Old patterns, new variables

Middle Eastern crises often repeat themselves: change the dates and the story stays largely the same. However, this conflict is different. After two years of fighting following the October 7 attacks in Gaza, Israel and the Sunni Palestinian group Hamas have reached exhaustion. Hamas, which won a single disputed election back in 2006, has been battered, while Israel’s politics have drifted further right. Glenn quips, “They probably won the election the way Stalin did — which was at the end of a gun … well, not probably, they did.”

The conversation turns to history. In 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo Accords for peace, but within months, Hamas carried out its first suicide bombing. Two years later, Rabin’s assassination by Jewish extremist Yigal Amir killed the peace process. Neither Hamas nor Israel’s religious right wings have changed since then.

Trump’s 20-point plan

Glenn describes Trump’s peace initiative as “imposed rather than negotiated,” but concedes that “the prospects … for a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians … are greater today than at any time since the Oslo Accords.” With characteristic irony, he adds that US President Woodrow Wilson’s plan had only 14 points against Trump’s 20, so we know Trump’s is the biggest and best.

Four provisions form the plan’s immediate backbone: a fragile ceasefire, Israeli troop withdrawal from half of Gaza, reciprocal hostage releases and humanitarian aid flows that Israel had long restricted. These changes are meaningful in themselves. After all, in war, an absence of casualties is typically better than mounds of them.

Trump’s approach is not diplomatic but transactional — an imposition shaped by leverage and timing. Exhaustion, public fatigue and shifting alliances created a rare window, one Trump exploited effectively, even if unintentionally. His unpredictability, often condemned by critics, paradoxically gave him the flexibility to push both Israel and Hamas when conventional leaders would have hesitated.

The new Middle East

Israel’s war effort has decimated Hamas’s fighters and tunnels, eliminating as many as 20,000 Hamas fighters and destroying 80% of the group’s vast underground network. The campaign has crippled the Lebanese Shia paramilitary group Hezbollah and accelerated Syria’s collapse. Now, Syria’s new leader, former al-Qaeda fighter Ahmed al-Sharaa (now known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani), is a proxy for the Turkish intelligence agency Millî İstihbarat Teşkilatı, or MIT. Syria is now “pockmarked like Swiss cheese,” Atul states. Glenn agrees, citing jubilant Israeli officers who told him that they’ve destroyed the whole air force.

In Israel, two-thirds of citizens now support ending the fighting. In July, the Arab League for the first time urged Hamas to disarm. This is a historic first; the Arab capitals that once tacitly supported Palestinian militancy are now openly urging restraint. Yet the real shift lies in Washington: Trump’s tight grip over Congress, unlike any president before him, lets him override the traditional pro-Israel consensus. Further, his dominance of the Republican Party enabled him to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a peace deal, something no previous US president managed.

Netanyahu ignored warnings from Israeli intelligence chiefs not to strike Hamas in Qatar. Far-right Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir and Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich pushed him to act, triggering Trump’s intervention. The result was a ceasefire that both sides accepted out of exhaustion, not reconciliation.

Domestic currents and lingering dangers

Israel’s demography is tilting power toward the ultra-Orthodox right. The secular Jewish Ashkenazi elite that once led Israel’s Mossad intelligence and the Israel Defense Forces’ special operations has fewer children and diminishing political power. Israel’s domestic politics now point further right. The ceasefire will likely prove to be a mere prelude to another round of fighting.

The plan’s second phase — lasting peace — faces towering obstacles. Hamas refuses to disarm, twisting the agreement’s language to its advantage. A proposed international stabilization force has no firm backers, and Israel rejects Turkish participation outright. Governance of Gaza is also unresolved: Hamas insists on inclusion, while Israel wants it excluded.

The reconstruction effort, projected at $50–70 billion, hinges on Saudi Arabia and other Muslim states’ cooperation — and on a “Grand Bargain” linking Saudi normalization with Israel–US guarantees against Iran and a two-state solution. Glenn warns that this would demand “years of daily cajoling, harassing, imposing,” something he doubts Trump can sustain. That vision faces hurdles at home, too, as both conservative Republicans and progressive Democrats in Congress oppose extending nuclear cooperation or security guarantees to the Saudi capital of Riyadh.

The ceasefire’s endurance will depend less on written agreements than on political will. Without consistent US engagement, regional mediation and trust-building on the ground, even the best plan risks unraveling. For now, the guns are silent, but history suggests silence rarely lasts for long. And in the Middle East, every lull risks becoming a moment of calm before the next storm.

[ edited this piece.]

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

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How intelligence recruitment works

Carle explains that this type of influence operation involves spotting, assessing, developing and ultimately recruiting targets, often through subtle psychological manipulation. He describes how even small gestures, such as offering a favor, can establish bonds of loyalty or create a sense of indebtedness.

Trump, in Carle’s view, is especially susceptible due to his vanity and his consistent loyalty to those who flatter him. While Trump does not align with Russia on every issue — notably diverging on Iran — Carle notes he has parroted Russian state messaging and advanced Kremlin-aligned policies across many domains.

Domestic ideology and institutional erosion

Whitaker and Carle shift the conversation from foreign entanglements to the domestic sphere, where they see grave danger in the political movement surrounding Trump. Carle argues that Trump’s actions are part of a broader ideological push by elements of the Republican Party’s right wing to gut the federal government. This includes promoting the “unitary executive theory,” shrinking federal functions to defense and border control, and dismantling institutions built since the New Deal. These ideas, according to Carle, come not from Trump himself but from his inner circle and movement intellectuals.

The crisis of American democracy

Carle concludes with a stark warning: The United States is undergoing its deepest institutional crisis since the Civil War. Unlike the societal unrest of the 1960s, he believes the current moment poses a threat to the core structures of American governance. He cites attacks on the First Amendment and on the free media, reduction of social services programs, efforts to centralize military command and widespread distrust in democratic institutions. Although critics may dismiss these concerns as exaggerated, Carle insists they are very real — and dangerous.

[ edited this piece.]

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

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It would be fair to assume that as the child develops, the carrot and stick morph into new motivational structures symbolized by things that spoil, entertain, inform, protect, inspire and delight.

Incentives are embedded in the West as fundamental levers to cajole, influence and persuade communities, families, institutions and the body politic. The current life form is on a ventilator in a proof-of-life scenario where the character isn’t one individual but a tapestry of diverse viewpoints, cultural practices and discourse. 

Incentivizing for self — not othersĚý

To pinpoint where I live would be to locate a red state in the US, previously known for country music and entertainment that has quickly lost its way into a vast and murky retread of history laden with acts of bigotry, ignorance and sheer petulance for anything and anybody different from the then-majority. 

A recent CNN , “What Happened to Tennessee? The Battle of Blue and Red,” took viewers down the hallways of history to explore the southern state’s path to achieve a supermajority ruled by an uber out-of-your-seat Republican party.

Those concerned that plodding politicians represent the practice of government engaged only when requested haven’t been to Nashville over the last decade. The current leadership of the Tennessee GOP actively constructs legislation not demanded by the communities they serve but by a ragtag group of fear-mongering members seizing an opportunity to exact the powers of a supermajority. Committees have been built, at the hand of Speaker Cameron Sexton, with only one lonely Democrat among Republican peers, resulting in bills that never see the light of day or are whisked through without the whisper of dissent.  

Why would I, for my first 51łÔąĎ column, dare dive into the farce that is Tennessee’s democracy? Because the stranglehold of any one political party suffocates the average voter from the one thing that is self-defining of the Great Experiment that is Democracy — hope. 

Gerrymandering districts confiscates the notion that citizens choose communities and neighborhoods of shared values and community practices. Redistricting says to the average voter that their vote does not count. In 2022, Odessa Kelly for Tennessee’s 5th Congressional District, capturing more than 70% of the vote in Nashville. Kelly did not win.Ěý

Imagine walking the urban neighborhoods of Nashville trying to explain to voters that securing over two-thirds of the local vote resulted in a loss. And, while urban voters are trying to understand the new math of the GOP, the suburbs are being infiltrated by representatives more concerned with radical measures that smack of hypocrisy in the face of a nation that prides itself on the notion of freedom. Let’s not kid ourselves: squeezing your neighbor’s freedom because their values aren’t in line with yours is not representative of democracy. 

Democracy turtlingĚý

The primary incentive structure of democracy to make a difference is facing gale force winds of oppression, stopping at nothing or no one to secure generational control. Gerrymandering, or as I like to call it, a sophisticated form of cheating by culturally unsophisticated adults, has reduced the call to civic duty to an either-or proposition: Either you stand down or risk your safety and your family’s in a state ranked in the .Ěý

It is no wonder why many statewide elections are non-starters from the outset, with many candidates running unopposed. The Democratic party once ruled the Volunteer State. Not anymore. It would be naïve to think the Dems of their day didn’t participate in retail politics and classic good ole’ boy negotiations. Still, the body politic didn’t resemble downtrodden and unrepresented community members waiting for the next injustice to tackle Lady Liberty. Whether it is a current bill to remove basic checks and balances from the legislative process or removing Pride flags from public schools while maintaining protections for the Confederate flag, the shine of Tennessee has patinated. It is on the verge of walking its citizens back through time, passing progress and decency for all into the past, girded by a simple notion that one is better and more worthy than the other.

Maybe I’m a prisoner of the moment, closely tracking the overarching trajectory of the GOP during this presidential campaign. Or perhaps I reside in, arguably, the least democratic state in the US. Either way, I recognize the quiet panic of disassociation from my fellow neighbors. Whether it’s the look of resignation at the grocery store or the lack of adult conversations at a local soccer field, there’s a reluctance to speak up or put out a yard sign that may counter the loudest voices.

I am unsure if 51łÔąĎ found me or if I discovered 51łÔąĎ. The readership thirsts for discourse and unfiltered representation of thought across disciplines, warzones and society. I echo the calls to represent balance, fairness, new opinions, varied opinions and discourse through discussion.

I may not have the background of a former diplomat or intelligence officer, as many of my new colleagues at 51łÔąĎ do. I have had, however, the luxury of traveling worldwide, documenting stories of humanity within a in Eastern Africa, surveying historical locations (the baptism site of Jesus in Jordan) and garnering an audience of monumental figures like Pope Francis and leading voices for the United Nations.

If democracy is to survive the winds of authoritarianism, we may need to expand our concept of the kitchen table for one family, into one home. We may want to consider the kitchen table as a metaphor for the world: Unless we invite our planetary citizens to join in active discourse, the global community will starve under the oppressed motivations of a history, sadly, repeated without lesson or favor for the next generation.

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

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Haley served as governor of South Carolina and as the US Ambassador to the United Nations. She presents a unique profile within the Republican Party. Her tenure at the UN showcased her as a tough, outspoken diplomat, while her governorship highlighted a pragmatic approach to governance.

Despite these credentials, Haley’s candidacy raises questions about her ability to consolidate the Republican base, which is staunchly loyal to Trump. Critics argue that her positioning as a more traditional conservative may not resonate with the populist wing of the party. Additionally, she harshly criticized Trump for his role in the January 6, 2021, riot on Capitol Hill that sought to overturn the result of the 2020 election. Haley later walked these comments back, giving the impression that she lacks steadfastness, which may have diminished her appeal.

Haley’s challenge lies in striking a delicate balance between the traditional conservative wing of the party and the populist wave that still engulfs the GOP. The viability of Haley’s candidacy will depend on her ability to close this gap in a field where Trump’s enduring presence still dominates.

The enigma of a second Trump term

Trump is currently undergoing a range of civil and criminal cases, ranging from business fraud to his alleged role in the Capitol riot. Despite the legal storms, Trump’s base has demonstrated remarkable resilience and loyalty. This unwavering support underscores the deep-seated cultural and political divides within the US. However, the question of sustainability looms large. Will these legal challenges eventually erode Trump’s base or impact his eligibility for office?

The enduring popularity of Trump within the party raises questions about the true influence of legal troubles on his political standing. While investigations may raise doubts, Trump’s ability to maintain a loyal following suggests that, for now, his legal woes haven’t significantly dented his political fortress. However, the long-term impact remains uncertain, making the upcoming election a critical juncture for Trump’s political future.

Observers often discuss the Republican primary as if Trump’s nomination were a foregone conclusion. His enduring popularity and the absence of a strong, unifying challenger contribute to this perception. However, the certainty surrounding Trump’s dominance may be premature. The political landscape is dynamic, and unexpected candidates could emerge, challenging the assumed trajectory of the Republican primary.

Speculation about Trump’s potential running mate adds an additional layer of complexity. Analysts mention figures like Senator Tim Scott, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy or Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. The selection process will not only signal Trump’s priorities but also introduce dynamics that may shape the general election in unexpected ways.

What might the future look like?

Predictions about a second Trump presidency are fraught with concerns about the direction he may take the country. His first term was characterized by unconventional governance, and a potential second term could see an emboldened Trump pushing his agenda without the constraints of re-election. This prospect raises questions about the potential impact on domestic and foreign policy.

The protectionist policies of Trump’s first presidency have already left a significant imprint on the global economic order. Biden’s reaction to these policies becomes a crucial point of contention. Critics argue that Biden has failed to articulate a clear alternative that addresses the shortcomings of globalization while protecting American interests. With a possible second Trump presidency on the horizon, worries about further erosion of democratic principles and the exacerbation of polarization worldwide are mounting.

Finally, many are concerned that Trump, with a freer hand in his second term, would endanger democracy not only abroad but also at home. Without the check of another election, Trump might pursue more radical policies and executive actions, potentially leading to significant consequences for the rule of law and the balance of power within the US government.

As the nation inches closer to the next presidential election, the unfolding dynamics will determine the course of American politics in the years to come.

[Peter Choi edited this podcast and wrote the first draft of this piece.]

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

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Or perhaps, because of poll numbers that fall as trial dates approach, the Republican Party won’t end up nominating the current frontrunner as their presidential candidate in 2024.

And, of course, in the general election, despite its lukewarm attitude toward Joe Biden, the American electorate could still unite in the face of the political equivalent of an asteroid strike to reject the greatest-ever threat to American democracy.

But sometimes you just have to face your nightmares. What would Donald J. Trump do to the world if he once again enters the White House in 2025?

Enter the Joker

The world of geopolitics is relatively predictable — until it isn’t. The greatest sources of unpredictability are the wild cards: Vladimir Putin’s decision last year to invade Ukraine, the subsequent victory of political outsider Gustavo Petro in the Colombian presidential elections, the surprise announcement this year of a diplomatic rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Donald Trump is the ultimate wild card, a joker-in-chief whose every pronouncement threatens to disrupt the status quo. When he became president in 2016, he certainly made some predictable decisions — canceling US participation in the Paris Climate Agreement, withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement — which fulfilled campaign promises.

But who could have guessed that he would sit down with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un not just once (Singapore), not just twice (Vietnam), but three times (at the DMZ)? I don’t remember any pundits predicting that Trump would commit an impeachable offense by delaying aid to Ukraine in exchange for dirt on Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. And what about Trump’s attempt to buy Greenland, his disparagement of “shithole countries,” his sudden decision to withdraw US troops from Syria and Turkey’s invasion of that country?

Unpredictability is not always a bad thing. Meeting with the North Korean leader could have been a shrewd move if Trump actually understood a thing or two about Kim Jong Un and his country. But there was no method in Trump’s erratic behavior. He was not a crafty “mad man” trying to emulate Richard Nixon. He was just going with his (fast-food-filled) gut.

So, the first thing to know about the prospect of another Trump term, when it comes to foreign policy, is that all bets are off (along with all gloves).

Battling the State

Trump and his MAGA followers have an almost pathological disgust for government. His future plan to fire huge numbers of federal employees, based on an executive order he pushed through in the waning days of 2020, targets about civil servants who have the most impact on federal policy: the so-called “deep state.”

But Trump and company don’t simply want to “deconstruct the administrative state,” as Trump whisperer Steve Bannon . They want to remake the state to concentrate political and economic power in the hands of themselves and their wealthy friends. That requires removing the checks on executive power that are embedded in the federal bureaucracy.

Basically, Trump wants to transform a system that already tilts dangerously in the direction of oligopoly into a full-blown patronage state along the lines of what Viktor Orbán has done in Hungary and Vladimir Putin has accomplished in Russia.

The same can be said for his attitude toward the institutions of the international community. In 2025, Trump will again try to wreck as many global deals and bodies as possible, from the Paris Agreement on climate change to the UN Human Rights Council. He’ll do his best to undermine NATO, even withdrawing from the security pact, his former national security advisor John Bolton, himself no friend to internationalism.

Trump despises everything global beyond his own business empire. He’s not against free trade per se, and he is certainly not thinking of improving the lives of US workers. But he fancies himself a great dealmaker who can force the Europeans, the Chinese and everyone else to negotiate more favorable terms for US businesses. For Trump, this must be in a bilateral context, mano a mano. That’s why he opposes multilateral trade deals, even if they would ultimately advantage the United States.

If he wins, Trump has promised to create a tariff wall around the United States at a rate of 10% for all countries. Right now, some countries face practically no tariffs while a country like China with an average rate of 19%. Trump’s proposal, which has the odor of something composed on the back of a cocktail napkin, is designed not so much to protect American interests as to reward nations (with tariff reductions) that kowtow to Trump and stimulate a global trade war among everyone else.

This stance might eventually cost Trump the election, because Wall Street doesn’t trust him to make good deals. Indeed, The Wall Street Journal Trump for his scattershot protectionism. Sure, such populist moves might win him some votes in battleground states — though and alike argue that those policies actually lost jobs in the Rust Belt — but it will probably send a lot of high-level donors to the Democrats. Alas, in the United States, money doesn’t just talk, it votes.

War and (Not So Much) Peace

Trump is positioning himself as the . Like everything else about the man, it’s a sham.

Trump has claimed that he could end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours by using threats to goad both sides to the negotiating table. The , specifically, would be to threaten Ukraine with a cut-off in aid and simultaneously threaten Russia with a sharp increase in aid to its adversary.  Trump makes no mention of the other countries that supply Ukraine with substantial military assistance or the current difficulty of pushing additional Ukraine aid packages through Congress.

The plan consists of a double-bluff — and is, itself, a bluff. Having shown his hand, however, Trump would find it rather difficult to execute his plan.

Elsewhere, Trump is likely to escalate, not de-escalate. Having wrecked the Iran nuclear deal, Trump will likely pick up where he left off. During his time in office, Trump with Iran on two occasions, ordering the assassination of a top military leader and contemplating missile strikes in his last days in office. Because the ayatollahs will never contemplate a Trump Tower Tehran, thus rebuffing the most transactional and self-serving president in US history, the Donald will no doubt turn up the volume of his attacks on the country.

There are other possibilities for war under Trump. After all, he’s irascible, quick to anger, and trigger-happy. During his presidency, he threatened North Korea, Venezuela and Syria.

But honestly, the most terrifying war that Trump is planning is his attacks on America: on the Constitution, on democracy, on the state. The only reason that Trump in a second term might not end up waging war on another country is because he’ll be too focused on destroying his own.

The world awaits the judgment of the American voters. Democracy is all about learning from collective mistakes. If America makes the same mistake again, it will have committed democratic hara-kiri.

[ first published this piece.]

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

What Explains Donald Trump’s Foreign Policy?

Will American Democracy Perish Like Rome’s?

Trump’s Monumental Lies Without Consequences Endanger a Nation

The post What Will the World Look Like if Trump Wins? appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

The leading Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential race, Donald Trump, faces four criminal indictments. The leading Democratic candidate, President Joe Biden, has favorability ratings. The presidential race has so far generated as much positive enthusiasm as a barroom brawl between two old duffers, which in a certain sense it is.

Meanwhile, in Washington, Congress was deadlocked for three weeks in October because the Republican Party couldn’t decide on a new Speaker of the House. Finally, the party chose the far-right politician Mike Johnson, whose was his greatest asset, because he hadn’t made enough enemies among his colleagues to sink his candidacy. Obscurity also translates into precious little deal-making experience, which is not a good sign when the federal government faces a shutdown in just a few months, despite a , if the two major parties can’t agree on a spending bill.

President Biden’s spending woes

With a year left before Americans go to the polls in yet another supremely consequential election, President Biden is eager to keep the economy on an even keel and demonstrate resolve in the field of foreign policy. The latter has been sorely tested. Not only has the administration attempted to maintain support for Ukraine in its battle against Russian occupation forces, it is now trying to increase military assistance to Israel in its fight against Hamas.

Toward that end, the administration has proposed a $105 billion that bundles together military aid to Ukraine and Israel along with funding for Taiwan, increased security at the US–Mexico border, and some humanitarian assistance for Palestinians.

In typical DC style, the bill contains something for nearly everyone. And yet, it still manages to piss off nearly everyone.

Most of the money earmarked for Ukraine and Israel would go to the Pentagon to replenish its stocks of weaponry to send to those countries. Congressional supporters of military spending, who make up the vast majority of lawmakers, should be delighted that, of the $61 billion slated for Ukraine, $44 billion would go to the Pentagon, while $10 billion of the $14 billion for Israel would also go to the military-industrial complex. China hawks will rejoice at the money for Taiwan while MAGA Republicans should be happy about the $13 billion for “border security.” The bill also includes some of the humanitarian aid to Palestinians that progressives have been urging.

Bundling is a traditional tactic for building consensus in a divided Congress. But it might not work this time, not only because the House is divided but because the Republican Party itself is a house divided.

Splits within the Republican party

On the issue of Ukraine, Republicans come in three flavors.

Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell heads up the plain vanilla faction. He supports Ukraine because he doesn’t like Russia, believes the United States is still locked in a cold war with this evil-ish empire and was horrified by Trump’s pro-Putin statements over the years. McConnell is no friend of Biden’s, but he buys the administration’s frankly distasteful argument that the West is engaged in a civilizational struggle against a common enemy. For these reasons, McConnell has to support the bundled funding in the Senate, though with some important caveats.

Over in the House, Mike Johnson straddles the vanilla faction and the Rocky Road crew: he’s a scoop of vanilla with some nuts sprinkled on top. Like McConnell, he is no friend of Russia. “We can’t allow Vladimir Putin to prevail in Ukraine, because I don’t believe it would stop there, and it would probably encourage and empower China to perhaps make a move on Taiwan,” Johnson Fox News. “We have these concerns. We’re not going to abandon them.”

But Johnson has also adopted most of the positions of the nut-filled MAGA faction, from its unmitigated support for Trump to its diehard opposition to abortion. So, despite his aversion to Putin, Johnson has a bill to divide the funding for Israel from the money for Ukraine, presumably so that the far right can register its disapproval of the latter without compromising its approval of the former.

Johnson’s colleagues have various problems with the bill. J. D. Vance the small amount of humanitarian aid for Palestinians. Other Republicans have taken aim at the measure that was included precisely to curry their favor — money for border security — because suddenly they don’t care about money but insist instead on a change in administration policy.

Johnson is a budget-cutter, and he knows that of Republicans believe that the value of aid to Ukraine is not worth the cost (compared to a mere 29% of Democrats). Reducing government spending is a perennial favorite of the Republicans going into an election (as opposed to after they win an election, when they go on a spending spree). As a result, Johnson supports the crowd-pleasing (but budget-busting) tactic of funds for the Internal Revenue Service to pay for the military assistance.

But the leading criticism of the bill, from the far right, concerns Ukraine. Why the skepticism? Vance about “an endless conflict with no plan from the Biden administration.” But Vance and friends are not anti-war, anti-intervention or anti-militarist. The signers of a congressional in September to the Biden administration vowing to oppose any further aid to Ukraine, aside from the libertarian Rand Paul, have no problem preparing for “an endless conflict” with China.

In fact, many of these fixtures of Trump’s political universe have a residual affection for Vladimir Putin. In many ways, he’s their ideal politician: anti-LGBT, pro-Church, anti-liberal, pro-sovereignty, anti-woke. He’s also the leader of a predominantly white country that has many in white supremacist circles in the West. Finally, Vladimir was one of Donald’s best buds. Republican Senate nominee Lauren Witzke summed up the MAGA position when she back in April 2022 that anyone who supports Ukraine is “either transgender, a Satanist, or a straight-up Nazi.” Methinks that Witzke doth project too much.

But it’s not just failed politicians who make these arguments. “NATO has been supplying the neo-Nazis in Ukraine with powerful weapons and extensive training on how to use them,” Marjorie Taylor-Greene back in March 2022. Paul Gosar in May 2022 when he said that “Ukraine is not our ally. Russia is not our enemy.” More recently, Tommy Tuberville that Democrats “created” the war in Ukraine. Who needs Twitter trolls when US lawmakers indulge in such fictions?

Making the wrong link

It’s one thing to link aid to Ukraine and Israel as a political tactic. It’s quite another to make the larger argument that the money goes toward fighting the “same enemy.” Putin and Hamas have almost nothing in common beyond their militant illiberalism. Putin has turned Russia into an imperial power that has attacked its neighbors, occupied Ukraine, and attempted to establish an international network of illiberal states. Hamas is a reactionary entity that has enough power to commit atrocities but not enough power to occupy territory—not even its “own” territory of Gaza as the current Israeli invasion demonstrates.

If there are any comparisons to be made between the two regions, Russia’s counterpart is not Hamas but Israel, an increasingly far-right polity with messianic dreams that has been steadily expanding its control within the already Occupied Territories.

Unfortunately, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has also bought into this civilizational discourse, coming out in strong support of Israel. His statements, however much they reflect his personal outrage at Hamas’s attacks, are largely directed at US audiences. The Israelis have already indicated, by an offer from Zelensky to visit in solidarity after the Hamas attacks, that there won’t be a quid pro quo in terms of boosting their support for Ukraine. So, Zelensky’s real goal is to help advance the $105 billion bill in Congress.

There’s a definite downside to this strategy. Zelensky’s attempts over the last year to woo Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia, are taking a hit from his defense of Israel. In August, Saudi Arabia hosted a meeting in Jeddah to consolidate support for Ukraine’s ten-point peace plan. Now, all of that patient diplomacy is at risk. A of key countries, such as China, Egypt and the UAE, didn’t attend a follow-up meeting last weekend in Malta, and Saudi support seems to have as well.

Putin didn’t plan Hamas’s deadly intervention in Israel, but he must be pleased at the geopolitical . On the other hand, being lumped together with Hamas, conceptually and budget-wise, doesn’t do Russia any favors. Ukraine’s image, at least among a certain class of wavering Republicans, might benefit from the faulty comparison.

Looking toward 2024

The US economy is in relatively good shape, at least according to the conventional indicators: low unemployment, modest growth, tamed inflation. Despite the usual link between pocketbook issues and political favorability, Joe Biden’s approval ratings remain in the dumps.

On certain foreign policy issues, however, Biden is doing better. His approval rating on Ukraine is a few points than his overall polling. When it comes to US policy toward Israel and Hamas, the gap is in Biden’s favor.

At this point in the campaign, at least, Biden is building the case that he is the more competent candidate when it comes to global issues. It’s not clear, though, whether American voters will care a year from now that America’s reputation is considerably higher around the world under Biden than it was under Trump. Being a competent statesman with an agile secretary of state would certainly guarantee Biden a presidential victory — if everyone in the world voted in the US election.

For better or worse, however, only Americans will go to the polls next November. Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee, will claim that he is the “peace candidate,” didn’t start any wars when he was president, “got us out of Afghanistan,” and would have restrained the adventurism of both Putin and Netanyahu. All of this is , but elections rarely bring out the rational side of an electorate.

With the latest supplemental funding bill, the Biden administration hopes that it can help Ukraine win the war and somehow contain the damage of the Israel-Hamas conflict. This is a pipe dream, since US influence is limited. But this “new and improved” mission to fight a civilizational war, however false the narrative, might prove sufficiently convincing to speed passage of the supplemental funding bill and, in appealing to plain-vanilla conservatives and a few independents, perhaps win a presidential election as well.

[ first published this piece.]

[ edited this piece.]

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

Peace in Their Time: No Appeasement for Putin

The Military-Industrial Complex Is Now Scarily Huge

The US Isn’t as Powerful as We Like to Hope

The post Congress Divided on the Funding for Ukraine and Israel appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

Fear versus hope. Fear is a powerful motivator.

The Democratic Party’s fear-based argument in 2024 is that if you don’t vote for them, you are usher in the new era of American fascism embodied in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. We are instructed to take this threat very seriously. I suppose it’s a coincidence that making the 2024 race about encroaching fascism distracts from the fact that the Democrats have an extremely weak presidential candidate — Joe Biden, who would find it very difficult to win reelection next year on his merits.

There is potency to this argument that the Republicans are plotting a full-scale move toward fascism if they win the presidency in 2024. Democratic operatives are quick to warn that a vote for anyone but Democratic candidates is a vote for encroaching fascism. That’s scary. That’s some real fear-based thinking.

That kind of fear-based thinking was commonplace during the George W. Bush era.

How politicians use fear to manipulate you

Let’s take a step back in time to the 2004 presidential election.

President George W. Bush was running for reelection against Senator John “Reporting for Duty” Kerry. The campaign was hard-fought, focusing mainly on the Iraq war and terrorism. Like today, Bush’s reelection pitch was fear-based. 

Remember, this was just three years after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The government was still in full-on freakout mode. The American public was feeling very edgy. We were all waiting for the next big terror attack. When was it gonna be?? I think we were all coping with a little society-wide PTSD. And Bush’s message was: Stick with me or the terrorists are going to start blowing all sorts of shit up here in the US of A.

So, the hysteria over a creeping terror threat was still very immediate. The newly-formed Department of Homeland Security developed a scary, color-coded “Advisory System” to let the public know about any potentially imminent attacks. The rainbow colors went from calming green (low) to emergency red (severe), yet never seemed to drop below the yellow (elevated) indicator in the middle. 

In his memoir, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft pressured him to raise the terror alert level just days before the 2004 election. Ridge revealed a “dramatic” discussion with them on October 30th, writing like a naïve little lamb,

I wondered, “Is this about security or politics?” Post-election analysis demonstrated a significant increase in the president’s approval rating in the days after the raising of the threat level.

Ultimately the terror alert level was not raised in that instance. Ridge turned in his resignation exactly one month later, claiming in his book that this incident was what convinced him it was time to go.

But make no mistake, fear-based politics is what helped secure George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004. And you can bet that plenty of the oldsters who run the Democratic Party learned that lesson well. And are employing that lesson right now before our very eyes.

Fear kills your hope for a better alternative

Fear-based politics works. I’m not even trying to argue that there isn’t a strain of truth to the Democrats’ sales pitch! In one 2022 , 42% of Republicans agreed with the statement that “Strong, unelected leaders are better than weak, elected ones.” Of course, 31% of Democrats agreed with that as well. Donald Trump has been joking for years about how he would like to be president for life — and let’s not forget that he had his own Beer Hall Putsch in 2021 trying to make that happen.

My point isn’t that Republicans aren’t steering towards authoritarianism in a frightening way — it’s that fear-based politics, while effective, only works to support the status quo. When you’re voting because you’re terrified about some vision of a dystopian future, you’re not able to imagine a better one. Fear shuts down hope.

If you’re scared to death, you’re not thinking about the future, because you don’t even know if there will be a future. This is the problem with having only two parties. If one is going over the ledge into straight-up authoritarianism and the other can only say, “Let’s keep things the way they are,” nothing will ever get better. 

Democrats aren’t offering anything but more of the same. Will democracy be “secured” if Democrats win in 2024? Won’t the threat of encroaching fascism still exist in 2026, 2028, 2030? If it does, you can bet that Democrats will still be using it to scare you into voting for them. And nothing will ever get better for a working class that’s just struggling to make ends meet in an economy run by and for the rich and corporations — who are the true beneficiaries of any fascist system. Go ahead and look that up if you don’t believe me.

But hey, that’s just like, my opinion, man. Do with that what you will.

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

The Democratic Party vs. Its Voters

Don’t Be Discouraged. Voting Will Make You Powerful

Will American Democracy Perish Like Rome’s?

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In a country where the criminal justice system is tasked with so much more than it is designed to do and funded to do, it can seem slow to act and too susceptible to manipulation by those with resources. Meanwhile, the poor, the disadvantaged, and Black and Brown miscreants get outsized law enforcement attention that generally results in negative outcomes. 

So, take it seriously when an elected criminal prosecutor confronts evasion, threats, and the rigors of a long road ahead with an uncertain outcome to indict the rich and powerful, not to mention a former president of the United States. 

Trump’s Troubles With the Law

Further, the fraud indictment of Trump in New York is not trivial. The charges are serious and represent the first commitment to seek to impose a measure of criminal accountability on a dangerous and powerful man who has seemingly had his way with the justice system since the cradle.

The New York alleges 34 felony counts of fraudulently falsifying business records to conceal criminal conduct. It is accompanied by a 13-page statement of facts. The case is about fraudulent concealment from the public of critical negative information concerning two of Trump’s alleged adulterous sexual adventures and, most importantly, fraudulent concealment of this information in the critical days before Trump’s unexpected 2016 presidential victory.

Further, there seems to be a growing consensus that there will be more criminal indictments to come and that these indictments will focus on Trump’s misconduct while in office or just after leaving office, not while seeking office. In this context, it is noteworthy that Trump was twice impeached for actions during his presidency without consequence, a backdrop that only adds to the clamor among progressives for a flood of indictments and associated perp walks.

To add to the excitement, Trump was just found for sexual abuse and defamation in a suit brought by a woman for sexually assaulting her years ago in a department store dressing room and then publicly lying about it. That sure sounds a bit like the underlying notion in the New York indictment – get caught in a messy sexual encounter, and then lie about it to avoid accountability. The New York indictment adds criminal fraud and allegations of hush money payments to the mix.

All of this comes amid the steadily increasing fervor of support from the 30% or more on the far right of the already right-wing Republican Party who are fully committed to a Trump rerun. This stunningly unprincipled patch of humanity seemingly will follow Trump anywhere, support his “vision” for America, and continually fail to get the message that their hero is incapable of sorting fact from fiction.

Republicans Still Love Trump

In today’s political climate, the Republican Party’s incapacity to set Trump adrift provides the best path to the best outcome for Democrats in the 2024 presidential election. Democrats can only hope that the true Trump believers will deliver to him the coveted 2024 Republican nomination for president or at the least remain so committed to a Republican Party implosion that Trump will make it almost impossible for the resulting nominee to win.

While this is hardly a sure path to victory, it may well be the best hope going forward as long as the Biden/Harris ticket remains the only presently viable option for the Democrats. So keep those indictments coming. While the New York indictment is an important and emphatic first attempt at imposing a measure of criminal liability and accountability on Trump, it is cautionary to note that for years Trump has gotten away with whatever criminal misconduct seemed to underpin so much of his successful lifelong grift. Maybe one day soon, in some jurisdiction, we will get a real mug shot and a set of cuffs.

To be sure, there is more to this than my antipathy and that of others toward Trump and his cronies. Rather, it is a deep conviction that if our institutions fail us now, America is headed into an abyss from which it will be very difficult to emerge. So, stopping Trump, his acolytes, his supporters, his donors, and the racist Christian right from realizing their ambitious plan for transforming the nation in their image has palpable immediacy now.

And it is not just Trump. The right-wing “aristocracy” has polluted all three of the branches of the US government with a crush of highly-educated, wealthy, interconnected, and morally bankrupt vermin seeking only the power to impose their will on the rest of us while playing by their own set of rules. Somehow Trump became and continues to be a convenient tool for undermining confidence in American institutions through unabashedly attacking historical facts and creating a threatening national tableau for those ignorant enough to buy into the notion of an existential threat to a way of life that never was.

It would be comforting to believe in cycles and in the someday emergence of new and enlightened interpretations of constitutional fundamentals that could help shape a safe, moral, diverse, and prosperous national future. Or, for the faithful, to believe that there is a god who has chosen this moment in time to screw around with America but who will eventually turn his playful attention back to Nigeria or Pakistan. For my part, however, I don’t believe in inevitable cycles, or in the fundamental wisdom of a document written two hundred years ago, or in god.

Instead, I am trying to believe that the young people of this nation may get off their cellphones long enough to reshape the electorate to reflect an understanding that our collective conscience demands so much more than the dark and shallow version of America in which those young people now live. It is also possible that elements within the aging generation of which I am a part will recognize the tainted legacy we are leaving behind and use some of our time and resources to try to rearrange that balance sheet.

While I await the revolution of the young and a renewed commitment of the aged, I will take a moment to enjoy every Trump indictment and hope that each one makes the right-wing aristocracy and its racist and White Christian collaborators just a bit less sure of themselves as they worry that I am coming for their guns.

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Reed and Inhofe’s idea is to tuck their wartime amendment into the FY2023 National Defense Appropriation Act (NDAA) that will be passed during the lameduck session before the end of the year. The amendment sailed through the Armed Services Committee in mid-October and, if it becomes law, the Department of Defense will be allowed to lock in multi-year contracts and award non-competitive contracts to arms manufacturers for Ukraine-related weapons.

Plans to Spend Big on Weapons

If the Reed/Inhofe amendment is really at replenishing the Pentagon’s supplies, then why do the quantities in its wish list vastly surpass those to Ukraine? 

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Let’s do the comparison: 

1. The current star of US military aid to Ukraine is Lockheed Martin’s rocket system, the same weapon used to help reduce much of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, to in 2017. The US has only sent 38 HIMARS systems to Ukraine, but Senators Reed and Inhofe plan to “reorder” 700 of them, with 100,000 rockets, which could cost up to $4 billion.

2. Another artillery weapon provided to Ukraine is the 155 mm howitzer. To “replace” the 142 M777s sent to Ukraine, the senators plan to order 1,000 of them, at an estimated cost of  $3.7 billion, from BAE Systems.

3. HIMARS launchers can also fire Lockheed Martin’s long-range (up to 190 miles) ATACMS missiles, which the US has not sent to Ukraine. In fact the US has only ever fired 560 of them, mostly at Iraq in 2003. The even longer-range “,” formerly prohibited under the renounced by Trump, will start replacing the ATACMS in 2023, yet the Reed-Inhofe Amendment would buy 6,000 ATACMS, 10 times more than the US has ever used, at an estimated cost of $600 million. 

4. Reed and Inhofe plan to buy 20,000 anti-aircraft missiles from Raytheon. But Congress already spent $340 million for 2,800 Stingers to replace the 1,400 sent to Ukraine. Reed and Inhofe’s amendment will “re-replenish” the Pentagon’s stocks 14 times over, which could cost $2.4 billion.

5. The US has supplied Ukraine with only two Harpoon anti-ship missile systems — already a provocative escalation — but the amendment includes 1,000 Boeing missiles (at about $1.4 billion) and 800 newer Kongsberg (about $1.8 billion), the Pentagon’s replacement for the Harpoon.

6. The air defense system is another weapon the US has not sent to Ukraine, because each system can cost a billion dollars and the basic training course for technicians to maintain and repair it takes more than a year to complete. And yet the Inhofe-Reed wish list includes 10,000 Patriot missiles, plus launchers, which could add up to $30 billion.

Why So Much Spending?

ATACMS, Harpoons and Stingers are all weapons the Pentagon was already phasing out, so why spend billions of dollars to buy thousands of them now? What is this really all about? Is this amendment a particularly egregious example of war profiteering by the military-industrial- complex? Or is the US really preparing to fight a major ground war against Russia?  

Our best judgment is that both are true.

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Looking at the weapons list, military analyst and retired Marine Colonel Mark Cancian: “This isn’t replacing what we’ve given [Ukraine].  It’s building stockpiles for a major ground war [with Russia] in the future. This is not the list you would use for China. For China we’d have a very different list.”

President Joe Biden says he will not send US troops to fight Russia because that would be. But the longer the war goes on and the more it escalates, the more it becomes clear that US forces are directly involved in many aspects of the war: helping to Ukrainian operations; providing intelligence; waging; and inside Ukraine as special operations forces and CIA paramilitaries. Now Russia has accused British special operations forces of in a maritime drone attack on Sevastopol and the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipelines. 

As US involvement in the war has escalated despite Biden’sbroken promises, the Pentagon must have drawn up contingency plans for a full-scale war between the US and Russia. If those plans are ever executed, and if they do not immediately trigger a world-ending, they will require vast quantities of specific weapons, and that is the purpose of the Reed-Inhofe stockpiles. 

At the same time, the amendment seems to respond to by the weapons manufacturers that the Pentagon was “moving too slowly” in spending the vast sums appropriated for Ukraine. While over $20 billion has been allocated for weapons, contracts to actually buy weapons for Ukraine and replace the ones sent there so far totaled only $2.7 billion by early November. 

“A Demand Signal” for Industry

So the expected arms sales bonanza had not yet materialized, and the weapons makers were getting impatient. With the increasingly calling for diplomatic negotiations, if Congress didn’t get moving, the war might be over before the arms makers’ much-anticipated jackpot ever arrived.

Mark Cancian to DefenseNews, “We’ve been hearing from industry, when we talk to them about this issue, that they want to see a demand signal.”

Business Insider Makes the Case for Nuclear War

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When the Reed-Inhofe Amendment sailed through committee in mid-October, it was clearly the “demand signal” the merchants of death were looking for. The stock prices of Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics took off like anti-aircraft missiles, exploding to all-time highs by the end of the month.

Julia Gledhill, an analyst at the Project on Government Oversight, decried the wartime emergency provisions in the amendment, saying it “further deteriorates already weak guardrails in place to prevent corporate price gouging of the military.” 

Opening the doors to multi-year, non-competitive, multi-billion dollar military contracts shows how the American people are trapped in a vicious spiral of war and military spending. Each new war becomes a pretext for further increases in military spending, much of it unrelated to the current war that provides cover for the increase. Military budget analyst Carl Conetta demonstrated (see) in 2010, after years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, that “those operations account(ed) for only 52% of the surge” in US military spending during that period.

Andrew Lautz of the National Taxpayers’ Union now calculates that the base Pentagon budget will exceed by 2027, five years earlier than projected by the Congressional Budget Office. But if we factor in at least $230 billion per year in military-related costs in the budgets of other departments, like Energy (for nuclear weapons), Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, Justice (FBI cybersecurity), and State, national insecurity spending has already hit the trillion dollar per year mark, gobbling up of annual discretionary spending.

America’s exorbitant investment in each new generation of weapons makes it nearly impossible for politicians of either party to recognize, let alone admit to the public, that American weapons and wars have been the cause of many of the world’s problems, not the solution, and that they cannot solve the latest foreign policy crisis either. 

Senators Reed and Inhofe will defend their amendment as a prudent step to deter and prepare for a Russian escalation of the war, but the spiral of escalation we are locked into is not one-sided. It is the result of escalatory actions by both sides, and the huge arms build-up authorized by this amendment is a dangerously provocative escalation by the US side that will increase the danger of the world war that Biden has promised to avoid.

After the catastrophic wars and ballooning US military budgets of the past 25 years, we should be wise by now to the escalatory nature of the vicious spiral in which we are caught. And after flirting with Armageddon for 45 years in the last Cold War, we should also be wise to the existential danger of engaging in this kind of brinkmanship with nuclear-armed Russia. So, if we are wise, we will oppose the Reed/Inhofe Amendment.

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

The post New Congressional Amendment Benefits War Profiteers, Risks World War III appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

What Is the Ruckus Over AUKUS?

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Real fiscal insanity is what Congress does year after year, taking most of its discretionary spending off the table and handing it over to the Pentagon before even considering the country’s urgent domestic needs. Maintaining this pattern, Congress just splashed out for 85 more F-35 warplanes, six more than Donald Trump bought last year, without debating the relative merits of buying more F-35s vs. investing $12 billion in education, health care, clean energy or fighting poverty.

The Military Budget

The 2022 military spending bill (the National Defense Authorization Act) that passed the House on September 23 would hand a whopping $740 billion to the Pentagon and $38 billion to other departments (mainly the Department of Energy for nuclear weapons), for a total of $778 billion in military spending. This is a $37-billion increase over last year’s military budget. The Senate will soon debate its version of this bill, but don’t expect too much of a debate there either. Most senators are “yes men” when it comes to feeding the war machine. 

Two House amendments to make modest cuts both failed: one by Representative Sara Jacobs to strip that was added to Biden’s budget request by the House Armed Services Committee; and another by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for an across-the-board (with exceptions for military pay and health care).  

After adjusting for inflation, this enormous is comparable to the peak of Trump’s arms build-up in 2020. It is only 10% below the set by George W. Bush in 2008 under the cover of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would give Biden the dubious distinction of being the fourth post-Cold War US president to militarily outspend every Cold War president, from Harry Truman to George H.W. Bush. In effect, Biden and Congress are locking in the $100 billion per year arms build-up that Trump justified with his that Barack Obama’s record military spending had somehow depleted the military. 

As with Biden’s failure to quickly rejoin the nuclear deal with Iran, the time to act on cutting the military budget and reinvesting in domestic priorities was in the first weeks and months of his administration. His inaction on these issues, like his deportation of thousands of desperate asylum seekers, suggests he is happier to continue Trump’s ultra-hawkish policies than he will publicly admit.

In 2019, the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland conducted a in which it briefed ordinary Americans on the federal budget deficit and asked them how they would address it. The average respondent favored cutting the deficit by $376 billion, mainly by raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations, but also by cutting an average of $51 billion from the military budget. 

Even Republicans favored cutting $14 billion, while Democrats supported a much larger $100 billion cut. That would be more than the in the failed Ocasio-Cortez amendment, which from only 86 Democratic representatives and was opposed by 126 Democrats and every Republican.

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Most of the Democrats who voted for amendments to reduce spending still voted to pass the bloated final bill. Only 38 Democrats were willing to a $778 billion military spending bill that, once Veterans Affairs and other related expenses are included, would continue to consume over of discretionary spending.

“How’re you going to pay for it?” clearly applies only to money for people, never to money for war. Rational policymaking would require exactly the opposite approach. Money invested in education, health care and green energy is an investment in the future, while money for war offers little or no return on investment except to weapons makers and Pentagon contractors, as was the case with the $2.26 trillion the United States wasted on death and destruction in Afghanistan. 

A by the Political Economy Research Center at the University of Massachusetts found that military spending creates fewer jobs than almost any other form of government spending. It found that $1 billion invested in the military yields an average of 11,200 jobs, while the same amount invested in other areas yields: 26,700 jobs when invested in education, 17,200 in health care, 16,800 in the green economy, or 15,100 jobs in cash stimulus or welfare payments. 

Tragically, the only form of that is uncontested in Washington is the least productive for Americans, as well as the most destructive for the other countries where the weapons are used. These irrational priorities seem to make no political sense for Democrats in Congress, whose grassroots voters would cut military spending by an average of $100 billion per year on the Maryland poll. 

Why the Disconnect?

So, why is Congress so out of touch with the foreign policy desires of their constituents? It is well-documented that members of Congress have more close contact with well-heeled and corporate lobbyists than with the working people who elect them, and that the “unwarranted influence” of Dwight Eisenhower’s infamous military-industrial complex has become and more insidious than ever, just as he feared.

The military-industrial complex exploits flaws in what is at best a weak, quasi-democratic political system to defy the will of the public and spend more public money on weapons and armed forces than the world’s next 13 military . This is especially tragic at a time when the wars of mass destruction that have served as a pretext for wasting these resources for 20 years may finally, thankfully, be coming to an end.

The five largest US arms manufacturers (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics) account for 40% of the arms industry’s federal campaign contributions. These companies have collectively received $2.2 trillion in Pentagon contracts since 2001 in return for those contributions. , 54% of military spending ends up in the accounts of corporate military contractors, earning them $8 trillion since 2001.

The House and Senate Armed Services Committees sit at the very center of the military-industrial complex, and their are the largest recipients of arms industry cash in Congress. So, it is a dereliction of duty for their colleagues to rubber-stamp military spending bills on their say-so without serious, independent scrutiny.

The , dumbing down and corruption of US media and the isolation of the Washington “bubble” from the real world also play a role in Congress’s foreign policy disconnect. 

There is another, little-discussed reason for the disconnect between what the public wants and how Congress votes, and that can be found in a fascinating by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations titled, “The Hall of Mirrors: Perceptions and Misperceptions in the Congressional Foreign Policy Process.” The study surprisingly found a broad consensus between the foreign policy views of lawmakers and the public, but that “in many cases Congress has voted in ways that are inconsistent with these consensus positions.”

The authors made a counterintuitive discovery about the views of congressional staffers. “Curiously, staffers whose views were at odds with the majority of their constituents showed a strong bias toward assuming, incorrectly, that their constituents agreed with them,” the study found, “while staffers whose views were actually in accord with their constituents more often than not assumed this was not the case.”

This was particularly striking in the case of Democratic staffers, who were often convinced that their own liberal views placed them in a minority of the public when, in fact, most of their constituents shared the same views. Since congressional staffers are the primary advisers to members of Congress on legislative matters, these misperceptions play a unique role in Congress’ anti-democratic foreign policy. Overall, on nine important foreign policy issues, an average of only 38% of congressional staffers could correctly identify whether a majority of the public supported or opposed a range of different policies they were asked about.

On the other side of the equation, the study found that “Americans’ assumptions about how their own member votes appear to be frequently incorrect … [I]n the absence of information, it appears that Americans tend to assume, often incorrectly, that their member is voting in ways that are consistent with how they would like their member to vote.”

Resources for the Public

It is not always easy for a member of the public to find out whether their representative votes as they would like or not. News reports rarely discuss or link to actual roll-call votes, even though the Internet and the Congressional make it easier than ever to do so.

Civil society and activist groups publish more detailed voting records. lets constituents sign up for emailed notifications of every single roll-call vote in Congress. tracks votes and rates representatives on how often they vote for “progressive” positions, while issues-related activist groups track and report on bills they support, as CODEPINK does at. enables the public to track money in politics and see how beholden their representatives are to different corporate sectors and interest groups.

When members of Congress come to Washington with little or no foreign policy experience, as many do, they must take the trouble to study hard from a wide range of sources, to seek foreign policy advice from outside the corrupt military-industrial complex, which has brought us only endless war, and to listen to their constituents. 

The study should be required reading for congressional staffers, and they should reflect on how they are personally and collectively prone to the misperceptions it revealed. Members of the public should beware of assuming that their representatives vote the way they want them to, and instead make serious efforts to find out how they really vote. They should contact their offices regularly to make their voices heard, and work with issues-related civil society groups to hold them accountable for their votes on issues they care about.

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Looking ahead to next year’s and future military budget fights, we must build a strong popular movement that rejects the flagrantly anti-democratic decision to transition from a brutal and bloody, self-perpetuating “war on terror” to an equally unnecessary and wasteful but even more dangerous arms race with Russia and China. 

As some in Congress continue to ask how we can afford to take care of our children or ensure future life on this planet, progressives in Congress must not only call for taxing the rich but cutting the Pentagon — and not just in tweets or rhetorical flourishes, but in real policy. While it may be too late to reverse course this year, they must stake out a line in the sand for next year’s military budget that reflects what the public desires and the world so desperately needs: to roll back the destructive, gargantuan war machine and to invest in health care and a livable climate, not bombs and F-35s.

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

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The Maricopa “audit” has assumed such mythic proportions among the Trump diehards who insist that their Il Duce won the presidential election that some QAnon believers have  that the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan is a hoax — to distract attention from the allegations of vote-tampering in Arizona. No doubt rumors have begun somewhere in cyberspace that the forest fires, earthquakes, hurricanes and droughts sweeping across the world are also “false-flag operations” designed by the Biden camp to help them erase evidence of election fraud.

US Media Amplifies Afghan Chaos

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The Trump forces that have taken over the Republican Party regularly fulminate against The Squad, antifa, that “socialist Biden” and other convenient punching bags. But the real target of their ire is closer to home: Republicans who have refused to join the Trump personality cult.

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer is a very conservative Republican who supported Donald Trump as his party’s leader. He has also refused to lie for the president. Prior to the release of the Cyber Ninja “audit,” he  that a tri-partisan (Republican, Democrat, Libertarian) hand count of the ballots immediately after the election matched the machine count 100% while a live-streamed assessment of the tabulation equipment revealed no manipulations whatsoever.

The thanks Richer has gotten for standing up for the rule of law? Death and ridiculous for being a RINO (Republican In Name Only).

Bill Gates is an Arizona Republican who serves on the Maricopa Board of Supervisors, which oversaw the 2020 election and  the results. Gates is one of four Republicans who serve on the five-person board. He and his colleagues resisted calls for the Cyber Ninja audit even as his GOP colleagues in the Arizona Senate unanimously  a resolution calling to arrest all the supervisors for contempt.

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In a telling passage in Jane Mayer’s recent New Yorker  on the financing of the anti-democratic initiatives of the far right, Gates spoke of the death threats that he received for what would ordinarily be the routine actions of the Board of Supervisors. “Part of what had drawn Gates to the Republican Party was the Reagan-era doctrine of confronting totalitarianism,” Mayer writes. “He’d long had a fascination with emerging democracies, particularly the former Soviet republics. He had come up with what he admits was a â€�kooky’ retirement plan—â€�to go to some place like Uzbekistan and help.’ He told me, â€�I’d always thought that, if I had a tragic end, it would be in some place like Tajikistan.’ He shook his head. â€�If you had told me, You’re going to be doing this in the U.S., I would have told you, You’re crazy.’”

Democracy promotion — it was supposed to be a method by which the US remade the world to look more like us. Thus, the interchangeability of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in the above passage couldn’t be more revealing. In traditional democracy promotion, the foreign contexts have been wildly diverse — and largely irrelevant. The important part of the equation has never been the various facts on the ground but, rather, the verities of the American constitutional system.

These verities are now under attack as insurrectionists, vigilante groups and conspiracy theorists attempt to undermine the fundamental principle of one person, one vote. With Democrats rushing to promote democracy at home, Americans are now getting a taste of our own medicine. Actually, given the rapid spread of the anti-democratic disease, we’re in desperate need of a full course of antibiotics.

Destroy Democracy to Save Democracy?

After the January 6 insurrection, I wrote about the future of democracy promotion overseas, concluding that the concept was still viable as long as democracy means not only checks and balances, but also grassroots efforts to promote racial justice, reduce economic inequality and address the climate crisis. At the end of the piece, though, I  that “at some point in the future, we may need to call upon the international community to help us save our democracy as well.”

So, only six months later, how close is America to sending out that SOS? For the time being, much depends on Trump.

In the best-case scenario, Trump exits the political scene as smoothly as he did the White House after one disastrous term. He continues to poll poorly in the country as a whole with a 60% rating (and only 76% of Republicans viewing him favorably). Still banned from Facebook and Twitter and largely ignored by the mainstream media, he lacks a platform to appeal beyond his base. And let’s not forget the lawsuits he faces from election tampering, inciting violence on Capitol Hill, sexually assaulting at least two dozen women and engaging in myriad corrupt business practices.

If Trump drops out of political life, his followers in the Republican Party will be left leaderless, though any number of rogues aspire to take his place. Without a broadly popular standard-bearer, the Trump forces would disintegrate and the Republican Party would face the inevitable. America is becoming increasingly  (and the Republican Party ľ±˛ő˛Ô’t). Climate change is raging across the country (and the Republican Party remains in denial). The US needs to retool its economy to meet the demands of the global market and the constraints of natural resources (and the Republican Party still has its head in the tar sands).

In this scenario, Trump has been little more than a deus ex machina inserted into the final act of the Republican Party’s story to enable it to escape, momentarily, its self-inflicted marginality. Trump has been the last-ditch effort of America’s version of the Nationalist Party in South Africa, the minority Afrikaner party that presided over apartheid, to preserve white power.

Trump or no Trump, the Republican Party extremists have latched onto an age-old method of maintaining control: voter suppression. Democrats have demography on their side: African-American voters  Biden over Trump by a margin of seven to one, Latinos by two to one and Asians by almost two to one. Instead of trying to woo the non-white vote, which is growing every election cycle, Republicans have decided simply to make it as hard as possible for those folks to vote.

So far in 2021, 17 states have 28 laws making it harder to vote. Democrats in Texas fled the state to prevent one more such vote from passing, but that looks to be only a temporary . Meanwhile, the omnibus voting rights bill (For the People Act) has attracted exactly zero Republican support in the Senate, which means that it will die  some modification of the filibuster. The narrower bill that just passed the House along party lines, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act,  a similar fate in the Senate.

Then there’s the effort among some Republican extremists to do an end run around the popular vote altogether by empowering state legislatures to pick electors in the Electoral College and thereby determine the outcome of presidential elections. They call it the “independent state legislature doctrine,” and unfortunately it has even attracted some support from four Supreme Court justices. In one 2024 scenario, Richard Hasen  in Slate, “Republican legislatures in states won by the Democratic candidate could seize on some normal election administration rule created by a state or local election administrator or some ruling from a state court, and argue that implementation of the rule renders the presidential election unconstitutional, leaving it to the state legislature to pick a different slate of electors.”

So, all those careful arguments about Trump’s unpopularity, the divisions within the Republican Party, and the demographic transformation of the United States mean little in the face of a brazen power play by Republican stalwarts who have already demonstrated on multiple occasions that they could care less about rules, law or the rule of law. Like the US Army units in the Vietnam War that were determined to “save” Vietnamese villages by destroying them, the Republican Party is mission-driven to “save” American democracy in their own special way.

In between the voter suppression laws and ploys like the “independent state legislature doctrine” are the more insidious efforts to call into question the integrity of all elections that produce outcomes that Trump supporters simply don’t like. The spread of insane conspiracy theories undermines not only the impartiality of elections, but the verifiability of their integrity. Conservative Republicans have time and again debunked the outlandish claims of “voter fraud” in Maricopa County, but that has not silenced the crazies.

Multiply Maricopa by the hundreds, even the thousands, and US elections will no longer reflect popular will but extremist skepticism. When faith in elections erodes, democracy can’t endure.

Geopolitical Implications

It would be comforting to report that the defeat of Trump in 2020 has taken the wind out of the sails of the far right around the world. But the success of the far right relies on a globally networked set of ideas — the failures of neoliberal globalization, the perfidy of “globalists” in supporting this failed project and the perception of immigrants as the foot soldiers of globalization — not any one figure.

In fact, Trump proved to be something of a liability to the global far right. He’s an American (a no-no among the anti-American right), a nationalist (who believes that America is better than everywhere else) and an ignoramus (whose gaffes are so gross as to embarrass the more discerning members of the far right). In America, Trump was the perfect candidate to unite disaffected independents, traditional conservatives and the American alt-right. As his would-be Svengali Steve Bannon discovered in his failed effort to create a nationalist international, Trump was not a grand unifier on the international stage.

Without Trump in the White House, the far right continues to prosper. In Europe, right-wing nationalists remain securely in power in Poland, Hungary and Slovenia. A neo-fascist party  the polls in Italy, the far-right Sweden Democrats are  to exercise real power after helping to oust the Social Democratic prime minister, and the extremist Marine Le Pen continues to  head-to-head with Emmanuel Macron in France’s presidential polls (though her Nationalist Rally didn’t do so well in recent regional elections).

Authoritarian nationalists still preside over the largest countries in the world: China, India, Russia, Brazil, Turkey. The Taliban have taken over in Afghanistan, the conservatives have come to power in Iran and the Saudis are still running their extremist theocracy. In the one Arab Spring success story, Tunisia, Kais Saied just  the state of emergency he declared last month. Coup leaders continue to control Thailand and Myanmar. It’s hard to find good news on the democracy front in Africa. Colombia, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Venezuela: all still run by strong-arm caudillos despite significant public protests.

All of this means that the list of countries that can pitch in to save American democracy is a short one. New Zealand and Iceland can teach Americans how gender equality is central to a healthy political system. South Korea can give us some pointers on how to put a Green New Deal at the center of national policy. A number of European countries can provide guidance on the importance of strong social policy for any thriving democracy.

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US President Joe Biden plans to invite these countries to his Summit for Democracy in December. The  of this initiative are reasonable: “defending against authoritarianism, addressing and fighting corruption, advancing respect for human rights.” Given the trends in the world, however, the gathering has a whiff of the desperate. It threatens to be a farewell party: Alas, poor democracy, I knew it well for it hath borne me on its back a thousand times.

It would be a different matter if Biden convened the summit as a true listening session. The Summit for Democracy could be an opportunity for America to admit that it has a problem and submit to a 12-step program of self-help, perhaps with a couple of sponsors (South Korea, Costa Rica) to keep us on the road to political health.

But that’s just a fantasy. The United States doesn’t listen to other countries. America is like the alpha male who refuses to ask for directions even when he’s dangerously lost. Right now, America is heading into uncharted political territory. Will any of our leaders ask for directions before it’s too late?

*[This article was originally published by .]

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

The post Saving Democracy by Destroying It appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

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Those particular events were dramatic enough. But in the background lay other pressing issues. First among them was the rapid decline of the health of the planet due to anthropogenic climate change. At the same time, the effects of wealth and income disparity became ever more visible inside the US and across the globe. In the background was the persistence of wars, terrorism and global instability accompanied by a very real nuclear threat, aggravated by powerful nations’ obsession with producing increasingly sophisticated weaponry. Arms sales had become essential for the economies of Western nations, exacerbating instability in entire regions of the world. Not only the American people but also the global population were becoming increasingly aware of the stakes implied by these converging issues. In this context, expectations grew for Biden’s FDR-style change in American politics. Not that he would challenge the existing order, but that he would for once address the real issues.

President Biden thus entered the White House with an implicit mission to restore a semblance of order, whatever that meant. Observers quickly discovered that today’s version of US democracy entertains two possible approaches to restoring order. The first, which to many people appears logical, requires assessing the nature of the crises and promoting policies designed specifically to address the perceived causes. The second is clearly less logical but represents a long-standing tradition a seasoned politician such as Joe Biden fully understood. It consists of weighing the opinions and interests of the two parties that share power and devising solutions that do not threaten their specific interests. It also implies relegating the needs and desires of the nation’s population to a secondary position.

Biden quickly put his well-honed skills to work. The New York Times describes the in which he “strode to the cameras on the White House driveway on [June 24], flanked by an equal number of Democratic and Republican lawmakers, to proudly announce an overall infrastructure agreement totaling $1.2 trillion over eight years that could cement his legacy as a bipartisan deal maker.” 

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Bipartisan:

A descriptive term for any agreement between the two dominant parties designed to buttress the status quo, bipartisanship becoming a necessary ingredient when the status quo itself has become exceptionally dysfunctional, built on policies that are unpopular with the majority of the electorate but considered vital to the preservation of donor support by the political class

Contextual Note

Progressive Democrats wasted no time expressing their displeasure with a bill that fails to address even the most tepid of Biden’s campaign promises concerning the real problems the nation was facing. Emboldened by his belief in his own bipartisan superpowers and wishing to appease progressives, Biden explained, in response to a question from the press, his commitment to pushing through another bill that would deal with those issues. He even promised to reject the bipartisan version he had just negotiated if it was not accompanied by the partisan version. The Times commented: “It may not seem like much, but it was enough to upend Mr. Biden’s proud bipartisan moment.” Pride certainly appears to be a more powerful motivator for the president than problem-solving.

Revealing the strategy that would have had a chance of working only if left unmentioned, Biden announced, “if this is the only thing that comes to me, I’m not signing it.” This set off a firestorm among his bipartisan partners, who judged they had been taken for a ride. Over the next 24 hours, Biden had to find a way of walking back his imprudent remarks. He dutifully promised to back the original bill with no conditions, and peace was restored. Republicans now have a clear path to devise ways of canceling the threat of action being taken on the issues that matter.

There is still a small chance Biden could succeed by mobilizing every member of the Democratic Party to pass the “real” infrastructure bill through reconciliation. But the odds seem rather long. This leaves some observers wondering whether the gaffe was inadvertent. Perhaps Biden’s real bipartisan aim was to provide his opponents with a pretext for ensuring that the second bill never gets passed.

“The drama does not appear to have sunk the deal,” The Times writes reassuringly, “but Mr. Biden admitted that his comments on Thursday left �the impression that I was issuing a veto threat on the very plan I had just agreed to.’” That was �certainly not my intent,’ he added.” This glib explanation of the confusion may sum up the public’s perception of the first months of the Biden presidency. There is a thick fog around his intent.

Politico that Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell criticized accused Biden of “â€�completely caving’ to the party’s left wing and has repeatedly emphasized his commitment to derailing Biden‘s progressive agenda.” What this means is that the nation must prepare for a direct confrontation between the ideologies of the two parties, the very opposite of bipartisan government. The logic has come full circle, as often happens these days in Washington.

Historical Note

The myth of bipartisanship in US politics is relatively new. It is linked to the emergence a century ago of a binary political system in which only two dominant parties could legitimately claim the right to govern. It took new meaning in recent decades once the parties had settled into their stable ideological identities. For the first two-thirds of the 20^th century, the Democratic Party drew its capacity to govern from its force as a coalition of Northern liberals and Southern segregationist Dixiecrats. The Republicans had their own two factions: Northeastern liberals and heartland conservatives. In such circumstances, bipartisanship was both an inevitable ingredient of almost all legislation and a meaningless concept. Once the Democrats became “the liberals” and the Republicans “the conservatives,” bipartisanship would become a real challenge.

Joe Biden entered Congress at a time when the old bipartisanship was fading but not yet deceased. At one point, progressives excoriated Biden for expressing his nostalgia for the days when he collaborated respectfully with white supremacists. The progressives were right in their reproach, but not for the moral reasons they cited. Rather for what it indicates about Biden’s inability to dissociate himself from an irrelevant past. He still hasn’t adapted to today’s very different reality.

The idea of bipartisanship may be the central myth of the Biden presidency. Conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans have fallen in love with it and revere Biden for his commitment to it. Senator Mark Warner, a conservative Democrat, lauded Biden’s successful negotiation in these terms: “The message it sends to the American people, and also to our friends and adversaries around the world, is so important. In a post-Jan. 6 world, it shows that people who come from different political views can still come together on national priorities.” The fiasco that followed Biden’s threat to veto his own bill demonstrates the absurdity of this maudlin sentiment.

Despite persistent public quarrels about budgets and taxation required to maintain the conservative or liberal label of the two parties, bipartisanship has actually been the norm in recent decades. And it is a destructive norm. Critiquing Biden’s brazenly illegal bombing this weekend of Iraq and Syria, Glenn Greenwald makes this historical : “This has continued for close to two full decades now because the establishment wings of both parties support it. Neither of them believes in the Constitution or the rule of law, nor do they care in the slightest about the interests of anyone other than the large corporate sectors that fund the establishment wings of both parties.”

*[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 51łÔąĎ.]

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

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Ordinarily, an event like that wouldn’t be worth noting, but these aren’t exactly ordinary times. In this twilight world of ours, half-in and half-out of a pandemic, hanging around without masks and within spitting distance of vaccinated friends should be considered just this side of miraculous — a combination of luck, privilege and a stunning series of events on a national scale that would strain credibility in a work of fiction.

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To get to that birthday party required, first of all, surviving the pandemic, which has so far  somewhere between 600,000 and  Americans, while infecting as as one-third of the population (including, months earlier, a couple of the guests at that very birthday party). No foreign enemy has ever inflicted such casualties on the US, and never in our lifetimes have American civilians faced such a catastrophic breakdown in homeland security.

Nor has the international scientific community ever responded with such dispatch and efficacy to a global crisis. Less than a year from the date of the initial outbreak, not one but several COVID-19 vaccines had been developed, tested and approved. Then came the anxious wait for eligibility and the constant refreshing of vaccination websites to try to schedule an appointment. Only when enough people like me had gone through the extended regimen of inoculation and after the infection rate had begun to fall rapidly did officials in my home state of Maryland begin to lift quarantine restrictions.

Even though everyone at that birthday party was fully vaccinated, I still felt uncomfortably vulnerable without my mask. I hesitated before hugging people. My hands itched for a squirt of sanitizer. It was, in other words, a celebration tempered by uncertainty. We were navigating new rules of social discourse. Handshake? Bear hug? Peck on the cheek? And no one dared jinx the celebration by saying, as we normally would have, “Next year, same time, same place.”

By temperament, I’m an optimist. By profession, however, I’m a pessimist. In my  as a foreign-policy analyst and in the speculative realm as the author of the dystopian â€śâ€ť trilogy of , I’m constantly considering worst-case scenarios.

So, yes, I’m well aware that COVID-19 infection rates have dropped to levels not seen in a year and that the United States may indeed be on  to reach a 70% vaccination rate among adults by July 4, which could, as the president has , offer us a new version of “Independence Day.” But this country is still experiencing the same number of infections (tens of thousands) and deaths (hundreds) as it did during the lull following the first outbreak last year. More infectious variants of the disease continue to emerge globally, most recently in India, where the numbers have been horrific, as well as in Vietnam. The current vaccines  stave off such variants, but what about the next ones?

T.2?

My professional dystopianism extends to the political sphere. I’m grateful on a daily basis that Donald Trump is no longer in the Oval Office or blathering on Twitter. I now take for granted a Democratic Congress (however marginally controlled), which seemed like a longshot last Election Day.

But let’s face it, politically, things could go south fast. Even though the Democrats are working overtime to inoculate this country’s economy with one stimulus shot after another, the Republicans could retake the Senate and even the House in 2022 and, three years from now, Trump could still prove to be a viable presidential candidate.

By then, for all we know, an even more infectious strain of Trumpism — call it T.2 — might have emerged in the form of far-right challengers like Republican Senators Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley, or even (God save us all) Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Their followers who lurched from reopen rallies to stop-the-steal protests were struck dumb by the failure of their Duce to cling to power in January 2021. In the months since President Joe Biden’s inauguration, with a of Republicans still proclaiming his election stolen, they’ve again become restive.

Keep in mind as well that dystopia remains unevenly distributed around the globe. Trump is gone (for now), but other putatively democratic authoritarians remain in power. President Vladimir Putin is still effectively leader for life in Russia, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro cling to their offices, and rebel-turned-tyrant Daniel Ortega just the woman challenging him this year for the Nicaraguan presidency.

Meanwhile, not only has India been overwhelmed by COVID-19, but the numbers in Brazil remain terrifying and Taiwan has recently been  with a first wave of infections — and that’s just to begin down a grim list. Even the Seychelles off the coast of Africa, despite a world-leading vaccination rate of more than 60%, has recently  an unexpected uptick in cases.

In other words, as I left that party, it just didn’t feel like the right moment to exhale. Human beings are adaptable creatures. We have an unfortunate ability to normalize worst-case scenarios. Rising temperatures? Guess it’s time to sell the beach house and move inland. Raging pandemic? A good opportunity to chill for a few months with Netflix and Uber Eats.

But dystopias are not just about objectively terrible things. Dystopia is about losing control over your life. It’s about a faceless bureaucracy trying to evict you from your home. It’s about a virus evading all your carefully constructed defenses. It’s about right-wing crazies subverting democracy even as they claim to revere it. So, tell me the truth: In June 2021, do you really feel back in control yet? 

The Insurrection Next Time

The last scene of a horror film often elicits a gasp. The eyelid of the supposedly dead serial killer snaps open. A mad scientist, reportedly cured, is released from the asylum clutching a briefcase full of plans for his next planet-destroying invention. A puppy scampers into the kitchen with the telltale orange rash of a disease that was allegedly extinguished. Such scenes are obviously setups for sequels, but they’re also reminders that horrors seldom simply disappear. Instead, they mutate, hibernate and burrow into our everyday world.

With that in mind, let’s revisit the final scene of this year’s most talked-about horror story: the storming of the US Capitol on January 6. Inflamed by the president’s lies and conspiracy theories, thousands of people overwhelmed the Capitol police, broke into what should have been one of the most protected buildings in the country, and launched a search-and-destroy mission against various politicians located inside. The noose  on the West Front of the Capitol was an unambiguous indication of the insurrectionists’ . Some of them had even .

The story of the insurrection ended with order restored, legislators returning to their chambers to confirm the 2020 election results and a modicum of bipartisan horror at what had just happened. But the very last scene elicited a gasp from the audience watching at home. Even as they condemned the violence that had just taken place in their midst, a handful of Republican legislators continued to claim election fraud. Early on the morning of January 7, seven Republican senators and 122 members of the House refused to certify the election results in the battleground state of Pennsylvania.

Those votes were the sick puppy with the orange rash, the sign that the infectious horror of Trumpism had not been stamped out. At best, this country would experience a respite of unknown length before another surge captured the headlines. After all, Trump and his followers have been in the process of fundraising, assembling a cast and crew, enlisting thousands of extras and beginning to film their sequel, while promising even bigger thrills and chills to come. Their fans can’t wait.

While most Americans go about their calmer post-Trumpian lives under the Biden administration, a significant number of their fellow citizens live in a different reality entirely. For them, a world of dystopian intensity has just begun. After all, those Trumpsters are now experiencing their worst-case scenario: a Biden victory in a “stolen” election and Congress in Democratic hands. They have no desire to normalize what they consider a  in Washington. Astonishingly, one-quarter of Republicans  to the church of QAnon with its imaginary global syndicate of Satan-worshipping child traffickers.

Although it was the Trump administration that helped spur the creation of the COVID-19 vaccines,  of Republicans still say they won’t get inoculated (compared to 4% of Democrats). Against all evidence, they believe the vaccines to be , ineffective or even downright undemocratic in the way they subject their “victims” to nonstop surveillance through a supposedly injected microchip. Fixated on such imaginary threats, the anti-vaxxers are dismissive of a pandemic that is still a clear and present danger.

In the good old days, people with such a tenuous connection to reality would retreat to their armchairs to listen to Rush Limbaugh. They’d live in their own private dystopias — stocking their bomb shelters, polishing their guns, muttering to themselves — with lots of fire and fury but little real-world impact.

Taking Over the Republican Party

Thanks to Trump, the Proud Boys and QAnon, however, the dystopians of today have turned their delusions into a political project even to the point of taking over the Republican Party. Mo Brooks, the Alabama Republican who  that the 2020 election featured the “worst voter fraud and election theft in history,”  his followers to post-election violence. Gun nut Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican,  President Biden a “tyrant” for his tepid gun-control proposals after a spate of mass killings this spring. Led by Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson, the party is now  the events of January 6 to blame the violence on supposed left-wing agitators.

Equally troubling, true believers of this sort are still attempting to overturn the results of the election, beginning with the vote “recount” in Maricopa County, Arizona. The outfit in charge of that recount, Cyber Ninjas, has been set loose in a basketball arena in Phoenix like the Keystone Kops on a mad caper. In the process, they’re  all the rules of a proper audit, from tolerating a huge error rate in tally sheets to flagging ballots as “suspicious” for things like folds, Cheeto stains and suspected bamboo fibers (the result, supposedly, of having been sent from in Asia). According to Jack Sellers, the Republican chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, the Maricopa is “a grift disguised as an audit.”

It’s not the 2020 election that hangs in the balance, of course, since no amount of imaginary bamboo fibers — in Arizona or any of the states the Trumpsters are targeting — can overturn what Congress has already confirmed. What can potentially be overturned, however, is American democracy itself. After all, it’s now clear that the Trumpsters will treat every future election that doesn’t produce the results they desire as a globalist plot no different from a new vaccine or a new pronouncement by infectious disease specialist Anthony Fauci. Each contested election has the possibility of generating another potential insurrection, with the rioters perhaps chanting, “Remember January 6th!”

The nonsense now being spouted by the loony right would be grist for satire if we hadn’t seen all this before. Karl Marx once proposed (and Groucho Marx proved) that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.” Trump has turned this dictum on its head, since many of the laughable things he said on his road to the presidency in 2016 — his paeans to his future “big, fat, beautiful Wall,” his white nationalism, his love of Putin — were indeed turned into tragic policy by his minions.

We laughed when Barack Obama  Trump at the Gridiron dinner in 2011, but those jokes likely kindled Trump’s ambition to become president. We would be wise not to laugh at the antics of Greene, who has spouted QAnonsense and  mask mandates to the Nazi treatment of Jews, or else she could ride similar waves of derision to even greater political heights.

The Power of the Marginalized

I have a great deal of empathy for many people in the Trump camp. I’ve never liked Washington, DC, and its obsession with insider politics. I share the distaste that much of Trump country feels for the arrogance of the power elite and its incessant jockeying for influence.

After all, it wasn’t Trump who created our current mess. Sure, he turned up the heat under the pot and gave its contents a vigorous stir, but he didn’t assemble the ingredients or design the recipe. The climate crisis, the travesty of global military spending, the inequities of the global economy — these were created by the “adults in the room” backed by the mainstream political parties, Washington’s “Blob” and an ever-ascendant military-industrial-congressional complex.

The MAGA crowd was right to reject this version of the status quo. With his economic populism, Trump gave voice to those who felt shafted by Wall Street, transnational corporations and globalization in general. The wages of blue-collar workers, adjusted for inflation, had at best stagnated since the 1970s (while the incomes of America’s billionaires have done  but). Because the mainstream parties abandoned these voters, economically speaking, many of them naturally basked in the attention Trump showered on them. They felt that their dystopia of economic marginalization might finally be on the verge of lifting.

In challenging one pillar of the status quo, however, Trump consciously reinforced two others: the  of the wealthy elite and of white privilege. In the process, legitimate economic grievances became entangled with anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner and blatantly racist rhetoric. Trump’s electoral defeat has by no means silenced this white nationalism.

Fortunately, other voices have come to the fore as well, as millions of Americans rejected the status quo in more productive ways. One year ago, the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin reignited the Black Lives Matter movement, triggering the largest protests in American history (as well as demonstrations in more than 60 other countries). In exercising their freedoms of speech and assembly, those protesters were also very deliberately trying to regain control of their lives by rolling back a dystopia of police terror that has  harmed black Americans.

Similarly, the #MeToo movement has been a reassertion of control by women over their own bodies and lives. Thanks to such efforts, the dystopia of rape culture and patriarchal authority has to recede, though not everywhere or quickly enough.

Environmentalists are likewise standing up to the fossil-fuel companies, while economic justice advocates continue to challenge multinational corporations. Peace activists are protesting wars and military spending, while human rights demonstrators are rallying against authoritarian leaders. These efforts all contribute, little by little, to the possibility that we can regain control over our own lives. They are part of a long-term process whereby the powerless become subjects in their own stories rather than the objects of someone else’s tales. Such challenges to the status quo would become more powerful still if joined by some of the economically marginalized previously drawn to Trump (as long as they check their white privilege at the door).

â€Âٱč±ôľ±˛ÔłŮ±đ°ů±ô˛ą˛Ô»ĺ˛ő”

I’ve tried to describe such historic efforts in  and in fiction. In my â€Âٱč±ôľ±˛ÔłŮ±đ°ů±ô˛ą˛Ô»ĺ˛ő” series of novels, I’ve done my best to peer into our future and consider the worst-case scenarios of climate change, unrestrained corporate power and nationalism run amok. However, in the standalone finale, â€ś,” I let a little sunlight break through the dystopian storm clouds to tell the story of an international community of activists coming together in the face of a planetary crisis. (George Orwell, meet Greta Thunberg.) As I said, by temperament, I’m an optimist. Sometimes, that optimism even leaks into my professional life.

Sure, I continue to worry about what the next wave of COVID-19 might look like. I fear both the continued lunacy of the Republican Party and the pallid incrementalism of the Democrats. But I’m heartened by the energy of people all over the world determined to beat back dystopia, take control of their lives and transform the optimists’ credo of “hope and change” into something a great deal more significant than a campaign slogan.

*[This article was originally published by . John Feffer is the author of the dystopian novel â€ś.” “” is volume two of his â€Âٱč±ôľ±˛ÔłŮ±đ°ů±ô˛ą˛Ô»ĺ˛ő” series and the final novel in the trilogy, â€ś,” has just been published. Feffer has also written â€ś.”]

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

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Authoritarianism, like war, makes headlines. It’s hard for democracy to compete against political crackdowns, military coups and unhinged pronouncements. Sure, democracies engage in periodic elections and produce landmark pieces of legislation. But what makes democracy, like peace, successful is not the unexpected rupture, such as the election of Barack Obama, but the boring quotidian. Citizens express their opinions in public meetings. Lawmakers receive constituents in their offices. Potholes get fixed. That’s not exactly clickbait.

Because the absence of war doesn’t make headlines, as Stephen Pinker has , the news media amplifies the impression that violence is omnipresent and constantly escalating when it splashes mass murder, genocide and war crimes on the front page. Peace may well be prevalent, but it isn’t newsworthy.

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The same can be said about democracy, which has been suffering for some time from bad press. Democracies have been dragged down by corruption, hijacked by authoritarian politicians, associated with unpopular economic reforms and proven incapable (so far) of addressing major global problems like the climate crisis. After a brief surge in popularity in the immediate post-Cold War period, democracy according to the general consensus has been in retreat.

Judging from recent quantitative assessments, the retreat has become a rout. The title of the latest Freedom House , for instance, is â€śDemocracy Under Siege.” The report details how freedom around the world has eroded for the last 15 years, with 2020 featuring the greatest decline yet. The Economist Intelligence Unit, which produces a Democracy Index every year, promoted its 2020 report with the headline, “Global Democracy Has a Very Bad Year.” The authoritarian responses to the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the worst so far for the model, with the average global score plummeting from the previous year. Meanwhile, the Rule of Law Index for 2020 also  a drop for the third year in a row.

If we extrapolate from the current trend lines, democracy will be gone in a couple of decades, melted away like the polar ice. But it’s always dangerous to make such extrapolations given history’s tendency to move in cycles not straight lines. So, let’s look at some reasons why democracy might be in for a comeback.

The Pandemic Recedes in America

Much of the reason for democracy’s dismal record in 2020 was the expansion of executive power and state controls in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Some of those power grabs, such as Vladimir Putin’s  changes in Russia, are still in place. Some countries, like India and Brazil, are still struggling with both COVID-19 and powerful authoritarian leaders.

But even with the continued high rate of infection in a number of countries, the overall trajectory of the disease is downward. Since peaking in late April, the reported number of global cases has dropped nearly by half. So, two trend lines are now intersecting: the lifting of pandemic restrictions and the backlash against hapless authoritarians.

Americans, for instance, are coming to terms with both the retreat of COVID and the removal of Donald Trump from the White House, Facebook and Twitter. The Biden administration is undoing many of Trump’s undemocratic moves, including those imposed during the pandemic around immigration and refugees. The attempts by the Republican Party to tamp down voter turnout proved spectacularly unsuccessful in 2020, which despite the pandemic featured the largest-ever  in votes from one election to the next. In terms of the voting-age population, you have to go back to 1960 to find an election with a higher percentage turnout than the 62% rate in 2020.

This surge in voters helped put Joe Biden over the top. It has also motivated the Republican Party to redouble its efforts, this time at the state level, to suppress the vote. It is doing so under the false narrative that electoral fraud is widespread and that President Biden’s victory is somehow illegitimate. And it is setting the stage to orchestrate an authentic election  in 2024.

The backlash against these anti-democratic moves has been encouraging, however. When the state of Georgia passed its voting restrictions in April, pressure from voting rights advocates forced prominent Georgia corporations like Coca-Cola and Delta to reverse  and come out against the bill (though only after the bill had already passed). Major League Baseball  its all-star game from Atlanta, and Hollywood has also threatened a boycott.

These moves motivated Texas-based companies to  that state’s version of voting restrictions before the legislature scheduled a vote. None of that stopped Texas Republicans from pushing ahead with the bill. So, last weekend, Texas Democrats had to deploy the nuclear option of  out of the chamber to stop the vote suppression bill from passing. These courageous Texans, up against a powerful and determined state Republican Party, are now  to the federal government to safeguard voting rights.

At the federal level, the Democrats have put forward for the second time a comprehensive voting reform bill, the For the People Act, to expand access, reduce corruption and limit the impact of money on politics. The House approved a version of this bill in 2019, but it died in the Republican-controlled Senate. The House passed the  in March, but it again faces a difficult road to passage in the Senate because filibuster rules require at least 60 votes to pass and Democrats can muster only 50 (plus the vice-president’s).

A failure to find “10 good Republicans” for this bill, the cadre that Senator Joe Manchin naively expected to step forward to pass legislation creating a commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill, may  the Democrats to scrap or at least significantly modify the filibuster rules, which were  to block further enfranchisement of African-Americans in the 20^th century.

High voter turnout and efforts to secure voting rights are not the only signs of a healthy US democracy. Last year, the largest civic protests in US history took place as tens of millions of Americans expressed their disgust with police violence in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Civic organizations stepped forward to fight the pandemic and ensure more equitable access to vaccines. Young people, in particular, are engaged in large numbers on the climate crisis, gun control and reproductive health. After a long winter of discontent under Trump, perhaps it’s time for an “American Spring.”

Mixed Record Elsewhere for Democracy

Europe, meanwhile, is coming out of the pandemic in slightly stronger shape politically. The budget compromise that took place at the end of 2020, which ended up providing considerable relief to the economically disadvantaged countries of the southern tier, effectively  the European Union from disintegrating out of a lack of solidarity. Alas, the compromise also watered down the EU’s criticism of its easternmost members, particularly Poland and Hungary, for their violations of the bloc’s commitments to human rights and rule of law.

But there’s hope on the horizon here as well. Eastern Europe appears to be on the verge of a political sea change. Voters brought down Bulgaria’s right-wing populist leader Boyko Borissov in elections in April, and the new caretaker government has  to dismantle his political system of cronyism. In Slovenia, tens of thousands of protesters have massed in the capital of Ljubljana, the largest demonstration in years, to demand the resignation of the Trump-like prime minister Janez Jansa. The near-total ban on abortion orchestrated by the right-wing government in Poland has motivated mass  by women throughout the country, and even “Polish grannies” have  in support of a free press and the rule of law. A finally united opposition in Hungary, meanwhile, is  in the polls to Prime Minister Viktor Orban ahead of elections next year.

The far right, with their contempt for human rights, free media, rule of law and political checks and balances, are the greatest threat to democracy within democracies. Fortunately, they are not doing very well in Western Europe either. The anti-immigrant Alternative fĂĽr Deutschland has witnessed a significant  in support in Germany, while Lega in Italy has also  in popularity. Golden Dawn has  from the scene in Greece. Vox is still the third most popular party in Spain, but it hasn’t managed to rise much 15% in the polls, which is the same story for the Sweden Democrats (stuck at 19%). Only in France and Finland are the far-right parties continuing to prosper. Marine Le Pen  leads the polls against French President Emmanuel Macron ahead of next year’s election, while the Finns Party  by a couple of percentage points in the polls but with elections not likely before 2023.

Elsewhere in the world, the pandemic may result in more political casualties for far-right populists, as they get caught in the ebbing of the Trump wave. Brazilians are  throughout the country under the banner of impeaching Jair Bolsonaro, a president who, like Trump, has compiled a spectacularly poor record in dealing with COVID-19. Bolsonaro’s approval rating has to a new low under 25%. The still-popular former leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, recently cleared by the courts to run again for office,  to be assembling a broad political coalition to oust Bolsonaro in the elections set for next year.

Hard-right leader Ivan Duque has achieved the distinction of being the least popular  in Colombian history. Politically, it doesn’t matter so much, since he can’t run again for president in next year’s election. But the public’s disgust with the violence in Colombia and the economic inequality exacerbated by the pandemic will likely apply as well to any of his would-be hard-right successors.

The extraordinary mishandling of the pandemic in India has had a similar effect on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity, which has also recently fallen to a new low. However, after seven years in office, he remains quite popular, with a 63%  rating.

Modi’s Teflon reputation speaks to the fragility of democracy in many parts of the world. Many voters are attracted to right-wing nationalists like Modi —  in Turkey, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador — who promise to “get the job done” regardless of the political and economic costs. Such leaders can rapidly turn a democratic country into a putatively democratic one, which makes the step into authentic authoritarianism that much easier.

The coups in Mali and Myanmar, China’s crackdown in Hong Kong, the enduring miseries in North Korea, Venezuela and Eritrea — these are all reminders that, however fragile democracy might be in formally democratic states, politics can always get a lot worse.

Lukashenko: Strong or Weak?

Take the example of Belarus, where Alexander Lukashenko has ruled supreme since 1994. Thanks to his own ruthlessness and the patronage of neighboring Russia, Lukashenko has weathered mass protests that would have ousted leaders of weaker disposition.

His latest outrage was to order the grounding of a Ryanair flight from Greece to Lithuania as it was flying over Belarus — just so that he could apprehend a young dissident, Roman Protasevich, and his Russian girlfriend, Sofia Sapega. Virtually everyone has decried this blatant violation of international laws and norms with the exception, of course, of Putin and others in the Russian president’s orbit. The editor of the Russian media conglomerate RT, Margarita Simonyan, , “Never did I think I would envy Belarus. But now I do. [Lukashenko] performed beautifully.”

Lukashenko indeed came across as all-powerful in this episode. But this is an illusion. Putin has not hesitated to assassinate his critics, even when they are living outside Russia. Lukashenko doesn’t have that kind of reach or audacity, so he has to wait until dissidents are within his own airspace to strike. I’d like to believe that the opposition in Belarus takes heart from this desperate move — is Lukashenko really so scared of a single dissident? —  and doubles down on its efforts to oust the tyrant.

Outside of Putin and his toadies, Lukashenko doesn’t have many defenders. This elaborate effort to capture a dissident only further isolates the Belarussian strongman. Even putatively democratic states, like  and , have unequivocally denounced Lukashenko.

Anti-democratic actions like the Ryanair stunt capture headlines in ways that pro-democratic efforts rarely do. Honestly, had you even heard of Roman Protasevich before this affair? Along with all the other depressing news of the day, from Texas to Mali, this brazen move suggests that democracy is teetering on the edge of an abyss.

But all the patient organizing against the strongmen that doesn’t make it into the news will ultimately prove the fragility of tyranny. When it comes to anti-democrats like Lukashenko, they will one day discover that the military, the police and the party have abandoned them. And it will be they who teeter at the abyss, their hands scrabbling for a secure hold, when along comes democracy to give them a firm pat on the back.

*[This article was originally published by .]

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

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By any reasonable measure, the Freedom Caucus and its members are not conservative. Because of their disruptive tactics and rhetoric, their contempt for bedrock conservative values like the rule of law and their embrace of the most radical populist in modern US history, they are more akin to European far-right politicians like those in the Alternative for Germany and Fidesz. Traditional Republicans recognize that the caucus and its members have nothing to do with the party they joined many years ago. Former House Speaker John Boehner, a more traditional Republican, gave an apt  of the caucus when he said in 2017, “They’re anarchists. They want total chaos. Tear it all down and start over. That’s where their mindset is.”

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The misidentification of the Freedom Caucus as “conservative” is not the only example of the misuse of this term. At various points over the last four years, Donald Trump was  a “conservative” president. Certain policies, like the dismantling of environmental regulations or the promotion of laissez-faire economics, have also been erroneously called “conservative.” Various media outlets and personalities, from  to , have likewise been mislabeled “conservative.” When The Washington Post tries to rectify the problem by  far-right activist Ali Alexander an “ultraconservative,” it only makes matters worse. An ultraconservative should be even more determined to uphold the status quo rather than, like Alexander, trying to undermine it.

The recent ouster of Liz Cheney from her position as the third highest-ranking Republican in the House has only further muddied the waters of this definitional quagmire. True, Cheney has upheld law and order in defending the integrity of the 2020 election against the revolutionary fervor of the “Trump Firsters” in her party. Prior to her recent stand, however, Cheney herself flouted many of the principles of conservativism by embracing the more radical policies of the Trump-inflected Republican Party, voting with the former president  of the time on such issues as gutting the environment.

The misuse of the term “conservative” is the result not only of a structural quirk of American politics, but also the evolution of political ideology in the United States.

The Europeans

In Europe, multi-party systems allow for greater nuance in political labeling. Thus, conservatives in the various Christian Democratic parties compete for votes against far-right populist parties that embrace anti-democratic, racist and even fascist positions. America’s two-party system, on the other hand, collapses such distinctions into a binary opposition between a single “liberal” and a single “conservative” party. If a faction emerges within the Republican Party, therefore, it is by definition “conservative” even if it so obviously isn’t. It’s as if politics in America is digital — either one or zero — while European politics reflect all the messy gradations of the analog realm.

At the same time, ideologies have evolved considerably in the United States over the last half-century. “Conservative” once stood for preserving traditional arrangements in society such as family, faith, community and small business against the modernizing forces of the market. Conservatives have also adopted the British philosopher Edmund Burke’s distaste for the Enlightenment project of human rights and egalitarianism. Conservatives were also once conservationists (remember: it was Richard Nixon who, in 1970, created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the Clean Air Act Extension).

The Reagan/Thatcher revolution changed all that. Conservatives suddenly became ultra-liberal in the economic sense. They wholeheartedly embraced the free market in their eagerness to deploy any powerful force against what they considered to be the primary evil in the world: big government. They supported laissez-faire economics — essentially, no government controls on the economy — even though unrestrained market forces tear apart communities, break apart families, undermine faith, destroy family farms and sweep away small businesses. But since such a market served as a counterforce to government authority, the neo-liberal conservatives prepared to throw out whatever babies were necessary in order to get rid of the bathwater.

A further revolution in conservative thought came with the neoconservatives. These foreign policy hawks discovered a fondness for human rights and a taste for revolutionary change, as long as it was in countries the United States opposed. Overthrowing the Taliban, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi, which required a revolutionary destruction of the status quo, became a new addition to the conservative agenda.

In some respects, Trump attempted to purge the conservative movement of these two newer tendencies through his rejection of both the cherished free trade of the neoliberals and the “forever wars” of the neoconservatives. In their place, the new president reverted to the older right-wing ideology of nationalism, populism and racism of the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s and the America First movement of the 1940s. At the same time, however, Trump retained the allegiance of these newfangled conservatives by slashing government involvement in the economy and championing higher Pentagon spending.

As a result, the current Republican Party features a dog’s breakfast of right-wing ideologies. You can still find ardent neoliberals like Senator Rob Portman of Ohio who espouse free-trade economics and a few neocons like Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas who rail against neo-isolationism. A solid majority of the party, Cheney notwithstanding, backs Trump no matter how much he deviates from conservative values.

The Media

Given the inability of Republicans to define themselves with any degree of precision and their preference for hiding behind labels like “conservative,” it’s no wonder that the media has difficulty parsing right-wing terminology. If the Freedom Caucus calls itself “conservative,” and the American Conservative Union agrees, should it really be the job of The New York Times to correct the record?

And yet, that’s precisely what the mainstream media does for other ludicrously inapt designations. No major newspaper believes that North Korea is democratic simply because its official name is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. No mainstream journalists would mistake the far-right Sweden Democrats for the US political party of the same name. As for Russia’s Liberal Democratic Party, it is nothing of the sort, since it’s only the personal political vehicle of the raving extremist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and pity the poor reporter who takes the party at face value.

It’s long past time for the mainstream media to apply these common-sense rules of nomenclature to American politics.

There are several efforts ongoing to wean the Republican Party of its addiction to Donald Trump. Perhaps a more important first step would be to reclaim the term “conservative” so that it applies in the United States to the same system of values that inspires conservative parties in Europe. Only then will the Republican Party have a chance of becoming once again a defender of the status quo rather than its chief wrecking ball.

*[This article was originally published by .]

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

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Biden Scores Key Wins in First 100 Days

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I don’t know of anyone who predicted that this 78-year-old lifelong politician could seize the moment and grip the nation. But somehow, he has. It was to be expected that anything would be better than Trump, and Biden could have coasted on that alone. But that is not what is happening.

President Biden has used quiet confidence, competence, compassion and a solid moral foundation to propose the most progressive agenda in decades to try to lead Americans to where they didn’t know they wanted to go. Senator Bernie Sanders, among others, understood and articulated the problems and offered a vision of fundamental reform. Now, somewhat out of the clear blue, Biden may prove to be a leader capable of actually delivering some of that reform.

Biden Has More in Mind

After the election in 2020, there was much talk about the Biden who most thought to be a transitional figure, at best. But while we were talking to each other, it seems that Biden was actually telling himself and maybe a few others that he had much more than that in mind. Progressives like me didn’t even know he was listening to us. Maybe we had become so often disappointed that we never quite understood how far compassion and empathy can take someone when they are empowered with the opportunity to try to make a real difference.

To be clear, it will take much more than compassionate leadership to move America even slowly toward fulfilling its promise. It will take steady and competent administration officials and public servants committed to progressive ideals and then willing and able to turn ideals into public policy. It will take a united Democratic Party at all levels of government to both support and actively promote the policy initiatives. And then it will take President Biden to remind the whole nation that good people not only can accomplish good things, but that there is a moral imperative to do so now.

There will be no help whatsoever from Republican politicians at the national level, and the right-wing media apparatus will only ramp up its bile. Somewhere, around 70% of those who identify as Republicans still the reality that Biden is the legitimate president of the United States. With this in mind, Biden should ignore the national Republican Party and its acolytes until there is a clear and unequivocal affirmation of the results of the last presidential election from their political “leaders,” including the disgraced and seditious losing candidate.

In the current political environment, the most basic tenet of democratic governance continues to require repetition, so here goes: No one can be entrusted with democratic governance without a commitment to the democratic process, the rule of law and the resulting government. So, for all of you Republicans who still are waiting for Trump’s “triumphant” return and those who try to diminish the institutional significance of the insurrection that shook the nation, you have earned the right to be ignored. No nation can succeed at governance if those who do not believe in government continue to have a seat at the table.

I have some confidence that Biden knows this as well. And even more confidence that those counseling the president are exploring all of the realistic options to achieve their policy objectives. Further, they know that it will be imperative to negotiate with Democratic officials at all levels of government to increase broad public support for his progressive agenda.

Republican Officials

There may also be some state and local Republican officials willing to sign on. However, Biden and his supporters will have to work much harder than they should have to in order to convince state and local Republican officials of the painfully obvious value of federal support for education, health care, child care, roads and bridges, better wages, affordable housing and the like. After years of local community neglect, most Republican officials still seem willing to reflexively resist any federal mandates, no matter how much those mandates might benefit their constituencies.

In this context, it will not be necessary to fix everything at once. However, it will be essential to initially restore a national faith in the capacity of government to meet collective societal challenges and to convince the nation that solutions to 21^st-century problems require an actively engaged national government.

To succeed at this, Biden will have to directly address the most persistent element of resistance to collective national solutions — the perception that to implement policy changes beneficial to all requires that some give up a little individual “liberty” and a measure of individual “security.” There is only one cohesive response. It is that realizing a better America engenders a collective liberty that provides a more secure future for all of us.

This is what transformation looks like. Over the 40 years since Ronald Regan first stained governance with his disdain for the very government he was chosen to lead, much has been lost. A certain atrophy has set in that has often resulted in government failure, not because government can’t work, but because political leaders never trusted the institutions that were essential to success. It was much easier to find failure than the courage to fix it. And it was even easier to allow delusional waves of national greatness to mask a shameful level of collective despair.

Convincing Americans

If President Biden is to be transformational, he will need to convince a cynical nation that government is worthy of the trust needed to meet the challenges ahead. Then, he will need to fight for the resources required to meet those challenges and to demonstrate that we are writing a better chapter this time because we finally realize the distortion of previous chapters.

To write new and better chapters, the usual national distractions will have to be avoided. Two simple “truths” need to be emphasized. The first is that deficit spending is not a threat to needed reform, while resistance to paying taxes to meet public policy objectives is a threat. The second is that costly international adventures can only be avoided by accepting that “winning” is not a given. In both instances, simple cost/benefit analysis would serve America well and temper the hubris at the core of so much national angst.

Joe Biden may well be suited to rise above the exaggerated pride and self-confidence that has driven many of his predecessors to achieve far less than they could have or should have achieved and that has shattered promise after promise. Maybe Joe is the guy. I sure hope so. It is nice for the moment to feel like some of us are no longer walking alone.

*[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 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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So, now that the mass shootings have started again in earnest in America after seemingly taking a small break during the height of pandemic restrictions, it is again mostly white guys out front depriving lots of others of their lives and sense of security. Of course, who can forget the hordes of white guys storming the US Capitol a few months ago trying to prevent their fearless leader from the perceived insult of a permanent return to his beloved mansion in Florida.

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It is worth asking who these white guys are who continue to board their trains to nowhere, callously leaving misery, destruction and even death in their wake. Some are among the really challenged people in America. Among other things, they seem to be intellectually incapable of seeing the connection between incredibly easy access to firearms and mass human slaughter in the American landscape. Find an assault weapon, and you are likely to find a challenged white guy.

However, those white guys fueling the nation’s resistance to humane immigration policies, to easy access to the polls to affect democratic change, to a racial reckoning and equal opportunity, to universal access to meaningful health care, and even to a comprehensive public health response to the pandemic are all on the same trains to nowhere, along with their gun nut buddies. Tragically, they enable America to fail and they empower each other to add critical mass to their efforts.

Many of these white people live in neighborhoods with a lot of other white people, only some of whom share their views. Some live in more diverse neighborhoods or pockets of poverty where they often hide their views until, for some reason, they have had enough of “others” and snap. But a whole bunch of these white people were among the 74 million people who voted for Trump in the last election.

Thwarting Efforts to Govern

Worse yet, they and their Republican cohorts are now determined to thwart any Biden administration effort to govern. Governing is not the same thing as being a government. Governing is, in its most basic sense, the of authority thru the making of policy and the administration of that policy. President Joe Biden often has the authority to act, but to exercise that authority within America’s constitutional framework requires collaboration with, and the cooperation of, other institutional elements of that framework.

Take immigration policy as an example, since there is often talk of “comprehensive immigration reform.” The Biden administration can determine policy and administer elements of that policy through executive action. It can humanely allow Latino children to enter the United States and then make sure that they have a bed, a blanket and enough food to sustain them. After that, figuring out how these immigrant minors should be processed and treated becomes much more complicated, unless it is viewed as a component of a much larger US immigration problem that requires “comprehensive reform.”

Enter Congress, enter the Republicans in Congress, enter the white guys on the trains to nowhere and that comprehensive reform is almost certainly doomed. So, what happens to the children? With some luck, they disappear into the fabric of the world of undocumented immigrants striving to find a place in a nation where a lot of white guys don’t want them to be.

Although the immigration example is bad enough, there is more bad news from the white guys on the trains to nowhere. They don’t seem to want anybody but themselves to have a go at voting. It would be nice to say that this effort will fail in that exceptional “model democracy” known as America. But hold on, the white guys have a plan: You change the voting rules to get better results. This is easier than changing the policies, programs and personalities that many of the voters rejected under the old rules.

Just to make sure that nobody mistook the latest white guy effort at voter suppression for a serious effort to make voting easier, those wacky Republicans in the Georgia , aided and abetted by the Republican governor, just criminalized providing food and water to their fellow citizens waiting in voting lines. That is, of course, only part of what they did, but enough to fully demonstrate the lengths to which the white guys on the trains to nowhere will go to preserve their shrinking political influence.

You see, prior voting practices in Georgia often left voters of color waiting in longer lines than their white counterparts, so instead of legislating to reduce wait times for everybody, someone came up with the bright idea of making it harder to wait in line. (This plan will work even better if the white guys also make it a crime to sell those little cooler bags to anyone who isn’t a white guy.)

The Key That Unlocks the Door

I wish I were making this up, but I am not. The Biden administration’s capacity to govern is being not by people who have a sincere agenda of constructive reform for the nation, but by those same kind of white guys on their trains to nowhere who have just criminalized giving grandma a drink of water while she waits in line to vote.

Even some things as potentially lifesaving for white guys as wearing masks and seeking COVID-19 vaccines seem challenging to way too many of them. While they should overwhelmingly embrace these measures if for no other reason than if only people of color get vaccinated and white guys die off, their situation gets even more desperate. Yet the world has watched while many white guys on their trains to nowhere have overtly contributed to tens of thousands of COVID deaths in the US and continue to try to thwart coordinated government efforts to address the nation’s pandemic and public health crisis.

For some reason, even their significant contribution to the deaths of so many has failed to pause the white guys on their trains to nowhere long enough to stand back so that those of good will in government have the space they need to function and the support they need to govern.

For as long as the mindless obstruction continues, the nation’s governmental institutions will be significantly impeded from pursuing the long-delayed promise of a more just and equitable America. And it will be that much harder to demonstrate that good government is the key that unlocks the door.

*[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 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

The post Obstructing Governance as a Substitute for Public Policy appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

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Equity, in the sense of fairness and impartiality, has never been an American strength. Rather, the nation’s history glorifies those who grab what they can get, even when what they can get is at the expense of others. “Success” itself is prized above a fair and impartial process for achieving it that has equality of opportunity at its core. While there is nothing new about this observation, its application to both the COVID-19 vaccine distribution issues and the more general drive to confront societal inequities that the coronavirus pandemic has dramatized is worthy of discussion.

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After failing at every turn to create a national urgency to adopt and implement recognizable public health measures to address the pandemic, and amid a dizzying array of inadequate state and local solutions, it became apparent that most Americans were in it for themselves. This provides the oxygen on which privilege thrives. So, for many, making individual decisions has been freed from any collective moral imperative. The Biden administration, with quiet competence, is trying to use a new national response to the pandemic as a foundation for altering this key impediment to a more equitable society.

People with resources, a good job, a good computer and good internet access have thrived, while many “essential” workers were left to fend for themselves. The privileged know that “essential” was often just shorthand for interchangeable people required to put themselves at risk, frequently for low pay and no benefits. Humanity wasn’t a big consideration. Worse yet, the privileged didn’t seem too troubled to know that these “essential” workers frequently headed home to a crowded apartment or multi-generational substandard housing, increased health risks and limited access to meaningful health care. The joke was clearly on them.

Those for whom testing and contact tracing would have been paths to some measure of health security seemed less likely to have access to either, while some of those wanting to take a break in Mexico or Disneyland easily found a test and cleverly avoided the rigors of contact tracing. So the beat goes on. But to what end?

Three Threads

While there will be a day when masks, social distancing, testing and maybe even COVID-19 vaccines will no longer be a part of daily life for most of us, it is not clear at all that any real lessons will have been learned about how best to engender the collective will necessary to meet critical national societal needs. There are three threads that seem to be coalescing to ensure that a return to “normal” is a return to a stratified society where the privileged almost always win and the underprivileged most often lose.

First, there is the power of “normal” itself. The people with the most influence want a return to their normal while those with the least influence generally want something better than a return to their normal. This is understandable, but guess which team is going to win unless good government and good people step in to level the playing field.

Second, to successfully confront inequity, it is essential to understand the impact of inequity and the value that it brings to privilege and the impediments that it brings to those without privilege. Then, those with privilege have to be willing to part with some of it. (Not necessarily a zero-sum game.) For this to occur at the systemic and institutional levels required for enduring change, some awakening will have to occur. There is a small possibility that when some of those with privilege lose anyway, as with the vaccine distribution, it may engender a deeper empathy for those who seem to lose all the time.

Third, there is the morally bankrupt Republican Party and its shameful indifference to the suffering of even those who still seem to believe there is something there to admire. The Biden administration, Democrats in Congress and progressives everywhere have gone big and actually gotten important things legislatively accomplished to meet the current pandemic crisis. But that effort demonstrated how tenuous a hold any effort to make America better for all actually has on the nation’s essential legislative process. With all that we have gone through as a nation in the last year, you would think that maybe some moral light would have been lit in some recesses where it had not previously penetrated, yet I don’t see much evidence of that.

A Big Deal

For now, President Joe Biden’s has been signed into law providing the legislative framework and funding for the critical elements of a national plan to confront the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout. And, perhaps even more significant for the future of the nation, Biden and congressional Democrats have given legislative gravitas to a progressive and activist agenda for confronting economic and social inequality in America. This is a big .

As with every advance in a deeply divided nation, there will be pushback from those who have for decades cratered meaningful attempts at progressive social and economic legislation. Even the obvious inequities driven by pernicious systems and exposed in big bright lights by the pandemic haven’t broken the stranglehold that the pushback machine has on large segments of public thinking.

In this context, the national response to every drive for racial justice in America’s history is instructive as progressives strive to use the lessons of the pandemic to inform a full and appropriate response to it and to the underlying inequities that helped fuel America’s pandemic response failures. Every time that racism boils its way to the surface, it readily becomes apparent that it is the systemic racism deniers in our midst who rally together to ensure that systemic change is avoided.

Think of it in these terms: America wallowed in pandemic response failure not because some idiot didn’t wear a mask, but because coronavirus deniers stood in the way of a collective public health response. To alter this formula, Americans have to be separated from the cherished notion that they are all good people at heart. While it is undeniable that there are many good and decent Americans working every day to serve others at some risk to themselves, it is also shockingly obvious how easy it is for individuals to separate themselves from the common good.

Unexamined privilege is the vehicle that often allows those who separate themselves from the common good to somehow feel good about themselves. Until this dynamic is changed, it will be hard to see how America can change for the better.

*[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 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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In this case, it might just be the best outcome. The fringe has morphed into the identity of the Republican Party so completely that somewhat hinged used-to-be Republicans don’t stand a chance of turning this around. But they don’t deserve another chance, having previously sold their souls to Ronald Reagan’s vision of undermined governance and unchecked capitalism as a means to a better end. Many Americans are just now beginning to figure out how poorly that has actually worked out for them.

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The spectacle of the Republican Party dancing around their new , Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, is a bit like watching some moron taking a selfie at the edge of a cliff only to realize as she falls that the rope around your waist is tethered to her waist. Republicans should have known that they would be in trouble when their old Uncle Mitch warned them that that rope was a bad idea.

Since Greene is no ordinary moron teetering at the edge of a cliff, she has been empowered to drive the Trump narrative as a creed for both the party and the nation. Then there is the newly crowned “conscience” of the Republican House leadership, Representative Liz Cheney. She covered herself in “glory” by voting to impeach Trump for sedition and inciting an insurrection, and then a few scant weeks later covered herself in dung by to take the minimal step of removing Greene from her committee assignments. I can only guess, but maybe she used up her family allotment of “conscience” on that first vote.

If you are wondering about the top guns in the Republican congressional orbit, you would be wondering about Mitch McConnell, now Senate minority leader, and the wannabe speaker of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy. These two supported the whole Trump national trauma for four years and then, faced with armed insurrection inside the Capitol, still can’t say never again. And they still can’t clearly and unequivocally hold Trump responsible for his incitement of the mob.

Republican Frauds

Let me be clear about one thing: Even though there are those trying to proclaim themselves newly-crowned “heroes” of the Republican Party, they are all frauds of one kind or another. This includes the crowd and the host of “former” Republicans trying desperately to resurrect their right-wing version of their right-wing party. Today’s self-proclaimed Republican heroes did everything they could to torch the Affordable Care Act, have for decades pushed scandalous tax relief for the wealthy, and have promoted some version of unregulated capitalism through which their personal greed could thrive amid the economic distress of so many others.

And that doesn’t even reach the infamy of a political party and its adherents who have for those same decades fueled racial animus and anti-immigrant sentiment in the country for political and personal gain. Before trying to find virtue amid the wreck of the Republican Party, remember that the party and its minions are now, and have for those decades, promoted the delusional “American exceptionalism” so comforting to their white base and so destructive of a meaningful confrontation with the nation’s past that is rooted in the truth.

As with the racists in their midst that Trump legitimized and encouraged, any welcome unmasking of these new Republican “heroes” is long overdue. Some of them served a useful purpose in giving voice to the national disaster that was the Trump presidency. But none of them has given us any reason to believe that the recent past has engendered a new and truly inclusive vision for a policy partnership with Democrats that could begin to legislate a better future for those who have watched and waited for so long.

The coronavirus pandemic has done more than even a close reading of history and outraged truth telling could have done to lay bare the moral and institutional bankruptcy that is America today. Systemic racism is finally on the lips of a US president because it has to be. Huge health care, housing, educational and economic deficits are everywhere to be seen, and now so obvious that ignoring them again would be yet another epic betrayal.

To understand the depth of that betrayal and the Republican Party’s role in it requires a clear understanding that the kind old Republican “h±đ°ů´Ç,” Ronald Reagan, cravenly gave white America a clear path away from the promise of the civil rights movement. That same national “hero” told the nation that government was the problem, not the solution and then set about to prove it on the backs of those most dependent on good government to realize a share of America’s bounty. Other Republican Party “heroes” willingly followed in those soiled footsteps.

This is not to say that there is a purity of vision or spirit in the Democratic Party. Rather it is to say that America’s way forward cannot depend on either the cooperation or the acquiescence of Republicans. If you doubt this, the spectacle of the Trump impeachment trial in progress will again demonstrate the depths to which the Republican Party has sunk in its drive to regain power at all cost. A disgraced former president with the blood of hundreds of thousands of citizens already on his hands who delivered insurrection to the Capitol will continue to command Republican loyalty and get it.

A Message for Biden

So, President Joe Biden, don’t waste a minute on them. Don’t repeat the mistakes you and Barack Obama made from 2008 forward. Go all in this time. With those same Republicans already at work legislating new voter suppression measures where they can, your time to act may be short. In doing so, remember every day that closing the human value gap in America is essential to any attempt to reach for a better nation.

And whatever else you do, President Biden, remember every day that systemic racism is the original sin that begat today’s deeply flawed America. Telling the truth about that is America’s irreplaceable first step forward.

*[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 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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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.

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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, Biden’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 51łÔąĎ.]

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

The post The Post-Election Art of Drawing Hasty Conclusions appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

His Senate seat in South Carolina, which formerly belonged to Strom Thurmond, has always been deemed secure. During the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, Graham has cleverly navigated the issues to appear independent of Trump — notably in his condemnation of Saudi despot Mohammed bin Salman — and yet totally loyal to the US president as the ultimate wielder of power. He was counting on this dual image of a man who knew how to balance an image of brave individuality with the right level of obsequiousness to power to guarantee victory in this election and others to come.

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But this year’s senatorial election in South Carolina has produced what may be one of the major surprises of an exceptional moment in politics. Graham has now fallen behind in the polls to an African-American challenger, Democrat Jaime Harrison. The Democratic nominee has benefited from an war chest now evaluated at $57 million compared to the mere $28 million remaining for Graham in the final stretch of the campaign. By September, Harrison’s campaign had, since the beginning, raised $85 million compared to Graham’s $58 million. And as every American knows, money talks.

In normal times, Republican politicians like Graham celebrate the fact that money talks. But as he complains about Harrison’s war chest, Graham is at least being consistent. In late 2015, when he was campaigning in the presidential primaries against a slate of Republican hopefuls that included a political outsider named Donald Trump, Graham was the one Republican who “to add an amendment to the Constitution curtailing money in politics.” That was a bold idea. His plan, if successful, would have prevented the Supreme Court from defending its notorious Citizens United decision establishing the principle that “corporations are people” and that “money is speech.”

Now, Graham is about his own hide. The logic of fundraising has betrayed him, leading him to complain: “Where is all this money coming from? You don’t have to report it if it’s below $200. When this election is over with, I hope there will be a sitting down and finding out, â€�OK, how do we control this?’ It just seems to be an endless spiral.’”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Endless spiral:

1) A series of causes and effects that develops a dynamic of its own to escape the control of American politicians, a group of people who feel that, as the greatest nation in the history of the world, nothing should escape their control

2) In the political system of the United States, the perennially repeated ritual of enthroning, in election after election, the same personalities, whose successful association with power derives from their skill at using the power of the media to become the name that will always prevail on a ballot

Contextual Note

Newsweek that “Graham’s team has accused his rival of trying to â€�buy a Senate seat.’” That privilege was traditionally reserved for Republicans, though Democrats in recent decades have become adept at the skill of gleaning dark money from corporate donors, which helps to explain why their politics have become indistinguishable from that of the Republican.

Graham feels just as justified today in accusing Harrison of buying a Senate seat as he felt justified in pushing through the nomination and confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court weeks before a presidential election, after claiming in 2016 that no president should ever be allowed to fill a Supreme Court vacancy in the year of an election. Graham clearly understands how political opportunism works.

He also understands how, in modern times, the media works concerning the idea of outsiders meddling in elections. He has decided to mobilize the Democrats’ favorite trope concerning elections. It consists of blaming evil foreigners (mostly Russians) for interfering with the integrity of electoral processes. Because this is a state election, Graham’s outsiders needn’t be a foreign power but simply masked interlopers from other states.

Though the mysterious donors remain unidentified, their characteristics can be surmised. Just as establishment Democrats draw about foreign interference on the basis of their suspicion that certain actions bear “all the earmarks of a classic Russian information operation,” Graham sees a cabal of out-of-state Democrats undermining his hopes for reelection. Vox Graham, who appears literally shocked: “He also shared a statement outlining what were described as â€�shocking numbers from Jaime Harrison’s record-setting fundraising haul,’ describing the money as coming from â€�liberal out-of-state donors angered by Sen. Graham’s support of Justice Amy Coney Barrett.’”

At least Senator Graham is comforted by the fact that he is a true conservative in a truly conservative state. “National Democrats will invest more than $100 million of out-of-state money to buy the race, but the voters of South Carolina know a liberal Democrat when they see one,” Graham’s campaign spokesman earlier this month. Liberals have never been welcome in the Deep South.

Historical Note

Thanks to his skill with the media, Lindsey Graham has become a fixture of US politics. He established himself as a symbol of continuity in the culture of the formerly Confederate South. At the same time, he has successfully avoided appearing simply as a caricature of the traditional Southern politician committed to rural values, historical nostalgia and deeply ingrained racism. Throughout his career, he has understood how to appeal to his peers in both parties while maintaining his own staunchly conservative identity focused primarily on an aggressive militaristic stance.

In 2002, Graham seized the opportunity of running for the Senate seat that became available at the retirement of the iconic racist and former Dixiecrat presidential candidate, later turned Republican, Strom Thurmond. Senator Thurmond had held onto his Senate seat for 48 years. Graham knew that with the right PR and the unrelenting support of Fox News, he would most likely be poised to demonstrate a similar longevity.

His African-American opponent, Jaime Harrison, is now unexpectedly threatening Graham’s political longevity. Who could have imagined a black man occupying Thurmond’s seat in the Senate? Harrison understood that Graham’s Senate seat was very secure, if not beyond reach. Harrison has expressed his own surprise: “I got into this race because I knew I had a shot, but not in my wildest dreams did I imagine a campaign growing like this campaign has grown.”

In a statement like this, Harrison demonstrates his own mastery of the art of electoral rhetoric. It would have been more honest and accurate to say: Not in my wildest dreams did I imagine the funding of my campaign growing like this funding has grown.

It wasn’t the campaign that grew, but the amount of cash in his coffers. Although he may not want to admit it, Harrison too knows that money talks.

*[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 51łÔąĎ.]

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

The post Lindsey Graham’s Campaign Falls Below the Political Poverty Level appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

Hussain cites two stories that US media have been running with in recent weeks to generate emotional heat while depriving them of the light of intelligible analysis. The first is the strategic partnership agreement between Iran and China. The second is the normalization of diplomatic and trade relations between the United Arab Emirates and Israel.

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Hussain notes that both stories have been interpreted in the US as “escalations in the geopolitical conflict between the US and Iran.” Seeking some needed perspective, he points out that “the first development was a media creation. The New York Times (NYT) ran a front-page story citing a �leaked’ draft of the 25-year strategic partnership agreement under negotiation between China and Iran since 2016.” The Times story summed up its case in its misleading : “Defying U.S., China and Iran Near Trade and Military Partnership.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Media creation:

1) Fabricated melodrama masquerading as news provided by respectable media outlets to prove that they can be just as disrespectful of the truth as social media 

2) The state of hyperreality induced by society’s obsessive addiction to professional media and the entertainment industry, effectively canceling the public’s relationship with reality 

Contextual Note

The methodology of media creation has achieved something close to perfection in the Donald Trump era. It reflects a complex team effort shared by an infinitely creative political superstructure and the complicit media.

Before Trump, this novel dynamic that now regulates the news cycle had never existed in the political world. Trump didn’t invent “alternate facts,” even though a member of his team made the term a permanent item of US political vocabulary. Politicians have always lied and exaggerated, but it was always about specific issues. With Trump, it has now become a way of life. Without hyperreality, the news would be too boring to pay attention to. The public now expects it. For their profitability, the now depend on it.

Building the hyperreal system required two critical components. At its core is a democratically elected clown show whose members are skilled at turning every utterance into a deliberate distortion and often inversion of reality. President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have perfected that role. For a while, they were accompanied by John Bolton, the former national security adviser. But when that began to look too much like the , the production team pared it back to make it look more like.

One member of the show’s technical crew, Senior Adviser Jared Kushner, has the Trump administration’s show to Alice in Wonderland. Once the hyperreal wonderland sets were in place, the media could play their role of amplifying every absurdity in the actors’ actions and discourse and presenting it as the essential news of the day. The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC and many others then had an open field for manufacturing scoops designed to reveal how artificial and distorted the starring team had become.

In the example Hussain examines, the lead player was Pompeo, a man whose commitment to hyperreality includes a personal belief in a marvelous work of American evangelical fiction that claims to be inspired by the Bible: “.” Hussain recounts that when interviewed by Fox News in early August, “Pompeo claimed that the prospective China-Iran deal would put Communist cash in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s hands.” Hussain then mentions Pompeo’s warnings: “China’s entry into Iran will destabilize the Middle East. It’ll put Israel at risk. It’ll put the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates at risk as well.”

No patriotic American is allowed to doubt that Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are the good guys on the world stage. It doesn’t matter that any of these good guys may from time to time slaughter civilian populations (in Gaza or Yemen), seize land that is not theirs in violation of UN resolutions, ambush, assassinate and dismember the occasional dissident journalist or blockade an allied nation (Qatar) that doesn’t toe their line. Washington long ago elected those three nations to the good guys club. If any of the three detects or even invents a threat from elsewhere, the US will be by their side.

In the interview with Fox News, Pompeo amplified his : “Iran remains the world’s largest state sponsor of terror, and to have access to weapons systems and commerce and money flowing from the Chinese Communist Party only compounds that risk for that region.” It doesn’t matter how much truth or falsehood there may be in Pompeo’s claim. What matters is that the evil force he has identified combines the two permanent objects of US paranoia in a single historical event: terrorism and communism.

Breaking free from the envelope of hyperreality his reporting has focused on, Hussain offers this extraordinary moment of sincerity so rare in today’s media: “At the risk of spotlighting my own inadequacies as a journalist, I [cannot] help wondering why editors and writers seem so willing to fan the flames of war.” 

To answer his own question, he might have simply reviewed the past 75 years of US history to realize that the Cold War has always been a Hollywood production, courtesy of the military-industrial complex and its pervasive economic logic. But unlike Hollywood action films, US foreign policy as modeled by the media has real world consequences. Hussain makes this clear: “The long-suffering peoples of the Middle East could do without journalists once again playing cheerleader for American politicians who perpetuate their domestic power by igniting conflict in others’ backyards.”

Russiagate is one obvious manifestation of the hyperreal campaign. It’s the one chosen by the Democrats. Pompeo and the Republicans prefer demonizing China. The New Yorker has just an article debunking in glorious detail the entire Russiagate ideology so assiduously pursued by the most respectable media in the US, starting with The New York Times. But the principle goes beyond Russia and President Vladimir Putin. “Foreign interference is now a trope in American politics, at risk of becoming as cheap and meaningless as the term �fake news’ became once it was co-opted by Trump,” The New Yorker reports.

Historical Note

Future historians centuries from today will wonder why the US empire of the late 20th and early 21st centuries required the non-stop fabrication of an imaginary all-powerful enemy to maintain its identity as an empire. The Roman Empire did quite well for centuries without requiring a cold war ideology. Neither did the British Empire, Genghis Khan or the ancient Persian Empire. Once they had the military might to move and conquer, they focused on the supposed pragmatic rationality of their ability to control and exploit resources to occupy an ever-expanding geographical zone of influence.

Analyzing the US empire from the perspective of Pakistan, Tom Hussain reminds those Americans who happen to read his column of this simple truth: “There is no grand alliance or â€�evil axis’ – just tentative diplomacy and proxy warfare amid shifts in the balance of power in the Middle East, necessitated in part by the withdrawal of US combat forces from the region, as well as the seepage of power to Beijing from Washington.”

Only a small minority of Americans today are willing to accept the idea of “shifts in the balance of power,” knowing that the “greatest nation in the history of the world” has monopolistically exercised power over the globe for decades. Nor are they about to countenance the idea of “seepage of power” because that would call into question America’s divine mission to spread its enlightened but fundamentally elitist democratic-capitalist ideology across the globe.

In the age of Trump, it appears useless to point out that enlightened leaders — and even benevolent despots — have throughout history consistently recognized and dealt with the historical reality of shifts in the balance of power. Power is never absolute and never stable, but when it does approach becoming absolute — as happens, at least in people’s minds, when hyperreality takes over — Lord Acton’s dating from 1887 ends up prevailing: it “corrupts absolutely.”

*[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 51łÔąĎ.]

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

The post The Mad Complicity of Trump, Pompeo and the Media appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

Police Brutality: It’s About More Than Defunding

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Business Insider Taylor’s explanation of her move: “Moments of upheaval can change you, shift the trajectory of your life, and mold your character. The President’s comments and actions surrounding racial injustice and Black Americans cut sharply against my core values and convictions.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Trajectory:

The path followed by a flying object that has no control over its movement or by human beings who in their professional careers live with the illusion of controlling their movement

Contextual Note

As a native of Washington from an early age, Taylor was observant enough to detect the opportunities an ambitious black youngster may have for a career in politics. The Republican side offered an especially attractive opportunity because of their need for minority faces to attenuate the otherwise justified perception of being the party of white privilege. After an internship at Koch Industries during her studies at Bryn Mawr College, Taylor was ideologically equipped for a future in the Republican Party.

In 2017, during the hearings to confirm Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court, the news website Heavy.com that “Taylor has become a social media star, grabbing the spotlight from the judge.” Unsure of her role in the campaign, since “she was not a lead staffer,” Daniel S. Levine, who wrote the article, speculated that she might be there mainly for visual effect. “She’s been more visible than Gorsuch’s wife Louise Gorsuch and it’s not clear why she has been given such a prominent seat.”

NEWSONE, a news website based in the DC area that targets the African American community, at its own conclusions about Taylor’s stardom when it asked the question: “Who’s the Gorgeous Black Woman Sitting Behind Neil Gorsuch?” It answered its own question with this suggestive remark: “Why she’s been given such a prominent role when Heavy.com reports she’s not a lead staffer on Gorsuch’s nomination team … well, we’ll leave that to you.” 

Could she be the Republicans’? Both Taylor and Jemima appear to be stepping away from their assigned roles at the same moment of history, though in Jemima’s case it doesn’t appear to be voluntary.

Historical Note

Mary Elizabeth Taylor’s resignation may be a significant sign that we have entered into a stage of history that will be remembered more as a moment of rupture than transition. Earlier this month, before her resignation, Taylor expressed her emotion in a message to her team. “Every time we witness these heinous, murderous events, we are reminded that our country’s wounds run deep and remain untreated,” she wrote.

From this, it would appear that Taylor’s personal trajectory has been eclipsed by something of greater significance: the trajectory of the nation’s history. Susan Rice, one of the leading prospects to run alongside the presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the November election, that Taylor should have reacted much sooner, considering it shameful on her part to accompany Donald Trump, a manifest racist, for three and a half years.

But Rice accompanied Barack Obama for eight years. Obama cannot, of course, be called a racist, but, among other policies that are consistent with an established system of white supremacy, he did more than any president to the police and cannot have ignored that such a policy would specifically target black communities.

The aggressive policing of the black population in America began in the era of slavery. Slave patrols — the famous militias facilitated by the Second Amendment — eventually evolved into modern police forces. Though the black population achieved legal equality following the Civil War, with varying degrees of subtlety, laws and law enforcement procedures were specifically designed right up to the present to marginalize, hobble and control the majority of urban blacks.

Following the civil rights movement in the 1960s, legislators managed to change some of the laws but few of the practices. President Lyndon Johnson’s great reforms had the principal effect of opening up a small avenue for “deserving” African Americans toward membership in an elite club, potentially with all of the same privileges as the most powerful white oligarchs.

In the 1990s, the New Democrats led by Bill Clinton — the “first black president” as Toni Morrison awkwardly him — helped to invent what could be called the “New Multiracial Elite” that enabled Obama to become president (overtaking Clinton’s own wife). This newly designed club of media stars elevated Oprah Winfrey, Will Smith, Whoopi Goldberg, Muhammad Ali, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan and an impressive cast of “successful African Americans” in the media, entertainment, sports and politics to the parliament of wealthy sages who are not just admired but adulated. Unlike Joe Louis, Willie Mays, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington or Sugar Ray Robinson, appreciated for their skill, the new black elite had the right to speak out in the media on public issues. 

The difference between the two eras is telling, but it has had little impact for ordinary black Americans. In New York in 1938, wasn’t allowed to use the Lincoln Hotel’s main entrance and had to walk through the kitchen and access the service elevator to get to the stage on which she was the featured singer. During a cigarette break in August 1959, Miles Davis was by four police officers who accused him of loitering outside the door of the jazz club in New York’s Greenwich Village where his band was featured. There is no door that will not automatically open today if Beyoncé so much as approaches it.

Taylor’s trajectory through the Republican Party — where she did the bidding of Mitch McConnell, Neil Gorsuch, Mike Pompeo and Trump himself — gave her a ticket to the New Multiracial Elite. It should be noted that not only blacks but also the vast majority of white people are excluded from the club. In that sense, there is a principle of equality at work. Just as commercial success can earn members of the British working class a knighthood or even a peerage, the descendants of slaves can now buy their way into the American elite or, after meritorious service, simply be co-opted by it.

For that very reason, Rice’s judgment is eminently unfair. Rice is a confirmed member of the elite. Taylor’s choice to renounce the current key to her membership in the club required courage and sacrifice. To the extent that it shows a successful black woman can be swayed by the terrible lessons of her people’s history more than by the promise of a career path laid out for her by the elite, she deserves our admiration.

Cynics may say that at the very moment of Trump’s plunge in the polls and the increasing likelihood that he will lose his bid for re-election, any black person associated with him would be wise to shift their own trajectory, if only to be in a position to readjust their trajectory after his fall. 

In today’s competitive consumer society, all decisions are about branding. The relatives of the actresses chosen in the past as the image of Aunt Jemima have the concern that if Quaker Oats abandons the brand, “their family history will be erased.” They are indignant that their family trajectory is being threatened by white marketing strategists. Is that a cause worth protesting about? The family of one Aunt Jemima stand-in “filed a $3 billion lawsuit against Quaker Oats in 2014.” 

In the coming months, the American public will learn more about the ultimate fate or the radical makeover of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben. A few may be paying attention to the more interesting case of Mary Elizabeth Taylor.

*[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. Click here to read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary.]

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

The post The Stirring Case of Mary Elizabeth Taylor appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign seized on the opportunity related to the fact that the pandemic originated in the Chinese town of Wuhan. Just as the Democrats turned their Russian obsession into the legal proceedings of the Mueller investigation and then impeachment, the Republicans have moved on from merely complaining to looking at making a legal case for their indignation.

Wuhan: The Same Evidence Can Be Enormous or Nonexistent

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As the has already highlighted, the thought processes of power-wielding American politicians inevitably turn to the ultimate solution to any problem: take it to court. As Republican Representative Dan Crenshaw said, “We’re going to find somebody to sue.” He himself explained that the “somebody to sue” was none other than the People’s Republic of China.

Now, the superhawk, arch-conservative, hyper-nationalist John Bolton has stepped into the debate to take a surprising position in adamant opposition to his Republican colleagues. While he agreed that this approach is “very politically appealing,” he thinks that “it’s a very bad idea.” Bolton, the former national security adviser to President Trump, deems it dangerous to play games with the idea sacred to all hyper-nationalists: sovereign immunity.

Reporting on Bolton’s objections, Jenna McLaughlin, the security and investigations reporter at , sees some merit in the idea promoted by the Israeli civil rights organization Shurat HaDin. “While officials have typically opposed lawsuits against foreign governments, a number of lawyers and organizations, including Shurat HaDin, have found creative and sometimes controversial ways to challenge sovereign immunity, such as by launching multiple lawsuits aimed at banks and businesses associated with governments they hold responsible for harming their clients,” McLaughlin writes.

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Creative:

Free to imagine clever ways of skirting around not only the law but especially the spirit of the law for the sake of either getting some undeserved financial compensation or scoring points in the game of power

Contextual Note

In a 2016 on Slate, journalist John Kelly explored the rising fortunes of a new verb in the English language that had come to dominate political and journalistic discourse. The verb was to weaponize. “The history of this word weaponize reveals the shifting anxieties of the past half-century,” Kelly wrote. In some sense, the law has always been used as a weapon, not so much for justice as for “settling differences,” a traditional euphemism for vengeance. More recently, the idea of weaponizing the law has even taken the form of “,” another useful neologism. In some sense, the key to modern “creativity” is finding a way to weaponize any traditional tool. The courtroom is a great place to begin.

For once, Bolton is right — and on two counts. The purely electoral strategy is indeed “politically appealing” for Trump and Republicans because it mobilizes those two great forces of political motivation that have the power to turn an election: fear and xenophobia. And because of its appeal and Trump’s past success with xenophobia, there is little doubt that Trump will continue to exploit this strategy right up to the November election.

Bolton is also correct when he explains that it’s a bad idea. He explains that “it would put the judicial system of the United States right in the middle of international controversy” and “would just lead to lengthy, drawn-out proceedings that are not likely in a timely manner to bring justice to victims.” It would, however, keep a large number of high-profile international lawyers busy, which may explain Shurat HaDin’s motivation.

Bolton provided a number of other reasons to prove the futility of the endeavor, its waste of valuable time and resources in the midst of a pandemic and the possibly permanently damaging effect on international relations. He pragmatically sums up his case with this reflection: “This is a state-to-state matter.”

Historical Note

Kishore Mahbubani, the former Singaporean diplomat and celebrated author, in on this controversy, adding another important consideration by citing recent history. He pointed to the fact that the 2008 financial crash that began in New York. “The crisis began with investment bank Lehman Brothers’ collapse in New York, and caused tremendous damage to economies around the world, but nobody suggested that other countries should get compensation from the United States.”

Mahbubani suggests a more constructive approach: “What we should learn from this is that, instead of being punitive to the countries that suffered it first, we should immediately help the countries that get affected first. Because if we don’t help them, we will get affected.”

Asian journalist Leslie Fong looks deeper into history to make the that people “in the West who blame China for the Covid-19 pandemic and demand reparations for the damage to their economies have probably done Beijing a favor.” Like many Chinese, Fong hasn’t forgotten the history of Western, and particularly the shameless, destructive manipulation of the Chinese people and their economy in the 19th century with the Opium Wars by the British and French, all in the name of commerce. Britain’s National Army Museum the first Opium War in these terms: “Between 1839 and 1842, British forces fought a war on behalf of drug traffickers … with the full blessing of the British government.” At the end of the war, Britain assumed control of Hong Kong and the Chinese were forced to pay reparations for the cost of a war the British waged on their territory.

Fong points out what Westerners never learn in their history classes at school: “They have unwittingly — or perhaps unthinkingly — reopened a scar that is deep in the Chinese psyche and given the party more of the ammunition it needs to rally the people against what it has portrayed as hostile moves to put China down.” He goes on to say that “asking for reparations is certain to bring back painful memories of when the country was forced at gunpoint to pay 450 million taels of silver to eight imperialist powers in 1900 as an indemnity after losing a short war.”

Historians have given the title “The period of �unequal treaties’ with China” to an entire portion of modern Chinese history. Encyclopaedia Britannica devotes a to the topic of “Unequal treaty” in Western relations with China. France’s Digital Encyclopedia of European History (EHNE) the period up as one of “aggressive commercial diplomacy” in which “�Gunboat diplomacy’ opened European trade and imposed its sometimes unilateral clauses on China, which subsequently lost its sovereignty over numerous portions of its territory in favour of France and Great Britain, as well as Germany, Russia, the United States, and Japan.”

Shurat HaDin’s “creative and sometimes controversial ways to challenge sovereign immunity” belong to the tradition of bullying, gunboat diplomacy, reparations and “unequal treaties” that dominated the West’s relationship with China in the 19th century and effectively led to the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911. The British, after all, thought they were being very creative when, in the name of commerce, they promoted massive addiction among the Chinese population to opium grown in British India to pay for the tea and other products they had become dependent on.

Americans may not yet have realized it — and as Fong points out they may continue to draft policies “unwittingly” and “unthinkingly” — but China today has achieved a status today that in no way resembles the decrepitude of the 19th-century Qing dynasty.

*[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,, 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.]

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

The post The Limits of Western “Creativity” Facing China appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

Can the Democratic Establishment Afford to Shun Sanders Again?

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On April 8, Sanders cited this simple for ending his campaign: “The path toward victory is virtually impossible.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Virtually impossible:

Possible

Contextual Note

Some stylists and linguistic commentators have pointed out that the word “virtually” can be used as a facile and misleading rhetorical device. The linguist William Lutz, author of the book “Doublespeak,” calls it a “weasel word,” which is his term for words that convey a meaning beyond and sometimes in contradiction with the meaning people usually attribute to it. Words become weaselly when they lead to conclusions or ideas that deviate from the perceived logic of the situation.

Here is what Lutz has to say about the word: “One of the most powerful weasel words is �virtually,’ a word so innocent that most people don’t pay any attention to it when it is used in an advertising claim.” Lutz tells us, “�Virtually’ means not in fact.” The same is true when the word is used by a newscaster, an entertainer or a politician, even a politician with as strong a reputation for sincerity as Sanders.

So, was Sanders being disingenuous when he evoked a “path toward victory” that is virtually impossible? Before dealing with how he treats the idea of “virtually,” we should notice that “path” is a metaphor. Most people take his statement to mean that victory is impossible. Given what we know about political procedures, even in this strangest of all election years, a Sanders victory is very literally impossible. But the path to victory is only “virtually” impossible, meaning it is real. The path he has created exists even if the victory of being the nominee is now excluded.

Sanders provides some clarity about the path he has embarked on. “While Vice President Biden will be the nominee, we must continue working to assemble as many delegates as possible at the Democratic Convention, where we will be able to exert significant influence over the party platform, and other functions.” US President Donald Trump was the first to notice Sanders’ clever ambiguity. It even seemed to worry him as he called it “weird.” Here is how Trump Sanders’ decision: “He didn’t really drop out … What about his delegates? I mean he said he’s going to keep his delegates, which is sort of interesting … and he would like to get more. Now, is he dropping out or not? That’s not dropping out. … That’s a weird deal going on there.”

“Weird” obviously means out of the normal, unexpected. But for Trump, it also implies “suspect” or “devious.” Given Trump’s plan to focus on thrashing Biden in November, he appears to believe it’s also problematic since the Sanders variable makes it more difficult for the president to assess the nature of his adversary in preparation for his battle plan. At the same time, Trump cleverly highlights for the public’s appreciation the conflict and confusion within the Democratic Party. As he has always been accustomed to do, he seizes on this as an opportunity to exacerbate the party’s internal divisions.

As the author of “The Art of the Deal,” he then goes on to say: “I think he’s doing it to negotiate. That’s a hard thing to do.” President Trump is right. And this is especially true of a Democratic Party that has consistently demonstrated in recent decades its inability to reconcile or even accommodate its own contradictions. 

Historical Note

The history of the Democratic Party since President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1932-45) tells the story of a party with a permanently unstable identity. For his four electoral victories, Roosevelt relied on a majority that depended on the combined support of two unlikely demographic groups: progressive-urban and working-class voters in the North and the racist, reactionary political forces that had dominated the South since the end of the Civil War in 1865. White Southerners could never forgive the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln for emancipating the slaves.

In contrast with the Democrats’ unnatural coalition, the Republicans based their appeal on their commitment to two more easily reconcilable themes. The first was the promotion of business and the economic prosperity of the nation. It enthroned entrepreneurs, industrialists and self-made men as heroes. The second was a vague cultural idea of independence and freedom from unneeded restrictions.

In terms of ideology, the rivalry of Democrats and Republicans thrived on a simple contrast between those who accepted and encouraged a positive role for government (Democrats) and those who entertained the ideal of a civilization with minimal government or indeed no government at all other than that provided by local initiatives. Many Republicans sought to frame this as a competition between capitalism (freedom) and socialism (despotism), creating the myth that capitalism was incompatible with despotism and socialism was incompatible with civil liberties. 

Republicans could thus accuse Roosevelt of being a socialist because of the centralized reforms he put in place to reduce the misery caused by the Depression. Republicans interpreted this as a violation of the play of free markets, a sin against capitalism and a first step toward communist despotism. In reality, everything Roosevelt did was designed to save the capitalist economy from total implosion or revolution. Nevertheless, the Republicans managed for decades to keep those misleading labels alive and continued to shame Democrats for their disloyalty to capitalism.

The Rooseveltian coalition inevitably broke down when the success of the civil rights movement in the 1960s led to the end of segregation in the South. Previous Democratic regimes, including Roosevelt’s, had protected the blatant apartheid practices of the former Confederate states as a condition for retaining the support of Southern Democrats. But the civil rights movement provided the straw that broke the Democratic donkey’s back. The South could no longer embrace its traditional Democratic identity and, as a voting bloc, migrated toward the Republicans, who were more amenable to racism. 

From that point on, the Democrats began to focus on all minorities, not just black Americans, to rebuild a solid enough coalition to win elections. That effort, combined with the continued shaming of Democrats for being “big government” socialists, led to the focus on identity politics. At the same time that Democratic politicians realized the value of courting the sophisticated practitioners of financialized capitalism of Wall Street, identity politics allowed them to polish their profile as defenders of the oppressed. Their association with finance, furthered by their activism in promoting globalization, had the twofold merit of encouraging big business as a creator of national wealth and jobs while providing a generous source of financing of Democratic electoral campaigns. Democrats could no longer be accused of being socialists.

This inevitably created a new contradiction, which Bernie Sanders, in the 2016 presidential primary campaign, was the first to exploit and turn into a movement. The Vermont senator helped wide swaths of Democratic voters perceive that the principal source of oppression wasn’t the cultural marginalization of minorities (even though racism, prejudice and injustice continue to exist and required corrective measures), but the economic system itself that was now dominated by finance and monopolistic corporations that effectively produced wealth but also growing inequality.

This posed a new problem. As the new leader of the Democrats in the 1990s, President Bill Clinton had firmly aligned the party’s identity around the performance of an economic system that abandoned Lyndon Johnson’s preferred themes of justice and equality (civil rights, “war on poverty”) in the 1960s and now focused uniquely on profit and growth. By 2017, Nancy Pelosi, today’s Democratic House majority leader, could that “we’re capitalists and that’s just the way it is.”

In his 2016 campaign, Sanders had already claimed to be a democratic socialist. Even after his defeat to Hillary Clinton for the party nomination, it became clear that he had launched a grassroots movement that was challenging the Democratic Party from within and ultimately forcing an identity crisis that is even more visible in 2020.

Since that critical moment of history, at the end of which Clinton was defeated by Donald Trump in November 2016, the Democratic Party has had to live with that contradiction. A clear majority of the younger generation has elected to focus on reforming the economy to the point of tolerating the idea of socialism. This also reflects a growing impatience with the financial capitalism that has become such a visible presence in Democratic politics. But the party establishment has demonstrated its commitment to making the “path to victory” a literally impossible goal to achieve — and not just for Sanders, but for the younger generation too.

Trump is right to see this conflict as a serious weakness of the opposing party. The party itself has once again shown itself to be helpless as well as clueless to find a way of reconciling the two visions. If their goal is to win elections, the Democrats should be dedicating themselves to creating harmony between the two sides. But there may be a good reason for their failure to do so: The two visions are strictly incompatible, just as keeping the South and supporting civil rights were incompatible commitments. Reaching a compromise today would require humbling the financial sources the party has come to depend on. But moneyed interests refuse to be humbled. They are happy with the Republicans and would instantly withdraw their support from Democrats who betrayed their interests. So, the party does what it always does: it humbles those who challenge it.

But Bernie is absolutely right, in ways that perhaps his followers don’t even understand. The path to victory for the insurgent forces in the part is for the moment impossible, but only “virtually” impossible. This is especially true at a time when the flaws and contradictions of a system skewed toward moneyed interests and indifferent to human needs have never been more visible and more damaging to ordinary people’s lives. And though the path toward a possible victory may only be trodden at the cost of political conflict and possibly even popular rebellion, Sanders knows that he has cleared much of the brush from that path.

Can Joe Biden win in November? It’s possible, given Trump’s easily exposed weaknesses. But it’s also possible that the chaos that will inevitably unfold in the coming months will produce a number of other credible scenarios, one of which includes the canceling of the presidential election itself. 

If Biden loses in November, the Democrats will once again blame Sanders and the “deplorable” Bernie Bros. They’ve already begun blaming Sanders for not losing himself in ecstatic praise of Biden as he quit the race. But whatever happens in the November election, they probably won’t be able to grow back the brush that formerly covered the path Sanders has cleared.

*[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,, 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.]

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

The post Bernie Leaves a Path Behind Him appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

The rot in the Trump White House and the rancid political self-interest putrefying the Republican Party have been on display as never before. This is what a nation looks like when it has lost its way. Watching Republicans pretend they never said what they are as having said may be a new low point in America’s checkered political history. That so few Republican voters seem to care about the lies and the underlying hypocrisy continues to provide the fertile ground for mendacity and corruption to thrive.

Can Sanders or Warren Clinch the Democratic Nomination?

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This is not to say that no Democrat in recent memory has ever said anything untrue or regrettable. But they at least seem to own it and try to explain it away. Republicans, however, are inhabiting a political universe in which readily provable events become props for an alternative narrative that derives its “veracity” from repetition.

Trump will not be removed from office and may well get reelected in November because way too many Americans willfully avoid uncomfortable truths and seek refuge in that political universe by “alternative facts.” It is hard to watch but critical to comprehend — Trump can get reelected. His acolytes will emerge on Election Day spurred to the polls by their alternative narrative. Armed with a morally-challenged sense of entitlement, fueled by racism and individual greed, and bathed in religious zeal, they will vote.

To defeat this rolling thunder, the Democrats will have to overwhelm the acolyte army with numbers. Democrats must convert their dream of a diverse and compassionate electorate into a wave of voters on Election Day. Those who say they are willing to fight for good governance have to stop talking about it and show up at the polls this time. It is way too late to wait for next time.

That wave must include everyone worried about the health of the planet, everyone who seeks racial justice, those who rail against willful ignorance, those from elsewhere and those who believe that access to meaningful health care and quality education must be available to all, without exception.

Get Voting

I will vote this time as I have tried to do every time since I got the right to vote. I have lost more than I have won, but I have voted every time I could to choose America’s leaders. I am a 74-year-old white male, now retired, with access to meaningful health care, the lifelong beneficiary of access to a quality education and resources to spare. I will vote for progressives when they are on the ballot and Democrats whenever they have a Republican opponent. But a lot of people who look like me and are privileged like me don’t vote like me.

This time, as last time, there simply will not be enough well-intentioned progressive white voters to win much of anything outside of a few coastal states. This time, to ensure Trump’s defeat, black voters have to vote in record numbers, with Trump’s racist words and deeds propelling every black woman to carry her community to the polls. Latinos have to get each other to polls using the images of caged Latino children to make sure that every single one in their communities eligible to vote will vote this time to erase the reality behind those images. And millennials have to stop pretending that Netflix matters more than network news and get their collective asses to the polls to vote to save the planet they are inheriting from my generation that has screwed it up so badly.

And, perhaps most important of all, it does not matter who the Democrats nominate. That candidate has to win this time. It is easy for some like me to rally to Bernie Sanders. Many of us think he would make a wonderful president, bringing a lifelong commitment to transformative change to a dying democracy. I am a socialist, and so is he. But what if Joe Biden or Michael Bloomberg wins the nomination instead of Sanders? It matters a great deal, but this time it cannot matter enough to allow us to care so little about so much.

For starters, any Democrat still in the running will try to restore some semblance of good governance and begin to undo the damage already done by the Trump cabal to the institutional foundation of the nation. All of them will offer a vision of a government that functions to do the things that government is supposed to do — ensure national security, protect the environment and provide resources to meet the basic needs of the citizenry. 

The words of any Democrat nominee will at least momentarily renew the spirit. There will not be a Democratic version of “” or “” this time around.

So, if Biden wins the nomination, his basic decency and long devotion to public service will be enough, even though I expect his administration will transform little that needs to be transformed while devoting itself to undoing the damage. With Bloomberg, trust is the issue. Billionaires do not become billionaires without craven self-interest at the heart of their creed, often leaving a lot of broken dreams in their wake. Yet Bloomberg is smart, and he may be able to deliver a competent team that will begin to restore public faith in governance and government. He surely will fight to undo the damage.

No Time to Fail

While this discussion leaves out the rest of the field for now, it seeks to make a point. It matters a great deal this time. I don’t want to wait anymore for universal access to meaningful health care, for racial justice, for an equitable economy, for confiscated guns or for an end to America’s corrosive contribution to the world’s killing fields. But, under even the best circumstances, I am likely to have to settle for steps toward those ends.

What I cannot settle for this time is enabling the present national race to the bottom to continue simply because those with a stake in a better America can’t figure out how to vote. Now is the time to organize, advocate, raise the necessary funds and vote to define a new national character animated by a collective conscience that honors the common good. The American people have failed before, and they cannot fail again this time.

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

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

The post Testing America’s National Character appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

Such coups still take place around the world — in Thailand in 2014, in Egypt in 2013, in Honduras in 2009. These more recent coups all give off the rank odor of desperation, as the old order resorts to extreme measures to stave off the demands of a democratic age.

Or maybe not. A new era has dawned in the world of politics. Like nationalism, authoritarianism did not fade away in the dimming light of the 20th century. And those who shout “coup” in a crowded political theater are now as likely to be the authoritarians themselves. They present themselves as various iterations of St. George fighting the dragon of the “deep state” on behalf of all the good people back in the village. It’s nonsense, of course. But such nonsense can translate into the winning margin in a close election.

Impeachment as a Coup

The prime example of this relatively new phenomenon is Donald Trump. The US president has emphasized one message above all during the impeachment proceedings. As he has : “As I learn more and more each day, I am coming to the conclusion that what is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP, intended to take away the Power of the People.”

An ad by his campaign called the impeachment process “nothing short of a coup and it must be stopped.” The final image is of Trump himself with two thumbs up, as though he has personally stopped the coup with nothing other than a glowing review of his own performance in office. Fox News has dutifully followed this script by repeating Trump’s language throughout its line-up of putative pundits.

While all the sober citizens of NPRLand watch the Democrats play by the rules in the congressional hearings, the rest of the country is primed to view the proceedings as a circus, a witch hunt, a clown show. They are being led to believe that the very procedure designed to ensure the rule of law is, in fact, a profound violation of that law.

This is what makes Trump the consummate populist. According to his own self-serving narrative, the elites have always been out to get him, particularly now that he has clawed his way to the top. He should have won the popular vote in 2016 — if it weren’t for the (imaginary) meddling of Ukraine. He should have implemented his flagship projects (like the border wall) — if it weren’t for the machinations of the (imaginary) “deep state.” His party should have won the 2018 midterm elections — if it weren’t for (imaginary) voter fraud. In the dog-whistle symphony of Republican Party politics, Trump’s supporters substitute their own imaginary villains: Jews, women, African Americans, Muslims, the undocumented.

Trump implicitly argues that all of these “non-people” — check out the telling visuals in the aforementioned campaign ad — are teaming up under the rubric of the Democratic Party to “steal” back the election from the people. The president must fabricate “the people” in this way because of what should be obvious to everyone: the majority of voters didn’t want him to be president, find his policies repugnant and communicated that disgust very clearly in the 2018 elections.

The truly remarkable part of the “impeachment-equals-coup” argument is that it’s coming from the same people who love to carry around pocket Constitutions. Dahlia Lithwick wrote on  back in January 2011: “Members of the Tea Party are really into the Constitution. We know this because … House Republicans propose to read the document from start to finish on the House floor, and they also propose to pass a rule requiring that every piece of new legislation identify the source of its constitutional authority.”

If they had read the Constitution from front to finish, they would know that the document explicitly identifies impeachment as a legal way of removing a president. It’s the law of the land. The Democrats have been scrupulous in observing the letter of this law even when it has been counterproductive to do so.

The way Trump talks about impeachment, it sounds as if Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would suddenly sit in the Oval Office if the president were removed from power. Actually, it would be Vice President Mike Pence. It’s a very strange coup indeed that removes a member of one party and replaces him with someone equally noxious from the very same party.

It would be a different matter if the US military were plotting to unseat Trump and replace him with a four-star general. That would indeed be a coup. But the Pentagon has remained loyal to its commander-in-chief, even as he has intervened in several military court proceedings, ignored the sage advice of military advisers (as in Syria) and disparaged key military allies (like South Korea).

The only threat of a coup is, of course, from Trump himself. He has “joked” about serving indefinitely as president. He has attempted to circumvent all the democratic mechanisms designed to constrain his executive power. He seems to delight in flouting the Constitution. Given an inch of executive power, he won’t be satisfied until he gets the whole nine yards.

Revolution as a Coup

No one would confuse the French Revolution for a coup. It was a popular uprising against the monarchy. No one would label the American Revolution a coup. It was an anti-colonial struggle for independence. The Haitian Revolution, the Russian Revolution of February 1918, the Iranian Revolution: these were all popular transformations of the existing order.

But today, a number of popular revolts have been labeled coups. The Euromaidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2014, for instance, was a protest started by students upset over President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to backtrack on a promise to sign an association agreement with the European Union. When the riot police attacked the students, a million people showed up on the streets in Kyiv and protests broke out around the country. Women, and feminist organizations in particular, played a key , as did other social movements. Nationalist and far right-wing organizations like Svoboda were also present.

But a transpartisan  emerged over the illegitimacy of the Yanukovych government, his  and violations of human rights. This consensus eventually brought enough pressure to bear on the Ukrainian parliament to  to impeach Yanukovych — who had already fled Kyiv — and announce early elections.

Nevertheless, Russian President Vladimir Putin has  that what took place in Ukraine was a coup sponsored by the United States. Incredibly, some US voices on the  and even the  have echoed this argument, despite the clearly popular nature of the uprising. Certainly some key US figures, like the State Department’s Victoria Nuland, supported the protesters. And plenty of US moves — like the attempted expansion of NATO to Russia’s doorstep — raised tensions in the region. But direct US involvement in the Euromaidan, beyond Nuland’s distribution of pastries to the protesters (and the riot police), was minimal.

Most critically, the Ukrainian military did not play a role in ousting the Yanukovych regime. Did the subsequent government in Ukraine make mistakes? Of course. But that doesn’t somehow make the Euromaidan events retroactively a coup.

From Protest to Coup

The protests against President Evo Morales in Bolivia bore a superficial resemblance to the Euromaidan events of 2014. Responding to charges of election fraud in the October 2019 election, Bolivians of various political , including some trade unionists, feminists and members of indigenous communities, began to protest. The dissatisfaction with Morales had begun with his earlier refusal to accept the results of a referendum that failed to abolish term limits. Morales argued before the constitutional court that term limits violated his human rights, eventually gaining the “right” to run for his fourth term.

But that’s where the similarities end. Morales was a genuinely popular leader, which Yanukovych was not. Morales had brought about many important social reforms, reducing the poverty from 60% in 2006 to 36% in 2017. “His first act as president was to form a constituent assembly charged with writing a new constitution that radically extended political and social rights — such as equal access to water, work, health, education and housing — to historically marginalized groups, while offering indigenous autonomy and land rights,”  Natasha Bennett in The Washington Post.

Morales was very to win this year’s presidential election. The only question was the margin and whether he would win in the first round. In the face of protests over the election results, he even promised to hold another election.

That’s when the military “suggested” that Morales resign. The military’s intervention was perhaps not as heavy-handed as in the “post-modern coup” in Turkey in 1997, which led to the resignation of then-President Necmettin Erbakan, but it produced a similar result when Morales stepped down.

And that’s when the true takeover occurred, as the second vice president of the Bolivian senate, Jeanine Anez Chavez, assumed power. Her crackdown on protests has led to at least 30 . She has exempted the military from prosecution for its use of force, has aligned herself with the Christian far right, and consolidated her political control despite the strength of Morales’ party Mas. The Trump administration, not surprisingly, has embraced Anez.

An agreement with Mas mandates elections . If Anez respects the agreement, if the elections are free and fair, if the military returns to its barracks, then the Bolivian coup might turn out to be limited in scope. But those are a lot of ifs. And it remains a significant step backward for all the marginalized groups that benefited during the Morales era.

The Parliamentary Coup?

When President Dilma Rousseff was impeached in Brazil in 2016, she  the process a “parliamentary coup.” Rather than a perpetrator of corruption, she has argued that she was the victim of it: a corrupt elite had her removed to protect itself from investigations.

Rousseff’s charge seems to resemble Trump’s. Impeachment is as much a part of the Brazilian Constitution as the US Constitution. She wasn’t impeached over major misconduct, but rather the narrow charge of concealing a budget deficit. On the other hand, a majority of Brazilians  impeachment hearings and Rousseff’s approval rating was in the low teens.

The impeachment may well have been unfair, but it’s hard to call it a coup. Rather, it reflects the deeply-divided nature of Brazilian politics and the pervasiveness of corruption, such that all sides can weaponize accusations of influence-peddling. In addition to the persistence of caudillo-like leaders in Latin America — like Brazil’s current leader, Jair Bolsonaro, or Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro — the region still struggles with unmanageable violence, a culture of impunity, deep economic inequality and fragile political institutions.

But Latin America is not unique in this regard. The debate over whether impeachment is a “coup” — in Brazil, Ukraine or the US — speaks to the giant step backward that democracy has taken over the last decade. For better or worse, there is no longer a consensus around “normal” democratic practice. The polarization of the electorate now allows for two entirely different concepts of democracy to coexist — one determined by the rule of law and the other determined by the powerful.

Yes, yes, I know: The rule of law reflects the interests of the powerful. That principle was certainly on display in Brazil. But the rule of law also protects the weak against the predations of the strong. And in this brave new world that Donald Trump presides over, this latter understanding of the rule of law is under siege. It can be seen in how the Trumps of the world are attacking the courts, attempting to roll back the gains of social movements in the area of human rights and undermining a range of watchdog institutions.

If Trump wins in the Senate and then at the polls in 2020, he won’t just beat the impeachment rap. Like Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey and, so far, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, he will have successfully destroyed the mechanisms that stand in the way of his absolutism.

*[This article was originally published by .]

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

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On Twitter, Romney to react: “When the only American citizen President Trump singles out for China’s investigation is his political opponent in the midst of the Democratic nomination process, it strains credulity to suggest that it is anything other than politically motivated. By all appearances, the president’s brazen and unprecedented appeal to China and to Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden is wrong and appalling.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Politically motivated:

Decided by a politician on the exclusive basis of seeking an electoral advantage, a criterion that applies to every act and every decision, without exception, of most politicians in a democracy

Contextual Note

Romney appeals to an abstract moral ideal. He speaks as if everyone agrees that there is something suspect about acts that may be “politically motivated.” If taken literally, this would make practically everything politicians do in America’s current system of oligarchic democracy suspect. But Romney expresses his indignation on what he deems to be Trump’s of defending his obviously politically motivated actions as a combat against corruption. When asked about his insistence on investigating the Bidens, Trump replied: “I don’t care about Biden’s campaign, but I do care about corruption.”

If the reason for impeaching Trump were the lies he tells, he should have been impeached more than 12,000 times, according to the of The Washington Post. But so should George W. Bush have been impeached for far more consequential lies than Trump’s concerning the motives for invading Iraq in 2003. Had he not resigned in 1974, Richard Nixon would have been impeached for lying. Bill Clinton escaped destitution even though he admitted lying. And wasn’t Barack Obama lying when he promised hope, change and transparency but then waged a war on whistleblowers while continuing the Bush wars he had claimed to oppose? Americans now expect presidents to lie. That is why the new criterion for impeachment is hypocrisy.

Vox that “Trump went as far as to insist �this is about corruption’ or a close variant of that statement six times in less than 40 seconds.” If anything, this shows how seriously Trump has taken on board the “wisdom” of a certain Adolf Hitler, who wrote in “” that for “the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.” This has proved especially useful now that presidential lying has become something to be expected, if not a positive virtue.

The ultimate irony here lies in the fact that, for all his lies about his own intentions, Trump is closer to representing the truth about how politics works than Romney, who relies on the falsehood of supposing that acts motivated by electoral concerns rather than democratic ideals are exceptional, whereas in reality they are the norm. Trump’s contribution to our understanding of US politics has been significant: He has consistently displayed through his acts what all trained politicians have been skilled at hiding. It isn’t that he does things other politicians don’t dare do. It’s just that he does them without taking the precaution of keeping them out of public view. 

In order to survive in politics, politicians will do literally anything to ensure their election. That includes compromising themselves with lobbyists, seeking dirt on their opponents or creating it whenever it seems credible to do so, as well as endorsing policies that are in direct contradiction with their stated ideals. The reason for doing so may be of two types: they may need to fulfill promises made to significant donors or, sensitive to polls in the runup to elections, they may feel the need to bend with the winds of popular opinion as transmitted by the media. The essential problem they struggle with has little to do with making decisions in good conscience and everything to do with managing their image once they have succumbed to outside influences.

But there is a further irony Trump exemplifies. He doesn’t just get away with bending the truth. He thrives on it. His base sees it as virtuous in the Machiavellian sense of action required to consolidate power. By acting despotically and lying about it, Trump appears like a daring leader who gets the job done.

Many Americans who don’t consider themselves Trump loyalists nevertheless respect what they see, interpreting is as his courageous effort to challenge an establishment they no longer trust. Their culture tells them that, like P.T. Barnum, Trump may be a huckster, but he’s also a talented huckster and, however phony the show, they still love to buy tickets for the circus. That’s also because they’re convinced that the Romneys and Adam Schiffs who criticize Trump are also hucksters, but with less entertainment value.

Historical Note

US culture has succeeded in elevating what might be called the “idea” of capitalism and the amoral pursuit of influence into something intended to resemble a moral system. But capitalism is not an idea and even less a philosophy. Instead, it is a practice and a set of always shifting rules and laws built around the use of money.

Nevertheless, in the US, people “believe” in capitalism, in a religious sense. This means that for the average person, self-serving behavior, which in other cultures tends to be condemned as antisocial, often appears as a virtue. The self-proclaimed philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand, who has many fans in government and business, turned assertive self-interest into the . 

American culture nevertheless attempts to distinguish between positive or innocent forms of self-serving behavior and criminal ones. And while most other cultures elaborate complex, tacitly understood rules to define and regulate human relationships of all kinds, US culture counts on the formality of the law to be the exclusive arbiter of behavior. In other words, if you can get away with any self-serving practice, however antisocial, it doesn’t matter how other people perceive it so long as the law doesn’t specifically condemn it.

This moral orientation has spawned an economy and a social environment in which ambition — even excessive ambition — will typically be rewarded by both financial success and celebrity. And because people count on the law to make the ultimate decisions when self-serving individuals or corporations enter into conflict, it is a system in which lawyers play an exaggerated role in the regulation of human interactions. The combined force of the celebrity associated with financial success and rule by law (not the “rule of law,” a pregnant myth designed to maintain the stability of the status quo) means that those who have the financial means to control not just the formulation of the law, but also its application, will have the power to mold social institutions in a way that serves their interests.

In his dialogue “The Republic,” to set things up so that Socrates could propose and define a moral reading of the meaning of justice in a political entity, Plato to the Sophist Thrasymachus the definition of justice as actions that are conducted “to the advantage of the stronger.” This allows Socrates to demonstrate that justice is not about self-interest or the rules imposed by the stronger members of the polis, or even the law that focuses on behaviors that are required or forbidden, but that it is about the “good,” a virtue or moral quality that has its parallel in the idea of the human soul and its striving for happiness (eudaemonia) through virtue.

Mitt Romney acts as if Socrates had created the norm for political behavior in the US, a norm accepted by both politicians and the people in America’s democracy. But Trump demonstrates that the workings of the current system, of which Romney is a part, correspond more to Thrasymachus’s definition.

*[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,, 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.]

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

The post Romney Breaks Ranks, Drawing Insults from Trump appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

The only serious policy rift visible on stage among the 10 Democratic presidential hopefuls who participated in last week’s televised debate concerned the choice of a hybrid system of health care. This is one that maintains private health insurance as opposed to a single-payer system, often referred to as “Medicare for all” (and which Republicans call “socialized medicine” and the rest of the developed world calls “life as usual”).

Politico highlights the part of which believes it must show it has the guts to do things differently, while the other part wants to reassure the voters that it will only do what can be considered “reasonable,” tame and unprovocative, in contrast with Trump, the provocateur-in-chief. Impeaching Trump would be seen as “divisive” and provocative. But most of all we learn: “Vulnerable House Democrats fear the party’s drive toward impeachment will undercut them in 2020.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Undercut:

Remove the basis on which something is built, a prospect that inspires fear even when there is no solid basis in the first place

Contextual Note

The Democratic Party’s progressives — comprising both young (the Squad) and old (Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren) — have earned the media’s spotlight by militating for systemic change and calling attention to a host of ambient evils. In contrast, the centrist legislators referred to in the article studiously avoid identifying with and defending any significant hot-button policy positions. This reduces their fear of failing to deliver on their timid agenda of business as usual piloted by the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. They do, however, fear being undercut on one thing: not being reelected. That is the one issue worth going to the media and fighting for.

These same centrist Democrats don’t appear to fear the prospect of war (or rather more war than they already have, this time with Iran). Some, such as Senator Chris Coons, even seem to. The centrists don’t seem to fear the ongoing effects of a justice system that imprisons millions of people every year and serves to criminalize an entire race. After all, it was a Democratic president — Bill Clinton — along with Senator Joe Biden, the current Democratic frontrunner in the presidential primaries, who in 1994.

Most of all, they don’t fear the influence of money on politics, because that was the key to their getting elected in the first place. Their legislative record shows that they don’t fear many other obvious, deeply ingrained social ills that tend to get worse as the years go by, such as increasing inequality, crushing and stultifying student debt or even an opioid crisis that is a symptom not just of commercial abuse by cynical pharmaceutical firms, but more particularly of a certain deepening malaise of civilization itself and seriously eroded social values.

Politics is a full-time, year-round game of getting elected and then getting reelected. Anything that undercuts that prospect is bad. Any objectively bad thing (war, injustice, poverty, torture, etc.) that comforts the prospect of being reelected because it responds to the voters’ wishes or prejudices is considered good, though not necessarily deemed desirable in itself.

That’s why George W. Bush was proud of a “war president” in February 2004. It’s not that he thought war was good, but that in an election year being seen as a war president was a feather in his cap. That’s why Barack Obama was thrilled to remind his public that he had killed Osama bin Laden and why Hillary Clinton could proudly announce, with a smile and a smirk, with regard to Libya and the brutal murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi: “[W]e came, we saw, he died.” Killing normally doesn’t give Democrats pleasure, but taking credit for killing the right enemies certainly helps with getting elected.

Historical Note

For most of the past 50 years, the Democrats have never been able to work out their relationship with their own history. Under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democrats identified with the common people and radically reformed the capitalist system in their interests. But the party also embraced the racist American South, states on which their electoral success depended. Roosevelt was elected to a third and then a fourth term because he was a “war president.”

The war economy is what finally allowed the US to emerge from the doldrums of the Great Depression. The Democrats thus found themselves, like the rest of the nation, consciously or unconsciously committed to a militarized economy. They joined the always more jingoistic Republicans in promoting the fears and obsessions of the Cold War that justified continuing to develop a militarized economy. 

The youthful “New Frontier” reformer, John F. Kennedy, continued as an adamant Cold warrior until his assassination in 1963. And though war (in Vietnam) is what finally undid Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, the Democrats have remained ever since committed to perpetuating the military-industrial complex that produced not only jobs, but also the technology that could be transferred to new sectors of the consumer economy. At the same time, it ensured that the US would maintain uncontested leadership in the growing marketplace for professional and consumer technology, dictating norms of technology and even behavior to the rest of the planet.

The current tribe of Democratic presidential candidates, including the two most prominent progressive — Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — have been wary of even suggesting that US military budgets be scaled down and foreign policy readjusted to pull back from its implicit goal of imperial reach and control. They focus, as Democrats since Roosevelt have always done, on adapting the internal rules of capitalism to reduce the role of greed as the principal motivating factor driving the economy.

The progressives promote concrete measures — taxing corporations and the rich, deprivatizing health care, canceling student debt, offering free college, etc. — all of which are painted by Republicans as sources of cost and new taxation. Nevertheless, for many, these reforms appeal to the growing sense among the public, and especially the young, that if nothing is done, society itself may collapse.

The centrists, focused on reelection, sense the danger of even suggesting measures that imply raising anyone’s taxes. Their strategy consists of appearing inclusive (showing respect for every type of identity) and sympathetic to people’s local concerns. Once elected, they can be counted on to support reforms that will “help people” or “address problems” but which will rarely if ever challenge deficiencies in the structure of the economy or the political system.

The Politico article bears the title: “Moderate Democrats warn Pelosi of impeachment obsession.” Centrist Democrats weren’t particularly concerned by their party’s absurd obsession with “Russiagate,” whose outcome — had their suspicions about Trump’s collusion with Russia in the 2016 election been confirmed — should have led to his impeachment. But they now fear that focusing on impeachment will force the nation to make more complex moral assessments of political behavior that could call into question the corrupt core of the current system.

Trump’s sins have nothing to do with collusion with foreign governments. They have everything to do with greed, influence trafficking and abuse of power. These happen to be the pillars of the current economic and political system. Trump does what everyone else does but on a scale that matches his inflated ego and with an openness that embarrasses the political class, generally adept at hiding the everyday reality of corruption.

President Trump’s personality has made visible the corruption and perverse political values that have underpinned the system for decades. That growing visibility is the factor that threatens to undercut the political careers of centrist Democrats and possibly the entire corrupt system. A good reason to prefer talking about other things.

*[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, , 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.]

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

The post Centrist Democrats Fear a Showdown on Impeachment appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

I haven’t found anyone who claims to be both a racist and a Republican, including Trump.ĚýYet, as each slimy racist word dribbles from the lips of the self-proclaimed “,” the collective silence is deafening.ĚýWorse yet is the acolyte circumlocution that follows each Trump verbal racist assault.ĚýThe one I like best is: “He (Trump) is saying what many other people are thinking.”ĚýBut if none of the people who think like racists self-identify as racists, where does that leave those who think like Trump.ĚýSure sounds like racists to me.

The Chosen One

Next up, how about that Trump “chosen one” comment itself.* Although embedded in some nonsense about China, it should have made even the most hypocritical among the hyper-Christian community wince.ĚýIt sure seems to be pushing that blasphemy line that evangelicals say cannot be crossed.ĚýYet the silence from the religious right is as deafening as the silence of the racists.ĚýAnd now that we have a self-proclaimed “chosen one” in place, what better way to memorialize that stature than another prayer breakfast to kiss the golden (orange) dome of the second coming. Just to ensure that we wring all the hypocrisy out of the moment that we can, I suggest bagels, lox and cream cheese as the menu du jour.

While we are at it, I am challenging readers to find photo evidence that Trump ever attended a Saturday or Sunday service anywhere before 2015. Weddings, funerals, various mitzvahs and the like don’t count.

While the Christians can reach extraordinary heights of hypocrisy in service to Trump, it appears that some Jewish people are trying to keep up. Just after I was born a Jew, my number one concern was seeking to avoid circumcision, which even to my then barely-formed mind seemed like a really bad idea. I was overruled by what appeared to be a group attached to a religious faith that honored this ritual mutilation. Thus began my steady but consistent journey on a different spiritual path. 

While this early personal drama was playing out, there was no state of Israel that might have garnered the loyalty of those seeking my circumcision. Instead, it was all about following some ancient ritual that seemed to captivate the Jewish conscience. Today, the conscience of many Jews in America seems, at the least, to take a rest where Israel is concerned. From my perspective, this is not a question of “loyalty” to anything. It is a question of conscience.

Loyalty Test

Enter Trump, his “love” of Israel, his corrupt embrace of its present leader and his disgust that all of his pandering isn’t causing enough Jews to vote for him. So, he takes a dive into the Jewish conscience to impose a new “loyalty” test for Jews — if you are Jewish and don’t support him and his draconian policies, you must be to both Israel and the Jewish people at large. It becomes even more of a sin if you don’t support Israel’s draconian policies.

What a Rubik’s Cube of hypocrisy unfolds in this moral morass. It is so profound that it leaves some Jews, most evangelicals, many regular Christians, Trump and the anti-Semitic wing of the Republican Party swimming together in the same hypocritical pool with no easy exit to dry land. To be candid, I am enjoying the spectacle. Trump’s addition to the “America First” playbook of a loyalty oath for some Americans that includes loyalty to another country is rich indeed. Just think about that for a minute.

Now on to helpless children, where hypocrisy provides the backdrop for human cruelty. In America, “family values” is a pathetic code for right-wing extremist views of everything from abortion to gay rights to civil rights, designed to mask the hypocrisy at its core. With the flag of “family values” leading the parade, most Republicans, evangelicals, hard-core Christians and Jews “loyal” to Israel seem to join the rest of us in caring deeply about our own children. But that isn’t a response to much of a moral challenge. 

The challenge seems to arise when lessons we learn about caring for our own children are to be extended to the children of others, some of whom don’t look like us. This is a challenge familiar to mother bears that seem to care a lot about their own children, while showing little to no interest in the children of other bears or other animals.

To put it bluntly, I am suggesting that the crowd of “family values” Trump supporters looks a lot like moral bears to me. Don’t get between me, my kids and Jesus, but if you want to slay a helpless baby rabbit, go for it. In my moral universe, poor and frightened immigrant children, hungry inner-city and rural kids, and children living under hostile occupation share way too much in common with baby rabbits in this allegory.

What, in fact, could be more hypocritical than to profess deeply-held, faith-based values that seek to protect the sanctity of one’s own children (and fetuses and embryos in every corner of the land), but find no compassion for the children of others held in literal and figurative cages? What recognizable moral compass guides many of these zealots to often care more about baby rabbits than baby black and brown people?

Thoughts and Prayers

If you find yourself still pondering about bears and baby rabbits, let’s journey to another epicenter of hypocrisy — the “thoughts and prayers” that flow like holy water from the mouths of gun nuts every time a different gun nut shoots up a school, a shopping mall or a place of worship. I am all in for the collective power of thoughts and prayers to ease the pain of brown spots on one’s lawn, a shattered bottle of good booze, a cellphone dropped in the toilet and the like.ĚýHowever, it is apparent that all the thoughts and prayers that can be mustered is no match for the 393 million handsĚýin the United States.

So, instead of the smokescreen of caring that emanates from those thoughts and prayers for the dead and dying, how about taking a moment to reflect on the underlying cause of all that misery that gun nuts seek to pray away. It is 393 million firearms, each of which poses a threat to someone else and some of which are readily available to the truly deranged.

On your way to K-Mart to buy a bullet-proof backpack for your child, take a moment to ponder the twisted logic of those who advocate for unfettered gun rights as a constitutional imperative (Second Amendment) while at the same time seeking to limit the reach of the rights of all citizens to life, liberty and the equal protection of the laws guaranteed in that same (14th Amendment).

And then, if you still can’t change your gun-nut mind about guns, reach out with those thoughts and prayers to a fellow gun nut after the gun he bought to “protect” himself is left lying around and his 5-year-old blows away his 3-year-old.

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

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

The post America Is Awash in a Sea of Hypocrisy appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

The Soviet Communist Party, under the strong guiding hand of Joseph Stalin, had long turned its back on the internationalism of its founders and their commitment to world revolution. In its place, Stalin vowed to “build socialism in one country.” And that ultimately required a new kind of nationalism.

“Rootless cosmopolitan” was not just a term for run-of-the-mill internationalists. It had a very specific meaning. Stalin was targeting Jews.ĚýIronically, most of the Jews who’d been so influential in the creation of Soviet communism — Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Karl Radek — had already been purged or exiled. That didn’t stop Stalin from searching for other hidden enemies, such as a group of Jewish poets, or an imaginary cabal of Jewish doctors determined to assassinate the dictator. The anti-Semitic purges that Stalin began in the Soviet Union spread throughout Eastern Europe as well, as the communist parties there took a hard turn toward nationalism.

History repeats, Karl Marx once said, first as tragedy and then as comedy. In mid-July, a group of putative conservative intellectuals gathered in Washington to confirm a new, nationalist direction for their movement. The conference featured the likes of John Bolton and Tucker Carlson, Peter Thiel and Julius Krein. According to itsĚý:

“The conference on �National Conservatism’ will bring together public figures, journalists, scholars, and students who understand that the past and future of conservatism are inextricably tied to the idea of the nation, to the principle of national independence, and to the revival of the unique national traditions that alone have the power to bind a people together and bring about their flourishing.”

On the face of it, this ideological transformation mirrors President Donald Trump’s assault on “globalists” and pledge to “make America great again.” Lurking behind this fixation on the nation, as with Stalin’s earlier campaign, is the GOP’s own purge of cosmopolitanism, including the rootless variety.

In this comic reworking of the earlier Soviet tragedy, a key target is not Trotskyism but its distant cousin, neo-conservatism. Many of the neo-conservatives who proved so influential in the 2000s were Jewish —Ěý,Ěý,Ěý. Some, like Kristol’s father Irving, were once even Trotskyists, which helps to explain their peculiar transmutation of world revolution into global democracy promotion.

Mind you, most Soviet and Eastern European communists were not Jewish, and neither are most neocons. And theĚý for this particular conferenceĚýwas Israeli author Yoram Hazony’sĚý“The Virtue of Nationalism.” But it’s hard not see a similar anti-Semitic trope in operation behind the attacks on cosmopolitanism at the conference.

Trump didn’t attend the meeting, and the conference speakersĚýĚýof his name. But his upending of the policy status quo has made this nationalist turn possible. Even before he stepped out of the closet toĚý an unabashed nationalist in October 2018, Trump pushed back against the neocon obsession with democracy promotion abroad (indeed, the president doesn’t promote democracy at home either).

Instead, like Stalin, Trump is focusing his revolution in one country. The US president is obsessed with securing the borders and cracking down on “rootless” immigrants. He has repeatedly trafficked in racist rhetoric of the “white makes right” variety. He has heaped scorn on cosmopolitan cities like Baltimore. He is not against JewsĚýper seĚý— witness his strong embrace of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel more generally — but only a particular kind of Jew, whose allegiance to Israel or the United States might be called into question because of liberal cosmopolitanism. HeĚýĚýat Jews who accuse him (or he thinks have accused him) of anti-Semitism.

This new turn toward nationalism among American conservatives is troubling for reasons other than its implicit indictment of rootless cosmopolitanism. Right now Muslims, the LGBTQ community and the undocumented are certainly more vulnerable to Trump’s attacks than American Jews. Trump is telling prominent people of color in Congress — not prominent Jewish politicians — to “go home.” The intended audiences for these messages can interpret the rhetoric according to their favorite intolerance: racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, xenophobia.

But the assault on globalists, on the elite, on financiers like George Soros all push in the same direction: against the internationalism that is in such short supply when it is needed the most.

Against the Globalists

It’s hard these days to find anyone in the US in a position of political power who will put in a good word for internationalism.ĚýThe candidates for the Democratic Party presidential nomination haveĚýĚýforeign policy (though bothĚýĚý˛ą˛Ô»ĺĚýĚýhave issued good statements). And when the candidates do venture into matters beyond these borders, it’s usually to bash China (as several didĚý) orĚýĚýor Trump’s policy onĚý.

Then there’s the new Quincy Institute, which unites Soros and Charles Koch in an effort to reduce the US military footprint in the world. That’s all for the good, of course. But given the Koch funding and its , this new initiative is unlikely to embrace strong internationalist institutions and programs except on a strictlyĚýad hocĚýbasis (like support for the Iran nuclear deal).

But while the liberals are busy staying silent about internationalism, the right wing is conducting an all-out frontal assault.ĚýGone are the days of overt enthusiasm for economic globalization or beefed-up security alliances like NATO and, frankly, good riddance. But Trump’s version of “America First” is spreading through conservative circles like some intellectual version of kudzu. The new fifth column in this nationalist assault are the liberal internationalists, the globalists, the cosmopolitans.

At the National Conservatism conference, for instance, Republican Senator Josh Hawley led the charge against this new enemy, arguing that an elite of the left and right had sold out the “American middle” to global interests. “Today’s leadership elite is a â€�cosmopolitan’ elite in the way defined by Prof Martha Nussbaum: â€�the cosmopolitan [is] the person whose primary allegiance is to the community of human beings in the entire world,’ not to a â€�specifically American identity,’” HawleyĚýĚýin a follow-up tweet. “And the cosmopolitan agenda of hyper-globalization & disrespect for the American middle has been bad for workers, bad for families, bad for America.”

Hawley’s jeremiad against cosmopolitans drewĚýĚýfrom various organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee. Hawley refused to back down, saying that the “liberal language police have lost their minds.” He then cited his support for Israel and his opposition to the boycott, divest, and sanction movement as proof of his philo-Semitism.

Similarly, in 2017, when Trump adviser Stephen MillerĚý a reporter of having a “cosmopolitan bias,” charges of anti-Semitic dog-whistling didn’t stick because of the obvious fact that Miller is the one who’s Jewish and the reporter, Jim Acosta, is not.

But again, the anti-Semitism in question is not directed at all Jews, just as Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaign exempted Lazar Kaganovich, the only Jewish member of the Politburo in the 1940s. Kaganovich escaped censure because his loyalty, as an uber-Stalinist, was never in question. The charge of cosmopolitanism today is also about loyalty — to America, to Trump’s brand of nationalism, to Netanyahu’s right-wing version of Israel. If American Jews subscribe to that agenda, they can tell themselves that they, too, are exempted from the ugly name-calling.

This campaign against cosmopolitanism is strengthened by repetition across borders: throughout Europe, in Russia and even in India. Vladimir Putin has his own brand of illiberal nationalism shot through with Orthodox Christianity. The leaders of Hungary and Poland are similarly ill-disposed toward any minorities that might dilute the presumed homogeneity of their countries. More explicitly fascist echoes can be heard in the far-right parties in France, Spain, Italy and Greece. In India, Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi isĚý the secular, multiethnic and cosmopolitan democracy enshrined in the constitution.

But here’s the difference with the Soviet Union of the early 1950s. Jewish poets didn’t conspire against Stalin; there was no such Doctors’ Plot. Those were paranoid delusions.

With Hawley and his fellow nationalists, however, some truth lurks in their accusations. A political elite of the left and rightĚýdidĚýpartner with Wall Street and transnational corporations to promote policies that widened economic inequality within the US and around the world. NeoconsĚýdidĚýpush for military interventions that were wrongheaded and tragic.

But none of this had to do with cosmopolitanism. The perpetrators of these policies were just as vocally patriotic as their current detractors. They believed in American exceptionalism. They’d reject the notion that they’re world citizens first before American citizens. In fact, the people who pushed through the policies that Hawley now excoriates looked a lot like Hawley himself, aĚýĚýlawyer whoĚýĚýfrom Stanford and Yale and taught in London.

Against the Cities

The ultimate strategy behind this “anti-cosmopolitanism” is not just to pit a disloyal elite against the common American. It’s also to drive a further wedge between those who live in the cities and those who live elsewhere. Cities, after all, are the home base of cosmopolitans.

Case in point: Trump’s latest tweets demonizing Baltimore and its elected representative, Elijah Cummings. The president hasĚýĚýas a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” where “no human being would want to live.” I’ve been living in Baltimore for the past year and it’s a wonderful place, full of museums and quirky festivals and vibrant neighborhoods. Yes, it has a high murder rate, many abandoned storefronts and endemic poverty. But welcome to the modern American city, starved of federal funds and abandoned by the wealthy.

Baltimore shouldn’t take it personally. Trump has also gone after Chicago, Oakland and Ferguson. It’s no accident that Trump singles out cities with large African-American populations for criticism. He knows that he can’t pick up any votes in these places. But he can win points with suburban and rural Americans who have traditionally been suspicious of what takes places in cosmopolitan places: “un-American” activities like race-mixing, gender-bending and religion-avoiding.

Trump is engaged in political triage. He doesn’t bother campaigning in areas of the country where he’s disliked by the majority. HeĚýĚýas much as possible to areas dominated by his supporters. He insults his blue state opponents with electoral impunity. It’s sobering to learn that, according toĚýĚýin the Cook Political Report, Trump could lose by 5 million votes — nearly twice the margin of the popular vote in 2016 — andĚýstillĚýwin the presidency via the Electoral College. NowĚýthatĚýis a disgusting mess.

Reorganization of the Right

Not all conservatives have fully embraced this nationalist turn. Take Bret Stephens, for instance, TheĚýNew York TimesĚýcolumnist. He’s reluctant to give up on his bedrock commitment to free markets. He tries to stick up for immigration as an important American principle. But even in his explicit rejection of these national conservatives, heĚýĚýa few potshots at globalists: “Nationalism offers protection toĚýâ€�somewhere people’ against the political and moral preferences of â€�anywhere people.’ And transnational bodies like the European Union have largely failed the test of democratic representation and accountability.”

The once-grand coalition of conservatives that created the Reagan revolution — laissez-faire enthusiasts like Milton Friedman, “America firsters” like Pat Buchanan, Christian conservatives like Jerry Falwell, neoconservatives like Jeane Kirkpatrick — no longer exists. The parochialists are displacing the globalists, and cosmopolitans are replacing communists as the enemy of choice. Even the mild dissenters within the conservative coalition, like Stephens, feel the need to give nationalism its due.

The Democrats are doing their best to sound the same themes. Elizabeth Warren’sĚý, after all, is called “economic patriotism.” That’s fine for winning elections. But without a new internationalism, progressives will end up with the tired old foreign policy of the Blob — or worse.

*[This article was originally published by . Updated on August 6, 2019: A previous version of this article referred to the “Koch brothers” and has since been amended to “Charles Koch.]

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

The post The GOP’s Sinister New Nationalism appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), former White House aide Sebastian Gorka, reminding his audience of the horror in store for them if Democratic progressives ever get their way, the indignation felt by President Donald Trump’s base. He declared: “They want to take your pickup truck. They want to rebuild your home. They want to take away your hamburgers. This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved.”

At the same conference, Evangelist and Liberty University PresidentĚýJerry Falwell warned: “I’ve got 100 cows — you just let Alexandria Cortez show up at my cows and try to take my cows away,” without delineating the actual threat he had begun to articulate.

Both were using what should, in a broader context, be called a “trope,” a rhetorical device that relies on the repetition of an idea expressed with identical words. The original formulation was a leitmotif of the Obama era, when politicians such as Marco Rubio could : “His plan after the attack on San Bernardino? Take away our guns.”

Reporting on CPAC, Aaron Rupar on : “In this respect, they’re taking cues from the president, who has in recent weeks also mocked the Green New Deal (claiming �they want to take away your car’).”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Take away:

Implement socialism by confiscating honest citizens’ inalienable property, and in particular the most precious items that Americans require to live as a civilized people. These include pickup trucks, assault weapons, gas-guzzling cars, as well as the cattle of the plains that so conveniently replaced the barbaric bison allowed by uncivilized savages in former times to roam across unclaimed land, thanks to the natives’ total ignorance of the requirement to establish and issue deeds to every square inch of land.

Contextual note

One went so far as to say they were hoping to take America itself away, though without indicating where they intended to deposit it. As impatient with establishment Republicans as with Democrats, the website Townhall asks us to: “Take America away from Washington politicians, like Bush, Clinton and McConnell whose very nature reduces freedom and nets excessive regulation that harms job-creating businesses.”

Americans clearly think of the world as a complex set of discreet objects that can be carried from one place to another, where the possibility of seizing in one’s hands an object as big as a nation or as small as a hamburger constitutes a way of implementing a policy or solving a problem.

Here’s how The Washington Post parses Gorka’s warnings about hamburgers: “Republicans have turned environmentalists’ recommendations to eat less meat into an all-out culture war in which nothing less than American freedom is at stake.” But they may be missing the real point.

The Vox article highlights the Republican strategy as that of “motivating the Republican base by stoking fears about what Democrats will do if they retake the White House and/or the Senate in 2020.” And although the Democrats built their own election strategy in 2016 around the fear of Trump as an irresponsible egoist in a fundamentally ad hominem attack, by failing to identify what Trump would steal from them they missed the opportunity the Republicans never fail to exploit: to create the irrational fear that Democrats are out to rob them of what is rightly theirs. Kleptophobia, the fear of being robbed.

Historical note

The “take away” trope predates the National Rifle Association’s defiant message of recent decades, made famous by actor when he summoned his cheapest, mawkish Hollywood rhetoric to conclude that the only way they can take away his guns would be “from my cold, dead hands.” In the same speech, Heston evoked the mission of the Republicans in 2000, six months before the presidential election pitting Al Gore against George W. Bush. They have “set out this year to defeat the divisive forces that would take freedom away.”

Republicans like to think of elections as a form of war, not about winning but rather about defeating the enemy. They frame it as a war on crime as they assail the thieves who wish to “take away” everything that defines them. “Take away” has become the essential metaphor at the core of Republican rhetoric.

This ploy has its roots in history. Ever since the Boston Tea Party, Americans have a negative perception of taxes, which they see as an act of taking away their “hard-earned money.” A decade after the establishment of the US federal income tax (1913) and a decade before President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” Republican President that: “In essence, citizens of the United States are slaves, and the slave owner is the ever-growing bureaucracy that confiscates their hard-earned money.” As a privileged white man born in 1872, Coolidge may have forgotten that in his parents’ lifetimes, slavery wasn’t just a metaphor but an established institution, and it concerned human bodies and minds, not just “hard-earned money.”

But the fear of being forced to share one’s wealth for the sake of the common good — other than for “defense,” which plays out in reality as “offense” — has become the basis of a kleptophobic instinct that, at least in terms of rhetoric, even liberal Democrats bought into. When they say, , “Let’s Take America Away from Wall Street and Give it Back to Main Street,” they appeal to a similar notion of possession and the attribution of a title to property to its rightful owner.

The two sides seem to agree that “America” is meant to be somebody’s property, while they disagree on who owns the deed. On the Republican side, we : “Trump is our last chance to take America away from the elites and those who rule through oligarchy. If you love America, YOU MUST VOTE FOR TRUMP!”

These two statements by opposing sides reveal a trend that the establishment of both parties has failed to take on board. The feeling has grown among voters that America (an idea and presumably an ideal rather than a nation) should be “taken back” from the “elite,” the “oligarchy.” They simply don’t agree on how to define the elite, though the sentiment is growing that, whatever it is, it includes all the establishment politicians.

The one thing they do share is the fear and indignation of someone who feels they have been robbed. That is a sentiment deeply implanted in US culture.

*[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, , 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.]

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

The post The Kleptophobia at the Core of Republican Rhetoric appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

In the midst of the debate on Donald Trump’s border wall, CNN quotes Republican Senator Lindsey Graham’s to the president: “It is time for President Trump to use emergency powers to fund the construction of a border wall/barrier.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Emergency:Ěý

1. An unexpected and dangerous situation that requires an immediate response

2. In politics: a pretext with no basis in reality that allows a person with authority to impose solutions that appeal to the politician’s base

Contextual note

The Merriam-Webster dictionary provides this definition: “[A]n unforeseen combination of circumstances or the resulting state that calls for immediate action.” Collins offers a more detailed definition: “[A]n unexpected and difficult or dangerous situation, especially an accident, which happens suddenly and which requires quick action to deal with it.”

There is little in the situation at the US-Mexico border that can be considered “unforeseen” or “unexpected.” It would be equally absurd for the US to call it “difficult” or “dangerous,” unless, in a burst of unaccustomed empathy, American authorities were adopting the point of view of desperate refugees. That certainly would be unforeseen and unexpected. As for it’s happening “suddenly,” Trump’s project of building a wall dates from the fatal day in June 2015 when he announced he would be running for president.

CNN’s report seems to indicate that most Democrats and some Republicans have actually consulted their dictionary on the meaning of “emergency.” “Democrats have said the move would not withstand legal scrutiny, and some Republicans have expressed hesitancy about the prospect,” CNN states. The law, after all, does have to respect the meaning of words even if politicians don’t.

So, if no emergency exists to justify mobilizing emergency powers, what can we read into Senator Graham’s intentions? Perhaps Graham provides the key elsewhere in the same article: “I hope it works,” he said, adding that it would “get challenged in court for sure as to whether or not this fits the statutory definition of an emergency.” Apparently, unlike the people he’s addressing or the man he’s advising, Graham has actually taken the trouble to consult a dictionary.

In politics, “hoping” something works means defining your ideological position or affirming your alliances while probably admitting or even expecting that that hope will not be realized. This is where political hypocrisy becomes an easy and often effective game to play. It’s called Ěý“grandstanding,” defined by the as “acting or speaking in a way intended to attract the good opinion of other people who are watching.”

We must then ask the simple question: Who are those “other people who are watching”? The answer, in the case of Graham, can only be Republican voters.

Historical note

For at least the past decade, Lindsey Graham has been playing a deliberately ambiguously iconoclastic role in party politics. Graham, the “wingman” to “” and former Republican presidential candidate John McCain, at McCain’s funeral as someone who was thrice lucky: “lucky to have been in his presence,” Ěý“lucky enough to have walked in his shadow” and “lucky to have been loved by him.” This self-effacement contrasts strongly to the rhetoric of the man he now admires and appears to be stumping for, Donald Trump, a narcissist who never tires of telling us luck had nothing to do with his success: It was all merit, to the acts of “a very stable genius.”

Recently, Graham has stepped forward on several occasions to laud Trump’s policies and efforts, in particular, vehemently defending Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, and now the border wall. Playing the cheerleader, Graham made the in a commentary on President Trump’s address to the nation to plead for a budget to build the wall: “Everything he said was true.” Nearly every , including 51łÔąĎ, pointed out how much of what Trump claimed, including his most compelling arguments, was false.

But Graham has equally and prominently played a contrasting role, as Trump’s most vehement critic. In 2016 he pulled no punches, “a �kook’, a �jackass,’ �a race-baiting bigot,’ and �the most flawed nominee in the history of the Republican Party.’” Just in the last few months, he has brutally lambasted Trump for protecting Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after the Jamal Khashoggi murder and then again for promising to withdraw American troops from Syria.

The pundits find Graham’s sudden loyalty to Trump puzzling and seek explanations. For : “It seems more likely that Graham’s friendship with Trump has to do with Graham’s re-election in 2020.” Because he has in the past been relatively civil in his relationship with Democrats, The New York Times appears to be discovering only today that Graham, like McCain, is a died-in-the-wool conservative as a vehement proponent of the US militarily-enforced empire The Gray Lady , “What Happened to Lindsey Graham? He’s Become a Conservative �Rock Star.’”

The Times describes Graham as “a kind of happy-go-lucky independent thinker,” confusing the effects of his grandstanding in different directions as evidence of thinking. Like nearly everyone else in politics, Graham talks rather than thinks or simply thinks about how he will talk, and, more than most, does so with an eye to creating for the media a strong personality branded as a loveable maverick. If he is a thinker at all, what he thinks about, like Trump himself, is mainly his image and being talked about in the media. And, like Trump, he’s pretty good at it.

*[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, , 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.]

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

The post Is Lindsey Graham Playing the Cheerleader? appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

Controversy surrounding the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi continues building in Washington as the world awaits a definitive policy position from the Trump administration concerning US relations with Saudi Arabia. The issue has the potential to change the geopolitical balance of power in the Middle East and has already put a serious dent in the legitimacy of the Trump administration itself.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who has supported President Donald Trump on most issues, has once again called Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) a “wrecking ball,” this time after hearing the testimony of CIA Director Gina Haspel, a person eminently qualified to about torture and assassination.

Reporting the accusations of Graham and another Republican senator, Bob Corker, British newspaper The Telegraph felt it necessary to remind its readers of the contrast with : “The senators’ position contradicted that of Mr Trump who has been more neutral, equivocating over who was responsible for Mr Khashoggi’s death.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Neutral:

1. Opposed to an obvious truth based on the pretext that very few facts can actually be incontrovertibly proved Ěý

2. Willfully blind

Contextual note

Senator Graham spoke ironically not of a smoking gun, but of “a smoking saw” — the bone saw the Saudi team brought along with them on their trip to Istanbul, just in case they were to run into a body that needed dismembering. He added, “You have to be willfully blind not to come to the conclusion that this was orchestrated and organised by people under the command of MBS. I think he is complicit in the murder of Mr Khashoggi to the highest level possible.”

Willful blindness appears to be one of President Trump’s favored strategic tools. He continues to appeal to a principle that can apply to any historical event that was not recorded on video as it happened: “[M]aybe he did and maybe he didn’t!” Even if a direct witness had seen MBS give the explicit command to murder Khashoggi but failed to record it on his smartphone, Trump would remind us that the person could be lying, since even presidents lie.

Trump has fully understood the persuasive impact of the (a reference to Akira Kurosawa’s classic film), without understanding the . When confronted with the overwhelming evidence of climate change’s negative impact on the US economy presented by the US Global Change Research Program, mandated by Congress and conducted by the top American climate experts, , “I don’t believe it.”

Along with willful blindness, Trump appears to have adopted the heterodox principle of “implausible deniability” by a person in a position allowing for the exercise of arbitrary power. All respectable politicians — and even less respectable ones — learn early on to master the subtle art of plausible deniability. Trump, as the man who unsuccessfully the expression “you’re fired,” is a professional decision-maker who has cultivated the practice not of deniability, but of flat-out denial. His whims and self-interest counterbalance any amount of evidence.

Historical note

Neutrality is a diplomatic concept that as: “[T]he legal status arising from the abstention of a state from all participation in a war between other states, the maintenance of an attitude of impartiality toward the belligerents.” Everyone’s prime example of a neutral nation is Switzerland, in particular because of the delicacy of its neutral status during World War II, but the tradition of Swiss neutrality before being officially formulated in the 1815 Treaty of Paris.

Neutrality therefore implies three contrasting positions represented by two adversaries (or belligerents) and a third party that insists on not taking a position in the conflict. Calling Trump’s position on Mohammed bin Salman neutral can only be considered an aberration. He is not abstaining from participation. On the contrary, his position appears to be a commitment to the side of MBS, with no consideration of the opposite point of view, even when formulated by his own intelligence services, and no attempt to distance himself from both.

This recent tendency in US culture to claim that there are two sides to every issue (rather than multiple perspectives, according to the Rashomon principle) leaves the opening that Trump habitually exploits to characterize his refusal to listen and think as an act of neutrality. But Donald Trump isn’t the only opportunist to follow this logic. It also serves the US media’s tendency to exclude any other view from consideration than the two dominant ones in any supposed “debate.”

For all such debates, typically, there is an official “liberal” (or Democrat) and a “conservative” (or Republican) position. If Republican Mitch McConnell and Democrat agree that “we’re capitalists and that’s just the way it is,” other points of view that may assess reality differently or propose alternatives can simply be excluded. This also means that practically every debate is reduced, in case of disagreement, to a “he says/she says” or “maybe he did, maybe he didn’t” game, which the voters will eventually decide, irrespective of facts or serious reasoning.

After all, voters are neutral, aren’t they? Even if placing one’s gears in neutral is a recipe for either political inertia or political disaster.

*[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,, 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.]

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

The post Senators Disagree with Donald Trump on MBS appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

So, what do the results of the US midterm elections tell us? The Guardian observed that “the vote is widely viewed as a referendum on [Donald Trump’s] .” True to his hyperreal self, President Trump to have turned the otherwise “boring” midterms into “the hottest thing,” a kind of political Super Bowl that became symbolically what 51łÔąĎ’s founder, Atul Singh, called a “war for America’s soul.”

As usual, whether it’s sport or war, the suspense turned around the binary question of which party would raise its hand in triumph and which would retreat to lick its wounds. All eyes were on the scoreboard, not on the players or what they represented — especially in this case, where the chief player was sitting on the bench during play and cheerleading during the timeouts.

The chaotic battle itself held no interest, as the entire electoral system has been engineered to be devoid of political sense. Issues never matter except to the extent that they can be turned into electoral slogans. And all anyone wants to know in the end is which party won and which party lost.

The one result pundits can forecast for any national election in the US is that in various places there will be and that, more generally, the system will once again reveal how undemocratic, if not frankly anti-democratic, it is in its very foundations.

One major, still unresolved scandal revolved around the election of Republican Brian Kemp as governor of Georgia. As the secretary of state of Georgia, responsible for monitoring the election process, he refused to be released from his duties during the campaign, of the internationally respected Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Kemp has been accused of putting in place a system of massive voter suppression targeting minorities that may have secured his narrow victory.

In a fitting , it appears that, when he tried to vote, Kemp himself “received a voter card that said �invalid’ when he tried to vote on Election Day.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Invalid:

Failing to conform to any set of arbitrary rules, which may be just, perversely unjust or structurally faulty, depending on the intentions of the authority that defined and enforces the rules

Contextual noteĚý

Invalid is one of those rare words that, depending on how you pronounce it, can mean : “being without foundation or force in fact, truth, or law” or “one who is sickly or disabled.” Both meanings help to describe what the electoral system in the US has become. It has affected the health of the nation itself, which has become a democratic invalid.

Republican administrations across numerous states have made monumental efforts to invalidate the voting rights of American citizens, using clever strategies to target minorities. Their obsession with the notion of invalid voting, which they justify by the pretext of preventing voter fraud, demonstrates their deep-seated suspicion of democracy.

But the Democrats have long been complicit in an overall approach to democratic representation and election procedures that are equally anti-democratic. The peculiar contemporary reality of “states rights,”Ěýwritten into the Constitution, means that democracy on a national scale will never be possible in the US. The voice of the people, as we have seen repeatedly, weighs little against the voice of the states. And within the states the freedom to gerrymander ensures that the façade of democracy exists primarily to permit the re-election of career politicians, those who are most adept at raising money from corporate sponsors as well as being the most responsive to the “services” provided by lobbyists.

Historical note

Instead of seeing the midterms as a referendum on Trump, it would be more accurate to see them as a referendum on democracy in America. And though the different parties and factions can claim to have achieved at least a , democracy, once again, finds itself on the losing side. This isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s merely the latest stage in a long historical process.

Historical documents, including the Constitution and the federalist papers, reveal that the idea of trusting the voice of the people to elect governments was intended to be “the voice of some people” — ideally, the voice of white propertied men. Slaves and the traditional inhabitants of the continent could have no voice. Neither could women. After the abolition of slavery, Jim Crow — with its multiple devices, including literacy tests accompanied by educational deprivation — taught the white leaders in the South the art of manipulating the electoral side of democracy.

Between gerrymandering, lobbyists’ control of Congress, defective voting machines that are , massive , vacuous and mendacious negative advertising flooding the media, and the Supreme Court’s decision in that racism no longer exists, rather than speculating about who might unseat Trump in 2020, shouldn’t we be asking ourselves whether it’s even possible for democracy to exist in America?

*[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,, 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.]

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

The post The Midterm Elections and Democracy in America appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

Who could forget that moment? The blue [red] wave — long promised but also doubted — had, however modestly [however massively], hit Washington and [the Democrats had just retaken Congress] [the Republicans had held Congress] [the Democrats had taken the House]. The media, Fox News and the usual right-wing websites aside, hailed the moment. [Fox News and the usual right-wing websites cheered the president on.] Donald Trump’s grip on America had finally been broken [reinforced]. Celebrations were widespread. Congressional investigations, possibly even impeachment, were only months and a new Congress away [were now a faint memory], and it was then, of course, that the unexpected struck. It was then that President Donald Trump, citing national security concerns and a crisis on the US-Mexico border, began the process whose end point we, of course, already know…

Midterm Elections 2018Ěý

OK, consider that the dystopian me speaking.ĚýWe don’t, of course, really know how our story yet ends, not faintly.ĚýWhile I was writing this piece, I didn’t even know how the vote on November 6 would turn out, though by the time you read it, you may.ĚýGiven the experience of election 2016, it would take a brave (foolish) soul to make a prediction this time around.

I certainly learned a lesson that November. During the previous months of campaigning that election season, I never wrote a piece atĚýTomDispatchĚýthat didn’t leave open the possibility of Donald Trump winning the presidency.ĚýIn the couple of weeks before that fateful day, however, I got hooked on the polling results and on Nate Silver’sĚý website and became convinced that Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in.

Of course, I was in good company.ĚýAs Michael Wolff wouldĚýĚýin his bestselling book,Ěý, on election eve, few in the Trump campaign, including the candidate himself, expected to win. Most of them, again including The Donald, were already trying to parlay what they assumed was an assured loss into their next jobs or activities, including in the candidate’s case a possible “Trump network.”

So when, sometime after midnight, reality finally began to sink in — fittingly enough, I had a 103-degree fever and was considering heading for an emergency room — I was as disbelieving as the president-to-be. (He had, Wolff tells us, “” his wife, Melania, who was reportedly in tears of anything but joy that night, that he would never win and that she would never find herself in the White House.) By then, it was for me a fever dream to imagine that bizarre, belligerent, orange-haired salesman-cum-con-artist entering the Oval Office.

Honestly, I shouldn’t have been the least bit surprised. During election campaign 2016, I grasped much of this. I wrote of the future president, for instance, as a con artist (particularly in reference toĚýĚýof his that we couldn’t see) and how Clinton’s crew hadn’t grasped the obvious: That many Americans would admire him for gaming the system, even if they couldn’t do the same themselves.ĚýAs IĚýĚýat the time: “It’s something Donald Trump knows in his bones, even if all those pundits and commentators and pollsters (and for that matter Hillary Clinton’s advisers) don’t: Americans love a con man.”

I also saw that he was daring in ways unimaginable to an American politician — because, of course, he wasn’t one — particularly in promoting his slogan, Make America Great Again (MAGA), whose key word few of the political cognoscenti paid the slightest attention to: “again.” At that moment, forĚýĚýorĚýĚýwho wanted to become just that, it was obligatory to claim that the United States wasn’t just great but the greatest, most exceptional, most indispensable land ever.Ěý(As Hillary Clinton typicallyĚýĚýthat election season: “America is indispensable — and exceptional — because of our values.”)ĚýTrump’s “again” in Make America Great Again suggested something quite different and so rang a bell in the heartland.ĚýIn the process, he became America’sĚý.

Early that October, IĚý:

“[A] significant part of the white working class, at least, feels as if, whether economically or psychologically, its back is up against the wall and there’s nowhere left to go.Ěý Under such circumstances, many of these voters have evidently decided that they’re ready to send a literal loose cannon into the White House; they’re willing, that is, to take a chance on the roof collapsing, even if it collapses on them. That is the new and unrecognizable role that Donald Trump has filled.Ěý It’s hard to conjure up another example of it in our recent past. The Donald represents, as a friend of mine likes to say, the suicide bomber in us all. And voting for him, among other things, will be an act of nihilism, a mood that fits well with imperial decline.

“Think of him as a message in a bottle washing up on our shore…”

And yet, on that day of decision, I evidently reverted to the boy I had once been, the boy who grew up with a vision of an idealized America that would always do the right thing.ĚýSo I was shocked to the core by Donald Trump’s victory.

In that fever dream of a night, when he washed up on all our shores, I had certainly been trumped, but then, so had he, so had we all.ĚýUnder the circumstances, I’m sure you’ll understand why I’ve remained hesitant about putting my faith in polls in this election season or giving special significance toĚýĚýthat the White House staff was glum as hell about the 2018 midterm elections and expected the worst. (After all, mightn’t this be that Michael Wolff election night all over again?)Ěý

The American Shooting Gallery

Two years after that fateful November night in 2016, we’re still living in a fever dream of some sort, enveloped 24/7 by the universe of President Trump and the “fake news media,” that provides him and the rest of us with a strange, all-encompassingĚý.ĚýAmerica, you might say, now has a 103-degree temperature and there isn’t an emergency room in sight.

And it’s unlikely to get better, whatever happens in the midterm elections.ĚýThose who expect that a Democratic victory or aĚýĚýin the weeks to come will be the beginning of the end for the Trump presidency (or, for that matter, that the victory of an everĚýĚýRepublican Party will simply prove more of the grisly same) might want to reconsider.

Perhaps it’s worth weighing other grimmer possibilities in the as-yet-unending rise of what’s still called “right-wing populism,” not just locally butĚý.ĚýHere in the United States, with hate and venom surging (and, yes indeed, beingĚýĚýby President Trump for his own purposes), a genuinely ugly strain central to this country’s history is being resurrected. In the process, a burgeoning number of deeply disturbed (and deeply animated) figures from among the mostĚýĚýcivilian population on the planet — Yemen, of all the grim places, comes in aĚýĚý— are turning this country into a shooting gallery.

Win or lose today, don’t think that the Donald Trump we have is the one we’re fated to have until the day he goes down in flames. He is distinctly a work in progress, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say: in regress.ĚýIn that context, let me mention an evolution of a grim sort in my own thinking over the last two years.

For some time now, there have been both thinkers and activists who have been convinced that Donald Trump is anĚý, an outright fascist.Ěý(According to his ex-wife, in the early 1990s he kept a book of Adolf Hitler’s speechesĚý and, during the 2016 election campaign, heĚýĚýa Mussolini quote, defending himself for doing so.)

I’ve always disagreed, however.ĚýTo my mind, he’s clearly been a man who wants to be idolized and adulated (as happens at any of his rallies) — wants, that is, to have fans, not (in the fascistic sense) followers; applause and the eternal spotlight, not a social movement.ĚýThat, it seems to me, has been an accurate description of the president who entered the Oval Office and occupied it in such a suggestive way these last nearly two years.ĚýBut I’ve recently started to wonder.ĚýAfter all, once upon a time, Donald Trump wasn’t a Republican either. Let’s face it, he’s a quick learner when it comes to whatever may benefit The Donald.

And keep in mind that he entered an unsettled world alreadyĚýĚýfor such a presidency by his predecessors in Washington.ĚýIf the fascist or, if you prefer, autocratic tendency that lurks in him and in the situation that surrounds him does come out more fully, he will obviously be aided by the ever more imperial presidency that was created in the decades before he left Trump Tower for the White House.

When he entered the Oval Office, he found there a presidency in which — particularly on the subject of war (the president was, for instance, already America’s globalĚý) — his powers increasingly stood outside both Congress and the Constitution. The weapons he’s now bringing to bear, includingĚýĚýand the US military, were already well prepared for him.ĚýThe refugees he makes such effective use of, whether from Syria or Central America, came to him, at least in part, thanks to this country’s war and other policies that had already roiled significant parts of the planet.ĚýBefore entering the Oval Office, the only aspect of such preparations he had any role in was the increasinglyĚý that gave a “populist” billionaire president, always ready to put more money in the hands of his .01% pals, a pained but receptive audience in the heartland.

In other words, this world and the fever dream that goes with it were Donald Trump’s oyster before he ever lifted a finger in the White House.ĚýAs a result, no election results, no matter whether the Democrats or the Republicans “win,” are likely to bring that temperature down.ĚýIn fact, if the Democrats do take the House (or even Congress), Trump is unlikely to become more pliable. If the Mueller report results in impeachment proceedings in the House, he won’t be humbled. In the face of any such development, my guess is that his impulse will be to become more autocratic, more imperial and even possibly more fascistic. And the same may hold if the Republicans hang onto both houses of Congress.

Waiting for the Red Hats

Even before the vote was in, the evidence was there.ĚýIn the lead-up to the election,ĚýĚýUS troops (or maybeĚý?) are headed for the US-Mexico border to deal with what the president has called both an “” and a “.” (“Fake news!”) There, those troops will essentiallyĚýĚýtheir thumbs (since they areĚýĚýto do little) simply because the president wanted it so.ĚýThere may, in fact, be two soldiers for every desperate refugee, including children and babies, headed toward the US border in that now notorious “caravan” from Honduras.

In other words, on a whim, Trump is already capable of building a wall (of troops) at that border.ĚýThe question worth asking is this: In an embattled near-future moment in which aĚýĚý(think of “him” as the next John Bolton) is in place as secretary of defense and another “national emergency” is declared, where might those troops go next because the president wanted it so?

In the days before the election, the president alsoĚýĚýto sign an executive order to nullify birthright citizenship — in the process, threatening to functionally nullify the Constitution (see the 14th Amendment), while bringing back to lifeĚýĚýof American racial history just because he wanted it so.ĚýAt the moment, he might not even sign that order or, if he does, it might go down big time in Congress and the courts. But who knows what the future of an executive-order presidency holds, especially with another Supreme Court justiceĚýĚýin place, no matter who controls Congress?

As for thoseĚýĚýof his: Tell me you can’t conceive of a future America in which his adulatory crowds have stopped simply cheering and shouting for him (“Build the wall!” “Lock her up!”) and are now marching for him as well. Is it really so hard to imagine a future in which there would be a place for a Trump Corps or for “the Red Hats”; for, that is, the kind of social movement that would no longer be confined to the arenas and stadiums of red-state America or even the polling booths of Election Day, one that might indeed be in the streets of this country at the beck and call of a fierce and autocratic billionaire?

In an increasingly unsettled world, an Autocrats, Incorporated moment globally, with an ever more powerful chief executive, and a right wing still on the march, everything that Donald Trump inherited could certainly be intensified further. And he might be just the man to do it. In a world in which Congress is no longer fully in his camp, in which legal charges against him, his family and his cronies only grow, to adapt a title from aĚýĚýof the early 20th century, unquiet could flow The Don — and in that lies peril for us all.

Now, excuse me, I’m heading out to vote.

*[This article was originally published by .]Ěý

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

The post Thoughts on Election Day 2018 appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

America is a nation given to superlatives. We even have a World Series that is played annually by two baseball teams chosen from only two eligible countries (29 USA teams and one from Canada).ĚýSo, it is hard to get people in the US, never mind elsewhere, to understand just how important the midterm elections on November 6 really are to those who see their principles and their moral foundation under relentless attack. This election may be the most important election in the history of the world, or at least, since World War II. Or at least since 2016.

In the last couple of weeks, America’s superlatives have reached some new lows: greatest number of bombs sent to public servants in one week in the history of mankind, most Jewish people killed in a synagogue in US history, greatest impending invasion of the homeland by rapists and criminals ever.

In spite of these superlatives, American “exceptionalism” may have taken an unlikely hit — America is not even close to the top in the historic killing of Jews in their synagogues and neighborhoods.ĚýThere is nothing “exceptional” about American performance on this one.ĚýIf fact, there aren’t enough Jews in America to top Germany in this category.ĚýAlthough this particular record may be out of reach, if the American people tolerate much more of the hate mongering and dehumanizing verbal assaults from Trump, who knows where he can lead us.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention Maurice Stallard and Vickie Lee Jones, two black people in their 60s in a Kroger supermarket in Kentucky by a white guy looking for black people to kill. As a sign of the times, nobody paid much attention to this shooting spree while there was a bomber on the loose. It seemed to get noticed only after the synagogue carnage.

It is particularly instructive to note a few of the players who have been silent in the face of Trump’s extremism and the violence it has spawned.ĚýRemember Steve Scalise, a right-wing Republican congressional leader who was almost killed in a violent hate-inspired hail of gunfire a little over a year ago? Not a single uplifting peep from him about hate-inspired pipe bombs or gun violence at a synagogue or grocery store.ĚýWhen Scalise was shot, House Speaker Paul Ryan rose to rhetorical heights to us all that an “attack on one of us is an attack on all of us.” He must have used up all of his moral energy on that one — now silence on the bombs and killings.

Even the always outraged Benjamin Netanyahu his morally-confused message to the mix — rightfully expressing his outrage at an anti-Semitic attack at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, while failing to even mention Trump’s thinly veiled anti-Semitic “nationalist” and “America First” embrace as a potential proximate cause of the violence.ĚýIt is bad enough when Trump’s Republican stooges allow his daily racial, ethnic, and religious slurs to go unchallenged. That has come to be expected. But when a major Jewish leader keeps silent after an anti-Semitic attack about the anti-Semitic rhetoric in our midst, it only deepens the wound to the moral fiber of our nation.

So, I am afraid that we are back again toĚý“enough.” If you had not reached that point a couple of weeks ago, and you are not there yet, it is probably time for you to slink back into your cave or add another automatic weapon to your arsenal.ĚýFor the rest of us, the time has to be now.

The challenge for each of us who harbors a fundamental belief in a common humanity and who embraces a sense of community is to act before it is too late to act, before tragedy again stains America’s soul. When Trump dehumanizes elements of our society and seeks to marginalize “others,” there are those in our midst who hear a license to eliminate that which they are told to fear. The silence of so many and the media’s incoherent and profit-based response only magnify the threat.

There is nothing new about dehumanizing rhetoric in America’s political history, nor in the history of most nations. However, and this is really important, when the volume of dehumanizing rhetoric goes up in a society and comes from the top to sow fear and doubt, only bad things happen.ĚýAmerica is on a precipice with no sign of a collective retreat from that precipice.ĚýThis leaves all who live among us who are intentionally marginalized in grave danger.ĚýAn immediate and unequivocal response is even more critical in a nation with a heavily-armed populace in which there have over 47,000 documented gun incidents in 2018, resulting in almost 12,000 deaths.

Maybe Netanyahu couldn’t say it, but I can: Trump has empowered racists, anti-Semites, white nationalists, America firsters and the other hateful human garbage that pollutes our world.ĚýThere will be more tragedy, and there will be more blood on his hands.

“ENOUGH”Ěý— vote, march, make the silent uncomfortable and resist.

*[A version of this article was also featured on the author’s , Hard Left Turn.]

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

The post Has America Had Enough? appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

In Silicon Valley, the sun is shining and it does not seem as if the US midterm elections are taking place. This author meets few people who discuss or care much about politics or the elections. In this post-truth world created by social media, some still have the hubris to declare that their app is the best way to change the world. In their view, politics is too messy and it is a waste of time to meddle with intractable problems involving the government.

In other parts of the US, the elections have a more real feel. has declared the battle for Congress to be close. analyzes five possible scenarios for Election Day. In his analysis of the election, Jon Sopel of the declares that the midterm elections “are ALL about Donald Trump.” Sopel has a point. With the bully pulpit of the White House at his disposal, Air Force One to ferry him around and 55 million followers on Twitter, President Trump is proving to be a formidable and an indefatigable campaigner.

Historically, sitting presidents suffer in midterm elections. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama found their wings clipped after Americans placed their opponents in the US Congress. indicate that this pattern might be repeated and Democrats might regain control of the House of Representatives, if not the Senate. Pundits opine that the “” of a record number of women candidates might sweep aside a president with a reputation for racism and misogyny. Yet they might be missing two key facts.Ěý

FACT ONE: “THE ECONOMY, STUPID”

The “dark genius” James Carville coined the phrase, “” in the 1992 presidential campaign in which unheralded Bill Clinton dethroned George H.W. Bush. The elder Bush was by far the more qualified candidate, but maverick candidate Ross Perot and an economic downturn brought his downfall. In 2018, Carville’s slogan still holds true.

Culturally, America is one of the most capitalist societies on the planet. Not only years of indoctrination courtesy the Cold War, but also the structure of its economy make it uniquely consumerist, materialist and exceedingly capitalist. The US has no National Health Service à la its Anglo-Saxon mother ship, the UK. Decent health care is tied to one’s job. College fees remain frighteningly high. Childcare is prohibitively expensive.

Cash is truly king in the US and even dating apps are no exception. Premium members, who pay to play, can swipe till the cows come home, while freeloaders suffer a rationing of choices. An Arab friend, who wishes to remain unnamed, remarked aptly, “In Amreeka, everything is for sale.” So, money matters immensely in the land of the free and the home of the brave because Americans cannot lean on the state, the community or the family as in other parts of the world. And Trump has cut taxes, leaving families with more money in their pockets.

Furthermore, the American economy is humming along quite nicely. Trump can make the argument that solid growth, good job figures, rising consumer confidence, booming stock markets and huge pools of capital flocking into the US are making America great again. When Americans get around to casting their ballots on November 6, they might worry that voting for the Democrats might jeopardize if not derail a flourishing economy. Therefore, they might tell pollsters one thing, but end up doing another. “The economy, stupid” brought Clinton to power. Soon, we will know if it will help Trump retain his hold on power.

FACT TWO: THOSE PESKY IMMIGRANTS

The US is an immigrant society. Most of the original inhabitants are conveniently dead or in reservations like endangered animals in a zoo. Wave after wave of immigrants, largely from Europe, have come to American shores and, for many, the Statue of Liberty defines the identity of this immigrant nation.

As journalist brilliantly chronicles, fears of immigrants go back all the way to Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Even before the formation of the US, Franklin worried that German immigrants might not assimilate well and strain the social fabric of Pennsylvania. Worries about the Irish, the Jews and, in particular, the Chinese have reared their heads from time to time. In the late 19th century, the shut the door to Chinese immigration, which only opened again during World War II.

Fears of unrestricted immigration run high in the US. Not only Republicans but also Democrats have told this author that such immigration depresses wages in the US. Mexican immigrants do the hardest jobs in the US for a pittance. , Trump’s former chief strategist and son of a blue collar Democrat, points out that this suppresses wages, hurts “the deplorables” and benefits “the party of Davos.” Many find more than an element of truth in Bannon’s argument.

The that is headed from the Guatemala-Mexico border to the Mexico-US one is triggering subliminal fears among millions of Americans. President Trump has responded by sending to the border, an active-duty force comparable in size to the American military contingent in Iraq. This is the first time after the Mexican-American War of 1846-48 that troops are back on the border.

That war ended with the 1848 and “Mexico ceded 55 percent of its territory, including parts of present-day Arizona, California, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, Nevada, and Utah, to the United States.” This time, American troops are on the defense, not offense. Their goal is to save their country from a flood of poor Hispanic immigrants.

Trump played on this fear of mass immigration from south of the border by a clever video that portrays an illegal immigrant smiling with glee and expressing no remorse for killing two policemen. It shows hordes of immigrants streaming toward the US and ends with a rallying cry, “Making America Safe Again!”

WHAT NEXT?

Regardless of how Americans vote in the midterms, the fundamental problems of American society will persist for now. As of now, Democrats are still haunted by the who simply refuse to go away. They have no new ideas on student debt, education, health care, inequality, defense policy and even the environment. An cabal of princelings rules the roost in the party that claims to represent the poor and the oppressed. And hysterical political correctness has become the refuge of its leaders, the vast majority of whom cannot think beyond clichés and sound bites.

On the other side, gun-loving and abortion-opposing Republicans have lost their cojones. Trump has conducted a hostile takeover of the party of free trade and imposed mercantilism on it. He has hugged the Saudis ever closer, damned Iran and castigated the European Union. So far, there has been no pushback from the Grand Old Party of virtuous family values to any of Trump’s actions that militate against its long-cherished values.

In 2018, both parties have lost their souls. In the long run, it does not matter who wins the battle for Congress. The midterm elections are just yet another battle in a long-drawn-out war between rival values, visions and interests for America’s soul. The haves and have-nots, creditors and debtors, the secular and the religious, the urban and the rural, and so on and so forth are no longer speaking with each other. People increasingly live in echo chambers and are intolerant of those they disagree with. The common bonds that civilize society and enable democracy are frayed. Only reasoned discourse, not frenzied demagoguery, will reknit these bonds and end the bitter war for America’s soul.

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

The post Midterm Elections 2018: The War for America’s Soul appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

In today’s America, we seem to come face-to-face with some politician’s horse’s ass moment on an almost daily basis.ĚýBut Republican Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona moved into horse’s ass hall of fame territory after initially trying to sound like a man of principle in the thoroughly unprincipled spectacle that eventually resulted in the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh for a seat on the US Supreme Court.

Flake’s big play began with his public announcement of support for the confirmation of Kavanaugh.ĚýThen, apparently his conscience caught up with the rest of him, and in no time flat, he was announcing that there wasn’t sufficient information for him or the US Senate to make an informed determination.ĚýIf you’re confused by this, imagine how confusing it must have been to the old white male Republican boy’s club that was already lining up the kegs for a big confirmation celebration.

Somewhere on the path to confirmation, Flake seemed to have had a principled moment. His initial support was seemingly up for grabs because he had miraculously found some doubt about Kavanaugh’s suitability for confirmation to a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land.ĚýFlake’s answer was a one-week FBI investigation into the veracity of Kavanaugh’s vociferous denials of sexual misconduct allegations and a general pattern of hard-party drinking and misogyny in high school and college.

Thankfully, Flake couldn’t resist the opportunity to tell an adoring nation what a terrific guy he is.ĚýA scant two days after his shining moment of principle, Flake showed us all what a true moral midget he is and always has been.ĚýHe appeared in a televised interview on 60 Minutes, a popular nationwide news show.ĚýAfter the interviewer noted that Flake was not running for re-election, he was asked whether he could have taken his seemingly principled stand if he were running for re-election. Flake’s was an unwavering: “No, not a chance.”

So much for profiles in courage.ĚýLet’s get this absolutely straight — Flake would have kept his mouth shut and willingly confirmed a nominee for the Supreme Court about whom he apparently had suitability doubts simply to satisfy his personal craving for re-election.

America is adrift in large part because the nation’s “leaders” don’t stand for much of anything but themselves.ĚýIt seems that whatever moral compass may have previously guided some elements of public life has been turned off.ĚýSelf-interest is the rule of the day.ĚýWant to get re-elected? Want to get confirmed? Want to make some money on public service? Make sure you are ready and willing to sell your soul.

This phenomenon is bipartisan.ĚýTo illustrate, take a look at the Obamas, who have seemingly taken a big page from the Clinton family finance playbook:Ěý“When they go low, we go for the money.”ĚýIf you are wondering where Barack Obama has been hiding the moral might of his soaring rhetoric, he has been very busy signing a huge book deal, filling his foundation coffers and hanging out with stars. Meanwhile, Michelle Obama has been busy crafting her moral message for sale to anyone who can afford a ticket to her , hawking a book for which she is already being ridiculously compensated.

The point here is that our leaders seem prepared to go high only until their self-interest takes them low.ĚýThat horse’s ass hall of fame is already full to the brim.ĚýEven so, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Nancy Pelosi, Scott Pruitt, Trump and Mike Pence head an entering class that is likely to be of unparalleled size and diversity.ĚýThe situation is so bad that Judge Roy Moore, Kanye West and Sarah Huckabee Sanders are unlikely to make the cut.

There is seemingly no collective national exit strategy from this mire and muck, no surge of outrage, no vision to tap the vein of discontent.ĚýIt seems that those who seek to lead hardly ever end up actually leading their constituents to a better place. Conflicts of interest have become the norm.ĚýPolitical payoffs are a currency without consequence.

I desperately want to be proved wrong, to see a wave ofĚý“enough”Ěýinundate those who seek power without conscience.ĚýI will believe in a new dawning when African-Americans and Latinos vote “enough,” when young people not only shout “enough” but actually vote “enough,” when activist women somehow convince complacent white women that simply being empowered is not “enough.” Even men, including those who feel threatened by everything they see around them, will have to put down their guns and testosterone long enough to find a real strength, the strength to add their voices to the chorus of “enough.”

2018 Midterm Election

Those who think this upcoming midterm election doesn’t matter enough to vote should be limited to those who think they have already won: the wealthy, under-regulated and unregulated corporations and financial institutions, the health care and drug industry, the weapons industry, the gun nuts and those feeling more comfortable with their own racism, to name a few.

The rest of us should be running to the polls to end the Republican Party blight on our body politic.ĚýI do not want to wake up on November 7 (the day after the election) to hear about low voter turnout, voter suppression, mixed messages, flawed polls and the like.ĚýWhat little is left of America’s mostly delusional greatness cannot make it to 2020 without those who have had enough, actually voting “enough.”

I do want to wake up on November 7 with Trump on the run, McConnell powerless to destroy more of the nation’s moral fiber and Ryan neutered.ĚýI want to see a Democratic Party determined to find new leadership.ĚýThen, I want to see a serious legislative agenda from a new Democratic speaker of the house outlining measures to address the nation’s health care needs, educational deficits and infrastructure requirements.ĚýAnd, a well-developed plan to find out what has gone so wrong so fast in the last couple of years and what can be done about it.

Finally, when I have a minute, I plan to write a note to retiring Senator Flake thanking him for sharing his personal profile in perfidy.ĚýBy his shining example, Flake has shown us how far we have to go to make things better.

*[A version of this article was cross-posted on the author’s , Hard Left Turn. Updated: October 24, 2018.]

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

The post Midterm Election: A Mirage of Principle appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

I happen to like to listen to country music, Christian preaching, evangelical problem-solving and right-wing radio. So, I had a lot to listen to on my recent solo car and camping journey through West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and southwest Virginia.ĚýEvery once in a while I hit the button for NPR, but that was just to make sure that I could still reach a part of the American dream that didn’t have anything to do with hard living and heartache, redemption, accepting anyone in my life or Benghazi.

This journey brought into further focus something that has been on my mind for quite some time, even predating the ascent of Trump to his self-delusional throne. Each of the states that I visited (southwest Virginia is an extension of West Virginia) is among the poorest states in America by a variety of .ĚýWest Virginia could get off a list for its natural beauty, Kentucky for its bourbon, and Tennessee for its country music.ĚýBut if we’re talking poverty, we are talking these three states.

In the last presidential , Tennessee supported Trump by a whopping 26% over Hillary Clinton, Kentucky by an even more whopping 30% and West Virginia by an incredible 42%. These days, all three of these states predictably vote Republican, particularly in presidential elections, but those margins are ridiculous.ĚýIn , all three supported Mitt Romney over Barack Obama by large margins, but West Virginia was the largest margin at 26%, with Kentucky at 23% and Tennessee practically blue at 20%.

All three states have Republican governors and heavily Republican-majority . While you probably see where I am going with this, it makes it no less a mystery why so many with so little would overwhelmingly support a wealthy, narcissistic, snake oil salesman from New York for president and continue to elect Republicans to state office when those officeholdersĚýhave consistently failed to deliver meaningful health care, quality education and fundamental 21st-century infrastructure.

Observing

This trip did not resolve the mystery, but it brought some clarity to the factors that seem to drive the folks in these states and others in the South and Midwest over the cliff and into the Republican pit.

But let me be clear about one thing: There is a palpable sense of rural poverty and infrastructure collapse in all three of the states I traversed.ĚýHousing is often subsistence at best, small towns are more ghost towns than community centers and overweight people abound, many smoking their way to an early death. Three industries seem to be flourishing: the tattoo industry, the tobacco products industry and the gun industry.

While much of this dreary landscape is nearly everywhere, it is dotted by pockets of wealth — from the new housing and shopping centers in suburban West Virginia, to the horse farms of Kentucky, to the commercial vibrancy of Nashville in Tennessee. Even so, most of the accessible commercial options are a heady mix of fast food restaurants, gas station food marts and a big box store or two.ĚýOn what is left of small town Main Streets, there may be an open diner, a small bank branch and a liquor store.

So, what is going on here?

At the most basic level, it can’t really be explained by simple reference to a longing for a century past and for a fundamentalist morality that seems threatened by outsiders. People who don’t have much should be seeking ways to ensure a better life for themselves and their families.ĚýYet they aren’t clamoring for universal access to meaningful health care, increased budgets for education, access to higher education and affordable housing connected to paved roads?ĚýInstead, they want to build a wall to keep out Mexicans, ensure universal access to guns and seem unmoved to confront the economic inequality that always leaves them further behind.

I have a sense that this part of America is in a collective coma that has overwhelmed a collective conscience.ĚýWhat should be simply isn’t.ĚýThere should be at the least a slow awakening to a changed and changing world, but there aren’t many signs of that.ĚýThere should be an evolving majority moral compass adjusting to the realities of community diversity, but there aren’t many signs of this either.ĚýIf nothing else, there should be a collective drive to learn, to shrug off the ravages of ignorance, but there isn’t.

Look at Health Care

It may be easy to dismiss my observations as those of a holier-than-thou elitist lacking the insight to understand people who have made different choices than mine.ĚýHowever, I went on my journey to try to learn, not as some academic exercise, but to try to work on a message that will resonate with people whose motivations I question.

There is good reason for those who don’t have much to distrust those who do.ĚýBut they should also distrust those whose messages have repeatedly failed them: Republican politicians, the Christian and evangelical preachers and panderers, and the right-wing purveyors of doom who so glibly spew unsubstantiated venom.ĚýThese seemingly ever-present forces in their midst are the drivers of polarization and serve to obscure what should be common cause.

If you doubt this, focus on access to meaningful health care.ĚýI have that access, but care deeply that others do not.ĚýThose Republican politicians, preachers and right-wing pundits also have that access, but don’t give a damn whether others do or not.ĚýWorse yet, they have united to demonize those who do care and to undermine institutional efforts to extend access to those most in need.ĚýTherefore, it is left to those advocating a progressive agenda to find common cause with the mother in Appalachia without access seeking health care for a child suffering from treatable illness.

I will promote and vote for that progressive agenda. If she votes, likely she will not.ĚýSomehow, I have to help hone a message that will not only convince her to vote, but to vote for people like me.

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

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

The post Some Parts of America Are in a Collective Coma appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

At the end of a bad week in court for the White House, The New York Times the quandary of Republicans facing re-election in November’s midterm elections with the headline, “Republicans Urge Embattled Incumbents to Speak Out on Trump.” The US has always encouraged its citizens to speak out. Isn’t it ironic that politicians, of all people, would have to be urged to do so for their own good?

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Speaking out:

Framing the expression of one’s self-interest as a compelling demonstration of moral probity by attacking vulnerable opponents who might, after a little persuasion, be perceived as more impugned and corrupt than oneselfĚý

Contextual note

When citing the of the United States to compare them with those of other countries, the notion of “speaking out” or “speaking up” always . Americans are encouraged to “speak their mind,” “tell it like it is,” “be outspoken,” “let their voice be heard,” “have their say,” “sound off,” “make their point” and — in the interest of assertiveness, the key to everyone’s success — “not hold back.” The Chinese and Japanese, by way of contrast, seek harmony (absence of conflict) and are careful to save face even when debating. They try to avoid demonstrating their disagreement even when they do disagree, a trait that traditionally led Americans to call Asians “inscrutable.”

Representative Tom Cole, a former House Republican campaign chairman, didn’t hold back and spoke out (kind of) against Donald Trump: “Where there’s smoke, and there’s a lot of smoke, there may well be fire.” What better way to persuade one’s audience of the logic of one’s complaint than rolling out a cliché? But a more appropriate cliché with smoke would be “smoking gun,” which the evidence in the court cases against Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen is beginning to smell — if not look — like.

And indeed, where smoke is the issue, guns can’t be far behind. This is America, after all. A few paragraphs later Cole speaks up again, offering yet another cliché: “[M]y advice to any candidate would be: Keep your powder dry and don’t rush to attack or defend anybody because you just don’t know enough to have a reaction that you can still defend three months from now.”

There is one American who never stops speaking out, especially after receiving his “intelligence” from Fox News. Reacting to President Trump’s latest tweet promising to save white South African farmers from expropriation, a white South African farmer , “We don’t love Donald Trump and his outspokenness.”

Historical note

We learn in the same article that “Democrats face their own pressure to shed their cautious midterm strategy.” On cue, one progressive Democrat, Ammar Campa-Najjar, spoke up in these terms: “The division, chaos and corruption in Washington has gone too far.” Democrats are being encouraged to identify Trump with a “culture of corruption.”

Now, why — we should ask ourselves — would the Democrats have been timid about doing so? The answer lies in recent history, and nowhere more obviously than in the 2016 election that put Trump in the White House.

Bernie Sanders, an independent consistently allied with the Democrats and seeking the party’s nomination, opposed Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment on the grounds that the entire system was corrupt, including Clinton (doing the bidding of Wall Street) and the Democratic National Committee (doing the bidding of Clinton). There was enough evidence of at least “soft corruption” to convince a lot of otherwise Democratic voters not to vote for Clinton, paving the way for the election of a corrupt businessman who claimed to be above corruption because he was independently wealthy.

The Democratic Party has been living with this image problem ever since. It depends on corporate money — a certain source of corruption — just to stay in the game. The electorate finally understood that and is unlikely to forget. Highlighting corruption could thus be less a smoking gun for Democrats than an explosive boomerang.

In an extraordinary display of journalistic blindness, the author of The Times article cites Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi as spokespersons against corruption. Pelosi described the Trump White House as “a cesspool of self-enrichment, secret money and ethical blindness.”

Emanuel and Pelosi are household names, but not because of their association with moral purity. Chicago, under Emanuel, has been identified in a serious as “the most corrupt city” in America. Pelosi has on the stock market in circumstances related to the passage of legislation she promoted, where the drift of smoke is strong enough to hint at the existence of a gun with a warm barrel. And as the ideologue of the party the most committed to capitalism as a of belief and belonging, Pelosi’s smoke smells a lot like the brand of incense favored by her cult: the church of self-enrichment.

*[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, , 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.]

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

The post The Daily Devil’s Dictionary: “Speaking Out” on Trump appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

The New York Times, like many , picked up an Associated Press story about the Republican primary race for governor of Kansas, featuring a high-profile Republican, Kris Kobach. Not only did The Times pick it up, it also got extra mileage out of it by running the same story with two datelines, first on in the run-up to the vote, then again on after Kobach’s victory in the primary.

The article focuses on the image of Kobach as a tough guy, highlighted by the title, “Kobach’s Take-No-Prisoners Style at Forefront in Kansas Race.” It turns into a rambling biography of the man that, as we shall see, curiously skirts the key factor in Kobach’s national fame, where we learn, in two separated paragraphs, that his defining issue has something to do with his obsession with voter fraud.

In one paragraph we are told, “And many election experts say voter fraud is extremely rare.” Then we jump to another paragraph: “But many GOP leaders across the country agree with him that it is rampant and requires tough ID laws.” So, is it “extremely rare” or “rampant”? Alas, the article never really gets to that point.

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Rampant:

Barely existing, existing just enough for politicians to claim combating whatever it is to be a priority

Contextual note

If ever proof was needed to show why being content with what The New York Times and other “newspapers of reference” publish can be dangerous for one’s political intelligence, this one should seal the case. And if ever proof was required for the need to consult independent publications such as 51łÔąĎ, this example should remove all doubt.

An attentive reader would have recognized that the article originally came from an AP feed, meaning it was not original reporting by The New York Times. The Associated Press is a dependable news agency. But presumably The Times editors are aware of major issues in the news, and Kobach himself is an issue not just because of his “take-no-prisoners” attitude, but because of his deep involvement in voter suppression. The Times may have forgotten from less than two months ago: “Federal Judge Strikes Down Kansas Proof Of Citizenship Law. The judge said the law championed by the Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach violated federal law and the 14th Amendment.”

The New York Times and AP should also know about the work of who, since 2000, has done in-depth investigation of voter fraud but whose reporting is only published by The Guardian, the BBC and Rolling Stone. He has uncovered the existence and examined the functioning of Kobach’s infamous Crosscheck program, which in 2017 “gets it wrong over 99 percent of the time.” But unlike Palast, The Post cites a few states that have rejected Crosscheck, but it doesn’t bother to look at how the many states that haven’t rejected are using it to purge minority voters.

This week’s AP article never even alludes to the major scandal that Crosscheck represents as documented by Palast in this article in . Instead, it makes this mild assessment of Kobach’s initiatives: “Kobach’s voter ID efforts have taken some recent hits, though. In June, a federal judge found the Kansas law unconstitutional. And the commission found no evidence to support [Donald] Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election.”

Historical note

Voter suppression and other forms of manipulation (such as phantom ballots) have been a staple of US democracy, at least since the days. In investigating the way Crosscheck plays out, Palast describes how easy it is for states to weed out minority voters and prevent them from voting, not because they were guilty of “double voting,” but because they didn’t know how to respond to the requirement to prove that they weren’t another person with the same name in another state.

Palast writes: “The Virginia list was a revelation. In all, 342,556 names were listed as apparently registered to vote in both Virginia and another state as of January 2014. Thirteen percent of the people on the Crosscheck list, already flagged as inactive voters, were almost immediately removed, meaning a stunning 41,637 names were “canceled” from voter rolls, most of them just before Election Day.”

The , in early 2016, informed us that the US had, as reported by , the “worst elections of any long-established democracy.” The truly “rampant” trends we’ve seen recently, which correlate strongly with the semi-official racism of the Trump administration, are the exclusion of minorities thanks to practices exemplified by the brainchild of the Crosscheck system.

In November 2018, all eyes will be on Kris Kobach in Kansas (can we abbreviate that as KKK?), who all alone symbolizes a deeply corrupt and racist electoral system.

*[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, , 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.]

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

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I have been thinking a lot lately about the state of the states in America. For now, the nation is stuck with a Constitution that created a federation of states with a central federal government of limited powers. While this Constitution has been subject to interpretation for well over two centuries, one glaring divide continues to split the nation.

There are states in the land in which the predominate view is that limited government at all levels, but particularly the federal level, is the intended constitutional model (red states), and other states that recognize the strong role that government at all levels can play in ensuring a better life for its citizens (blue states).

Both groups say they revere the same Constitution, but fight like hell to secure their favored model.ĚýI have had enough of this.ĚýIt is time to move on.ĚýIt is way past time to permit those who choose to live in red states to have it their way, but to do so without the federal influence and resources they claim they can live without.

In the short term, this will mean that some folks now living in red states who care about things like the quality of public education, access to meaningful health care, the quality of the air they breathe, the water they drink and the roads they travel will suffer. These good people will soon begin to move to blue states, further diminishing the quality of life for those remaining in red states.ĚýFurther, the reduced demand for federal resources and services from the newly “free” red states will provide a windfall for blue states seeking to cooperate with the federal government to meet collective needs.

This should make both Republicans and Democrats happy. Republicans can assure their constituents that they have finally succeeded in freeing their red states from the yoke of federal tyranny, while singing the praises of the future economic and social growth to come from unfettered capitalism and little or no taxes.ĚýMeanwhile, the Democrats will be able to talk freely to their constituents about a cooperative federal, state and local government effort to improve schools, provide meaningful health care, improve public transportation, promote greater access to higher education, and ensure cleaner air and better water.ĚýThey might even be able to sprinkle their speeches with “democratic socialism.”

At the federal level, Congress will have to adapt a bit. I propose they have separate red state and blue state legislative days. Everything should pass.ĚýIf you want a 19th-century abortion law that will apply only in red states, you pass it on a red state legislative day with the full support of the blue state congressmen who are proud of the strong reproductive rights in blue states.ĚýThis is done in exchange for red state cooperation on other issues on blue state legislative days, like expanded Medicaid access in blue states.

The beauty of this plan is that no one has to vote for anything that their constituents oppose that will have any impact on their actual constituents.ĚýThink about gun control.ĚýEach red state can fight with other red states to make that state the best magnet for the nation’s gun nuts, ensuring that every man woman and child is backed up by a psychopath with a gun.ĚýMeanwhile, in the blue states, now rid of the gun nuts who have flocked to the red states, hunters can hunt in peace and children can go to school without fear.

Meanwhile, the president of the United States, now free of the “united” part, can openly talk out of both sides of his/her mouth depending on the issue and the location of the listeners. Like Congress, the Supreme Court can have separate red dockets and blue dockets, where the Constitution is interpreted to meet local political and social realities.

Had enough yet?ĚýThen think about how much of this scenario is true already. This plan simply accepts much of today’s reality and gives it a path forward by institutionalizing it and encouraging citizens (and immigrants) to choose where they prefer to live and work.

A review of public school spending per student by each state is . Twelve of the top 13 states plus the District of Columbia (Alaska is the outlier) in spending per student are considered to be blue states.ĚýThe bottom 12 states in spending per student are considered to be red states, if you include Nevada as a red state. So, if you are thinking about sending your kids to public school, which would be better: a state with high expenditures per student or a state that spends what little it has on a “bibles-with-breakfast” program?

If you are concerned about taxes, you could check this out and make up your mind based on how much you are willing to spend to educate your child and then move accordingly.ĚýYou get bonus points if you take into account that whatever federal funding is available to red states will be eliminated and available to blue states in order to free red state public education from immoral, atheistic and communist control.

Spur Debate in America

While this simplistic analysis is rife with generalizations, there is enough of a kernel of truth to at least spur debate.ĚýRight now, political paralysis is undermining meaningful governance at every level. Public institutions cannot meet public needs even where there is a consensus that government is the key component to a successful outcome.ĚýRed state interests are so keen to prove that government cannot work that they will stop at nothing to ensure an unsuccessful outcome everywhere.

There should be no expectation that simply accepting the red state/blue state divide will result in a modern-day above-ground railroad moving the poor and educated to the north, nor a pick-up truck parade headed south full of folks seeking a life anchored in the 19th century.ĚýRather, it could be hoped that by accepting reality, America’s political institutions can be moved to permit the creation of dynamic pockets of progress.

If this can happen even on a small scale, the nation’s still-existing “freedom of movement” will allow more people to enjoy the benefits of progressive and enlightened public policy initiatives.

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

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

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Recent “breaking news” coverage of the Mueller investigation of Trump and his cabal and everything Stormy leaves the impression that lawyers of every stripe have their tentacles in all aspects of the sordid Trump drama. And just when you tire of legal insight from actual lawyers, up pop the non-lawyers to offer their “legal” insight, including the almost daily fountain of lies from the White House Press Office and the occasional “legal” tidbit from Trump himself.

Next up is the Zuckerberg performance before Congress. Three things were abundantly clear: 1) Mark Zuckerberg listened to his wife and got a suit to wear; 2) Zuckerberg listened to real lawyers about never admitting anything of legal import after you apologize for being a way too trusting type of guy; and 3) virtually none of the senators and representatives took the time to learn anything from their tech-savvy staffers before embarrassing themselves in front of the cameras.

As if this isn’t enough, the speaker of the House of Representatives has decided not to run for re-election so he can spend more time with the family he says he has neglected because he cared so much about us.ĚýThis is the same guy who led the charge against access to meaningful health care for millions of other people’s family members and designed a massive corporate tax cut that largely favors wealthy individuals at the expense of the infrastructure, health care and education investments so critical to the rest of us. I guess he values his family a lot, but doesn’t want to waste any more of his time making life “better” for other people’s families.

Oh, and just to complete the picture, there is the rogues gallery of cabinet officials who seem to believe that America is so lucky to have each of them on the job that we should overlook their ethical shortcomings.ĚýWith Scott Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency at the head of the class, there is a cascading sense that even Trump can’t believe that his swamp is filled with so many petty thieves who only serve themselves while shinning a bright light on Trump’s ethical void.

There is a common thread in all of this depressing imagery — the morally blank stare from venal “leaders” as they fleece a nation unwilling to gather itself to collectively demand something better.

Americans seem unable to perceive the peril to the vitality of the nation as a whole. But, at the least, they ought to be able to understand that the public institutions at the core of the nation’s governance are under attack and failing. Meanwhile, as the Facebook saga indicates, corporate behemoths rise to fight for themselves with neither regard for, nor interest in, the public good.

So we are adrift with no life raft in sight.ĚýTrump will fall before long, but already weakened public institutions will be slow to respond to calm the storm.ĚýPracticed political paralysis is likely to ensure an uneven response at best and a dangerous drift to violence at worst. Those looking to find solace in Mike Pence will find a moral midget enthralled with his own rapturous glow.

With key players already lawyered up and a public dumbing itself down by feeding on lies and false narratives, it is hard to see how this ends well. I have been among those suggesting the likelihood that Americans will awaken only when the nation hits some unspecified rock bottom. I now think that we have hit that bottom, so this would a mighty fine time to collectively smarten up. There isn’t enough time to educate too many more folks, nor is there a collective willingness to be educated.

Even the public spectacle of the fired former FBI director, James Comey, engaged in a personal food fight with Trump doesn’t seem to have awakened those who have remained silent for so long.ĚýThis is in part because Trump tweets and the press chirps, each avoiding seriously confronting the significant conclusions that Comey has reached.ĚýAs a former high-level public servant, a Republican and a lawyer trained to collect and analyze evidence, his willingness to provide public testimony has put on the record what so many others are too cowardly to say: The president of the United States is and a pathological liar who is corrupting the very institutions he is charged with managing.

Wake Up, America

So, the present challenge is how to awaken the nation from its dumbed down slumber and quickly galvanize an awakened populace to forcefully respond. Normally this takes leadership, but I can’t find any.

The most hopeful sign that I see is a growing awareness among progressive activists that this time around it is time to put our litmus tests on hold and find candidates who say they are Democrats and can win in the coming November elections. Democratic Party control of the Congress is not a choice any longer; it is an imperative.

It can only be hoped that women of conscience will continue to express their fear and loathing of the Republican agenda in general and Trump in particular.ĚýWhatever it takes, these women must lead the march to the polls.

Meanwhile, the kids from Parkland and the movement they have birthed can’t take a summer vacation.ĚýEvery day, in every way they can, they and their young allies must work hard on voter registration of the many young lives that matter in every state in the nation, but with a clear and well-organized focus on districts with vulnerable Republican Party representatives.ĚýThen, through astute use of social media, they have to deliver those votes, their parent’s votes, and the votes of the millennials who have been galvanized by their younger brethren.

If somehow the women lead and the kids vote, there should be enough additional caring men and still-committed baby boomers to sweep the trash out of Washington this November.ĚýI, for one, will happily volunteer to help remove the resulting sewage from Washington’s beloved Potomac River.

*[A version of this article was also featured on the author’s blog, .]

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

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In the wake of the Senate’s vote on tax reform, Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, a key member of the Senate Finance Committee, for abolishing the estate tax, which is currently applied to personal wealth valued at more than $5.5 million. “I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing, as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.”

Grassley appears to have studied in great detail the daily activities of the rich and the poor,Ěýan admirable accomplishment, worthy of our finest sociologists.

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Investing:

A common activity of people who discover they still have money in the bank even after spending it on conspicuous consumption, lavish celebrations of their own egos and various forms of self-indulgence, who then find it convenient and amusing to speculate on other ways to effortlessly increase their wealth.

Contextual note

The first thing to understand is that the current version of the tax only applies to the value of the estate in excess of $5.5 million and twice that for married couples. This means that if a deceased individual’s estate is valued at $6 million, the tax is applied only to the $500,000 over and above $5.5 million. The new tax bill doubles the amount that remains tax-free — $11 million for an individual, $22 million for a couple. The House’s version will eliminate it entirely in 2024. There are, of course, numerous means of distributing one’s estate to family before dying to ensure that no tax will be paid. That’s what lawyers and accountants are paid to do.

That being true, Grassley would have a more convincing argument if he were to point out that the elimination of the state tax served a truly noble purpose by eliminating the need to hire lawyers to dodge the estate tax. After all, lawyers — who generally have no problem paying their own rent and electricity bills or sending their children to college — are the most likely class of people to spend their pennies “on booze or women or movies.”

And the logical conclusion would be that the money saved on lawyers and accountants could be fruitfully invested. For example, in a private plane, yacht or beach home. Or by simply placing it in a tax haven, which they’ve probably already done anyway, on the advice of their lawyers and financial counselors.

Historical note

The marketing wizards in the Republican Party, who insisted on calling the estate tax the “death tax,” know that death is the one thing all Americans are frightened of, since they all share the same wild hope of becoming both rich and immortal. That’s what drives the American dream. For ages, Americans have been told that the only things that are inevitable are “death and taxes.” But since all obstacles can be overcome in America’s “can-do” culture, the determination to fight the inevitable remains fierce. Thus, the cult of youth, the permanent repression of thoughts of death, the invention of techniques promising to abolish or at least postpone it (cryonics), and the belief that taxes represent nothing more than the immoral incursion of an invasive government in the lives of honest people.

The estate tax has been in effect since 1916 and has been under attack since the Reagan administration in the 1980s, when “trickle-down” economics became the unofficial ideology of the government and both major political parties. Grassley has expressed an extreme form of trickle-down theory, where the last thing that trickles out is the direct result of the booze consumed. But various prominent wealthy and super-wealthy people have not only found strong reasons to oppose abolishing the estate tax — they have even militated to reinforce it.

In 2012, on the initiative of “a group of wealthy Americans.” One of them, Abigail Disney, “a philanthropist and filmmaker and heir to the Disney fortune,” offered this line of thought: “We have the choice of taxing a small percentage of the wealthiest who certainly can afford it, or we can cut social programs for those who need them.”

In the combat of reasoning between Grassley and Disney, Grassley’s side has prevailed. If there is no bread for the people, let the rich invest in cake.

*[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,Ěý, 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.]

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

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The post The Daily Devil’s Dictionary: “Investing” in Cake appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

Recently, President Barack Obama that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Grand Old Party (GOP) figured out something very important during the Obama presidency: Most Americans either don’t know or don’t care about the nuance of how government works. “And the problem is, is that the general public is not following the intricacies of the legislature and they’re not interested in who’s to blame, they just want to see stuff done. And the one guy they know is the President of the United States, so if things don’t get done, that can advantage the politics of the other party.”

Americans know that the president is in charge of the government, and so if they are told that the government is not working, and they don’t see it working, it must be the president’s fault.

This is how the Republican Party survived—and actually thrived—through  eight years of obstructionism in Congress. By blocking nominations, budgets, and legislation—much of which that would have actually helped their own constituents, and some of which Trump —the GOP was able to convince enough Americans that the resulting ineffective governance was Obama’s fault all along. He is the president, after all, and he is responsible for getting things done.

Republicans were able to ignore a Supreme Court nominee for eight months, along with , without any electoral punishment—and they knew they could do it, because not enough Americans concern themselves with esoteric notions like structural democracy.

The In-PartyĚýGame

Now, Donald Trump is showing the next phase of this strategy: pure theater. First, Trump claimed credit for keeping a Ford plant in the US that or relocation. Now, he claims to be , which actually amounts to a state tax break deal from the governor of Indiana—soon-to-be Vice President Mike Pence—and still allows for jobs to be shipped to Mexico.

But most Americans don’t read beyond these headlines. They don’t understand or care about the details, such as an incoming president’s legal inability to unilaterally provide incentives for an individual firm to change their financial decision making. And Trump knows this.

He knows that his tweets and his statements will create headlines that will get tens of millions of views, whereas the resulting fact-checking and counterarguments will merely get thousands of views among his supporters. Further, he and the GOP have already convinced that the “mainstream media”—the ones best positioned to uncover the facts behind his claims—are untrustworthy.

Like a lucky hat during a baseball game, Trump supporters will cling to these superficial displays as the cause of all that is good while overlooking the bad—or likely blame it on Obama. No rigorous investigation of cause-and-effect will take place. And without hold of either the House or the Senate, the Democrats have little ability to even use the Republican’s obstructionist playbook. They have little ability to undermine the empty theatrics of the Trump administration that will echo among his supporters.

The Democrats cannot count on Trump’s scandals or failures to shake his support come 2020. If the president-electĚýkeeps up his smoke and mirrors theater and Americans take them at face value, the next election may actually be more “post-truth” than 2016.

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

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New York, November 9, 2016. Suspense reigns as the last polling stations in Hawaii closed hours ago following one of the most bizarre election campaigns in the history of the United States. At this early hour, the entire world is waiting with bated breath for the final count in Ohio, which will give victory to Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

The Clinton campaign has yet to make a public statement, but Trump decided to break the silence with a surprise announcement that will undoubtedly resonate across the globe. For the first time since declaring his candidacy in 2015, the Republican candidate clarifies his true motivation in running for president.

The text of Donald Trump’s speech delivered on November 9, 2016

The battle is not quite over but let me start off by saying this. We have already achieved our goal. I say that even as they are tallying up the votes in Ohio, the last of three battleground states where the outcome of the election was still in doubt an hour ago. So we still don’t know yet whether our corrupt opponent has succeeded or not in rigging this election. But without waiting any longer I decided to speak out now, accompanied here by my beautiful family—my wife and fantastic children.

Now that the voting is finished, the first thing to understand is that our achievement will never be held in doubt. It’s absolutely huge. And I now want the nation to know the truth about what this means.

Throughout the campaign people asked themselves why Donald Trump—a real estate mogul, a builder, a businessman, fantastic businessman, folks—suddenly decided a year and a half ago to enter the political arena. My detractors said it was ego, narcissism. Others said it was a ploy to develop my brand, implying in the same breath that it was an example of my famed business acumen.

Some corrupt members of the media predicted I would lose badly because I dared to tell the truth. The Washington establishment refuses to hear. Now we know who the losers are. It’s them. They said I would lose by a landslide. But there can be no doubt who the losers are, and in a few minutes you’ll understand why they were so wrong.

We’re still waiting for the final count, but I felt it was time for me to set the record straight and reveal the real reasons I decided to run for president. And believe me, it’s going to surprise you.

But telling the truth is simple, as simple as building a wall, something nobody knows how to do better than me. In fact, if the pundits were really as smart as they think, they should have seen it over a year ago. I thought I made it clear when I said we could make America great again.

The truth is I got into this race because I was worried about the direction the country has taken. A lot of people didn’t believe me or simply denied it, but the fact is America stopped being great years ago. I’ll go further. It even stopped being real. If it isn’t real, how can it be great?

When I got into the race I didn’t know that I would win. Everybody said it was rigged so that Jeb Bush would be nominated alongside Hillary for the Democrats. My mission was to get that message across: “Make America real again.” Walls are real. Towers are real. Nothing is more real than the Trump Tower, the greatest tower since Babylon. But America stopped being real some time ago. To make America great we have to make it real.

As you all know, politics was new to me but I realized that to get to this point—and we’re now on the brink of victory—I had to go through all the motions of a political campaign: the outlandish promises, the wild criticism of the opponent, the manipulation of the media, the barely concealed aggression, the dog whistles, all that crap. That’s what presidential campaigns have always been about.

Now that we are here, I can pull away the curtain and reveal what it was all about. I know a lot of you have been wondering, so it’s time I told you. That’s how negotiation works, as anyone knows who has read the Art of the Deal, the greatest bestselling business book in the history of publishing. You don’t give away your game plan until you get the result.

So what do you need to understand?

Well, I’ll tell you. I played by the rules—the media’s rules—the only ones that count. I did it so that all of you could see that your political parties stand for nothing that’s remotely democratic. They are corrupt, guided by opportunism, by the greed of the elite club their leaders all think they belong to.

The politicians are beholden to whoever provides them with the financial means to win. I’ve been saying it all this time. As a billionaire businessman I knew how the system worked on the inside. I knew that on the outside, public side, everybody lies all the time. So I launched my campaign and respected the rules. I had to lie even more than my opponents.

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It’s obvious now that thanks to this campaign everyone can see that both parties, Republican and Democrat, are now in a total shambles. They’ve no credibility, none! They need to be rebuilt. And whether I win or lose, don’t forget, I’m a builder. I will rebuild both of the parties, build them with a beautiful solid façade like no one has ever seen. Starting with the Republican Party, the party I chose for this campaign.

I could have chosen the Democrats, but Hillary’s camp have been holding a monopoly on that option for at least 10 years. But I’m ready to do it for the Democrats too. I’ll rebuild their party and get them to pay for it. Nobody knows how to build a political party better than me. I can make not only America but also party politics great again.

So here’s the real story, the one I couldn’t reveal until the negotiation we call an election was over.

I did this so that all Americans can start working together, rethinking and rebuilding all our public institutions. They’re all a mess. Everybody, and not just blacks, is living in hell. Our institutions—government, education, the military, you name it—they no longer produce anything that even resembles human reality or responds to human need.

So if nothing is real, what do we see around us?

I’ll tell you. You can see it on this podium: hyper-reality. Yes, we need to understand that hyper-reality—something totally imaginary but based on our past ideas of reality and created and disseminated through the media—has replaced reality in our culture.

Disneyland, Las Vegas, political parties, so-called “reality TV.” We live in a fantasy world where it’s impossible to distinguish between truth and lies because the lies—including the ones I carefully crafted for this campaign—are more believable, more realistic than the truth. Why settle for reality, such a messing thing, when you can have hyper-reality?

So here’s the real story of this campaign. About two years ago I met this French guy in Scotland who told me about this idea of hyper-reality. I liked the idea. It could be turned into a real business opportunity. So I asked around and it turns out there was this other French guy, Pierre Baudrillard, who came up with the idea of hyper-reality and wrote about it. Suddenly I recognized everything that I’d been experiencing all my life. It’s what we were doing on our TV show. It could also be about, who knows, standards for grooming your hair.

So here’s the truth. Listen carefully. I picked up a book by that guy, Pierre Baudrillard, and said to myself we have to do something with this. So I decided to launch my campaign in June 2015. After a long career as a hugely successful businessman—probably the most successful in American history, no one has built as many towers, casinos and golf courses—I wanted to see how I could best serve the country. Isn’t that what a president does? And it was the ideas of Pierre Baudrillard—not Ann Coulter, as some believe—that inspired me.

You remember the launch of my campaign at Trump Tower of course? You know, that time I railed about the fact that Mexicans are rapists and criminals. That was a textbook case of hyper-reality. It set the tone for the whole campaign, it provided the benchmark that all the candidates had to live up to. It meant substituting a totally imaginary idea of reality for the one people see around them every day.

Although I berated them, I really want to thank the press, the media in general for their total complicity. And now, win or lose, millions of electors have provided the final demonstration of Pierre Baudrillard’s thesis. I’m sure that if Pierre were alive today he would be pleased with this proof of his theory, just as Albert Einstein was when astronomers proved the theory of relativity by observing that space is actually curved. You know, when they measured the path of the light behind the gravitational field of the sun during an eclipse? Everybody remembers that.

Finally, I want to congratulate Hillary Clinton for joining me in this effort to educate the nation, along with the indispensable Debbie Wasserman Schultz. By taking the trouble to enact and then reveal, whether it was voluntary or not, how skewed the electoral system is, and how easy it is to rig elections and lead voters astray with imaginary stories of Russian presidents controlling American electoral campaigns, they played a key role in this effort.

And, of course, there was Bernie Sanders who magnanimously accepted to be the sacrificial victim as well as the Pied Piper and without whom none of this would have been visible.

I only wish Pierre were still alive to be present at the inauguration in January. Whoever the eventual winner may be—myself or Hillary—I’m sure Pierre would have appreciated the degree to which the nation has now become aware of the fundamental hyper-reality of our political rituals.

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

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It is time to take a break from the non-stop American media obsession with the detritus of the US presidential election. In the present political environment, children being murdered in Aleppo, Syria, black men being murdered by police officers in Everyplace, USA, and even a massive hurricane have taken a backseat to such things as Donald Trump’s lewd behavior, the past and present dress size of a 1996 Miss Universe contestant, and Trump Foundation shenanigans.

It is time to get really serious about the choice American voters have to make in a few weeks. And it is way past time that the mainstream media and the nuthouse media start putting the country they say they love ahead of their bottom line and their narrow self-interest.

They all know it and now it has to be the consistent message: Donald Trump is unqualified for the position he seeks and his election puts all of us in peril. Being prepared for any job should be a prerequisite; being prepared to be president of the United States in an unstable and unforgiving world cannot be open to question.

“PROTEST VOTES”

As if to underline this proposition, there is in the mix a former Republican governor of New Mexico who is now the who is polling around 10% of the vote in some places. As of a few weeks ago, this clown seemed to think that Aleppo was akin to a dog food; as of a week ago, he couldn’t name a significant living world leader; and as of today, he does not think that climate change is anything that the government should worry about. For some reason, this guy is attractive to some young voters who don’t think that Hillary Clinton will make them happy enough or aren’t informed enough themselves to even recognize that Trump is so woefully uninformed that he could really threaten their good times.

I am a lifelong believer in public protest when issues merit targeted exposure, but protest voting is another thing.ĚýIt is not public, and it isn’t much of a protest. Throwing one’s vote away in protest is a bit like leaving a few fries on the tray in protest at McDonald’s. No one will notice, everyone else is eating theirs, and McDonald’s continues to push calorie laden fast food.

Sometimes, voting with your heart feels good, but this time voting with your head is really important.

In this presidential election, I share with other progressives the deep concerns about foreign policy choices that Clinton will make if elected, and I am not completely convinced that she will fully embrace the progressive policy initiatives . But,Ěýand this is really critical, I have no doubt that she is extremely intelligent, articulate, compassionate and educated about the fundamentals of the issues she will confront on the first day of her presidency.

And,Ěýthis is even more critical, there is no evidence at all that Donald Trump is in any way prepared to protect US interests abroad, to govern domestically, or to promote the public healing that will be required from the first to the last day of his presidency. Further,Ěýand perhaps most damning, there is no evidence to suggest that Trump will make any effort to master the fundamentals necessary to provide a steady hand at the helm of a troubled and extremely dangerous America.

REPUBLICAN PARTY

Regrettably, many Republican Party “leaders” continue to be so driven by hatred toward Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and partisan interests that they still remain silent in the face of this real threat.ĚýTheir intra-party battles have coughed up a candidate who they all should have known from the outset was an inspiration to racists, was anathema to any concept of gender equality, and was woefully unprepared in any way to govern. It seemed like a good joke at the start, but right now no one should be laughing.

The still silent collection of Republican lowlife leadership should for once really serve the country they were elected to serve and say they cherish. Even now, after Trump’s exposure as a serial misogynist with a deep-seated and dangerous pathology, minions of Republican “leaders” still cannot say “enough” and move their political party to the moral high ground they so often bleat about occupying.

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Perhaps no millennial, no Latino and no black American wants to be told what to do by an aging, left-wing, white guy. But here goes anyway in the hope that someone will read this and act on what they have read.

The Republican Party is led by a morally bankrupt collection of profiteering white folks who have somehow convinced a significant segment of downtrodden America that the best way to improve their schools, their health care, their infrastructure and their lives is to let rich guys get richer and then voluntarily share with the rest of us. Every country club in the land has tables full of these guys laughing at the rest of us.

It might have been easier to swallow that a nice rich guy like Mitt Romney would actually get around to the sharing part, but there is not one iota of evidence to suggest that Donald Trump will voluntarily share anything with anybody unless he profits from the exchange.

Trump’s me-first and me-always identity should disgust each and every one of us and unite divided people of all cultures, racial and ethnic backgrounds, and religions to call out Trump and his merry band of the rich and the racist.ĚýThis is a culture war that we all should be able to agree is worth fighting.

VOTE ON NOVEMBER 8, 2016

I have a limited time left to roam this world.ĚýI have had a very good journey that many young people are just beginning. Sane and stable American leadership in my lifetime has gotten it wrong more often than it should have and continues to do so today, but there should be no doubt that a sane and stable American leadership will always be a part of getting it right both at home and abroad.

So, register yourself to vote, urge your friends and family to register, vote on Election Day and make sure that others vote as well.ĚýIf this election is lost to Trump and his ilk, it will be because not enough people were sane enough and stable enough to recognize the peril and do something about it.

*[A version of this article was also featured on Larry Beck’s , Hard Left Turn.]

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

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