It Gets Worse… and Worse

To My Daughter, With Apologies

Picture by Hilary Stone Ginsberg

As 2021 draws to an end (good riddance), and as I am not far from entering my ninth decade on this besotted planet, I thought it an apt time to apologize to my daughter — and everyone of her generation — for the world we old fogies are leaving behind.

It is not a pretty picture. The Earth is either burning or drowning or suffering from cataclysmic weather events. Humankind is threatened by one variant after another of the coronavirus in a seemingly never-ending pandemic. Government in America, and in other democratic countries around the world, for that matter, teeters on the brink of descending into autocracy. Society suffers from an ever-widening inequality of wealth and opportunity. And, undergirding our inability to respond to these intertwined crises is the destruction of truth and the unwillingness of many to engage in civil public discourse.

Not pretty at all. And, while some of it may not be entirely the fault of those alive now, much of it is exacerbated by our lassitude and our unwillingness to cooperate as a society to tackle these problems.

Take climate change. We know the clock is ticking on our ever-warming globe, and we know both the cause of the problem and the remedy. But, we take, at best, only fitful measures to combat climate change. This year demonstrates the seriousness of the problem. Nearly one in three Americans experienced a weather disaster this past summer. In June, thermometer readings in the Pacific Northwest (and British Columbia) exceeded 110° in a region where the average temperature at that time of year is in the seventies. Air conditioning is not common, so most suffered and hundreds died. On the other coast, flash floods killed scores as record-setting rain pounded an area from Connecticut to Pennsylvania. Back on the West Coast, a lack of rain and record-shattering heat contributed to raging forest fires..

The deadly weather continues. Last week, tornadoes ripped through the country’s midsection. Unusually high temperatures for December — readings in Wisconsin and Minnesota set records — contributed to high winds across much of the middle of the United States a few days later. And, let us not forget the continuing drought in the western United States that has caused a severe water shortage on the Colorado River, the source of water for much of the southwest and parts of Mexico.

The effects of climate change are not felt only in the United States. One example: A super typhoon — with wind gusts up to 168 miles an hour — hit the Philippines this week, the 15th major weather disturbance to affect that country in 2021. And, while each weather calamity cannot be blamed directly on climate change, the United Nations concludes that warming temperatures have led to a fivefold increase in weather-related disasters in the last few decades.

The coronavirus has been with us almost two years now, and it is unrelenting. The newest variant — omicron — is highly transmissible but may not be as deadly as previous ones. The latter is good news, but with so many people still unvaccinated, no one knows what the next mutation will bring. Or the one after that. It still boggles my mind that so many of our fellow citizens see the vaccine and mandates to wear a mask in public as political issues. Apparently, many Republicans are willing to die to “own the libs.” Some ownership! Except, of course, that the unvaccinated threaten to infect us all, torpedo the economy, clog the healthcare system, deny access to emergency rooms for those who need it desperately because of heart attacks and strokes, and provide a huge pool of victims in which the virus can further mutate.

Nothing occurs in a vacuum, and the politicization of the response to the virus reflects the bitter polarization of our politics. The defeated former president refused to accept his defeat and staged a coup against democracy. Millions believe the “big lie” of a stolen election and are willing to do whatever to return Donald Trump to the presidency. The January 6 committee is turning up valuable evidence against the plotters of the insurrection, but to what outcome? Will the guilty leaders — not just those who actually stormed the Capitol — ever face justice? Remember, a failed coup is merely a dress rehearsal for the next one.

Worse is the prospect that Trump may be president again. He has a solid base of loyal cultist followers, and many others appear to be forgetting the excesses, corruption, and incompetence of his term in office. Quite a number of Americans just want a change, believing the current occupant of the White House unable to solve our critical problems. Trump may win the presidency outright, but if not, his Republican acolytes are stacking the electoral deck through gerrymandering, voter suppression, and voter nullification. In several states, Republicans are passing laws to allow members of their party to decide what votes to count. It is a bit like letting the New York Yankees call balls and strikes in the very game they are playing.

The Democrats appear feckless, unable to pass major legislation to buttress the American social safety net or protect voting rights. The latter, of course, is needed to save American democracy from sliding into autocracy through the stealing and manipulation of elections. A gridlocked Congress cannot tackle the major problems afflicting our country, and it cannot mitigate growing economic inequality. Part of the problem is that America taxes income, not wealth, leaving Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and their ilk in possession of obscene wealth that they use to corrupt the system and prevent change that might level the playing field. It is a maddenning, never-ending cycle.

For vast numbers of people truth is what they are told by their leaders or the propaganda they hear or read. Make no mistake about it, Fox News is not news; it is propaganda. As bad as Fox is, there are even worse. While there may be a few serious journalists at Fox, we learned more this past week about the extent of the coziness between some of the network’s personalities and the disgraced former president. Incredibly, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity texted that Trump should call off the rioters on January 6, only to go on air that night and claim that the rioters were not Trump supporters but rather provocateurs. The ubiquitousness of information today, unfortunately, means that much of the information is misinformation or disinformation. And, our body politic and civil society suffer from it. Civil public discourse becomes impossible without a shared sense of what is truth.

This is not a very heartening end-of-the-year message. I wish I could be more optimistic about the future. But, the sad truth is that we older folks have made a hash of things. I only hope that you in the younger generation can right the ship before it is too late.

I will be rooting for you and wholeheartedly will support your efforts to set things right.

Posted December 19, 2021

Politics and History will be on vacation for the rest of 2021 (what else could I possibly say about the year?). It will return in early 2022.

Look Homeward, Joe

Picture by Hilary Stone Ginsberg

Democracy, like charity, begins at home. Before we Americans lecture others about democracy, we must secure our own democratic institutions. If we are to be, as John Winthrop said on the founding of the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1630 and President Ronald Reagan often cited, “as a citty [sic] upon a hill [for] the eies [sic] of all people are upon us,” then we must, in fact, be that city on a hill.

Citizens of democracies around the world no longer see the United States as a beacon of freedom. In a recent poll from the Pew Research Center, 57 percent of people in 16 democratic countries once thought America was a “good” democratic model, but now only 17 percent believe the United States “is a good example for other countries to follow.” Our warts are on display.

The idea of America as a democracy comes to mind as President Joe Biden hosts this week a virtual “Summit for Democracy.” There has been much quibbling over who was and was not invited. The U.S. State Department cites the governments of Pakistan and the Philippines as responsible for “unlawful and arbitrary killings,” but both countries were asked to attend. Hungary, a member of the European Union and NATO, and Turkey, also a NATO ally, did not make the cut. Both deserved to be excluded, but there is a question as to whether the standards for invitations were evenly applied.

Democracy is in retreat around the world. Freedom House reports that 2020 “marked the 15th consecutive year of decline in global freedom. The countries experiencing deterioration outnumbered those with improvements by the largest margin recorded since the negative trend began in 2006.” Freedom House says nearly 75 percent of the world’s population live in countries where freedom is waning. As Ann Applebaum headlined in a recent article in The Atlantic, “The Bad Guys Are Winning.”

Those bad actors may be winning at home, too. It is certainly a plus for the fate of democracy that the occupant of the White House today is Joe Biden, not Donald Trump. But, Trump has damaged, and continues to damage, American democracy. Abroad, his coddling of dictators — including North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, with whom Trump “fell in love” and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, whom Trump believed over the American intelligence community — hardly encouraged democratic movements in countries with authoritarian regimes. America now has a president willing to call out dictators. Biden may be shy, unfortunately, in condemning human rights violations by countries with whom the United States wishes to have good relations (Saudi Arabia, that means you), but he has acted against China with a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics and warned Russia about provocative moves against Ukraine.

But, it is the damage Trump has done to America’s democratic institutions that caused Freedom House to say that freedom in the United States declined by 11 points, placing America among the 25 countries that have suffered the largest declines in the decade between 2010 and 2020. To be fair, the erosion of democracy in the United States has been ongoing for decades — Freedom House cites political corruption and punitive immigration policy as two factors in the decline of freedom in America, both of which did not begin with Trump — but the Trump presidency certainly accelerated the trend.

Trump continues to threaten democratic stability while out of office. His efforts to overturn the 2020 election and influence future elections weaken America’s constitutional foundation. The violence of the January 6 insurrection to prevent the peaceful transition of power, the praising of violence and intolerance among Republicans, the refusal of a vast majority of Republicans to confront their party’s threat to democracy, and the continuing efforts to suppress voting in many states along with the empowering by Republican state legislatures of Republican election officials to tamper with voting outcomes all jeopardize democracy at home and undermine Washington’s ability to influence democracy abroad.

Biden and his fellow Democrats know all this to be true, but they seem hesitant to take strong actions to preserve American democracy. Biden gave a speech in July at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia about the need to safeguard the right to vote, which he labelled “fundamental” to the protection of democracy. He attacked Trump for promulgating the “big lie,” and cited numerous instances of current assaults on voting rights. Biden ended by saying, “We’re facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War. That’s not hyperbole…. I’m not saying this to alarm you; I’m saying this because you should be alarmed.”

It sounded like a clarion call, but a clarion call the president has not answered. Nor has the bulk of the Democratic Party, which continues to refuse to abolish or amend the filibuster, the single most significant obstacle to Congress passing substantive voting rights reform to guarantee every American’s right to vote. The possibility that more than two centuries of self-government in America might be at an end ought to move the president and his congressional allies to action. But, they seem paralyzed in the face of the palpable danger.

Certainly, Biden is busy trying to secure his agenda. The passage of the infrastructure bill occupied much of his attention until it passed Congress. Biden is now focused on the continuing fight to enact the vast measure to extend the American social safety net, now tied up in the Senate. But, all of these pale in importance before the onslaught by the American right on American democracy.

The current president must take effective measures to protect American democracy — starting with guaranteeing every American the right to vote — to insure that the former president does not use his vast army — I chose that word deliberately — to undermine American democracy. So, President Biden, please preserve and protect our American democracy. Only then can you legitimately and credibly further democracy abroad.

Posted December 10, 2020

The Danger to Democracy

Democrats would need to win every single election… to prevent the destruction of democracy, while Republicans only need to win one. And the American system is set up so that Republicans will win sooner or later, whether fairly or by cheating. — David Atkins, Washington Monthly, December 4, 2021

Picture by Hilary Stone Ginsberg

It is an axiom of international politics that the first democratic election is easy. It is the second that is difficult.

The descent into authoritarianism in many of the countries carved out of the former Soviet Union and in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe proves that axiom. Most held fairly democratic elections as they threw off the yoke of the commissars. It was the second, or third, or fourth elections that were either fixed, manipulated, or simply not held because those in power refused to cede control through the democratic process.

This sad history is now playing out in the United States after more than two centuries of elections in which the losers recognized their obligation to hand the reins of power to the winners. The two-party system, which has served America well since its creation in the 1790s, no longer functions effectively because one of the parties is no longer committed to majoritarianism. The Republican Party has become an antidemocratic organization willing to use extreme tactics to remain in power.

The Republican Party has few policy ideas. Instead, devotion to the cult of Donald Trump and a commitment to furthering his “big lie” have become the core of Republicanism. The decision of the vast majority of Republicans in Congress to vote against impeaching and convicting Trump for his part in the January 6 insurrection and their unwillingness to investigate the riot demonstrated that the party’s raison d’être is its desire to cling to power. To do this, Republicans at the state level are busily stacking the electoral deck by drawing legislative maps that give new meaning to the term gerrymandering while passing laws disenfranchising Democratic-leaning groups of voters. The undemocratic structures in the U.S. Constitution — an upper chamber of Congress based on equal state representation and the Electoral College — are institutional aids to the GOP’s nefarious ploys.

The Republican Party may win a congressional majority in next year’s midterm elections and the presidency in 2024 fairly because of the tendency of the electorate to blame those in power for problems out of the direct control of government. Gas prices, for example, are influenced by the rise and fall of crude oil prices, not political policy. (Gas prices are especially problematic for the administration in power because roadside signs advertising the price of a gallon are a constant reminder of high costs.) The refusal of millions of Americans to get vaccinated or wear masks is the major contributor to the continuation of the pandemic, yet those who are not vaccinated and go unmasked join their representatives in Congress in blaming the administration of Joe Biden for any spike in cases of COVID-19. Economic fluctuations owe more to the vagaries of international trade, the rise and fall of stock prices, and consumer demand, yet in bad economic times the voters want “to throw the rascals out” while seldom rewarding those in power for booms. So, regardless of responsibility, everyone “knows” where the blame falls.

But — and this is the scary part — Republicans are not pinning their hopes only on the voters, which brings us back to the tactics Republicans are using to tilt the playing field in their favor. Laura Thornton, who is the director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, recently wrote in The Washington Post that the attempted hostile takeover of elections in Wisconsin by Republicans is “shocking in its brazenness.” Last month, Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson told The New York Times: “Unfortunately, I probably don’t expect them [Democrats] to follow the rules. And other people don’t either, and that’s the problem.” Aside from the fact that Johnson offered no proof of Democratic cheating, his solution to a nonexistent problem is mind-boggling: Abolish bipartisan oversight of elections and give Republican legislators control over elections in which they are participating. (Excuse me, Officer, I’ll be the judge of whether I was speeding!)

Thornton — who has worked overseas for two decades to advance democracy — says if what Johnson is proposing were promulgated in any country that receives U.S. aid, that nation would be condemned roundly by Washington for undermining democracy. Yet, despite a spate of news stories at the time Wisconsin Republicans proposed their power grab, Americans largely ignored this threat to democracy. It certainly does not appear to have given impetus to Democrats to pass legislation guaranteeing voting rights, an indication that we Americans do not hold ourselves to the same standards to which we hold others.

Thornton points out that a nonpartisan (or bipartisan) election body is one of the best ways to ensure fair elections and guarantee democratic outcomes. “The U.S. aid agency’s own guidelines on elections emphasize the importance of neutral and independent election management,” she writes. Yet, a high-ranking politician — Ron Johnson — is proposing that Republican politicians run his state’s the election process. Johnson says the Republican-controlled legislature should “reassert its power.” (I wonder what Johnson would say if Democrats were to win control of the state legislature, an unlikely event given the lengths to which Republicans have gone to gerrymander election districts in Wisconsin.)

What is astounding is that Republicans are so open about their attempts to manipulate and steal elections. In most countries, political parties trying to control elections usually hide their machinations. Not in the United States, where a senator publicly brags about proposals to grant his party sole authority over the electoral process! But, again, why be surprised about any of this? Former President Donald Trump barely has hidden his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and he and his minions are laying plans — clear to anyone who looks — to steal the 2022 and 2024 elections if Republicans do not win outright majorities.

Yes, American democracy is in danger, and it may not survive. Inevitably, as David Atkins notes, Republicans will win an election, fairly or not, and it may well be the last free and fair election held in what is, as of now, the world’s oldest democracy.

Posted December 7, 2021

It Already Stinks

Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts? — Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, during oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, December 1, 2021.

Picture by Hilary Stone Ginsberg

Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor posed this trenchant question during oral arguments over a Mississippi abortion law that may be the vehicle for the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a nearly 50-year precedent guaranteeing a constitutional right to abortion.

The justice’s question is premised on the obvious fact that not much has changed since the 1973 landmark Roe v. Wade. There have been no vast scientific or medical advances regarding the procedure. No novel legal theories have emerged on whether the Constitution does or does not protect a woman’s right to choose. Public opinion has hardly shifted on the issue for the last 50 years. Only one thing has changed. The Supreme Court now has a majority of very conservative justices who are determined to restrict, at least severely, access to abortion if not overturn Roe outright.

Sotomayor rightly worries that a purely political decision on such a controversial issue as abortion endangers the existence of the high court. “If people actually believe that it’s all political, how will we survive?” she asked. “How will the court survive?” The concern over the politicization of the pending decision — expected next June or July — is buttressed, as Sotomayor pointed out, by the admission of the bill’s sponsors that they passed the law only because there are new, very conservative justices on the court.

The stability of public opinion on abortion is remarkable. Since 1975, the percentage of Americans who believe abortion should be legal in at least certain circumstances has hovered between 76 percent and 83 percent, while the percentage who would ban the procedure in all circumstances has remained consistently in the high teens. Not only would a high court decision allowing states to ban (or severely limit) abortion be a political decision, it would be a political decision that runs counter to the views of a large majority of Americans.

The politicization of the court’s pending decision on abortion is magnified by the politicization of the court itself. There are a majority of conservatives on the court even though Democratic presidential candidates won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. Two presidents who were in the office only because of the Electoral College nominated five of those justices. To put it bluntly: The Supreme Court is dominated by conservative jurists appointed by presidents elected by a minority of voters.

And, then there are the machinations of Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell who — in a display of brazen political power lacking either constitutional or historical justification — manipulated senatorial rules to prevent President Barack Obama from appointing a successor to Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. McConnell’s flimsy rationale: Scalia died in the last year of Obama’s term in office. When Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died less than two months before the 2020 election, McConnell tossed his new standard out the window so he could rush the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett before the electionthans.

Barrett, perhaps sensitive to the political nature of her appointment, gave a recent speech in which she claimed, “This court is not comprised of political hacks.” She added, “Judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties.” I might give more credence to Barrett’s words had she uttered them some place other than the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center. Yep, that McConnell, the senator who strong-armed her appointment to the Supreme Court!

Overturning Roe, which appears likely based on the questions the justices asked Wednesday, will be the capstone to a alarming number of political decisions made by the Supreme Court in the last two decades. Bush v. Gore was premised on legal arguments, as one academic phrased it, that “would further the election of the Republican candidate, George W. Bush.” Citizens United reversed century-old campaign restrictions previously upheld by the courts, again an instance of the only thing that changed was the makeup of the court itself. The same can be said of the high court’s ruling in 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder which gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion in Shelby County, and while he is often viewed as an institutionalist who believes the court should tread carefully and incrementally, he is a longtime antagonist of the 1965 voting law. So, in a signal of the political brazenness of the current conservative majority, the Roberts-led court eviscerated another section of that law in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, decided last June, further tipping the electoral scales in favor of the Republican Party by allowing states to deny whole groups of Democratic-leaning voters access to the ballot.

In addition to the pending abortion decision, the Supreme Court is slated in the current term to hear highly political cases involving the right to carry concealed weapons outside the home, the fate of affirmative action, and a religious case that could erode the separation of church and state. As the recent past indicates, and the possible future may buttress, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court issues political decisions frequently.

Unfortunately, Justice Sotomayor, there is already a stench issuing from the Supreme Court. The likely overturning of Roe is a political act, but the high court already stinks because of its numerous political acts — and the politicization of its makeup — over the last few decades.

Posted December 3, 2021

What’s a President To Do?

Picture by Hilary Stone Ginsberg

Joe Biden, as president of the United States, may be the most powerful person in the world, but even he is at the mercy of events and public perception of those events.

How else to explain the disconnect between the popularity of Biden’s policies and his plunging popularity? As Nate Cohn pointed out in Sunday’s New York Times, Biden has presided over the enactment of a whopping stimulus plan and a bipartisan infrastructure act. He is on the cusp of pushing through Congress an ambitious $2 trillion bill to modernize the American social safety net. The components of those bills are all very popular; the president is not.

Biden’s approval ratings are in the mid-40s. He gets little or no credit for the passage of his agenda. Polls show a majority of respondents do not believe that Biden’s policies have helped them much, even though most households received stimulus checks and parents received additional funds.

The media is partly at fault for concentrating on the messiness of the legislative process and the overall price tag for each measure without providing a sense of what each piece of legislation contains. Most of the media also has ignored the Republicans’ refusal to participate in lawmaking. The political reality of Republican obstructionism has been obscured, resulting in a lack of public understanding of the differences between the two parties. The simple fact, not always grasped, is that Democrats want to get things done — build bridges, provide child care, lower drug costs — and Republicans do not.

Biden has tried to bridge the partisan gap. Bipartisan cooperation is built into Biden’s DNA; it is part and parcel of his entire legislative career. Biden also believes that achieving bipartisan cooperation in Congress would fulfill his promise to restore a sense of “normalcy” to politics, whatever that might be at this point. Many of Biden’s political allies worry that Biden’s emphasis on reaching out to Republicans obscures the danger the Republican Party presents to American democracy through its devotion to former President Donald Trump, ndorsement of Trump’s “big lie,” and drift toward authoritarianism and embracing violence as a means to its ends.

Messaging is part of Biden’s problem. Biden’s popularity plunged in August because of the perception that the pullout from Afghanistan was botched. The speedy takeover of that beleaguered country by the Taliban and the the deaths of 13 American soldiers at the Kabul airport dominated the news, allowing Republicans to portray the president as incompetent. Hidden in the overwrought headlines were two salient facts: First, Biden inherited a deal Trump reached with the Taliban; and, second, the United States successfully airlifted more than 124,000 people out of Afghanistan, the largest airlift in American history.

Another driver of Biden’s plunge in the polls is COVID-19, which Biden promised to bring under control. In truth, Biden has been far more successful tackling the pandemic than his predecessor. He has urged all Americans to get vaccinated and undertake safe practices. He promised speedy delivery of vaccines, and he delivered. He cannot reasonably be blamed for mutations in the virus that lead to more dangerous and more easily transmitted variants.

Yet, Republicans have successfully portrayed Biden as failing to combat the coronavirus. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy made this argument recently: “I took President Biden at his word; I took him at his word when he said he was going to get COVID under control. Unfortunately, more Americans have died this year than last year” from the disease. It is a cynical line of attack: Blame the president for failing to tame the pandemic while using every trick in the book to undermine his attempts to do so. Republican governors have opposed mask mandates and blocked the president’s vaccine mandates. Large parts of the party’s base refuse to get the vaccine and continue to go unmasked. As of September, 90 percent of adult Democrats had been vaccinated; only 58 percent of Republicans were fully vaccinated.

Republicans have spread disinformation about the pandemic, undermining Biden’s attempts to control its spread. The most blatant recent example of this is the tweet this past weekend by Representative Ronny Jackson, a Texas Republican who served as White House physician for Presidents Trump and Barack Obama. In his tweet, Jackson launched the most absurd conspiracy theory about the appearance of the new coronavirus variant, Omicron: “Here comes the MEV – the Midterm Election Variant! They NEED a reason to push unsolicited nationwide mail-in ballots. Democrats will do anything to CHEAT during an election – but we’re not going to let them!”

How idiotic can anyone be? Does Jackson really believe that a new variant discovered in November 2021 will affect elections a year away? Are the South African doctors who first reported the variant part of the Democratic plot to steal elections? Are all the other countries that imposed travel bans working to help Democrats win elections? It is easy to mock Jackson, but his ignorant tweet highlights Biden’s problem: How to message effectively the truth when so much disinformation is so readily disseminated?

So, what can the president do to turn things around? For starters, Biden should stop trying to enlist Republicans in bipartisan cooperation. Democrats, the president included, must reveal Republican as obstructionists unwilling to govern, showing them to be a danger to democracy. This line of attack must be part of the strategy to get recalcitrant Democrats to support federal legislation to protect voting rights. Failure to do so will allow Republican-controlled state legislatures to continue to pass legislation geared to undermining democratic government, making it impossible for Democrats to win elections in the future.

Democrats must also use the remaining weeks in the current legislative session to pass the social infrastructure bill. Providing child care and universal pre-K, expanding Medicare, extending child tax credits, paid family and medical leave, and combatting climate change are all popular provisions in the bill. A bill signing event at the White House will help Democrats launch the 2022 election season on a high note and will give Biden the big, substantive win to show Americans he is truly working for them.

Getting stuff done has to be the Democrats’ emphasis. There is no guarantee that it will work, but Biden and the entire Democratic Party have little alternative.

Posted November 30, 2021

There Will Be Blood

What is so hard, what is so hard about saying that this is wrong? — Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, on the floor of the House during the debate over censuring Representative Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, for posting a violent video depicting him murdering Ocasio-Cortez and attacking President Joe Biden.

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Picture by Hilary Stone Ginsberg

Someone will be killed. People will die. The eagerness of some Republicans to portray violence against members of the opposite party and the willingness of most of the rest of the party to condone those depictions, inevitably, will lead to violence. Violence begets violence. Of that, there is no question. And, when the inevitable occurs, blood will be on the hands of virtually every Republican, including those who lacked the courage to say: This is wrong!

Ocasio-Cortez’s question was directed at Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy, who once again demonstrated his willingness to tolerate violent and hateful speech and actions from members of his caucus. McCarthy has said nothing publicly about the cartoon Gosar posted on the Internet. McCarthy’s silence condones Gosar’s ugliness, encouraging the Arizonan and others to engage in more vileness while inviting actual violence.

Make no mistake about it: Gosar’s posting endangers members of the Congress and the president of the United States. If anyone without the protection of a congressional seat posted a similar video, he or she would have had the Secret Service and the FBI at his or her doorstep in a split second. Threatening an official of the United States government is a felony.

Gosar has not apologized for the video. He mocked what he called the “faux outrage,” which he finds “infantile.” He says,“The hyperventilating and shrill accusations that this cartoon is dangerous [is] laughable or intentionally hyperbolic.” In his defense on the House floor Wednesday, Gosar noted he took down the video — after three million views of it — and tried to portray himself as the victim. He vowed to “continue to speak out.”

Only two Republicans — Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois — voted with Democrats Wednesday to censure Gosar. No doubt many fear the anger of ultra-conservatives. Officials report that death threats against members of Congress have more than doubled in the last few years. Colorado Democrat Jason Crow says such threats “are unfortunately the reality of congressional life.” Ohio Republican Representative Anthony Gonzalez recently announced he would not seek reelection because of threats against him following his vote to impeach then-President Donald Trump. Gonzalez, who is 37, is leaving Congress after only two terms because of fears for the safety of his wife and young children.

Gonzalez is not exaggerating the danger. Representative Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican, received an obscene and violent voicemail in which the caller said, “I hope you die. I hope everybody in your fucking family dies.” Upton’s “crime”: He voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill, along with 12 other House Republicans and 19 Republican Senators, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

It is, of course, extremely telling that what raises the ire of Republican right-wingers is not Gosar’s gross video but the votes of those 13 House Republicans. Apparently, doing the people’s business is now a crime on the right. Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene — who may be even nuttier than Gosar — said this about her colleagues: “Any Republican that votes yes to an infrastructure bill that helps Biden pass his agenda when bumbling Biden doesn’t even know what he’s doing, then that Republican is a traitor to our party, a traitor to their voters, and a traitor to our donors.”

Nuttiness is endemic on the right these days. Gosar, for example, claims that Ashli Babbitt, the insurrectionist shot dead by Capitol Police on January 6, was “executed in cold blood” by an officer “lying in wait.” Gosar asserts, “Facts are coming to light that the FBI might have had a hand in planning and carrying out” the insurrection, though he fails to cite any of those “facts.” Gosar was one of more than 20 Republicans who voted against awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to the officers who defended the Capitol on January 6. Finally, Gosar has consorted with White nationalists.

And, Republicans are angry at their colleagues who voted for better roads and bridges! As Kinzinger tweeted: “So let me understand, Gosar’s creepy anime of murder and such is ok but [New York Republican Representative] John Katko is the sinner for negotiating and voting for infrastructure?”

In remarks on the floor Wednesday, McCarthy accused Democrats of making “rules for thee, but not for me.” McCarthy has his facts wrong. The last censure vote in the House was in 2010 when New York Democratic Representative Charlie Rangel was rebuked for ethics violations in a bipartisan vote. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — a Democrat — read aloud the resolution censuring Rangel for bringing disgrace on the House.

But, the debate over who is doing what to whom and who is or is not being consistent is beside the point. The important point is simple: Violence is unacceptable. Members of Congress cannot issue threats against their colleagues nor against the president (nor against anyone else, for that matter). Gosar is lucky he was only censured. He should be expelled and prosecuted for his felonious action.

Violence begets violence. Inevitable in this atmosphere is a shockingly violent act. When it happens, there will be blood not only on the hands of Paul Gosar and his ilk, but on all his enablers, whose ranks include Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and every member of the GOP caucus save the two who voted for Gosar’s censure. Sickeningly, even then, they likely will duck responsibility. When will Americans hold them accountable?

Posted November 19, 2021

War on America

Picture by Hilary Stone Ginsberg

Much of the modern Republican Party is pitted against America — against American values of free speech and freedom of religion, against the rule of law and the Constitution, and against civility in the public square.

I hesitated to write this introduction because it evokes the dastardly campaign of right-wingers during the Red Scare of the 1950s when the accusation of un-American was common. The epithet was used against progressives who sought to enshrine liberal values and fight discrimination. But, the current Republican Party indicts itself for being against America when its leader refuses to accept the results of a free and fair election and much of the party backs him. It indicts itself when it purges members who deviate from the “party line.” It indicts itself when members extol violence against political opponents and the rest of the party is silent. It indicts itself when it attacks free speech and the free exercise of religion.

The ongoing war waged by the disgraced former president against the results of the 2020 presidential election undermines the social contract upon which a free America rests. The Constitution — as drawn up by the Framers and modified over more than two centuries — is a framework that can succeed as the basic law only when all agree to abide by its rules. One of those rules — implied, but sanctioned by precedent — centers on the sanctity of the election process. Ever since the first presidents surrendered office to their successors, Americans have accepted the results of elections. Granted, there may have been some griping about the results, but the results were accepted.

Apparently, no more! Donald Trump claims — without any evidence — that he won. The bulk of the Republican Party refuses to contradict him, and, in state after state, Republicans are attempting to skew election rules in ways that guarantee Republican victories by essentially decreeing that the votes of some groups — all of whom support the Republican Party — count for more than those of other groups. They are passing laws making it more difficult for Democratic voters — people of color and young voters, specifically — to vote. They are making it harder to vote by mail, a mode of voting favored by Democrats. They are giving Republican state officials power to overturn the results of elections. All of this runs against the arc of American history that witnessed the continual expansion of voting rights. Now, the Republican Party is attempting to turn back the clock and restrict the franchise, not expand it.

The Republican Party — at least most of it — refuses to condemn the insurrection of January 6. Republicans in Congress voted against all attempts to probe the coup attempt by the former president, demonstrating an unwillingness to investigate an attack on a fundamental part of the American electoral process — the role of Congress in sanctioning the peaceful transfer of power. (And, purged from leadership positions Republicans who had the courage to vote for an inquiry.) Worse than that, elements of the Republican Party deny that an insurrection even took place and extol as a martyr an insurrectionist killed during a spasm of violence aimed at the American system of government.

Violence seems endemic in the modern Republican Party. Most Americans, no doubt, believe that violence as a political weapon became unacceptable after the Civil War. But, that is no longer the case as one of the two major political parties appears comfortable running candidates for high office who stand accused of violent actions. The front-runner for the Republican nomination for Senate in Pennsylvania in 2022 is awaiting a judge’s ruling on an accusation he choked his estranged wife and hit one of his children. The lead candidate in Missouri for the GOP Senate nomination allegedly tied up his mistress in the basement of his marital home, an accusation which drove him from the governorship. And, in Georgia, the wife of former football star Herschel Walker says he threatened her with a gun. Walker is likely to secure the Republican nomination for a Senate seat as he has Trump’s backing.

It gets worse! A right-wing member of the House from Arizona, Paul Gosar, posted a cartoon on the Internet showing him killing a progressive member from New York and threatening the president of the United States with violence. No one in the Republican leadership said a word in condemnation. At a conservative rally in Idaho a man asked, “When do we get to use the guns” to kill Democrats. The audience applauded, and a local state official called it a “fair” question. In Ohio, a Republican senatorial candidate, Josh Mandel, called upon Republicans to resist “tyranny… when the Gestapo show[s] up at your front door” to allegedly force people to wear masks and get vaccinated. Mandel is the grandson of Holocaust survivors. The disgraced former president notoriously has praised violence, calling upon his supporters to “knock the hell” out of protestors and recently defended January 6 rioters who yelled “hang [Vice President] Mike Pence.”

Republicans across the land are attacking free speech in a quest to ban books on race and gender. The question of banning the Pulitzer-Prize winning book “Beloved,” written by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, was a factor in the victory of Republican Glenn Youngkin in the Virginia gubernatorial election earlier this month. Republican governors in South Carolina and Texas are threatening to ban books. From banning books to burning books is, apparently, a short step. In Spotsylvania County, Virginia, two school board members called for burning books they labelled “sexually explicit.” For those with a short historical memory, note this: Book burning is something associated with Nazi Germany, not an America committed by the First Amendment to freedom of speech.

And, finally, speaking of the First Amendment: Disgraced former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn called for the establishment of “one religion” in the United States. Flynn, who remains close to Trump, said: “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God and one religion under God.” He did not specify which religion, but I think it a fair guess that he has some version of Christianity in mind. Minnesota Democrat Ilhan Omar is correct when she tweeted, in response to Flynn, “These People hate the US Constitution.” And, are ignorant of it: Flynn apparently has no knowledge of the establishment clause (which prohibits the establishment of religion) in the First Amendment.

This is only a sliver of the Republican Party’s war on America. And, it is likely to get worse. Attacks on free speech are likely to escalate in coming months as Republican candidates for office try to outdo each other in heated rhetoric. And, the attack on the electoral process will continue. Trump is likely to be the Republican nominee for president in 2024. His actions in attempting to undo the results of the 2020 election are just a prelude to what he may do in the next election. A failed coup, after all, is just a training exercise for the next go around.

Posted November 16, 2021

Learning the Right Lessons

Picture by Hilary Stone Ginsberg

Politicians, like generals, often look backward for guidance rather than to the future. Just as generals, as the saying goes, always fight the last war, politicians tend to take the perceived lessons from the last campaign as inspiration for the next one. Democrats and Republicans alike are pouring over the results of last Tuesday’s election to glean nuggets upon which to base strategy for the 2022 midterm elections.

But, are they drawing the right lessons?

No one elected Biden to be the second coming of FDR

Virginia Democratic Representative Abigail Spanberger said of President Joe Biden after the election: “Nobody elected him to be FDR, they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.” Spanberger is a two-term member of Congress from Virginia. In 2018, Spanberger defeated David Brat, an ultra-conservative Republican incumbent, to become the first Democrat to represent her district since 1971. She is understandably nervous about her political fortunes in a district that Biden carried narrowly but which voted for Donald Trump for president in 2016 and which Glenn Youngkin won handily in his victory in last week’s gubernatorial election.

Spanberger is wrong historically and politically. Nobody in 1932 elected FDR to be FDR! Those who voted for Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not have any inkling of the scope and extent of the New Deal. Roosevelt ran a cautious campaign, partly because he and his advisers did not fully understand the structural causes of the Great Depression and had not yet fully developed plans to combat the economic catastrophe. Also, Roosevelt realized how unpopular Herbert Hoover, the incumbent was, so he said little of substance, hoping to not commit any gaffes.

Politically, Spanberger is wrong. Now, it is possible that Democrats in Spanberger’s district played down Biden’s progressive agenda, but in deep blue parts of the country voters knew exactly for whom they were voting. Biden’s campaign was not shy about touting guaranteed family and medical leave, lower cost prescription drugs, universal preschool, free community college, expanded broadband, and a vigorous attack on climate change.

In other words, all the progressive measures in the Build Back Better Bill were part of Biden’s campaign.

The 2021 election was a defeat for progressivism

Maybe! But, it is also possible to look at the results and conclude that Republican gains came because of Democratic dithering in Washington. After all, the infrastructure package passed Congress after Election Day, and Democrats are still struggling to enact the Build Back Better Act. Terry McAuliffe, the defeated Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia, begged Democrats in Washington to “get their act together” and pass Biden’s agenda.

Would it have made a difference? Who knows? But, this we do know: Individual parts of the Biden program are very popular with voters. Passage of most of the president’s agenda, coupled with a vigorous campaign to inform voters that Democrats are legislating on their behalf (yes, working on behalf of their constituents — what a novel idea!), might have an impact next November. Part of that campaign must be to highlight the contrast between Democrats and their do-nothing Republican opponents. After all, former President Donald Trump kept promising an “infrastructure week,” but it never happened. Democrats passed a significant infrastructure bill a “mere” 11 months into Biden’s presidency.

Democrats must compete for the rural vote

Yes, the urban-rural vote divide is real and getting worse for Democrats. And, yes, Democrats should be competitive in all demographic and geographic groups and areas. But, it is easy to over-analyze the Virginia results.

Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin outperformed Donald Trump’s 2020 showing in even the reddest counties, winning rural Virginia counties by record margins. But, that is not the whole story of the Virginia election. McAuliffe won voter-rich Fairfax County, a Washington suburb, by 30 points. Biden beat Trump in Fairfax by 42 points. Same in Loudon County, which Biden carried by 25 points in 2020, but McAuliffe won by only 11.

The lesson here? The rural vote should be contested, but McAuliffe lost in 2021 because he bled suburban voters.

Youngkin won because he handled Trump correctly

Yes, Youngkin ran a smart campaign, cleaving close enough to the discredited former president so as not to alienate Trump’s base, but keeping Trump far enough away in order to lure moderate suburban voters. But, it takes two to tango, and Youngkin’s strategy worked because Trump cooperated, staying out of Virginia and not saying anything too damaging. Will the irrepressible former president cooperate in 2022? His track record indicates he will intervene in many races.

Republicans should nominate moderates

Youngkin is hardly a moderate, but he ran a campaign that appealed to the particular concern of Virginia voters in 2021: Outrage over the teaching of race in public schools. This is an issue drummed up by conservatives who want to push so-called cultural issues over actual policies that benefit voters. In his campaign, Youngkin succeeded in avoiding some of the more damaging pitfalls that have torpedoed conservative Republicans in the past. (See Ken Cuccinelli, an ultra-conservative candidate who ran an unsuccessful race in 2013 against McAuliffe for governor of Virginia.)

Youngkin became the Republican nominee for governor by winning an unusual ranked-choice vote implemented by the Virginia Republican Party to prevent the nomination of a right-wing kook (again, see Ken Cuccinelli). But, the Virginia template will not be the electoral structure in other states. Much more likely will be primary battles in which ultra-conservative candidates try to outrun each other to the far right to please Donald Trump. Republicans who can win primaries may not be strong candidates in general elections (see Christine O’Donnell in Delaware in 2010, Todd Akin in Missouri in 2012, and Richard Mourdock in Indiana in 2012.)

Conclusion

There are valuable lessons to be learned from the 2021 off-year election. But, it is easy to draw the wrong conclusions. Besides, the electoral environment may be starkly different in 2022. The recovering economy may be booming by next November, thanks in part to implementation of the Biden agenda. Voters may be in the mood to reward Democrats for legislating on their behalf.

Posted November 9, 2020

Make It About the Economy, Stupid

It’s the economy, stupid. — James Carville, 1992, advising the campaign of presidential aspirant Bill Clinton.

Picture by Hilary Stone Ginsberg

Tuesday’s Democratic debacle was devastating. But, bad as the results were, they point a way forward for the party’s candidates to win in the 2022 midterms: Make it about the economy.

President Joe Biden knows the truth of this maxim. “I think we should produce for the American people,” Biden said the day after the election. The president was explaining the need to enact his agenda, which, he said, would improve the lives of millions of Americans. He would not say that failure to pass the infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better Act hurt Democrats, particularly Terry McAuliffe’s campaign in Virginia to regain the governorship, but Democratic squabbling in Washington certainly left the impression of incompetence (thank you Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia!).

Before Democrats go into full panic mode, they should take stock. Tuesday was awful, but not cataclysmic. Democratic Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey won reelection, albeit narrowly, in a reliably blue state. A progressive candidate, Michelle Wu, easily won the Boston mayoral race. Wu is a protégé of Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat. Eric Adams, a Democrat, won, becoming New York City’s second Black mayor. And, while McAuliffe lost in a state Biden carried by 10 points a year ago, Virginia almost always elects as governor a candidate from the opposite party of the president who won the previous year.

Virginia was, of course, the big disappointment because the state has been trending blue. It may well be true that Virginia really is a purple state that looked blue only out of antipathy in recent years to former President Donald Trump. Certainly, the successful Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin, managed the delicate balancing act of keeping Trump out of the state while sounding enough Trumpian themes to avoid angering the thin-skinned former president and Trump’s loyal base. Trump behaved, saying nice things about Youngkin and staying out of Virginia. Youngkin’s strategy frustrated McAuliffe, who tried unsuccessfully to argue that a vote for his opponent was a vote for the former president.

But, will Youngkin’s strategy of keeping Trump at arm’s length work for other Republicans running for office in 2022? Probably not, because it is difficult to imagine that Trump will sit idly by in his lair at Mar-a-Lago while Republican congressional, senatorial, and gubernatorial candidates distance themselves from him. He managed the trick this time around with Youngkin, but I would not bet the ranch on him doing it again next year.

Youngkin’s handling of the disgraced former president is the first lesson Republican politicians and political pundits claim to have learned from the Virginia results. The second lesson is — supposedly — that cultural issues work to drive the base. Youngkin made education the centerpiece of his campaign, focusing on critical race theory and book banning. Those issues resonated to such an extent that Republicans think education should be at the forefront of issues next year.

The ever spineless Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, quickly got on board. “If the Virginia results showed us anything, it is that parents are demanding more control and accountability in the classroom,” McCarthy wrote in an election-night letter to his caucus. And, J.D. Vance, running in the Republican primary in Ohio for the Senate, channeled former President Richard Nixon, saying: “The professors are the enemy.” Parenthetical note: Vance has a law degree from Yale University.

Will concerns over how race is taught in public schools work next year? Youngkin succeeded in using the teaching about the history of race relations in the United States as a dog whistle for fears surrounding White identity, but education does not travel well from the local arena to the national. For one thing, education is — and always has been — a local issue. Parents control education through local school boards, making public education perhaps the most democratic aspect of American society. And, historically, education is not a Republican issue. Voters usually trust Democrats to handle it better than Republicans.

More importantly, there were educational concerns in the Virginia gubernatorial race that are particular to one state and one year. In addition to the highly publicized fears over race in the classroom, parents in Virginia were angry over last year’s closing of schools because of COVID-19 and riled about mask-wearing mandates. Those concerns may be ancient history by November 2022. Asian parents had worries over access to programs for gifted students, and Black parents were upset over teachers’ unions’ opposition to charter schools.

I am not at all certain that Youngkin’s campaign provides a template for Republican candidates running for national office in 2022. I am certain, however, that Democratic success at the polls hinges on first producing results for the American people and then convincing voters of the value of those results while painting the Republicans as the “do-nothing” party. Let Republicans stick to the war on culture in lieu of economic policies that substantively improve voters’ lives.

People are nervous about the economy, which has recovered unevenly from its disruption during the depths of the pandemic. Gas prices are up, inflation fears loom, and breaks in the supply chain are a worry as the holiday shopping season begins. To allay anxiety, Democrats must quickly pass the Build Back Better Act, and then waste no time explaining its benefits to the public: Universal free preschool, child care for working parents, tax credits to families with children, expanded care for seniors, assistance to cash-strapped consumers shifting to clean energy, relief from the high cost of prescription drugs, improvements to the Affordable Care Act, and on and on.

These are real benefits for working, middle-class Americans. It is a platform for Democrats to run on in 2022, contrasting Democratic-passed reforms with the do-nothing Republicans whose major accomplishment when Trump was president was a whopping tax cut for the very wealthy. And, part of next year’s campaign should be this: Elect more Democrats who will build on and strengthen these accomplishments.

Make it about the economy, stupid!

Posted November 5, 2021