on a Friday before a holiday, but who are invested in some way in the idea that they are not racists. They already know that Trump is a white supremacist, but they can’t quite bring themselves to vote for a Democrat, because the Democrats, thanks to years of GOP propaganda and intellectual fraud among “respectable” pundits, seem almost to be anti-white.

One way the president holds onto this cohort of “moderate” white voters is by portraying the Democratic Party as full of terrifying boogeymen — communists, violent anarchists, mobs of radical leftists and so on. More important to Trump, I think, is portraying Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee, as being as corrupt as he is. This seems like hypocrisy — a transparently corrupt president who lies at the rate in which he breathes is accusing Biden of corruption? — but it’s more cynical than that. In pulling Biden down to his level, Trump is making the choice between them appear morally relative. In doing so, Trump is betting the bonds of whiteness will make it OK for “moderate” white people who do not want to vote for a racist to vote for a racist.

The president’s methods are blunt, but there are far more subtle means of achieving the same goals. Instead of bringing Biden down to Trump’s level, thus turning the public square into a brownfield, one could worry about “liberal mobs” tearing down statues, trying to “erase history” like totalitarians of yore. (Protesters are in fact tearing down paeans to slavocracy and genocide, actions related to the mass demonstrations demanding justice for George Floyd’s murder, but I digress.) Instead of inventing boogeymen that are easily debunked, one could worry, as the New York Times’ Bret Stephens did this weekend, about “thought police” emerging out of a growing “cancel culture.”

I’m not going to say much about “cancel culture” except that it’s almost entirely make-believe. Critics do not generally take into account actual arguments made by social reformers but instead fabricate arguments in order to undercut them. The point that I want to make is that Stephens and other dishonest intellectuals, comprising maybe half the pundit corps, are in effect, to borrow from the late Philip Roth, koshering Trump.

In the novelist’s The Plot Against America, Charles Lindbergh, renown for antisemitism as much as aviation, defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 election with the help of a rabbi who “koshers” him — that is, makes clear to non-Jews who do not want to vote for a renown antisemite that Lindbergh’s antisemitism is fine. It’s OK to vote for him. (Many thanks to Seth Cotlar for bringing this aspect of Roth’s novel to my attention.)

Koshering, I hope it’s clear, shouldn’t be limited to minimizing or whitewashing antisemitism. Diamond and Silk, a pair of Black grifters, kosher Trump when they make clear to white people that the president’s racism is OK. But again, this is only an obvious form of koshering.

When “moderate” pundits write columns worrying about “cancel culture” or “political correctness” more than a literal fascist president coming very close to declaring war on other Americans; when they fret about Confederate statues more than the mountains of evidence pointing to institutional racism injuring and murdering Black Americans; when they fixate on the norms of language more than the norms of socially acceptable sadism; and, when they talk about a white backlash more than they talk about the crimes of history — that’s a kind of koshering, 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: 06 July 2020

Word Count: 845

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Brian Stelter is CNN’s chief media reporter. His Sunday program, “Reliable Sources,” is probably as close to conventional wisdom among members of the Washington press corps as one can get. On Thursday, he tweeted a video clip from John Berman’s show in which reporter Miguel Marquez started crying after reporting scenes from a Texas hospital that was full to bursting with patients suffering from the new coronavirus.

Marquez’s report and Berman’s discussion afterward were of serious public interest. Republican Governor Greg Abbott rushed in May to “reopen” his state in the service of a GOP president desperate to campaign on the economy. For Donald Trump’s sake, Abbott straw-bossed Texas back to normal. He even barred big cities from mandating masks in public. He changed his mind yesterday after Covid-19 cases surged to new records. It was too little, too late, though. There are more sick Texans than hospital beds to heal them in. Marquez’s report put flesh on public-health statistics. More importantly, it took a side. It took the side of human beings suffering needlessly.

That was the experience of those watching CNN. For those like me following Brian Stelter on Twitter, the experience was quite different. What was important, according to what he decided was worthy of our attention, was not a public-health disaster resulting from negligent leadership putting partisan self-interest above the potential for and the devastating reality of human suffering. It was that a reporter got weepy. Stelter is a pro, but try as he might, he can’t quit TV biases, which are for novelty, conflict and emotion, especially crying. Tears are the crack cocaine of cable news.

Bias isn’t so bad as long as it’s yoked to something real, like human suffering, and as long as it illustrates who is doing what to whom — as long as it points to the whole truth. Television viewers got a sense of that. Stelter, however, directed his followers toward Marquez’s tears as if they were newsworthy on their own. The result was a kind of drama without context, emotion without causation. People are dying, but nobody did anything wrong. Justice is therefore pointless. I do not doubt that Stelter was acting in good faith, but an outcome of his conventional wisdom was the invention of a political fiction in which everything is as good or bad as everything else, and nothing matters.

Moral relativism and nihilism were less dangerous to the body politic (as well as to literal bodies) when presidents recognized the difference between the news media and the real world. The incumbent, however, sees no difference, because he is a product of a fictional, meaningless and morally relative world. Reality isn’t what it is. Reality is what Donald Trump says it is. If he says the economy is getting better in the face of a pandemic that has killed over 131,500 people and counting, then it’s getting better. Moreover, it’s unfair that the press corps is paying more attention to suffering in Texas, Florida and other states than to his super-duper “policies.” Trump must invent reality in order to survive. It harms him politically when the press corps ignores it.

He isn’t alone of course. His Republican confederates, especially from southern states that rushed to reopen for his benefit, are equally invested in creating a worldview in which nothing matters. Republican Tom Cotton, senator of Arkansas, whose state is reeling from sickness and death, found the time yesterday to dash off a tweet that managed to slander, lie, distort and malign in a mere 28 words. He appears obsessed with something he calls the “liberal mob.” I could not find one tweet — not one — expressing anything, not even sympathy, for those sick or dead from the coronavirus. Cotton doesn’t need to invent reality to survive. He doesn’t need to impugn the press corps for ignoring this made-up world. He’s doing both for the president’s sake.

I see Brian Stelter’s tweet as illustrative of a kind of transition taking place between the old way of doing things in journalism and the new. In the old way, one side said this and the other said that. They were presented as equal even if one was a fact and one was a lie, giving the impression that the truth is partisan and morality relative. In the old way, the press corps was complicit in the creation of a cynical, meaningless and made-up world immediately beneficial to the interests of the Republican Party.

The new way, as practiced by younger reporters, especially younger reporters of color, is morally responsible. It is therefore pissing the president off. It’s self-evidently bad when people get sick. It’s self-evidently bad when people die. It’s self-evidently bad when sickness and death could have been prevented by leaders who knew that what they were doing was self-evidently bad as they were doing it for reasons incompatible with human health.

Yes, tears will be the result of disease, death and the dereliction of duty, but tears alone are not newsworthy. They are part of a context, part of a system of causality, one that responsible reporters duly report. The GOP hates that, of course.

 

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 July 2020

Word Count: 856

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I disliked President George W. Bush immensely. I thought he was illegitimate. The US Supreme Court decided his 2000 victory, not voters. I thought he was weak. Dick Cheney was in charge more than he was. I thought he was a liar. Iraq did not possess “weapons of mass destruction.” I thought he was dangerous. His gross ineptitude destabilized the international order. It enfeebled what had been the Pax Americana.

I never thought he was disloyal, though.

Indeed, his love of country was such that he believed democracy could grow out of the end of a gun barrel; that scores of thousands of dead Iraqis were an even trade for 3,000 dead Americans; that moral and legal abominations like torture and “enemy combatants” were acceptable to achieving American security; that war crimes and atrocities were OK if they meant preserving life and liberty at home; that being an American citizen meant more rights and privileges than being a mere human being. Call me quaint if you wish, but I want presidents to pursue truth, justice and the American way — in that order. For George W. Bush, it was the American way or zip.

For the current president, there is no American way. Sure, he won on a message of “America First,” but the “America” in that hoary campaign slogan never meant the United States. It meant a wholly imagined community, a confederacy of the mind and the spirit, that’s always already at work, often covertly but these days overtly, and that seeks to undermine the US by any means, including treason, to accomplish its goals.

George W. Bush, as bad as he was, was a patriot. Donald Trump and his confederates in the Republican Party, however, are not. They are quite literally the enemies within.

You could say, well, they’re still American. They’re not traitors. They haven’t done anything to help another country at the expense of the US. That depends on what you mean by “another country,” though. During the American Civil War, the Confederate States asked but failed to get imperial powers to lend a hand in destroying the union. Trump and his GOP confederates are also seeking foreign assistance. In standing idly by, Senate Republicans are tacitly inviting Russian propagandists to poison the public understanding of Joe Biden. More explicitly, the Trump campaign, namely Rudy Giuliani, is working with a Ukrainian lawmaker to smear the Democratic nominee. The enemies within are working with the enemies without to injure the United States.

The GOP confederates don’t believe they are traitors. They believe their confederacy of the mind and the spirit is the true home of the “real Americans” for whom God chose a flawed leader to deliver into their hands an America that is subordinate to their righteous domination. That arrangement demanded that they trust Donald Trump, which meant that arrangement could not possibly endure. At some point, sooner or later, there’d be a moment in which it was clear, even to GOP confederates, that the president had betrayed them the way he betrayed everyone else in his life.

That moment seems to be here. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press and others have reported that the president knew the Kremlin was paying Afghani terrorists to kill American troops stationed overseas. The AP says Trump knew about Russian bounties in early 2019. Yet the administration did nothing, and continues to do nothing, even as it denies that it knew anything at all. Moreover, he’s defending the Russians and their association with the Taliban, the very people who aided and abetted Osama bin Laden, who conceived and executed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a time of existential angst among GOP confederates that comes close to rivaling the election of the first Black president of the United States.

The Washington press corps is reporting a split in the Republican Party between people loyal to the nation-within-a-nation and people, especially senators up for reelection, worried about the appearance of being loyal to the nation-within-a-nation. But I think the GOP is being split in another way not yet being reported: between confederates disloyal to the United States and a president disloyal to Republican confederates. The “American Taliban” are supposed to be liberal activists tearing down statues of the founders, according to US Sen. Ted Cruz. They are not supposed to be members of the Republican Party whose chief loyalty is to the nation-within-a-nation. The president is creating cognitive dissonance that may never be resolved.

If I’m right, the GOP confederates will crumble the way the Confederate States crumbled. Betrayal is a feature, not a bug. For all his flaws, George W. Bush’s allies and opponents knew where he stood.

This is what happens when a major political party abandons its values, its history and its former leaders. It inevitably self-destructs.

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: 02 July 2020

Word Count: 808

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The news that President Trump is planning to stage a “massive fireworks display” before a sizeable crowd on Independence Day eve at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial (notwithstanding the prospect of both wildfires in the tinder-dry surroundings and the further spread of Covid-19) has left me mulling over once again the possible creation of another such epic-scale monument. Maybe it could even be incised into a nearby ridge in the same Black Hills area of South Dakota as the original, if the Lakota Sioux could be convinced to allow it, which they certainly didn’t the first time around.

After all, back in the late 1920s, less than three decades and not 70 miles from the site of the ultimate treachery of the Wounded Knee massacre, that original undertaking to carve the faces of presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt into the side of Mount Rushmore barreled heedlessly along, oblivious to Native American concerns. In the process, it desecrated one of the Sioux’s holiest sites (the stark cliff face the Lakota ironically called the Six Grandfathers) in order to celebrate the leaders of the very nation that had stolen their land and then so savagely repressed them.

Incidentally, did you know — I hadn’t — that the sculptor of the original Rushmore monument, Gutzon Borglum, was an avid member of the Ku Klux Klan? In fact, his first stab at such a gargantuan effort, earlier in the 1920s, had been his proposed Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial, featuring the mounted figures of generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, as well as the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, leading their rebel armies.

That vast bas-relief was to grace the very site, half an hour outside Atlanta, where, on a cold Thanksgiving night in 1915, just a few months after the premiere of D.W. Griffith’s movie Birth of a Nation (and shortly after that, the notorious mob-lynching of the falsely convicted Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank in nearby Marietta), a select group of sheet-hooded men, led by William J. Simmons, founded the second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan. Their ceremony culminated with the burning of a 16-foot cross atop the dome of the mountain, an act commemorated there every Labor Day for the next 50 years with similarly festive cross burnings.

As it happened, Borglum only made it as far as sculpting Lee’s head before the initial version of the project bogged down in financial difficulties and intra-Klan sectarian strife in 1925. A couple of years later, he moved on to the Mount Rushmore project. Several decades later, however, work on a variation of Borglum’s Stone Mountain would be revived by others, long after Mount Rushmore’s completion. Indeed, with work once again well underway toward what would become the largest bas-relief anywhere in the world, a vast state park at the bottom of the mountain was inaugurated on April 14, 1965, the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, and the place would quickly become Georgia’s most visited tourist attraction. But that’s another story, worthy perhaps of an entirely different reckoning.

As for my own fantasized Rushmore 2.0, perhaps the Lakota would be more amenable to this version than they were the first time around, since the project would be aimed at addressing our common future, maybe half a century from now, and represent a graven missive from our own time to our progeny’s, an attempt to account for the botched and blighted world we’ll likely have bequeathed them by then.

Whose heads (and whose hands) in the pillory stockade? Rather than gazing off with visionary zeal toward some divinely sanctioned manifest destiny, as in the original, the foursome on my Mount Rushmore 2.0 would be lined up in a pillory stockade, each with his downcast face bracketed by similarly yoked hands. (The encasing yoke-planks would be meticulously carved into that granite cliff as well.) These would be the four men (and yes, of course, they would all be white men) from our era who, perhaps more than any others, could be deemed responsible for the dire endgame into which the world by that time might well have plunged: Four men who had the resources and intelligence to have known better but instead chose to swap out the long-term fate of their grandchildren (and the rest of the human progeny) in relentless pursuit of short-term profit and power.

The way I envision it, the first slot on that mountain would be reserved for media baron Rupert Murdoch who, by way of his News Corp empire, so single-handedly poisoned the well of public discourse with denial and obfuscation, not only in the United States, but in Britain as well as in his native Australia (where he controls 60% of all daily newspaper sales). For that matter, his damage extends globally, thanks to Fox News, the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, the Sun, the News of the World, and their ilk (and recently, he even chose to solidify his malign record by installing his ideologically matched son Lachlan atop the firm’s line of succession in conspicuous stead of his more circumspect and reportedly reform-minded son James).

The next slot over should surely go to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. After all, across a single crucial decade — and how long can scientists and others keep insisting that we only have 10 or 12 years left to avert planetary ecological calamity before those years run out? — he managed to upend virtually every effort of the Obama administration, no matter how deeply inadequate, to deal with the burning of fossil fuels. Then he abetted every anti-ecological, anti-climate-change initiative of the Trump administration, with immediate short-term benefits to his billionaire (often fossil-fueled) donors. Meanwhile, he succeeded in packing the courts with similarly blinkered reactionaries as a way of forestalling future efforts to reverse any of this.

And no, Donald J. Trump wouldn’t even come close to qualifying for the third spot on that cliffside commemorative relief. The candidates, after all, would have to demonstrate enough intellectual bandwidth to grasp, however faintly, the stakes involved, and Trump demonstrably lacks any grasp whatsoever of the future he’s leaving our children and their children. In any case, his hands are way too small. They’d keep slipping out of the stockade’s granite boreholes and, as for his hair, how could any sculptor, no matter how gifted, be expected to reproduce such a mare’s nest? Moreover, merely excluding him from such dubious company should be enough to provoke a veritable tweet storm of umbrage, which could, at least, provide the rest of us with a tad of dark entertainment across these dismal times, even if the project itself never advanced to the chiseling stage.

So what of slot three? On that one, I’m of at least two minds and, in any case, why should I be the only one who gets to decide? Shouldn’t these choices be a matter for public conversation and deliberation? Still, for my money, one-time Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Vice President Dick Cheney would definitely be in the running, given their formative roles in fomenting the sort of dyspeptic politics that made the current Trumpian moment possible.

And don’t forget Bill Clinton either. (No reason not to be bipartisan on such a monument.) Too clever by half in his zeal to be loved by those at the top of the financial pyramid, President Clinton didn’t even begin to rebalance the neoliberal excesses of President Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Given the craven surrender of Gingrich, Cheney, and Clinton to the short-term needs and dictates of financial and technological monopolies at the expense of longer-term environmental initiatives, all three would surely merit consideration.

The fourth slot for the fifth vote? Which brings me to that fourth slot, one that could well be determined in the next six months and, at least to my mind, is Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’s to lose.

Yes, the current administration botched its response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the unprecedented financial collapse that resulted, and yes, Trump and his minions have appallingly racist instincts in their treatment of immigration, police violence, systemic discrimination, and the widening chasms of economic inequality. Still, the single most crucial issue in the upcoming November election should surely be the environmental future of our planet and, let’s face it, in that regard the United States remains the decisive battleground in determining all humanity’s collective fate. (And it’s hard to overstate the terminal devastation four more years of Trumpian governance could wreak in this regard.)

Of course, with each passing week, Trump’s defeat in any sort of fairly conducted election seems ever more assured (though no thanks to the issue of climate change, which is still being widely ignored). Still, whether the coming election will, in fact, be fairly conducted, with widespread access to the ballot guaranteed, is fast becoming the defining question of this electoral season.

From President Trump and Mitch McConnell to local operatives in key swing states, the Republicans have made no secret of their determination to shrink suffrage through voter suppression tactics like mass purges of voting lists; arbitrary registration requirements blatantly tilted against people of color and young people generally; flagrant efforts to prevent mail-in balloting (even in the face of a likely autumn upsurge of the Covid-19 pandemic and even if it takes bankrupting the Postal Service in order to do so); the conspicuously uneven distribution of polling places on Election Day, along with the assignment of more breakdown-prone polling machines to key opposition districts; all of that to be supplemented by massive, secretly funded efforts at voter intimidation — and that’s not even to mention complications that might arise in the subsequent counting of the ballots. Most of these gambits will provoke urgent legal challenges that will undoubtedly quickly wend their way to an already highly politicized Supreme Court. There, Trump and his fellow Republicans can count on at least four stalwart votes (that being in large part why those judges, most recently Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, were put there in the first place).

This, in turn, means that the fate of both the republic and the human future could come down to the jurisprudence of just one man: Chief Justice John Roberts, the fifth vote (and the only one that may matter in the end). In this context, much is made of the chief justice’s supposedly overriding concern for the historical reputation of the institution he presides over, its nonpartisan majesty, and its abiding place in the constitutional firmament. After all, wasn’t he the one who found a way to salvage the Affordable Care Act, secure the employment rights of LGBTQ workers, and forestall both the deportation of the DACA Dreamers and the obliteration of abortion, at least for the time being?

It’s worth noting, however, that the absolute right of states and localities to control access to voting in any way they see fit (without regard to gerrymandering or ongoing racial discrimination) has been a fundamentally unswerving feature of Roberts’s legal philosophy since long before he was on the Supreme Court. After all, from July 1980 through August 1981, he clerked for Justice William Rehnquist, who’d made it his own life’s work to roll back much of the liberal Supreme Court’s jurisprudence of the previous three decades, particularly with regard to voting rights. On leaving that clerkship, Roberts joined the Justice Department’s civil rights division where he served under Kenneth Starr in the newly installed administration of President Ronald Reagan. There, his portfolio was particularly focused on undercutting the 1975 Voting Rights Act, even if to only limited effect, owing to congressional opposition at the time. In 1986, he left government to enter private practice.

But after the November 2000 Florida presidential election debacle (remember those “hanging chads”?), Roberts was one of the first outside lawyers selected by 29-year old Republican campaign adviser Ted Cruz (another onetime Rehnquist clerk) to fashion a legal strategy for a preemptive appeal to the Supreme Court. Thereafter, working behind the scenes on behalf of Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the brother of Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush, Roberts fashioned a gambit designed to force the suspension of any recount in that state. He would thereby award the narrowest possible electoral college victory to the younger Bush over Democratic candidate Al Gore (who had actually won the national popular vote by more than 500,000 votes).

Roberts’s strategy proved entirely successful — in partial appreciation for which, as one of his first acts, the newly installed president nominated Roberts to a seat on the Washington, D.C., Circuit Court of Appeals (a nomination that languished for two years until the Republicans secured control of the Senate). Then, in 2005, Bush nominated him to succeed the recently deceased Rehnquist as chief justice of the Supreme Court in which capacity Roberts promptly resumed his lifelong focus on systematically eviscerating most forms of federal electoral supervision.

In 2010, Roberts was the fifth vote in the notorious Citizens United decision that effectively equated money with speech and opened the floodgates to unprecedented private spending in election campaigns, virtually without regulatory oversight. Three years later, he was the fifth vote in Shelby County v. Holder, a case that gutted major provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Movement, radically undercutting the federal government’s capacity to address clearly documented discriminatory practices at the state and local level.

At the end of the 2019 term, Roberts provided the fifth vote in a case ensuring that federal courts couldn’t review even the most egregiously partisan gerrymanders by state legislatures. On the eve of the recent Wisconsin primary, his was the fifth vote overturning the ability of that state’s governor, acting at the behest of his health commissioner, to suspend or extend primary voting thanks to the rampaging coronavirus. Roberts and crew thereby sentenced tens of thousands of voters to wait in dangerous lines for hours on end at polling places, especially in urban districts like Milwaukee, where a total of only five polling stations were able to open to service the entire city.

In the balance So, we’ll see. In the wake of the November 3rd election, will yet another set of fifth votes, this time in defense of a slew of Trumpian election outrages, net him that fourth slot on Rushmore 2.0, or might some sudden, otherwise unaccountable about-face on his part spare us the need even to erect such a monument?

If, however, Roberts does provide those deciding votes for the Republican side, will democracy as we know it even survive a second Trump term, so that anyone might ever again even be allowed to muse over and plan, let alone erect, a Rushmore 2.0 monument? On the other hand, were Roberts to demur, who knows whether achingly conventional Joe Biden will be able to rise to the historic occasion of his own election or might he, in the fullness of time, yet find himself becoming worthy of insertion into the fourth slot in that stockade?

History will tell: some of us may even live to see it.

Lawrence Weschler was a staff writer at the New Yorker for 20 years and then the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU. He has authored more than 20 books, the latest of which, in collaboration with the artist David Opdyke, is This Land: An Epic Postcard Mural on the Future of a Country in Ecological Peril (due out in September from Monacelli/Phaedon). His website is lawrenceweschler.com. This article originated at TomDispatch.com

Copyright ©2020 Lawrence Weschler — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 July 2020

Word Count: 2,519

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You know that feeling when you trip on the street and instantly sense that you’re about to crash hard and there’s no way to prevent it? As gravity has its way with you, all you can do is watch yourself going down. Yeah, that feeling.

I had it the other day on my way to a Black Lives Matter demonstration when I caught my toe on a curb and pitched forward. As time slowed down, I saw not my past, but my future, pass before my eyes — a future that would at worst include months of rehabbing a broken hip and at best a few weeks hobbling around on crutches. I was lucky. Nothing was broken and I’ll probably be off the crutches by the time you read this.

But that feeling of falling and knowing it’s too late to stop it has stayed with me. I suspect it reflects a sensation many people in the United States might be having right now, a sense that time is moving slowly while we watch a flailing country in a slow-motion free fall. It has taken decades of government dereliction to get us to this point and a few years of Trumpian sabotage to show us just where we really are. To have any hope of pulling back from the brink, however, will take the determination of organizations like the Movement for Black Lives.

That national descent, when it came, proved remarkably swift. In less than six months, we’ve seen more than 2.5 million confirmed Covid-19 infections and more than 125,000 deaths. And it’s not slowing down. June 24th, in fact, saw the biggest single-day total in new U.S. infections (more than 38,000) since April and that number may well have been superseded by the time this piece comes out. During this pandemic, we’ve gone from an economy of almost full employment — even if at starvation levels for those earning a minimum wage — to one with the worst unemployment since the Great Depression (even as billionaires have once again made a rather literal killing). The government’s response to these twin catastrophes has been feckless at best and criminal at worst. While this country may not yet be a failed state, it’s certainly in a free fall all its own.

What is a failed state? People use this expression to indicate a political entity whose government has ceased to perform most or all of its basic functions. Such a condition can result from civil war, untrammeled corruption, natural disaster, or some combination of those and more. The Fund for Peace, which has been working on such issues for more than 70 years, lists four criteria to identify such a country: 

Loss of control of its territory, or of the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force therein

Erosion of legitimate authority to make collective decisions

Inability to provide public services

Inability to interact with other states as a full member of the international community

I’ve always thought of such fallen lands (sometimes given a fatal shove by my own government) as far-away places. Countries like Libya. The Fund for Peace identifies that beleaguered and now fractured nation, where rival armed forces compete for primacy, as the one in which government fragility has increased most over the last decade. The present chaos began when the United States and its NATO allies stepped in militarily, precipitating the overthrow of autocrat Muammar Qaddafi, with no particular plan for the day after.

Then there’s Yemen, where Washington’s support for the intervention of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates only exacerbated an ongoing civil war, whose civilian victims have been left to confront famine, cholera, and most recently, with a shattered healthcare system, the coronavirus. And before Libya and Yemen, don’t forget the Bush administration’s disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq, which damaged that country’s physical and political infrastructure in ways it is now, 17 years later, starting to dig out of.

So, yes, I’d known about failed states, but it wasn’t until I read “We Are Living in a Failed State” by George Packer in the June 2020 Atlantic magazine that I began to seriously entertain the idea that my country was bouncing down the same flight of stairs. As that article’s subtitle put it: “The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken.”

The monopoly of the legitimate use of force In his 1919 lecture “Politics as a Vocation,” German sociologist Max Weber observed that “a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” In other words, a state is a given territory whose inhabitants recognize that only one institution, the government, has the capacity — and therefore the right — to authorize the use of violence against members of the community.

Weber described three main ways that the use of violence acquires legitimacy: through long tradition, through the charisma of individual leaders, or in the case of many modern states, through the rule of law. In a way, Donald Trump’s administration can be viewed as one long attempt to roll back the legitimacy derived from the rule of law and replace it with the power of one man’s personal charisma. The president’s often-bumbling attempts to rule by fiat have reminded many fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation of a hapless imitation of Captain Jean-Luc Picard repeatedly calling out from the bridge of the Enterprise, “Make it so!”

Recently, however, Trump has used his presidential authority to directly threaten his own citizens with military force. On June 1st, he said at a Rose Garden press conference, “If a city or a state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.” Minutes later, he showed just how it could be done, when protesters in Washington, D.C.’s Lafayette Square were attacked by a combined force of National Guard, federal Park Police, and Secret Service agents. That last group Trump chose to congratulate for the job they did in a celebratory tweet, addressing them as the “S.S.,” an evocation — one hopes unintentional — of the Schutzstaffel (a Nazi paramilitary force of the previous century.) The world saw, as the Washington Post reported, “federal officers shoving protesters with shields and firing pepper balls, chemical grenades, and smoke bombs at retreating crowds” — all so the president could have a photo op with his buddy, the Bible, in front of a church down the street from the White House.

Max Weber was hardly suggesting that, in a functional state, only the government uses force to achieve its ends. Residents would still, for instance, experience criminal violence. When a state begins to fail, however, it either can’t or won’t prevent other forces from threatening or using violence — a growing trend in Donald Trump’s America. He has even, for instance, encouraged attendees at his rallies to “knock the crap out of” hecklers and offered to pay their legal fees afterward. We’ve watched him congratulate a Republican congressman for physically attacking a reporter and noted his approval of some “very fine people” at the 2017 Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a white nationalist murdered a woman by driving his car into a crowd of counterdemonstrators.

Recently, the president’s support for extralegal violence has taken a far more sinister turn. Now, he’s given his imprimatur not just to his individual supporters, but to armed militias opposing their states’ efforts to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. He’s urged them to “LIBERATE!” places like Michigan and Virginia, approved of armed vigilantes physically menacing legislators deliberating about Michigan’s stay-at-home policies, and had no objection to their parading in front of the office of Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer with signs bearing slogans like “Tyrants get the rope!” His encouragement of armed resistance to state authority so alarmed Washington Governor Jay Inslee that he accused the president of “fomenting domestic rebellion.”

What do you call a nation in which armed militias can threaten officials without fear of penalty? Whether it’s Libya or the U.S., I’d call it a state on the way to failing.

Eroding the legitimacy of collective decision making The United States is a republic. Those who can vote elect representatives who make the laws that govern us. That’s how federal and state constitutions, city charters, and town bylaws have set out the major process for collective decision-making in this country. (Of course, sometimes we also participate more directly, as when we speak or write about public affairs, demonstrate our concerns in marches with banners and chants, or organize ourselves as communities, workers, or other groups of people sharing common interests.)

Recognizing that this country is still officially a republic doesn’t mean that everyone legally entitled to vote is actually able to vote. I wish that were so. In many parts of this country, however, the Republicans have been working assiduously to make voting by some of us either illegal or impossible.

In my lifetime, African Americans (and some white allies) died to secure the vote, an effort that culminated in the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In 2013, however, under George W. Bush-appointed Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court essentially gutted the act. Ever since, we’ve seen an acceleration of efforts to reduce access to the polls for African Americans and other marginalized groups. These include onerous voter identification procedures and restrictions on early voting or access to vote-by-mail options. The Brennan Center for Justice reports that, in the past decade, 25 states have imposed new restrictions on voting.

To the extent that Americans recognize elections as a means of collective decision-making, it’s because a sufficient number of us have confidence in the basic integrity of the system. In less functional societies, the results of elections are frequently, sometimes violently, contested by the losing side. So it’s one thing — and bad enough — for local jurisdictions to make it difficult or impossible for particular groups of people to vote. It’s quite another when a country’s leader acts to undermine public confidence in the entire electoral process.

That, of course, is exactly what Donald Trump has been doing from the moment of his 2016 electoral victory when he began blaming his failure to win the popular vote on millions of ballots supposedly cast illegally by undocumented immigrants. He even set up a presidential commission to investigate such a massive fraud, which later disbanded without finding any evidence to support his contention.

Nonetheless, the president revisited the theme of voter fraud in a 2019 address to young conservatives, this time throwing in a few made-up details for verisimilitude:

…and then those illegals get out and vote, because they vote anyway. Don’t kid yourself. Those numbers in California and numerous other states, they’re rigged. They’ve got people voting that shouldn’t be voting. They vote many times, not just twice, not just three times. It’s like a circle. They come back, they put a new hat on. They come back, they put a new shirt on. And in many cases, they don’t even do that. You know what’s going on. It’s a rigged deal.

In the context of an ongoing pandemic, the most sensible way to hold the November 2020 election is largely by mail. Oregon has held successful all-mail elections for two decades. In fact, mail-in voting turns out both to be efficient and to substantially boost participation. (Oregon’s turnout was a whopping 63% in the 2018 midterm election.) Greater turnout, however, often favors Democratic candidates, which may be why Trump has launched a campaign against mail-in elections, claiming they are fraught with fraud, making his own wild claims in the process. In May, for instance, he tweeted:

There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed.

Only recently, he went at it again, all-cap tweeting:

RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!

Undermining public confidence in electoral integrity is a vicious strategy. In a country armed to the teeth like this one, when Trump encourages his supporters to believe that only massive fraud will explain his losing the 2020 election, he’s playing a dangerous game indeed. You know that you’re in a new world when opinion writers in the mainstream media find themselves asking if Trump will actually relinquish the White House, should he lose the election. (And if he is losing and vote-by-mail slows the counting process in some states, he’ll use any delay after November 3rd to create further “rigged-election” chaos.)

Inability to provide public services There’s no need to rehearse here the hideous details of the Trump administration’s abject failure to confront the spread of Covid-19 and to acknowledge the people it’s killed. Suffice it to say that a combination of disinterest and incompetence at the federal level has thrown responsibility on individual states and counties, which have found themselves in competition for life-saving equipment and have even been reduced to begging the federal government for support. As thousands were dying, corrupt procurement processes led to absurdities like the purchase of millions of miniature (and unusable) soda bottles instead of the glass tubes needed for virus testing.

As a result, by June 20, 2020, the U.S., with 4.25% of the world’s population, accounted for more than 26% of its 8.9 million verified coronavirus cases and about the same proportion of Covid-19 deaths. However, even if the administration’s response had been well-prepared and brilliantly executed, the pandemic would still have revealed this country’s longstanding inability to provide basic healthcare to large numbers of its citizens, especially in communities of color and among the poor.

As Covid-19 spreads in jails and prisons, a grim new aspect of decades of unnecessary and cruel mass incarceration has been revealed. As it ravages encampments of unhoused people, the virus continues to reveal to anyone who hadn’t already noticed the nation’s decades-long inability to house its citizens. The pandemic has also illuminated the devastation wrought by the most profound level of economic inequality since the Gilded Age — the inevitable result of combining staggering tax cuts for the rich with the systematic dismantling of one public service after another, from public education to infrastructure maintenance to emergency food support.

The country that, until recently, had the world’s greatest economy can’t even guarantee clean drinking water for 63 million Americans. The lead-contaminated water of Flint, Michigan, is only the best-known example of this.

Recently, the Ford Foundation, with other big nonprofit funders, made an extraordinary announcement. In the face of the government’s inability to respond adequately to the present crisis, they plan to make at least a billion dollars in new grants. Foundations giving away money is, of course, nothing new. What’s different is how they plan to fund this operation: by issuing “social bonds” — investment instruments for sale alongside U.S. Treasury bills and municipal bonds.

What does it say about a country when private foundations find themselves driven to borrow money in the bond market to provide public services that ought to come from the government?

Inability to act as a full member of the international community Here, too, the Trump administration has pushed the United States towards failure. Though this country had, in the past, routinely acted less like a member of the international community than its hegemon, with this president there is no longer even a semblance of international cooperation on global issues. He’s withdrawn us from a previously successful treaty to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, as well as from successful Cold War treaties to control them. He’s repeatedly threatened to pull the U.S. out of NATO and placed sanctions on individuals working with the International Criminal Court investigating possible American war crimes in Afghanistan. In the midst of this global pandemic, he’s even pulling out of the World Health Organization.

Perhaps most disastrous of all, he’s reneged on our obligations under the Paris climate accord, thereby undermining humanity’s best hope of staving off an ecological catastrophe.

Under Donald Trump, in other words, the United States has demonstrated that even if it is not unable to take its place among the community of nations, it is certainly unwilling to do so.

Can Black Lives Matter break the fall? My thinking about our nation’s rapid fall into failure began with my personal tumble on the way to a Black Lives Matter demonstration. In a way, that couldn’t be more fitting, because African Americans, particularly through their presence on the streets and in the media, are leading the present effort to pull this country back from the brink and toward legitimacy, more collective decision-making, the genuine provision of people’s needs, and participation in the community of nations.

The platform of the Movement for Black Lives represents an excellent place to start when it comes to preventing this country from becoming a failed state. The document itself is the result of an extended process of collective discussion and decision-making. Its goals include ending police violence and mass incarceration; investing in community needs; supporting the rights of women, LGBTQ communities, and immigrants; creating economic justice; and increasing black political power.

The Black Lives Matter movement began in response to this country’s long history of state-sanctioned violence against African Americans, whether in the form of lynching, cultural erasure, forced labor, or predatory lending. More than a century of violent, indeed murderous, policing of black and other marginalized communities has made this country’s use of state violence profoundly illegitimate. The present wave of resistance has forced the rest of the country, and the world, to look at it squarely.

If the U.S. is to break its headlong rush into failed statehood, it must begin by addressing the legitimate demands of the people this country has failed from its very inception. Through that process we might also begin to restore our nation’s collective decision-making, improve the genuine provision of public services, and make a new and better place for ourselves in the community of nations. Without it, there is no hope of doing so.

We shouldn’t fool ourselves, though. In Donald Trump’s — or even Joe Biden’s — United States, it’s going to be a long, hard haul. But better that than a steep fall.

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: 30 June 2020

Word Count: 3,066

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In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Washington has initiated its largest spending binge in history. In the process, you might assume that the unparalleled spread of the disease would have led to a little rethinking when it came to all the trillions of dollars Congress has given the Pentagon in these years that have in no way made us safer from, or prepared us better to respond to, this predictable threat to American national security. As it happens, though, even if the rest of us remain in danger from the coronavirus, Congress has done a remarkably good job of vaccinating the Department of Defense and the weapons makers that rely on it financially.

There is, of course, a striking history here. Washington’s reflexive prioritizing of the interests of defense contractors has meant paying remarkably little attention to, and significantly underfunding, public health. Now, Americans are paying the price. With these health and economic crises playing out before our eyes and the government’s response to it so visibly incompetent and inadequate, you would expect Congress to begin reconsidering its strategic approach to making Americans safer. No such luck, however. Washington continues to operate just as it always has, filling the coffers of the Pentagon as though “national security” were nothing but a matter of war and more war.

Month by month, the cost of wasting so much money on weaponry and other military expenses grows higher, as defense contractor salaries continue to be fattened at taxpayer expense, while public health resources are robbed of financial support. Meanwhile, in Congress, both parties generally continue to defend excessive Pentagon budgets in the midst of a Covid-19-caused economic disaster of the first order. Such a business-as-usual approach means that the giant weapons makers will continue to take funds from agencies far better prepared to take the lead in addressing this crisis.

There are a number of ways the Pentagon’s budget could be reduced to keep Americans safer and better protected against future pandemics. As the Center for International Policy’s Sustainable Defense Task Force has pointed out, the biggest challenges we now confront, globally speaking — including such pandemics — are not, in fact, military in nature. In truth, hundreds of billions of dollars could be cut with remarkable ease from U.S. military spending and Americans would be far safer.

Recently, some members of Congress have started to focus on this very point. Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA), for instance, proposed diverting money from unnecessary intercontinental ballistic missile “modernization” into coronavirus and vaccine research. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has gone further, suggesting a 10% reduction in the Pentagon’s budget, while Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA), the only member of Congress to vote against the post-9/11 war resolution that led to the invasion of Afghanistan, has gone further yet, calling for the cutting of $350 billion from that budget.

But count on one thing: they’ll meet a lot of resistance. There’s no way, in fact, to overstate just how powerfully the congressional committees overseeing such spending are indebted to and under the influence of the defense contractors that profit off the Pentagon budget. As Politico reported years ago (and little’s changed), members of the House Armed Services committee are the top recipients of defense industry campaign contributions. Even the chair of the House Foreign Affairs committee, which should be advocating for the strengthening of American diplomacy, has drawn criticism for the significant backing he receives from the defense industry.

Focusing on weaponry that can’t fight a virus Defense contractors have consistently seen such investments pay off. As my colleague at the Project on Government Oversight, Dan Grazier, has pointed out, despite repeated warnings from independent watchdogs and medical professionals, even military healthcare has been significantly underfunded, while both the Pentagon and Congress continue to prioritize buying weapons over taking care of our men and women in uniform. Congress’s watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, warned in February 2018 that the health system of the Department of Defense (DOD) lacked the capacity to handle routine needs, no less the emergencies of wartime. As Pentagon spending has continued to escalate over the past 20 years, military healthcare funding has stayed largely flat.

Under the circumstances, I doubt you’ll be surprised to learn that Congress has also written additional arms contractor giveaways into its coronavirus relief bills. Though its CARES Act authorized trillions of dollars in spending, ProPublica unearthed a provision in it (nearly identical to one proposed by industry groups) that allows defense contractors to bill the government for a range of costs meant to keep them in a “ready” state. The head of acquisition for the Pentagon, Ellen Lord, estimated (modestly indeed) that the provision would cost taxpayers in the low “double-digit billions.” Additional language offered in the House’s next relief bill, likely to survive whatever the Senate finally passes, would increase such profiteering further by including fees that such companies claim are related to the present crisis, including for executive compensation, marketing, and sales.

In such a context, it was hardly surprising that, during a recent hearing at the House Armed Services Committee on how the DOD was responding to the Covid-19 crisis, the focus remained largely on ways that the global epidemic might diminish arms industry profits. Representatives Joe Courtney (D-CT) and Mac Thornberry (R-TX) both argued that the Pentagon would need yet more money to cover the costs of any number of charges that defense contractors claim are related to the pandemic.

Most ludicrous is the idea that an agency slated to receive significantly more than $700 billion in 2020 can’t afford to lose a few billion dollars to the actual health of Americans. Of course, the Pentagon remained strategically mum earlier this year when, in an arguably unconstitutional manner, the White House diverted $7.2 billion from its funds to the building of the president’s “great, great wall” on our southern border. In fact, General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, even admitted that it wasn’t exactly a major blow for the government agency with the largest discretionary budget. “It was not a significant, immediate, strategic, negative impact to the overall defense of the United States of America,” he assured Congress. “It’s half of one percent of the overall budget, so I can’t in good conscience say that it’s significant, immediate, or the sky is falling.”

A Chicken Little Congress, however, doesn’t consider taking more funds from the Pentagon budget to shore up the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) anywhere near as crucial as, for example, approving the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, a slush fund that will be part of this country’s new Cold War with China — starting with a modest $1.4 billion in seed money, while the homework is done to justify another $5.5 billion next year. Similarly, even in such an economically disastrous moment, who could resist buying yet more of Lockheed Martin’s eternally troubled and staggeringly expensive F-35 Joint Strike Fighters than the Pentagon requested? Comparable support exists, even among senators unwilling to fork over any more dollars to desperate out-of-work Americans, for the president’s Space Force, that new service now in the process of creating a separate set of rules for itself that should allow it free reign over future spending. That, of course, reveals its real mission: making it easier for contractors to profit off the taxpayer.

If anything, the main congressional criticism of the Pentagon is that it’s been too slow to push money out the door. And yet, in an institution that has never been successfully audited, there are red flags galore, as a recent Government Accountability Office assessment of major weapons programs suggests. The costs of such new weapons systems have cumulatively soared by 54%, or $628 billion, from earlier GAO assessments. That, by the way, is almost 90 times this year’s budget request for the CDC.

And that’s just the waste. The same report shows that any number of weapons systems continue to fail in other ways entirely. Of the 42 major programs examined, 35 had inadequate security to prevent cyber attacks. General Dynamics Electric Boat’s $126 billion nuclear submarine program has been plagued by faulty welding for two years. The new Ford class aircraft carrier, built by Huntington Ingalls for $13.2 billion, includes a General Atomics launch system that continues to fail to launch aircraft as designed. In addition, as Bloomberg first reported, the ship’s toilets clog frequently and can only be cleaned with specialized acids that cost about $400,000 a flush. As my colleague Mark Thompson has pointed out, “escalating costs, blown schedules, and weapons unable to perform as advertised” are the norm, not the exception for the Pentagon.

That track record is troubling indeed, given that Congress is now turning to the Pentagon to help lead the way when it comes to this country’s pandemic response. Its record in America’s “forever wars” over the last nearly two decades should make anyone wonder about the very idea of positioning it as a lead agency in solving domestic public health crises or promoting this country’s economic recovery.

Broken oversight As the first wave of the pandemic continues and case numbers spike in a range of states, oversight structures designed to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse when it comes to defense spending are quite literally crumbling before our eyes. Combine weakened oversight, skewed priorities, and a Pentagon budget still rising and you’re potentially creating the perfect storm for squandering the resources needed to respond to our current crisis.

The erosion of oversight of the Pentagon budget has been a slow-building disaster, administration by administration, particularly with the continual weakening of the authority of inspectors general. As independent federal watchdogs, IGs are supposed to oversee the executive branch and report their findings both to it and to Congress.

In the Obama administration, however, their power was undermined when the Office of Legal Counsel, the legal expert for the White House, began to argue that accessing the “all” in “all records, reports, audits, reviews, documents, papers, recommendations, or other material” didn’t actually mean “all” when it came to inspectors general. Under President Donald Trump, the same office typically claimed that then-Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson did not have the authority to forward to the House and Senate Intelligence committees a concern that the president had improperly withheld aid to Ukraine.

In fact, in the Trump years, such watchdogs have been purged in significant numbers. Shortly after Department of Defense principal Deputy Inspector General Glenn Fine was named to lead the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, for instance, the president removed him. Not only did that weaken the authority of the body overseeing trillions of dollars in spending across the federal government, but it jeopardized the independence and clout of the Pentagon’s watchdog when it came to billions already being spent by the DOD.

In a similar fashion, the Trump administration has worked hard to stymie Congress’s ability to exercise its constitutional role in conducting oversight. A few months after the president entered the Oval Office, the White House temporarily ordered executive branch agencies to ignore oversight requests from congressional Democrats. Since then, the stonewalling of Congress has only increased. Mark Meadows, the president’s latest chief of staff, has, for example, reportedly implemented a new rule ensuring that executive branch witnesses cannot appear before Congress without his permission. In recent weeks, it was invoked to stop Secretary of State Mike Pompeo from appearing to justify his latest budget request or to answer questions about why his department’s inspector general was removed. (He was, among other things, reportedly investigating Pompeo himself.) Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley have both resisted calls from Congress to answer questions about the use of military force against peaceful protesters.

Congress has a number of tools at its disposal to demand answers from the Pentagon. Unfortunately, the committees overseeing that agency have seldom demonstrated the will to exercise them. Last year, however, Congressman Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) added an amendment to a defense bill limiting funds for the secretary of defense’s travel until his department produced a report on disciplinary actions taken after U.S. troops were ambushed in Niger in 2018 and four of them died.

That tragic incident was also a reminder that Congress has taken little responsibility for the costs of the endless conflicts the U.S. military has engaged in across significant parts of the planet. Quite the opposite, it continues to leave untouched the 2001 authorization for use of military force, or AUMF, that has been abused by three administrations to justify waging wars ever since. The Congressional Research Service estimates that it has been used in that way at least 41 times in 19 countries. According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, that number should be 80 countries where the U.S. has been engaged in counterterror activities since 2001.

And there are significantly more warning signs in this Covid-19 moment that congressional oversight, long missing in action, is needed more than ever. (Trump’s response, classically enough, was “I’ll be the oversight.”) Typically, among the trillions of dollars Congress put up in responding to the pandemic-induced economic collapse, $10.5 billion was set aside for the Pentagon to take a leading role in addressing the crisis. As the Washington Post reported, among the first places those funds went were golf course staffing, submarine missile tubes, and space launch facilities, which is par for the course for the DOD.

Implementation of the Defense Production Act also betrayed a bizarre sense of priorities in these months. That law, passed in response to the Korean War, was designed to help fill shortfalls in goods in the midst of emergencies. In 2020, that should certainly have meant more masks and respirators. But as Defense One reported, that law was instead used to bail out defense contractors, some of whom weren’t even keeping their employees on staff. General Electric, which had laid off 25% of its workforce, received $20 million to expand its development of “advanced manufacturing techniques,” among things unrelated to the coronavirus. Spirit Aerosystems, which received $80 million to expand its domestic manufacturing, had similarly laid off or furloughed 900 workers.

While Americans are overwhelmed by the pandemic, the Pentagon and its boosters are exploiting the emergency to feather their own nests. Far stronger protections against such behavior are needed and, of course, Congress should take back what rightfully belongs to it under the Constitution, including its ability to stop illegal wars and reclaim its power of the purse. It’s long past time for that body to cancel the blank check it’s given both the Pentagon and the White House. But don’t hold your breath.

In the meantime, as Americans await a future Covid-19 vaccine, the military-industrial complex finds itself well vaccinated against this pandemic moment. Consider it a Pentagon miracle in terrible times.

 

Mandy Smithberger writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is the director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight (POGO).

Copyright ©2020 Mandy Smithberger — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 29 June 2020

Word Count: 2,466

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Let’s assume that Donald Trump loses the election in November.

Yes, that’s a mighty big assumption, despite all the polls currently favoring the Democrats. If the economy begins to recover and the first wave of Covid-19 subsides (without a second wave striking), Donald Trump’s reelection prospects could improve greatly. The Republican Party has a huge war chest ready to fund ads galore, massive targeted outreach, and widespread voter suppression. And if all that isn’t enough, the president could borrow a tactic from the dictators he so admires and cancel the election outright out of concern over the coronavirus or some fabricated emergency.

Playing up fears of Trump’s reelection is a useful get-out-the-vote strategy, but for the sake of argument, let’s imagine that the election happens and the president loses unambiguously. A majority of Americans will sigh with relief. Still, don’t count on Trump — and more important, Trumpism — evaporating like a nightmare at daybreak.

To begin with, there’s the president’s legendary base of support, the one-third of Americans who’d continue to back him even if he were to shoot someone on New York City’s Fifth Avenue (or, through criminal negligence, effectively murder more than 100,000 people by ignoring a pandemic for 70 days). Such Trumpists aren’t going to suddenly emigrate en masse to New Zealand, as some liberals threatened to do after the last presidential election.

For the time being, the president still has an entire party apparatus behind him, having transformed the Republicans into little more than a personality cult, banishing dissenters like former Senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker to the political hinterlands, and silencing the handful of so-called moderates that remain.

Trump enjoys institutional support as well, having replaced so many putative deep-staters with civil servants prepared to unquestioningly do his bidding. He’s personally fired his perceived government enemies, chief among them six inspectors general. Minions like former body man John McEntee, former Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, and presidential aide Stephen Miller have all purged experts, replacing them in the government bureaucracy with loyalists. Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell has done the heavy lifting in the Senate, filling the judicial system with Trump flunkies: two Supreme Court judges, more than 50 Court of Appeals judges, and 140 District Court judges so far.

Ever the money man, the president has secured a reliable cash flow, bringing the uber-wealthy class of conservative donors onto his team, a total of 80 billionaires, including Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, Texas banker Andy Beal, World Wrestling Entertainment cofounder Linda McMahon, Silicon Valley guru Peter Thiel, and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. Thanks to his violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution, Trump has also funneled taxpayer money into his own business: millions spent on rooms at the Trump Organization’s hotels and golf clubs. Even before factoring in his money — Trump personally spent $66 million of his own dollars on the 2016 election — his campaign fund already has more than one-third of a billion dollars.

And then there’s the bulk of conservative civil society — ranging from think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and evangelicals like Franklin Graham to the anti-abortion lobby and the International Union of Police Associations — that now operates in his corner. Despite the entertainment world’s general loathing of the president, he’s even lined up a celebrity or two like rapper Kanye West and actress Roseanne Barr along with a handful of D-listers like actor Jon Voight and Barack Obama’s half-brother Malik. On the fringes roam the true “bad hombres”: white supremacists, live-free-or-die militiamen, and QAnon conspiracy theorists.

Taken together, these component parts of Trumpism form that most dangerous of creatures, a political chimera with the head of an establishment machine and the body of a radical social movement. This creature has its hands on the levers of power, its boots on the ground, and its eyes on the prize of four more years.

Are all these people and institutions true believers in Donald Trump? Probably not. Sporting more of a performative style than a coherent ideology, he is, to misquote Lenin, a “useful idiot.” When he’s no longer useful — that is, no longer in power — he’ll only be an idiot and the opportunists will move on.

While Trump may be expendable, Trumpism — which lies at the intersections of racial and sexual anxiety, hatred of government and the expert class, and opposition to cosmopolitan internationalism — is not so easily rooted out. Drawing heavily on American traditions of Know-Nothing-ism, America-First-ism, and Goldwater Republicanism, Trump’s essential worldview will survive the 2020 election.

If their candidate loses in November, Trumpists will dig in their heels just as their predecessors did after Barack Obama’s 2008 victory. Only a month after his inauguration, the Tea Party was already up and running. But the Tea Party will prove child’s play compared to the resistance the Trumpists are likely to mount if their candidate tanks on Election Day 2020. And such resistance could succeed in finishing what Trump started — disuniting the country and destroying the democratic experiment — unless, that is, the United States were to undergo a thorough de-Trumpification.

Other societies have gone through such processes, but those efforts — Reconstruction after the American Civil War, denazification in Germany after World War II, and de-Baathification after the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003 — have all been flawed in various ways. Reconsidering them, however, might help us avoid repeating the mistakes of history as we try to drive a stake through the heart of Trumpism.

Regime change The United States hasn’t recently been invaded, lost a major war in its homeland, or had its government fall to a popular uprising.

That’s usually what it takes to dislodge a deeply entrenched ruling ideology. The South lost the Civil War, the Nazis World War II, and Saddam Hussein the second Gulf War. Those defeats provided the winners with unprecedented opportunities to remake the old order, but don’t seem to apply to America in 2020. The electoral defeat of a president and party, if that’s even what happens in November, doesn’t constitute regime change. It’s just the kind of peaceful transition of power that’s the cornerstone of democratic stability.

But let’s face it: 2020 isn’t shaping up to be a normal election year. Conservative pundits, like military historian Victor Davis Hanson, believe that Barack Obama and the Democrats have brought the country to the brink of a literal civil war. During last year’s impeachment hearings, Trump himself tweeted approvingly a comment made by Robert Jeffress, an evangelical ally, that impeachment “will cause a Civil War-like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal.” Meanwhile, typically enough, Obama’s first secretary of labor, Robert Reich, suspects that President Trump’s flagrant disregard of the Constitution will precipitate major social unrest, even as comedian Bill Maher urges Democrats to reach out to Trump supporters as part of a bid to defeat the president — or risk civil war.

Many Americans seem to agree. In a 2018 Rasmussen poll, one-third of respondents thought it likely that another civil war would break out within five years. According to a 2019 civility poll from the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service, the consensus was that the country is already two-thirds of the way toward a civil war.

Nor is there much confidence that the 2020 presidential election will go smoothly. Take your pick from a menu of potential disruptions: allegations of voter fraud and Republican voter suppression, a resurgence of the coronavirus, voting machine software glitches, Russian hackers, confusion over mail-in ballots, or an authoritarian president who repeatedly jokes about serving more than two terms. A recent Georgia primary offered a warning of what might come, with fiascos aplenty, particularly for voters of color. There weren’t enough polling places, people waited in line for endless hours, absentee ballots never arrived at homes. Multiply Georgia by 50 and you’d have a full-blown crisis of political legitimacy.

Even if this country manages to pull off the 2020 presidential election, a post-election insurrection is not out of the question. During the lame-duck period, a defeated Trump might call on his supporters — gun owners, militia members, active-service military — to serve as a Praetorian guard to keep him in office. Mark Villalta, an attendee at Trumpstock in Arizona last October, was typical of some Trump supporters in confessing that he’s hoarding weapons just in case Trump loses. “Nothing less than a civil war would happen,” he told The New York Times. “I don’t believe in violence, but I’ll do what I got to do.”

It’s essential to ensure that the November 3rd election is free and fair, but if Trump loses, then the bigger problems are likely to begin.

Confederacy of dunces In the 1860 election, America confronted a polarized electorate, a stupendously mediocre president in James Buchanan, and a clear geographic divide between north and south, urban and rural. Not even the election of Abraham Lincoln could save the union. The attack on Fort Sumter, the opening salvo of the Civil War, took place roughly a month after his inauguration.

Donald Trump seems to have learned all the wrong lessons from the “War Between the States,” resisting as he’s done recently the removal of “beautiful” Confederate statues and the redesignation of U.S. military bases named after Confederate generals. In the last Oscar season, he even wished that Gone with the Wind had won rather than some South Korean film he’d never heard of. Such favoritism for the disgraced and vanquished should be as politically disqualifying as a Heil Hitler salute.

The reason that Trump can get away with his Confederate nostalgia comes, at least in part, from the failure of the Reconstruction era after the Civil War to extirpate racism and its associated economic inequality from American society. In fact, as historian Allen Guelzo points out, “Reconstruction did not fail so much as it was overthrown. Southern whites played the most obvious role in this overthrow, but they would never have succeeded without the consent of the Northern Democrats, who had never been in favor of an equitable Reconstruction.”

The Democrats of the time, in other words, became a party of resistance — to Reconstruction, civil rights, and the radical Republicans of that moment. So the Confederacy continued to live on not only in the hearts and minds of defeated Southern whites but also in the racist policies that elected officials in both parts of the country would resurrect.

Here, then, is a lesson of the Civil War’s aftermath for this moment. Today’s Republicans, the equivalent of the northern Democrats of the post-Civil War era and a true confederacy of dunces, cannot be allowed to persist in their current incarnation as a vehicle for Trumpism. A thorough thumping at the polls in November is a necessary but insufficient response to what they’ve become.

Gaining a congressional majority, in other words, is not enough. The Democrats and chastened Republicans would have to work to make that party a far less extreme force in American politics, abandoning Trump and reclaiming Lincoln.

“We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” Barack Obama insisted as he entered office in 2009, sidestepping efforts to investigate the wrongdoing of the George W. Bush administration. He was convinced that such forward thinking would unite the country. He was wrong.

To avoid a Reconstruction-like fiasco, the next administration would have to drain the swamp Trump created, bring criminal charges against the former president and his key followers, and launch a serious campaign to change the hearts and minds of Americans who have been drawn to this president’s agenda.

Detoxifying government When Saddam Hussein fell and American troops took Baghdad, the United States established an occupation authority that attempted to expunge all traces of the former Iraqi autocrat’s Baath Party from that society. At the time, the State Department considered three basic positions on what came to be known as de-Baathification: focus just on Saddam’s inner circle of about 50 top-ranking officials, expand that circle to include a larger number of top politicians, or eradicate Baathism altogether because “democratization is simply not possible unless and until the entire apparatus of control and authority is uprooted.”

Thanks to Paul Bremer, the head of that Coalition Provisional Authority, the third option became its very first directive, which led to the ejection of between 35,000 and 50,000 Iraqi civil servants onto the streets of their country. “In effect, the United States dismantled the Iraqi state, leaving a deep security vacuum, administrative chaos, and soaring unemployment,” wrote pundit Fareed Zakaria in 2007. “We summarily deposed not just Saddam Hussein but a centuries-old ruling elite and then were stunned that they reacted poorly.”

That thoroughgoing purge, along with the literal dismantling of the Iraqi army, generated a deep distrust of the American occupation and provided an instant pool of recruits for any militant resistance, fueling an all-out war.

The good news is that since Trumpism has only been a governing ideology for three years, it hasn’t (yet) penetrated the civil service or the military to the degree that Baathism dominated the Iraqi government and armed forces. Since Trump appointees don’t form a particularly deep state, however much Trump would have liked to create one of his own, no Iraq-style resistance is on the horizon.

The judiciary is another matter. The roughly 200 judges that Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have already managed to appoint for life will do their best to block all attempts to deconstruct Trumpism. If it can be shown that any of these judges engaged in serious ethical or criminal misconduct, then impeachment would be an option. However, you can’t impeach judges just because you don’t like their rulings (though some Republican legislators did try to do just that in Pennsylvania a couple of years ago).

Instead of attempting to remove individual judges, it would be more strategic to go after their ideological backer, the Federalist Society, an uber-conservative legal organization that has functioned as a judicial matchmaker for Trump, providing him with a list of potential Supreme Court nominees. All but eight of his federal appellate court picks have been members of the society.

You can’t outlaw a legal society, however lunatic its interpretation of the Constitution may be. However, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who’s on the Judiciary Committee, proposes to make it illegal for judges to be members of the Federalist Society. An added benefit: such a move would also go after the big money behind the attempted right-wing takeover of the court system because, as Whitehouse points out, “the Federalist Society is at the center of a network of dark-money-funded conservative organizations whose purpose is to influence court composition and outcomes.”

Detoxifying the court system is crucial not only for reversing Trump’s regressive policies but for clearing the way to prosecute him for his wrongdoing.

Hauling them into court At Nuremberg after World War II, the Allied victors put nearly 200 Nazis on trial for various crimes: 161 were convicted and 37 sentenced to death. The precedents established there and at other war crimes trials have guided contemporary tribunals culminating in the International Criminal Court (ICC).

It would be satisfying if the U.S. government could give Donald Trump and some of his top aides to the ICC for their violations of international law at the U.S.-Mexico border, the assassination of the head of the Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, and similar actions. But that’s unimaginable even for a government led by President Joe Biden in which the Democrats had a veto-proof majority in the Senate. So it will be up to the American courts to charge and convict Trump, which has so far failed to happen, despite some cases related to his tax returns and allegations of sexual assault still inching forward.

The Nuremberg process developed new standards to prosecute the Nazis. Since the barriers have grown high indeed, the Trumpian opposition would have to get more creative to make sure that Trump goes to jail.

As soon as he is no longer president, federal prosecutors should label Donald Trump and his top associates an ongoing criminal organization and begin the process of bringing them to justice under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. For years, after all, the president has been acting like a mafia godfather, demanding loyalty, bullying competitors, and scorning “rats.” Last year, former Trump fixer Michael Cohen’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee laid out in graphic detail ways in which the president and his gang were guilty of racketeering: bribery, fraud, obstruction of justice, and the like.

The House of Representatives impeached the president, but with the help of his Republican enablers, he managed to avoid removal from office. Getting read the RICO Act, on the other hand, could leave him facing years in prison and the Trump Organization would be liable for treble damages as compensation for victims. As Forbes contributor Steve Denning concluded during the impeachment proceedings:

While impeachment would obviously be a severe personal sanction for Donald Trump, convicting the Trump Organization as a RICO enterprise could be far worse. If Trump is ‘only’ impeached, he could always go back to his family business, sadder but perhaps wiser. But if the Trump Organization were to be convicted as a criminal enterprise under the RICO Act, there might be no business for Trump to go back to.

U.S. diplomat Herbert Pell, instrumental in bringing war-crimes charges against the Nazis during World War II, saw “how Confederate veterans in the South had created for themselves a misty-eyed mythology about the U.S. Civil War and was determined that the Nazis would not do the same.” As Dan Plesch explained in his study of international war crimes tribunals, “Pell’s motivation was to prevent postwar nostalgia for the Nazis breeding more war.”

Putting Trump on trial would not only remove him from the political equation but could effectively delegitimize Trumpism and prevent a second round of it from occurring.

The popularity of Trumpism Nazism didn’t die with Adolf Hitler’s suicide, the collapse of his regime, or those convictions at Nuremberg. More than 10% of the German population had belonged to the Nazi Party. Early efforts at denazification sputtered out largely because the United States and its allies needed a stable, prosperous Germany at the heart of Cold War Europe — and Germany quietly allowed former Nazis to remain in every echelon of society. Seven years after the war, for instance, 60% of the civil servants in Bavaria were former Nazis.

Nazi ideology was even more difficult to root out. According to a public opinion survey conducted in West Germany in 1947, 55% percent of those living under the U.S. occupation believed that “National Socialism was a good idea badly carried out.” Worse yet, the majority of those in this category were under 30, not just the old guard.

As bizarre as Donald Trump might be, Trumpism itself is not a new American phenomenon. The difference is that the far right never before had such access to power, not during the George W. Bush era, not even during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. It always remained on the margins, kept alive by the likes of the John Birch Society, the occasional extreme member of Congress, and weirdo talk show hosts like Alex Jones of InfoWars.

The danger of Trump lies in his remarkable capacity to mainstream views that previously had been beyond the pale (at least in official Washington). A significant number of Americans feel liberated, thanks to his imprimatur, to give voice to the worst angels of their nature. Transforming such deep-seated belief systems represents quite a different challenge than changing the guard in the Oval Office and beyond. After all, democratic societies don’t send people off to reeducation camps. Certain communities, like universities, can legislate against hate speech, but it’s people’s hearts and minds, not just their tongues, that must be reached.

To do so, it’s imperative to separate the legitimate grievances of Trump supporters from the illegitimate ones. Yes, “bad hombres” are attracted to Trump’s racism, misogyny, and xenophobia, but many of the disenfranchised who voted for him were motivated by a disgust at political elites and the raging economic inequality they produced in this land. After the triple whammy of the coronavirus pandemic (and its disproportionate impact on the working poor), the economic semi-collapse that followed its spread (and the disproportionate benefits Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and other billionaires drew from it), and an epidemic of police violence (visited on people of color), more and more Americans are coming to feel that the status quo is simply unacceptable. They’re disgusted by Republican duplicity but also by the Democrats’ version of business as usual.

Because Trumpism is a cancer on the body politic, the treatment will require radical interventions, including the transformation of the Republican Party, a purge of Trumpists from government, and the indictment of the president and his top cronies as a criminal enterprise. To avoid a second Civil War, however, a second American Revolution would need to address the root causes of Trumpism, especially political corruption, deep-seated racism, and extreme economic inequality.

Otherwise, even if The Donald loses this election, the political creature he represents will rise from the ashes and eventually return to power (President Tom Cotton? President Ivanka?!). America can’t survive another civil war, but neither can it afford another failed Reconstruction, a half-hearted de-Trumpification of America, and a return to the previous status quo.

John Feffer writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). John 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: 26 June 2020

Word Count: 3,559

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I trust that you know that when I talk about Berniebros, I’m not talking about Bernie Sanders. I’m not talking about progressives, liberals, or socialists. I’m not even talking about democratic socialists or social democrats. I’m talking about the Very Loud Leftists (VLLs) who had more invested in the Vermont senator than advancing his candidacy.

They had a financial stake. Moreover, they believe even more money would follow what they thought in 2016 was Sanders’ rising star. That didn’t pan out, of course. Sanders honorably bowed out. He joined Joe Biden’s effort to unseat the incumbent. Most Sanderistas followed him. The policy, though not the spirit, of The Revolution has been assimilated. Thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic and its attendant recession, Biden now sees the need for a presidency as bold, shrewd and forward-thinking as Franklin Roosevelt’s. In terms of political influence, the VLLs should be high-fiving each other.

They aren’t. They didn’t want to influence. They wanted to destroy. And now they are on the outside looking in. They no longer have the clout they once had. They no longer have the audience they once had. They might not even have the revenues. That’s a very long way to fall. People like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Katie Halper and Nathan Robinson went to war only to see their hero side with the enemy. American history is chock full of betrayed extremists ping-ponging between ideological poles. There’s plenty of precedent for the VLLs now appearing to be open to the idea of the enemy of their enemy being their friend. Greenwald asked Thursday: “Should the Populist Left Work With the Populist Right Where They Have Common Ground, or Shun Them?”

I’ll leave it to others to discuss the finer points of populism and the rest of Greenwald’s piece. For my part, what I think needs saying seems obvious to me but baffling to Greenwald and his cadre of VLLs: class is not one-dimensional. Indeed, the working class, to anyone who has lived within its constraints, isn’t theoretical. It’s certainly not theoretical enough to be one-dimensional. To those withstanding the injuries of class, a Biden presidency is a transparently obvious boon. Yet to hear Lee Fang, who works with Greenwald, tell it, the only things rising from the ashes of Sanders’ so-called “Revolution” are disappointment, bitterness and conspiracy. “The dream of a revived working class left built on mass economic redistribution is dead for now. In its place we have a chummy handshake between media, academia and corporations content with revolution in the form of diverse board rooms and toppled statues.” These people are primed and ready to find common cause with the enemies of their enemies.

I know it sounds strange. How can people fighting for the American working class not understand how class works in America? It’s simple really. They read about it, but didn’t experience it. The same people dedicating their lives to smashing the “dominant neoliberal ideology” understand that ideology better than they understand the working class, because they come from it directly. Taibbi, Halper and Robinson, for instance, are all products of elite college prep schools connected to the Ivy League. Hard work and playing by the rules — merit — had relatively little to do with their success, because they were born successful. They have spent their careers, in one fashion or another, trying to bust the myth of meritocracy. In that, the VLLs are righteous authorities.

And in that, they were born to misunderstand class. The working class — the real multi-hued working class — does not want to destroy the status quo. It wants to reform it. It wants to be let in. The “dream of a revived working class left” isn’t dead and the VLLs would know that if they bothered looking. Among other things, the George Floyd movement is a class-conscious effort wanting what every out-group in US history has wanted: equal opportunity, equal justice, greater peace, and greater liberty. This month’s protests have been an amazing demonstration of cross-racial solidarity and cross-class solidarity, the very things the VLLs went to war for but now can’t bring themselves to see. Merit must mean something. Merit must be made real if it isn’t currently. The VLLs think they are helping working-class Americans by removing the scales of illusion from their eyes. What they are really doing is pissing people off.

The VLLs are always wrong about the Democratic Party. It isn’t “neoliberal.” It isn’t conservative. (It isn’t as bad as the Republican Party.) But we might thank them for going all the way ’round the bend, from one extreme pole to the other, joining Republican fascists who long ago abandoned “movement conservatism.” Greenwald and his ilk are shifting the landscape so that liberalism looks safer, more acceptable, more central, so that working-class demands to expand the franchise don’t seem so radical compared to the true believers on the left and right who want to smash it.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 26 June 2020

Word Count: 820

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I’m not sure why negligent homicide is not at the center of debate over the reopening of southern and plains states like Texas, Florida, and Oklahoma. I’m not sure why we are not discussing what these Republican governors knew, and when they knew it, as they rushed to reopen in the face of authorities saying it would lead quickly to eye-popping spikes in rates of coronavirus infection. So far, the debate seems centered on partisan politics, especially the president. That’s not where it ought to be, though.

Consider what this might look like in a nonpartisan setting. In the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Carnival’s Grand Princess cruise liner was still at sea. Company executives discovered she’d grown lousy with coronavirus. They knew Carnival would face wrongful death lawsuits. The firm might even be subject to criminal prosecution, depending on the severity of the outbreak. They decided to let passengers party on. About 1,500 got sick, and dozens more have died since March. Company executives knew what they were doing when they did it and went ahead with doing it anyway. Whatever the cost of defending the firm in the future was going to be less than the profits earned from maintaining the status quo. This is what happens when human health and human suffering are gains and losses in the accounting department.

This strategy was perfected by the tobacco industry. It knew smoking caused cancer. It knew smoking was addictive. It knew a cancer-causing, addictive and socially accepted product like the cigarette had killed and would kill scores of millions of people. Cigarettes were cash cows, though. So for decades, Big Tobacco mounted a two-pronged front. One: sell sell sell. Two: deny deny deny. Eventually, the public figured out its game, but not before scores of millions were dead. The industry later had to pay out, sure, but after profits secured and no one going to jail. The strategy has been repeated by the companies peddling plastics, coal, consumer products and others.

I see the Republican governors of Florida and Texas and others playing a similar game. They knew the status quo — no masks, no social distancing, and/or no orders to require them — was going to sicken or kill people, especially people of color and the elderly. Greg Abbott and other GOP governors were even forthright about being aware of the risks and pressing ahead with reopening without a comprehensive plan for doing so. I think they believed reopening in a hurry was going to “profit” in the form of economic activity that would boost Donald Trump’s chances of being reelected. They made a cold-blooded “business” decision. Dead people were the cost of doing GOP politics.

As a consequence of their gross negligence, Wednesday saw a record 36,000 new cases, the biggest one-day increase since late April. As a consequence, the case number and death toll in the United States keeps climbing while they keep falling in other western nations. As a consequence, states that flattened the curve — specifically, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut — now require visitors from “hot spots” to quarantine. As a consequence, the European Union might bar travel from the US, as if the US were a banana republic whose corrupt leader is indifferent to the suffering of his people.

It was a bad decision, though. I don’t mean “bad” in terms of public health. I don’t mean “bad” in terms of economics. Those are obvious. I mean bad politically. And because it was bad politically, it was bad in every other sense. Remember that Republican governors, like their national counterparts, represent most the country’s 1 percent, and the 1 percent views the world almost entirely through a lens of gains and losses. So, quite naturally, Republican governors believed everyone else does too.

Everyone else does not. If that were true, highly taxed New Yorkers would vote red, and federally subsidized Kentuckians would vote blue. Republicans leaders, moreover, should know better. They knew Republican voters thought the economy was terrible at the end of Barack Obama’s tenure. They knew Republican voters thought the economy was terrific after Trump was inaugurated. Their “economic anxiety” went poof! — gone in the span of a month! That’s not due to economics. That’s due entirely to politics. They thought a strong economy was going to win it for Trump. Instead, they have brought a plague upon themselves and supporters the president cannot afford to lose.

Republican governors probably won’t face criminal consequences for negligent homicide, but they will probably face political ones, as the president is. Greg Abbott announced today policies to slow down the reopening of Texas, perhaps to the point of a second lock down. He must act for the sake of public health, of course, but he must act for the sake of his political fortunes, too. As the death toll accelerates, the absence of action will spark louder and more numerous cries of negligent homicide on his part. I’m not sure why we are not talking about that more, but indeed we ought to be.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 25 June 2020

Word Count: 839

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It’s not that I don’t trust the New York Times when it says a new poll found that Joe Biden has “a commanding” 14-point lead over the president among registered voters. It’s not that I doubt that most women and Americans of color support the former vice president. It’s not even that I think some Republicans aren’t going soft on Donald Trump. It’s that we do not know what we cannot know until the moment has arrived in which knowing is made possible. In other words, I’ll believe Joe Biden is winning on the day he wins.

What we can know right now is more worthy of our attention. What we can know is that attention itself, lots of people paying attention, is probably the most important causal factor moving public opinion Biden’s way. As I have said often, most people most of the time have something better to do than pay attention to politics, and that’s always true except when it isn’t, and it isn’t when there’s a pandemic that has killed the equivalent of forty-one 9/11s and that has unemployed scores of millions of people. Out of this context arose mass demands for racial justice. Out of the commingling of these energies arose a majority of the people speaking undeniably with one voice.

To be sure, these energies remain volatile and likely will shoot off in a thousand competing directions. But we should, at least for the time being, recognize this as an achievement, and appreciate it. The majority rarely speaks in unison. As a matter of fact, elites in politics and business trust that it won’t, just as much as they trust that the opinion of the majority will reflect elite opinion. Only during times of dire national emergency does the status quo become inverted. American elites usually take the lead. They usually do not scramble, as they are doing now, to catch up with the majority. They too did not know what they could not know until the moment they knew it.

Moments arrive but understanding that they have arrived is another matter. Consider the Senate Republicans. During Trump’s impeachment trial, many of them behaved as if they understood perfectly well what the president had done, and why it was wrong, yet they refused to believe his misconduct (treason) was grounds for removal. They refused to believe it was grounds for removal, because they presumed probably that they understood what a majority in their states thought about Trump’s misconduct. Importantly, the Senate Republicans presumed a majority knew what they knew.

A majority of voters almost certainly did not know what the Senate Republicans knew, because, well, to repeat myself: most people most of the time have something better to do than pay attention to politics.

Indeed, the majority of voters in their states is now paying close attention thanks to the pandemic and the recession, and what they are seeing is:

• John Bolton, the conservative’s conservative, confirmed the charges against the president; and,

• the charges against the president were understood perfectly by the Senate Republicans;

• but Senate Republicans, believing their voters knew what they knew, decided to acquit Trump of all charges anyway;

• which is news to the majority of voters in their states.

Given that most people have other things to do, it’s possible Bolton testimony might have had less impact during the impeachment trial than his book is now having during a time in which lots of people are at home, paying attention.

Especially the elderly, people who vote every time it’s time to vote. The pandemic has created conditions in which Democratic lawmakers are demanding mail-in balloting for the sake of democracy and public health. Mail-in balloting is a dire threat to Trump. It overcomes the state-by-state infrastructure the Republicans have built to suppress votes. The president is therefore going to war with mail-in balloting, which is taking the form of going to war with democracy itself in eyes of the people on the receiving end of Trump’s attacks — a gigantic cohort of Americans that’s now paying close attention to politics, because there isn’t much else to do.

Even the most hard-shelled racist is now a potential victim of disenfranchisement, so even the most hard-shelled racist might have good reason to second-guess Donald Trump.

We do not know what we cannot know until the moment of knowing (Election Day) has arrived. But we do know — now — that fascism thrives when the majority is divided, when it has better things to do than pay attention to politics. Fascism and the fascists who practice it tend to wither under scrutiny, yielding to the majority’s moral authority. That, or they go to pieces, as the president appears to be doing currently.

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 June 2020

Word Count: 781

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