The US claims to be a representative democracy, meaning the people’s elected officials are obligated to consider their constituents’ ideas, interests, concerns, and welfare in making political decisions. However, the reality is that US politicians feel indebted to the megadonors who finance their elections, and as a result, choose to serve not the people who voted them into power, but the financiers who made their election to office a reality. 

Will American Democracy Perish Like Rome’s?

The rich have US politicians on a leash. In 2017, the then president, was accused of meeting with his 2016 campaign megadonor, Sheldon Adelson, for counsel on how to address the mass shooting in , a horrific attack that killed 59 people and injured over 500 at a country music festival. That was two days before Trump finally arrived in Las Vegas to meet with the surviving victims and the families mourning the dead. Trump has denied these allegations, claiming that the timing of his meeting with Adelson was purely coincidental, and had nothing to do with the fact that Adelson had major investments in Las Vegas.

The US electoral system is incredibly , as demonstrated by its of the House Speaker, an event that will go down in history as one of the most notorious examples of the inefficiency of American politics. The country seems to be exclusively  run by two conflicting political parties: the Democrats and the Republicans. Consequently, the nation has become extremely politically polarized, and many Americans experience daily frustration and anger over conflicting political beliefs. 

Economic disparity and discrimination are particularly oppressive to minority groups including Native Americans, blacks, Latinos, and now Muslims. The gap between the rich and the poor is deep and ever-widening. Approximately 32% of all wealth in the US is held by only 1% of the population, an alarmingly disproportionate statistic. Even more concerning is that at the same time, over 11% of Americans live below poverty.

A 2020 article by described the economic disparities in the United States quite accurately, stating that, “Americans may be equal, but some are more equal than others.” Even when the US is in a deep deficit, the government tax policy consistently favors the rich, despite the fact that of Americans believe the nation’s wealthiest should pay more taxes.

The Trump Dynasty is as Dysfunctional as the Windsors

The United States government (USG) is entangled with the , the “” of America. By definition, any  government whose power, either overtly or covertly, is controlled by a small group of wealthy constituents, is called plutocracy. Former US president once alluded to the plutocracy of the US political system, describing it as, “an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery.”

The Incentive for Corruption

Because political candidates in America require to run their campaigns, they become obliged to the rich. Towin a Senate seat, a candidate spends an average of over $10 million. According to , the 2016 presidential candidates, Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump, spent a combined sum of over one billion dollars on their political campaigns.

The wealthy also use their power to manipulate the media, flooding broadcasting platforms with polarizing advertisements and persuading the American public that the only votes that count are votes for either the Democratic or Republican parties. 

This sort of propaganda makes many Americans feel overwhelmed and confused about  which candidate they  should be voting for, and some even choose to abstain from voting at all because they don’t support either candidate. Many Americans are ignorant that the elections are a scheme to make them think about having a voice in the government. However, the choice of who ultimately becomes president, congressman, or other official is usually left to the two political parties at the mercy of the rich. 

Even at the state level, wealthy Americans control political candidates and elected officials by donating to their campaigns. The rich also use their financial power to marginalize certain communities through a process called , in which the boundaries of electoral districts are strategically drawn in a way which favors one political party over the other. . Minorities, the poor, and the least educated are usually the victims of this unethical practice.

Understanding Racial and Partisan Gerrymandering

A Call For Reform

Without ethical standards in place to ensure equal opportunity and constitutional rights for all citizens, democracy can easily become what John Adams called, “the of the majority.” Thomas Jefferson also purportedly claimed that democracy can often resemble mob rule, and this comparison has a ring of truth.

The USG must reform.The country’s current system is riddled with corruption and will not be sustainable long term, as evidenced by the 2021 insurrection at the U.S. capitol building. At the very least, steps must be taken to make sure that campaign funding is democratic and fair first by cutting all  government funding to individual campaigns and political parties, and instead requiring the media to allocate “” at no cost to candidates. Second, the USG must create and enforce regulations to limit campaign funding and prevent “megadonors” from manipulating elections and government policy.

To alleviate the megadonors’ influence, the USG could limit all contributions from all sources equal to what an average-income American is willing to contribute to a candidate. PACs, unions and other associations can multiply that amount by the number of their active members. However, no member can be allowed to double-dip, individual and in group.

Only when the United States takes steps to implement these changes will the nation begin its ascension to true democracy. 
[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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This law intends to give parents greater control over their children’s upbringing and comes at the heels of a raging debate around (CRT) and its purported instruction in schools (K-12). Debates around the bill also culminated in the passage of another bill- HB 7:The Individual Freedom bill, which quite ironically curtails speech by prohibiting classroom instruction, curricula design, and workplace training on particular kinds of discussions about race, color, sex, or national origin. Once again, the law does not define what those restricted forms of speech are. The of this law is to crack down on what DeSantis calls “wokeness”.

Advancements in Gay and Lesbian Rights over the Years: What went wrong?

While these two laws are specific to Florida residents, ongoing hysteria over sexuality, gender, and race in American classrooms has a long political and legal history. On the issues of sexuality and gender in particular, the United States has made tremendous progress over the years. Pew research show that three decades ago, nine-in-ten American adults (89%) would have been upset if their child told them they were gay. But by 2015, that number fell to just four-in-ten adults (39%). On the issue of same-sex marriage too, support has meteorically over the years. In 2005, only 36% of adults favored legalizing same-sex marriage, while a much larger 53% opposed it. By 2015, opinions flipped and 57% of adults favored same-sex marriage, while only 39% opposed it. However, this support/opposition was pretty much confined to party lines, with 65% of Democrats and 65% of Independents showing support for same-sex marriage, compared to only 34% of Republicans (as of 2015). At the time of this Pew survey, same-sex marriage was already legal in 36 states and the District of Columbia but wasn’t yet legal nationwide. Yet almost 75% of voters across party lines believed it would inevitably become the law of the land (this indeed occurred in the landmark 2015 US Supreme Court ruling,). So how did the United States go from legalizing same-sex marriage in 2015 to banning certain types of classroom and workplace discussions on gender and sexuality in 2022?

Most of the activism over the past three decades focused on securing rights for gay and lesbian Americans, which meant same-sex marriage was typically the key issue at stake. As far back as 1986, the US Supreme Court ruled in that the US Constitution did not grant homosexuals the constitutional right to engage in same-sex conduct (“sodomy”) even within the privacy of their homes. Further, the Court repudiated a lower court’s ruling that ‘gay rights’ emanated from the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Seventeen years later in 2003, this judgment was overruled in, in which the same Court held that the reasoning in Bowers was flawed because the Fourteenth Amendment did in fact protect homosexual people’s liberty to engage in private and consensual same-sex conduct. 

By this time, debates around the (ill)legality of same-sex marriage had also taken center stage in American politics, with Congress the now-infamous Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 1996. DOMA defined marriage as a “legal union between one man and one woman” for federal purposes (under Section 3 of DOMA) and allowed states not to recognize same-sex marriages recognized in other states if they so wanted (under Section 2 of DOMA). Section 3 of DOMA was eventually overturned by the Supreme Court in (2013), and Section 2 fell in (2015). With Obergefell legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide, any state ban on same-sex marriage was invalidated, effectively overturning DOMA. 

It should be noted that Windsor and Obergefell were decided by narrow 5-4 margins, and both victories emanated from decades of sustained efforts by gay and lesbian lawyers and activists. Such was the opposition they faced that a detailed 45 page by the Committee on the Judiciary accompanied the DOMA legislation, which cited the need for an Act like DOMA. The report spelled out the fear that legalizing same-sex marriage, even at the state level, would “divide people unnecessarily” and adversely affect governmental interets. These interested were not confined to “defending and nurturing” heterosexual marriage but encompassed a fear of state sovereignty “subversion” and the “impingement” of scarce government resources. 

At that time, no state in the US had yet recognized same-sex marriage. However, in May 1993, the Hawaiin Supreme Court held in that the denial of marriage licenses to same-sex couples may constitute discrimination on the basis of sex. It was this ruling in Hawaii that then-Congressman Charles Canady and others called a “significant threat to traditional marriage laws,” leading to multiple same-sex marriage across the length and breadth of the US over the next three decades, with DOMA being just the beginning.

While gay rights activists may have ultimately won the same-sex marriage debate, new and unfamiliar issues now animate voters, specifically conservatives. These issues include the rights of transgender people and those beyond the lesbian and gay sexuality spectrum (i.e. those beyond the “L” and”G” of LGBTQ+). Since 2017, have considered passing “bathroom bills” that would prohibit transgender and gender non-conforming people from accessing multiuser restrooms, locker rooms, and other sex-segregated facilities of their choice. Instead, these laws would compel them to use rooms corresponding with their biological sex. As recent as April 2022, Alabama’s state legislature an expanded “bathroom bill” that would not only limit transgender and gender-nonconforming people’s bathroom access but also prohibit certain discussions of gender and sexuality in classrooms from kindergarten through fifth grade (very similar to Florida’s HB 1557). 

Florida’s law has been named the “don’t say gay” law by because of its vague language proscribing classroom discussions on gender and sexuality in any manner not conducive to state standards. Moreover, parental notification rules in the law have raised speculation by critics that teachers may be compelled to “out” LGBTQ+ students to their parents under this law. Conservatives, however, have pushed back on these claims, arguing instead that the law “protects” children from sexual predators and ““. By re-defining this law as an “anti-grooming” law, conservatives effectively draw from age-old tropes about homosexuality, such as the idea of a “”- one that popular American evangelical commentator and theologian Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr. once as “propaganda for immorality” and “poisonous to Christian morality.” He was, however, referencing the increasing representation of gay and lesbian characters in Hollywood. Nonetheless, the is applied by conservatives today to address gender and sexuality in school pedagogy. 

What lies ahead?

Ever since Lia Thomas became the first transgender athlete to the NCAA swimming title, conservative media has run a series of non-stop against her, which included multiple instances of intentional misgendering that eventually ignited a new debate about ‘women’s rights’ and the ‘protection of women’s sports’. have already passed laws banning transgender girls and women from participating in sports corresponding with their gender identity, while have banned gender-affirming care for minors with gender dysphoria. This fixation with ‘protecting’ women and children has now become a common thread in many Republican-backed laws – from, to, to the slew of. The conservatives of today may have made a begrudging truce with same-sex marriage, but they still consider other LGBTQ+ issues a form of “dangerous woke propaganda” that is detrimental to children.

Clearly the path ahead is rocky. While gays and lesbians may have won the hard-fought right to marry, there is still a long way to go. Americans are still uncomfortable discussing sexuality, gender identity, and gender nonconformity, and only time will tell how all of this will play out in the courts and in the upcoming midterm elections.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Compared to a range of other industrial countries, the SGI 2022 shows that the US remains a weak in terms of sustainable policies in general (rank 33 out of 41 nations) and it receives middling scores overall (rank 22) with regard to economic policies – a topic which looms large for almost every US voter. 

Will American Democracy Perish Like Rome’s?

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The SGI 2022 US Report explains that “GDP growth bounced rapidly back, returning to robust levels in 2021,” which coincides with the first year of the Biden administration. Massive emergency spending, which had already started under former president Trump, “included payments to individuals and firms, as well as expanded tax credits and unemployment benefits”. Based on the findings on economic performance, while the incumbent president’s party could be vulnerable, slight increases in some policy indicators since the Trump years, especially economic measures, also suggest that the incumbent majority party is unlikely to face a thumping defeat.  

The party polarization indicator of SGI – where the US is ranked as the most country – makes it plausible that both sides of a politically divided voting public feel energized in this election year, albeit for different reasons. Democrat optimism regarding their party’s chances to contain losses is driven by the recent Supreme Court Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that ended the nationwide constitutional right to abortion that had existed since the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973. At least initially, the Dobbs decision had a significant energizing effect, especially on women, steering them towards Democratic candidates. In contrast, polls taken until the early fall of 2022 seemed to indicate that Republican-leaning conservative voters in small-town America may have felt complacent after the success of the conservative movement’s decades-long effort to strike down Roe v. Wade. 

The Trump effect

Former president Trump remains a central, and polarizing figure. Trump continues to claim falsely that the 2020 election was stolen and he has remained in the public gaze amid Congressional investigations into the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol and his handling of classified documents. As a consequence, Democrats’ campaigns focus on perceived threats to US democracy by Trump and his followers. From the perspective of SGI 2022, this strategy is obvious, but not risk-free. While the report states that there is “increasing tension over the conduct of elections”, and “voting rights have become a contested issue, with the Republican party seeking to suppress low-income and minority votes”, it is also true that Democrats have failed to pass a major voting-rights act through Congress despite their majority. The United States falls into the upper-middle ranks (rank 15) in terms of quality.

The Next Surge of Trumpism

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Meanwhile, the Republican electorate is reveling in President ��������’s approval ratings of well below 50 percent, though ratings are not as low as it was a few months ago. In the polls, it is inflation, not abortion or democracy, that tops potential voters’ concerns. Recent economic data—which showed ongoing inflation—will keep it there. Nearly every US household is grappling with higher costs, energy and gasoline prices. But only Republican-leaning voters see inflation as the number one issue, blaming it squarely on Joe Biden and the Democrats. For Democrat-leaning voters, however, inflation is important but does not top the agenda, seen instead in the context of global economic disruptions following the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. For these voters, abortion rights for women after the Dobbs decision is the top issue. The number two and three issues for Republican-leaners are immigration/border control and rising crime. For the Democrat-leaning constituencies these topics matter less. For them, a close second after abortion rights is saving US democracy from the perceived attack by MAGA-Republicans, followed by health care.  

It’s the economy, stupid

But the mobilization of white suburban Republican and independent women who may be worried about the cost of living, school decisions or rising crime could neutralize or offset the impact of those who are mobilized by abortion and the threat to US democracy. As a consequence, Republicans aim to focus voters’ attention on crime and immigration and away from abortion. Meanwhile, rising prices and inflation remain a factor everywhere and will ultimately decide at least the House elections. 

In sum, the midterms are more than just a referendum on President Biden. A few weeks before election day, predictions of sweeping Republican gains have been tempered by the changing political climate, thanks in large part to the Dobbs decision, although the Republicans remain favored to take control of the House. In the final weeks, amid economic jitters, elections could turn on how much sustaining energy the Dobbs decision provides for Democrats or whether it fades in the face of so-called “kitchen table” concerns. 

What happens now in 2022 will also lay foundations for the presidential elections of 2024. If Trump-backed Republican Senate candidates like Herschel Walker in Georgia or J.D. Vance in Ohio do badly on November 8, 2022, Trump is less likely to be nominated as their 2024 presidential candidate. If Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida is re-elected as governor of the sunshine state for a second term, this will give him momentum for a likely bid for the White House. Conversely, if the Democrats manage to keep their Senate majority and win statewide races for governor and/or the Senate in crucial presidential battlegrounds like Michigan, Wisconsin or Pennsylvania, it would likely fuel confidence for a President Biden re-election campaign for 2024. On the other hand, if the Democrats fare badly in the midterms and other state elections on November 8, 2022, the current president faces rising pressure not to seek a second term. 

[We thank the Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI) project of the German Bertelsmann Foundation for this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Will the Pandemic Revitalize Ideas of the Global Common Good?

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In the same period, Great Britain moved to the right under Prime Minister Boris Johnson while autocratic regimes in Poland, Hungary, Turkey, the Philippines and Brazil tightened their grip on governance structures.

What does the future hold for liberal democracies around the world in the next decade? Are current trends an aberration, or is Marc Plattner prophetic in in “Democracy in Decline?” that authoritarianism seems to have the “wind at its back even if it has not yet spread to many more countries”?

Inevitable Decline Scenario

Current trends produce compelling evidence that seems to suggest that the decline of democracies is an inevitability. In the United States, daily columns appear pronouncing that democracy is in peril and under siege, and asking whether another civil war is possible. The January 6 assault on the Capitol continues to be a flashpoint in what was already a very volatile political environment. Voting restrictions targeted at likely Democratic voters have been instituted in many pro-Republican states. Given the prominence of America as a symbol of liberal democracy, countries around the world are now thinking the unthinkable about the future of democratic governance.

Last year’s Freedom House , “Freedom in the World for 2021,” carries the subheading “Democracy under Siege.” It suggests that the aggregate decline in freedom has exceeded gains for the past 15 years. While much of the deterioration in 2020 was associated with regimes in Africa and the Middle East, European nations — Poland, Hungary and Turkey — recorded reductions in freedom. Moreover, the United States has seen a 10-year decline in freedom equivalent to that experienced in 25 other nations.

Meanwhile, as the left-wing populist party headed by Nicolas Maduro has captured the headlines because of his dismantling of democratic institutions in Venezuela, right-wing populist movements are increasing across Latin America — Brazil, Bolivia and Peru are examples. More recently, following Jair Bolsonaro’s playbook in Brazil, the leader of the right-wing populist Christian Social Front in Chile, José Antonio Kast, forced a run-off in a recent election after voicing a desire to return to the autocratic regime of Augusto Pinochet.  

Kast eventually lost in a landslide, which bodes well for the stability of democracy in Chile for the near future, but still raises the disconcerting issue of the popularity of authoritarianism among a sizeable minority of Chile’s polity. 

Predisposition to Authoritarianism

All of these recent events would seem to posit an argument that many citizens are susceptible to an authoritarian appeal. However, forecasting trends from recent events is always hazardous. Yet there is a more ominous source for predicting inevitability than the recent accounts and actions of political leaders and pundits. The writings of a number of social psychologists, historians and political scientists are extremely relevant to the question at hand.

Karen Skinner argues in her book “The Authoritarian Dynamic” that autocratic tendencies are baked into the psychic of citizens of liberal democracies. Fear of change and diversity is easily transformed into a call by a politician for a return to the status quo of the past, like “Make American Great Again.” Long before the ascent of Trump, Skinner estimated that as many as one-third of the population in liberal democracies have a predisposition to authoritarianism.

Given that democracies encourage diversity, alternative interpretations of history and open dialogue on difficult issues, these strengths may exceed people’s capacity to tolerate difficult issues. A growing lack of tolerance toward immigrants, people of color or bureaucrats provides a platform for opportunistic leaders to activate that “authoritarian ���Բ�������.”

Roger Griffin a similar argument when he attributes modernity as a force for fascism. With the unfolding of modernity, populist interpretations of an idealized national past arise in response to the anxiety that citizens feel about a future where the only certainty is that it will be different than the past. Leaders with autocratic ambitions use “restorative nostalgia” — Svetlana Boym’s concept in her book “The Future of Nostalgia” to describe a hereafter that replicates the past — to rally citizens to a populist political movement, a revolt against democratic institutions and their advocates, “the bureaucratic elites.”

The arguments offered by Skinner, Griffin and others provide an important understanding of how the internal vulnerabilities of liberal democracies can nurture their own demise. However, despite the presence of an authoritarian dynamic within liberal democracies, a political leadership factor is part of the calculus for predicting the future of democracies. The past decade has witnessed the emergence of Plutarchian leaders who have learned to navigate the pathway that enables populist sentiments to be integrated with autocratic predispositions.

While their hold on the masses is important, what is required to secure power is their ability to bewitch a small key group of capable and principled people in leadership roles and convince them to submit to the autocratic impulses of a prophetic leader as a means of achieving limited policy goals.  

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A cadre of — those who have no autocratic predisposition but are willing to align with anti-democratic politics as a means of achieving specific policy goals or to ensure their own power base in the governance structure — is required. The important and notorious role that Franz von Papen had in enabling the rise of fascism in Germany in the 1930s must not be duplicated if democracy is to be resilient in countries experiencing populist movements. The dangerous combination of a charismatic populist leader and a sizable component of politicians willing to compromise their political ideals for transitory political goals would make the downward spiral of democracy inevitable.

Yet in the United States, a contingent of politicians did defy the urges of the Trump administration to decertify the election results and preserve democratic rule. In Chile, citizens and political leaders rejected the call to return to the autocratic governance model of Pinochet’s dictatorship. In Europe, despite the political uncertainties created by the pandemic, right-wing populist movements have not established themselves as viable alternatives to current regimes. 

Democracy will be resilient and survive the current wave of right-wing authoritarianism if leaders and institutions demonstrate their ability to solve critical social and economic problems, reverse the erosion of trust between themselves and the public, and put the safeguarding of democracy at the forefront of their political agenda.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Whatever Happened to Elon Musk?

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During the presidential campaign of 2000, Bush famously said, in a moment of humorous truth-telling at a gala dinner in New York: “This is an impressive crowd. The haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elite. I call you my base.” Bush spoke as a Republican, a party known to cater to the wealthy business class. But he was speaking for everyone in the crowd, his Democratic opponent, Al Gore, included.

Bush’s election inaugurated a period of political and cultural chaos that began a prolonged process whose effect was to undermine Americans’ understanding of the nation’s proclaimed democratic values. Bush’s Middle East wars — so pleasing to Carlyle — were followed by a financial meltdown, leading to President Barack Obama’s bailout of the “have-mores” and his sacrifice of the middle class. It reached a point of culmination in 2016 when Donald Trump, like Bush himself, was elected with a minority of the popular vote and a sense of a quasi-religious mission.

The elections of 2000 and 2016 left the Democrats in a strategic quandary from which they still haven’t recovered. Promoting issues that appeal to voters and a demography evolving in their favor, Democrats should easily dominate national politics. But they simply do not know how to win elections. Worse, every time they lose — as they did in an important gubernatorial race in Virginia last week — they become more deeply confused. It has become an extraordinary spectacle featuring political ineptitude aggravated by the legacy media beholden not so much to the Democratic Party as its donors. The New York Times heads that list.

An opinion penned by The Times’ editorial board on the dilemma facing the party after the disappointment in Virginia predictably claims that “what is badly needed, is an honest conversation in the Democratic Party about how to return to the moderate policies and values that fueled the blue-wave victories in 2018 and won Joe Biden the presidency in 2020.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Moderate policies and values:

Any approach to politics and government that will find both straightforward and devious ways when necessary to protect the vested interests of people with enough wealth to pay for the outlandishly expensive electoral campaigns of Democratic candidates who are nobly focused on the only goal that matters: getting elected or reelected

Contextual Note

Despite The Times’ insistence, 2018 and 2020 saw no “blue waves.” In both cases, Democrats progressed slightly thanks to a powerfully orchestrated negative reaction to the havoc created by Trump faithfully amplified by the media. The logic of the narrow victory achieved in the 2018 midterm elections and the capacity to rise above Trump’s nevertheless impressive numbers in the 2020 presidential election lay entirely in the capacity of the media to convince enough people that Trump was an aberration from hell. For many “moderate” voters, unconvinced by either party, there was no positive reason to vote for Democrats. There was, however, a compelling reason to free themselves from a news cycle dominated by a narcissistic troublemaker. What The Times called a blue wave was nothing more than a Trump-colored ebb as the residue of 2016 temporarily receded.

It is always instructive to learn how off-kilter The New York Times’ collective thinking can be. In the wake of the Virginia gubernatorial race, the editorial board notes that “Democrats lost there — even with a longtime moderate as their candidate for governor.” Could that realization persuade them to wonder whether being a moderate committed to doing things the way they have always been done isn’t the problem? No, not The New York Times. Instead of blaming the moderate candidate, it excoriates an imaginary entity — “the party” — that has failed to consolidate around “moderate, unifying solutions.” The Times specifically complains about the Democratic Party’s insistence on “looking left on so many priorities and so much messaging.”

The editorial cites “left-center squabbling” that has prevented “passing both the bipartisan infrastructure bill and a robust version of the Build Back Better plan.” The rhetorical trick here is the word “robust.” Robustness is exactly what not just the progressives but even establishment stalwarts such as Chuck Schumer appear to be pushing for. It is “moderate” Democrats — namely, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema — who have ostentatiously battled to deprive the legislation of its robustness.

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The Times fears a “sharp leftward push” in the party and claims that “more centrist Americans” are opposed to spending. That is a convenient but traditional fabrication. A clear majority of Americans polled want the specific programs being eliminated in the name of reduced spending. But that fact doesn’t interest The Times. Those who have led the opposition to robustness are “centrist” Democrats, like the multi-millionaire Manchin and the obstreperous narcissist Sinema.

On the same day as the editorial, Times reporter Shane Goldmacher revealingly what he sees as the real problem President Joe Biden is faced with. He recounts that last year, Biden promised his “top fund-raisers,” whose cash got him elected, to “never, ever let you down.” Ten months later, Goldmacher reports that the donors “are feeling neglected if not outright cast aside.” He quotes one major fund-raiser who complains: “It’s very discouraging. We don’t exist.” The Times finds that worrying. It finds less worrying the fact that a majority of Americans, with no expectations of a hotline to the White House purchased with hefty contributions, have long felt the same way. This is so absurd it could lead to the speculation that Biden has become a left-wing activist intent on shafting the donor class.

The Times describes the Democrats as “the only party right now that shows an interest in governing and preserving democratic norms.” This is meant to sound reasoned and reasonable. But it says nothing positive. It focuses on “preserving,” defending the status quo. Every election since 2008 has been an expression of the voters’ admittedly confused desire for change that never happens.

Historical Note

The New York Times may have forgotten that the historical basis of any two-party system in a modern democracy relies on the distinction between concepts traditionally termed left and right. The left has traditionally represented two characteristics of the population: people who depend on a propertied class for employment, and the oppressed. The right has traditionally represented the authority of the business class and those segments of the stable middle class that were comfortable with their superiors’ ability to collectively manage the economy. Whether in the US, Britain, France or Germany — to cite only those countries — there is a documented trend of a loss of confidence in the ability of any of the traditional parties to manage things efficiently.

Radical changes have been taking place in this simple dichotomy across the developed world. As Thomas Piketty has insisted, parties traditionally of the left — supposedly representing the working class and the oppressed — have become dominated by the educated class with a technocratic managerial mindset.

As a consequence, broad swaths of the population have begun to feel alienated by a system controlled by technocrats working alongside business leaders focused on accumulating wealth. In total disorder, they turn to various forms of populism that can range from forms of anarchism to fascism. Donald Trump brilliantly exploited that trend and, despite serious personal discredit, is continuing to do so even today. In other words, the dummy Trump understands what the shining intellects of The New York Times refuse to see.

According to The Times’ editorial board, the Democrats, wedded to moderation and technocracy, are in deep water because they have drifted too far to the left. According to Shane Goldmacher, they are suffering because they haven’t properly honored their wealthy donors. Put the two lessons together and it’s easy to understand that The Times has a clear preference for oligarchy over democracy.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Democrats face challenges of their own trying to figure out how to weave together moderate Biden Democrats with a new generation of democratic socialists. One way to become “the party of the future” is to articulate a clear plan for solving the problems of the future. Here is one clear opportunity.

The Weak European Reflex in German Cybersecurity

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Both the Trump and the Biden administrations approved multibillion-dollar pandemic stimulus programs. Despite the gravity of the COVID-19 economic crisis, half of the did not get to the working Americans who desperately needed help. Much was stolen by fraudsters and criminal rings who exploited online claims. Made worse, 70% of the stolen funds went abroad to Russia, China and Nigeria.

California State Auditor Elaine Howle as much last August and announced in a January report that the Employment Development Department (EDD) had sent 555,000 claims to 26,000 suspect addresses — an of 21 per address — despite the evidence of fraudulent activity. One address had more than 80 claims, and yet EDD’s missed 12 as late as in December 2020. Howle also noted that a disturbing number of claims went to people currently incarcerated in California prisons.

This begs the question: How long will taxpayers support government programs only to learn that the money ended up in the hands of criminals? This is how we stop it.

Every FBI or Drug Enforcement Administration office has a special agent in charge (SAC) to coordinate efforts in combatting criminal threats. We need state-based SACs for cybersecurity to assist state and local governments, prevent fraud and direct funding for state task forces as we already do for counterterrorism.

Under the authority of the secretary of homeland security, chief security officers in each state would provide a full conduit of information to all levels of government to intercept criminals. Besides preventing fraud, they could play a valuable role in helping local governments encrypt both and as well as portect against .

Governments in general also need more cyber experts. Cyber gangs have upped the ante, going so far as to examine companies’ before activating ransomware as experts believe was done in the most recent Kaseya hack. We need to raise the bar to intercept these bad actors before they reach private citizens or entities. A Marshall Plan for cyber hiring across all government would put us on stronger footing to combat increasingly aggressive behavior by state-supported crime syndicates.

Lastly, we need to measure how we are doing. We need to require that states publicly account for the share of unemployment benefits that get into the right hands. Obviously, not every malicious individual can be caught. By spotlighting our efficacy, we can highlight the problem, heighten demand and recruit more people with the tech backgrounds we need to tackle fraud.

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As a lifelong Democrat, I believe in the power of a strong government that provides a social safety net to protect its citizens. The answer is not less government or pretending there will not be more tech-based attacks on our citizens and businesses. The answer is for government to demonstrate it can proactively provide solutions to stop the problem and provide accountability.

We need a government that is technologically capable enough to protect our people and smart enough to get the money to those who need it most. Whichever party shows it understands the future by solving new problems like cybersecurity will be in the pole position to win in 2022 and beyond.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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This week, before glancing at political division in the US, we look at what is shaping up to be a game-changing development in China. Bloomberg’s reporters refer to it as a “,” but mainstream media in the West have largely ignored it. This neglect may have something to do with the conviction in the West that, though there are monumentally important problems to deal with, the inertia of the political and economic system we have today is such that no one believes that anything we decide to do will ever change anything. Could China be on course to become the century’s new “exceptional nation”?

Xi’s Promise of a New Great Leap Forward

In his successful 2008 campaign, Barack Obama railed against George W. Bush’s tax cuts and wars, only to maintain both during his two terms in office. In his campaign last year, Joe Biden lamented Donald Trump’s provocative policies regarding Cuba and Iran as well as Trump’s tax cuts. But after six months at the helm, he has shown no serious intent to reverse those policies. 

Both Democratic presidents claimed they would effect change (Obama) and be transformative (Biden), hiding they would be acting to reduce the inequality between makers and takers that Republicans promoted as an illustration of capitalist virtue. Both Democrats have shown themselves ready to accommodate and defend the interests of the 1% who supported their campaigns while expressing a sentimental commitment to improving everyone’s lives. The structure of US democracy seems to make challenging the status quo an impossible task. Sentiments consistently fail to influence reality.

Thought Suppression Flourishes in France and Washington

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China is governed by an exclusive elite, the Communist Party. Its monopoly on power spares its leaders the trouble of having to invent campaign promises to seduce ignorant voters. Many have noticed the comfortable complicity of China’s communist leaders with an economy that has become a decidedly capitalist power structure. If the US has cultivated an efficient, legally validated system of structured private capitalist corruption that offers the wealthy class the privilege of controlling politics, the Chinese have perfected a system of state corruption that offers the politically powerful direct control of wealth itself.

All recent US regimes have had no choice but to capitulate to the private interests that literally own the economy. The Democratic Party’s public war against the progressive reformers within its midst provides a good demonstration of the phenomenon. The democratic processes laid out in the US Constitution have been successfully manipulated over time to comfort oligarchy. This makes it particularly remarkable today that China’s authoritarian regime under President Xi Jinping, a true and largely unassailable oligarchy, appears to be providing the rare example of a government intent on taking action against the powerful interests that control the global economy. Xi appears to be taking steps to move China’s political economy in a more egalitarian direction. It may not be Karl Marx, but it clearly isn’t Milton Friedman.

According to Bloomberg journalists, Tom Hancock and Tom Orlick, “Xi is engaging in a “” that will change the way the Chinese economy works in the coming years. Xi’s new agenda “puts three priorities ahead of unfettered growth.” The first, which should surprise no one, is national security. It “includes control of data and greater self-reliance in technology. All nations in our dangerous world are enamored of security. The second is far more radical: “Common prosperity, which aims to curb inequalities that have soared in recent decades.” The third is consistent with traditional Chinese culture: “Stability, which means tamping down discontent among China’s middle class.” In Chinese culture, this is the effect of the virtue of harmony.

In other words, Xi is attempting to do what Joe Biden has ominously warned he might do: use his authoritarian power to achieve pragmatic goals in the name of the people that are difficult to achieve in the kind of democracy practiced in the US.

Common prosperity:

The opposite of the now current regime of private prosperity that works by undermining what was once idealized in the notion of the commonwealth, implying a fraternal sharing of national wealth

The Context

Xi appears to be announcing a quiet but stern revolution that has already provoked panic among many of the vested interests in the world of finance, both foreign and Chinese. Forty years ago, Deng Xiaoping’s departure from Mao Zedong’s radical communist egalitarianism and his encouragement of Western-style economic freedom led to China becoming a fixture of the global capitalist system. It achieved this goal by exciting the appetites of both Western and Chinese economic opportunists, leading to a record-breaking expansion of the Chinese economy.

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The new policy aims at relieving the suffering of “stretched workers, stressed parents, and squeezed start-ups.” The article’s authors designate the losers: “tech billionaires and their backers in the stock market, highly leveraged property companies including China Evergrande Group, and foreign venture capital firms that had hoped to take Chinese companies public in the U.S.” The Economist describes the in these terms: “Alibaba in e-commerce or Tencent in payments and entertainment will be around but less overweening — and less lucrative. Policies to curb their market power will redistribute some of their profits to smaller merchants and app developers, and to their workers.”

Xi’s gambit doesn’t appear to be merely rhetorical. Whether he can accomplish his goals remains an open question. He has undoubtedly set the scene for a major drama that, as it plays out, will most likely dominate the decade to come. Both the world of global capital and the declining US empire will react. It could lead to war. It could also lead to radical restructuring of the current geopolitical order in what may become a more multipolar world. For the moment, we the spectators are simply discovering the dialogue of Act I, Scene 1.

Can Xi Really Corral Such Ferocious Animals?

The same Bloomberg article explains Xi’s political motivation for his “.”  To ensure the population’s acceptance of his hold on the reins of power, Xi wants to reassure the middle class that he is defending their interests. There may be more complex geopolitical causes, but that motivation clearly explains the urgency of the shift. The authors go on to evoke the possible downside of Xi’s new agenda: “The bigger risk for Beijing: Heavy state intervention might dampen the animal spirits that drive private investment and reverse an integration with the global economy that has helped drive growth in the last four decades.”

Animal spirits:

The spontaneous exuberance attributed to unthinking creatures with energy to expend, an unbridled appetite and scorn for anything that stands in their way

The Context

Xi is undoubtedly a clever geopolitical strategist. He can see clearly the issues Western empires have struggled with in past centuries. China had a privileged vantage point for observing the British Empire’s strengths and weaknesses after experiencing a pair of Opium Wars in the 19^th century. The incoherence of nationalistic rivalries in Europe ultimately undermined the British Empire that had reduced much of Asia, and particularly India and China, to a state of economic submission, if not slavery. 

Two world wars that included an emerging Japanese Empire eventually cleared the space for the USA’s consumer society-led neo-colonial, officially apolitical but heavily militaristic empire that eventually crafted a productive role for China’s post-Marxist economy. The Chinese “workshop of the world” became a vital feature of a system focused on permanent growth and obsessively stoked consumerism. Following World War II, American consumers became literally addicted to falling prices on consumer goods. China, with help from US capitalists, could step in to provide an ever-expanding cornucopia of goods at lower prices.

Xi is aware that the entire Western world, struggling with various imperfect models of democracy, has reached a tipping point regarding two existential problems: health and wealth. Both are clearly out of control. Governments in the West have demonstrably failed to address both the health of the planet, increasingly subjected to climate chaos, and the health of their people. None more so than the US, a nation that continues to resist even the idea of universal health care and persists in spectacularly bungling most of its initiatives with regard to the COVID-19 drama. 

With its retrograde approach to the distribution of vaccines, the intellectual ownership-obsessed West, guided by the wisdom of Bill Gates, has failed to live up to its image as the putative provider of global solutions. As it focuses on protecting and exploiting its supposed intellectual property in competition with the rest of the world, the West has, embarrassingly for itself, allowed spectacular chaos to continue and amplify. As for wealth, the effects of the pandemic have aggravated the growing and insurmountable gap between the hyper-rich and the rest of humanity. The idea that everyone can someday become a millionaire has been replaced by the clear perception that the super-wealthy will do everything in their power to ensure that only a select few will ever be admitted into their club.

China’s authoritarian system has made it easier to enact and implement policy. Powerless to solve problems, Western governments, captured by binary logic, prefer to explore hypothetical consequences and debate what emerge as two contradictory positions. With his Belt and Road Initiative, Xi has already expertly used the contrast between the image of constructive cooperation and the American addiction to war, military operations and sanctions as the solution to all problems. Xi’s gambit may translate more as image-building than economic realism, and it may rely as much on corruption as the will to collaborate, but it stands as an effective example of soft power.

Now Xi can remake his image as a populist hero at home. His announced policies even correspond to the fantasies of populists on the right and left who would love to see the financial operators ushered out the door, replaced by laws and practices that at least appear to be transferring power to the people under the protection of the government. Xi promises to put a leash on the over-exuberant animals who alone make the law in the capitalist West.

Antony Blinken Worries About China’s Ambitions

The Biden administration has apparently decided that the key to consolidating its image with voters lies in a foreign policy that consists of getting tough on the nations that refuse to get in line behind US leadership. The first among them and the one most likely to inspire the kind of fear that galvanizes American voters is, of course, China. With nearly four times the population of the United States, the quantity of fear it can generate will be spectacular. And in politics, it’s the spectacle that counts.

Bloomberg has by Peter Martin with the headline, “Blinken Warns Asian Nations of China’s Growing Nuclear Ambitions,” in which he cites the US secretary of state’s “‘deep concern’ over China’s growing nuclear arsenal.” 

Deep concern

The emotion politicians claim to have, thanks to their privileged knowledge of geopolitical realities, which, when communicated to the people, generates the degree of fear that justifies risky and aggressive policies, including war

The Context

Secretary Blinken’s complaint that “Beijing has sharply deviated from its decades-old nuclear strategy based on minimum deterrence.” China is expected to understand that only the US is authorized to practice maximum deterrence. The following two paragraphs in the Reuters article give an idea of why Blinken’s concern is so “deep”:

“A 2020 Pentagon report estimated China’s nuclear warhead stockpile in ‘the low 200s’ and said it was projected to at least double in size as Beijing expands and modernizes its forces.

Analysts say the United States has around 3,800 warheads, and according to a State Department factsheet, 1,357 of those were deployed as of March 1.”

Who wouldn’t be concerned with only 3,800 warheads to ensure peace in the world? Bloomberg quotes Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who disapproves of “countries interfering in each other’s internal affairs.” Wang added a casual historical observation “that Asian nations had been bullied by others in the past and didn’t require ‘teachers’ or ‘saviors.’” The Opium Wars apparently left an indelible smoky taste in the Chinese collective unconscious.

The Latest Skirmish Inside the Increasingly Divided US Democratic Party

As the Republican Party continues its existential anguish surrounding the role of Donald Trump, the Democratic Party struggles to define whether its loyalty is to the people or the lobbies that fund its campaigns. The drama played out this past week in a special election pitting two African American women against each other.

The Los Angeles Times provides its of the come-from-behind victory of mainstream Shontel Brown over progressive Nina Turner in a high profile Democratic primary election for a congressional seat in Ohio: “Brown’s primary win is a boost for moderate Democrats who have been in increasingly testy tussles with progressive activists and gives a new voice in Congress for voters who are more hungry for calm pragmatism than for the passionate populism that animates Sanders’ followers.”

Calm pragmatism:

The fear of calling into question the visible cause of one’s suffering because the status quo has proved so destructive that people think any change will make things even worse

The Context

One Democratic political consultant in Cleveland explained what he thought “calm pragmatism” amounts to: “People are tired and worn out after the last four or five years.” They have stopped thinking about the implications of political choices and simply hope there will be a new status quo. The loser, Nina Turner, claimed that her campaign “didn’t lose this race. Evil money manipulated and maligned this election.” She has a point, since the effect on politics of money — once deemed in the Christian West to be “the root of all evil” — now dominates the rhetoric deployed in campaigns to the point of definitively crippling and even excluding serious political debate. Populist passion is real, but so is the passion of fear-mongering that incites voters to retreat into the illusion of calm pragmatism.

On an unrelated topic, Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst, Marwan Bishara, has at the African Union’s acceptance of Israel as an observer despite its consistent criticism of what it qualifies as Tel Aviv’s apartheid policies. Bishara explains that African nations may “reckon that Israel has major sway in Washington and may be of help to influence the decisions of the world’s superpower in their favour.” He then adds, “Indeed, such pragmatism — read opportunism — may have worked for the likes of Sudan in getting US sanctions lifted after it began normalising relations with Israel.”

Bishara thus equates “calm pragmatism” with “cynical opportunism.” Can the Ohio voters who chose Brown over Turner be accused of opportunism? Undoubtedly no, if only because they have nothing specific to gain from Brown’s election. The true explanation is the “evil money” Turner complains about paid for yet another media campaign based on stoking voters’ fear of the unknown. Democratic Party stalwarts — which included Hillary Clinton, Jim Clyburn and their sources of corporate money — effectively countered the successful grassroots funding of Turner’s campaign and turned the tide in Brown’s favor. Those stalwarts and their backers are the opportunists. The voters persuaded by their fear of the unknown were their dupes.

What links these two stories together is what a significant factor in Brown’s primary victory. As the , a lobbying group, “Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) threw its support behind Brown.” The DMFI reportedly nearly $2 million to Brown’s campaign. Why? Because they know that Turner is one of the rare American politicians who has the independence of thought to criticize Israel, something no US politician is permitted to do on pain of being branded anti-Semitic. The idea that Turner might challenge the unconditional commitment of the US to supporting Israel galvanized the white suburban voters who ended up giving Brown the majority.

The lockstep alignment of the US with Israel has been as important a factor as access to oil in determining US Middle East policy in recent decades. That policy has been disastrous for the region, the US and the world in a variety of ways. Is that the result people still expect from following a policy of calm pragmatism?

A Washington Post Columnist’s Shameful Feinting With Damned Praise

Conservative Washington Post columnist Marc A. Thiessen quite logically makes it clear that he is ready to come to the as the most effective way of undermining pretentions of the most vocal black US Americans: “As the Cuban people — up to 75 percent of whom have Afro-Cuban ancestry — rose up to demand their freedom, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation issued a statement praising the brutal regime that oppresses them and calling on the Biden administration to lift the U.S. embargo on Cuba.”

Praise:

Make an objectively true statement describing a complex situation that includes a reference to a regime that has been labeled for ideological reasons as a diabolical enemy of every moral (i.e., economic) principle the United States is believed to stand for

The Context

In July, protests spread in Cuba provoked by a variety of ills for which many Cubans, succumbing to conditions of severe deprivation, wish to hold their government to account. US media predictably seized upon the occasion to nourish the dream of various interested parties in the US — mostly located in the quintessential swing state, Florida — to restore the situation of effective neo-colonial rule that the US enjoyed over the island from 1915 to 1959.

The first thing to notice in Thiessen’s piece, as in most of the media treatment in the US, is the facile use of the term “the Cuban people.” When a crowd of protesters appears, they become “the Cuban people.” Many of the same pundits in 2003 claimed that an overwhelming majority of Iraqis were ready to toss flowers at US soldiers invading their country. Honest reporters might write “a significant number of discontented Cubans” or some variation on that idea, but the dishonest ones simply declare that the protesters, some waving US flags, are synonymous with “the Cuban people.”

Thiessen reveals his utter dishonesty when he complains that Black Lives Matters was “praising the brutal regime” in its statement. Thiessen links to a on Instagram that begins by condemning “the U.S. government’s inhumane treatment of Cubans.” At no point does it praise the Cuban government other than citing an objective fact of “the country’s strong medical care and history of lending doctors and nurses to disasters around the world.” The BLM statement notes one other objective fact concerning a government’s policies, that “the United States has forced pain and suffering on the people of Cuba” through its embargo.

Anyone inclined to doubt that fact need simply refer to the of April 6, 1960, that describes a policy that has been in place for the last 60 years: “The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.” It recommends “every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba … to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

Although the sanctions regime was loosened in 2015 by Barack Obama, Donald Trump scaled back and imposed new crippling measures. During his campaign last year, candidate : “I’d try to reverse the failed Trump policies that inflicted harm on Cubans and their families.” Instead, he has maintained Trump’s sanctions and last week , while promising even “more to come.”

 *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post In China, Cuba and Ohio, Reform and Inertia Go to Battle appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The Good Old Days: Nostalgia’s Political Appeal

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The fact is that we do live in an age of resentment, and populism has been among its main political beneficiaries. Resentment has been for propelling Donald Trump into the White House in 2016, contributing to the narrow, playing a in Jair Bolsonaro’s election in 2018, and fueling the most recent for radical right-wing populist parties in Europe. Those who vote for them are to be “fearful, angry and resentful of what their societies have done for them over the years.” Those of us who have been studying these developments for the past several decades could not agree more.

Unsocial Passion

Populism derives much of its impetus from the force of the emotions it evokes. The arguably most potent of these emotions is resentment. Unfortunately, more often than not, the link between resentment and populism is merely asserted, as if it were self-evident. As a result, resentment is either trivialized or comes to stand for about any emotion .

The reality is, however, that resentment is a highly complex, equivocal and ambiguous emotion.  Etymologically, resentment from the French verb ressentir, which carries the connotation of feeling something over and over again, of obsessively revisiting a past injury (from the outdated se ressentir). It is for this reason that Adam Smith, in his 1759 treatise on moral sentiments ranks resentment among the “unsocial passions.” This is not to say that resentment is an entirely odious and noxious passion. On the contrary, Smith makes a that resentment is “one of the glues that can hold society together.” For, as Michelle Schwarze and John Scott have , “we need the perturbing passion of resentment to motivate our concern for injustice.”

On this view, resentment represents what Sjoerd van Tuinen has “a mechanism of retributive justice” that “prevents and remedies injuries.” It is from this sense that Smith’s notion of resentment as the glue that holds society together derives its logic and justification. If resentment is an unsocial passion, it is, as , that resentment, if “unregulated … can be the most socially destructive of all passions.” Here, resentment is nothing but vindictiveness and rancor, the urge to find malicious pleasure in revenge. This is the dark side of resentment.

The other, positive side to resentment is what the “safeguard of justice and the security of innocence.” In this iteration, resentment serves as a mechanism that “prompts us to beat off the mischief which is attempted to be done to us, and to retaliate that which is already done; that the offender may be made to repent of his injustice, and that others, through fear of like punishment, may be terrified from being guilty of the like offence.” This type of resentment is, as , “vitally important to maintaining the proper regard for the status of persons as equal participants in a common moral world.”

As a moral emotion, , “resentment is not only an appropriate individual response to failures of justice, but it is also an indispensable attitude to cultivate if an overall degree of fairness is to be maintained in society.”

An excerpt from a speech by Frederick Douglass, the prominent 19^th-century African American abolitionist, orator and preacher illustrates the point. Speaking before the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1853, that it was “perhaps creditable to the American people” if European immigrants from Ireland, Italy or Hungary “all find in this goodly land a home.” For them, he continued, “the Americans have principles of justice, maxims of mercy, sentiments of religion and feelings of brotherhood in abundance.” When it came to “my poor people (alas, how poor!) enslaved, scourged, blasted, overwhelmed, and ruined,” however, “it would appear that America had neither justice, mercy, nor religion.” As a result, he charged, African Americans were aliens “in our native land.”

Strangers in Their Own Land

The irony should not be lost on anyone who has followed the course of American politics in recent years. In 2016, Donald Trump not only secured the Republican nomination, but he was also elected president of the United States. He did so on a platform that catered to the disenchantment of large swaths of the country’s white population with a political class that appeared to care little about their concerns. Trump scored particularly big among the millions of white Americans who thought of themselves as having become, in , strangers in their own land.

Similar sentiments have been reported from the eastern part of Germany. A from 2019 by one of Germany’s leading public opinion firms came to the conclusion that 30 years after unification, “many eastern Germans still feel like aliens in their own home.” The political fallout has been dramatic: The “feeling of alienness” has informed party preferences more than have differences between political agendas.

Other studies have shown that a significant number of eastern Germans see themselves as second-class citizens. Talia Marin, who teaches international economics at the technical university in Munich, these sentiments to the fact that after unification, many eastern Germans were being told in not particularly subtle ways that their skills and experience acquired during the communist period “had no value in a market economy.” Confronted with this “feeling of worthlessness,” they “lost their dignity.” A from 2019 provides evidence of the extent to which eastern Germans continue to feel slighted. In the survey, 80% of respondents agreed with the statement that their achievements in the decades following unification have not received the recognition they deserve.

Dignity, studies have shown, is central to contemporary politics of recognition. It is at this point that resentment and populism meet. For, as , resentment represents “an interpersonal dynamic which desires the restoration of respect.” Recognition, , constitutes a “vital human need.” Recognition entails, in , “acknowledging and honouring the status of others.”

The opposite is misrecognition. Misrecognition, in turn, is a major source of resentment. Pierre Rosanvallon, in a recent essay on populism, ranks resentment among what he calls the “emotions of position.” These are emotions that express “rage over not being recognized, of being abandoned, despised, counting for nothing in the eyes of the powerful.” In his view, what provokes these emotions is the huge gap that often exists between objective reality, such as the fact that, in terms of GDP, France is ranked fifth among industrialized economies. Subjectively, however, the daily lived experience of a substantial number of French people is quite different who face difficulties making ends meet.

France is hardly unique. As early as 2008, one of the BBC’s top executives, Richard Klein, that “the people most affected by the upheaval” that had characterized Britain during the past decade, both economic and cultural, “have been all but ignored.” Klein’s comments were made at the occasion of a BBC documentary series on Britain’s white working class. The documentary revealed a of “victimhood, rage, abandonment and resentment” among these strata. Not even the Labour Party, once the protector of working-class interests, seemed to consider them important. As a result, they felt completely abandoned, no longer worthy of dignity and recognition.

This is what also seems to have happened in post-unification eastern Germans, or at least not in the perceptions of eastern Germans. Otherwise, they would hardly consider themselves second-class citizens, not on an equal footing compared to westerners. The result has been widespread resentment, surfacing, for instance, during the refugee crisis of 2015-16. At the time, the priority was to integrate the hundreds of thousands of newcomers Angela Merkel’s government had allowed to enter the country. For good reasons, in the east, the mood was one of irritation, if not outright hostility.

The predominant notion was that the government should first integrate what was once communist East Germany. Eastern Germans that in the years following unification they had been asked to fend for themselves. Yet a few decades later, the state was lavishing benefits and support on refugees. For them, eastern Germans grumbled, the state did have money, for “us,” not.

Misrecognition

The eastern German case is a classic example of misrecognition, defined as the denial of equal worth, which its victims from interacting on par with the rest of society. It denies its victims mutual recognition and, in the most extreme case, excludes them from equitable and just (re)distribution. Objectively, this might sound like a thoroughly unfair assessment. After all, for decades, the German government transferred a massive amount of funds to former East Germany (GDR). German taxpayers were forced to pay a “solidarity surcharge” designed to finance Aufbau Ost, a program of reconstruction designed to allow the eastern part of the country to catch up with the west.

Yet none of these measures appear to have substantially reduced the lingering sense of resentment prevalent among large parts of the eastern German population. In 2019, around in the state of Brandenburg considered themselves second-class citizens, while some 70% resented the economic and political dominance of westerners. Two years later, a few days prior to the regional election in Sachsen-Anhalt in June 2021, there agreed with the statement that “in many areas eastern Germans continue to be second-class citizens.”

The Politics of Recognition vs. Redistribution

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Federico Tarragoni, a leading French expert on populism, provides another of misrecognition, this time not from Western Europe but Latin America or, more precisely, from Venezuela. Tarragoni is primarily interested in explaining the widespread support Hugo Chavez garnered among large parts of Venezuela’s population. On the basis of discussions with ordinary Venezuelans living in the outskirts of Caracas, he reports the profound sense of injury and injustice experienced on a daily basis by the inhabitants of these barrios, who have a strong sense that nobody has any interest in them. They are cut off from the rest of Caracas. As one resident puts it, these are places where taxis don’t go. For Venezuela’s high society, these barrio dwellers are nothing but “savages” for whom they have nothing but disdain and contempt.

It should come as no surprise that contempt on the part of one side breeds resentment on the part of the other. Resentment, in turn, evokes a panoply of related emotions, such as anger, rage, even hatred, and particularly a wish for vengeance. When unfulfilled, however, when justified grievances are met with smug indifference on the part of those in charge, the wish for vengeance is likely to turn into resignation. In the sphere of politics, resignation is reflected in a drop in electoral participation, at least as long as there is no credible alternative. This is where populism comes in.

Feeding on Resentment

Populism feeds on resentment. Populist “encode reactions to a sense of loss, powerlessness, and disenfranchisement; they consolidate feelings of fear, anger, bitterness, and shame.” The targets of populist discourses are, however, rarely the institutions and policies responsible for socio-economic problems, such as neoliberalism, international financial markets or transnational corporations. Rather, they are found in groups that appear to have gained in visibility and recognition, such as ethnic and sexual minorities, while others have been losing out. Populists channel the resulting wish for vengeance to the one place where everybody, independent of their social status, has a voice — at the polls.

Election time is . This is how two prominent Austrian political scientists commented on the fulminant upsurge of support for the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) under its new leader, Jörg Haider, in the late 1980s. In the years that followed, the Austrian experience was replicated in a number of Western European countries, most notably Italy, Switzerland and across Scandinavia. The arguably most egregious case in point, of course, was Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 — an act of vengeance, at least in part, against a political establishment that more often than not appeared to show little more than thinly veiled contempt for ordinary people and their increasingly dim life chances (viz Hilary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables”).

The vote for Trump was an instance of what Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, from the London School of Economics, has as “the revenge of the places that don’t matter.” These are once-prosperous regions that have fallen on hard times, walloped by the decline of mining, by deindustrialization and offshoring: the Rust Belt in the United States, northern England in the UK, Wallonia in Belgium, the Haut-de-France region in the north of France. These areas have been left behind in the race to remain competitive — or regain lost competitiveness — in the brave new world informed by financialization and globalization.

To be sure, these developments have been going on for some time. More than a decade ago already, the French political geographer Christoph Guilluy drew attention to the emergence of what he called “” — peripheral France. These are areas increasingly cut off from the dynamic urban centers. These are the areas, Guilluy noted, where the large majority of the “new popular classes” live, far away from the “most active job markets.” Thus, Guilluy charged, “for the first time in history, the popular classes no longer reside ‘where the wealth is created’ but in a peripheral France, far from the areas that ‘matter.’”

The demographer and historian Hervé le Bras has extended the territorial analysis to include France’s educated middle class. He finds that “” increasingly also affects these social strata, segregation largely dictated by educational level. The higher the level of education, the closer a person lives to the urban center. The opposite is true for those disposing of lower levels of schooling who, as a result, see their upward mobility effectively blocked. The situation of qualified workers is hardly any better. Their qualifications progressively , they too find themselves relegated to the periphery, far away from the most advanced urban centers, more often than not forced to do work below their qualifications.

Brave New World

In this brave new world, it seems, a growing number of people are left with the impression that they have become structurally irrelevant, both as producers, given their lack of sought-after skills, and as consumers, given their limited purchasing power. Unfortunately for the established parties, as Rodriguez-Pose readily acknowledges, the structurally irrelevant don’t take their fate lying down. Telling people that where they live, where they have grown up and where they belong doesn’t matter, or that they should move to greener shores where opportunities abound more often than not has provoked a backlash, which has found its most striking expression in growing support for populist movements and parties, both on the left and on the right.

The eastern part of Germany is a paradigmatic case in point. British studies suggest that there is a link between geographical mobility — and the lack thereof — and support for populism. To be sure, there are plenty of people who insist on staying in their familiar surroundings for various perfectly sensible reasons, such as family, friends and proximity to nature. At the same time, however, there are also plenty of people who stay because they have no options, which, in turn, breeds resentment.

As , “the lack of capacity and/of opportunities for mobility implies that a considerable part of the local population is effectively stuck in areas considered to have no future. Hence, the seed for revenge is planted.” This is what has happened in parts of eastern Germany. One of the most striking demographic characteristics of eastern Germany is its skewed age distribution, disproportionately . And for good reason: After unification, many of those who could get away left in search of better life chances in the west.

The German ethnologist Wolfgang Kaschuba has characterized the rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the east as “the revenge of the villages.” In fact, a number of studies have shown that the AfD did best in structurally weak areas, characterized by demographic decline and lack of perspectives for the future. The most prominent example is Lusatia, a region in eastern Brandenburg and Saxony, bordering on Poland. In the regional elections in 2019, the AfD reached some of its best results in Lusatian villages, in some cases almost .

The region is known for lignite mining, which during the GDR period represented a major industrial sector, attracting a number of industries and providing employment for the whole region. After unification, however, most of these industries , resulting in mass unemployment and a large-scale exodus of anyone who could. The recent reversal of Germany’s energy policy, which entails a drastic reduction of coal in the energy mix, means that the days of lignite mining are counted — another blow to the region, rendering it even more economically marginal — if not entirely irrelevant. Under the circumstances, resentment is likely to remain relatively high in the region and with it continued support for the AfD.

Resentment, the Presbyterian bishop, theologian and moral philosopher Joseph Butler insisted in a sermon from 1726, is “one of the common bonds, by which society holds itself” — a notion later adopted by Adam Smith. Today, the opposite appears to be the case. Today, more often than not, resentment is the main driver behind the rise of identity-based particularism (also known as tribalism) and affective polarization, both in the United States and a growing number of other advanced liberal democracies.

Diversity in its different forms, with ever-more groups seeking recognition, breeds resentment among the hitherto privileged who perceive their status as being assaulted, lowered and diminished. The current stage of liberal democracy, or so it seems, generates myriad injuries and grievances and multiple perceptions of victimization, each one of them prone to fuel resentment, providing a basis for new waves of populist mobilization.

Populist mobilization, in order to have a chance to succeed at the polls, has to offer a positive motivation to those who experienced disrespect, contempt, slight or a general lack of recognition or appreciation. This is, to a certain extent at least, what is meant when we talk about the “” of the experiences of ordinary people. Valorization means in this context taking ordinary people, their concerns and grievances seriously. Populist valorization, however, falls far short of the norms of recognition, which are based on mutual respect and esteem.

It represents nothing more than what Onni Hirvonen and Joonas Pennanen as a “pathological form of politics of recognition” centered upon “the in-group recognition between the members of the populist camp” and the denigration of anyone outside. As such, it cannot but “contribute to the feelings of alienation and social marginalization” that were the source of resentment in the first place. It is unlikely to assuage the profound political disaffection permeating contemporary advanced liberal democracies. In the final analysis, the only ones who truly benefit from the politics of resentment are populist entrepreneurs.

*[51�Թ� is a  partner of the .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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But the American giant is stumbling. Today, Americans fear that the US is in decline. Its economy is progressively skewed to the ultra-rich. Its national government is almost paralyzed. China is challenging Washington’s international power and leadership. American society is more divided than at any time since the Civil War, with up to 40% of Americans believing that a “” leader — a fascist — is preferable to democracy.

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Almost all Americans worry that for the first time in history, their children will be than they are. Many of America’s political moderates and progressives fear that America’s democracy will be replaced by and consider former president Donald Trump and the current Republican Party fascist. Yet on the other side of America’s political divide, an NPR/Ipsos poll in December 2020 found that 39% of Americans believe that the country is controlled by a sinister “,” and this enrages them.

Social Stresses

My family and I are literally what made America. Since my ancestors arrived in 1620 on the Mayflower off the shore of Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, America was created by “White Anglo-Saxon Protestants,” popularly known as WASPs. The culture that shaped the United States for 350 years was overwhelmingly English, then Western European, with a dominant Puritanical, Protestant ethos.

For 15 generations, America was also culturally and legally a society for whites. Even for my generation growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, many Americans still changed their surnames to sound more “Anglo” — dropping the last vowel, say, from the Italian (and Catholic) “Lombardi” to “Lombard,” to appear more WASP-like and less “ethnic” or un-American. Fully 10% of the population was black, but they were excluded from power and lived on the cultural periphery. Half the nation still lived in an apartheid “” regime, the legacy of centuries of white domination and black slavery. In the media, one saw only white faces like mine, except in subordinate or, rarely, in “exotic” roles. And, of course, America, like the rest of the world since time immemorial, was only a man’s world.  

But with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, America began a stupendous social change, with blacks and women gaining unprecedented rights. Furthermore, non-WASP immigrants have arrived in the US by the tens of millions. When I was born, America was over . By the year 2045, under . The trend has already been clear for decades. In the past dozen years, the US has elected a black president twice, a black-Indian female vice president, and its second Catholic president.

Today, the US has a vibrant black middle class. Its Asian population is growing rapidly. Asian and Indian Americans hold many prominent positions in the country’s economic and scientific establishments. Women now hold countless key positions in all sectors of the US economy, including boardrooms. This demographic and social revolution has diversified America but also engendered a nativist, racist reaction and the rise of a fascist: Donald Trump.

Socially conservative whites — especially the least educated — have literally taken to the streets to “” their country from these changes. Donald Trump voices their anger and their demands. Having lost the presidential election of 2020 yet having refused to accept verified results, the Republican Party has taken dozens of measures to voting access for non-whites. There has been talk of civil war, and there has been an insurrection.

Economic Stresses 

Real incomes have largely for about 40 years. Globalization has destroyed entire sectors of America’s middle-class economy. Much of US manufacturing has moved abroad to lower-wage economies. In the 1960s, the single male income earner could provide a middle-class life for most families. Today, of families require two full-time incomes to maintain a middle-class life. According to a Brookings , women account for “91% of the total income gain for their families.”

In 2019, a Federal Reserve study that almost 40% of Americans “wouldn’t be able to cover a $400 emergency with cash, savings or a credit-card charge that they could quickly pay off.” With $41.52 trillion in assets, the top 1% of households more than 32% of the country’s wealth. With just $2.62 trillion in assets, the bottom 50% own a mere 2%. This concentration of wealth is creating social and political strains.

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The Republican Party has based its appeal on these grievances for decades, and Trump, the classic demagogue, exploited them all the way to the presidency. Blaming stagnation and increasing economic insecurity of ordinary Americans — and their loss of white social status — on globalization has been a ploy of Republicans since the mid-1960s. The party has progressively based its appeal on such tropes and fears since.

Today, Republicans systematically oppose any action by the federal government as a threat to “freedom.” They seek to reduce taxes, gut economic regulations, lower investments in infrastructure and slash expenditure on education, which they deem to be a means of dangerous social engineering. 

Political Stresses

As McKay Coppins has in The Atlantic, after emerging as the leader of the Republican Party in 1994, “Newt Gingrich turned partisan battles into bloodsport, wrecked Congress, and paved the way for Trump’s rise.” As speaker of the House of Representatives, Gingrich sought to demonize and destroy the Democratic Party. He refused to cooperate, let alone compromise with the Democrats at any level either in the White House or Congress.

When Barack Obama was elected president, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell acted ruthlessly to everything the Obama administration proposed. Before the 2010 midterm elections, McConnell : “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Today, McConnell has that “100% of his focus is on blocking” President ��������’s agenda.

Since the mid-1990s, American politics has turned increasingly polarized, its federal government almost paralyzed. There are two principal reasons the US suffers from political rigor mortis. First, the Republican Party has become increasingly . The Democratic Party remains more moderate and open to compromise but has gotten little in return from the Republicans. Second, America’s electoral structures accord a disproportionate weight to rural districts, which is where the anxious, angry and reactionary WASPs and other whites live. The more ethnically diverse, urban and educated citizens tend to live in the major cities, heavily concentrated on the country’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts. 

On July 1, 2019, population was 578,759 while numbered 39,512,223. In the presidential elections, Wyoming receives three electoral college votes; California receives 55. This means a vote for president in Wyoming is worth more than 3.72 times a vote in California. However, it is in voting for the US Senate where Wyoming really has an edge. Every state in the US elects two senators, regardless of its population. This makes a vote in Wyoming 68.27 times more valuable than a vote in California. 

This structural bias toward less populous rural states gives Republicans a tremendous political advantage. It has enabled them to triumph in two of the last six presidential elections despite winning a minority of the popular vote and to frequently hold a majority in Congress and Senate, despite receiving lower overall votes. America is so evenly divided politically that one party often controls the White House while the other dominates Congress, or at least one of its two chambers. Given the partisan gridlock in the US, this virtually brings legislation to a halt.

The consequences of this electoral and institutional schizophrenia are everywhere to see and experience: American roads, bridges, water mains, harbor facilities and education now lag far behind most developed countries and even many emerging economies. Some foreign visitors to the US have commented that American infrastructure reminds them of the 1950s — which is precisely when much of it was built. The Shinkansen, Japan’s bullet train network, awes Americans, including myself, and it is 50 years old. America has always been a “third-world country” for the ethnically excluded. Now, the strains and failures of America’s social, economic and political paralysis extend more broadly through society. Even the WASPs are not spared.

Global Stresses 

Two global issues in particular shape American public life and self-doubts. First, the US is no longer the only great power. China’s rise has been breathtaking. Beijing challenges American preeminence in trade, technology, diplomacy and military strength, posing the greatest challenge to the US since World War II. Many Americans fear that China’s rise is a sign of American decline.  

Second, global warming threatens the American way of life and shapes much of the political debate about the environment, the economy and the role of government. Signs of a literal cataclysm are already upon us. The West Coast has experienced the in recorded history and is living through the worst drought in . In 2012, the US Geological Survey estimated that sea levels would on the East Coast by nearly 50 centimeters by 2050. In 2021, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association projects the same level of sea rise in Boston and Massachusetts. By 2050, the spot where my Mayflower ancestors began the American experiment 400 years ago will be swallowed by the sea.

Yet even global warming divides America. Most of the Republican Party believes that global warming is a perpetrated by the “deep state” so that scientists can have jobs. Some even assert that the California wildfires are linked to “.” These Republican beliefs are an amalgam of lunacy and old fascist tropes. That one of the country’s two major political parties believes such dangerous lies and delusions bodes ill for America’s future. 

During his campaign and since becoming president, Joe Biden has that the next four years will be a “battle for the soul of the nation.” He and his party have to end the paralysis of America’s public institutions and democracy, heal social divisions, and reduce growing economic inequality. They must rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure and rise to the challenge of China as a fast-emerging peer competitor in international and economic affairs.

The Republican Party and nearly 40% of the American population will every step Biden attempts. The rural bias in the country’s political structures consistently grants this 40% control of about half the House of Representatives and Senate. Biden must win majorities to implement his transformative economic, social, political and diplomatic policies with only the slimmest majority possible in the legislature.

Furthermore, this majority is fragile. Of the 100 seats in the , Republicans have 50, Democrats 48 and independents two, both of whom caucus with the Democrats. The vice president presides over the Senate and supports the president but may only vote in the event of a 50-50 split. Historically, most presidents have struggled to enact their agenda even with strong electoral majorities.

No president since Abraham Lincoln in 1861 has had to deal with such an array of grave social, political and economic crises. Throughout history, many states have proven unable to address structural, systemic problems with legislation and policies that do not profoundly alter these structures or systems. In most instances, however, this requires major social and political upheaval, sometimes even revolution. This has happened before in America — in 1776, when there was revolution, in 1861, when there was civil war, and in 1929, when there was economic collapse. 

Within the current framework of American democracy, Biden can probably only succeed in radically addressing America’s daunting democratic, diplomatic, social, political and economic challenges if his party wins a more solid majority in both chambers of Congress. Thus, all eyes, hopes and fears turn to America’s congressional elections of 2022, now only 16 months away. This historic vote may well decide who wins the “battle for the soul of the nation.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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CNBC into the private thoughts of a president who now apparently feels empowered to judge the moral status of other leaders: “President Joe Biden says he believes Russian leader Vladimir Putin is a killer with no soul.” Biden intends to make the Russian president “pay a price” for interfering in the 2020 US election.

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��������’s remarks followed a issued by US intelligence that included the following observation: “A key element of Moscow’s strategy this election cycle was its use of people linked to Russian intelligence to launder influence narratives including — misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden — through US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, some of whom were close to former President Trump and his administration.”

One may forgive the incoherence of the author’s punctuation, but no reasonable reader can fail to deplore the confusion of the charges, highlighted by the use of phrases such as “people linked to” and “some of whom.” And then there is the semantic enormity of the phrase, “launder influence narratives.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Influence narrative:

Anything any politician or diplomat of any nation happens to utter in speech or writing. The basis of all political discourse.

Contextual Note

In his , “The Ultimate Goal,” former Indian spy chief Vikram Sood explores the way governments and their intelligence arms build and promote their self-interested narratives. Like a modern Machiavelli, Sood offers today’s princes the basic recipe: “Manage narratives to manage your destiny … tell your story first, any other story thereafter will only be a reaction.” That sums up the business of the CIA. The fact that US intelligence operatives want people to feel shocked that Russia might be using “influence narratives” reveals more about the CIA and its belief in the naivety of the US public than it does about Russia. The report itself is a perfect example of an “influence narrative.”

Covering the same topic for The Washington Post, Ellen Nakashima confusingly the CIA’s metaphor of laundering when she cites the report’s claim that Russians used “Ukrainians linked to Russian intelligence to ‘launder’ unsubstantiated allegations against Biden through U.S. media, lawmakers and prominent individuals.” “Launder,” in this context, is clearly a metaphor in spy language borrowed from the idea of “money laundering,” the act of pushing dirty money through indirect channels to return to the economy with a clean appearance. 

It may seem odd to apply a metaphor borrowed from the banking world and apply it to the hyperreal field of political narrative. But given the intelligence community’s well-documented predilection for dirty information — otherwise known as lies — it should hardly surprise us that the masters of plots and subplots see the public narrative as something that needs to be laundered. Sood, after all, tells us that the political language in any official narrative “is designed to make lies sound truthful and to give an appearance of solidity to the pure wind.”

Since the idea of “laundered narrative” belongs specifically to spy vocabulary, it may seem disconcerting that Washington Post journalists have uncritically adopted the term and feel no need to explain what it means. Could it be that they are corrupted by their incestuous relations with the spymasters in Langley, Virginia, who feed them much of their most valuable content and which they reprint uncritically? In contrast with The Post, Al Jazeera took the liberty of a different verb, writing: “Moscow sought to ‘push influence narratives’ that included misleading or unsubstantiated claims.” 

“Launder” has become part of The Post’s standard vocabulary. In September 2020, during the presidential election campaign, Post columnist Josh Rogin had the term concerning the same claims about Moscow’s interference. According to Rogin, Democratic leaders demanded “a briefing based on concerns that members of Congress were being used to launder information as part of a foreign interference operation.”

This pushes the accusation a little further by supposing that the members of Congress referred to were actively involved in making the dirty information look clean. But that’s exactly how the fabricated Russiagate narrative is designed to play out: Putin’s accomplices and useful idiots can be found under every table. Just like in the good ol’ days of Joe McCarthy. After all, if the narrative tells us there’s a threat, we really do need to feel threatened. That’s the CIA and the media doing their job. Who doesn’t remember all the al-Qaeda cells that populated every American city following 9/11?

Historical Note

The website Strategic Culture a succinct explanation of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird that permitted it to infiltrate domestic media in the US. The journalist, Wayne Madsen, writes: “A major focus of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency from its very inception was the penetration of the news media, including the assignment of CIA agents to the newsrooms and editorial offices of America’s largest media operations, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, Hearst Newspaper, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, and other major newspapers and broadcast networks.” That has been ever since one of the harder components of US soft power.

This week, Matt Taibbi the famous whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who, in 1971, leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times, exposing the embarrassing truth about the war in Vietnam that had been carefully hidden from the media. Taibbi recounts how “Ellsberg described a vicious cycle, in which leaders lie pervasively, then learn to have so much contempt for the public that swallows those lies, that they feel justified in lying more.”

In its own dissemination of the content of the intel report released this week, The New York Times that the “report did not explain how the intelligence community had reached its conclusions about Russian operations during the 2020 election.” The report itself explains: “The Intelligence Community rarely can publicly reveal the full extent of its knowledge or the specific information on which it bases its analytic conclusions, as doing so could endanger sensitive sources and methods.” In other words, don’t ask for evidence, you won’t get it. Glenn Greenwald his readers that when, last October, the story broke concerning Hunter ��������’s laptop that intel attributed to Moscow’s meddling, the FBI had already “acknowledged that it had not found any Russian disinformation on the laptop.”

When the same discredited story reappeared months later with no significant changes and still with zero evidence, instead of casting doubt on the entire story, the obedient media interpreted it as confirmation of the original narrative. What better illustration of Vikram Sood’s principle, “tell your story first, any other story thereafter will only be a reaction”?

Perhaps the most neglected dimension of this debate concerns the official role of intelligence. A month after John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, former President Harry Truman complained in an for The Washington Post that the CIA — an agency he had created — had betrayed its straightforward mission of gathering information to clarify the president in his decision-making. Truman insisted that “the most important thing was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions.” When Operation Mockingbird under the direction of Cord Meyer was launched during Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency, the CIA had not only begun focusing on influencing the president, it realized that the best way of influencing executive decisions was to control the narrative that the media would share with the public.

The result is visible today, though no public figure will admit it. Democracy itself is engulfed within an elaborate system coordinated between the intelligence community, vested interests and the commercial media that generates and disseminates an endless stream of influence narratives.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Against that, by the time of the 2020 election, there was a wealth of evidence that “” was central to President Trump’s political agenda. This, however, did not prevent a significant number of minority voters from casting their ballots for him. Whether or not this made a difference is an interesting question. In some cases, it might have, most notably in Texas.

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To be sure, Biden won the vast majority of the Hispanic vote in the big cities like Dallas, San Antonio and Austin. Trump, however, did surprisingly well in the heavily Latino counties in southern Texas along the Rio Grande border with Mexico. In Starr county, for instance, which is almost completely Hispanic, Trump gained more than 55% of the vote compared to 2016. These results, as neutral observers have , “ended up helping to dash any hopes Democrats had of taking Texas.”

High Hopes

Ahead of the election, that this time, the emerging Democratic majority was finally going to materialize. The notion goes back to the title of a book from 2002, written by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira. In it, the authors argued that the future belonged to the Democrats, for a number of reasons. There was the transformation of America’s demography, there were secular ideological changes going in a progressive direction, and there was, last but not least, the growing socioeconomic and sociocultural dominance of large metropolitan areas, rooted in the growth of a postindustrial economy — what Teixeira called “,” organized around ideas and services.  

The idea was that the Democrats were in a better position than the Republicans to appeal to the diverse constituencies emerging from these developments: on the one hand, the growing ranks of professionals in the high-tech, finance, education, law and medical sectors, a growing number of them women; on the other, ancillary services, such as sales clerks, waiters, janitors, security personnel and teachers’ aides, a large number of them Hispanics and African Americans. Together, Teixeira suggested, they “formed powerful coalitions that now dominate the politics of many ideopolises united in their support of a politics of “tolerance and openness.”

In the meantime, much ink has been spilled over the crucial socioeconomic and sociocultural importance of metropolitan areas, largely confirming Teixeira’s assessment. Today’s “global cities” such as New York, London, Paris and Tokyo generate a significant part of their respective nation’s wealth. At the same time, however, they also represent quasi self-contained entities increasingly from the rest of the country.

This is a problem, for in the process, the hinterland, which at one time played a crucial role as a supplier of myriads of inputs from small and medium-sized companies, has largely become structurally irrelevant to the metropolitan economy. With it went the middle-class labor force that was the backbone of what once was known as America’s heartland but is today disparaged as flyover country, its inhabitants dismissed as deplorable and repellent racist, sexist, homophobic ignoramuses. Proof: Why else would they have voted for somebody like Trump?

After roughly two decades since the book was published, the emerging Democratic majority has still not fully materialized. Instead, what we have got are two antagonistic political tribes whose seemingly irreconcilable differences have polarized American politics along a wide range of fault lines: views on immigration, reproductive choice, gender, Black Lives Matter, gun control, affordable health care, social security — the list goes on. This divide’s grand signifier in today’s politics is Donald Trump. As unbelievable as it might sound — given he lost the election, given he was impeached twice, given he left the office scorned and disgraced — his legacy continues to haunt post-Trump politics and is likely to do so for the foreseeable future.

Not Fade Away

According to a recent representative , around 80% of Republicans continue to have a favorable view of Donald Trump; more than 70% believe that the charge that the former president incited the assault on the US Capitol on January 6 is untrue; and almost two-thirds believe there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election. It fits that according to the most recent , conducted after Trump’s acquittal in the Senate, three-quarters of Republican respondents said they wished Trump would continue to play a “big role” in the GOP. So much for those who think Trump will somehow into oblivion.

Trump won in 2016 because he quite skillfully managed to articulate, appeal and respond to a range of diffuse popular grievances, accorded them legitimacy and, in the process, gave the impression that he listened and not only understood, but empathized with them — reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s well-known “I feel your pain” from 1992.  Even if Trump should miraculously disappear from the American political scene, Trumpism, as The Washington Post’s conservative commentator Gary Abernathy has , “Trumpism is the GOP’s future.” If this indeed should be the case, it means that the chances for the emergence of a Democratic majority are likely to be as bleak as they have been over the past two decades.

The notion of an emerging Democratic majority is premised on the idea that certain groups in society, most notably the highly educated, visible minorities, women and sexual minorities, qua their subordinate socioeconomic and sociocultural position have a “natural” affinity for a certain type of politics. Any deviation is either seen as a result of “false consciousness,” a failure “” or, worse, simple betrayal of the cause, as the singer in 2016. A case in point was Barak Obama’s who voted for the incumbent in 2020, accusing them of ignoring Trump’s track record of race-baiting.  

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The same applies to all the white women who voted for Trump, despite his record of routinely disparaging and denigrating women. As Sarah Jaffe has put it in an for the New Labor Forum, no single fact about the 2016 election was “more confounding than the fact that Trump’s margin of victory included a slim majority of white women voters.” Things were even worse in 2020. While Trump lost some support among white men, his support among white women virtually unchanged.

Political parties, particularly in two-party systems such as the United States, have to assemble a coalition of disparate groups. A case in point was the Democratic Party, which for a long time managed to hold together two factions, one from the South and the other from the Northeast, that were fundamentally at loggerheads over major issues such as civil rights. Behind the idea of the emerging Democratic majority is the expectation that it is possible to put together a coalition on the basis of shared values and shared aspirations, derived from shared experiences of a lack of recognition, if not outright discrimination.

Radical Nostalgia

Twenty years ago, this was a reasonable expectation, given the direction of social, and particularly demographic, change. The populist surge that has swept over the United States during the past decade or so, however, has fundamentally altered the logic of electoral choice. Populist mobilization derives its logic not from shared values and aspirations, but from disparate grievances and the perceived unresponsiveness of the political establishment to these grievances.

Successful populist protagonists are not successful because they come up with elaborate blueprints for profound socioeconomic change, but because they absorb and reflect myriads of disparate grievances and give them a voice. More often than not, populist politics are not about the future but a glorified past, reflecting the surge of nostalgia that has become a hallmark of the current age, further enhanced and intensified by COVID-19.

There is nothing wrong with nostalgia. In fact, show that nostalgia can be a beneficial mechanism helpful to coping with a difficult situation. It becomes dangerous, however, when it provokes an aggressive response. This, it seems, is what has happened in recent years among parts of the American public — or, at least, that is what the mentioned earlier suggests. In response to the statement that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it,” more than a third of respondents agreed either completely (11%) or somewhat (25%).

In light of the events of January 6, this is quite alarming. But it jibes with the findings of a , who to a significant extent consist of white Christian males beyond retirement age. Full of resentment toward assertive women no longer willing to take shit from men, African Americans seen as not trying hard enough and immigrants accused of changing American culture for the worse, they epitomize this kind of radical political nostalgia.

Nostalgia in terms of a yearning for the status quo ante might to a certain extent explain why a majority of white women voted for Trump. More often than not, grievances stem from changes that individuals perceive as having been imposed on them. A classic case is the construction of nuclear power plants, which in the past gave rise to massive popular resistance and contributed to the rise of Green parties. In the current situation in the United States, grievances stem to a significant extent from both demographic change and the increased visibility of minorities who refuse to remain silent.

When white women voted for Donald Trump, it was because what has been happening over the past years is a fundamental challenge to the existing racial hierarchy that had been taken for granted. A vote for Trump was a vote for maintaining a , where white women might be second-class with respect to gender but first-class with respect to race. The same logic certainly does not apply to black voters supporting Trump, a majority of whom were black men. It also does not apply to Hispanics, whose diverse background (Mexican, Cuban, Central American, etc.) makes it even more difficult to come up with a common denominator. Religious considerations, particularly with respect to reproductive choice and gender issues, certainly played a significant role, as did the perception that neither party cares about their .

What has been emerging over the past decades is a new constellation of political contest, pitting substance-based politics grounded in reasoned deliberation and values, however flawed, against grievance-based politics fueled by anger and resentment. This is hardly confined to the United States. Western Europe has been struggling with this phenomenon and its fallout for decades. Yet given its peculiar system, the United States is in a unique position to serve as a laboratory to see how these dynamics play themselves out. One might wish that the vision behind the notion of the emerging Democratic majority will ultimately carry the day.

Nietzschean skepticism informed by the notion of “human, all too human” calls for caution. Trump might be finished politically. His spirit, however, is alive and well, capable of causing mischief to no end. Trump’s recent full-front attack on Mitch McConnell is a foretaste of things to come. It portends an attempt to completely transform the GOP into a radical right-wing populist party, devoid of any kind of real substance — in other words, a replica writ large of the Great Leader.

*[51�Թ� is a  partner of the .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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We have watched the rise of authoritarianism in Poland, Hungary, Brazil and other former democratic regimes, assuming that our institutions and our Constitution were too strong to be compromised by right-wing populist movements. Looking back over the past five decades, it is clear we missed or misread the signs of the coming storm.

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Beginning with Richard Nixon’s “,” to Ronald Reagan’s “,” to the acceleration of neoliberalism and globalization under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, to the rise of the Tea Party during the Obama administration, the threads of extremism were being woven into the tapestry that Trump donned in 2016. This underlying malaise became the core of the movement that erupted in insurrection on Capitol Hill.

Knowing the history of its evolution does not explain why the passions associated with each of these threads created a violent revolt. One author who was particularly prescient on this question is Eric Hoffer, sometimes called the working man’s philosopher. Writing not from the ivory tower of an elitist, but from his working-class background, in 1951, he in “The True Believer” what has been described as the best analysis of the origins of fanatical or extremist movements. Two points are particularly salient in understanding Trumpism and today’s political environment.  

First, Hoffer writes, “though hatred is a convenient instrument for mobilizing a community for defense, it does not, in the long run, come cheap. We pay for it by losing all or many of the values we have set out.” The language of the extreme right has become more vitriolic as individuals become caught in the information vortex of social media. In the echo chambers on the internet, ideas become overwhelmed by angry rhetoric demonizing those who have legitimate differences on issues.

The vocabulary of dissent becomes more hateful, a rigid us-versus-them construct is formed, and a collective narcissism fed by a narcissistic leader emerges based on a sense of aggrievement. Differences become reasons for a “war” or a “battle” to reclaim control of the future so that it will resemble the past. The language of war cheapens the values of democracy, which, while encouraging passionate stances on issues, requires resolution through thoughtful and respectful dialogue and the rule of law.

The language for fomenting an insurrection has been there for all to read prior to the emergence of Trump as president, but as a nation, America ignored the warning signs, content that the future would advance securely without addressing the social fractures of its past. After all, we have been reassured by Francis Fukuyama that we are at the end of history. What we seem to ignore — what Hoffer recognized in 1951 — is that a leader with authoritarian tendencies can give shape to an insurrection movement by stoking the seething discontent and perceived injustices of the past, a leader with clearly definable traits. Hoffer’s enumeration of the required traits of such a leader is chilling for it describes Trump so clearly:

“Exceptional intelligence, noble character and originality seem neither indispensable nor perhaps desirable. The main requirements seem to be: audacity and a joy in defiance; an iron will; a fanatical conviction that he is in possession of the one and only truth; faith in his destiny and luck; a capacity for passionate hatred; contempt for the present; a cunning estimate of human nature; a delight in symbols (spectacles and ceremonials); unbounded brazenness which finds expression in a disregard of consistency and fairness; a recognition that the innermost craving of a following is for communion and that there can never be too much of it.”

Given what we know about President Trump’s character and leadership style and compare it to Hoffer’s list, his role in encouraging, throughout his time in office, what finally transpired on January 6 is not surprising — nor should his unprecedented second impeachment be. Now the challenge to secure a resilient democracy is to learn from our recent history. The outcome of the impeachment trial and the Republicans’ subsequent behavior will determine the resolve of our political system to thwart authoritarian passion. Democracy requires a Republican Party grounded in principles and policy rather than one guided by personalities, conspiracies and seditious impulses. 

More broadly, how do we transform groups with collective narcissistic mentalities into proponents of deliberative democratic action? How do we stay alert to the ascent of autocratic leaders with the character flaws Hoffer has enumerated? If we do not address these two questions, the ashes of the Capitol Holl insurrection will be the foundation for future mass movements of violent political disruption. Maintaining a vibrant democracy in the United States requires vigilance and the recognition that exceptionalism does not make us invulnerable to the autocratic impulses of our past.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The arguably most important reason for dismissing the fascist charge was that scholars of fascism did not want to contribute to what Gavriel D. Rosenfeld has “symbolic inflation” — the fact that invoking Adolf Hitler has led to a process where the “value of ‘Hitler’ as an admonitory signifier has become progressively devalued over time.” Examples abound. Jörg Haider, for instance, the leader of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) who propelled it to international prominence in the 1990s, was with Hitler.

How Do You Tell an Authoritarian From a Fascist These Days?

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It was only in the aftermath of the assault on the US Capitol that one of the most eminent contemporary scholars of fascism, Columbia University historian Robert Paxton, that “Trump’s incitement of the invasion of the Capitol … removes my objection to the fascist label. His open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line. The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.”

A Diagnosis of Decline

Behind this reassessment of Trump(ism) is the fact that those who invaded the Capitol on January 6 had no qualms about engaging in violent actions. In fact, by now, it has become obvious that many of the insurgents considered violence a perfectly acceptable means to advance their agenda. The Proud Boys — a neo-fascist terrorist group by the Canadian government — add a whiff of squadrismo to the mix. The (this picture is taken at the Foro Italico, a piazza in front of the Olympic stadium in Rome, depicting an armed squad heading out for a punitive expedition) were Benito Mussolini’s armed goons routinely swarming out to the countryside where they terrorized socialists and trade union leaders.

Squadrismo was informed by a “” that was also at the heart of Mussolini’s version of totalitarianism. The term was originally coined and developed by Roger Griffin, another leading expert on fascism. Griffin fascism as a palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism, where “palingenetic” refers to the myth of rebirth, revival and regeneration provoked by a profound sense of decline, decay and decadence. It follows that fascism is revolutionary and, thus, by definition, the opposite of conservatism. The last thing fascists are interested in is defending and preserving the status quo.

From this perspective, there can be no doubt that Trumpism has certain affinities to fascism, to put it cautiously. The very slogan that informed Trump’s 2016 campaign, “Make America Great Again,” reflects the palingenetic spirit of fascism. It serves both as a diagnosis and a promise. A year ago, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat of how the diagnosis might go. In his view, the United States, if not the whole Western world, suffers from decadence, manifested by “forms of economic stagnation, institutional sclerosis, and cultural repetition at a high stage of wealth and technological proficiency and civilizational development.”

There undoubtedly is much truth to this diagnosis. In fact, a from early 2019 revealed that a significant majority of the American public shared this view. When asked about their expectations 30 years into the future, a majority thought that the United States would lose importance on the world stage; that the country would be saddled with a huge national debt; and that socioeconomic inequality would be even higher than at the moment. At the same time, the vast majority of respondents had little confidence in the capability of the country’s elected officials to meet these challenges. In fact, more than half of respondents thought that “Washington” had a “negative impact” on finding solutions to the country’s major problems.

Various studies from 2020 provide further confirmation of the perception of decline. A Brookings Institution preview of the results of the 2020 Census, for instance, painted a , both in terms of population growth and mobility. A of the most recent findings of its annual country rankings found widespread skepticism that more than three years of Trump had made the country “great again.” In fact, compared to the previous year, more Americans thought the US was corrupt: at 31%, a 5% increase on 2019. At the same time, the number of Americans who thought their country was “trustworthy” declined from 61% in 2019 to 55% in 2020.

Finally, according to a from early 2020, most American Christians have come to believe that their religion has lost, and continues to lose, influence in American life. Worse still, most also believe that there is a fundamental “tension between their beliefs and the mainstream culture.” This is particularly galling given the fact that at one time in the not-so-distant past, Christian culture was mainstream culture. Not for nothing, in 2016 and 2020, (white) evangelicals voted overwhelmingly for Trump.

Something Like Fascism

Diagnosis, however, is relatively easy. Coming up with a genuine remedy is a fundamentally different issue, provided it goes beyond trite platitudes couched in catchy sloganeering epitomized by Trump’s MAGA campaign. “Make America Great Again” is one of these slogans that sound good but are fundamentally meaningless in the true sense of the word. As such, it is part of the new type of “” characteristic of contemporary Western-style democracy, a politics staged as an , the “embodiment of a reality style of politics,” as Douthat puts it, by a president who was “performing a drama that doesn’t necessarily have strong correlates in the real world.” All of this makes Trump a “cartoonish imitation of something like fascism,” a “weird, internet-enabled simulacrum of fascism.”

The carnivalesque mise en scène of the storming of the Capitol — a pastiche of the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, itself a symbolic act given there were only seven prisoners held in the fortress — lends some credence to Douthat’s interpretation. Exemplary here is the “almost-farcical” case of “” who thought she would take part in a revolution only to get Maced (and complain bitterly about it). The farce, of course, goes only so far, given the very real violence resulting in material destruction and the loss of life. It is at this point that the simulacrum turns into reality, exposing the potential of genuine fascism hiding behind the ludicrousness and absurdity of the last days of Trump.

Trumps’ departure has not diminished the potential. Quite the contrary: His ignominious exit has added new fuel to the anger and resentment among many Americans that propelled Trump to the presidency in the first place and has done nothing to assuage diffuse political disenchantment or weaken latent authoritarian inclinations. In fact, an from June 2020 found a “substantial minority” of Americans being open to “authoritarian alternatives.” In late 2019, around a quarter of US survey respondents expressed support for a strong leader “who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections.” Overall, it concluded that between a “quarter and a third of the American public flirt with the idea that an alternative to democracy would be a good thing.”

The study does not disaggregate the results along color lines. It stands to reason, however, that a majority of those yearning for a strong leader are white voters, the very same voters who constituted the bulk of Trump’s loyal supporters. White Americans have always considered themselves the only true embodiment of the nation, in a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage, which was only gradually extended to Europeans of other Christian faiths. In fact, for much of the 19^th century, Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Germany and Italy were considered less white than Americans of Anglo-Saxon stock and, as a result, subject to discrimination.

Over the past several years, the universe of white American identity and pride has come crashing down. For one, as have pointed out, by 2045, white Americans will have become a minority in what they see as “their own country.” The result has been both growing white “racial anxiety” and the beginnings of a sociocultural and sociopolitical backlash against the rise of visible minorities, reflected in the support and vote for Trump. Secondly, there is the seemingly inexorable decline of Christianity’s influence in American society. Over the past few decades, American Christians, and particularly white American Christians, have progressively lost their “cultural dominance” and, with it, the assumption, as the editor of a prominent Christian news outlet , “that people are like us and people understand us, and people accept us.”

Finally, there is the notion that the United States is the greatest country in the world and, therefore, predestined and entitled to assume the leadership of the Western world. This was certainly true in the postwar period, given the essential threat posed by the Soviet Union. Today, it is a rather iffy proposition, as the skepticism of a majority of the American public about the country’s position in the world clearly shows.

The Trump years have severely among the country’s key allies. The trade war with China exposed American weaknesses in the face of a new challenge to its supremacy. The pandemic, and particularly the way it was handled, only made things worse. In late 2020, a mere quarter of the German population and around a third of the French had a of the United States. In the UK, traditionally America’s closest ally in Europe, only around 40% saw the US in a favorable light.

Fertile Ground

If there has ever been fertile ground in the United States for the kind of palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism Griffin has identified as the core of fascism, it is now. Fertile ground, however, is not enough. It takes the right enabler to translate the mixture of anxiety, resentment, political disenchantment, the flirting with authoritarian alternatives and the yearning for revival and the reestablishment of the “natural order” into political action. Trump might have appealed to some of these sentiments. However, in the end, the combination of egocentric narcissism and mental slothfulness assured that he would never amount to more than a of the likes of Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi.

This is not to say that Trump was nothing but a fleeting moment in contemporary American politics. Quite the opposite. Trump might have been the wrong person at the right time. His impact, however, is enduring. It is reflected most prominently in the direction large parts of the Republican Party have taken. Whereas in the not-so-distant past Republicans championed various culture-war causes, from opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage to the promotion of school prayers, today, a large number of Republican officials on the federal, state and local levels have adopted positions that lean in the direction of Trump-style subversion of the American democratic system. As Chris Hayes has recently in the pages of The Atlantic, the fight these days between Democrats and Republicans is less about policy, where under the impact of COVID-19 “the gaps are narrowing. It’s about whether the United States will live up to the promise of democracy — and on that crucial question, we’ve rarely been so divided.”

Even after the shock of January 6, Republican officials continue to feed into the politics of anger and resentment that was at the heart of the assault on Congress. Yesterday, as the Senate voted to proceed with Trump’s impeachment 56-44, just six Republicans joined their Democratic colleagues in the move to condemn the president’s role in inciting an unprecedented domestic assault on American democracy. With 17 Republican votes needed to impeach Donald Trump, a reckoning is unlikely.

The temptation to harvest white resentment for individual gain is too strong and, with it, the temptation to follow the lure of some form of post-fascist fascism, American-style. In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published a novel with the provocative title, “It Can’t Happen Here.” Lewis, of course, thought fascism was a possibility, even in the United States. It might be a good idea to give his book a second look.

*[51�Թ� is a  partner of the .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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For a moment, watching Trump skulk out of the presidency to the tune of a 21-gun salute that he ordered for himself was too poetic not to enjoy. Then, it fell quickly to the new president, Joe Biden, to pick up the pieces of a nation in turmoil. Every commentator and pundit, including me, has a long list of what is wrong and a shorter list of how to make it right. So much was wrong before Trump, and four years of Trump and his cabal have made so much that was wrong so much worse.

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President Biden has one big immediate advantage going forward — he is not Trump. And for a nation watching its soul die a little more each day amid the pandemic, just having a national leader with a heart that beats and a moral compass that projects empathy and understanding will lift the nation on its own for a little while. To sustain the advantage, Biden will have to prove that he and his administration can deliver a national plan for confronting the pandemic.

The sad truth is that Americans, lots of them, have done their part to make the nation what it looks like today. I cannot help but remember all those unmasked boobs who shouted about their freedom as they took away mine, all those callous young people who thought “their” party would be just fine and then went home to spread disease and death to loved ones and anyone else who got in their way, and all the people who still don’t want to pay those “essential” workers a living wage after seeing what they did for us every time we made it to the grocery store or put out the trash.

America Is Not Done

The nation is not done with its turmoil, not by a long shot. The allure of “normal” can be a prescription for a return to normal. However, what was normal to the fortunate can never again be allowed to overwhelm the reality for so many for whom “normal” is defined by poverty, racism, poor education, substandard housing and limited access to limited health care. If you are comfortable with that normal for so many, you are likely to continue to be unmoved by the image of hungry children on your next journey to the spa, country club or suburban church.

It was easy to be hopeful for a day as a beautifully choreographed presidential inauguration unfolded. On January 20, President Biden gave a galvanizing inauguration address and then immediately set to work undoing the symbols of as much of Trump as he could touch with the stroke of a pen. But, amid the pomp and celebration, here we are again, where we have been so many times before — seeking unity, seeking a moral response and seeking justice.

Every “renewal,” almost every protest march, and almost every Martin Luther King Day, someone the nation that “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Now, yet one more time, America is beginning the long journey with that first single step. How come we have to do this over and over again? What about the steps that follow if the journey is ever to be completed? It remains so disheartening that Americans need to take that first step again in the fight for a nation that is finally unchained from the fundamental lies that stain its collective soul.

Some of these lies are old lies, some are as new as yesterday. America is a shining beacon on some hill to some because it has loudly proclaimed itself to be. America is the world’s last best hope to some but only because it has loudly proclaimed itself to be. And Americans have always been ready to indiscriminately kill others for our nation’s honor or cause, without ever making the connection between them and us.

While this discussion needs to be about more than systemic racism and racial justice, the homegrown lies about race in America are so profound and so undermine any moral high ground that those lies have to be collectively addressed before addressing any of the other lies will be taken seriously by those who understand the pernicious impact of the lies. When all is said and done, white Americans can only be freed from the burden of the lies by moving far beyond their continued repetition.

Racial Reckoning

Much will be said in the months ahead about “reckonings” in both the racial context and the accountability context. Racial reckoning has long been a subject of fierce debate in America, and now, with pandemic negligence, corruption and insurrection leading a parade of official misconduct, accountability will need to be reckoned with as well. Centuries of failed racial reckoning can serve as a guide to the difficulty of national reckoning in any context. Lies have been allowed to overshadow history when repeated over and over again, when believing them seems so much easier than confronting them.

While it is hard to define a formula for success, reckoning is not a process — it is an end result. The journey to reckoning is the hard part, with racial reckoning and accountability among the most difficult journeys to complete. While neither may require the full journey of a thousand miles to be achieved, neither will ever be achieved after only one step and a few more to follow.

To escape the past, Americans have to seize the present moment and finally take something more than those first steps on the long journey forward. It would be a good start to simply commit ourselves to the truth.

*[A version of this article was co-published on the author’s , Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The Economist sees good reasons for Biden to succeed. With interest rates so low, the government can virtually borrow for free. This means the Biden administration could roll out a $1.9-trillion stimulus. This could fund a polio-style vaccination program, extend unemployment insurance and expand child tax benefits. An infrastructure bill and investment in clean energy to combat climate change could create new jobs for the 21st century.

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The Economist’s ebullient optimism might come from the fact that it has been on the winning side of history since its inception in 1843. For more than 178 years of its existence, it stood for Pax Britannica. For the last few decades, this blue-blooded British publication has pivoted to be a trumpeter of Pax Americana. This has led to errors in judgment such as its infamous support for the 2003 Iraq War. 

In January this year, The Economist may be making a similar misjudgment. It is prematurely heralding America’s journey to what memorably termed “broad, sunlit uplands” by using shoddy facts and specious reasoning just as it did in 2003. Its assertion that the US banking system looks sound is not backed by evidence. Its claim that “the economic pain is not widespread” is ridiculously untrue.

On Capitol Hill

On Wednesday, January 6, I read about a mob besieging Capitol Hill as I sat at my desk less than four miles away. Against the advice of my American friends, I left to see firsthand what was going on. They told me the white supremacist mob would beat me to a pulp. I ignored their advice because I was curious. I got off at the Archives metro stop and with Donald Trump’s supporters. Some were heading to the Capitol, while others were walking away from it. Prima facie, the people walking around were not much different than at other Trump demonstrations.

Although I lost count after 23, I am sure that I spoke to more than 50 people. They were all friendly, sociable and deeply distressed. They told me repeatedly that I was the first journalist who had cared to speak with them. They said that mainstream media was filming them but did not want to listen to them. They asked me whether elections were rigged in India. When I responded that India solved the problem of rigging by creating an independent election commission, some piped in that the US should have one too. That is certainly not what I expected to hear.

To be sure, I met the saner members of the crowd, a mix of what has called “the strange, the sincere, the silly and the sinister.” I stayed on Capitol Hill grounds talking to one person after another. At some point, tear gas bombs started going off on the terrace and the curfew hour started drawing nigh. I finally beat a retreat and started walking down to the L’Enfant Plaza metro station. Someone stopped me, exchanged words and offered me food. I took a sandwich, granola bars and water while declining the chips. Instead of getting beaten, I had been welcomed and even fed. Even as I sat in the metro and later worked at home, the images and the words of the day stayed with me. Needless to say, I did not sleep well. In fact, I was so troubled that I hit writer’s block and was unable to put down my thoughts on paper coherently for days.

Even though I have long been a critic of Donald Trump, I have been cognizant of the power of his appeal. While explaining Trump’s victory in 2016, I gave facts and figures about increasing income and wealth inequality in America. I also pointed out how social mobility has been falling. For most Americans, life is tough, and prospects for their children increasingly bleak. In 2017, CNN that 6 in 10 Americans had savings of less than $500. The great American dream has become a terrible American nightmare for far too many families.

Every Trump supporter I met on January 6 spoke about being left behind. One supporter claimed to be a Catholic bishop from Kentucky. He proudly posed for a at my request and blessed me when we parted. The bishop had done missionary work in India and had been to my ancestral hometown of Varanasi. He waxed lyrical about how the political system was broken. The man in holy robes said those on Capitol Hill have long stopped caring about the American people. Instead, they now represent special interests with money. 

The pain

When I think about what the bishop said, I find it hard to disagree. As per , the 2020 election spending was nearly $14 billion, more than double the 2016 sum. It is an open secret that members of Congress spend more time than legislating. There are numerous studies about declining congressional and surging presidential . Such has been the divide in Congress that it has been impossible to pass meaningful legislation for a while. Too often, legislation is bloated, poorly drafted and caters to those who can lobby hardest for their interests. Like many other democracies, the US has turned disastrously dysfunctional.

Although most people I met were white and working-class, I ran into members of minority communities as well. A of South African origin was singing paeans to Jesus and to America. I ran into two ladies who had immigrated from Vietnam and the Philippines. They believed that Trump was the only leader who could stand up to China and bring back law and order. When I asked if I could photograph them, the Vietnamese lady bolted, taking her friend along.

Later that evening, my friends were referring to the crowd as a “bunch of pigs.” They were appalled by the scenes they had seen on television and what they had read on their smartphones. In their eyes, those in the crowd were not protesters. They were rioters, seditionists, insurrectionists, terrorists and perpetrators of a coup. They were guilty of breaking down democratic institutions, if not treason. They deserved arrest, trial and punishment. Given that the day’s attack on the Capitol was the first in the nation’s history—bar the British invasion of 1814—their indignation at this assault on their democracy was understandable.

But they were not on Capitol Hill that day. What I saw is that President Trump, his son, Donald Jr., and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, played pied pipers. They riled up the crowd that turned into a mob and overwhelmed Capitol Police. Most people in the mob were misguided instead of malevolent. When I spoke to them, it was clear they had no plan of action, unlike those who actually plan a coup. As historian observed in his tour de force for the New York Times, “The American Abyss”: “It is hard to think of a comparable insurrectionary moment, when a building of great significance was seized, that involved so much milling around.” At the end of the evening, the mob inevitably melted away. I met families on their way back to Alabama, truck drivers returning to Texas, old ladies headed back to Georgia and even plumbers returning to Democrat-run New York. They had come to Washington, DC, to be heard, stormed what they saw as a modern-day Bastille and were going back to their daily lives.

What struck me most was that everyone I spoke to was convinced that they did not matter to the system and their votes did not count. Since that fateful day, a question has played repeatedly in my mind: When people genuinely believe their votes do not count, what stops them from taking up arms?

A strange new world

After January 6, I have followed my father’s advice and gone back to the past to peer into the future. A 1987 edition of Plato’s Republic with crinkling yellow pages and my brother’s fading notes has made me think. In the words of the late classicist , Plato was living in “an age which had abandoned its traditional moral code but found it impossibly difficult to create a new one.” Athenian democracy had forced his tutor Socrates to drink hemlock. It had degenerated into chaos and dissension. Needless to say, it did not survive.

A few centuries later, the Roman Republic perished too. At some point, oligarchs took charge. They controlled almost all the land. Form triumphed over substance, and democratic institutions decayed. Populists emerge to lead the mob. One of the better known was , who attempted agrarian reform, assembled a mob on the Capitol but was clubbed to death in the Senate.

Unlike that long-forgotten Roman revolutionary, Trump did not bring in any radical reform for the people but, like the ancient populist, he has overreached. After years of profiting from Trump’s mass following, Twitter not only silenced him but terminated his account. A political leader who had just got over 74 million votes was obliterated from his favorite public platform by a private company in a jiffy. For all its faults, the New York Times is considered the “newspaper of record.” Its support for the CIA-led 1953 coup in Iran or the case the newspaper made for the 2003 Iraq War is in the public domain. By deleting Trump’s profile, Twitter has demonstrated that a corporation now arbitrates over what constitutes the public domain.

It is not only the question of what constitutes the public domain but also the issue of freedom of speech that is problematic. America’s fabled “protects freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and the right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” For years, internet giants have claimed to be platforms with no editorial responsibility. The First Amendment has been their first defense against allegations that they were letting falsehood, hate and toxic propaganda run amok. Unlike traditional newspapers, these social media platforms did not restrict what people could say. Suddenly, they have changed tack.

After Trump evaporated from Twitter, more was to follow. Amazon Web Services abruptly kicked out conservative social media platform from its servers. Google and Apple also banned the app. They argued Parler incited violence, breaching their terms and conditions. Like Trump, Parler was effectively shut down in minutes. The companies might have had good reasons to do so. However, the action raises uncomfortable questions. Who decides what is free speech? Is it the legislature, the executive, the judiciary or a billionaire-controlled Silicon Valley company?

The First Amendment “guarantees freedom of expression by prohibiting Congress from restricting the press or the rights of individuals to speak freely.” Nothing restricts companies from curbing freedom of expression. When the constitution was drafted, big companies did not exist. Today, the situation is dramatically different, and no equivalent of the First Amendment protects Americans from censorship by big companies.

It is now transparent that the balance of power in the US lies with the big corporations. Its CEOs wield far greater power than governors, members of Congress, senators and, at times, presidents. In 2008, Barack Obama won a historic election by getting nearly 69.5 million votes. In American history, only Joe Biden, with more than , has gained greater support in absolute numbers than Trump. Still, Twitter has summarily deleted his profile. Not only Trump supporters but also many of his opponents are uneasy with this decision.

The left-behind

Despite his crass, erratic and boorish behavior, Trump improved his voting numbers in 2020. He won 36% of the Latino vote, an increase of 4% compared to 2016. Despite ��������’s Catholic faith, Trump won 50% of the Catholic vote, with 57% of the white Catholics casting their ballots for him. The easy explanation is Trump’s appointment of Amy Coney Barrett, the anti-abortion Catholic who studied at Notre Dame, to the US Supreme Court. However, something more might be going on. Trump increased his support among other such as black men and Asians as well.

Why did so many Americans vote for Trump? I got the best answer from some militia members in West Virginia. In an article in November 2020, I mentioned how they conceded that Trump was an unsavory character who lies incessantly, but they credited him for telling one big truth: Things had turned much too ugly for far too many people like them. Far too many Americans have been suffering for much too long, and politicians from both parties have been pretending things are hunky-dory, denying grim realities.

When Trump speaks about making America great again, he is appealing to nostalgia by using one of . He is also acknowledging that things are not so great for many Americans. He is feeding off the anger many Americans feel for what his recently pardoned adviser has called “the permanent political class.” Bannon is an Irish Catholic from a working-class family who voted Democrat. This Navy veteran graduated from Harvard Business School and worked at Goldman Sachs. Then he went rogue.

Bannon is the ideologue who threw his lot with Trump to smash the status quo. He entered politics by launching the right-wing news site Breitbart. Instead of targeting Obama and the Democrats, he went after the Republican establishment because he saw them as traitors to the American working class. Bannon masterminded Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party, something Bernie Sanders tried but failed to achieve with the Democrats.

Bannon consistently makes the case that trade and immigration are two sides of the same coin. Both suppress workers’ wages. Companies can move factories from Michigan to Mexico for cheaper labor to improve their profits and share prices. When foreigners flood in, whether it is Latinos who mow lawns or Indians who write software on H-1B visas, companies do not have to hire Americans for the same jobs. They can and do than their American counterparts. Companies do well and so do their shareholders. Executives do better: has soared 940% since 1978. American workers do not. Like Native Americans and African slaves in times past, they are now the left-behind.

Many economists and politicians ridicule this argument. They stress that immigrants bring in skills that are in short supply. They point to the likes of me who turn entrepreneurs, raise capital, create jobs and boost the American economy. It is true that immigrants give the nation a unique strength. Like Rome, America can draw in the best and brightest of foreigners to give it an edge. Yet not all immigrants are necessarily terribly talented. Many of them are cheap cannon fodder for the unremitting American economic system, where people’s health care is tied to their job, holidays are rare, and 13 million work more than one job. These immigrants increase labor supply and decrease the wages of ordinary Americans.

To add insult to injury, it is these beleaguered workers who have bailed out banks after the financial crash of 2007-08. Both Republicans and Democrats sang from the same hymn book to prevent a recession from turning into a depression but did nothing to curtail or curb the financial class from behaving badly. Only one went to jail. More importantly, taxpayer money ended up as bonus payments for some of the executives who had caused the crash. It was a classic example of capitalism on the upside and socialism on the downside. As a hedge fund manager told me off the record, the bailout was, Heads I win, tails you lose—with “you” being the American taxpayer.

Both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements opposed these bailouts. They had different philosophies and belonged to two ends of the political spectrum, but they opposed what was a fundamentally unjust government policy. The bailouts were accompanied by quantitative easing, which in simple terms means the central banks cutting interest rates to virtually zero and then flooding the economy with money by buying bonds on the market. The rich have gotten richer. The poor find themselves of the market. Many on both the right and the left have lost faith in the system.

A very modern feudalism

During the COVID-19 pandemic, things have gotten worse. The central bank may be printing money, but it is only ending up in the hands of big boys. After the 2007-08 financial crisis, banks prefer to lend to large businesses or those with guaranteed incomes to reduce credit risk and avoid another meltdown. This means that cash flows into a few big rivers instead of many small streams. Even as small businesses are , the is touching the stratosphere. As William Shakespeare memorably penned in Hamlet, “The time is out of joint.”

Such is the state of affairs that even the Financial Times, a paper of choice for the financial elite, is sounding the alarm. On January 3, its Washington correspondent Edward Luce that easy money and fiscal gridlock were leading to populism. Today, the top 10% of Americans own 84% of all shares in the US, with the top 1% owning half. About 50% of Americans own almost no stocks at all. As pointed out earlier, they do not have $500 in savings. It is many of these Americans who form the support base of Trump and Sanders.

America today is in a similar situation to Rome’s during the era of Tiberius Gracchus. The rich were grabbing land from poor farmers and using slaves from Carthage to work their estates. The republic where all Romans were citizens with a say in the affairs of the state was fraying. Rome was creating an imperial economy where the elite grew richer through plunder of conquered territories like Spain and Carthage as well as cheap labor from newly enslaved populations. This made the Roman farmer and worker largely redundant. The Roman plebeian was so exploited and powerless that he slipped to subsistence or below-subsistence levels of income. On the other hand, the elite grew wealthier and wealthier.  

Tiberius Gracchus and his brother Gaius Gracchus attempted reforms, but both were murdered. The Populares rose up to champion their reforms to redistribute a bit of land, ameliorate the plight of the urban poor and reform the political system. The Optimates emerged to fight for the status quo, which preserved the supremacy of the Senate over the popular assemblies and the tribunes of the plebeians. This bitter discord was similar to the Athenian republic Plato found himself in. Roman divisions eventually led to the rise of Julius Caesar.

This ambitious general believed the dysfunctional system to be leading to ruin. Taking sides with the Populares, he sought to reform the system and redistribute wealth to the plebeians. The Optimates did not budge; a civil war resulted, and the collapse of the Roman Republic ensued.

In both Athens and Rome, rising inequality and deepening discord obliterated the common bonds that made democracy possible. In America, inequality has reached feudal dimensions. Technology is destroying thousands of working-class jobs while creating far fewer highly paid ones. The “frightful five”—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google—control the internet and large swathes of the economy. They are strangling small and medium-sized businesses. 

Furthermore, Big Tech’s algorithms, filter bubbles and echo chambers have led to a post-truth world of fake news, conspiracy theories and more. People cannot even agree on basic facts. The constant deluge of data has put their minds in Brownian motion, and they have lost the ability to focus or sift fact from fiction. The irony of the current situation is that the leaders of these companies are self-proclaimed liberals, avowed philanthropists and cheerleaders for progress. Yet they have unleashed Frankensteinian monsters that have wrecked journalism, destroyed discourse and damaged democracy.

What lies next?

On Monday, January 18, I ventured into the city once again, again against the advice of my friends. I got off at L’Enfant Plaza metro station yet again to walk north and found the streets deserted and the National Mall sealed. I walked for an hour from one checkpoint to another. Eventually, a police officer told me that instructions were changing all the time and I was better off taking the metro. When I did take the metro, it stopped far away from the heart of town. Clearly, 25,000 troops and all the police were not enough to guarantee security in the capital. Authorities took the view that shutting down access to the heart of town was necessary too. The security arrangements seemed a bit of an overreaction but understandable given the events of January 6.

On January 20, I watched the inauguration with some American friends. Some were delighted to see the back of Trump and were celebrating with mimosas already in the morning. With Trump gone, many hoped that the populist genie could be put back in its bottle. I wish I had the same sense of American optimism. I simply cannot forget that despite a raging pandemic and thousands of deaths, over 74 million Americans . They are not going away.

As ancient republics demonstrate, populism flourishes when inequality increases. In tough times, people are also more likely to turn against those they see as threats or competition. In 1873, the US suffered its deepest depression to date. Cotton prices crashed and unemployment rose. A disputed led to the end of post-Civil War Reconstruction and the reintroduction of racial segregation through Jim Crow laws. A campaign of intimidation and violence kept black voters away from the polls for decades to come. Only in the 1960s did the historic civil rights movement end segregation, but black people remain poorer and die earlier than their white counterparts.

In addition to black people, another group suffered after 1873. The 1860s had been the time of the California Gold Rush and the First Continental Railroad. The Irish alone were unable to supply enough labor. Therefore, the 1868 “ensured a steady flow of low-cost Chinese immigrant labor,” toiling primarily in goldmines and on railroads. The emerging trade unions saw Chinese workers as competitors who lowered everyone’s wages and so opposed immigration. The Chinese worked for less money and worked harder. They also worked in areas where whites refused to work. White society at that time did not want people of color around. The labor movement was able to crystallize that latent racism.

The media played its part. William Randolph Hearst’s papers popularized the phrase “yellow peril,” and the US Congress passed the , prohibiting all immigration of Chinese laborers. This was the first legislation in American history to place broad restrictions on immigration. And this was the Gilded Age. Rapid economic growth led to millions of European immigrants streaming onto American shores. This lowered the price of labor, and workers suffered. At the same time, the concentration of wealth continued apace, with robber barons and speculators making fabulous fortunes.

The Gilded Age also led to the emergence of a left-wing agrarian movement called the People’s Party. They came to be known as the Populists, a word that has stuck with us to this day. Despite doing well in the 1896 election, the party eventually disbanded, but some elements of its program were adopted by the likes of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. It is important to note that this party drew support from white Protestant farmers who were losing out to industrialization, urbanization and mass immigration.

While they advocated many measures of public welfare, the Populists were anti-Semitic, conspiracy-minded and racist. They offer a good insight into what America’s near future might look like. As the predominantly white working-class suffers, some of its members are more likely to wave Confederate flags, blame blacks for sponging off welfare and oppose immigration from Mexico, India or elsewhere. This enrages many urban liberals who argue that the white working class is not the real oppressed. It is Latinos, blacks and Native Americans who have suffered much more. Instead of complaining, members of the white working class could just mow lawns, clean homes or serve coffee. Also, these liberals are furious that many members of the working class pick on poor Mexican immigrants, not rich Wall Street bankers.

This urban elite misses an important point. Many Trump supporters are acting in the same ways as Populists in the 1870s who focused as much on the Chinese as on the robber barons. Part of the reason is simple. Like the robber baron in the 19th century, the banker is not a tangible part of most American lives. He is a character from movies such as Wall Street and The Wolf of Wall Street. The aggressive banker and the ruthless entrepreneur are archetypes that American culture apotheosizes. They represent the Nietzschean Übermensch, who deserves devotion, not just admiration, in a cult of success that is deep-rooted in America. That cult explains why Harvard has a school of government, not of politics. Success is non-negotiable, a Socrates-style failure unacceptable.

In contrast to the Übermensch who controls the commanding heights of the economy but is rarely seen in the flesh, Mexicans are ubiquitous. They work longer for lesser pay. Every office or apartment building I have visited across the country has had Mexicans or other immigrants from Central America doing the cleaning or taking out the rubbish. They look different, smell different and speak a different language. They excite insecurity. That insecurity rises when increasing numbers compete for fewer jobs.

American elites like immigration for both emotional and practical reasons. After all, America is a land of immigrants. They provide America with cheap labor, technological talent and entrepreneurial energy. Those with capital enjoy having access to all three. It boosts returns on capital. In contrast, the left-behind want less competition and higher wages. 

Biden has his task cut out for him as president. An increasingly unequal America with declining social mobility is seething with rage. The rich have turned rentiers, profiting off quantitative easing and rising asset prices. Those without capital or connections can no longer move up in society. The stock market is a bubble waiting to burst. America cannot ignore the last four years, and a significant proportion of the 74 million who voted for Trump have lost faith in the system. Many of them have guns. This is no time for dogged centrism. It is time for bold political and economic reform that decreases inequality and increases social mobility. If Biden fails, a modern-day Julius Caesar will inevitably emerge to bury yet another dysfunctional democracy.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Flashpoint America: What the Hell Is Happening?

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Much has been written about the radicalization of QAnon adherents since the coup attempt, and there is an available body of work for anyone brave enough to wade into this conspiracy pool. There have also been extensive attempts to dissect the QAnon mindset since President ��������’s inauguration, given Donald Trump’s failure to deliver on the promises made by Q.

Turbulence Ahead

While some are taking a certain satisfaction in watching the QAnon worldview crumble, the situation is poised to grow even more complex. This presents an even deeper challenge to the long-term social and political health of the United States. Observers who are commenting on the disillusionment of QAnon communities now that ��������’s presidency has become a reality are missing the point, since reality was never the point to begin with. The point has always been escapism — absconding into a world of fan fiction where the entanglements of our political and economic lives can be distilled down to memes, anonymous “transmissions” and a binary choice between good and evil, filled with legions of heroes and villains. None of this will be abandoned any time soon, let alone gracefully.

Because of this, there is deep turbulence ahead, namely what to do with potentially millions of people who now adhere to an untethered ideology. These digital communities are not going to vanish, nor are they simply going to recognize the absurdity of their ways and come back to the mainstream. Doing so would undermine the investment they have made in the conspiracy that has consumed them, forcing them to acknowledge that their estrangement from family, friends and colleagues is actually of their own making. There is also another dimension, one that goes even deeper. Letting go of the conspiracy and admitting that their beliefs are misplaced is to also acknowledge that they allowed themselves to be deceived and manipulated.

Having this expectation is a heavy lift and one that cannot be expected without programs or mechanisms that support personal disengagement. Arab countries battling extremism have pioneered these kinds of programs and have been running them for years. Unfortunately, programs like this that are currently available in the US do not exist on the scale needed to be effective. What we are left with is much more rudimentary and reactive, allowing us to only assess the pathways these individuals are taking and how their digital communities are supporting their radicalization.

There are five main QAnon archetypes currently in play. Each has a role in either disrupting or scaling the radicalization behind the next version of the conspiracy. The first group are those who can be reached. These will be individuals who understand they unwittingly fell into something and are looking for a way back to their lives pre-QAnon with a minimal amount of embarrassment. The second group are those still consuming the conspiracy but who are negotiating their belief system within it as Biden settles into his presidency. The cracks have started to form for these individuals, and it could go one of two ways: Either they are reached and brought back into normative political and social life or they will evolve in the direction of the new conspiracy.

The third group are the enablers who are still committed to trafficking in conspiracy regardless of the form it might be taking. They are the content creators, communicators, logistical planners and recruiters. They have influence within their digital communities, which they will protect by espousing whatever version of the conspiracy keeps them most relevant.

The fourth group are the ideological drivers of the conspiracy, those not only with the most followers and content but those capable of articulating the most radical aspects of the conspiracy. Many of the previous ideological leaders of QAnon have dropped out due to a loss of legitimacy within these digital communities. But in doing so, they have left behind a vacuum. This space is now being filled by opportunists who need to make even more outlandish claims as a way of establishing their bona fides to the millions of followers looking for what comes next, accelerating the potential for radicalization.

Turn to Anger

The fifth group is the most worrisome and where intelligence gatherers and federal law enforcement will need to be most focused. These are individuals who recognize the conspiracy was a lie, but still maintain all of their underlying resentments, specifically white grievance. This will turn to anger, which can be easily exploited, not just because they realize QAnon was a lie, but because they believe they were abandoned by the same politicians who told them the election was stolen. These individuals will be looking for new digital communities that are less keen on fan fiction and more prone to direct action as a way of exercising their grievances. They will be for white supremacist groups and militias who are looking to recruit, plan and engage in violent action. The recalibration of these relationships is already ongoing.

Believing the followers of QAnon have lost faith in the conspiracy in any meaningful way is naive. Their reality is flexible. Spend a few minutes in any QAnon Telegram channel, and you can see that the unreality of their beliefs is only accelerating. A is already claiming that Trump will become president again on March 4 under a “restored republic,” which links to a belief that the US was dissolved in the 19^th century. Individuals who have retreated from normative social and political life into their conspiracy-driven digital communities will continue to find ways to thrive because they have no other choice. Their emotional investment in the conspiracy has become their personal identity. This is only going to make the conspiracy more dangerous and the radicalization stronger. 

The FBI cannot arrest its way out of this problem, nor can the tech companies be counted on to regulate their own platforms in a way that addresses the complexity of these vast challenges. While radicalization is nothing new, it is new in the American context. This is a knowledge frontier in its infancy and one we are wholly unprepared for — for all the reasons that led us to this place to begin with. If left unaddressed, we might soon find ourselves in a position where our unreality has indeed become our reality.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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A Perspective on America’s Imperfect Democracy

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But it’s not a good look for American democracy when the peaceful handover of power has the appearance of a banana republic installing a tinpot dictator — or resembles the America of 1861, for that matter, when a huge security presence at Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration  the outbreak of civil war. The brain  it receives from the eyes upside down so that we can ultimately perceive the world right side up. Our brains must now perform the task when looking at the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Cracked Vessel

Washington, DC, might look like a city besieged, but this day is in fact the culmination of a vigorous and successful defense of democracy. Voters have removed an autocrat from office by way of an election. The courts and state officials have prevented his attempt to perpetrate electoral fraud. Those who broke into the Capitol on January 6 are belatedly being subjected to the rule of law. And the dictator wannabe is slinking out of town with the  farewell parties imaginable. Not only did a coup not happen on January 6 to keep Trump in power, but a coup wasn’t necessary to remove Trump from power. Two for democracy!

The Biden administration has promised to repair the political damage that Trump has caused. The proposals on the domestic side, such as undoing some of the Republican Party’s voter suppression efforts, are no-brainers from a progressive standpoint. But the foreign policy recommendations around democracy promotion are not so contention-free. A promise to bring together a global Summit of Democracies, for instance, has met with considerable .

There is no question that American democracy has been tarnished, not only by the events of January 6 but by the entire four years of the Trump administration. As I  right after the 2020 election, “The democracy that Donald Trump dropped on the floor suffered a great deal from the experience. It’s going to take more than an election to put it right.”

The events of January 6 have prompted many observers, in the United States and abroad, to declare an end to US pretensions to democracy promotion. As Emma Ashford  in Foreign Policy: “How can anyone expect — as Joe ��������’s campaign promised — to ‘restore responsible American leadership on the world stage’ if Americans cannot even govern themselves at home? How can the United States spread democracy or act as an example for others if it barely has a functioning democracy at home? Washington’s foreign-policy elites remain committed to the preservation of a three-decade foreign policy aimed at reshaping the world in America’s image. They are far too blasé about what that image has become in 2020.”

Of course, US democracy has always been a cracked vessel, from the limitations on the franchise that accompanied the country’s birth and the near-constant  to the deformations of executive power by practically every president. So, when Roger Cohen  in The New York Times that the “images of the overrun Capitol will be there, for those who want to use them, to make the point that America would be best advised to avoid giving lessons in the exercise of freedom,” the natural retort would be: There have always been such images.

From its inception, the United States has continually needed to put its own house in order. When it comes to democracy, America has always been a work in progress. Actually, over the last four years, it was a work in regress, but the point still holds. Democracy in America is not perfect. But does that mean that America’s recent slide away from democracy has disqualified it from engaging in democracy promotion?

Exports and Brands

Countries are always promoting something. The French want you to buy their wines. Russia hawks its oil and natural gas. South Korea lobbies on behalf of its boy bands, Saudi Arabia its Wahhabist version of Islam, India its Bollywood movies, Israel its security forces, and so on.

Democracy might seem like just another export. And, indeed, some American promoters treat their work as if it were an extension of the US brand. They are promoting not democracy in general but American-style democracy. Consultants in Europe, for instance, have evangelized about increasing the role of  in elections, an American innovation that hitherto has not been so prominent on the continent. In other cases, the promotion of democracy has been just a cover for the projection of US power and influence, as in Iraq after the 2003 invasion or Ukraine after the Maidan revolution of 2014.

In other words, “democracy promotion” either boils down to the promotion of the US version of democracy or the promotion of US interests, actual democracy be damned. Either way, the phrase and the program have acquired a poor reputation, particularly in their linkage to the political agenda of neoconservatives throughout the Reagan years and again under George W. Bush in the 2000s.

As with the support of other exports like soybeans and soda pop, there’s a lot of money in democracy promotion. USAID, for instance, has a budget of a couple of billion dollars for “,” which includes Elections and Political Processes, the Human Rights Grants Program, the Global Labor Program, the Disability Rights and Inclusive Development Program, and so on. Various foundations and civil society organizations also put a lot of money into the global promotion of democracy and human rights. All of this has been put at acute risk by what Trump and his followers have unleashed upon the United States, much as a sour batch of wine can send an entire wine industry down the drain.

“Repairing the substantial damage to U.S. image in the world and regaining credibility on democracy issues will be tough and take a long time, even under the best scenario,” Michael Shifter, the president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based study group, told the . “The problem is not so much Trump himself, but rather his enablers and those who have remained silent and been complicit in his patently antidemocratic rhetoric and behavior.”

Progressives have  the United States to support labor rights overseas. If another country is throwing labor leaders into jail merely for organizing strikes, the United States should protest. If corporations are employing slave labor or child workers, the United States should sanction them. If a country is abusing its migrant laborers, Washington should say something.

And the United States should do that even though its own record on labor rights is inconsistent at best. Sometimes US failings are connected to a lack of enforcement of rules on the books. Sometimes the rules on the books are lousy. And sometimes, as was the case in particular during the Trump years, administrations have gone out of their way to depress wages, ignore or actively worsen miserable working conditions and otherwise engage in a veritable war on labor.

But none of that means that progressives should urge the incoming Biden administration to keep quiet about labor rights abuses overseas until it compiles a perfect record at home. Foreign and domestic policy ideally should go hand in hand. In this way, the United States can demonstrate how to repair an imperfect labor record even as it urges other countries to do the same. The same applies to other elements of the progressive agenda: access to reproductive health care, LGBTQ rights, environmental regulations. The United States has an imperfect record on every issue on the progressive agenda.

Promoting Progressive Values Overseas

The way out of the apparent contradiction between what the United States says for export and what it does domestically is relatively simple. Don’t do as we say; do as the world says. Focus, in other words, on international standards. All countries, including the United States, should adhere to these standards on labor, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, environmental regulations and the like.

So, does democracy fall into the same category as these other planks in the progressive platform? To the extent that democracy consists of protections for human rights and political rights such as freedom of speech and a free media, progressives can comfortably insist that all countries, including the United States, adhere to international standards. Let’s call this embrace of the component parts of democracy the “let a thousand trees bloom” approach, with each tree a different human right.

The challenge comes with the “let’s plant a forest” approach. Democracy as a category can be tricky because of widely varying definitions of what the forest is exactly. Viktor Orbán insists that Hungary is a democracy, albeit an illiberal one, and so far the European Union reluctantly agrees. Brussels might grumble about certain Hungarian actions, but it hasn’t expelled the country from the EU. Plenty of Hungarian activists, however, argue that Orbán has undermined the country’s democratic institutions by compromising the independence of the judiciary and the freedom of the media, to name just two violations. So, does Hungary qualify to participate in ��������’s planned Summit of Democracies?

Although there might be an international consensus around certain aspects of democracy as enshrined in various UN human rights conventions, there is no such agreement over democracy as a whole. Plenty of non-democratic countries have signed UN human rights agreements, for instance, but they would never presume to be invited to a Summit of Democracies. It’s not so much that we can’t see the forest for the trees. Many progressives have reservations about the forest and prefer to focus on the trees.

One of those reservations concerns regime change. Neoconservatives, in particular, used “democracy promotion” as a cover for pursuing the collapse of governments they didn’t like. In the case of North Korea, for instance, they viewed US pressure on Pyongyang as necessary to eliminate not simply the country’s nuclear weapons but its entire political system. Ditto Iraq, Iran, Libya, Venezuela and Cuba. Such a version of democracy promotion should be off the table. It is up to the people of a country to determine their own political future. And they should be protected in their efforts to do so by international pressure to ensure that the country abides by global human rights standards.

Over the next four years, let’s by all means work to protect all of those fragile trees at home and abroad. But let’s also take some time to define what we mean by the forest, and let’s make sure to include Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, the Occupy struggles and all the other powerful examples of grassroots democracy. The trees, after all, are part of a larger ecosystem, and they can’t prosper if the overall environment deteriorates.

Once we have defined what we mean by democracy, American progressives should absolutely support its promotion, even as we work to improve our own political ecosystem. After all, at some point in the future, we may need to call upon the international community to help us save our democracy as well.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Historic:

1. An adjective that calls attention to the special status or original character of an event witnessed by the media, signifying that the event may remain in the public’s memory at some later point in history, thanks principally to the media’s insistence that the unfolding event is far more important than it may appear to any serious historian.

2. Predictably hyperreal.

Contextual Note

US presidential inaugurations are predictable events. They happen every four years. Except in the case of a sitting president’s reelection to a second term, they mark a transition between two different personalities and two contrasting administrations. That fact alone will always have some minor historical significance. But the event itself is choreographed to follow essentially the same formal scenario from one administration to the next. Apart from this year’s social distancing, a reduced crowd and the wearing of masks, nothing in the event itself justifies calling ��������’s inauguration ceremony historic.

��������’s inauguration program contained some of the unique features required by the glitz and glamor of today’s hyperreality. Lady Gaga sang the national anthem and Jennifer Lopez offered some complimentary patriotic entertainment. There was a rap-influenced poem recited by a young female black poet, Amanda Gorman, the first-ever national youth poet laureate. But nothing about its staging or content was original or unpredictable enough to merit the epithet historic. So why did all media commentators lose themselves in using that word to describe it?

They did have one good reason, though most reporters opted to spend more time on the first-ever enthronement of a female vice president, Kamala Harris. Though an unexciting politician as her performance in the Democratic primaries revealed, Harris offers two rare attributes besides being a woman. Their combined effect adds to the sense of this being a unique moment in history. She is the daughter of two foreigners, one black (her Jamaican father) and the other Asian (her Indian mother, and Tamil, to boot). 

Oddly, no commentators seem aware of a true historical curiosity: that of the two individuals of African heritage to have risen to the presidential or vice presidential position — Barack Obama and Harris — neither are descendants of the American slaves who constitute the core of African American ethnicity. That means, from a historical point of view, there is still a gap to be filled.

The real reason ��������’s inauguration could be called historic was the absence of his predecessor, Donald Trump. But even that was not only predicted — by Trump himself — but also predictable, given his narcissism. The 45^th president’s absence had no effect on the protocol of the event. It did, however, affect, at least unconsciously, everyone’s perception of the moment. For the first time in five and a half years, Americans had to face the odd fact that Donald Trump was no longer at the core of the news cycle.

For 22 minutes, Biden proceeded to produce a thoroughly unhistoric speech, rife with timeless clichés rather than the timely observations one might expect from a historic moment. Biden has always preferred pompous �����Բ�������é�� and self-plagiarism to original thought. He predictably recycled his litany of crowd-pleasing but meaningless rhetorical formulas, already devoid of sense but even more so when repeated for the thousandth time. 

As expected, there was the eternal (and historically false): “We have never, ever, ever failed in America when we have acted together.” At least he made it slightly more compact than on all the previous occasions. He drew applause with his stale chiasmus, “We will lead not merely by the example of our power but by the power of our example,” without realizing that a witty rhetorical figure loses its quality of wit when parroted over and over again. Inauguration audiences are trained to be solemnly polite. So, predictably, applause replaced the groans that ��������’s oft-repeated trope deserved.

The absence of a sense of true historical significance failed to deter the commentators. “A historic moment, but also a surreal one,” in The New York Times, noting that unlike other inaugurations it “served to illustrate America’s troubles.” He seems to have forgotten a notable and recent precedent: the inauguration of Donald J. Trump, who famously evoked “American carnage” at the core of his inaugural address. 

Trump’s speech four years ago was authentically surreal, as was so much that Trump thought, did or tweeted in the following four years. Trump himself, beyond his surreal acts, was the epitome of hyperreality, in the sense that he existed as a parody of the “normal” hyperreality of US politics. He permanently drew his audience’s attention to a political system built like a movie set façade and acted out following the rules of a scripted pro wrestling melodrama. Trump’s premature departure from Washington, DC, was exceptional, if not historic. But is there any justifiable reason to believe that ��������’s plodding return to normal hyperreality can be called “historic”?

Historical Note

Inaugurations are, by definition, theatrical exercises. As transitional moments, they mark a date in history, but that doesn’t make them historical. The one inauguration that still makes that claim —because it has remained in the collective memory — was John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s performance in 1961. That was poised to be historic because Kennedy was the youngest president ever elected and the first to break what should be called the WASP barrier. As a Roman Catholic of Irish descent, Kennedy was the first who didn’t fit the obligatory presidential mold of being white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant.

But what people associate with that January 1961 event is the memorable line from Kennedy’s address: “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” In contrast with Biden, Kennedy had never used that line before. It took people by surprise. First there was the syntax. It possessed Miltonic solemnity by eschewing the now obligatory “do” that structures negative commands in English. People normally say, “don’t ask” rather than “ask not.” 

Kennedy made the injunction sound like a divine commandment. In reality, it was as empty of meaning as any of ��������’s formulas. Americans don’t need a president to tell them whom to ask and not to ask. There is no shame in asking your country to do something, even if it never gets done. Get the wealthy to pay their share of taxes, for example. They might even ask the country not to do something, such as launch a nuclear showdown over the presence of Russian missiles in Cuba or wage a war in Vietnam. And many people do spontaneously ask what they can do for their country, though their request is usually accompanied by the demand for some form of payment. Both Kennedy and Biden responded to the public’s expectations in an inaugural address of rhetoric that “elevates the spirit” and encourages feelings of generosity and solidarity. Because it is such a standard feature of inaugural addresses, the presence of such sentiments can hardly be considered historic. On the other hand, Trump’s “American carnage” was historic, simply because nobody expected it.

CNN desperately sought an original thought in ��������’s speech, something to relate to the “historic” nature of the event. : “About halfway through his inauguration speech, President Joe Biden said something very important about the work of Washington — and how he envisions his presidency.” What did he find? Unlike Kennedy’s positive incitement to action, he selected ��������’s negative admonition: “Politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire destroying everything in its path. Every disagreement doesn’t have to be a cause for total war.”

That’s where the US finds itself today. It lives with the hope that disagreement will not produce war. And yet, a culture war has been raging for decades, inflamed by the media. For the first time in a century and a half, there is a sense that a messy may break out. That truly is historic.

*[Correction: An earlier version of this article mistakenly referred to Amanda Gorman as national poet laureate.]

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The United States does not have the social contract in its DNA. While most other countries limit economic freedoms to prioritize (or at least pay lip service to) maintaining a safety net, providing health care and helping the most vulnerable in society, a large number of Americans believe that it is not the government’s job. Violent and catastrophic events like the Civil War, the Great Depression and the civil rights movement brought about emancipation, social security and Medicare and Medicaid, respectively.

Most Americans, however, believe that running a small system of carefully crafted checks and balances among the executive, legislative and judicial branches is the government’s primary responsibility. With minimal regulatory interference, it is the economy that has dictated politics in the US, making it somewhat anomalous among developed countries.

Unfair Advantages

Over the past few decades, this structure has given the United States enormous unfair advantages. In the aftermath of World War II, with the collapse of European colonial powers, intellectual capital moved in droves to calmer American shores. The boomer generation, born between 1946 and 1964, brought enormous wealth and prosperity to the United States, making it a world leader. So much so that the turbulent civil rights and Vietnam War era, as well as the scrapping of the gold standard during Richard Nixon’s presidency, did not dislodge the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

A Perspective on America’s Imperfect Democracy

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Despite all the flaws, the complex and sophisticated US financial markets, along with the occasionally susceptible ratings agencies, are considered transparent enough for the world to trust the dollar. That has brought immeasurable benefits to this system, exhibit A being the ability of federal, state and municipal governments, as well as American corporations, to borrow money at throwaway rates. It sustains the productive and efficient American military-industrial and research-industrial complexes. Thanks to this system, even individual Americans, on average, have racked up of up to $30,000 with no tangible plans to pay it back, a privilege few others around the world enjoy.

This unfair advantage is a game of trust and perception. The US cannot go back to pegging its currency to gold. In the recent past, the world has already gone through a few scares. During the 2008-09 global financial crisis, when the US dollar seemed volatile, investors briefly ran to the Swiss franc. It forced the Swiss government to announce unlimited capital controls to keep its currency from rising and maintain a competitive economy. European regulators followed suit by forcing reluctant Americans to participate in tougher global financial regulations.

While China is still far away from matching developed countries in per-capita GDP, it is slated to overtake the US in the absolute size of its economy in a decade or two. It has already started forcing smaller partners to trade with it in renminbi instead of the US dollar. In the middle of a pandemic, despite a debt-to-GDP ratio of almost 300%, China recently sold its government bonds at a negative interest rate. There is no immediate threat to the dollar’s pole position because there is currently : 40% of international trade and more than 60% of the world’s outstanding debt securities are held directly in US dollars. Competitors are waiting in the wings, looking for chinks in the American armor. However, it is the stable American political system that underwrites this economic behemoth.

Assault on the System

Although not shocking, that is why Donald Trump’s assault on the system — including the physical attack incited by the executive branch against the legislative that took place on January 6 at the US Capitol — is ironic. Born in 1946, two years after the declining colonial powers adopted the US dollar as the reserve currency, Trump has embodied, nay, ruthlessly exploited, all these privileges throughout his career. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he has bankrupted one business after another, duping investors and customers by always staying one step ahead of others. Trump has always found lenders from around the globe to bankroll his private businesses. When he could not beg, borrow or steal to get reelected, losing on the world’s biggest stage, his narcissism almost brought down the whole system.

The United States is still considered a center-right country because even left-leaning centrists implicitly understand that they are, above all else, serving the economy. And right-leaning centrists have, against their stated principles, indulged in the moral hazard of bailing out failing businesses with trillions of dollars at the expense of individuals. However, with the underlying system showing its weakness, it was high time businesses paid back in kind.

The bans instituted on Trump by Twitter, Facebook and other online platforms seem excessive. With moderators in place, they could have temporarily suspended his account or moderated each of his posts until Biden’s inauguration. Although these private companies are not legally obligated to abide by the , which protects freedom of expression from government overreach, their actions (with reasonable restrictions) would have upheld the spirit of free speech. Perhaps they were erring on the side of caution. Parler, a far-right social media network with no mechanisms or desire to enforce legal restrictions on freedom of expression, was disowned by Apple, Google and Amazon overnight. Scores of banks, brands and even the PGA have stopped doing business with Trump. Several corporate houses have halted political donations to him and his enablers.

After intelligence briefings following the attack on Congress, horrified military leaders (not just retired, but even serving members) have issued unusually stark warnings to active-duty personnel against indulging in seditious acts. The House of Representatives has impeached Trump for a historic second time with a bipartisan vote. All eyes are now on the Senate, the self-proclaimed greatest deliberative body in the world. Outgoing Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has announced that the Senate will take up impeachment only after ��������’s inauguration.

Time will tell whether it was McConnell’s bargaining chip to ensure Trump did not cause more harm while still in power or just a delaying tactic to minimize the political costs of convicting Trump. The stakes are high because, if Trump is not convicted and wins again in 2024, no one will have any leverage over him. When coining his winged catchphrase, Carville had assumed that the underlying system was rock solid. In a mere four years, Donald Trump has shown the world it is anything but.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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America Gets Rid of Trump, But Not Trumpism

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Does anyone really think that the vast majority of Republican legislators who could not bring themselves to object to the attempted coup at the Capitol — or any of the other outrageous antics Trump has unleashed on America for the past four years — will suddenly experience sleepless nights and pangs of conscience now that he is gone? Au contraire. This band of spineless, morally bankrupt congresspeople and senators are far more likely to follow Trump and carry Trumpism into the 2024 presidential election.

That presents something of a dilemma for the Democratic Party, which seems to be far more inclined to believe that it can “turn” enough Republicans to vote Democrat next time to make a difference. Instead, we should expect an ongoing slugfest between the two parties for decades to come.

What has occurred over the past four years in the country’s political landscape is a transformation from simple political differences that prevented bipartisanship to a battle for cultural identity and the soul of America. That shining city on a hill has descended into Dante’s inferno — in a torrent of racist, bigoted, sexist and xenophobic impulses among such a large segment of the population, that it could prevent the country from ever being what it was before.

A recent of Europeans revealed that the majority believe that America’s political system is hopelessly broken, that President Biden will be unable to halt its decline on the world stage, and that  will become the world’s leading power within a decade. What if they are right? America’s Trump-inspired death spiral has practically ensured any real recovery will likely take decades — and multiple terms with a Democratic president and Congress at the helm — to achieve.

The European view acknowledges the depths that America has sunk to and that, in the process, Trump has rolled out the red carpet for China to rise to great new heights on the global stage, which it has been doing particularly well over the past four years. It took generations of leadership to create America’s well-earned reputation as a beacon of freedom and liberty but just one presidential term to shred it.

America must now make a choice. Given how closely contested the 2020 presidential election was and that the Democrats have a razor-thin margin of a Congressional voting majority, it would be folly for the Democrats to believe that Trumpism is, or will soon be, buried. It could easily be the case that in four years, it is the Republicans — fully armed with Trumpists and QAnon radicals — who again take the legislative helm. Given that more than 70 million Americans voted for Trump after four years of his outrageous behavior, and given that he may not be constrained in his behavior in any way in the coming four years, the Democrats may have just four years to turn this ship around.

An important priority must be to repair America’s fractured alliances and to restore faith and hope in what America can and needs to be again. There is a better than even chance that the Democrats will fail at this task. If the Europeans are right, and if the Republicans take the mantle of power again in four years, America may lose its ability to recover. That would imply a host of bad things for the country and the world in the near future. A second term of Trump — or someone even worse — could return the world to a very dark period, reminiscent of the Nazi era. That is why President Biden and the Democrats must succeed.

*[Daniel Wagner is the  of “The Chinese Vortex: The Belt and Road Initiative and its Impact on the World.”]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Sex Abuse Is the Moral Downfall of the Catholic Church

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One of the most drastic attempts to wield such influence was the Vatican’s decision in mid-1949 to excommunicate all members of the Communist Party. Given the fact that was “materialist and anti-Christian,” anyone who came out in support of the ideology automatically expressed their hostility “to God, religion and the Church” and, therefore, had no place among the community of believers. In a country where faith in the Catholic Church and its teachings were deeply ingrained, this was a formidable weapon. It is to the credit of the creator of Don Camillo and Peppone, Giovannino Guareschi, that he showed in many of his stories that this had little to do with reality on the ground — that somebody could be a communist and a good Catholic.

Bygone Era

In contemporary Italy, these are stories of a bygone era, one where the Christian Democrats still were the predominant party and where Italians still flocked to the churches. By now, the Christian Democrats are politically dead, and Italian churches have become museums rather than places of worship. In my own country, Germany, the Catholic Church has long abandoned its anti-socialist rhetoric aimed at the Social Democrats, perhaps, but not only, because the SPD has largely abandoned any pretense to be a socialist party.

Even in Ireland and in Poland, the Catholic Church is increasingly in a defensive position. Take, for instance, recent shocking about decades of neglect and abuse in Ireland’s mother and baby homes. Most of them run by religious orders affiliated with the Catholic Church, they reflected a “brutally misogynistic culture” promoted by the church. This culture resulted not only in unmarried women and girls being held “virtual prisoners” in these “homes” but also in the death of thousands of babies, oftentimes anonymously in mass graves. Under the circumstances, the Catholic Church’s adamant pro-life stance rings somewhat hollow.

The church’s taking the moral high ground has also started to undermine the position of the Polish Catholics. It was about the sexual abuse of children involving, most infamously, an icon of Polish Catholicism, , a legend of the Solidarność movement that was instrumental in putting an end to Poland’s communist regime. His statue was toppled by protesters in 2019 in the city of Gdansk, before being officially dismantled and removed. The fact that until today, the Polish Catholic Church has refused to accept responsibility has led to a dramatic loss of trust in its authority. The church, in turn, has sought to from the crimes committed in its name by targeting the country’s LGTBQ community as the new “plague that seeks to dominate our souls, hearts and our mind.”

I doubt that the American Catholic Church is tuned in to developments in contemporary Poland or that it has any awareness of the far-reaching influence of the Italian Catholic Church in the immediate postwar period. Yet the parallels are striking, particularly in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. This time, President Donald Trump garnered roughly 50% of the vote and about 57% among white Catholics. To be sure, Catholics voted for Trump for a range of different reasons. “Pro-life” considerations probably rank very high, if not highest, particularly among white Catholics. So do anti-immigrant sentiments. Among Hispanics, economic considerations appear to have had a significant influence on electoral choice, plus the open hostility a number of Catholic spiritual leaders have expressed toward Joe Biden and the Democratic Party in general.

Take, for instance, Jesse Romero, a former cop turned into a well-known Catholic evangelist, who appears to have “witnessed diabolical satanic activity,” recounted in his , “The Devil in the City of Angels: My Encounters With the Diabolical.” A cop staring down the devil — what other qualifications does one need to be a major authority on spiritual guidance? In early 2020, Romero that proclaimed that a vote for Trump was the only choice for Republicans, Democrats and Independents alike. Those interested in the rationale behind Romero’s plea should consult his to a Never Trump Catholic, which provides a long list of Trump’s “accomplishments” starting with his “pro-life” measures. What about him being a liar and philanderer? Who cares?

To be sure, Romero is nothing more than another one of these evangelical snake oil salesmen that clutter America’s airwaves. Usually, they are of the Protestant persuasion; but then, the US is an equal opportunity country, and Romero is certainly not the worst of the lot, at least on the Catholic side.

Party of Death

A on the Jesuit America magazine website provides a sobering account of the extent to which Catholic officials have gone to incite hatred toward Joe Biden and the Democrats. The author quotes one priest who posted a clip to YouTube that charged that the Democratic platform was “against everything the Catholic Church teaches.” Therefore, American Catholics who voted for the Democrats should “just quit pretending” to be Catholics. Those contemplating voting for Biden should repent of “their support of that party and its platform or face the fires of hell.” Christianity in action.

And who cares that Biden is, in fact, a practicing Catholic, while Donald Trump, as his Presbyterian Protestant congregation puts it, is not an “.” As Rick Stika, the bishop of Knoxville, Tennessee, put it in a in August, Biden should not claim to be a good Catholic “as he denies so much of Church teaching especially on the absolute child abuse and human rights violations of the most innocent, the not yet born.” As a member of an institution infamous for widespread abuse of the most innocent, Stika should have known better than to use this kind of language. And yet, as an article in the National Catholic Reporter , he was hardly the only top Catholic dignitary to question ��������’s Catholic faith and credentials.

When God Hates America

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Lower ranks followed suit. One priest posted a clip that called the Democrats the “party of death.” This is a trope that has been around for years, first introduced by the former St. Louise Archbishop Raymond Burke. Burke was appointed to the Vatican’s highest court in 2008 from where he both Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, who, he charged, “while presenting themselves as good Catholics, have presented Church doctrine on abortion in a false and tendentious way.”

Given the relatively long tradition of labeling the Democratic Party as the party of death by the gotha of American Catholicism, it is hardly surprising that the recent video clip received enthusiastic support from Joseph Strickland, a bishop from Tyler, Texas. Strickland not only endorsed the message but exhorted his flock to listen to this “wise and faithful priest.” It might also come as no surprise that to one witness in Pennsylvania, some priests were “openly suggesting that politicians who support abortion rights should be denied Communion.”

This is akin to what the Italian Catholic Church told its flock in the postwar period. This is what the Polish Church has been telling its flock since the collapse of the communist regime. The result: In 2019, a of the Polish population expressed trust in the country’s Catholic Church.

Blood on Their Hands

Things are likely to move in the same direction in the United States. The headline of a recent in National Catholic Reporter minced no words: Catholics, the article charged, “need to confess their complicity in the failed coup.” The author claims that, given the five casualties caused by the assault on the Capitol, “Catholic apologists for Trump have blood on their hands.” The tacit or open support of parts of the American Catholic Church’s clergy and affiliated lay organizations, such as Catholics for Trump, CatholicVote.org and LifeSiteNews, for a president who represents the very antithesis of Gospel teaching is bound to have a significant fallout, given the assault on the nation’s cradle of democracy.  

This comes at a time when the Catholic Church is under tremendous pressure given the growing number of revelations of widespread sexual abuse, more often than not hushed up by the Church hierarchy. In Pennsylvania, for instance, the Catholic Church more than $5 million on lobbying to prevent victims of sexual abuse from getting meaningful compensation.

Ever since the creation of the United States, Catholics have been under a cloud of suspicion. It took more than a century to alleviate these suspicions and allow Catholics to be accepted as equal members of the nation. By openly supporting a president who represents the very antithesis of Christ’s teaching, parts of the American Catholic Church have managed to erase much of the progress the American Catholic Church has managed to accomplish over the past several decades. Consumed by one issue, the question of abortion, they condoned Trump’s behavior by looking the other way on questions of racism, white supremacy, refugees and Black Lives Matter.  

On the contrary, radical right-wing influencers, such as Michelle Malkin (who once that what was at the heart of her “outspokenness” was her Catholic faith), Black Lives Matter protesters as “vigilante terrorists.” A few weeks before the assault on the Capitol, Malkin the idea that Trump supporters might be “the real threat to civil order” or that the “populist movement to ‘stop the steal’ of election 2020 is rooted in hate.”   

In the wake of the assault on the Capitol, it has become clear that the American Catholic Church’s narrow focus on the question of abortion is a dead end with serious consequences. It is time to shift the focus to pressing issues like social justice, affordable health care for all, human dignity independent of skin color, gender and sexual orientation, and, last but not least, a fundamental break with the Trump administration’s approach to the global climate crisis. In other words, following in the footsteps of Jesus Christ rather than kowtowing to the likes of Donald Trump and many within the Republican Party who care only about themselves. 

A recent in the Chicago Tribune suggests that this is going to be an uphill battle. When a Catholic priest in Chicago raised uncomfortable questions about the church’s complicity with the Trump administration and the assault on Congress, a significant number of his congregation walked out, clearly unprepared to confront reality. This suggests that the rift in American society extends deep into the country’s Catholic community. This is hardly surprising, giving the polarizing figure of Pope Francis.  What many of his detractors in the Catholic Church have to is that his “theology stems from reality: from the reality of injustice, poverty and the destruction of nature.”

As it happens, the American Catholic Church is a to Pope Francis. This might, in part at least, explain the support of many American Catholics for Donald Trump and the vitriol parts of the Catholic community have directed at Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. Hence the irony that the country’s second Catholic taking over the Oval Office since John F. Kennedy is anathema to so many American Catholics.  

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Who Owns Susan Collins’ Brain?

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One commentator states it in : “Big corporations are deciding they don’t want their campaign contributions being linked to violent insurrections.” This has turned out to be particularly problematic for Republican lawmakers after the scandalous raid on Capitol Hill on January 6. The Washington Post that “Several major companies on Monday said they planned to cut off political donations to the 147 members of Congress who last week voted against certifying the results of the presidential election.” Yahoo Finance notes what may become a as “companies are just beginning to recognize that ‘political spending today poses a really broad risk and a deep risk that they need to manage.’”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Broad risk:

Risk related to the level of awareness of an entire population, as opposed to deep risk that concerns the legal and commercial status of a monopoly or privileged economic position.

Contextual Note

The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, a provider of health insurance to over 100 million people, has now pledged to stop its contributions “to those lawmakers who voted to undermine our democracy.” Critics might point out that health insurance providers have been undermining democracy for decades. They literally control Congress thanks not only to their lobbying efforts but also to the direct campaign contributions needed to obtain the legislation their lobbyists push through Congress.

Will pulling back weaken their chances of getting privileged treatment in the future? The risk is real. But health insurance providers are experts in evaluating risk. They realize that the public’s growing preference for a national single-payer system means they desperately need to improve their moral profile. What better way than to express their indignation at the immorality of politicians?

Yahoo Finance interviewed Bruce Freed, the president of the Center for Political Accountability. Freed asks the fundamental question about what Donald Trump, in his original presidential campaign, referred to as the DC “swamp” that needed draining. “Does this really lead to a fundamental change in the way companies approach their political spending?” Freed calls the recent announcements a “reaction of the moment.” He nevertheless thinks this could be the beginning of a trend. It all depends on how long the public’s indignation lasts as well as how consistently the media give it play.

Wall Street banks have taken the most radical position. Rather than punishing Republicans for their lack of civism, some “have announced steps to back away from giving money to all lawmakers — both Democrats and Republicans — at least for now.” This is undoubtedly an act of pure PR calculation. They must at all costs avoid singling out Republicans for punishment, who have always been the first to do their bidding. Yahoo judges that this “appears to be temporary and could expire before fundraising for the 2022 midterm elections begins in earnest.” In other words, this clearly is PR. It sounds more like a vacation than a strike. Basically, these companies will save some money in the short term, take the time to observe the drift of opinion and think out their strategy just in time for the next midterms.

This entire episode demonstrates how radical Trump’s impact on US institutions has been. The Republican Party has become the principal victim. When Republican elected officials in their majority made the choice of remaining loyal to Trump, they painted themselves into a corner. They accepted Trump’s strategy of polarizing the electorate beyond possible reconciliation. For the past four years, public debate has consistently turned around the extreme positions Trump tweeted on a daily basis. The media lost all interest in rational debate about real political issues. It doesn’t attract eyeballs.

It wasn’t always like this. In the lead-up to the 2016 Republican National Convention, the GOP establishment massively opposed Trump. At the time, commentators speculated about a possible revolt within the party against Trump’s nomination. Party stalwarts even seemed to count on his defeat in the November election to rid the party of its troublemaker. In vain.

When, to Trump’s own surprise, he won against Hillary Clinton, the designated dynastic heiress to the imperial throne as defined by the Democrats, establishment Republicans employed a strategy that consisted of accommodating Trump’s idiosyncrasies while pursuing their traditional goals: tax cuts, militarism and transforming the judiciary. The strategy worked well, indeed too well for the taste of many Republicans. They realized that Trump had become the key to the party’s winning of elections, and they knew for a fact that politics today is about nothing other than winning elections.

Historical Note

This story highlights not just the importance of corporate financing in political campaigns but also the emergence of a culture focused exclusively on electoral success. If the US is still a democracy, it has become literally a democracy of beggars. The needs of the citizens and the methods of good government have taken a back seat to the perennial quest for campaign funding. Members of Congress now spend 67% of their time on . Not only does that mean that they have limited time to do their job as legislators — it also means that their fundraising needs redefine and inevitably pervert their official role in government: representing their constituents.

At best, in their interactions with lobbyists, lawmakers can resist specific demands of their donors on the grounds that what they are requesting would be unacceptable to their voters. What happens then is that, instead of refusing, they will more likely work on the window-dressing that makes policies inimical to their constituents’ interests seem logical, acceptable or simply inevitable. 

This type of beggars’ democracy becomes palatable to many because society itself has become a civilization of beggars fighting for survival in an economy of beggars. Lobbyists themselves are professional beggars, but with clout. The rest of the population has increasingly adapted to the gig economy, which sums up what democratic politics has become. 

Traditional economies owed their stability to a somewhat sclerotic continuity of gainful economic activity. Successive generations in the same family exercised identical vocations. With the advent of the industrial revolution, capitalism worked on the basis of creating a pool of largely uprooted workers begging for a job that had nothing to do with inherited skills. This brought the advantage of flexibility and the capacity of manufacturing to produce more efficiently what generations of artisans could only create on a limited scale. The enclosure system in England forced peasants to towns where manufacturing, exploiting the resources made available through colonial conquest, offered the possibility of employment. The poor of the countryside became the beggars of the town.

The Industrial Revolution created a society that depended on the notion of mass anonymity. It required pools of potential workers who could be available for employment to meet the growing needs of industry. The anonymous masses then had the choice of selecting to invest personally in skill sets that promised possible employment. This relationship has defined the economic system that has prevailed for the past two centuries in the West and now in most of the global economy.

Because anonymity and fluctuations in every marketplace lead to instability, the latest permutation of this model has been the evolution toward the gig economy. Paradoxically, it represents a return to the logic of early capitalism and the policy of subsistence wages. Employers needed simply to ensure that the pool of workers could be physically maintained to continue to meet the needs of production. The policy of subsistence gradually evolved to include cultural factors that contributed to a notion of prosperous and stable subsistence. This permitted the creation of the modern welfare state. But the aggravation of competition and the financialization of the economy ultimately led to the gig society where people sell their time on a piecemeal basis.

Millions of people make their living online. Increasingly, they do it as beggars, offering their services in the hope someone will need them enough to pay. A beggar’s democracy requires a beggar’s economy.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Recruiting an Army for a Civil War

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Even as the United States fashioned an army, a constabulary and an evolving rule of law, the mob continued to define what it meant to be an American. It policed the slave economy. It helped push the borders westward. It formed the shock troops that rolled back Reconstruction. A 20^th-century version of this mob rampaged during the long of violence that stretched from 1917 to 1923. It mobilized against the civil rights movement. And during the Trump era, it has reared its ugly head in Charlottesville, Portland and, last week, on Capitol Hill. America is motherhood, apple pie … and the mob.

Un-American

Last week, many a politician decried the mob violence at the US Capitol as “un-American.” Consider, for instance,  of Kevin McCarthy, House Minority Leader: “This is so un-American. I condemn any of this violence. I could not be sadder or more disappointed with the way our country looks right now. People are getting hurt. Anyone involved in this, if you’re hearing me, hear me loud and clear: This is not the American way.”

McCarthy was not on the same podium with Donald Trump earlier in the day urging on the mob. But he and the president were on the same page between November 3 and January 6. Two days after the election, the California Republican  that Trump had won. Later, he  the outlandish Texas lawsuit to overturn the election results, refused to acknowledge ��������’s win well into 2021, and stood up in the House last week even after the mob retreated to challenge the Electoral College results.

After January 6, McCarthy has tried to put some distance between himself and the rabble. He has been willing to consider an official censure of the president and has also indicated that he won’t try to enforce party unity against an impeachment vote. No doubt McCarthy has shifted his stance because he feared for his own life when the insurrectionists stormed the barricades and invaded his sanctum. Trump, enjoying the images on TV,  McCarthy’s plea to issue a statement calling off his attack dogs. It’s enough to make even the most loyal lapdog bark a different tune.

None of this detracts from the fact that McCarthy, since the election, was the elected representative not of his California district but of the mob. He was their cheerleader, their mouthpiece on the Hill, one of the many suits over the ages who have translated the “will of the people” into official-sounding acts and bills that attempt to preserve the privileges of white people at the expense of everyone else. For that is the beating heart of Trumpism: the Confederate flag, the noose, the closed polling booth, the knee on the neck of non-white America.

The word “mob” makes it sounds as though the violence was perpetrated by a group of mindless rowdies. But there has always been a method to the madness of this particular crowd. Let’s take a closer look at what the latest incarnation of the American mob wants, how it connects to like-minded groups overseas, and what to expect over the next weeks, months and years.

Against the Globalists

At first glance, the people who descended upon Washington to disrupt Congress on January 6 are almost obsessively focused on domestic issues. They’re not so much America First as Trump First. They have turned against anyone in the Republican Party who has abandoned the soon-to-be-ex-president, and that includes the vice president. They are nationalist and parochial. They are also anti-globalist, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t global in their strategizing, their connections and their aspirations.

One of the core components of the Stop the Steal coalition is QAnon, an amorphous global network that believes that another amorphous global network — of Satanic child molesters — somehow controls the levers of international power. What started out as a conspiracy theory centered on Donald Trump as a St. George figure battling a devilish dragon went global in 2020, attracting adherents in by August. One German QAnon group counts 120,000 members in its Telegram account.

Another key member of the coalition is a bloc of white nationalists and militia members that encompasses accelerationists like the Boogaloo Bois, who want to spur a race war to bring down the liberal status quo, and organizations like the Proud Boys that emphasize male supremacy. These groups have  over the last decade in Canada, Europe, Russia, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere.

Prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, these chauvinists united around a “great replacement” narrative according to which immigrants and people of color are determined to “replace” white people through migration, higher birthrates or sheer pushiness. When the border closures around the pandemic reduced the salience of the immigration issue, the great replacement became a less useful organizing tool.

It was into this vacuum that QAnon became the conspiracy theory de jour. Meanwhile, the far right shifted its discourse on “globalists” to challenge their approach to COVID-19, their deference to the Chinese and their proposed “reset” of the global economy — anything to deflect attention from the obvious failures of the nationalist populists who headed up the countries with the highest number of infections and deaths: the United States, Brazil, India, Russia and the United Kingdom.

Although they often disagree about particulars, this array of groups is united by an animus against government. They supported Trump not as the head of government but as someone opposed to government. And they adored him because he didn’t just hate the US government and the elites that staff it, but global governance as well. The “deep state” was always a canard. The far right despised the liberal state, full stop. Trump attracted an even wider following by squaring off against the expert class: the uppity journalists and fact-bound scientists and Hollywood liberals and hand-wringing academics. Burn it all down, Trump’s followers demanded.

Inside-Outside Game

Trump in government, however, represented a certain check on the most ambitious impulses of the far right. True, during his reign, extremists have come out into the streets to protest economic shutdowns, masking ordinances and Black Lives Matter mobilizations. Some extremists planned more violent interventions, like kidnapping the governor of Michigan. But with the administration on its side, with the Senate in Republican hands and with Republicans controlling the vast majority of state legislatures, the far right focused its wrath selectively. It played the ultimate inside-outside game.

After the November election, with Trump on his way out of power, the far right no longer has to place any caveats on its anti-government impulses. First came an attack on Congress, not coincidentally on the very day that the Republicans lost their Senate majority. Next, the far right is planning an armed march on Washington and all 50 state capitols on January 17. To cap it off, a Million Militia March is planned for Inauguration Day.

What happened on January 6 was, despite some prior planning, a disorganized coup attempt. What comes next may well be more precisely planned, which may result in a focus on the weakest links rather than the most potent symbols, just as the Oregon extremists chose the easily occupied Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in January 2016 rather than the heavily guarded state capitol building.

The storming of the US Capitol, meanwhile, has proven to be a great winnower. The fainthearted, like Kevin McCarthy, have proven to be chaff, as has a number of previously ardent Trump supporters. According to  conducted after the attack, “a quarter of Trump voters agree that actions should be taken to immediately remove him from office. Further, 41% of Trump voters believe he has ‘betrayed the values and interests of the Republican Party.’” This is an extraordinarily rapid fissure in what had hitherto been an impregnable base of support for Trump.

What remains is a revolutionary core. They won’t muster enough force to make a difference over the next two weeks, not against the  likely to be deployed to Washington, DC, for Joe Biden’s inauguration. After the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August 2017, the far right couldn’t handle the avalanche of criticism and could barely muster a couple of dozen extremists for a rally one year later in DC. But it has since altered its messaging and its strategy. Expect even more adaptation over the next months and years.

What Comes Next

The idea that the Civil War was a “war of Northern aggression” has survived 150 years of civic, political and media education to the contrary. A large section of white Southerners, and even a few folks outside the region, cling to their “lost cause” much as Serbian nationalists mourn their defeat on the plain of Kosovo in 1389, Hungarians rail against the loss of territory after the Trianon Treaty of 1920, and the Japanese and German far right has bridled at the “outside interference” that robbed their nations of a measure of sovereignty after World War II.

Prepare for the “stolen election” narrative to serve a similar function for the Forever Trumpers. This narrative of an unfair political system ties together many of the far right’s themes: liberal institutions are fundamentally broken and corrupted, the mainstream media is compliant in tilting the playing field, and the globalists will do anything to regain power from “the people.” Note, too, how these messages can appeal to a left also angry at the status quo, and you can understand why so many people who voted for Bernie Sanders switched to Trump and why the European far right have harvested votes from previous bastions of the communist parties.

Such appeals to fairness — a stolen election is above all unfair — conceal the racist, sexist and otherwise exclusionary content of the far right’s agenda. An explicitly fascist platform has considerably less broad-based appeal than a cry to right a wrong. Over the next four years, the far right will beat this drum of political illegitimacy. It will claim that nothing the Biden administration does will be legal or constitutional because of its original sin of ascension via a stolen election.

The fallout from January 6 will continue to divide the Republican Party. But the opportunity to brand the Democrats as illegitimate will prove just too addictive to be ignored. Consider the attacks on Obamacare or the successful effort to block Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Even in the face of overwhelming counterevidence, the Republicans hammered on the illegitimacy of the Democratic initiatives. A “stolen election” caucus, composed of the congressional members who survive a corporate and fundraiser boycott, will attempt to pull the Republican Party further to the right, just as the Tea Party did during the Obama era.

The international ramifications of this strategy are equally worrisome. The far right attacks governments not only because they are liberal in the sense of providing government “handouts,” but because they follow liberal principles of governance — checks and balances, free press, rights to gather and express dissent. Trump’s attacks on January 6 were not just seditious. They were designed to transform his position and that of the GOP into something resembling the United Russia party and Vladimir Putin’s leadership for life. Trump has always wanted to build a Moscow or a Budapest or an Ankara or a Managua on the Potomac: iron-fisted leadership, no serious political opposition, a cowering press, a cult of personality. He thought he saw his opportunity on January 6.

This is also the ultimate goal of the mob. It doesn’t want anarchy, except as an interim strategy. It wants a strong hand on the tiller, as if Trump were the Great Helmsman guiding the country in a Great Leap Forward (or backward, given that a mob’s sense of direction is never very precise). Trump’s hands, however, are being wrenched from the tiller. Even better, he is being abandoned by leading members of his party, his social media enablers, his financial backers and his corporate sponsors. His ambition having overleapt itself, Trump has stumbled, irrevocably. The mob is taking note, even as it falls back to protect its wounded leader.

For the next four years, prepare for the mob and its political representatives to rely on street power to identify, campaign for and put into office their next Great White Hope. What’s more quintessentially American than that?

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post America: Motherhood, Apple Pie and the Mob appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

First thought:

Often the most pertinent idea resulting from strong intuition, but sometimes exactly the kind of misguided musing no serious person would ever want to admit having allowed to cross their mind unless their aim was to cast doubt on the idea that they even possess a mind.

Contextual Note

Susan Collins may be spending too much time listening to recent speeches by Mike Pompeo or remembering past pronouncements of John Bolton. In her op-ed, she claims that she was “well aware that emotions were running high because of the president’s repeated claims that the election was ‘stolen,’ despite the fact that approximately 90 judges, including the Supreme Court justices, had ruled otherwise.” That would be enough of a clue for most intelligent people when the rumbling of mutiny began to become audible inside the Capitol on January 6.

Even with that knowledge, the only credible explanation that popped into Collins’s brain was that it was an attack by Iran. Had she been a Democrat, she probably would have assumed that it was Vladimir Putin in person trying to break down the doors, armed, of course with a hammer, and sickle. But Collins is a Republican. Each party sees its own preferred goblins under the stairs.

Cody Fenwick, for Alternet, judges that Collins “underestimated the true threat of Trump’s radicalism and right-wing extremism, and she is likely overestimating the threat posed from countries like Iran.” But it wasn’t about rational risk assessment. Collins’ comment tells us something deeper about how politicians think. First thoughts belong to the same family of mental events as Freudian slips.

They reveal processes that are anchored in a region of impulses and automatic reflexes that sits below the faculty of reasoning and decision-making. Politicians possess a Freudian unconscious meticulously programmed by their party’s ideology and propaganda. It can even prevent them from seeing or seeking to understand what is happening around them.

Collins knew on that day that thousands of members of her own party were mobilizing to protest Trump’s electoral defeat. Unless she exists in a different universe, she knew something about who they were and how MAGA crowds and the adepts of QAnon typically behave. In her eyes, they were known to be rowdy, but they weren’t evil. As Trump himself had said concerning the events in Charlottesville: “There were good people on both sides.” 

Despite that knowledge, her programmed logic assumed that an assault on the US government could only be attributable to a force officially classified as “evil.” It’s a time-honored Republican tradition. Reagan programmed the nation to fear the “empire of evil.” George W. Bush called it an “axis of evil.” And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who now that “al-Qaeda has a new home base in Iran,” has been pushing the idea that Iran is the center of the axis. He added a more sinister commentary: “I would say Iran is indeed the new Afghanistan.” Afghanistan is a code word for “justified war.” 

Since the Cold War, US foreign policy requires the inculcation of a Manichaean mythology that fixes in people’s brains the idea of a metaphysical combat between pure existential good (the US and at least one of its allies, Israel) and pure existential evil. Iran has been at the top of the rankings for the Trump administration, if only because of Obama’s shameful “Iran deal.” Al-Qaeda, of course, has remained the symbol of absolute evil since 9/11. This is true even when the US provides al-Qaeda’s affiliates with weapons in Syria, because Bashar-al-Assad, as the head of state, is even more evil.

Balance is always important. Giving all the publicity to evil would be wrong. In her breathtaking account of the Senators’ daring escape from imagined Iranians, Collins also finds a way of highlighting the existence of pure existential good. She recounts the charming story of how Senator Todd Young, a Marines veteran, “moved over near Sen. Lisa Murkowski and me. Only later did I learn that he was positioning himself to repel the rioters and defend us.”

As Joe Biden would say, God bless the troops. America’s military heroes, even after choosing a political career, are always ready to act when an evil enemy is at the door. This may help to explain why an overwhelming majority in Congress voted to override Donald Trump’s veto and approve the $740-billion Defense Authorization Act in December. After all, without that bloated expenditure, it is likely that there would be fewer well-trained warriors in the Senate to protect defenseless damsels in distress.

In the end, the Iranians hadn’t mounted the nuclear attack all Americans (and Israelis) fear, or even a non-nuclear attack. The MAGA fanatics never managed to reach a single lawmaker. All was well that ended well, or at least not too badly, with only a handful of fatalities of unimportant people. It gave Collins the opportunity to vaunt her own bravery. She and her colleagues courageously stayed on to finish the job and defend the Constitution. As she proudly announces, “There was no way I was going to let these thugs succeed in their attempt to disrupt the constitutional process and undermine our democracy.”

Historical Note

Collins never tells us whether the heroic Senator Young also believed it was the Iranians pounding on the doors of the Capitol. Her harrowing tale is nevertheless worth reading. It evokes the atmosphere of the Viking siege of Paris in 885, when the monks at the Abbey of St. Germain des Pres woke up to discover a host of marauding Norsemen. Collins’ account may not be the equal of the lengthy by the Benedictine monk, Abbo Cernuus, “Bella Parisiacae Urbis,” but it does give an idea of the frightening unexpectedness of the threat.

Senator Young never had to step up to play the role of Count Odo or Bishop Gauzlin, two heroes who had some initial success displaying their prowess to fend off the invaders. The Viking siege lasted for nearly two years before the Holy Roman emperor, Charles le Gros (Charles the Fat), intervened and bought them off with £700 of silver — an astronomical sum at the time — complemented by a land grant at Rouen, on the condition that they leave Paris to the Parisians.

When the Vikings arrived in Paris with an estimated 12,000 men on 300 ships, they simply requested free passage to sail further up the Seine. The authorities refused, and, for the following two years, mayhem and slaughter became the norm in and around Paris. When the dust finally settled, the Norseman appeared pleased with the gift of what would become the Duchy of Normandy. The Norman nation quickly prospered. Within two generations, all Normans spoke French and, a century later, in 1066, they conquered England, a nation whose people never managed to master French grammar. Nevertheless, centuries later, the British, possibly inspired by William the Conqueror, used their own ships to subject much of the world, including the Indian subcontinent and the east coast of North America, to their rule and their language.

One protester who penetrated the Senate chambers donned an impressive costume inspired by Viking mythology. He sat down in the vice president’s chair. The latter-day Viking provided the imagery to make the event legitimately hyperreal. Whether last week’s assault turns into the equivalent of the Viking siege of Paris over the next two years remains to be seen. For one thing, we are all wondering what Donald the Fat will do after being released from the White House. Will his Vikings offer us a new episode of hyperreality TV or even a lambent civil war? Will Joe Biden befriend the evil Iranians? The world is waiting for the next episode. 

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Who Owns Susan Collins’ Brain? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

A Perspective on America’s Imperfect Democracy

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However, neither a good government nor actual good governance is even close to being assured. First, there will be those, maybe President Biden himself, who will speak to a moderate response to what we have witnessed over the last days and years, and the terrible toll it has taken on so many people. I hope that voices of immoderation prevail when order is restored, at least until the seeds of public accountability have taken root. The good news will not last beyond the virtual inauguration parade unless the new president has nerves of steel and no, I repeat, no illusions about governing in partnership with Republicans in some faux display of “unity.”

Immoderate Actions

Moderated responses to immoderate actions are doomed to fail and serve only to further enable those willing to destroy to achieve their ends. In the instant case, there must be a quick and decisive immoderate response, albeit a non-violent response freed from revenge as its motive. That response must be seen as urgent and restorative. If not, this moment will be lost, and the nation will again descend into governmental dysfunction in the face of the multiple challenges of the pandemic, economic disarray, systemic racism and social injustice.

As we anticipate a new day dawning, one of the vestiges of days past should disappear from our discourse — the notion of alternate reality. Not only is there no such thing, but there cannot be such a thing, unless there are also alternate facts. There is reality and there is fantasy. When willful ingestion of fantasy overwhelms reality to drive political agendas and actions, you get the United States of America. It is simply time for this to end.

The nation cannot expect to move forward while treading water beneath the surface. We must find a way to rescue those souls drowning in a sea of fantasy largely of their own making. I love the First Amendment, but this crucial foundation of America’s constitutional democracy was adopted in 1791. Other than falsely shouting “fire” in a crowded theater, there is little public knowledge about the limitations of free speech, including the extent to which provoking insurrection in a crowded city is protected by the First Amendment. Further, it bears noting that neither the internet nor social media was around in 1791, and that the is a prohibition only of governmental activity even in its broadest reading.

Without attempting a First Amendment primer, it is safe to say that a great many people in America’s delusional home of free speech believe that the right to freedom of speech is some kind of absolute. Since it is not an absolute and has next to nothing to do with private action, it should be safe to note that there is a lot of room to debate the extent to which America’s vile social media cesspool can be subject to limitation and control. Whatever else can be said, the First Amendment is not a license to monetize “free” speech, nor is it a shield that amoral peddlers of snake oil can use to avoid responsibility for the damage caused by their wares.

Postmortem

Since much of the fantasy at large in the land, including the fantasies that brought armed thugs to the US Capitol, has been well documented for quite some time, the postmortem review should take a hard look at why it took an armed insurrection to expose a fundamental flaw in the notion that “moderation” can be an effective response to venal delusion when that delusion takes hold in the body politic. And, further, it should consider why it took an armed insurrection to finally raise the stakes on those who generate, spread, consume and defend the fantasies.

Then there is the tactical disconnect apparent in law enforcement planning and the initial response to what readily should have been seen as a clear and present threat of violence. A mob of white insurrectionists storms the Capitol, with little to no resistance. Meanwhile, pleas for assistance are , and the insurrectionists are allowed to calmly walk away from the battered scene of their crime carrying their spoils of war. The inciter-in-chief is absent from the fray, watching it all on television, while his Marie Antoinette seem-a-like is finishing a White House furnishings photo shoot.

So it goes in benighted America. I can hardly wait for the next Black Lives Matter protest that threatens prompt service at a coffee shop where the police move in to forcefully restore “law and order” at a point of a gun and arrest everyone who is black or cares about pervasive racism. Being a black protester in America just got even more perplexing. Perhaps the key to “peaceful” protest is to wrap yourself and your cause in the American flag or some flag-branded garb that says you and your cause are not a threat to law enforcement or to its cause.

There finally may be enough palpable outrage among some in the nation’s political class, maybe enough to ensure the security of the presidential inauguration. Meanwhile, the scum is fleeing from Trump’s orbit, leaving in their wake a dysfunctional national government, over 380,000 coronavirus deaths, a vaccination free-for-all and ever-lengthening food lines. I hope that all will be investigated, their professional lives ruined and the guilty eventually charged. That is what accountability looks like to me.

However, accountability cannot be complete until Donald Trump, his grifter family and his acolytes are driven from our midst, charged with crimes where applicable and shamed into irrelevance. Trump’s second impeachment should be just the beginning. That may seem immoderate, but so be it.

*[This article was cross-posted on the author’s blog, .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Trump’s Impeachment Should Be Just the Beginning appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Pearl Harbor allowed the United States into what until then had been largely a European conflict. The US subsequently became the dominant force in the Second World War and then the world, after ushering in the nuclear age with a shocking and scientifically sadistic attack on the civilian populations of two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The JFK assassination cleared the path for two other game-changing events: Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam and the flowering of the hippie movement. Combined, these marked an important stage in shattering the trust Americans formerly had in their institutions, a trend that has continued ever since. 

Flashpoint America: What the Hell Is Happening?

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The attacks of 9/11 provided the scheming neocons and their pliant president, George W. Bush, with the pretext for spreading endless wars across the Middle East. It was designed as an intended display of virile might but turned into a failed and futile melodrama that, in the eyes of most of humanity, seriously undermined the vaunted moral authority of a nation that for two centuries had claimed to be the “beacon of democracy.”

An by Emma Grey Ellis in Wired, “The DC Mobs Could Become a Mythologized Recruitment Tool,” points to one of the possible long-term consequences of last week’s event. Ellis cites Shannon Reid, a researcher of the phenomenon of street gangs and white power at UNC Charlotte: “My fear is that this moment will die down and everyone will think we’re OK. Really this [riot] was a recruitment tool, a part of a mythology that is going to grow.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Recruitment:

Conversion to an extreme, violent ideology of people who realize — though with limited understanding — that the respectable institutions controlling their lives and to which they are expected to pledge allegiance have no interest in their well-being, and even less in recruiting them for gainful employment.

Contextual Note

One commentator cited in the article notes how an event that achieved nothing evokes a positive reaction from the extreme right, suggesting that “The hardened neo-Nazis on Telegram are over the moon that this all happened. They feel like it’s going to radicalize millions of boomer-tier people. They’re kind of scolding the boomers: ‘You tried to work through the system, but now you’re radicalized along with us.’”

The FBI has now warned that thousands of Trump supporters and election deniers are currently organizing armed protests across the nation, seeking to make a furious show of force before Joe ��������’s inauguration. But they don’t see it as a one-time event. The movement will continue and possibly grow in the coming months. Its participants share a mentality of civil war. After four years of Trumpian fireworks in the media, these rebels — many of them well-trained war veterans inured to righteous violence — simply cannot imagine the nation in the hands of someone other than The Donald, who in their eyes has become the symbol of American assertiveness.

Sociologist Cynthia Miller-Idriss sees this event as confirming “a swing back toward anti-government extremism.” She believes it is “creating odd coalitions.” With his usual reflexive mendacity, when Trump sought to for the storming of the Capitol, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy immediately contradicted him. Nevertheless, while it is unlikely that antifa and the MAGA crowd could ever agree on coordinating their studied nihilism, a certain convergence in their mutual capacity for discord seems possible.

The main victims of the growing disorder will be the vast majority of Americans and, more particularly, the significant swaths of the population who are seriously interested in reforming, if not transforming, a system whose injustices seem patent and the indifference of the moneyed elites only too evident. The entire black and Hispanic communities will be the first to suffer since the most likely immediate response will be to impose heightened surveillance and more aggressive policing in the name of national security, following the precedent of 9/11.

The hopes that were awakened last year with the popularity of the Black Lives Matter movement following the death of George Floyd will be dashed by the combined force of COVID-19, tightened security and official suspicion of anything that isn’t resolutely middle-of-the-road during the Biden presidency.

Racial injustice and wealth inequality will be put on the back burner. That should surprise no one, but the coronavirus crisis and the George Floyd protests led many to believe that some form of positive change was about to emerge. For once, the government seemed to show awareness of the needs of a population that the pandemic had cast into the gulf of uncertainty created by unbridled free market capitalism. 

The Biden administration will immediately focus on the evident danger of right-wing radicalism that drew its energy from the personality of Donald Trump but has now achieved a life of its own. But an aggressive attempt to throttle it may aggravate its attraction. Right-wing militias are more the symptom than the problem. The deeper issue lies in the fact that a significant portion of the population places more of its hope in hard drugs, opioids, suicide missions and the rage of the mob than it does in government reforms.

Historical Note

Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the 9/11 attacks 60 years later had the effect of immediately designating an enemy Americans felt must be countered with force. The Japanese attack provided the US with a ticket to a world war that had started in Europe. From then on, it concerned the entire Northern Hemisphere. In a similar fashion, 9/11 provided the pretext for an undefined global war on terror that has prolonged its effects in both violent and profoundly insidious ways ever since, sapping the nation’s morale.

The JFK assassination is the outlier in that series of traumatic events. What happened in Dallas in November 1963 was engineered to appear as a purely domestic murder mystery. By focusing on a single designated killer, it succeeded in masking its true historical significance. Nevertheless, the Kennedy assassination produced a powerful effect on the international as well as the domestic front. It cleared the path for the Vietnam War. The combined force of the assassination and the war stimulated the creation of a counterculture that turned many of the reigning values in US society on their head.

As the year 2021 begins, marked by nervous anticipation of Joe ��������’s arrival at the White House, the consequences and eventual lessons of last week’s insurrection will begin to emerge. At the time of this writing, the FBI is anticipating violence in all 50 states. Where that will lead, nobody knows. At the same time, the stability of both political parties appears to be seriously compromised. It will take months and perhaps years to assess the consequences of what may become known as .

Commentators, even those favorable to the Republicans, admit that this is the one event history is likely to associate with Donald Trump’s presidency. Others fear that the events of January 6 were simply the initial skirmish of a struggle that will play out with growing anarchy over the months and even years to come, in what may be a muted civil war.

Some specific issues related to the riot will undoubtedly be addressed. Action will be taken to strengthen the protocols for the protection of public sites. The behavior and training of law enforcement and security personnel will be reviewed once again. But any of the specific issues will pale in significance to the growing awareness of the studied indifference to the concerns of the people on the part of those who make the laws, to say nothing of their corrupt complicity with the moneyed interests that have the means to influence, if not dictate, the laws. Given their level of education, the team Joe Biden has recruited should have the intellectual capacity to grasp these issues. Will it be able to summon the resolve to deal with them?

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Recruiting an Army for a Civil War appeared first on 51�Թ�.

From there, we develop baselines that hypothetically stress these conditions, indicating the potential for instability. When these conditions exist in prolonged disparity, indicators and warnings start to present themselves. Sometimes, they are glaring and obvious; other times, they are subtle and nuanced. Nonetheless, it is safe to say that the indicators and warnings have been flashing red for some time in the United States.

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This is not to say that domestic intelligence and policy professionals spread across federal and local law enforcement were completely oblivious to them but rather that self-assessment is the hardest form of assessment. Americans typically lack the ability to reflect inward and analyze their own biases, prejudices and subjectivity against the prevailing political, security and economic conditions, especially at home. The January 6 attack on the US Capitol proved this.

Knowing this — even when we won’t admit it — what are we looking for as we assess this new political and security reality? Nothing has changed the underlying conditions between the storming of US Congress and today, and with a of Trump voters claiming sympathy with the attempted coup, we’re in for a rough road ahead. Assessing this situation as strategic intelligence and foreign policy professionals, however, gives us some insight to help structure our thinking for what might come next.

Political Intractability

Countries manifesting instability have moved past the point of political entrenchment into the realm of political intractability. The former is used by politicians seeking to legislate by obstruction, while the latter is driven by underlying grievances that have become too extreme to resolve. With millions of Trump loyalists and Republican lawmakers still beholden to a president who refuses to concede his defeat in a fair election, there are not many opportunities to seek effective political resolution — especially when one side refuses to accept the legitimacy of the incoming administration.

Democrats, on the other hand, are completely resolute in their plans to impeach Trump and remove him from office with little more than a week to go before his term officially ends. Neither party is willing to back down, and there is no mechanism at any level seeking meaningful de-escalation. This means tensions will remain elevated, grievances solidified and positions hardened, giving leaders on both sides an inordinate amount of power to antagonize around their own political goals and objectives. As we saw last week, the destructive power of this can be harnessed and directed with relative ease. 

Law Enforcement Failures

One of the measurements we always gauge stability against is the competency of the security forces, including law enforcement and the military. There were so many law-enforcement and intelligence failures last week, that it is almost impossible to pick a starting point. In fact, one could make the argument that the failures were so extreme as to suggest complicity, which might prove true in time.

As we now know, intelligence was discarded and ignored. In just one example, an FBI field office in Virginia issued an internal memo on January 5, warning that radicalized extremists were headed to the capital to commit “war.” As The Washington Post , “Yet even with that information in hand, the report’s unidentified author expressed concern that the FBI might be encroaching on free speech rights.” The shocking implicit bias inherent in the author’s assessment points to the absolute failure in accurately identifying contemporary threats of this nature.

In addition, there are now currently two Capitol Police officers suspended and 10 more under investigation. We have all seen the videos of cops taking selfies with the rioters, opening gates and providing assistance in the halls of Congress. This failure is not just tactical. It would be naive to believe that the same politics that powered the events of January 6 are not working their way through law enforcement agencies across the country — more so since Trump has unreservedly backed the police during the Black Lives Matter protests this summer. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that cops from , and are currently under investigation for being part of the Capitol Hill insurrection.

Reality Deficits

Communications and the media, especially when it comes to social networking platforms, are the forward edge of all modern conflict dynamics and play a key role in the stability of a nation in crisis, either reassuring anxious citizens or agitating the same population into action. We are now locked into an endless cycle of misinformation, disinformation and propaganda, pushed by media channels and social networks that are fueling vast conspiracy theories such as QAnon. These so-called have become so extreme that they have distorted reality, compelled radicalization and created an echo-chamber lifestyle for those who feel politically disposed of.

Politicians openly supporting QAnon have been into office. One such politician has even been of tweeting the exact location of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during the storming of Congress. Unfortunately, as we learned during the propaganda war with the Islamic State, the advantage is always with the home team. While shutting down social media channels is a temporary solution, it does not address the root causes of radicalization and only increases the sense of grievance, forcing these networks into new digital spaces that are harder to monitor. Indeed, since last Wednesday, extremists have already moved to encrypted messaging like Telegram to plan new actions ahead of Joe ��������’s inauguration next week.

White Supremacy

Assessing ideologies unique to specific countries and regions is an important tool in measuring stability. Here in the US, there is no more malignant and pervasive ideology than white supremacy. There is a reason why newly elected Republican Representative Mary Miller, one day before the coup, felt comfortable giving a speech on the steps of Congress positively Adolf Hitler.

Everything that cascades from white supremacy, including white grievance, remains the single largest threat the US currently faces. In a from October, the Department of Homeland Security said that white supremacists “remain the most persistent and lethal threat in the homeland.” In November, the Center for Strategic and International Studies published a identifying that 41 of 61 terrorist plots and attacks recorded in the first eight months of this year were perpetrated by white supremacists. All of this indicates that right-wing extremists continue to have the motivation to plan and execute acts of violence.

Since President Donald Trump is heavily invested in the politics of white supremacy and, given the intersection it shares with conspiracy theories over his election loss, there is nothing to suggest that this kind of extremist violence will abate any time soon. Furthermore, law enforcement does not have a particularly strong track record in disrupting threats that originate with white supremacist groups, even going back to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. This is in stark contrast to the nearly of police violence against the Black Lives Matter protesters just last summer, indicating a heavy bias in assessing threats from groups such as these.

Economic Hardship

Economic anxiety is a potent motivator in driving instability, if not its single most important indicator. It is important to remember that the events on Capitol Hill took place against the backdrop of the pandemic, economic hardship and a government paralyzed by intractability. Almost 22 million Americans have their jobs due to COVID-19, and the Pew Research Center at the end of September that half of those people still remain unemployed.

While the coronavirus remains politically neutral, the economic messaging between the two sides has been deeply partisan and tribal, casting both as victims of the other. Nothing raises the stakes for instability like people believing their lost livelihood is the fault of another group. Combine this with the government’s horrifying mismanagement of the pandemic, a nonsensical economic assistance package and ongoing conspiracies surrounding the virus, and you have all of the ingredients for continued tensions and hostility among different factions of the political spectrum.

There are traditions and customs that have proven effective against future instability. These include the military acknowledging the rightful transition of power, the courts upholding the rule of law and election officials not succumbing to executive pressure to alter election results. But these safeguards are only as good as the people behind them, and without any national platform to de-escalate and with tensions at this level, the potential for overreach and miscalculation is unavoidable. Should there be another spectacular event like the coup attempt of January 6, then groups on both sides will retreat deeper into fringe positions where their only recourse will be more violence as a means of perceived self-protection.

Each of these indicators and their subsequent warnings alone would be enough to raise the worry levels of a strategic intelligence or foreign policy professional assessing a volatile situation abroad. Unfortunately for us, this time, the turbulence is not in some faraway place, but at home.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Flashpoint America: What the Hell Is Happening? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

We now know that she was a prime target alongside Pence, whom the crowd was seeking to . In other words, it wasn’t a protest or an occupation, but a potentially murderous assault on lawmakers.

Death of an Insurrection Salesman

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Most analysts focused on the rioters themselves and the link with President Donald Trump, who commanded the crowd to gather at the Capitol and prepare for a fight. Pelosi peered further into the evil plot, demonstrating an investigative acuity worthy of Sherlock Holmes. Not only did she connect the threads dangling for the past four years inside the brains of prominent Democrats — a list that includes Adam Schiff, Chuck Schumer and herself — her far-sighted global perspicacity bore its most compelling fruit when she identified the Moriarty of the tale, the hidden ringleader no one in Washington or the media dared mention, but only she could suspect: Vladimir Putin.

On her congressional website, Pelosi laid out in her impeccable logic: “And the message that it sent to the world, a complete tool of Putin, this President is. Putin’s goal was to diminish the role of — the view of democracy in the world. That’s what he has been about. And, again, his enabler has been Donald Trump for a long time.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Enabler:

A useful idiot who only exists to do the bidding of the true puppet master responsible (in a paranoid person’s imagination) for everything considered wrong with the world.

Contextual Note

On her website, Pelosi added a few more details to cement her claim: “That’s why I said in that photo when I’m leaving his meeting, ‘With you, Mr. President, all roads lead to Putin.’ Putin wants to undermine democracy.  That’s what he’s about domestically and internationally. And the President gave him the biggest of all of his many gifts to Putin, the biggest gift, yesterday.”

If politics, especially in Washington, has become incorrigibly hyperreal, there are times when, thanks to voices like Pelosi’s, it also becomes surreal. Many members of last week’s mob were agitated by their quasi-religious belief in the conspiratorial ravings of QAnon. All were motivated by the belief that President Trump had charged them with a mission to restore order (by creating disorder). Inside the building were people like Pelosi, Schiff and Schumer, who have long been entertaining their own conspiracy theory. Four years on, that repeated mantra known as Russiagate has come to resemble a mental disorder.

As a significant segment of the American population was intent on demonstrating not just “who we are” (Joe ��������’s expressed concern) but “how we think” (irrationally) and “how we behave” (rowdily), Pelosi was turning the investigation of a crime into a casus belli, a call for war with Russia. This suggests that the soon-to-be-enthroned Biden administration, with militaristic hawks, may be tempted to be the tail that wags the dog, promoting a costly and risky new Cold War leveled not against Trump’s declared enemies, Iran and Venezuela, but against the nation whose economy and system of oligarchy was put in place and managed by , and spies.

Donald Trump’s seditious criminal actions last week should not be understated. Though Republicans deny the gravity of Trump’s role, AP correctly it in these terms: “The mob got explicit marching orders from Trump and still more encouragement from the president’s men.” The article quotes Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s exhortation, “Let’s have trial by combat.” It mentions the active role former Trump associate Roger Stone and National Security Adviser Michael Flynn played in instructing the crowds to fight “a battle between good and evil.”

Pelosi’s fantasy that Donald Trump’s motives boiled down to fulfilling Putin’s designs clearly belongs to the realm of conspiracy theories. That Russian or Chinese leaders might have a feeling of schadenfreude as they watched the events unfold would surprise no one. But hinting at a causal connection is not just irresponsible but a symptom of psychosis. Does the 25^th Amendment apply to the speaker of the House? If American voters are condemned to selecting which of the two parties’ conspiracy theories they prefer as the basis of the policy they will be governed by, it is fair to say that the decline of US democracy is nearly complete.

Historical Note

The richly diplomaed Democrats at the highest level of national politics know for a fact that Russia is no longer the communist Soviet Union. But they also appear to believe that the Americans who vote for them haven’t yet caught up with the news. The occasional made even by people in the intelligence community reveals that Americans are still prone to categorizing Russia as the ideological enemy of the US. The reflexes spread through the media for half a century during the Cold War still exist. Politicians who see the advantage of appealing to those reflexes will not hesitate to do so.

Every administration since the end of World War II has required the existence of a stable enemy that the media could highlight and instill in people’s minds as the principal threat to the integrity of US democracy, if only to justify the increasingly bloated military budget. This has never been more true than over the past two decades, in which the amount spent by the Pentagon has in reality — when something called “adjustments” are taken into account — consistently exceeded by as much as a multiple of three the allocated budget.

This week, in an with Lee Camp, the economist Mark Skidmore explained how the audit he conducted with Laurence Kotlikoff revealed that over a 15-year period, the Defense Department had effectively that appeared in its accounts in the category of adjustments.

 Kotlikoff admitted that the team of auditors was “left with having to decide whether or not we ‘trust’ that government authorities are sharing accurate information.” He added that “Greater transparency is needed to re-establish public trust. Instead, we are blocked from accessing any further information.” 

Given this betrayal of trust, should anyone be surprised that large segments of the US population refuse to believe the statistics presented to them by the government and the media? The rioters on Capitol Hill knew nothing about the scandal of the Pentagon’s true budget. They believed, thanks to Trump’s lies, that the election had been rigged. But their action reflects a more general breakdown in the trust Americans now have in their institutions.

If the real budget of the Pentagon is closer to $2 trillion than to the voted on at the end of December, it would be true to say that Congress and the House majority leader, Nancy Pelosi, have been playing the role of “enabler” of a monumental fraud that has consequences far beyond the dickering of the two parties over fictional budgets. The true accounting gives us an idea of the real cost of a military presence across the entire globe. The Pentagon’s figures dwarf the amounts allocated to social needs. It isn’t only about dollars, but about trust. The US now has no choice but to see enemies everywhere, which means paranoia has become the norm.

As the Trump White House gives way to the Biden regime and new questions of how many trillions of dollars will be required for a new stimulus, the population will be expecting a new transparency based on something that reflects tangible reality rather than fictional plots. Every new administration promises to rebuild public trust. Trump said he would clear the swamp but simply made the air around it poisonous. Building trust is easier to accomplish when leaders agree to rid themselves of their dependence on paranoid delusions.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Who Is Nancy Pelosi Enabling? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

What better way to consolidate his image than to demonstrate his unbending loyalty to a waning and helpless Donald Trump? The calculation made sense on the purely strategic level. But the son of a banker who launched his career as a lawyer thanks to diplomas from Stanford and Yale will always be unlikely to break free from his status as a captive of the cultural elite he hails from. Like Trump, though clearly better educated, Hawley is a calculating egoist and a faux populist.

To bridge the gap between the elite he represents and the working class he hoped to seduce, Hawley made one gamble too many. He earned quite a few brownie points with the working class when he challenged some of the monopolies that dominate not just the US and international economy, but also its political culture. But when he decided to prove his commitment to the enthusiasts who regard Trump as the messiah by backing and actively promoting Trump’s refusal to concede the election, his misunderstanding of the movement he was hoping to seduce caused his strategy to explode in his face.

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NBC summed it up with this : “Sen. Josh Hawley becomes a pariah on Capitol Hill.” Things quickly got worse. The publisher Simon and Schuster has canceled the publication of Hawley’s book, “The Tyranny of Big Tech,” which was intended to bolster his position as a bold reformer. Hawley, a constitutional lawyer and former attorney general of Missouri, feels morally offended. He has to take this profound injustice to court. He sees it not only as a violation of his constitutional rights under the First Amendment but also as proof that the nation has succumbed to the forces of evil and become the dystopia described by George Orwell in his 1949 novel, “1984.”

In his tweet denouncing Simon and Schuster Hawley complained: “This could not be more Orwellian. I was representing my constituents, leading a debate on the Senate floor on voter integrity, which they have now decided to rebrand as sedition.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Voter integrity:

The sacred principle at the core of a democracy that the manipulation of elections is only legitimate when the party that stands for the true values of the nation conducts that manipulation.

Contextual Note

Hawley’s crime was unquestionably gross. He intended to use supposedly serious constitutional reasoning to justify a thesis that was nothing more than a conspiracy theory spread by a narcissist to whom a lot of people had vowed their loyalty. Worse, the entire nation was by then aware that the Barnumesque charade led by Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani since the November election had seriously compromised a transition that every sane person knew was necessary for the stability of the government and political continuity. Most Trump supporters were resigned to seeing Biden take over while maintaining the hope that Trump might run again in 2024.

But Hawley was so committed to his own cause that he failed to see how it would inevitably and tragically spin out of control. And when the tragedy unfolded, all he could offer was the absurdly comic show of indignation that has so often been in the past by conservative Republicans. He complained that he was being deprived of his First Amendment rights. Because Hawley’s complaint was about a book, he could at least demonstrate that he knew something about books by qualifying his publisher’s crime as Orwellian.

Hawley has now been on Twitter by commentators who point out that as a constitutional lawyer, he appears ignorant of the meaning of the First Amendment. It restricts governments from suppressing citizens’ expression, but not private enterprises from making business decisions. The moral of the story: Every tragic moment in US politics has its moment of comic relief.

Historical Note

In the wake of what is now referred to as the Capitol Hill insurrection, The New York Times highlights the of the post-Trump Republican Party. The Times cites Republican Senator John Thune of South Dakota: “The gulf between Republican leaders and their grass-roots activists has never been wider since the start of the Trump era.”

Hawley was hoping to bridge that gap, as have many of the younger “,” including serious media commentators such as Saagar Enjeti and Rachel Bovard. At the core of their ideology was the hope that the party that had always represented the financial and business elite could, thanks to Trump’s success in 2016, convince the working class that the party had their concerns at heart.

What the articulate theoreticians of the new populist Republican Party had not realized is that the basis for Trump’s seduction of the working class was little more than its blatant anti-intellectualism. us today of what he demonstrated in his book, “Democracy and Ideology,” Thomas Piketty points to the historical trend that has seen left-wing parties of the past, representing the working class, lose all connection with their former constituency. Today’s Democratic voters are, in their majority, well-educated suburbanites. Piketty has noted the same trends in the UK, France and elsewhere.

Hawley and populist Republicans like Enjeti, Bovard and Marshall Kosloff believe that their party, long identified with free market capitalism, can simply morph into the political force that will support small business by steadfastly opposing big business. Somewhat romantically, they see that as the ultimate goal of the working class. The reasoning, like Hawley’s, is strategic. After all, if the Democratic Party could shift from being Franklin Roosevelt’s radical reform movement to becoming the respectful partner of Wall Street, Big Pharma, Big Oil and all the monopolistic enterprises that have become the core of the US economy, why shouldn’t the Republican Party take up the slack and win elections by promising to improve the lives of the working class? The problem is that, whether it’s Trump, Hawley or Ted Cruz, the elite culture of their proponents has never been one that delivers on its promises.

The Times highlights the splintering of the Republican Party as Trump prepares to leave the White House. The Gray Lady doesn’t appear as willing to recognize a similar truth about the Democratic Party. Both parties have historically neglected the working class. Trump was a Republican outlier, a TV celebrity who got the attention of the working class and created the hope among party stalwarts that his voters would become loyal to the Republican Party. Bernie Sanders had demonstrated that it was possible for the Democrats, but the party’s core of corporate loyalists made sure that couldn’t happen.

And yet that opportunity for the Democratic Party is far more credible than the idea that a Trump, Cruz or Hawley can turn the GOP into the haven of the working class. The vast majority of Democratic voters support single-payer health care, ending the forever wars and taking radical action to reduce wealth and income inequality. They scoff at the, who says, “We’re capitalists and that’s the way it is.” Pelosi is undoubtedly a capitalist in her thinking and in her lifestyle, but who is she referring to as “we?” All Americans? All Democrats? Or is she thinking of the members of Congress, who, in effect, can only run and win a political campaign by appealing to real capitalists for money?

2021 will be year two of the reign of COVID-19, which may eventually be defeated by vaccine. It will most likely also be the year when the twin towers known as the Republican and Democratic parties reveal the extent of the damage done through acts committed by their own overly strategic and insufficiently observant politicians.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Death of an Insurrection Salesman appeared first on 51�Թ�.

It was all on technicolor display on January 6, the day when both the US Senate and the House of Representatives were due to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election as required under the US Constitution. The world watched as Americans, so passionately aligned with President Donald Trump and so convinced that the election had been stolen from him, determined to disrupt, if not destroy, the most sacred core of the country’s democratic system, the Congress.

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It was a horrifying and tragic example of democracy run amuck. What took place on Capitol Hill that day was everything the framers of the Constitution and the Founding Fathers sought to prevent. In fact, the rioters’ actions by no definition can be remotely described as democratic. They were purposefully dangerous and, as facts come to light, intended to inflict violence. It was mob rule. Insurrection. Rebellion. Sedition. It represented the abandonment of democracy and descent into anarchy.

Compared to What?

But before America’s critics, doubters, adversaries and enemies pronounce the country’s or its democracy’s last rites, they may wish to consult history. They may wish to reflect on the many other occasions when the world’s oldest democracy turned away from its constitution, its values, principles and its own laws. How does January 6 then compare?

How does it compare with more than 250 years of legalized slavery that only a bloody, four-year civil war could end? Or to another 150 years of Jim Crow and segregation? Of course, there were also the more than 120 unspeakable committed against the country’s black citizens, including the in the Cherokee Nation of 1842, the of 1863, of 1921, of 1923, of 2015 and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of last summer, on top of the 3,400-plus of black Americans in the period after the Civil War until well into the civil rights era.

And would January 6 look more uncivil and unconstitutional than the systematic theft of Native American lands in violation of all the treaties signed by them with the US government and often their forced removal from those lands? These date back to the nation’s independence and continue to this day.

To add tragic irony to those two sets of gross injustice, consider that substantial numbers of and Native Americans fought valiantly to defend the very country and democracy that treated them as second-class citizens and often worse. At the start of World War II, the US government ordered Japanese Americans rounded up and confined in internment camps for the duration of the war. They committed no crime. They were given no trial. Yet despite the violation of their constitutional rights, 33,000 of the sons, husbands and brothers of those held in the internment camps to fight for the United States in the war, including 18,000 in the famed 442^nd Regimental Combat Team, a highly decorated all-Japanese-American Army unit led by white officers.

There is also the country’s long history of denial of rights to and prejudice against other ethnic and religious groups, including Irish, Germans, Italians, Jews, Catholics, Chinese, Vietnamese, Muslims, Hispanics and other people of color. They learned that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights did not always apply to them. Furthermore, when they may have belatedly come to be accepted, restitution has rarely been offered.

How does all this compare with January 6, however despicable and detestable that event may have been? In view of these and so many other imperfections manifested throughout its history, America looks less like the “shining city on a hill” than a shadowy ghetto of hypocrisy. January 6 is just one more example and maybe not the most egregious.

No Auto-Pilot in Democracy

Yet the nation’s founders understood that the republic they were creating was an experiment. It was one based on the consent of the governed, a novel concept for the mid-18^th century. They likely saw that a nation as large and diverse as it was in 1776 would only become larger and more diverse with time. The truly remarkable risk they took, however, was betting on the idea that the Constitution and a set of laws could define and unify a nation, as opposed to race, religion or language — another first in human history.

Since then, tens of millions of immigrants have risked their lives and futures, and those of their descendants, on the same idea. And new risk-takers continue to do so today. Last Wednesday and the annals of American history suggest that that idea is sometimes a mere aspiration. But it appears to be one with an irresistible attraction.

It should be no surprise that a man-made system, whatever its noble aspirations and claims to righteousness, might fall short from time to time, or even a lot. It is, after all, a nation of human beings prone to imperfection, individually and collectively. America has no special claim on perfection.

Moreover, a system as fragile as democracy requires constant maintenance and vigilance. It is never self-sustaining. Institutions and, most importantly, the people must attend, defend, revise, perfect and strengthen it continually. Citizens of courage may be called upon from time to time to make heroic acts and sacrifice to defend it. There is no auto-pilot in a democracy.

Those who participated in last week’s anarchy lost sight of America’s democracy. They cast aside a system purposely designed, however imperfectly, to allow for change, in exchange for change by violence. They failed. Despite the mob’s violent rampage, the House and the Senate returned to their chambers that same evening and proceeded to exercise their constitutional duty to certify the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as the next president and vice-president of the United States. There would be no in the United States in 2021.

Moreover, almost lost amidst all the noise of these events, just one day before, voters in Georgia, the heartland of the old Confederacy, elected, for the first time, a black man and a Jew to represent the state in the US Senate. Georgians showed up in record numbers at the polls or through mail-in ballots to express the “consent of the governed.” Voting officials and volunteers diligently managed the entire process without incident so that the voices of the people of Georgia would be heard and counted. The quiet courage of citizens attending to their democracy stifled the mob violence at the US Capitol.

January 6 surely should be a day that no American or citizen of any democracy should ever forget. It is a starkly painful reminder of human weakness and the fragility of democracy. Clearly, Americans should consider speaking more humbly of their “model” democracy. Their country is living proof that even after nearly 250 years, their experiment is still very much a work in progress.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post A Perspective on America’s Imperfect Democracy appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Biden is a skilled 20^th-century politician who, two decades into the 21^st century, follows the rules of the previous one. His public discourse never fails to remind us of the decorum affected by politicians in former times. Many Americans find ��������’s adherence to the values of a bygone era reassuring. But the dramatic events that took place on Capitol Hill on Wednesday demonstrate that, in today’s political card game, chaos still has a trump card to play and may even have the upper hand.

As the panic was raging, Biden stepped up to deliver a calm, realistic and responsible address to the nation. At the same moment, Trump, bunkered in the White House, was deviously maneuvering the forces of darkness while appearing to call for calm.

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��������’s was credible, but just a bit too Bidenesque. After an effective litany of the noble targets victimized by the ongoing assault, the president-elect resorted to stale rhetorical clichés. He immediately deployed the standard expression Americans trot out whenever something shameful occurs: “That’s not who I am.” (We heard it only last week, when the latest “Karen” made headlines by that a black teenager had stolen her iPhone. Accused of racism, she countered: “That’s not who I am.”)

Wishing to defend the now sullied character of the nation, Biden reached for the same cliché: “The scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect the true America, do not represent who we are.” He followed this up with his idealized vision of the nation’s identity: “America’s about honor, decency, respect, tolerance. That’s who we are. That’s who we’ve always been.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Who we are:

The imaginary self-image or ideal ego that Americans believe they must affirm when their actions reveal the true ambiguity of their character.

Contextual Note

Joe ��������’s public discourse has always been fraught with problems. He sounds reassuring but rarely convincingly sincere. In the past, he has been guilty of . The young man who overcame his stutter may have perceived the risk of launching into unprepared discourse. He eventually learned to avoid danger by limiting his plagiarism to one of two things: either resorting to anonymously source and generally meaningless ideas, like “that’s not who we are,” or plagiarizing himself by obsessively repeating what he deems his wisest and sincerest sounding pronouncements.

In his on Wednesday, Biden predictably signaled the denouement of the drama on Capitol Hill with his now inevitable self-quotation: “There’s never been anything we can’t do, when we do it together.” This has been going on for at least two years, inciting us to mention this rhetorical tic in several columns starting in October 2019, then in August and November this year. On Wednesday, he even insisted on repeating it a second time, with added emphasis, only a few seconds after his first self-citation: “There’s never, ever, ever, ever, ever been a thing we’ve tried to do that when we’ve done it together, we’ve not been able to do it.”

The first problem with this supposedly profound thought is that it is demonstrably false. For example, the US hasn’t managed to win a war in many decades, though not for lack of trying (and producing millions of victims). The nation hasn’t managed to eradicate racism or slow down growing wealth and income inequality, but that may be because it has never really tried. Those familiar with any of ��������’s speeches expect it to end with another predictable locution: “God bless America. God protect our troops.” Why this insistence? Does Biden really think that militarism defines the nation? It’s as if his message is, “The troops are who we are.”

As president, if Biden really wishes to protect the troops, he could simply decide to bring them back from places like Iraq and Syria, where they have accomplished nothing, even while “doing it together.” In the meantime, the locals have requested repeatedly that those troops return home. But as an establishment Democrat, Biden prefers to delegate to God the task of protecting the soldiers’ lives because his task is to put them in harm’s way. In her failed primary campaign, Tulsi Gabbard, who served in the Middle East, made that point repeatedly. It led to Hillary Clinton accusing her of being a Russian tool.

Historical Note

American history tells a story somewhat different from ��������’s about “who we are.” To defend their aggression, some of the protesters remembered their school history lessons about the Boston Tea Party and the Revolutionary War. They could have reasonably countered with “This is who we are and always have been.”

Biden believes he can return the nation to its true identity, as a nation of decency, order and peace. In reality, the US has never sought stability, order and peace. Throughout its history, it has used disorder and “creative destruction” for the purpose of conquest and growth. Whether it was the capture of Africans to serve as slaves, the genocide of Native Americans or the more recent implanting of hundreds of military bases across the globe, the essential ingredient of order, as applied by American governments, has always been founded on the assertive use of force.

Militaristic empires have been known to prosper for centuries. The US empire is facing a different problem today. The political values that ensure the kind of unity Biden wishes to restore — “honor, decency, respect, tolerance” — are simply no longer shared by the people and no longer promoted by the media. Because of this confusion of values, the nation has become fragmented, perhaps not beyond repair, but definitely beyond the capacity of a politician who doesn’t dare to present a vision or a project of society capable of mobilizing the population to participate in. Lyndon Johnson’s “great society” and the social programs that accompanied it had a real impact. Johnson’s commitment to war undermined it.

One thing that has changed since Johnson is the rise of radical individualism, an inevitable consequence of the culture of the consumer society that was already well advanced. Consumer society logic has now infected politics. Voters are now treated by professional politicians as consumers rather than engaged citizens. Political parties have become mass marketing enterprises. In the voting booth, consumers select the merchandise that most appeals to them on the basis of the advertising they have been exposed to.

Parties have become brands rather than vectors of political thought or even an ideology. This approach might work reasonably well if politics wasn’t also about the way power is distributed in society. People remain aware of power even when they don’t understand how it is structured. One reason for popular discontent is that having made their choice and finding that the product doesn’t meet their needs, they can’t just throw it away and buy something else.

The conjunction of an individualist culture and the structures of self-interested but well-organized economic and political power inevitably produced utterly unpredictable patterns of consumer behavior. Donald Trump’s election in 2016 proved to be one of those unpredictable outcomes. It revealed that society had reached a tipping point. Unpredictable outcomes had become the norm.

Observers are now mulling over the fate of the Republican Party after this week’s events. The GOP may be . The Democrats are just as profoundly fragmented, though that will become visible only in the coming months. And American society itself is much more fragmented than both parties. Trust in the parties — but also in the media, law enforcement, the electoral system and education — has withered. Republicans and Democrats get votes simply because there are no other choices. Politicians’ appeals to decency have become meaningless in an era of consumer narcissism fueled by commercial interests. The harsh reality is this: No one today is in a position to affirm “who we are.”

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Visible Cracks in the New American Order appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Mind you, when the Black Lives Matter movement came to town some months ago, legions of police and national guardsmen dressed in full battle gear lined the streets and monuments of Washington. This time, for some unknown reason (perhaps because of the skin color of most Trump supporters?), all the guardsmen seemed prepared to do was direct traffic, as they were purposely left unarmed. If the Black Lives Matter protesters had attempted to do what the Trump mob did, no doubt many of them would have been shot on sight. Instead, most of Trump’s supporters walked casually back to their hotels without being touched by law enforcement, even though their assault on American democracy is unprecedented in our modern history.

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It should therefore come as no surprise that much of the rest of the world has reacted with a combination of shock, horror and laughter. Indeed, such things are not supposed to happen in America. Could anyone blame the rest of the world for now referring to the United States as a banana republic? Over the past four years, US polity has exhibited many of the behavioral qualities of such a republic, including blatant tribalism, extreme partisanship and unbridled corruption. Trump has ensured that its electoral process has been reduced to a litany of lies, name-calling, finger-pointing and endless spinning. He has proven that he will literally do anything to remain in power — a true sign of a dictator in the making.

Such behavior has for many years been within the cone of possibility, given the depths of partisanship that has come to define the American political process. It just never descended to the levels it has during the Trump era. Now that most Americans have been well and truly shocked at the result and realize that it really can — and now does — happen here, it is time to put some guardrails in place to help ensure that nothing like this ever happens again. That will, however, require meaningful action on the part of lawmakers. Fortunately, since the Democrats now control the White House and the Congress, it may actually be possible.

It is up to them to do something about it. As a start, pass laws making it illegal for any member of the US government to brazenly lie, publicly incite agitation or promote violence. When it happens in the future, prosecute them. Approve laws that require every presidential candidate to disclose their tax returns and strip presidents of immunity from prosecution while they are in office. Place greater limits on what lobbyists and special interest groups can do in the halls of Congress. Only time will tell whether the Democrats have the courage to pass and enforce laws that prevent those promoting the enabling environment to continue to run amok without penalty.

America has dug itself into a very deep hole that will take many years, perhaps decades, to get out of. The question is, is it actually capable of doing so? One can now envision two terms to pass with a Democrat in the White House, but because the new Congress may squander the opportunity to do something truly meaningful, any good intentions may get lost in the ambitious legislative agenda Biden has in store.

But is there anything more important than preserving American nobility in the face of a crisis of confidence? The world needs an America it can believe in. America needs to invest real time, energy and resources in reestablishing the preeminence of truth and trust. It took generations to build it but just four years to destroy it.

Donald Trump’s tenure has proven just how low America can go, but it has also awakened the nation to the fact that if it veers just a little bit off course, the margins of error permit it to become just like so many other countries that never had the ability to proclaim exceptionalism in any form. If it can happen in America, it can certainly happen anywhere else. America must now prove to the world that it can pick itself up, dust itself off and stay on a path so many people in the world aspire to be on. It will take a Herculean effort on the part of President-elect Biden and the Democrats to do so. If they fail, it is arguable whether America can ever again claim to be exceptional.

*[Daniel Wagner is the  of “The Chinese Vortex: The Belt and Road Initiative and its Impact on the World.”]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post It’s Time to Put Guardrails in Place in Washington appeared first on 51�Թ�.

How Do You Tell an Authoritarian From a Fascist These Days?

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With echoes in Europe, Asia and Latin America, right-wing movements in the United States have organized and mobilized with great discipline. While right-wing extremism typically rises under progressive presidents, as seen during the , the discourse of outgoing President Donald Trump has given these movements an unprecedented level of oxygen for the modern era.

Actions and Recruitment

Historically, right-wing reactionary elements spread throughout the vast geographic expanse of the United States had a harder task in communicating and coordinating than they do today. Moreover, these groups and individuals were previously more frequently confronted with divergent points of view in their social circles and communities. In our digital age, however, heightened use of social media creates networks out of formerly atomized elements, which is a phenomenon that is not only limited to the far right. These networks, in turn, create echo chambers of misinformation and vitriol, which the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Parler and Gabfiscalize push back against too loosely, if at all.

Just as radical right-wing groups utilize social media to spread misinformation, these groups also work to expand membership by recruiting new members through social media platforms. For example, the Boogaloo movement, an extremist anti-government network in the US, uses Facebook groups and targeted advertisements to spread its message and recruit followers. The Boogaloo Boys use memes and digital humor tools in their targeted posts, often with links to purchase their merchandise and to generate a sense of community while increasing group membership and funding.

Other right-wing groups, such as the Proud Boys, operate several Facebook pages situated in different regions of the US to encourage individuals throughout the country to join their movement. However, efforts to recruit new members are not limited to Facebook; instead, right-wing groups, by way of e-flyers, online chat rooms and more niche social media platforms like Parler and Gabfiscalize, work to expand group membership by appealing to individuals with similar sociopolitical ideals as well as populations discontented with the status quo.

Over the last two years, as a result of the rise of leftist movements, both fringe and mainstream, and in response to COVID-19 restrictions, violent actions taken by extremist right-wing groups increased substantially. Throughout 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes, 2,421 flyering incidents perpetrated by 940 extremist groups across the US. In June 2020, a now-convicted man with ties to right-wing extremism into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters outside of Richmond, Virginia.

In October 2020, the , a US militia group, planned to kidnap Michigan’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer in an alleged domestic terrorism plot. The federal government charged eight Wolverine Watchmen members with conspiracy to kidnap Whitmer, along with other charges such as providing material support for terrorist activities, gang membership and the use of firearms to commit felonies.

The Wolverine Watchmen wanted to “unite others” to “take violent action” that, in their view, violated the US Constitution in enforcing COVID-19 lockdown measures. Although the plot against Governor Whitmer was thwarted, the event showcases how extremist right-wing groups are organizing to take more aggressive actions against the authorities.

Earlier this week, a mob of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol in an unprecedented attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, spurred on by the president’s insistence that the vote was fraudulent. The rioters managed to disrupt the legislative certification of Joe ��������’s Electoral College victory, which resumed after the deployment of the National Guard. With the Congress ransacked and five people dead, the events showed that these extremist factions are organized, militant and bold.

What’s Next?

As the COVID-19 pandemic enters its most critical phase before we can expect to achieve herd immunity promised by mass vaccination, the threat posed by right-wing groups in the US continues to escalate while lockdowns persist and the transition to the incoming Biden administration is imminent. With a November poll from Reuters suggesting around 68% of Republicans believe the , President-elect ��������’s transition has been anything but smooth, and there is no reason to expect his first year in office to be any different.

Passionate support for President Trump by right-wing groups, such as the Proud Boys who vowed to “stand back and stand by,” creates the alarming prospect of continued and intensifying public safety incidents around protests and rallies. Unfortunately, we have seen this trend toward tensions and clashes accentuated by the increased oxygen provided by both elected officials as well as activism by left-wing groups, such as antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Over the next 12 months, it can be expected that militant groups in the US will continue their activities as the Biden administration seeks to chart a new course for the country through the choppy waters left behind after four years under Donald Trump’s divisive presidency. With the US fractured along sociopolitical lines, the key actors of the Trump administration seeking to remain relevant on the national stage, and with the 2024 election already on the horizon, extremist and militant groups will remain key actors, engaged in public demonstrations and rallies as well as social media recruitment and activism aimed at increasing membership.

Depending on the breadth and scope of the progressive political agenda advanced over the coming years, violent actions could become commonplace for extremist groups throughout the country. To address this mounting challenge, legislators and regulators worldwide should act quickly in order to empower and co-opt tech giants into supervising social media activity by extremist groups. Simultaneously, more nuanced and targeted economic policies, as well as a transparent yet conciliatory sociopolitical discourse, will go a long way in healing society and fostering prosperous inclusion across the ideological spectrum as well as the rural-urban divide.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post For the US, Right-Wing Extremism Is Here to Stay appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Donald Trump: The Worst Kind of Populist

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The “fascism” is a complex ideological label that has found historical prominence in both 20^th century Italy and in Nazi Germany between the two world wars. The concept is currently applied broadly in academic literature to identify radical-right political parties, right-wing authoritarian (or military) regimes or even movements sympathetic to fascism. However, the term is more properly used when referring to the ideology that was promoted and implemented by Benito Mussolini in Italy in the interwar period.

Fascism Versus Authoritarianism

Historically, fascism derives its from nationalism, totalitarianism and the myth of violence. Firstly, through the advent of , fascism does not only try to achieve ethnic homogeneity of the members of the community but also introduces the concept of national superiority over other peoples and nations.

Secondly, to comprehend totalitarianism, it is necessary to keep in mind the impact of the Great War and the depersonalization of the individual. For fascism, an individual is a “tool” used to pursue the interests of the state, which coincide directly with the interests of the fascist party. However, fascism is not limited solely to obedience, as has been shown, among others, by Hannah Arendt. It claims legitimacy by obtaining the consent of the masses and, to accomplish this, fascism as an is mobilized and tends to encompass all sectors of society. As the self-styled Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile remarked, “for fascism everything is in the state and nothing is outside the state, in this sense the state is totalitarian.”

Finally, the myth of violence is one of the most important tenets of fascism. Enemies are everywhere, and fascism must assert itself through violence (extreme, if necessary). This pattern inevitably undermines any forms of pluralism. For this reason, for fascist ideologues, this eventual clash is inevitable, and, eventually, all the principles of both liberal democracy and representative institutions fall.

In defining authoritarian populism, we can refer to the “fourth wave” in the radical-right literature as outlined by . Mudde argues that there are three core patterns that make up this ideology, comprising nativism, authoritarianism and populism. Firstly, nativism refers to the “membership” of the nation, which is determined by ethnic terms. This notion is also related to the pattern of radical-right parties that tend to argue that multiculturalism should be considered as a threat to the national heritage and cultural traditions. Consequently, the state should impede access to those immigrants who differ from the majoritarian ethnic group; or, alternatively, immigrants should entirely adopt the national culture and fully assimilate.

Secondly, authoritarianism refers to what extent a society should be strictly controlled by the state in order to maintain security and order within the borders of the country. This is linked to the strong emphasis on law and order which “is directed not only against external threats (immigrants and asylum seekers) and criminal elements, but also against its critics and political opponents.” Finally, the notion of refers to the well-known definition of conflict within current societies, between the people (represented by the radical right) and the elite (mainstream politicians and the political establishment).  

The Cult of the Leader

It is clear from the above analysis that fascism and authoritarian populism are different, ideologically speaking. Nonetheless, there are two elements that are significantly comparable in both ideologies. The first is the cult of the leader, or fanatism. The fascist leader isn’t just someone to obey or support, but also serves as an image in which the electorate can feel represented. This image is one that is omnipotent and omniscient. For example, Mussolini was portrayed as a hero in all — “a hard worker, an athlete, an airplane pilot” and so on — in order to create a cult of personality.

A similar cult of personality was also portrayed in Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler, via the ��ü������������Գ����� — the leader principle. In this regard, US Present Donald Trump also (indirectly) reminds us of this type of leader. Trump often boasts of his “unlimited” knowledge and unprecedented achievement in various fields, from science and defense to economics and race relations.  

Trump also speaks through his body. For example, after the first presidential debate against former Vice-President Joe Biden, President Trump was diagnosed with COVID-19. Once recovered, he staged a to the White House to demonstrate strength in having defeated the virus and being immune from it. A not too dissimilar scene also played out in , with President Jair Bolsonaro also contracting COVID-19 but dismissing it as nothing more than an ordinary bout of flu.

In both fascism and authoritarian populist ideologies, the leader is presented as an invincible figure that most of the times is described (most often by the state propaganda machine) as the savior of the homeland from ruin. So, Mussolini should have restored the ancient splendor of the Roman Empire, while Trump was supposed to “Make America Great Again.”

Creation of the Enemy

The second analogy is the creation of an enemy. Recalling how fascism was founded on the myth of violence, conflict does not take place only on ethnic or religious, but also on political grounds. Thus, anybody who represents a danger to the stability of the fascist authority in the country should be eliminated (for the good of the nation itself).

As the Soviet author Vassily Grossman explains in his famous 1970 novel “Everything Flows,” the “scalpel is the great theorist, the philosophical leader of the twentieth century.” With this image, Grossman exemplifies how totalitarianism (including fascism) envisaged a certain political project — founded on purely abstract ideological principles applied in the real world — and everything that is not included in this project must be eliminated and overthrown.

Fascism does not foresee discussions or compromises with the other side. In this same regard, even does not offer dialogue to the opposition, since its raison d’être is to interpret society as a Manichean conflict between “the pure people versus the corrupt elite,” which does not include dialogue between these “two homogeneous and antagonistic groups.”

For example, during his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump declared several times that he would have jailed and later accusing former President Barack Obama of “some terrible things” that “should never be allowed to happen in our country again.” This is an example of how Trump, an authoritarian populist leader, identifies the political counterpart as an enemy, thereby leaving no space for discussion or disagreements. Scholars such as Matthew Feldman, the director of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, have even recently about the fascist ideological nature of President Trump. Recent events in the United States, such as yesterday’s storming of the US Capitol in Washington, DC, by pro-Trump rioters hoping to overturn the election result, give rise to fears about a neo-fascist wave.

Ideological Differences

Although fascism and authoritarian populism share two important ideological features, it might be easy to forget that fascism was, on the one hand, a conservative militia with the goal of subduing communist mass strikes of workers and peasants. On the other hand, it was born as a revolutionary movement. Indeed, the main historical of fascism was to overthrow the modern state “with its connotations of industrialism, individualism and bourgeois values.”

Put simply, the project of fascism was to reject liberal democracy, political pluralism and the market economy. Authoritarian populism’s aim is not to overthrow the democratic regime — instead, it is a part of the democratic system. Even though authoritarian populist leaders can achieve political power in government, they are not immune from the overall democratic process, especially when they lose power. President Trump’s loss in the 2020 US election, despite his claims of voter fraud, demonstrates this fact.

The year 2020 will surely be remembered for the significant impact that COVID-19 has had on globalized societies. During the first wave of the pandemic, national governments called for nationwide solidarity, and many succeeded in achieving it. At the same time, the past year may have ushered in authoritarian populism as the new zeitgeist of the next decade: The long-term impact of COVID-19 may benefit radical-right parties as the second wave of the pandemic wave has caused an even longer period of economic and social deprivations.

Authoritarian populism may play a legitimatizing role in democratic regimes, and it is important to note that this ideology has become increasingly mainstreamed and . While authoritarian populists should not be defined as fascists if they do not abolish democratic institutions, this normalization process represents the main threat to liberal societies across the globe in the 21^st century.

In contrast to neo-fascist movements, which are significantly opposed to democracy, the leaders of authoritarian populist movements are allowed to participate in the democratic game, to fuel protests politics among citizens and to capitalize on these in order to achieve power. Donald Trump’s insistence that the election was stolen from him to spur his supporters to disrupt the certification of Joe ��������’s victory has left four dead. As the world watched an “” at the heart of the world’s oldest democracy, it is clear that the line between fascism and authoritarian populism is becoming increasingly blurred.

*[51�Թ� is a  partner of the .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post How Do You Tell an Authoritarian From a Fascist These Days? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Every entry in the Daily Devil’s Dictionary aims to provide enough circumstantial, cultural and historical context to deepen our perception of the meaning behind the words and phrases glossed. Typically, we cite well-known public figures but also journalists and various media personalities. 

Texas: The End of Authentic America?

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Today’s possibly involuntary contributor, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, has made several appearances in these columns (for example, here, here, here and here.) Today, however, it is the first time Pompeo is the one who offers an original definition of a word he himself appears to enjoy using. He offered this astonishing definition in a with the hashtag #swagger.

In today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition, we quote Secretary Pompeo verbatim:

Swagger:

To represent America with pride, humility, and professionalism. We’ve done it.

Contextual Note

Alas, Mike Pompeo may have missed the point made by Ambrose Bierce or even of his predecessor, Dr. Samuel Johnson, the author of the very serious . Johnson sought to account for the full breadth of the English language in a fundamentally scientific approach to his sources. He nevertheless understood that some definitions and redefinitions require a touch of irony to reveal the true secrets of their significance. For example, Dr. Johnson gave the definition of “luncheon” — a relatively new concept at the very moment of history that saw the culinary innovation of the — as “as much food as one’s hand can hold.”

More closely related to Pompeo’s profession, Johnson defined the word “politician” as initially “one versed in the arts of government.” He nevertheless felt impelled to add a second meaning: “a man of artifice; one of deep contrivance.” As the former director of the CIA, Pompeo knew something about the art of contrivance. In 2019, he explained the kind of radical contrivance he was skilled at when he confessed, to resounding applause, that, as CIA director, he “cheated, lied and stole.” 

The problem, in contrast to Johnson and Bierce, is that Pompeo seems immune to irony. His definition of “swagger” reveals what appears to be a total absence of irony in his thought processes. He even fails to acknowledge the implicit irony that becomes evident as soon as an official definition of swagger is evoked, like the one offered by of the verb form: “to conduct oneself in an arrogant or superciliously pompous manner, especially: to walk with an air of overbearing self-confidence.”

Pompeo equates the dictionary’s “superciliously pompous manner” and “overbearing self-confidence” with “humility and professionalism.” This kind of inversion of meaning provides the key to understanding what many powerful politicians believe about their own actions: that their obsequious service to power is a manifestation of personal humility. They fail to notice that what they are doing is executing policies designed to express an attitude of supercilious arrogance.

But it gets worse. Merriam Webster offers a second definition of the verb “swagger.” It proposes three synonyms, “boast,” “brag” and “bully,” accompanied by the following definition: “to force by argument or threat.” In this definition, the reader will recognize Pompeo’s penchant for imposing sanctions and threatening military force against any nation that doesn’t sycophantically fall into line with US policy.

Pompeo adds to his curiously antinomic definition a note of self-congratulation, something no author of a dictionary would ever do: “We’ve done it.” By calling attention to his own accomplishments, he inadvertently justifies the original meaning of the word as he expresses his “overbearing self-confidence,” to say nothing of his Trumpian vanity and narcissism.

Historical Note

Many see Secretary Pompeo as a future Republican presidential candidate. There are indications that he currently processes what he sees as the historical lesson delivered by his guru, Donald Trump, following his surprising electoral success in 2016. Total self-confidence, bluster, lies and narcissism can deliver victory. Even when losing to Joe Biden in November, Trump attracted some 74 million votes.

If Pompeo can avoid the irritating tics that motivated television’s late-night comedians to create a wave of intense personal hatred for Trump that in turn motivated their audiences to vote not so much for Joe Biden as against the incumbent, Pompeo may feel he has a reasonable hope of emerging as the kind of more palatable swaggering strongman that a lot of American voters appear to appreciate. He could assume that he will attract not only the 74 million who voted for Trump but many others across the spectrum who are increasingly fed up with the kind of traditional DC elites Joe Biden and Kamala Harris exemplify. The Democrats need to be careful to avoid a repeat of 2016. But, if history is any guide, they won’t be.

Pompeo has another advantage. Unlike the president, he is an authentic evangelical, a true God-fearer and churchgoer, unlike the obviously immoral Trump. Pompeo believes in his own divinely appointed destiny. Moreover, he appears to be interested, in a way Trump never was, in language itself, the key to winning elections and exercising power. His recent activity as a lexicographical revisionist may indicate that he is preparing to create his own updated version of . “Swagger” is simply the first item in his new dictionary.

After the four-year Trump fiasco Republicans are left wondering how to recast themselves. One big challenge will be to find a way to deal with Trump. Some of them might be tempted to rally around Pompeo just to keep Trump at bay. After four predictably calamitous years of a Biden-Harris administration, Pompeo may see himself as bursting onto the scene to save America with the promise of turning the US into the “Nation of Swagger.” He has already semi-officially his State Department the “Department of Swagger.” 

Still, it’s too early to discount Biden, who has shown signs of wanting to do something similar. Almost all of his with this stale refrain: “This is the United States of America. And there has never been anything we haven’t been able to do when we’ve done it together.” This may not be swaggering per se, but it communicates the intent to swagger. Especially when he follows it up with sentiments such as, “now … we embark on the work that God and history have called upon us to do.” Biden simply lacks Trump’s and Pompeo’s brand of swagger to make his bullying sound credible.

The word “swagger” has been in the English language at least since , who used it in multiple contexts. Feste, the clown, closes the play “Twelfth Night” by lamenting the sorrows of his life In his , “The Wind and the Rain.” It includes this stanza:

But when I came, alas! to wive,

            With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

By swaggering could I never thrive,

            For the rain it raineth every day.

It isn’t clear whether Feste regrets having married the woman who became his wife or whether he simply expresses his disappointment at learning that married life forced him to rein in his swaggering. In both cases, he appears to accept, unlike Pompeo, that swaggering is a less than respectable form of behavior.

No one is positioned to tame Mike Pompeo’s swagger. His wife certainly hasn’t sought to play that role. She has even been accused of having her own concerning lavish State Department parties she organized and personal travel. She eventually beat the rap, though it was established that she had clearly bent official rules. Pompeo understands that in the world of political hyperreality, swagger is a key to being elected to the most powerful office in the world and occupying the limelight. He now has three years ahead of him to hone his skills at swaggering before the next round of Republican primaries begins in 2023.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Can Mike Pompeo Swagger His Way Into 2024 Election? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The 2020 election is another exception. Oddly, Bolsonaro has kept a low profile on the topic. On November 4, he expressed : “I think everyone has a preference, and I will not argue with anyone. You know my position, it’s clear, and that’s not interference. I have a good policy with Trump, I hope he will be re-elected. I hope.” Officials said that Brasilia was awaiting the US Supreme Court’s decision on the final vote tally before congratulating anyone — which Bolsonaro yesterday, following ��������’s Electoral College win.

The Biden-Bolsonaro equation matters because the United States and Brazil have had strong links for nearly two centuries. The US was the first country to recognize Brazil’s independence in 1822. During the period of the First Republic, from 1889 to 1930, the country’s official name was the Republic of the United States of Brazil. It imported a federal system of governance from the US and tried to associate with its northern counterpart.

Brazil Rejects Bolsonaro’s Anti-Politics

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The US-Brazil relationship goes back a long way and is deeper than ideological affinities between the two countries’ presidents. Until China overtook it in 2010, the US was Brazil’s biggest economic partner. A by the United States Congressional Research Service on US-Brazil trade relations gives insight into American thinking. in Latin America and the Caribbean from 2005 to 2019 amounted to $130 billion, with Brazil accounting for $60 billion and Peru for $27 billion. It is no surprise that the report states that there are “strategic and economic reasons for strengthening trade ties” with Brazil.

In 2016, between Brazil and the US hit a low of $23.2 billion in exports and $23.8 billion in imports. In the first year of Bolsonaro’s presidency, exports reached $29.7 billion, a new high since 2008, and imports rose to $30.1 billion, the highest figure since 2014. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic, falling oil prices and restrictions on trade have led to a negative performance. Amcham Brasil, published by the American Chamber of Commerce, tells us that exports and imports by 25% this year as compared to 2019. The total trade figure from January to September was $33.4 billion, the lowest in 11 years.

A Conservative Alliance

When Biden enters the White House next January, Brazil may suffer a stronger fallout. Bolsonaro aligned very closely with Trump’s highly conservative, anti-globalization agenda. Brazil and the US will have to sort out their personal and strategic differences.

According to Cristina Pecequilo, and professor of international relations at the Federal University of São Paulo, the personal bond between Bolsonaro and Trump will be difficult to let go of. Bolsonaro and his minister of international affairs, Ernesto Araujo, have aligned themselves with and have often emulated Trump. They repudiated multilateralism, undermined state actors and attacked intergovernmental organizations. Bolsonaro was critical of the World Health Organization and the United Nations in his speech at the UN General Assembly this year. He was appealing more to his anti-globalization voters back home than his audience at the UN.

“There is this idea that Brazil and the US belong to the West and that they should be a unit. However, when we look north, it is clear that they historically understand it as themselves and Western Europe, what we call the ‘new transatlantic.’ Brazil is out of that equation,” Pecequilo told me in an interview.

Araujo sees the world differently. He is a strong Trump supporter. In 2017, in an titled “Trump and the West,” Araujo praised the US president, describing him as a crusader against communism, Islam and globalism. Araujo then reposted the text in his blog . In the minister’s view, “The United States was getting into the boat of western decay, surrendering to nihilism, by deidentifying itself, by deculturation, by replacing living history with abstract, absolute, unquestionable values. They were going into that, until Trump.” Last month, he deleted the post.

Such words are unlikely to have gone down well with the Biden team. Therefore, Pecequilo believes that Araujo will have no option but to resign when all legal challenges to the US election result are exhausted.

The Question of the Environment

Apart from ideological differences, environmental and human rights issues will also present major challenges to US-Brazil relations. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have both openly and repeatedly criticized Bolsonaro’s environmental policies and beliefs. On September 29, Biden even took the issue to the first presidential debate, that he “would be right now organizing the hemisphere and the world to provide $20 billion for the Amazon, for Brazil to no longer to burn the Amazon. And if it doesn’t stop, it would face significant economic consequences.”

The statement generated an angry response from Bolsonaro, who the comment as “regrettable, disastrous and gratuitous.” Ricardo Salles, Brazil’s environment minister, the speech and questioned whether the amount would be an annual or a single transfer.

Nevertheless, it is necessary to place Biden’s remarks in context, delivered by a candidate reaching out to the more progressive voter. Such rhetoric often comes up in a debate. Biden will behave differently when in the Oval Office. His policy will be more centrist. Gabriel Adam, professor at Brazil’s Superior School of Advertising and Marketing, says: “There will be pressure concerning the Amazon, but there will be no sanctions. Pressure shall come through diplomatic means, but at no time will it harm relations concretely. Brazil has more risks of damaging trade relations with the European Union.”

Bolsonaro’s handling of the environment is a key element for Brazil’s relations with the European Union. In 2019, the EU and Mercosur, the South American trading bloc formed by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, announced an to boost trade between the two continents. They agreed to eliminate import tariffs on more than 90% of the products. However, the ratification faces by European civil groups and members of the European Parliament. Both criticize Brazil’s environmental policies. Last October, parliamentarians passed a non-binding resolution calling for changes in Mercosur countries’ environmental agenda to ratify the agreement. This is likely to hurt not only Brazil but also Mercosur’s other members.

Historically, the US has not been a great advocate for the environment. Recently, this issue has been growing in importance. At the center of the recent discussion is the Green New Deal, the project conceived by Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markley. Nevertheless, not even Biden and Harris seem to agree on a position on the subject. While Harris claims to support the plan, Biden says the Green New Deal is a “crucial framework” for his own platform but shies away from fully embracing the plan.

is aggressive when compared to other American presidents. His first duty is to work domestically and demonstrate that the US is no longer a . Internationally, the president-elect intends to “name and shame global climate outlaws” through “a new Global Climate Change Report to hold countries to account for meeting, or failing to meet, their Paris commitments and for other steps that promote or undermine global climate solutions.” Brazil is a candidate to be part of this ignominious group.

Brazil faces international outrage over deforestation in the Amazon. It must also decide whether to strengthen the country’s environmental targets under the Paris Climate Agreement by the end of the year. This decision could improve or worsen Brazil’s image on the international arena. On November 4 this year, the US formally withdraw from its commitments under the Paris accords, but the Biden administration promises to rejoin on its first day in office. American action may push Brazil in the same direction, even if unwillingly.

More Pragmatism, Less Ideology

Like their American counterparts, many Brazilians value the US-Brazil relationship. In an interview with CNN Brazil, the Brazilian ambassador to Washington, , said that a Biden victory would change in the relationship’s emphasis, not its essence. He stressed that he would seek to increase the Brazilian presence in discussions in the US Congress. 

Some people in Bolsonaro’s government have shown signs that they understand that changes are about to take place in January 2021. , the minister for the economy, said that Biden’s eventual victory would not affect the country’s growth dynamics. An admirer of the Chicago School of minimal state intervention and free competition, Guedes declared that Brazil’s government would “dance with everyone.”

While Bolsonaro’s silence on the US election and failure to recognize Biden as the president-elect has been widely criticized as hostile, the president, unlike his congressman son, , has not openly speculated about voter fraud. While the time it took the Brazilian president to recognize ��������’s win was damaging, it is unlikely to undermine a historic and extremely important relationship where strong mutual interests remain. Yet there are wrinkles to iron over. The Biden administration will not accept open hostility from Bolsonaro.

Despite current ideological differences, common sense will prevail on the American side. Good relations with Brazil will help the US contain China in Latin America. Pecequilo believes that “Biden will keep his pragmatism. We will see localized tensions, but, structurally, Biden will not want to lose the advantages that Trump obtained in the Brazilian market.”

It is Bolsonaro who faces a great dilemma. If Brazil’s ties with the US are further corroded by a blind belief in Trumpism and a lack of pragmatism, the South American giant will emerge as the major loser. As a superpower, it is easier for the US to find other partners and make Brazil a global pariah. Jair Bolsonaro’s choice will have significant consequences for Brazil.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Will Bolsonaro Leave Trumpism Behind to Embrace a Biden-led US? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Georgia has been a stronghold for nearly a quarter of a century, at both the national and state levels. The last time Georgia elected a Democrat to the US Senate was in 1996. Its last Democratic governor was elected in 1998. After electing Bill Clinton in 1992, Georgians have not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate until this November.

International Monitors Found No Fraud in US Election

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Georgia has suddenly become the center of attention for the entire nation after giving Joe Biden a majority in a closely contested race. After two recounts, Biden was the winner by Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on December 7. With both Senate seats headed for a runoff election, Georgia may well be on its way to becoming the newest battleground state in American politics.

What’s at Stake in Senate Runoff Elections?

The Republicans currently hold a narrow 50-48 majority in the Senate, pending the results of the Georgia runoff. If they win one or both the seats, they will hold the Senate majority in the 117^th Congress. If the Democrats win both seats, by virtue of winning the White House, they will control the Senate, with the incoming vice president, Kamala Harris, casting the tie-break Senate vote as needed.

In the first contest, Republican Senator David Perdue is running for reelection against Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff. The second contest is a special election between Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler, who was appointed to fill former Senator Johnny Isakson’s seat, and her Democratic challenger Raphael Warnock; the winner of this race will serve the remaining two years of Isackson’s six-year term. Both contests are at dead heat based on aggregated poll data from .

Despite losing the presidential election comprehensively, Donald Trump has not only refused to concede, but has been spreading misinformation on the integrity of the electoral and democratic process of the nation. Stumping for Loeffler and Perdue, Trump the Georgian Republican leaders for refusing to award Georgia to him, upending the will of the people.

Loeffler recognizes the stranglehold Trump has among Republican voters even during the lame-duck phase of his presidency. She stays safely ensconced among the 88% of those serving in Congress who refuse to accept Biden as the president-elect. In a nationally televised debate with Warnock, Loeffler to acknowledge Trump’s defeat. Instead, she provided the stock answer most Republicans resort to: “The president has every right to every legal recourse, and that’s what’s taking place.”

Can Biden Govern With a Republican Majority?

Ideological differences between Republicans and Democrats have not stopped them from working with each other in a bipartisan manner in the past. During his tenure as president, Bill Clinton advanced his signature achievements — the and the — both centrist agendas palatable to the Republicans and the House majority leader, Newt Gingrich, who helped shepherd the legislation through his party’s base.

Bipartisanship gave way to politics when Barack Obama become the nation’s first black president in 2009. Prior to retaking the House majority in 2011, Republican John Boehner opined about the level of cooperation he would offer to President Obama going forward: “We’re going to do everything — and I mean everything we can do — to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can.” Then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was not far behind with his infamous statement that “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

While McConnell could not achieve what he wanted, after the Republicans flipped the house in 2011, he was able to successfully block many of the president’s initiatives, culminating in thwarting Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland.

Without control of the Senate, Democrats will in all likelihood be able to do precious little to advance ��������’s agenda, being at the mercy of McConnell, who has demonstrated how good an obstructionist he can be. A shrewd politician who will go to any length to advance his political agenda, we can expect McConnell to be deferential to Trump until after the Georgia elections. Only a fool would underestimate the vicelike grip Trump has on Republican voters. McConnell is no fool.

Should McConnell remain the Senate majority leader, Biden will become the first president since George H. W. Bush in 1988 to inherit a divided government upon taking office. The first hurdle confronting Biden will be the Senate confirmation of his for cabinet positions as well as the deputy secretaries, undersecretaries and assistant secretaries. Biden may find himself handicapped in making choices that will meet both the approval of the progressive leftist Democrats and pass muster with McConnell and Republicans.

Even if the two Democratic candidates, Ossoff and Warnock, win the January runoff, ��������’s ability to advance his campaign promises will be dictated by a handful of Senators who typically do not tow the party line, the conservative Democrat Joe Manchin and the temperamental Republicans, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney.

Unless Trump decides to fade away from American politics, the fire he has ignited will be hard to put out. Trump may very well become the second US President after Grover Cleveland to lose the White House and run again in 2024. By refusing to concede, he can keep up the claim that he lost a rigged election. That will be enough to keep his voter base angry, as demonstrated by the violent in Washington, DC, on Saturday. Trump had successfully used a similar approach to chip away at Obama’s legitimacy with the conspiracy.

With the distinct probability of Trump running again in 2024, it is unlikely that Mitch McConnell will play along with Biden in a divided government. Without a Democratic Senate, that would portend a rough and acrimonious two years for the team.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Who Owns Intellectual Property?

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Last week Trump was in Florida campaigning for the two Republican Senate candidates in next month’s special election. He also Georgians to expect more rigging: “They cheated and they rigged our presidential election, and they’re gonna try to rig this election too.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Rigged:

Fitted out with the ropes, sails, pulleys and other equipment needed for a ship to sail, a traditional maritime labor that politicians long ago realized could be adapted to the needs of the democracies they felt predestined to control.

Contextual Note

The author of the article, Peter Ramjug, cites a survey conducted in November that reveals this astonishing fact: “More than half of Republican voters either believe President Donald Trump actually won the 2020 race or aren’t entirely sure who did win.” This should surprise no one. After all, when polled in 2006, a clear believed Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, even though none were found in the end. As late as 2015, a majority of Republicans that. This stands as a clear demonstration of the power of faith among Republicans, many of whom view Fox News as the Newer Testament.

Another finding from the survey may seem more surprising, namely that 34% of independents polled apparently either believed Trump was the winner or “weren’t sure who was.” That’s an impressive number for people who have no apparent reasons to prove their loyalty to a political party.

Ramjug alludes to the fact, often noted by pundits, that Americans have been showing a growing distrust not only of the nation’s institutions but of each other. The trend is toward solipsism and narcissism, the character traits Trump so perfectly exemplifies. A published in July 2019 drew this troubling conclusion: “Many Americans see declining levels of trust in the country, whether it is their confidence in the federal government and elected officials or their trust of each other.” 

It’s worth noting that this 2019 survey dates from what we now look back on as the halcyon epoch when there was no pandemic to fear and only the vaguest stirrings of the quadrennial psychodrama known as presidential election campaigns that was about to unfold. The survey contained some good news. It found that 84% of those polled “think the decline in trust can be turned around.” It would be interesting to find out what that figure might be today. Our guess is that it would be below 50%.

Ramjung cites the demographic breakdown that reveals “20 percent of white respondents overall believing Trump won, compared to 14 percent of Hispanic respondents, 9 percent of Asian respondents, and 7 percent of Black respondents.” The numbers for Hispanics, Asians and blacks correspond roughly to the percentage of each group that actually voted for Trump. This would appear to confirm the growing tendency of Americans to confuse their wishes with the truth or more simply to cast the notion of truth aside and cling to a belief in the “reality” of their wishes. And they aren’t wrong. Their wishes are real, even the ones that have no connection to reality.

The Pew survey found that more than “two-thirds (69%) of Americans say the federal government intentionally withholds important information from the public that it could safely release, and 61% say the news media intentionally ignores stories that are important to the public.” In this case, their perception is correct on both counts. 

Every citizen should be cognizant of the fact that all governments — even in democracies — manage the news and that corporate media have their own criteria, related to their obsessive quest for ratings, governing their selection of stories. The New York Times claims it reports “all the news that’s fit to print.” It fails to remind us of what everyone spontaneously understands, that commercial interests have the power to define what’s “fit.” The Times consistently ignores important stories and magnifies rumors and lies.

One lesson everyone in the US should have learned — despite what the government and media choose to teach or suppress — is that everyone has the duty to market their own agenda. It’s a competitive world. If not quite dog eat dog, it has at least become dog tweet dog. You have to get your message across as frequently and volubly as possible. In such a system, who can distinguish truth from lies?

Historical Note

Joan Didion, an acute observer of US culture, captured one essential truth in an written 50 years ago. She was attempting to come to grips with the disaffection and alienation that had become evident through the disruptive events of the 1960s: “It occurred to me finally that I was listening to a true underground, the voice of all those who have felt themselves not merely shocked but personally betrayed by recent history. It was supposed to have been their time. It was not.” 

Time has always been an important notion in US culture. Depriving people of their “time” or even of the feeling that their time might soon be coming is akin to an attack on their soul. We now know that Joe Biden wants to restore “the soul of the nation.” If he is serious, he should think about a way to give the nation the time for the soul. Amazon, the nation’s most successful company, and the contemporary symbol of American commercialism, literally steals the time of its employees as it holds them accountable for every minute of their presence, monitoring and measuring their time and punishing them for seconds wasted.

At the end of the 1960s — the age of the hippies and Vietnam War protests — the underground culture Didion was describing existed in the form of a restricted but vociferous minority. Its members strove to define a mission to which they could dedicate their time. It might be ending the war, returning to nature in a commune or chanting “Om” on a street corner with the Hare Krishnas. Those who feel betrayed today may no longer be a minority. But they have no mission, and they increasingly feel there is no exit.

Many of them cling to their admiration for and identification with celebrities. They confide their hope in them and offer them their trust. Donald Trump was the first pure celebrity to profit politically from that trend. Ronald Reagan may have paved the way in the 1980s, but he was a mere figurehead, a stand-in for the abstract idea of celebrity. He provided a name, a face and a voice, but all three were associated with an absence of personality. He robotically acted out the script of standard US patriotism. If people thought of him as a celebrity, it was as a cardboard cutout of celebrity. Trump is the opposite.

The hyperreal world of democratic politics Trump exploited requires sophisticated constructions designed to funnel votes in an intended direction, just as the masts, sails and rigging of an imposing 19^th-century clipper or frigate were designed to harness the power of the winds to maximum effect. In the end, whether it’s a massive sailing ship, a movie set on the scale of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” or James Cameron’s “,” the rigging is what holds everything together.

The rigging of elections in the US starts long before people can even think about voting. Between passing laws that make voting difficult for specific categories of people (), gerrymandering and the lock-hold on politics of the two-party system itself, the political class has consistently demonstrated its resourcefulness in preventing democracy from expressing and implementing the will of the people. For Trump this year, the Republicans’ rigging simply couldn’t match the Democrats’. It isn’t about shenanigans like stuffing ballot boxes or getting the dead to vote. It’s about equipping a ship that can sail for the next four years.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Welcome to Joe ��������’s Socialist States of America

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This trend is not equally celebrated by both sides of the aisle. As a group, Latino voters have traditionally leaned toward the , fueling hopes that the increasing share of Latinos among the US electorate would translate into growing support for Democratic presidential candidates even in states known for being Republican strongholds, such as Texas. This narrative gained further momentum in the current electoral cycle as many expected Latinos to Donald Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric. However, the results of the 2020 presidential election suggest that changing demographics might not be enough to shield US politics against the next Donald Trump.

Who Are the Latino Voters?

Understanding these voters in their complexity and diversity is no easy task. At times, even establishing who belongs in the Latino category is a matter of contention. For instance, most dictionary definitions of the term “” would encompass Brazilian Americans as they define Latino as “a person of Latin American origin living in the U.S.” However, the US Census Bureau (USCB) — and some — would disagree. The USCB establishes no clear distinction between the terms “Latino” and “Hispanic,” privileging the narrower definition that emphasizes the Spanish rather than geopolitical criteria.

This conflict of definitions is a sample of the challenges facing scholars and analysts who attempt to predict how the Latino vote will shape US elections in the future. Rather than being a monolith, Latinos are a diverse group with distinctive priorities, interests and political views. In fact, only a quarter of Latinos use the term to describe themselves, with most preferring to be identified by the of their families. Among those who have Spanish as the dominant language in the countries of origin, almost 70% claim Hispanics in the US cannot be described as having a .

Diversity is also a hallmark of these communities in the realm of politics. Although minoritarian, some Hispanics have a history of commitment to the Republican Party and were instrumental in securing Republican candidates around a at least since the reelection of Richard Nixon in 1972.

Again, in 2020, electoral results appear to have followed that trend, with voting for Donald Trump, an increase of 4% compared to 2016 results, while Joe Biden performed on par with Hillary Clinton, securing around 66% of the Latino vote. Despite President Trump’s gains this year, most Latinos still vote Democrat and, as they become a greater share of the US electorate, this should benefit Democratic candidates in the future. Nonetheless, given the peculiarities of the US electoral system, projecting the influence of Latino voters on the outcome of an election based solely on national voting trends can be misleading.

Beyond convincing voters of their ideas, candidates must also persuade them to actually cast their ballots as voting in the US is not mandatory and is usually low. Furthermore, as elections are decided by a few battleground states, the candidates’ performance in these is more critical to the outcome of an election than the nationwide popular vote, as we have seen in 2000 with and in 2016 with .

If we account for these two variables, turnout and performance in key states, Latinos have sent a mixed message during the 2020 electoral cycle. In the state of Georgia, turnout among Latinos when compared to 2016, with many of those votes going for Joe Biden. In Gwinnett County, a precinct with a high concentration of Latinos, Biden widened the by 46%, earning 75% of the votes in the county. Young Latinos also helped flip the state of , which hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential nominee since Bill Clinton in 1996; Biden won here by a tight margin of little more than 10,000 votes.

However, Trump made significant inroads among Latino voters in important in southern Florida and in the Rio Grande Valley, Texas, two of the states which account for the highest number of electoral votes in the country.

Latinos for Trump

The surge in support for Donald Trump among Latinos in Florida and Texas was received with surprise by many observers of US politics. Prior to the election, expectations were that the would actually increase Democratic margins in those states and potentially flip them in favor of Joe Biden. Yet precisely the occurred. But why did Latino communities in these states vote for Donald Trump, a candidate who made anti-immigration policies a staple of his administration?

As one would expect, the reasons are manifold, and among them, partisanship is one that is often overlooked. Voters in the United States are historically polarized along party lines, and the gap between Democrats and Republicans has in recent years. Latinos are no exception. As the from the University of Texas at Austin shows, Latinos in Texas who identify as Republican are almost twice more likely to forego concerns about Trump’s immigration policies than non-Republican Latinos.

Data from Florida also shows strong partisan identification, in particular among Cuban Americans, who make up the of Latino voters in southern Florida. According to the , 58% of Cuban American registered voters identify as Republicans. In Miami-Dade, the most populous county in Florida, approximately 55% of Cuban Americans in 2020.

In addition to partisanship, Trump’s performance among Latino voters in Florida and Texas can be attributed to effective signaling strategies on issues that resonated with specific groups of voters in these communities. In Miami-Dade, for instance, Trump’s tougher stance against “socialism” was a major driver of engagement and one the president exploited well. Since taking office in 2017, Trump courted Cuban Americans unhappy with the of diplomatic relations with Havana under the Obama administration. He announced the reversal of President Barack Obama’s Cuba policy at a rally in the neighborhood of in 2017, in a clear bid to increase his support among Cuban American voters.

During his presidency, Trump also wooed Venezuelan Americans by posting pictures on Twitter with Lillian Tintori, the wife of Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez, and recognizing the shadow government of Juan Guaidó. In the days leading up to the 2020 election, in Spanish circulated widely on social platforms like WhatsApp, portraying Joe Biden as a socialist and associating the Democratic candidate with the autocratic regimes of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

In Texas, home of the country’s second-largest Mexican American community, Trump’s message also resonated with Latinos who embraced the state’s conservative ethos. Tejanos, as some prefer to be called, traditionally lean more than their counterparts in other states and seem very much in tune with the attitudes of their fellow when it comes to religion, abortion, support for law enforcement and gun rights.

However, it was in the Democratic stronghold of the Rio Grande Valley, along the border with Mexico, that Trump registered his largest gains. In Zapata, a county dependent on the jobs created by the , claims that Biden would ban fracking helped Trump flip the county red for the first time in almost a century. Trump benefitted greatly from a strong engagement of local Republicans who tailored his message to the issues most affecting these communities. Caravans of pickup trucks, the so-called “Trump Trains,” drove around the region praising Trump’s “pro-business” views and warning against “liberals” who want to “defund the police.”

Those were powerful messages in a region where 14% of local residents, most of them Latinos, are and many others work in law enforcement, including border patrol and immigration enforcement. The result was an astounding loss of in the regions’ four counties, reducing the Democratic margin from Hillary Clinton’s 44% to only 11% for Joe Biden.

This time, Donald Trump’s inroads among Latino voters did not win him reelection. However, his performance showed yet again that the increasingly diverse make-up of the US electorate, when combined with the peculiarities of the US electoral system, is no antidote against far-right trends. For those concerned with the state of US democracy, Democrats and Republicans alike, the 2020 presidential election should sound the alarm against essentializing narratives that take groups as diverse as Latino voters for granted.

*[51�Թ� is a  partner of the .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Donald Trump’s Treason Against the American People

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More than three weeks after the election, Trump has not officially conceded. The president and his supporters are vociferously and aggressively claiming voter fraud. President-elect Joe Biden and his camp, alongside US election and security officials, are unequivocal that there is no evidence of foul play. At this time of bitter impasse, it would be invaluable to refer to a truly objective, unbiased third party. Fortunately, there is one.

Election Monitoring

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) was founded in 1975. It consists of 57 member countries, and the United States is one of them. A key raison d’être of the OSCE is election monitoring. It assesses whether are “characterized by equality, universality, political pluralism, confidence, transparency and accountability.” The OSCE has observed over 300 elections globally, both in established democracies like Canada and the UK as well as in countries like Croatia and Ukraine, where the democratic tradition is still tenuous. A multinational team of experts is on hand before, during and after the vote. The is thorough and transparent.

The organization has been observing every general and midterm election in the US since the 2000 disputed contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Its presence is particularly relevant at this moment in US history. The OSCE planned to deploy some 500 observers in the 2020 election, but the number was reduced due to the pandemic. By early October, the International Election Observation Mission (IEOM) to the US had some 130 from 39 member nations on the ground. While some states did not allow international observers full access, most did. And even in states where the observers were not allowed in the polling stations, they at least examined the mail-in process. On the night of November 3, the OSCE delivered a detailed, , the entirety of which is openly available on the internet. 

The report covers a lot of ground: the political context and the legal framework of the electoral system; election administration and observation; voter rights, registration and identification; candidate registration (no room for birther controversy here); campaign environment and finance; the role of the media; legal complaints and appeals; as well as new voting technologies and the conduct of the election itself. It also explains IEOM’s process, observations, analysis, conclusions and recommendations.

Anyone with any doubt about possible voter fraud and whether the election was legal will be assuaged by the report’s conclusion that “The 3 November general elections were competitive and well managed” and that, “In general, IEOM interlocutors expressed a high level of confidence in the work of the election administration at all levels.”

The report also offers two chilling warnings. First, it states that “Baseless allegations of systematic deficiencies, notably by the incumbent president, including on election night, harm public trust in democratic institutions.” Second, it surmises that “Numerous ODIHR interlocutors noted that the judiciary has become highly politicized and indicated that this would have an impact on the rules governing the holding of these elections and possibly the outcome.” This report is preliminary. The IEOM remains on the task and will release a final report in early January.

Virtually Ignored

Interestingly, the presence of international election monitors in this United States has been virtually ignored by the media, the public and the politicians themselves. On the one hand, it’s understandable. Given the US-centric focus of many Americans, they may not even be aware of the role international observers play in US elections. Those who claim that the election was stolen from Donald Trump are certainly not going to point out that there is an objective assessment of the validity of the voting process. In fact, President Trump the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Chris Krebs, for stating that this election was “the most secure in American history.”

But why are the Democrats, the left-wing media and indeed anyone interested in proving beyond doubt that the election was fair ignoring the OSCE findings? Perhaps they don’t want to rely on any outside institutions to determine the validity of their election. Or maybe they feel that international monitors are only for banana republics, not for established democracies — and certainly not for the world’s . Pride goes before the fall.

Susan Hyde, a professor of political science at the University of Berkeley, California, and an experienced international election monitor, that “In countries that are very divided, it can be hard for citizens to know which sources of information are objective because it seems like every domestic audience has a dog in the fight.” She that international observers can “act as an external but credible resource for voters and for political parties.” International monitoring missions do not stand for Democrats or for Republicans — they stand for democracy.

On the one hand, it may be ironic that the United States should be in need of the services of international election monitors. But it would be even more tragic if the US did not use their essential, objective and readily available expertise and their vital findings at this critical juncture in its democracy.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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To help us understand at least one dimension of the transformation awaiting us, Ben Smith — President Emmanuel Macron’s newest phone buddy at The New York Times — has authored a examining what is likely to stand as the most visible change in the coming transition. It has little to do with policy. Instead, it concerns the two presidents’ relations with the media.

Can Joe Biden Rewrite the Rules of the Road?

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The sudden switch next January from the tweet-wielding, unmasked Republican slayer of Mexican and Muslim dragons, a man equipped his desk with a live hotline to Fox News host Sean Hannity and who manages an extended family ready to spread his improvised policies across the globe, to the 78-year-old Democratic DC seadog who, after 36 years in the Senate, spent half of this year sequestered in his basement, the change is likely to be monumental.

The world has grown accustomed to Trump’s slogans, insults, claims of greatness and outrageous lies that are automatically echoed by his minions in the media, including those who oppose him. That has become an attribute of the White House itself. Trump is always on stage and always looking to land a zinger. As Smith points out, the contrast provided by the president-elect couldn’t be greater. Where Trump was constantly inventing counterfactual boasts to market his brand, “Mr. Biden liked nothing more than a wide-ranging, high-minded conversation about world affairs after he had returned from a trip to China or India.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

High-minded conversation:

A dialogue between two people who have mastered the art of sounding not only serious but responsible, regardless of whether the substance of what they have to say is either serious or responsible.

Contextual Note

Ben Smith recounts that Joe Biden, when he was vice president, showed himself “particularly attentive to the wise men of Washington, especially the foreign policy columnists David Ignatius of The Washington Post and Thomas L. Friedman of The Times.” The journalist was almost certainly using the term “wise men” ironically, since the wisdom of both of those writers has too often been questioned by truly wise analysts for Smith’s readers to suppose that Ignatius and Friedman seriously live up to that label.

According to the laws of the liberal marketplace — laws with which The New York Times generally complies — opinion writers treating serious subjects in a serious style, and who are read and quoted routinely by educated people, define a journalistic commodity that can be labeled “wise men.” These voices are a form of the merchandise The Times puts on sale every day of the week.

Ever since Hillary Clinton’s famous characterization of Donald Trump’s voters as “a basket of deplorables,” it has been clear that “high-mindedness” is a feature of the Democratic brand. Democrats like to talk about serious, complex problems, although, even when in a position of power, they appear to be far less adamant about solving them. Above all, they aim to convince a reasonably educated public that they are serious people, in contrast with Republicans who like to reduce complex issues to slogans that turn around a binary choice. That is the kind of thing deplorables voters reflexively respond to.

Michelle Obama is admired for the she taught her children, which ultimately became a slogan: “When they go low, we go high.” The problem with this as a mobilizing sentiment is that it tends to communicate an attitude of superiority and condescension. When it comes from people who have achieved a high position, it implicitly expresses their indifference to the concerns of those who, for whatever reason, feel impelled to go low. Appearing to be the product of complex thought, it expresses a simple idea: that “we” (the wise ones) refuse to listen to those who fail to admire our accomplishments and respect our rules.

Smith points out how patently unskilled Biden has been throughout his career at leveraging the power of the media, a force now available to any prominent figure in today’s celebrity culture to impose their brand. Whatever light a public personality has to shed outward can be refracted through the commercial media into thousands of colors and amplified by social media to create an impact that will generate enthusiasm among the populace. That is what Donald Trump consummately knows how to do, and Joe Biden clearly doesn’t. Smith sees Biden as clinging to “an older set of values.” In a word, Biden is an old school politician called to reign over a world that is more likely to resonate with Jack Black’s “.”

As Smith observes, “it misreads Mr. Biden to see him as either a true insider or a media operator with anything like President Trump’s grasp of individual reporters’ needs, his instinct for when to call journalists or their bosses and his shrewd shaping of his own image.” A good segment of the US population and a clear majority of people overseas will be reassured. But can this old school approach make an impact in the US today, where celebrity and influencer culture drives every social and even political trend?

Historical Note

In his latest , “Capital and Ideology,” Thomas Piketty pours out and analyzes in considerable demographic and economic detail the history of voting patterns in the elections of three democracies: the US, France and the UK. The statistics reveal an inversion of the scale of education between the parties labeled left and right in all three countries. 

Whereas the conservative parties in these countries have traditionally drawn a clear majority of the educated class, today, it is the parties on the left that have won over the college-educated crowd, producing what he the establishment’s “Brahmin left.” It may or may not overlap with the progressive left, who tend not only to be educated but, unlike their establishment peers, intellectual. Increasingly the parties on the right continue to appeal to the wealthiest segment of the population — their traditional constituency — but, paradoxically, they have managed to attract the less educated classes into voting for what Piketty calls their culture of the “merchant right.”

In a fascinating frank and personal between former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and author Anand Giridharadas, the writer explains his view of how the Democratic Party has evolved. After provocatively observing that “Democrats don’t know how to talk,” he tells Yang that “the Democratic Party as a constellation is a victim of its own high-mindedness, its own sense of moral purpose, its own very high level of educational attainment.” He quite rightly emphasizes that high-mindedness may be a bit overrated in the world of contemporary politics.

Joe Biden of course managed to squeeze past Donald Trump in five battleground states by having what Hillary Clinton lacked, a tenuous connection with the working class and an education that was definitely not Ivy League. He wasn’t exclusively high-minded. But Biden never acquired or even sought to understand the populist swagger that now seems to be obligatory. When Giridharadas says that Democrats don’t know how to talk, what he means is that they don’t know how to present and sell their vision or their ideas. That, of course, supposes they have a vision and really do want to sell it, a proposition that has become somewhat debatable.

If Giridharadas seems skeptical about any Democrat’s ability to promote necessary ideas, Ben Smith ends on a complementary melancholy note, wondering almost fatalistically “whether the electorate and we in the media can break our addiction to the Trump news cycle.”

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Low Expectations of ��������’s High-Mindedness appeared first on 51�Թ�.

America Is No Longer One Nation

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This brings me to another self-declared genius and self-appointed savior of his nation, Adolf Hitler. In an earlier article, I have maintained that associating Trumpism with fascism is pure nonsense. Equating Trump with Hitler is indeed utter nonsense, except for one not-so-minor detail.

Treason

Some 40 years ago, the German-British journalist and historian Sebastian Haffner wrote a remarkable book on Hitler with a rather unpretentious title, “Anmerkungen zu Hitler” (“Notes on Hitler”). In less than 200 pages, Haffner discusses the most significant aspects of the Hitler phenomenon, his “achievements” and “successes,” his errors, mistakes and crimes. None of these aspects is relevant for the point of this piece, even if they would make an excellent blueprint for any future notes on Trump. What is relevant here is Haffner’s final note: “treason.” Once Hitler realized, Haffner argues, that all was lost, he turned on his own people. Since he had failed to destroy the enemies of the Third Reich, and here above all the Soviets, he could at least destroy his own people.

As Golo Mann, one of Germany’s most eminent postwar historians, noted in his of Hassner’s book in Der Spiegel, in Hitler’s eyes, the potential demise of the German people was, “in and itself no loss” — as long as it guaranteed that the trains continued to roll toward Auschwitz and the gas chambers and crematoria to run smoothly.

Hitler’s betrayal of the German people was the quasi-logical consequence of his personality and self-projection. On a mission from the almighty (proof: Hitler survived the July 1944 attempt on his life largely unharmed), he himself as the “chosen one” selected to do “the work of the Lord.” And Hitler was hardly alone in considering himself chosen. In 1938, after the annexation of Austria to the Third Reich, a Catholic paper that Austria’s “return to the Reich” was a clear sign that “the Almighty God has blessed the work of the Führer.”

After the attack on Poland in 1939, the official organ of the Protestant Church of the Free City of Danzig wrote that God had sent Hitler to liberate Germany from the shackles of Versailles and redeemed the German people from the danger of Polish violence. Successes such as these affirmed Hitler’s belief that he was special, infallible, even almighty — a belief daily reaffirmed by his entourage of mediocre sycophants and yes-men scared to death of his choleric tantrums, perfectly by Bruno Ganz in “Downfall.”

At this point, in films, you usually get a disclaimer that “any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.” I don’t know whether this also applies to opinion pieces. In any case, the disclaimer does not apply here. Any associations evoked in the reader’s mind are fully intended. This does not mean to suggest that Trump and Hitler are in the same league. Quite the contrary.

Petty Impersonator

Hitler was evil personified, a mass murderer who drew great satisfaction from human suffering. Compared to Hitler, Trump is a petty impersonator, a “man without qualities” and substance, full of himself. And yet. As has recently put it in The Times of India, Trump’s behavior following his defeat in the presidential election is reminiscent of Hitler’s last days in his bunker in Berlin. “Ensconced in the White House ‘bubble bunker,’” Trump “uncorked a similar deluge of rants, delusions, a fake narrative, alternate reality and invincibility as witnessed by Hitler’s Generals and staff in his end days.”

Add to that the clownish public appearances of the likes of Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, who has finally managed to live up to his own Borat-type caricature, and the picture is complete. Like Hitler in 1945, Trump in November 2020 lives in an alternate reality. This is a reality where he has won bigly, where the American people cannot wait to see all the wonderful things he has in store for them, like a big, beautiful wall, really beautiful new industrial parks and coal-fired power plants — where he will finally have the opportunity to make America great again.

Delusion, even self-delusion, however, goes only that far. Reality hits when even Trump’s faithful toadies like Tucker Carlson, over at Fox News, take their distance — if cautiously, like treading on eggshells — and strong-arm methods no longer prove effective. It is in this situation that delusion turns into bitterness, and bitterness into a strong urge for revenge. This might be the point where we are now, the point where Trump turns on his own people, dishing out punishment for having failed him. Unfortunately enough, this is a real possibility, given he is going to be in office for another two months. And as the pandemic has taught us, two months are quite a long time.

The signs are there, for all to see, starting with COVID-19. Over the past several weeks, the situation has reached catastrophic proportions, particularly in the predominantly rural states such as the Dakotas. The statistics are public knowledge, daily displayed on the front page of The New York Times. By now, even some of the most reluctant Republican governors, such as North Dakota’s Doug Burgum, have caved in and wearing masks in their state after being overwhelmed by the pandemic. In the meantime, Trump completely , despite a skyrocketing rate of new infections. In line with his earlier shrug of shoulders, “It is what it is,” the administration has largely gone AWOL.

As Time magazine recently , in a situation where the United States and its people are confronted with a health crisis of terrifying proportions, Trump has “pulled a ‘disappearing act.’” But then, why should he care. He cared little before, when he was still the president. Now, he soon won’t be. It is what it is. Let them fend for themselves. Serves them right if they die from the “China virus.”

Reversing Democracy

In the meantime, Trump has done what he has done best — corrode America’s political institutions and weaken, sabotage and subvert the democratic system. The United States used to be a liberal democracy, all its serious faults and shortcomings notwithstanding. To be sure, the Founding Fathers of the republic were not entirely sure whether democracy was such a great idea. James Madison in particular had serious reservations, and it was he who drafted the US Constitution.

This explains the Electoral College, an archaic and arcane institution, which Trump has been trying to manipulate to his advantage. This explains why it took until 1913 that senators were elected by the people rather than being appointed by state legislatures. Madison had little trust in the wisdom of ordinary citizens. In view of the current situation, he might have been right. Be it as it may, the United States developed into a liberal democracy. Donald Trump has done whatever he could to reverse this development.

His persistent insistence that the result of the election has somehow been rigged, his ludicrous tweets charging that he was cheated of what is rightfully his, together with his so-called legal team headed by impersonator, Rudy Giuliani, and the chorus of his sycophants in Congress and the right-wing media who have been toeing the line have done indelible damage to the democratic system. A few days ago, a representative found that more than half of Republicans believe that Trump “rightfully won” the election; more than two-thirds believe that the election was rigged. Before the election, more than 50% of Republicans confidence about the electoral process; after the election, a bit more than 20%. In fact, a substantial majority of Republicans said they were “not at all confident” that the election had been fair and that the results were accurate.

What is at heart here goes far beyond the belief in various conspiracies involving ballot tampering and other forms of fraud, but a fundamental belief that the whole system is rigged. As Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes have recently put it in , elections, “Trump’s most fervid supporters feel, are rigged by open borders and low hurdles to the naturalization of people who have entered the country illegally and by making it easier for African-Americans to register and vote, policies introduced by Democrats who are thereby seeking to lock in their future preeminence by reshaping the electorate to their advantage.” As a result, they fear that for them, “there may never be another election.”

The whole thing would make for a jolly good Monty Pythonesque farce if it were not so pathetic and, unfortunately, bloody serious. As Tho Bishop from the Mises Institute has recently , “regardless of the legal outcome, America is about to find itself with a president that will be viewed as illegitimate by a large portion of the population — and perhaps even the majority of some states. There is no institution left that has the credibility to push back against the gut feeling of millions of people who have spent the last few months organizing car parades and Trumptillas that their democracy has been hijacked by a political party that despises them.” They should know, given that they voted for a president and a political party that for four years showed nothing but contempt for large swaths of the American public.

Betrayal of the American People

The American president is supposed to be the president of all Americans. With Trump, this has never been the case. He has foremost been, in descending order, the president of himself, the president of the rich, of the Fox News MAGA crowd, and the white portion of the US population of European descent. His presidency has been largely consumed by the mission to safeguard and protect the privileged position of these groups. Take, for instance, the census whose data form the basis for the reapportionment of seats in the House of Representatives. In July, Trump made it known that he “to remove unauthorized immigrants from the count for the first time in history, leaving an older and whiter population as the basis for divvying up House seats, a shift that would be likely to increase the number of House seats held by Republicans over the next decade.”

What all this amounts to is a large-scale, multi-pronged operation designed to add fuel to existing resentments, exacerbate the already high disaffection with politics, further undermine trust in political institutions and the democratic processes and, ultimately, pit Americans against Americans. In ancient times, they called this strategy divide et impera — divide and conquer. It is a core point in the playbook of every serious authoritarian and wannabe dictator, from Putin to Erdogan, from Orban to Maduro. In the United States, it is nothing short of a fundamental betrayal of the ideals that once upon a time, far, far away in history, informed the American republic, its founding documents and constitution. It has further eroded America’s standing as the defender and promoter of democracy across the globe, leaving its image further sullied.

What this operation amounts to, in turn, is a fundamental betrayal of the American people. The architects of American democracy, above all James Madison, firmly that elected political leaders, “who held their office as a public trust, were not merely to act as a mouthpiece of the citizenry but to see farther than ordinary citizens: ‘to refine and enlarge the public views,’ to have the wisdom to ‘discern the true interest of their country,’ and to do so against ‘temporary or partial considerations.’” It fell onto the country’s political institutions and civic associations — political parties, the media, churches and schools — to cultivate the citizens’ minds and shape “a democratic people.”

Over the past few years, the opposite has happened. As Larry Bartels, one of America’s most respected political scientists, has recently put it, under Trump, the Republican Party’s commitment to democracy has been by “ethnic antagonism.” He cites the results of a recent survey that found that, among Republican identifiers and independents leaning toward the GOP, more than half agreed with the statement, “The traditional way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” Four out of 10 agreed that “A time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.”

Under the circumstances, recent over the specter of a coup staged by Trump in connivance with Republican officials in Congress and the states might not be all that crazy. In fact, they reflect to what degree four years of Trump have debased the spirit of American democracy, and to what extent the United States under Trump have progressed on the way to becoming a banana republic.

It is fitting that by now, there are serious concerns that Trump’s attempts to create as much havoc as possible might even extend to the economy. As Claudia Sahm recently in the pages of The New York Times, “Is Trump Trying to Take the Economy Down With Him?” Trump already caused significant damage to the US economy with his protectionist policies aimed at China and the European Union — damage even by Trump’s economic advisers. In the twilight of his presidency, nothing is more tempting than leaving his successor with an economic train wreck, particularly if it causes maximum damage to cities, such as Detroit and Atlanta, and states, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, that killed his chances of reelection.

US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s recent decision to defund several Federal Reserve COVID-19 lending programs, sharply criticized by both the Federal Reserve and the Biden transition team, is a preview of things to come. As Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, put it, Mnuchin’s move was a “that the Trump administration and their congressional toadies are actively trying to tank the U.S economy.”

It is to be hoped, for the sake of the American people, first, and for the whole international community, second, that the worst is not going to come to pass. Trump’s continued non-response to the catastrophic trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic, his protracted insistence that the outcome of the election was not only unfair but illegitimate, and his administration’s recent decisions directly impacting America’s economy suggest that a worst-case scenario is not out of the realm of the possible. On the contrary, it is quite likely.

If it should come to that, it would represent an act of treason against the American people, which should be treated as such — and prosecuted, at least in the court of public opinion. Adolf Hitler betrayed the German people, starting in 1944. He was never held accountable for his betrayal, taking the easy way out by committing suicide. The German people, however, learned a lesson that for a long time immunized them to the siren songs of a politics based on the appeal to the baser sides of human nature. It is to be hoped that coming to terms with the extent to which four years of Trump have inflicted damage on American democracy will immunize the American people against a repeat of 2016. I, for myself, would not count on it.

*[51�Թ� is a  partner of the .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Donald Trump’s Treason Against the American People appeared first on 51�Թ�.

What was special about his prevarication? It was systematic and provocative, attention-getting. Traditionally, US presidents lied quietly, covering their reprehensible acts in expressions of virtuous intentions. Even the most obvious lie of the 21^st century — George W. Bush’s claim that Saddam Hussein was hiding a massive store of weapons of mass destruction — was presented as a concern for ensuring peace by preventing an imminent act of war by a mad Iraqi dictator. It turned out that both the madness and the capacity for war were on the American side. But nobody noticed because, well, the American military is by definition “a force for good.”

The Post-Election Art of Drawing Hasty Conclusions

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With the incoming Biden administration, there will be fewer obvious lies. Given President-elect Joe Biden’s limited rhetorical skills, there may even be moments when Americans have access to the true intentions of a government that ordinarily seeks to hide them.

After the signature by 15 Asian nations of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) last week, Biden what would be behind US strategy after he becomes president on January 20, 2021. “We make up 25% of the world’s trading capacity, of the economy of the world,” he said. “We need to be aligned with the other democracies, another 25% or more, so that we can set the rules of the road instead of having China and others dictate outcomes because they are the only game in town.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Rules of the road:

The prescription of behavior for a group of supposed equals that clearly favors the interests of one member of the group whose dominant status allows it to impose its values and preferred behaviors on other members of a group without having to consult an external authority or waste too much time negotiating among equals

Contextual Note

Leaders of hegemons rarely explicitly lay out their hegemonic agenda. No one could doubt the bold claim Biden has made about the “rules of the road.” The United States always seeks to set the rules rather than play by them. But his statement deviates from the truth when he compares the US attitude with China’s. When it’s about the US defining the rules, Biden uses the verb “set.” But when it’s China, he uses the verb “dictate.” After all, China is a communist dictatorship, so logically anything it does can be called dictating.

That’s how clever diplomatic language works, at least in the hands of Democrats. They prefer to select the effective verb to instill the idea of good versus evil. Republicans prefer to use the language of moral judgment or downright insult. President Trump likes to call them purveyors of evil, or even “shitholes.”

But the major difference between the rhetoric of the two parties is that the Republicans shy away from admitting the hard reality that results from the muscular use of power relationships. They prefer to present it as the logic of history, divine will or predestination that have put the US in the role of unique decision-maker for the rest of the world. The shining city on the hill spreads its light across the globe by virtue of being the shining city, not through its complex interplay with other nations. It has an existential quality that can no one can ever doubt.

That is what Trump means by “America First.” He presented the slogan as if it turned around the idea that the US should decide to tend only to its own needs and not worry about what happens elsewhere in the world. But it also contained the idea that because America was “first” by virtue of its might, it produced the light that illuminated the rest of the world. It didn’t actually have to be good and fair to stand as a model for everything that was good and fair.

The primary difference between these two interpretations of American exceptionalism lies in the respective rhetorical strategies rather than policy. That is why ��������’s foreign policy may not be very different from Trump’s in its overall effect on the rest of the world. It will be a variation on hegemonic rhetoric, but the military and financial base will be nearly identical. 

Democrats believe that American exceptionalism, the success story of the nation, endows it with the authority to write the rules of the road for the rest of humanity. The Republicans see it as the result of writing the rules for themselves which they expect the rest of the world will naturally follow.

Historical Note

When, alluding to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the RCEP, Joe Biden compared the attitude of the US quite naturally seeking to “set the rules of the road” and the Chinese who “dictate outcomes.” The case can be made that he inverted the truth concerning the history of these two trade arrangements.

When the TPP was still awaiting signature at the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, the that the deal designed to put the US in the position to set the rules of the road was contested inside the US. The BBC reports: “US opponents have characterised the TPP as a secretive deal that favoured big business and other countries at the expense of American jobs and national sovereignty.” That highlights the problem Biden will be facing in many of his future decisions: how to define the US and its interests. In other words, who defines the rules? Is it big business or the American people?

Commenting on the of the “secretive deal,” Vox reported: “Negotiations over the TPP’s terms were conducted in secret, with well-connected interest groups having access to more information — and more opportunities to influence the process — than members of the general public.” Even Congress was to the terms of the draft.

In other words, when Biden refers to setting the rules of the road, it is anything but an openly negotiated procedure. In contrast, the RCEP was drafted conjointly and largely democratically by all the interested parties, which include some of the strongest allies of the US: Australia, Japan and South Korea. It is a lie of Trumpian proportions to suggest that the RCEP was dictated by the Chinese.

Statements of that kind by the president-elect do not bode well for the future foreign policy we can expect from the Biden administration. Biden’s future secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, when he more realistically characterizes the state of the world at a forum at the Hudson Institute in July: “Simply put, the big problems that we face as a country and as a planet, whether it’s climate change, whether it’s a pandemic, whether it’s the spread of bad weapons — to state the obvious, none of these have unilateral solutions. Even a country as powerful as the United States can’t handle them alone.” 

Blinken’s approach to foreign policy is likely to be similar to Obama’s, which does indeed appear refreshing in comparison to Donald Trump’s. But it is likely to be a return to a certain form of wishing to write the rules alone, if not handling the problems alone. In an in July, Blinken regretted that, under Trump, the US had lost the ability to dictate the rules. “If we’re not doing a lot of that organizing in terms of shaping the rules and the norms and the institutions through which countries relate to one another,” he said, “then one of two things, either someone else is doing it and probably not in a way that advances our own interests and values or maybe just as bad, no one is and then you tend to have chaos and a vacuum that may be filled by bad things.”

The problem Biden will face is that the world has changed. Unlike a few decades ago, few now believe the US has a divine right to “shape the rules” or the ability to stave off chaos.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Can Joe Biden Rewrite the Rules of the Road? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Westly finds himself in the company not just of subtle political thinkers like Representative and former CIA officer, but also of apostate Republicans such as John Kasich and Meg Whitman. These are people who have discovered — thanks to the four-year run of Donald Trump’s White House reality-TV show — that the Democratic Party feels a lot like the Republican Party of old.

Alex Acosta and the Guidelines of the Elite

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Westly makes the following bold claim: “Democrats need to understand that America is still a center-right country with a large, highly motivated evangelical base.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Center-right country:

A nation that in its majority seeks to believe in and fulfill the ideals of democracy and equality but whose power brokers have the clout to convince the media that it prefers the stability of oligarchic control

Contextual Note

The Democrats seized on the idea of Russian meddling in 2016 to explain their defeat in the presidential election. This time, the scapegoat is the group of Democrats who pledge allegiance to “democratic socialism” and shout “defund the police.” Those words and ideas must now be stricken from the vocabulary of the party. All language must be formulated to soothe the fears of “moderates.” 

This exercise in pre-digested, reductionist analysis leading to the simplification of discourse and debate seeks to brand an entire swath of the population as un-American. The US is increasingly divided and visibly fragmented. The Democrats apparently want to use President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral success to dictate to the American people who they are as a group and how they should think of themselves.

There may be a statistical sense that justifies calling the country “center-right.” But this has no meaning when a wide range of cultural values are at play. When people are pushed toward the edges, no statistical mean accurately identifies a center. Westly is right to mention the existence of a highly motivated evangelical base. But even that fact requires further analysis. The Republicans have to a large extent created the fiction that it exists as a coherent voting bloc.

There are two reasons not to think of the US as a center-right country. The first is that it has never been more diversified and divided. That two extremes may exist does not mean that the mid-point between them defines the nature of a people.

Furthermore, polls taken during the election campaign have consistently shown that issues identified with the left and branded by Republicans and Democrats alike with the deliberately toxic term “socialism” are in fact endorsed by a large majority of the population. The most obvious is Medicare for All, consistently denigrated by centrists and the right as “socialist medicine” and rejected by Biden, but by Americans (70%) and even by a near majority of Republicans.

Even Andrew Yang’s theme of the universal basic income (UBI) — a “socialist” measure of redistribution if ever there was one — also has. If we consider single-payer health care and UBI centrist policies because a majority approves them, then we need to redefine who is a centrist on the political spectrum. Certainly not Joe Biden.

The second reason concerns the nature of the two extremes. They are radically different. In the US, the extreme right is indeed a powerful force, as the tea party movement demonstrated. It expresses its extremism by eschewing all forms of rationality, insisting that personal beliefs, opinions and prejudices trump any form of reasoning. Evangelical faith is one example of this, but not the only one. Blind nationalism is another, but to a large extent that is also a feature even of the Democratic center, which embraces the slogan of American exceptionalism. The idea of exceptionalism itself is anti-rational, an implicit rejection of the democratic principle of equality, if not of the rule of law itself.

The extreme left contrasts radically with the extreme right. First, just in terms of comparative size, the extreme left is marginal. This imbalance may contribute to the mistaken impression that the nation can be defined as center-right. More significantly, the left as a whole, with its many variants, clings to the value of rationality. It is fundamentally an intellectual movement promoting reasoned rather than emotional approaches to addressing social problems. 

In Shakespearean terms, the left is Hamlet, the thinker, as opposed to Polonius, the busybody focusing on executing the will of King Claudius, the wielder of power. Hamlet rebelled intellectually, but Claudius ruled Denmark until he was replaced in the final act by the Norwegian Fortinbras (literally “strong-in-arm”).

Like most establishment Democrats, Westly singles out “democratic socialism,” treating it as a kind of virus that has infected the Democratic Party. It encourages the idea that the incoming Biden administration’s essential task will be the production of a vaccine to eliminate it or at least contain any further contamination.

That theme of ostracizing the left seems to be the flavor of the month. Just now, Al Jazeera informs us that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has that the US will label the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign — a movement focused on contesting the politics of the Israeli government — as “anti-Semitic.” It is a theme the Labour Party in the UK has just used effectively to purge the left. The left everywhere is accused of toppling statues. The center, both right and left, topples people.

That kind of purge may not be what Westly has in mind, but it’s becoming more and more likely that that’s what the Democrats will be seeking to do.

Historical Note

The history of 21^st-century elections tells a tale that contradicts the characterization of the US as a center-right country. The center-right epithet implies the public’s preference for stability and adherence to the status quo. But recent elections have revealed a profound and growing unease with the status quo.

The presidential election of 2000 should have resulted in the election of a center-left candidate, Al Gore. Instead, the Supreme Court crowned George W. Bush, who lost the popular vote and even failed to win the Electoral College. Bush managed to get that close to winning by defining himself as a “compassionate conservative.” That was his way of claiming to be dead center: conservative to please the Republicans, compassionate to please the Democrats.

President Bush very quickly abandoned the compassionate side and sought to impose an aggressive neocon, neoliberal agenda that Americans had not voted for. It began with the notorious Bush tax cuts at a time when polls showed Americans were ready to accept tax hikes if the goal was to repair a crumbling infrastructure. Bush doggedly pursued his agenda rather than the people’s.

Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 promising hope and change. His first challenge was to resolve the financial crisis Bush left in his lap. This may have sobered his impulse to effectuate change. President Obama spent the next eight years consolidating the status quo. Then, in 2016, the status quo candidate, Hillary Clinton, lost to an irresponsible clown promising an irrational, undefined program of radical change.

These recent elections show that voters regularly come out to vote against the status quo. It defines a nation that consistently expresses its impatience with the center-right but is repeatedly given little choice. The centrist Republicans invented the idea of “anyone but Trump.” The voters have shown an attitude closer to “anything but the center.” The Democrats fared poorly in 2020 because “anyone but Trump” trumped “anything but the center.”

The massive go-out-and-vote campaign in the wake of the George Floyd killing helped the uninspired and uninspiring candidate, Joe Biden, to attain nearly 80 million votes as opposed to Clinton’s 65.85 million. Without the mobilization of those protesting the status quo, ��������’s numbers would have been closer to Clinton’s. He most likely would have lost massively in the Electoral College to Donald Trump’s 74 million.

As a new Democratic administration prepares to take office in January 2021, it would be wise to take the time to assess the deeper meaning of the vote.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Post-Election Art of Drawing Hasty Conclusions appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The girlfriend ventures out to find the residents of Bushwick fighting an invading horde. But it’s not a horde of zombies, even though they are committed to the same relentless violence. The invasion force turns out to be a right-wing paramilitary bent on securing the secession of Texas and most of the South from the United States.

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Why are they in Brooklyn? That’s not entirely clear. The grunts, all dressed in identical black riot gear, are just following orders. They didn’t expect resistance, but the diverse community has banded together — African Americans, Orthodox Jews, bearded craft beer connoisseurs. So, like zombies, the militia members are killing every resident they encounter.

Worst-Case Scenario

Militia violence. Rejection of the federal government. Right-wing crazies promoting a civil war. Bushwick was made at a time when Hillary Clinton looked like she’d be the next president and right-wing resistance inevitable. Instead, the Electoral College tilted toward Donald Trump. As the new head of the federal government, Trump preempted the worst-case scenario. His more extreme followers wouldn’t weaponize their grievances as long as one of their own was “running” the country.

At the same time, Trump implicitly promised to maintain this tenuous status quo as long as he won reelection. In the first presidential debate, Trump , a neo-fascist group, to “stand back and stand by.” The extremists waited, locked and loaded. A landslide — against Trump and against his Republican Party enablers — might have put this worst-case scenario to rest. Instead, with Trump refusing to concede the election and the Republican Party celebrating its congressional and state house victories, the country is now inching ever closer to the “Bushwick” plotline.

Accelerationists like the Boogaloo Bois, who want to bring down the existing system through a violent race war, are chomping at the bit. A raging pandemic has separated Americans into the cautiously masked and the defiantly maskless, further undermining what remains of the country’s cohesion.

As for zombies, they have  across American popular culture at least since “Night of the Living Dead” hit movie theaters in 1968. They have now lurched off the page and out of the multiplex into real life. For how else would you describe the millions of Americans who deny the effects of a disease that has killed nearly 250,000 people and the results of a free and fair election that repudiated Donald Trump? Jeez, something must have eaten their brains.

The Disease Spreads

In 2016, the virtual equivalent of zombies — bots operating through social media and the comment sections of websites — intervened in the US presidential election. In 2020, those bots were . But who needs virtual zombies when Americans themselves have become so willing to spread disinformation? The Russian intention back in 2016 wasn’t so much to get Trump elected. No one,  Donald Trump himself, thought there was much chance of that. Rather, the disinformation campaign sowed doubt about the political system more generally.

What started out as marginal hobbyhorses became widespread delusions. Don’t trust the candidates, the media, the NGOs. A conspiracy lurks behind the façade of normalcy. The Democrats are actually pedophiles (the ), the financiers are actually Nazis (the ), and government officials are part of a deep-state resistance to Trump’s agenda (the , among others).

And then there’s the one conspiracy that rules them all. The QAnon notion that all the world’s a Satanic child-trafficking ring — Pizzagate raised to the nth degree — is so absurd on the face of it, that no reasonable person could possibly entertain it. But plenty of people have embraced equally wacky theories. L. Ron Hubbard’s “Dianetics” has been a bestseller for decades, and all too many Americans were willing to believe that Barack Obama was a foreign-born Muslim despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.

Of course, it’s a lot easier to deny the existence of something if it remains far away in time or space. Those who live far from the ocean can blithely refute the evidence of the rising waters. That’s not so easy when those waters have reclaimed your land and your house tumbles into the sea.

Misinformation about COVID-19 — that masks are not necessary, that vaccines should be avoided or that herd immunity is a viable strategy — has been lethal. That denialism should have disappeared as COVID-19 infection rates began to spread to every corner of the United States before the election. The increasing proximity of the threat should have motivated Americans to come together as one to fight the virus. At the very least, fear should have kept people at home instead of venturing out to the potential superspreader events that President Trump was sponsoring as campaign rallies before the election. But no. Thousands still showed up to what Democrats should have called Trump’s “death rallies.” Even more unbelievably, Trump went on to defeat Joe Biden in those parts of the country hardest hit by the virus. According to the , “in 376 counties with the highest number of new cases per capita, the overwhelming majority — 93 percent of those counties — went for Trump, a rate above other less severely hit areas.” Even in hard-hit areas that ultimately voted for Biden, Trump often improved his showing from 2016, .

Well, zombies don’t know that they’re zombies. One day they’re ordering BLTs, and the next they’re eating their next-door neighbor. They’re completely unaware of how the abnormal has become normal.

The “Stolen” Election

A coup requires at least some public support. The Thai military could count on the “yellow shirts.” The Egyptian military relied on those fearful of the religious leanings of the Muslim Brotherhood. Pinochet courted the rich and the middle class. Where public support is lacking, coups often wither. That’s what happened in the Soviet Union in 1991. This week in Peru, the would-be president who forced the resignation of anti-corruption campaigner Martín Vizcarra  after only a week in office, as protests continued to roil the country and the police killed two demonstrators.

Trump has the backing of millions of Americans who have bought into his allegations of a “stolen” election. As importantly, only a minority of Republican Party grandees has bowed to the inevitable by acknowledging ��������’s victory. That includes a mere four Republican senators —Lisa Murkowski, Ben Sasse, Mitt Romney and Susan Collins. A number of Republican candidates in this month’s election, including those who were beaten by large margins, are also refusing to concede. Errol Webber, who lost his bid to unseat Karen Bass in a California congressional seat by an astounding 72%, now claims election fraud and won’t back down. He’s  in his delusions.

The question is, how far will Trump and the Republican leadership go? It’s not likely that the Pentagon would support a coup, even after the removal of Mark Esper. The militia movement is armed and dangerous, but it’s not even close to being as organized as in the “Bushwick” scenario. The “Million MAGA March” fell short of its goal by 980,000 people or so. Trump just doesn’t have the numbers — not the votes to reverse the election results in a recount, not the judges to overturn the decision through a legal strategy,  to replace the Electoral College delegates and not the people on the street for a popular uprising.

That doesn’t mean he can’t still do damage. Just this week, he announced that the administration would sell  to oil and gas companies to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. He  the Homeland Security official who declared the election secure, then  to install wacko Judy Shelton on the Federal Reserve board. And he came close to starting a war with Iran just to destroy any last chance of salvaging the Obama-era nuclear deal. His advisers  persuaded him that it would be unwise to bomb the country’s nuclear facilities.

Meanwhile, as I explain in a new  at TomDispatch, not only is Trump throwing sand in the wheels of transition, the Republicans are gearing up to block just about everything the Biden administration will try to do from January on. The Republicans have transformed themselves into a zombie party that relies on a narrow base of zombie support. The party effectively died as a viable political force — absent gerrymandering and voter suppression — before Trump brought it back from the dead. In films, zombification is a one-way street. Once you start twitching and slavering, there’s no going back. Let’s hope that the analogy doesn’t hold in American politics.

De-Trumpification

In 1956, three years after Stalin’s death, Nikita Khrushchev gave a secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress entitled “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences.” Today, the speech , full of jargon and acrobatic attempts to separate Stalin’s crimes from the Soviet system. But at the time, it shocked the Communist Party zombies who’d hitherto been unaware (or pretended not to know) of Stalin’s crimes.

Most of those who were well acquainted with Stalin’s crimes were already dead from famine, war or murderous purges. That’s the thing about plagues: By the time you’re finally convinced of their lethality, you’re on your deathbed. For some, even death is not enough. Compare the Stalinists who  love for their leader as they were being executed with the COVID-19 patients who continued to  with their dying breaths.

The party speech was the first major step in the de-Stalinization campaign that Khrushchev waged into the 1960s. The campaign produced some liberalization of Soviet society, but the Thaw came to an end in a Brezhnev backlash that lasted effectively until Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 (and  Khrushchev’s 1956 speech for all to read). Unfortunately, the de-Stalinization that Khrushchev started in 1956 didn’t completely discredit the Soviet dictator. Indeed, according to , an astounding 70% of Russians approve of Stalin’s role in Soviet history.

Trump’s personality cult exerts a similar effect. His adherents are incapable of seeing that the  extends far beyond his intemperate tweets. No speech by Joe Biden is going to make any difference. Not even denunciations by former Trumpers — Michael Cohen, John Bolton, John Kelly — have done much of anything. Trump’s support only grew from 2016 to 2020. So, what will it take to avoid the Stalin scenario?

In an article about three historical parallels —  Reconstruction, de-Nazification and de-Baathification — I  that a mere speech won’t do the trick: “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.”

In this way, the leader can be properly stigmatized while the followers can be progressively de-zombified. One thing is for certain: If the Biden administration doesn’t take firm and decisive action against the illegalities of the Trump team, and if Biden doesn’t address the root causes of the zombification of half the electorate, the new president will be eaten alive.

*[This article was originally published by .]

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It is clear America is still a very divided nation. The big question is, what did the Democrats do wrong, and how can we do better moving forward?

America Is No Longer One Nation

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Voter participation was not the problem, with a record-high 158 million Americans casting ballots. Fundraising was not the issue as election spending also hit record highs, at nearly billion, and Democrats raised close to double what Republicans did. The major story is that record turnout and fundraising failed to propel Democratic candidates in the House, the Senate and state legislatures to victory as expected. The presidential race was a clear referendum on Donald Trump that didn’t translate down the ticket.

President Trump’s overall approval rating generally hovered around 40% over the course of his term in office. That’s already dangerous territory as no president in modern history has won reelection with an approval rating below 48%. Joe Biden was able to cut into Trump’s 2016 base, including seniors and non-college-educated white men. At the same time, Trump was able to win over parts of Hillary Clinton’s coalition, including Hispanic voters. Most surprisingly, an incredible 56% of Americans said they were today than four years ago in a September Gallup poll. That’s more than in 2012 before the re-election of President Barack Obama.

In the end, it all came down to two major issues: the COVID-19 pandemic and the economy. As recently as April, Donald Trump was more trusted to  by 8 points over Joe Biden. But 59% of Americans  of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. As that lead diminished and the pandemic continued to claim lives, Trump lost his last remaining advantage. But to win after COVID-19, Democrats need to improve their messaging.

Democrats need to understand that America is still a center-right country with a large, highly motivated evangelical base. They need to cope with the repercussions of embracing democratic socialism at the national level. The Democratic Party also needs to address the fear many Americans have that the new economy may leave them behind as they see jobs move out of the country and the wage gap expands. Flirting with socialism is likely to frighten workers already nervous about the future.

The solution lies in finding smart ways to appeal to the growing base of young and minority voters without frightening rural, white constituencies. The common ground is likely to be in reliable kitchen-table issues like the economy, health care and jobs. The most important issue for the Democrats has always been jobs. They need to mount a full assault to retake this issue by focusing on how to better train America’s workforce to be job-ready for the 21^st century. They need to talk about how they will reduce income inequality by providing the specific skills necessary to get tomorrow’s jobs. And, most importantly, they need to talk about how to provide those skills to inner-city and rural voters alike.

The Democrats will enjoy the benefits and power from building a big tent party in an ever-closer majority-minority nation, particularly while the GOP wrestles with internal strife over white nationalism. But they can’t continue to lose over issues and messaging. It all starts with presenting a sensible strategy for preparing more Americans with 21^st-century skills. This election is over, but the battle for the next one has already begun. The Democrats don’t have time to waste.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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We are not talking about all those good people in Nebraska, Iowa or North Dakota who would have voted for the incumbent no matter what. We are talking about the substantial number of Hispanic and Asian Americans who cast their vote for a candidate and for a party not known for their enthusiastic embrace of multiculturalism. In fact, one of the most sobering lessons from this most recent contest was that the Democrats lost — or, perhaps better, failed to appeal to — a significant part of an electorate they considered not only theirs but their “natural” constituency.

America Is No Longer One Nation

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So much for the “emerging Democratic majority” often over the past decade or so yet proving once again quite elusive. As it turned out, to the apparent surprise of journalists and pundits alike, “non-whites” are significantly less homogeneous and significantly more diverse than progressive strategists have envisioned and taken for granted. “The horror, the horror!” to quote Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.”

The Other Side

The fact is that the Democrats lost a significant share of “voters of color” — African Americans, Hispanics and Asian Americans. This loss not only deprived Biden of carrying Florida, but cost the Democrats congressional seats in Florida, Texas and even California. Significantly enough, as The New York Times , “the only House seats Republicans picked up that were not in districts Mr. Trump also carried were in heavily Hispanic or Asian regions.” Heavily Democratic south Texas communities along the Mexican border are a case in point — areas, to Politico, along with parts of Florida, that “had some of the sharpest swings from Democrats to Republicans this year.”

Several south Texas counties, which Hilary Clinton had carried in 2016 by large margins, this time saw support for the Democratic contender like snow on a balmy spring Sunday; other counties went outright to the other side.

Among Asian American voters, Trump picked up around a third of the vote; the same was true for Hispanic voters. In both cases, the outcome of the vote was to a large extent a reflection of the heterogeneity of these communities. In Florida, for instance, Cuban and Venezuelan Americans predominantly voted for Trump; among Cuban Americans, around 60% said in a that they intend to vote for Trump. This was particularly the case among more recent Cuban migrants who, unlike US-born Cuban Americans, are overwhelmingly registered Republicans.

In south Texas, an area heavily dependent on jobs in law enforcement, Mexican Americans for Trump. In other parts of the country, Trump received from Vietnamese and Filipino Americans. In all of these instances, the to paint Biden as a socialist appears to have carried the day. Trump himself, in one of his , had charged that Biden was “a PUPPET of CASTRO-CHAVISTAS like Crazy Bernie, AOC and Castro-Lover Karen Bass.” In addition, Trump’s stance on China appears to have to significant numbers of Chinese, Vietnamese and Filipino voters, if for different reasons such as, for Vietnamese American voters, the memory of China’s “imperialist efforts” in the region.

It would be easy to dismiss all of these voters as misguided, taken in by a con man whose “muscular leadership style” among certain portions of in Texas and elsewhere. Trump’s Christian posturing appeals to conservative Catholic and evangelical Hispanics, particularly with regard to the question of abortion. As one voter is in The New York Times, “Abortion is the litmus test, Jesus is my savior and Trump is my president.” The Trump administration’s did nothing to undermine the conviction that he was the right man to fix the mess and get the country’s economy back on its feet.

Really Existing Socialism

All of these are valid reasons, as good as any to explain the outcome of this election. This, however, is not the case when it comes to the major charge, which apparently had considerable traction among a significant number of voters, that with Biden, the United States would be on the road to socialism. For a European, this is ridiculous. It is even more preposterous when it evokes the likes of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, as if Maduro had anything to do with socialism — except for his claim to be a socialist. It once again shows to what degree the experience of “really existing socialism,” as the East German regime liked to put it, has debased and discredited what once was a beacon of hope for millions of people.

Marx never envisioned that the first countries to adopt his thoughts would be economically backward ones such as Russia, China, Cuba and Vietnam. For Marx, the fundamental precondition for socialism was the establishment of an economy of abundance, brought about by the “unfolding of the forces of production” — technological innovation and progress which would liberate humans from the drudgery of dull, repetitious, stultifying labor. History, unfortunately, threw a curveball. In the hands of Lenin and his successors, both in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, socialism turned into a development strategy designed to catch up with the advanced economies in the West.

It was a miserable failure. In East Germany, for instance, the Socialist Unity Party (SED) claimed it was marching from one victory to the next until a rude awakening in 1989, when the “first socialist state on German soil” — as Erich Honecker, the leader of the GDR, declared on October 7, 1989, a month before the fall of the Berlin Wall — was forced to declare bankruptcy, both physically and ideologically. A system that cannot even guarantee the regular supply of toilet paper — and this in normal times, not during a pandemic — is hardly the socialist “workers and farmers’ paradise” the SED touted for decades. A socialist system is supposed to meet the material needs of its citizens so that the latter are in a position to develop their intellectual and artistic potential rather than having to stand in line to, perhaps, get hold of a measly banana.

Today, more often than not, “socialism” has been turned into a bugaboo that easily scares innocent minds. In the hands of political operators without scruples, it is an ideal means to undermine and discredit progressive ideas. Take, for instance, measures to confront global warming. In southern Texas, an area heavily dependent on the oil and gas industry, Hispanics voted against Biden because of the Democrats’ to promote renewable sources of energy, seen as being left-wing.

To be sure, the transition to renewables is causing and likely to continue to cause significant social dislocations. Economic theory suggests that the only reasonable way to mitigate the impact of these dislocations is a strong safety net that allows the losers of technological innovation to get the opportunity to retrain and lead a decent life. In the past, in advanced capitalist countries, it was primarily socialist and social democratic parties that promoted the social welfare state.

Today, even the and newspaper not only voice their concern about the dramatic increase in inequality and the nefarious fallout of hyperglobalization, but also stress the importance of a strong safety net and — the horror! the horror! — of state intervention in the economy. This is not socialism but basic common sense, which, unfortunately, appears quite alien to substantial parts of the American public.

The fact that a significant number of American voters have bought into the Republican narrative of Biden the promoter of socialism is just one more reflection of the deep polarization that characterizes the current political landscape of the United States. On the one side, Trump voters, full of nostalgia for times past when the US was a “God-fearing” country, the major economic power fueled by the abundant supply of cheap oil, respected and feared around the world. On the other, Biden voters, realistic (one might hope) about America’s diminished position on the international arena, humbled by the extent to which the virus exposed the country’s lack of preparedness and subsequent shortcomings which gainsaid the notion that the US still is “the greatest country in the world,” frightened by the apparent fragility of America’s democratic institutions and widespread public willingness to trade in democracy for the proverbial strong man.

It is to be hoped that ��������’s inauguration in January will mark the beginning of what promises to be a protracted process of healing. The threat of Trump returning in 2024 like Jason Voorhees (“He’s back!”) of Friday the 13^th fame, is certainly not going to make things easy. In the meantime, let hope prevail.

*[51�Թ� is a  partner of the .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The international community is happy that the American people have taken down the world’s biggest bully. The heads of international bodies — from the  to  — are delighted that soon Trump won’t be undermining their missions. Perhaps the 2020 presidential election will inspire people elsewhere to dethrone their lesser bullies like Viktor Orban in Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India, even Vladimir Putin in Russia. Short of that, however, the removal of Trump from the international scene will restore a measure of decorum and predictability to global affairs.

Joe Biden and America’s Second Reconstruction

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With a slew of executive orders, Joe Biden is expected to press the reset button shortly after his January inauguration. The Washington Post : “He will rejoin the Paris climate accords, according to those close to his campaign and commitments he has made in recent months, and he will reverse President Trump’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization. He will repeal the ban on almost all travel from some Muslim-majority countries, and he will reinstate the program allowing ‘dreamers,’ who were brought to the United States illegally as children, to remain in the country, according to people familiar with his plans.”

Just as Donald Trump was determined to delete the Obama administration’s legacy, Joe Biden will try to rewind the tape to the moment just before Trump took office. That’s all to the good. But the world that existed just before Trump began starting messing with it wasn’t so good: full of war, poverty and rising carbon emissions. Will Biden to do more than just the minimum to push the United States into engaging more positively with the international community?

Dealing with Russia, China and North Korea

The paradox of Trump’s foreign policy is that he often treated US adversaries better than US allies. Trump was constantly berating and belittling the leaders of European and Asian countries that had come to expect at least a modicum of diplomacy from Washington. The abrasive president berated NATO allies for not spending enough on their own defense, and he was constantly trying to pressure Japan and South Korea to pony up more money to cover the costs of US troops on their soil.

Trump loved to  what should have been his friends: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was “dishonest and weak,” British Prime Minister Theresa May was a “fool,” and German Chancellor Angela Merkel was “stupid.” But Trump was positively glowing about North Korean leader  (“We fell in love”), Chinese President (“He’s now president for life, president for life. And he’s great”), and Russian President (“he might be bad, he might be good. But he’s a strong leader”). On the campaign trail in the fall, Trump : “One thing I have learnt, President Xi of China is 100 per cent, Putin of Russia, 100 per cent … Kim Jong-un of North Korea, 100 per cent. These people are sharp and they are smart.”

Biden can be expected to reestablish the more routine praise of democrats and condemnation of autocrats. But will the reset go beyond rhetoric? During the campaign, for instance, Biden hit Trump hard on his China policy. The president, according to the Democratic candidate, wasn’t tough enough on China. Biden  to force Beijing to “play by the international rules” when it comes to trade and security. In addition, “under my watch America is going to stand up for the dissidents and defenders of human rights in China,” he .

The US-China relationship  before Trump took office. The consensus, therefore, is that ��������’s election won’t reverse the trend. As Steven Lee Myers  in The New York Times, “While many will welcome the expected change in tone from the strident, at times racist statements by Mr. Trump and other officials, few expect President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to quickly reverse the confrontational policies his predecessor has put in place.”

Remember, however, that China-bashing has become a time-honored element of US presidential campaigns. Biden was not different. He saw an opening to criticize Trump and an opportunity to look tough on foreign policy, a perennial requirement for Democratic candidates. Once in office, however, presidents have generally adopted a more business-like approach to Beijing.

My guess is that Biden will largely  that Trump applied on Chinese goods because those were self-inflicted wounds that hurt American farmers and manufacturers. But he’ll continue to use sanctions against Chinese companies — on the grounds of intellectual property theft or security concerns — and against individuals associated with human rights abuses. Practically, that would mean shifting tensions to more targeted issues and allowing the bulk of US-China economic cooperation to proceed.

More focused cooperation might be possible on environmental issues as well. In 2011, China and the United States established the  to combine efforts to develop technology that can wean both countries of their dependency on fossil fuels. The funding runs out this year. Trump would not have renewed the project. Biden can do so and should even expand it. Of course, just talking would be a good start. The United States and China need to dial back tensions over Taiwan, the South China Sea and the global economy. Biden will likely move quickly to lower the temperature so that he can focus on cleaning up some other foreign policy messes.

The same applies to Russia. Despite some rather conventional hawkish language about Russia, Biden is  in reducing the role of nuclear weapons in US military policy. He is not only skeptical about the huge cost of modernizing the US arsenal but has shown some support for a , which would put him to the left of Obama. These positions should facilitate arms control negotiations with Russia, beginning with an extension of New START, even if the two sides remain far apart on issues like Ukraine, human rights and energy politics.

The prospects for a resumption of negotiations with North Korea are perhaps not as rosy. Biden will probably order a strategic review of relations with Pyongyang, which will conclude after several months with various recommendations for cautious engagement. Those proposals, not terribly different from the ones that the Obama administration embraced in 2008, will not entice North Korea to give up its nuclear program. There might be negotiations, but they won’t be any more successful than the Trump administration’s efforts.

The end result: the same “strategic patience” approach of the Obama years. But perhaps a more flexible Biden administration will allow South Korea to move forward with its own slow-motion engagement with the North.

The Greater Middle East

Trump tilted US policy toward the Israeli hard line. He was a great deal more accommodating of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, particularly around Yemen and human rights. And he substantially escalated tensions with Iran.

��������’s first and perhaps least controversial step will involve the nuclear deal the Obama administration negotiated with Tehran. Biden has indicated that he favors rejoining the pact, and Iran would welcome such a move. To begin with, he’ll likely negotiate the  in exchange for Iran reversing some of the nuclear moves it has made over the last three years.

“One option for a Biden administration to jumpstart the process would be to revoke National Security Policy Memorandum 11, which formally ended U.S. participation in the JCPOA on May 8, 2018, on day one of his administration,” the National Iranian American Council . “Sanctions-lifting could be accomplished by the same mix of statutory waivers, Executive order revocations, and U.S. sanctions list removals as performed by President Obama when implementing the initial U.S. commitments under the nuclear accord.” It can’t come too soon. Iran will hold its presidential election by June 2021, and the reformists need to demonstrate that their strategy of engagement with the United States is still effective. The reform camp  in last spring’s parliament elections.

Another important first move would be for Biden to end US support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. The cancellation of all military assistance, from intelligence-sharing to spare parts for planes, would seriously compromise the war effort, and it’s a move that even some Senate Republicans . “He should publicly and privately tell the Saudis that he will do this on day one,” Erik Sperling, of Just Foreign Policy,  In These Times. ​“This will pressure them into negotiations and may end the war before he even enters the White House.”

The Saudis, not thrilled with ��������’s victory, have been  their congratulations. In addition to his stance against the Yemen war, the next president will take a harder line on Saudi human rights violations, including the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul. On the other hand, Biden might find a bit more common ground with Saudi Arabia in piecing together a new approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Donald Trump put a heavy thumb on the scale to favor Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Biden will seek to correct the balance.  in the Middle East Eye:

“It is very likely that once Biden enters the Oval Office, his foreign and national security team will renew contacts with the Palestinian Authority, reinstate the Palestinian embassy in Washington and re-open the US Treasury’s pipes to allow the smooth flow of financial aid to the Palestinians, which were blocked and closed by the outgoing administration.

From sources close to the Biden campaign, Middle East Eye also learned that the CIA will once again cooperate with its Palestinian counterparts and engage in mutual security collaboration to tackle terror threats. But at the same time, PA President Mahmoud Abbas will be asked to tone down anti-Israeli rhetoric and to resume talks with Israel.“

Biden favors a two-state solution, but it’s not clear whether this option still exists after Trump and Netanyahu teamed up to undermine the Palestinian negotiating position.

Climate Crisis and Security

Unlike the progressive wing of the Democratic Party — or major political parties in Europe and other countries — Joe Biden has not fully embraced the Green New Deal. Instead, he has put forward his “clean energy revolution,” which envisions a carbon-neutral United States by 2050 and would invest around $1.7 trillion into job creation in clean energy and infrastructure.

��������’s positions on the climate crisis are in marked contrast to Trump’s denialism. According to the president-elect’s , he “will not only recommit the United States to the Paris Agreement on climate change – he will go much further than that. He will lead an effort to get every major country to ramp up the ambition of their domestic climate targets. He will make sure those commitments are transparent and enforceable, and stop countries from cheating by using America’s economic leverage and power of example. He will fully integrate climate change into our foreign policy and national security strategies, as well as our approach to trade.”

This plan, if implemented, “would reduce US emissions in the next 30 years by about 75 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide or its equivalents,”  The Guardian. “Calculations by the Climate Action Tracker show that this reduction would be enough to avoid a temperature rise of about 0.1C by 2100.”

Achieving the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement is certainly a major improvement over Trump. But those goals themselves are insufficient. The pledges of Paris would still result in an , well above the 2-degree target. Moreover, those pledges were voluntary, and many countries are not even meeting those .

Of course, Biden will face considerable resistance from the Republican Party for even his modified Green New Deal. That’s why he has to focus on the jobs and infrastructure components to force the Republicans to appear “anti-job” if they stand in the way of the “clean energy revolution.” To pay for his green transition, Biden plans to rescind the tax cuts for the wealthy and leverage private-sector funds. He hasn’t discussed reallocating funds from a sharply reduced military budget. Indeed, Biden  about reducing military spending at all, right he  reducing American military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Joe Biden is rather unexceptional when it comes to his views on American exceptionalism. The Foreign Affairs  that outlined his foreign policy approach was titled “Why American Must Lead Again,” after all.

Granted, Biden was focusing more on the soft-power side of American leadership, leading on climate change, human rights and democracy, nuclear non-proliferation. His tone in the Foreign Affairs article is a welcome antidote to Trump’s bombast: “American leadership is not infallible; we have made missteps and mistakes. Too often, we have relied solely on the might of our military instead of drawing on our full array of strengths.” He emphasizes diplomacy, international cooperation, openness.

But Biden will be the president of the United States of America, not the Democratic Socialists of America. He believes that the United States has a right to intervene militarily overseas if necessary. He views the United States as an honest broker to mediate in parts of the world — the Middle East, East Asia — where the United States is hardly neutral. He will, like Obama, sell weapons, and lots of them, to almost any country with the cash to buy them (and even some that don’t). And if that weren’t enough, he’ll have a still-strong “America First” constituency in Congress scrutinizing his every move, eager to label him a “traitor.”

The international community, although welcoming the new president, will understandably remain wary of the United States. Dr. Jekyll will be back in charge in the White House, but who’s to say that Mr. Hyde won’t return in four years or even make some guest appearances before the next election? It simply doesn’t make a lot of sense to entrust leadership to a country with a severe personality disorder.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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360˚ Context: The 2020 US Election Explained

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The losing incumbent, Donald Trump, has been a singularly divisive figure in American politics over the past several years. He is a racist and a white supremacist, a xenophobe and an Islamophobe, a misogynist and a narcissist, a liar and a petulant loser. Trump repeatedly denied scientific evidence when dealing with environmental issues and the coronavirus pandemic. The is nearing 250,000 from over 10 million cases, primarily due to the mishandling of the pandemic by the Trump administration. And yet, 8 million more people than the 62 million who voted him into office in 2016 find Trump’s actions and behavior as acceptable. A staggering 70 million Americans still feel that there is nothing wrong with the soul of the nation and chose to cast their vote for Trump.

If we are forced to draw conclusions about that intangible entity referred to as the soul of America just from the votes people cast in the presidential contest, we can only surmise that it is split almost evenly between what Joe Biden and Donald Trump stand for. Refusing to accept that verdict, I investigated down-ballot races across the country with the hope of unearthing other clues that could shed a light in my quest to understand where and what America stands for today.

Should Non-Citizens Be Able to Vote?

Each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia have in their constitution language to the effect that the right to vote is available only to citizens of the country. Notwithstanding that, Alabama, Florida and Colorado passed constitutional amendments to make the citizenship requirement for voting more explicit. What is interesting is not that these measures with an overwhelming majority, but the fact that 23% of voters in Alabama, 20% in Florida and 33% in Colorado cast their ballots against the measure.

The 3.5 million Americans who subscribe to the idea that non-citizens should be able to vote belong to an interesting segment of the nation’s population. Perhaps they echo my thought process that it is appropriate for non-citizens to get to vote on specific issues. As non-citizens, it makes sense that they do not get to participate in the representational democratic aspects such as electing the president, governor or members of Congress. However, in keeping with the philosophy of taxation with representation, it also makes sense for them to vote in specific propositions, measures and initiatives local to their place of residence.

Criminal Justice Reforms

Arizona, Montana, New Jersey and South Dakota legalized recreational marijuana, increasing the list of that have decriminalized the to 31, including Washington, DC. Only in seven states — Alabama, Idaho, Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Wyoming — is the possession of marijuana fully illegal, even for medicinal purposes, although in North Carolina, it is not considered a criminal offense.

Oregon became a , the first state to decriminalize possession of small amounts of hard drugs. Today, America’s have a population of 2.3 million, where one in five behind bars is there on account of a drug offense. With the decriminalization of marijuana, America’s , initiated by Richard Nixon and perfected by Ronald Reagan, may finally be coming to an end.

A harsh reality of committing a felony offense is the loss of the right to vote. In the infamous presidential election of 2000, Al Gore lost to George W. Bush in the state of by a razor-thin margin of 537 votes. Florida, along with Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee, has some of the harshest possible for people who have committed a felony offense. According to the , 5.2 million people were ineligible to vote in the 2020 elections. Nearly 22%, or 1.13 million of them, are in the state of Florida. History may have been very different, and Bush may never have won the 2000 election had Florida’s laws allowed former felons who have paid their dues to the justice system and turned their lives around to vote.

This November, California made a shift to take a more liberal view on the voting rights of those with felony convictions. Californians restored the right to vote for people on parole, removing an important obstacle in allowing former felons to become full-fledged members of society. They also rejected a proposal that sought stricter parole rules and harsher sentencing.

Eliminating Symbols of Slavery

Earlier in June, retired the state flag that had incorporated a version of the Confederate battle banner in it. The people of Mississippi voted to a new flag with the symbol of magnolia and the words “In God We Trust,” removing one of the last vestiges of Confederacy in a state flag.

Rhode Island voters a measure to strip the racially insensitive phrase “Providence Plantations” from its official name, after having failed to do so in 2010. By an overwhelming majority of 80% and an impressive majority of 68%, respectively, voters in passed an initiative that removes references to slavery from their constitutions and suspends the permission of involuntary servitude as criminal punishment.

 And the Verdict Is

Toning down the populist and ill-conceived war-on-drugs rhetoric and easing the reintegration of former felons into society by restoring their voting rights are small steps toward meaningful criminal justice reform. Eliminating signifiers that celebrate the Confederacy and slavery from state names and flags is more than symbolic. They open up a path to healing, rejecting the hatred that lurks in the veneration of the icons of white supremacy.

The disappointments came from my home state of California. Here, Proposition 22 posed the question of whether such Uber and Lyft drivers should be treated as contractors or as employees with proper benefits. Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and Postmates pumped nearly $200 million dollars to avoid the responsibility of giving gig-workers employee status. Their marketing blitzkrieg recruited Mothers Against Drunk Driving to portray a dismal scenario of increased drunk-driving deaths should this proposition fail. In the end, capitalism won where people opted to have their cheap Uber and Lyft rides, even if it meant denying their drivers their fair share of benefits.

More poignantly, California missed its chance to reinstate affirmative action, which it ended in 1996 without giving adequate time for that initiative to have a meaningful impact. Sadly, more than 56% of voters failed to appreciate that compensating for centuries of advantages enjoyed by whites and other privileged classes would not only require counterinitiatives like affirmative action, but that they need to be given time so that African Americans and other disadvantaged minorities have a true shot at social equity.

Counterbalancing my disappointments stemming from the 70 million who are still willing to embrace Donald Trump and Californians rejecting affirmative action, I found many down-ballot measures, from Mississippi to Utah, from Arizona to New Jersey, pointing to a subtle shift in the right direction. That gives me a glimmer of hope that the soul of America may not be so dark as to be beyond redemption. And as they say, hope springs eternal.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Here is today’s 3D definition:

Triumphant:

An adjective usually reserved for the authors of exceptional, definitive victories that have a lasting impact on history, but which, in contemporary US culture, can be applied by a winner’s supporters to any candidate they approve of who ekes out any kind of victory by hook or by crook or by sheer luck.

Contextual Note

Given its well-known allegiance to the Democratic Party establishment, The New York Times has every reason to invent the mythology they want their public to subscribe to. If people believe that Biden has triumphed, there is a good chance the enemies of The New York Times and the Democratic Party will accept defeat. Those enemies basically consist of Donald Trump and the progressive left.

The article’s subtitle reads: “Joseph R. Biden Jr. campaigned as a sober and conventional presence, concerned about the ‘soul of the country.’” That is a fair enough description of his colorless campaign. It insidiously suggests that sticking to the middle, not making waves and avoiding radical programs is the recipe for triumph. But it is followed by a further, more dubious claim: “He correctly judged the character of the country, and benefited from President Trump’s missteps.”

The second half of that sentence is unquestionably true. Trump effectively shot himself in both feet during the campaign, paving the way for a Biden victory. Most people were surprised that Biden didn’t win by a landslide. Had he done so, there might have been grounds for asserting that he “correctly judged the character of the country.” Whatever Biden did, it had the not very triumphal effect of motivating nearly 72 million people to vote against him and in favor of the incumbent. The authors’ belief in ��������’s insight into the mood of the nation looks like a case of wish fulfillment rather than serious political reporting. But The Times has heavily invested in wish fulfillment over the past four years.

A more accurate account would note that Biden judged nothing at all, correctly or incorrectly. After former President Barack Obama ordered all the other prominent moderate candidates to back Biden, the former vice president mechanically followed a program that had already been laid out for him in the 2016 election. At that time, after some hesitation, due probably to his judgment that Hillary Clinton had a prior claim, he deferred to the Clinton machine and let the former first lady lead the party to the forecast glorious victory that never was.

This time around, with Clinton relegated to an embarrassing footnote in future US history books, Biden stumbled into the Democratic nomination only after the primary voters rejected the party’s hoped for “moderate” savior, billionaire Michael Bloomberg, an outrageous oligarch who, during his short and expensive run, demonstrated how easy it was to buy the party’s — but not the voters’ —loyalty.

At no point in that process did Biden demonstrate an ability to judge the character of the country. What better proof of that than the ambiguous finish to the election itself that required days of laborious counting of absentee ballots in six states for him to get past the finish line and cap off his suspense-ridden contest against a pathologically flawed opponent?

If Biden had been capable of judging the character of the country, he would have realized that 2020 may prove to be the last election built around the binary logic of a “liberal” Democratic Party opposed to a “conservative” Republican Party. His party stopped being liberal long ago, as he himself clearly realized when he recruited Republicans John Kasich, Colin Powell and Meg Whitman to be headliners at the convention that would nominate him.

Joe Biden was little more than the name the Democrats put on the ballot to get past a failing and flailing Trump. His defeat of Donald Trump was great news for the nation and the world, but it clearly wasn’t a triumph and reflected nothing significant about the character of the country other than the fact that it remains radically polarized.

It could have been a triumph, but two things were missing. The first was enthusiasm for ��������’s candidacy. He represented nothing voters could get excited about. Also lacking was even a vague sense of mission in the face of multiple monumental challenges. The only visible enthusiasm for his candidacy came from big donors on Wall Street who felt more comfortable with a traditional Democrat than a non-traditional Republican, even though they spontaneously endorse Republicans. They expressed their enthusiasm for Biden by generously financing his campaign.

Historical Note

Later in the article, the authors appear to admit that ��������’s campaign was not the triumph they initially hinted at: “It was not the most inspirational campaign in recent times, nor the most daring, nor the most agile.” They concede that he was not “an uplifting herald of change.” Instead, they give him credit for “discipline and restraint.” Shakespeare’s John Falstaff called that “discretion” when he played dead on the battlefield to avoid being assaulted by the enemy: “The better part of valor is discretion.”

The authors claim that ��������’s electoral success could be attributed to “how fully Mr. ��������’s campaign flowed from his own worldview and political intuition.” They even cite some of the features of his worldview: “the antiquated vocabulary and penchant for embellishment, his nostalgic yarns about segregationist senators and a defensiveness that led him, in one case, to challenge a voter to a push-up contest.” 

The Biden they present is a mid-20^th-century macho white man whose personal culture paradoxically embodies the very idea Trump promoted with his slogan “Make America Great Again.” Biden is a relic of the good ol’ days, the fulfillment of Trump’s ideological mission. If this were a Hollywood screenplay, Biden would be the good cop partnered with Trump, the bad cop.

The authors dodge the question of the historical origins of ��������’s worldview, inherited from another epoch and clearly ill-adapted to a world of pandemics, planetary destruction, a financialized economy, rudderless nationalism and endless military quagmires created and sustained by ��������’s generation. One might think addressing these dire issues could be the prelude to a triumph. Instead, the authors applaud Biden for focusing on maligning Trump’s character while “shunning countless other issues as needless distractions.” The health of the people, the planet and the economy are written off as “needless distractions.”

Biden is likely to be the most isolated president in US history. By definition, he has the entire Republican Party opposed to him and, more particularly, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell — despite Biden’s touted ability to reach across the aisle and his with McConnell. The populist Trump movement, which will most likely persist and possibly grow in force, will continue maligning him for stealing The Donald’s reelection. He will have the entire progressive wing of his own party — which possibly represents a of Democrats and certainly the majority of young voters — ready to strike back at him as soon they discover his likely refusal to take on board their agenda.

Even if he does open up toward the progressive left under the pressure of uncontrollable events, he will have not just his anti-Trump Republican friends revolting against him but also the far more significant Wall Street donors. In other words, after a few months in office, Biden may well lose the trust of 80% of the voting population across the political spectrum. The party stalwarts will remain with him, but the credibility of people like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Adam Schiff has taken a serious hit after four years of Russiagate and Trump’s bungled impeachment.

Biden will most likely also fail to merit the attention of the late-night comedians who for four years have thrived on the comic material Donald Trump dropped in their lap on a daily basis. That’s what inevitably comes of preferring discretion over valor.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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