Does Donald Trump Think American Sailors Are Enemies of the State, Too?

The story of the dismissal of Captain Brett Crozier from his command of a US aircraft carrier has only grown more troubling over the last day.  To review events so far: In late March, following previous failed attempts to get appropriate action from his superiors regarding a coronavirus outbreak aboard the USS Roosevelt, Crozier sent a broader communication asking that he be allowed to send the bulk of his crew ashore.  This message was then leaked to the media (by whom is not known at this point).  A few days later (this past weekend), Crozier was fired from his post for having sent the plea.

The optics were shocking – a naval officer punished for trying to protect the sailors under his command? – and the reasons provided seemed dubious at best.  Explaining his decision to dismiss Captain Crozier, Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly stated that Crozier had broken the chain of command and had cracked under pressure.  Modly’s action was an override of normal Navy protocols for handling concerns about a ship captain, and he essentially indicated to a reporter this weekend that he made this move at the suggestion of President Trump (though he described it as taking action before the president could insert himself into the matter).  

But today, events took a still darker turn.  In a remarkable in-person speech to the sailors of the USS Roosevelt (the vessel is currently docked in Guam), Modly escalated the list of accusations against Crozier.  Addressing the captain’s decision to send a communication to his superiors, Modly stated that, “If he didn't think, in my opinion, that this information wasn't going to get out to the public, in this day and information age that we live in, then he was either A, too naïve or too stupid to be a commanding officer of a ship like this," Modly said, continuing, "The alternative is that he did this on purpose."  Modly added that this was a “betrayal of trust, with me, with his chain of command.”

The big story here is the action of a Trump administration official to demonize a naval captain for trying to protect his crew from the coronavirus.  Remember, Crozier has already been relieved from command, even though there hasn’t yet been an investigation of his actions yet (which would be far more typical in such a situation).  So why has the acting Secretary of the Navy flown to Guam to talk directly to the crew of the ship whose captain he’s just defenestrated, not to reassure them that the Navy cares about their health and safety, but to ramp up the charges against Crozier, including the accusation of “betrayal,” which could subject Crozier to a court martial?

I think Paul Waldman gets it exactly right when he suggests that Crozier has been targeted so severely because he’s helped disrupt Donald Trump’s claim that he’s got the coronavirus under control.  After all, last month the Secretary of Defense had communicated to military commanders that they’d need to clear their coronavirus protection policies with him first – a policy presented as ensuring consistency across the US government, but which was clearly intended to spare the president from embarrassment should a general or admiral acknowledge the danger of the coronavirus at a time the president was still declaring it to be a hoax.

What has specifically escalated this whole situation in the eyes of the White House, and which this CNN article smartly notes, is that not only did Crozier’s plea for help leak, but that videos of his subsequent departure from the ship went viral – videos that show hundreds or even thousands of his sailors cheering for him, in acknowledgment of his efforts to save his crew.  I think it is this spectacle that has most unnerved the president and his cronies, to the point that Trump lashed out at him personally at a news conference this weekend.  The idea that anyone other than the president might be cheered is an affront to his sense of being at the center of the universe; the fact that Crozier was cheered for doing what Trump has failed at – to defend his charges against the coronavirus – makes the adulation of Crozier totally unacceptable.  What most Americans saw as a heartfelt display of loyalty and gratitude, the president and his gang saw as an enormous middle finger aimed at Donald Trump.  Any expressions of loyalty and gratitude, when not aimed at the president, are deemed to be treason and betrayal.

The fear and displeasure evoked by all those cheering sailors not only explains the need to kick Captain Crozier while he’s down, but also Modly’s otherwise inexplicable decision to take the sailors themselves to task (in person, no less!) for their support of their captain.  “Think about that when you cheer the man off the ship who exposed you to that,” he said in his speech today. “I understand you love the guy. It's good that you love him. But you're not required to love him.”  By “exposed you to that,” Modly appears to have been referring to the publicity that this whole story has garnered – but why the crew should be upset about the outside world discovering how the Navy failed to protect the health of its sailors doesn’t really make sense outside of the Trump propaganda bubble.  The crew cheered their captain because he was attempting to protect them; Modly’s attempt to browbeat them and to expect them to share his own indignation isn’t just bizarre, it’s positively Trumpian in its non-self-aware belligerence.

Modly has suggested that American security was compromised by adversaries learning of the illness aboard the ship, but this sounds like an excuse for a cover-up. The American people very much have a right to know when our nation’s military is being let down by its admirals and its civilian leadership. Modly might not like it, but the US Navy is not a private fiefdom to be run for the greater glory of the president.

I’m seeing a lot of commentary that Modly is not long for his acting secretary-hood, but that seems naïve.  Modly channeled his inner Trump in his ugly remarks today, likely in an attempt to ingratiate himself with his boss.  Why on earth should the president be displeased with what he said?

Was Navy Captain Fired For Crime of Taking Coronavirus Seriously?

You have probably already heard about the firing of US Navy Captain Brett Crozier in response to a letter to his superiors asking that the bulk of his aircraft carrier crew be moved ashore to prevent them from succumbing to the coronavirus, which had begun to spread aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt.  Although the acting Secretary of the Navy claims that Crozier was fired for violating the chain of command when he wrote his letter, this is a case where context really is everything.  The Trump administration has consistently and catastrophically played down the threat of the coronavirus, and a naval officer drawing attention to how the military has been impacted by the virus threatened to undermine the president’s case that he’s done a perfect job handling this pandemic.  The direct line between serving the president’s interests and firing the captain has now been established by reporting that acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly was aware that President Trump wanted the captain relieved of command; this decision cannot be viewed outside the president’s ongoing campaign to evade responsibility for the coronavirus crisis. 

Many have already pointed out the grotesque disparity between the president’s intervention in this case — firing a captain who tried to protect the lives of the sailors under his command — and his previous pardoning of multiple war criminals whose actions were incompatible with any recognizable American values.  For opponents of the president interested in combatting his claims that he’s a staunch backer of the American military, this latest action provides a bookend for making the case that he doesn’t actually have the least interest in defending either military lives or American interests.  While the U.S. military must always answer to civilian decision makers, a president who undermines its ability to conduct itself by basic American values — say, by abiding by the notion that we don’t kill unarmed prisoners, or that a captain has a duty to protect his crew from illness — dangerously undermines that military’s ability to do its job of defending the United States.  At this point, Trump’s claim that he is somehow an unparalleled supporter of both U.S. military power and its personnel has been pretty much revealed as a fraud, as well a particular insult to American service members.  

Last month, it was reported that Defense Secretary Mark Esper instructed military commanders around the globe to check in with him before making decisions on how to protect their troops from the coronavirus, in case those decisions “might surprise the White House or run afoul of President Trump’s messaging on the growing health challenge.”  Given that the president’s attitude at the time was a combination of denialism and mendacity toward the threat posed by the virus, it was clear that this instruction was a way of telling the military not to take the coronavirus as seriously as it should, so as not to contradict the president.  In light of this previous instruction, which seems to have put political protection of the president over the safety of American service members, Crozier’s firing should spur investigations into whether other military commanders felt they were not getting the latitude they needed to protect their charges, and if so, to what degree that was driven by the interest of the upper ranks and their civilian leadership to protect and promote the president’s deranged vision that the coronavirus was merely a Democratic hoax.

There’s also an important reminder in this baleful story about democratic practices in a time of national crisis.  Of necessity, the federal and state governments need to assert powers they would and should not in ordinary times, from states issuing shelter in place orders to the federal government directing private industry to produce critical medical supplies.  But the requirement for rapid and centralized action doesn’t mean that bedrock democratic principles of deliberation, openness, and public consent are no longer applicable or important.  To the contrary: in such an emergency situation, where liberties are curtailed and sacrifices are demanded, vigilance, skepticism, and the tolerance of dissent are more crucial than ever.  In the case of Captain Crozier, it seems that regardless of whether he did or did not violate the chain of command, he acted the way a good democratic citizen should: he raised his concerns with those in power in defense of the greater good of the sailors threatened by the coronavirus.  The fact that his request was granted, with many sailors now transferred to shore facilities, shows that he made the right call even by the standards of those involved in his termination.

Under Threat From Coronavirus, Some Americans Are More Equal Than Othersam

The coronavirus pandemic is operating like an X-ray of the inequalities and injustices of American society, with differences in economic status outrageously correlated with the odds that one lives or dies.  Many white collar workers are able to work from home now that self-quarantine has become the dominant strategy for combatting the spread of the virus, while millions of workers in service industry jobs have no choice but to keep working and so increase their chances of falling ill.  Better-off workers have sick days to use if needed, while those less privileged have faced the impossible choice of either taking time off and being fired, or working while sick with a potentially deadly disease.  National legislation extending sick leave to all on a temporary basis can’t paper over what has already been so harshly revealed.  To go back to the way things were, with Americans having no guaranties to sick leave or health care, would be to embrace a system we have now seen, in undeniable, broken action, to be a machine for killing those not lucky enough to have the right job.

But what we’re seeing in the life or death inequalities exposed among Americans based on their socio-economic status finds its most vivid and extreme expression in the threat faced by our homeless neighbors in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.  According to reporting in The New York Times, “Once infected the chronically homeless are more likely to get much sicker or die because of underlying medical conditions and a lack of reliable health care,” in part because, as The Washington Post notes, the population is also older than other groups of Americans.  The Post also reports that basic hygiene, like washing hands, has become even more difficult than before for many without shelter, as restaurants and other locations they previously had access to are now closed.  The idea of self-quarantine is something of a joke when you don’t have a home, though organizations across the country are working to find solutions.  But even when the homeless are able to stay in shelters, the crowded conditions are ideal for the spread of a disease like coronavirus.  

The Times remarks that “[t]here are also concerns for employees at shelters — nurses, administrators, charitable workers — who, like health care workers at hospitals, could find themselves exposed multiple times if the virus were to spread among the homeless community.”  I have little doubt that before very long, the president and his allies will be seizing on this possibility as a way to scapegoat the homeless population as at least partially responsible for this pandemic; the idea that the homeless are sources of contagion has already been a theme of the president’s so-called thoughts on the homeless.

Long before now, the notion that thousands upon thousands of our fellow Americans have been condemned to live without shelter, without stability, without prospects for a better life, should have sparked sufficient national outrage that sufficient resources and energy had been invested to resolve this admittedly complex problem.  But now, with homelessness being a proxy for one’s chances of living or dying in the coming months, we have no further excuses for seeing it in its actuality: as the most profound and unforgivable violation of these Americans’ civil rights.  And not simply their rights to health, wellness, and life itself, but also the rights to thrive, to be part of their larger community, to participate in the politics and economy of our nation. 

Like a Vampire of Chaos, Will Trump Feed Off the Coronavirus Disaster He's Made?

Having observed and documented the descent of Russia into totalitarian rule under the dead-eyed Vladimir Putin, journalist Masha Gessen’s observations of our Trumpified America are both troubling and invaluable.  In a recent piece, she notes how President Trump is reacting to the coronavirus in predictable ways, a repertoire that includes lies, self-praise, threats, and stoking fear.  But while she shares the harshest critiques of the president’s handling of the coronavirus crisis, she warns that the fear and uncertainty that accompany the pandemic may strengthen his authoritarian approach to governance:

[A] pandemic [. . .] exerts terror. Terror is effective when every person in the population has a credible fear of suffering and dying [. . .] [A] population gripped by terror creates extraordinary opportunities for this President, who has been groping his way to autocratic rule.

The biggest gift the pandemic may give Trump is the opportunity to envelop an ever greater number of people in his reality. [. . .] Anxiety is ever the autocrat’s friend. Living in a fog where one either doesn’t know whom to believe or finds fact-based reality terrifying, more and more people may heed the clarion call of the con man-in-chief.

Beyond the anxiety induced by the disease itself, the extreme damage to the economy could, counter-intuitively for many of us, also strengthen the president’s appeal:

Other friends of the autocrat, counterintuitively, are a tanking economy and a scarcity environment. The inability to plan, to have the certainty of being able to feed one’s family today and tomorrow, produces more anxiety and fear of change. 

Trump’s failures, by creating instability and fear in the population, might make Americans more receptive to further strongman assertions by the president that he alone is able to help them amid the disorder.  This certainly runs against what a lot of people think, who assume his failures will turn voters against Trump.  For instance, many think the president will be undone by a cratering economy — and indeed, there is good evidence that the strong economy he has enjoyed during his term has provided a buffer against even worse approval ratings than he already receives.  Against this, though, we need to recognize that a broad longing for certainty and order out of a chaotic situation is not just a possible scenario ahead of us, but is an apt descriptor for how many Trump supporters saw their situation in the United States when they made the fateful decision to vote for this awful man.  Millions of white Americans saw the demography of the country changing and perceived their status in the country to be slipping away, which was sufficiently disturbing to them that an explicit racist with anti-democratic tendencies was seen as an acceptable, indeed, the logical choice.

A general tendency to underestimate the appeal of the president’s authoritarian politics to date has blinded a lot of Americans to the appeal, as Gessen suggests, that such politics can have in a worsening economy and destabilized social environment.  Certainly the Democrats as a whole have been slow to realize that Donald Trump and the Republican Party don’t actually believe in democratic politics anymore, if the basic tenant of democracy is understood to be that the majority should rule.  Democrats expect that competence will win out at the end of the day, but they still seem not to see how much appeal there is to a president and party that will make you feel powerful, revenged and restored in a country that no longer seems to place them at the top of the food chain.

The idea that the president might benefit from the coronavirus crisis seemed to receive some slight evidence a week or two ago, when, amazingly, a plurality of voters approved of his handling of the pandemic.  But it seems those who suggested these polls might reflect a “rally around the flag” effect in a time of national emergency may have been right, as the latest polling shows those numbers turning against him.  This provides some hope that most of us are not buying his bluff and bluster as a way out of this crisis — but I don’t think this necessarily means that he won’t still be able to cement his hold on his base through his usual bag of racist and authoritarian tricks. A huge question for me is how much this crisis might strengthen his appeal, as Gessen warns, or whether it might serve up such a dose of deadly reality as to expose unforgivably the president’s incompetence and indifference to even his base’s suffering. This pandemic would seem to threaten the blood bond between Trump and his white supporters — after all, he was elected to inflict cruelty on minorities, not his own voters.

Build the Case Now

For anyone interested in holding the president and the GOP to account for their murderous incompetence in the escalating coronavirus epidemic — say, a Democratic party that finally comes to grips with its mandate to protect the American people — this weekend has supplied more powerful evidence in the case against this administration.  The New York Times has perhaps the most comprehensive story to date about what went wrong with the U.S.’s ability to test for the coronavirus.  The article identifies inept leadership at multiple agencies involved, including Centers for Disease Control director Dr. Robert Redfield and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.  It’s also clear that individual mistakes compounded each other, adding up to a systemic failure.  But even this systemic failure might have been headed off by adequate prioritization and leadership from the White House; instead, neither was forthcoming.

Publicizing such facts should be a top priority for Democrats because, as in the case of inadequate testing capacity, the problem is still happening, and is overseen by the same people who fucked up in the first place.  We cannot expect better results if the same players are allowed to stay in charge.  And in terms of holding the Trump administration accountable for its unforgivable errors, establishing the truth of its deadly incompetence is a necessity.  As much as this crisis cements the illegitimacy of the Trump administration, it is also an existential challenge for the Democratic Party.  We are beyond even the most fundamental debates about what values should guide our country, to the basic fact of a president whose policies and lack of action have resulted in the deaths of thousands of Americans, with the death toll certain to rise far more.  This administration is responsible for an overwhelming loss of life, and the Democrats need to start act liking it if they want to avoid becoming accomplices to mass death.

Will Stancil has been tweeting about the asymmetry between the Democrats and the Republicans in their approach to disseminating information to the public.  He makes the extremely important point that while Republicans have a vast right-wing media apparatus to spread coordinated disinformation campaigns, the Democratic Party consistently shies away from countering this by mounting its own coordinated efforts simply on the party level.  Rather than hitting the president consistently and relentlessly, elected Democrats rely on the media to pick up the slack.  But of course this isn’t the job of the media, or at least mainstream media.  It is a strangely passive approach, and one that, in our current moment, seems almost like self-sabotage.  When the president is directly responsible for mass deaths across America, there is both a moral responsibility and a political imperative to trumpet that responsibility across the land.

That imperative is all the more acute as the president, his party, and his right-wing defenders are already engaged in a disinformation campaign to allow the president to shirk responsibility for even his most murderous decisions.  It has been going on for weeks now, ever since the president proclaimed the coronavirus threat to be a hoax and a Democratic plot to take him down — propaganda echoed by both the Republican Party and outlets like Fox News.  And as Josh Marshall writes today, the GOP’s broader strategy for evading blame for the pandemic even while failing to adequately fight it is coming into view.  He points to the example of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who refused lockdowns of Florida while the coronavirus spread throughout the state, but who has now ordered a 14-day quarantine on anyone arriving in the state from the New York area.  Marshall sees a larger narrative emerging, in which the president and his allies will scapegoat blue states like New York and California for sickening the nation with the virus — a strategy that will become necessary as it begins to also spread widely in majority-Republican states.

Against this, the Democrats need to provide a coordinated and savage narrative that highlights the damning facts of the president’s culpability in this crisis.  This effort will necessarily encompass holding the GOP to account for its refusal to critique or check this malevolent president.  They should not shy away from tying the failed impeachment effort to the present danger we face; after all, the GOP looked at irrefutable evidence that the president placed personal interest over the nation’s safety, and declared it all good.  To their credit, after all, the Democrats tried to remove this unfit president from office, while the GOP did everything it could to ensure he’d be around to preside over what may yet be the most catastrophic health and economic disaster in American history.  What might have seemed abstract about the president’s malfeasance in the context of national security questions a few months ago is now grounded in the frightening everyday of our collective lived experience.

No More Politics as Usual

If we’ve learned one thing from the past three years, it’s that letting Donald Trump get away with even the most outrageous acts doesn’t make him self-impeach, it makes him stronger.  When the Democrats stand by without the appropriate level of criticism or calls to action, passivity becomes validation of his authoritarian and inept ways, a signal to the American people that his behavior is not so outrageous that we need to try to do anything to stop him.

Sitting back now and simply watching Donald Trump’s murderous incompetence, twinned with likely malevolent intent, in not acting with anything resembling reasonable speed to the sickening of blue states like New York and California sends seismic shock waves almost too great to measure across American society – a message that no matter how heinous his actions, there is simply no point in trying to do anything about the president’s unfitness for office.  Certainly Democratic politicians as of today exhibit little interest in expressing the adequate outrage and leveling the appropriate charges – that the president is a monster, surrounded by a gang of accomplices, all of whom are guilty of a level of negligence that should result in their being banned from public office and polite society for the rest of their days. 

And to ignore the president’s established ability, via the perversities of the contemporary media ecosystem, to manipulate reality and shift blame away from himself, in favor of the idea that the truth will simply become known to Americans and that they will judge for themselves what a terrible man he is, at this point amounts to politically suicidal malpractice.  The Democrats seem to be reading the polls showing a plurality of Americans support the president’s handling of the pandemic, and concluding that they had best not challenge him because of his apparent political strength, when in fact the opposite is far more likely to be true, and is morally required – that they do everything they can to communicate to the American people that the president’s disinformation campaign against even the existence of the virus, as well as his deranged and incompetent handling of the federal response, are unprecedented failures by an American president to do his duty and serve this country above his personal interests. 

Instead, day by day, despite hopeful media narratives to the contrary, Donald Trump simply and predictably gets worse and worse.  He threatens to undo the strict social distancing measures that his own months of inaction have made necessary. He suggests that state governors need to provide him with some benefit if they expect to receive medical supplies.  He incites hatred against Chinese and Latinos by rhetoric that suggests they bear particular malicious responsibility for the spread of the coronavirus.  He questions requests for ventilators from medical professionals.

We all have to fight starting far more viciously and savagely than we have until now.  It’s not often that you can say so, but we are in an actual life and death struggle.  We are very far from politics as usual.  People are dying because of the choices made by the monsters of the GOP.  We simply can’t wait until the next election; outright opposition needs to begin now, with the minimal goal of exposing and framing their inhuman behavior, and a maximal goal of changing that behavior.  The most basic thing we can start doing is describing the actions of the president and his party with brutal specificity and moral accuracy.

This opposition will be most powerful if Democrats and others are pushing an actual coherent vision as what we should be working towards in place of this death march treadmill the GOP and friends are so eager to push us all back onto.  We have no choice but to make this into a turning point toward great equality, social solidarity, and economic justice.  The political field is wide open for this sort of uniting, common-sense argument for where we desperately need to go as a society.  And it clearly starts with ensuring a medically-driven, fact-based fight against the coronavirus.

But if you want these ideas to be taken seriously, you need to deal with the party standing in the way – beating down the GOP goes hand in hand with moving any sort of positive vision for the future forward (as Jared Sexton vividly describes here, the GOP simply doesn’t think about the future anymore, only a present that they can exploit and plunder).  The Republicans and their goblin king are supremely dangerous, but particularly right now, they’re glass-jawed in their complicity in the mass suffering and economic distress now surging over our country.  Their race hatred and white nationalism had them obsessed with pretend enemies when all we really needed was basic epidemiological competence at the federal level.  Start hitting them and don’t stop, not until a Republican can’t get elected dog-catcher in this country.  Look at the fuss they’re making at one of the first ads that pin the coronavirus squarely on the president – already warning that networks might lose their license for telling the truth.  The truth makes them whimper, and their response is to grab for a tinpot dictator’s playbook.   Political annihilation is what they deserve and what we need.

Common Sense and Moral Outrage Can Defeat the Let-Them-Eat-Coronavirus Gang

Against the president’s unspeakably sick notions that America’s first and only priority is to make sure he wins re-election, and that the government must do all it can to propitiate the stock market, even at the  potential cost of millions of lives, we have the overwhelming force of moral rightness and basic facts on  our side – and both need to be deployed now as if our lives depended on it.  The willingness of many on  the right to consider accepting the deaths of countless Americans based on a deluded vision of  shortening the economic pain appears driven by a combination of avarice, cruelty, a eugenics-inflected  view of the most vulnerable members of our society, and, in the apparent willingness to sacrifice elderly  parents in the process, unresolved issues of the tragic Greek persuasion.  

We have to joke a little, because otherwise we might begin to scream in horror at cost-benefit  analyses from the president that would have us think of deaths from coronavirus as akin to the random toll of car crashes, deaths from flu, and other needless losses at the hands of drunk drivers and an unfair medical system.  It is a belief system that looks at America and doesn’t see people or families who  together form a society of love and solidarity, but only units of production, employees to be squeezed or  marks to be bilked, like some mad widget factory owner in whatever Dickens novel you care to choose.   In short, they don’t have a different moral system than the rest of one so much as lack one entirely, and we need so say this in unison if we want to break their plans to sabotage the lockdown before it’s had a  chance to be effective. 

As far as the basic facts being on our side, the best thing I’ve read today is this piece by Ezekiel Emanuel, where he gives us the bad news: we have a couple weeks left to stop this epidemic from becoming an  epic catastrophe – and also the good news: there’s a path forward to stopping its spread that doesn’t call for sacrificing our fellow Americans or gutting the economy.  He acknowledges that keeping the economy from crashing is completely valid, but also stakes out the overwhelming reality – that there can be no  healthy economy without stopping this epidemic.  And he sees a way to stop the virus while limiting U.S.  deaths to as low as 100,000 – horrific, but far short of the figures in the millions that could occur even under non-worst scenarios.  They include a national shelter in place policy; an accelerated testing program; ramped-up production of necessary medical equipment; and increasing hospital staff, including training non-medical professionals to assist in vital jobs.  Everything he proposes sounds like common sense, and none of it involves sociopathic talk about how many seniors need to be sacrificed per point of GDP.  It simply involves our government getting its act together, making the right strategic choices, and  implementing.  As we are beset by talk of America being open by Easter, if only enough Americans are  willing to let themselves die in Christ-like sacrifice, Emanuel’s ideas and those of other health professional can provide a benchmark by which the public can assess whether what our government is doing to stave off disaster is rational and purposeful, or whether it’s acting in ways that fail us all.

As Coronavirus Challenge Grows, White House Doubles Down on Madness

On a day of relentless bad news, the most chilling thing I’ve read is that President Trump has apparently grown impatient with the nation-wide lockdown orders aimed at checking the spread of coronavirus.  Viewing them primarily through the parlous effect they’re having on the economy, he has indicated that he will review the lockdown guidelines after they’ve been in place for 15 days — a countdown clock that began ticking last week.  According to Reuters, he told reporters that states with lower rates of infection might allow people to resume going to work.  In this, he disregards the reality of his administration’s failure to allow adequate testing for the virus; we can really have no idea how many people in such states are actually ill from or currently incubating COVID-19.

If it were simply the president alone floating such a deranged relaxation of measures, it would be bad enough.  But there’s strong evidence that this is a strengthening position among right-wing commentators, political allies of the president, and some corporations.  Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, tweeted that, “I think it is soon becoming time to have old and/or sick people take every precaution and healthy people go back to work forever changed w(ith) new habits in a grimmer reality.”  In a similar vein, former Goldman Sachs CEO tweeted, “Extreme measures to flatten the virus curve is sensible-for a time-to stretch out the strain on health infrastructure. But crushing the economy, jobs and morale is also a health issue-and beyond. Within a very few weeks let those with a lower risk to the disease return to work.”

Both Schlapp’s and Blankfein’s comments are irresponsible in the way they submerge the serious risks posed by community spread and ignore the impossibility of assessing who is sick and who is healthy, given the lack of sufficient testing capability. Who are the “healthy people” Schalpp is talking about? Even young people can die from this virus.  But even darker is the way they, like the president has begun doing, insinuate that there are health risks from the economy being so severely slowed down — it’s a venture into medical territory about which they are supremely unqualified to opine.

Yet most terrible of all is the sinister elevation of the economy above all other concerns, even above life itself.  At The Nation, Jeet Heer captures this perfectly, writing, “What they are arguing for goes beyond Social Darwinism and is, in fact, a kind of cult capitalism. The existing system is viewed as so sacred that it is worth sacrificing innumerable human lives to keep it going.”  Indeed, Jeer’s entire column about this frightening new strategy of calling off the lockdown prematurely is necessary reading.  Among other things, he cites how opposition to government intervention in the economy by conservatives and corporations is leading them to oppose the very measures that would help the economy now, in place of the doomed plan of sending workers back to the office too soon: “a combination of universal basic income, mortgage, and rent forgiveness, bailouts for small business and a Keynesian booster shot at the end of the pandemic.”

The president’s mad desire to declare victory over the coronavirus before we’ve really even begun to fight it is all the more nightmarish in light of his culpability in allowing things to get this bad, this fast.  If his administration had taken the coronavirus threat seriously, we would have had sufficient tests prepared to have a real chance at containing the virus.  Instead, as the threat grew, the president did everything he should not have: he told people it was a hoax, that it would go away, that we did not need to be concerned.  Always of paramount importance was his re-election and his obsession with the stock market and its imperfect relationship to the health of the economy. 

Having helped bring this catastrophe upon us, he now considers asking us to ignore its horror in support of his re-election campaign, with a false return to normalcy that, under current circumstances, would supercharge the spread of the virus.  His obsession with re-election over actually being president will get millions of us killed.

With Millions of Lives At Stake, It's Time for Trump to Step Aside

In the realm of politics right now, there may not be a more serious and necessary task than ensuring that the president is held to account for his grotesque mishandling of the U.S. response to the coronavirus threat, and that the Republican Party is also properly judged for its complicity in this disaster.  As I wrote last week, in an utterly perverse way the president is somewhat shielded from a proper examination of his incompetence by the direct result of that incompetence: a growing deadly pandemic for which we are dangerously unprepared, and that has much of American locked down and anxious if not scared shitless.  Yet it’s impossible to overstate the severity of the president’s offense: through his incompetence, many thousands, and potentially millions, more Americans will die from this virus than if the United States had had a competent and sane chief executive.  To avoid grappling with this fact amounts to accepting that the president is free to allow the infliction of untold death and suffering on all of us, free of consequence.  If we allow him to get away with this, there is literally no evil he and his allies will not hesitate to inflict on our country in the future.

Identifying the president’s mistakes is essential as a matter of basic accountability; the need to do so immediately, rather than after this crisis passes, is required in part because he has already embarked on a mission to rewrite the history of his culpability and to assign blame elsewhere.  He had already told us that “I don’t take responsibility at all,” but now he’s also claiming that he was aware of the threat the pandemic posed from the start, and that he did everything necessary to stop it.  These are bald-faced lies, but they are repeated not just by the president during his daily briefings and tweets, but by his political allies and right-wing propaganda outfits like Fox News.   Likewise, he has embarked on a campaign to blame China for the virus as a way to evade responsibility for the botched federal response; he has also suggested that Latino immigrants have vectored the disease into America, with his administration issuing ominous warnings about how immigrants in holding facilities pose a threat to border agents.  Opponents of Donald Trump cannot just assume that Americans will simply realize the truth of his culpability, not when there’s such a daily onslaught of distortion in defense of this president.

Nonetheless, even as Trump and his allies invoke racist defenses of their collective incompetence, damning facts continue to crash down on their heads like thunderbolts.  The New York Times details a government exercise held last year that simulated a response to a theoretical pandemic eerily similar to the one we are now facing.  The exercise revealed multiple shortcomings in U.S. preparations, including a realization that the U.S. “did not have the means to quickly manufacture more essential medical equipment, supplies or medicines, including antiviral medications, needles, syringes, N95 respirators and ventilators, the agency concluded” — problems that are facing us now in a moment of actual danger.  At a minimum, the existence of this practice run gives the lie to the president’s statements that we couldn’t have predicted a pandemic like the present one.

Even more upsetting is this report from The Washington Post, which discusses how President Trump and other officials were privy to warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies as far back as January about the threat posed by the coronavirus, but that “[d]espite that constant flow of reporting, Trump continued publicly and privately to play down the threat the virus posed to Americans.” As one source tells the Post, “Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were — they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it. The system was blinking red.” It’s impossible to say if this particular official was aware of it, but the “blinking red” comments inevitably hearken back to descriptions of the warnings President Bush received prior to 9/11 and likewise ignored.

According to U.S. officials, a “key task for analysts during disease outbreaks is to determine whether foreign officials are trying to minimize the effects of an outbreak or take steps to hide a public health crisis.”  In fact, some Trump advisers told him that the Chinese government was not being accurate in the coronavirus figures it was providing — yet the president essentially chose to believe the Chinese over his own intelligence agencies.  Among other things, the president tweeted in late January that “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus.  The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”

The story also includes details that have been reported before, such as Trump’s reaction to CDC official Nancy Messonnier’s February 25 warning that coronavirus could result in “severe” disruptions to American life.  The president complained to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Aazar that her comments were scaring the stock market; learning that he made these comments despite high-level warnings from intelligence sources that corroborated Messonnier’s perspective further cements a picture of a president determined to ignore the warnings of experts, and obsessed with maintaining a facade of normalcy.

For literally months leading up to this present crisis, the president made a fateful choice on a daily basis: faced with the prospect of a pandemic that threatened American lives, he chose a strategy of protecting his image over protecting Americans, and so refrained from the mobilization that would have protected countless lives.  In doing so, he has lost any possible claim to authority in leading us through this crisis.  Yet the same man who made this murderous calculation now appears before us almost daily, spreading lies and disinformation about U.S. efforts to combat this pandemic, both out of an ingrained incompetence and desperation to evade responsibility for his past bad decisions. Such a president will continue to derail the American effort against the virus, as he prioritizes a self-promoting worldview that downplays the threat of the coronavirus.

And so the point we have reached is both absurd and deeply sinister.  As the death toll mounts and fear spikes across the land, Trump will have an increasing incentive to deflect responsibility from his own unforgivable mistakes, which will only magnify his incompetence and the danger to millions of Americans. To look away from his unfitness for office now is to make ourselves complicit in our own mass suffering. We need to be demanding his resignation, or, save that, his removal from any responsibility in fighting this epidemic.

The Clarifying Fire of the Virus Crisis

The Washington Post has a report out on the background to Donald Trump’s disastrous coronavirus policy speech last Wednesday.  Paragraph for paragraph, it’s one of the most damning and enraging portraits of the White House I’ve read in . . . well, in at least a few weeks.    We learn that presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner attempted to take the lead on the coronavirus response, employing such novel methods as taking crowdsourced Facebook suggestions from an in-law.  As with the president, Kushner’s main goal seems not to have been to organize a response to protect the American people, but rather arrive at the right combination of words and hocus-pocus that might arrest the stock market’s precipitous fall as it reflects the reality of a fucked economy.  

The article describes a White House in which the president’s re-election is the pre-eminent concern, and where advisors’ fear of being accused of disloyalty stifles discussion.  It helps clarify that this president and his staff are simply overmatched by the current crisis, unable to see beyond the narrow range of the president’s personal interests.  The processes inside the White House are chaotic and unfocused, and not equal to the gravity of this moment; as the president conducts free for alls in the Oval Office, his advisors apparently spend a great deal of energy in absurd rivalries.  Meanwhile, others tell the Post that “they have to spend significant chunks of their day dealing with leaks, especially as officials try to escape blame for the testing issues that have plagued the administration’s response for weeks.”

As hard as it is to stomach, this article did at least clarify something which really should have been more obvious to me long before now: that the president has absolutely no conception of actually being the president.  There appears to be a complete and total separation in his mind — a separation reflected in the attitudes of those around him — between serving the American people as he was elected to do, and seeking re-election to the highest office in the land.  He is obsessed with the latter, and sees his path to success in manipulating reality in such a way that he fools enough people into voting for him.  Even in the midst of an epidemic in which his actions can mean the difference between life and death for millions of Americans, re-election is the paramount interest.  For the vast majority of anyone who might be in his place, the choice would be obvious, to the point that it would be no choice at all: you would do everything in your power to protect the American people, and let the election sort itself out.  Indeed, any rational president would have to acknowledge that personal failure in handling this outbreak would rightly be considered disqualifying — after all, what’s the point of being president if you’re just getting people killed?

At this point, to expect any sort of competent response from this president and this White House is not just nonsensical, it’s delusional.  We need to disabuse ourselves of our natural instinct to think that the same solidarity and empathy we feel for other Americans must be shared by the monster in the White House.  Trump has surrounded himself with people who reflect and amplify his own tremendous personal failings, making the White House as a whole a fusion reactor of self-interest, greed, white nationalism, and ineptness. The vast majority of Americans simply do no matter to him.  

Meanwhile, the president’s failings are perfectly complemented by the political beliefs of the Republican Party, which has spent the past four decades denigrating and degrading our government’s ability to act for the collective good, including to protect us from a pandemic like the one we are facing.  Together, the president’s personal incompetence and the GOP’s ideological irrelevance make this into a horrifying crisis for the rest of us.  We are going to see thousands if not millions of our fellow citizens die because these incompetents long ago stopped believing in a democratic government that serves everyone, and started seeing government as just a mechanism to help funnel money and power to an increasingly narrow band at the top of American society.

Homebodyism: Everyone is Doing It, So Why Don't You, Too?

The dilatory and incompetent federal approach to the coronavirus pandemic means that individual states and the public at large have been left playing catch-up in understanding and implementing the necessary responses to this outbreak.  Simply the basic question of whether it’s safe to go to the office, or whether working from home (if possible) will help arrest the spread of the disease, is confounding millions of people.  My partner and I have both experienced this confusion firsthand, as both our places of work have acknowledged the threat posed by the virus over the past few weeks, but been slow to act beyond offering suggestions for avoiding and preventing the illness (washing hands, staying home if sick), while refraining from implementing plans to keep everyone at home.  By Friday, individual managers at my business were deciding whether to send employees home, essentially leaving the fates of employees up to the epidemiological savvy of whoever they happen to work for.  Meanwhile, one group of employees was literally cordoned off from the rest of us on our open-plan floor, as they are considered essential personnel; this may have superficially protected those lucky few, but the arrangement meant that office foot traffic doubled in other areas, unfortunately sending a message that some employees are more expendable than others, and blowing our sense of solidarity to smithereens.

I do worry that too many people are taking too much guidance from employers whose grasp of the situation is no better than their employees, and who don’t necessarily have employee health as their absolute first priority.  At the risk of sounding overly cynical, we need to bear in mind that companies, despite their official line of caring about their employees, also have a contradictory interest in protecting the running of their business.  I fear that many Americans are relying on guidance from employers that aren’t treating employee health as their primary priority — if there were, I think it’s safe to say, all American businesses would have already closed and told their workers to remain at home. Count this over-reliance on compromised sources of information as yet another cost of the federal government’s failure to talk truthfully about this crisis.

At any rate, the most pressing question for all of us right now is what can be done to slow the spread of this epidemic.  I wanted to flag this article from the Center for American Progress, which lays out some frightening but essential data, beginning with its opening line: “The United States is at a tipping point: If transmission of COVID-19 is not slowed within the next week, the hospital system will be overwhelmed.”  Crucially, it acknowledges the compromised federal response, and points to the critical role state and local governments need to play.  

It also contains some good basic information, including numbers around worst-case transmission scenarios and the potential for getting those rates down.  The idea of “flattening the curve” is something people may have heard about, and refers to slowing the rate of infection, with the goal of ensuring that our medical system is not overwhelmed by critical cases.  I found this paragraph particularly helpful:

According to current estimates, 5 percent of those infected will require intensive care beds. There are approximately 98,000 intensive care beds in the United States. On the current track, these estimates indicate that 470,000 people will require intensive care beds—far more than are available. In reality, this massive shortage will be even worse because these beds will also be needed for other conditions, including seasonal influenza. If state and local governments begin aggressive measures today, however, the number of intensive care beds required could be reduced to 26,650.

With the goal of slowing the coronavirus spread front and center, the authors make several common-sense recommendations, including banning gatherings of more than 50 people, closing gyms, bars, and movie theaters, and “strongly encouraging employers to require employees to work remotely.”  The specific measures are a useful baseline for our societal needs at the moment, providing a reality check in the face of contradictory information floating around.

And even as they present their recommendations as what state and local governments need to do, we can also read them as an urgent call for individual action as well — even if that action is mostly the inaction of staying home as much as possible. The fact that the single largest contribution we can individually make is to remain home means we have an incredibly low bar to clear — the critical thing is that enough of us are aware of it.

For Trump's Base, Presidential Fantasy and Harsh Viral Reality Are On a Collision Course

In a great piece over at GQ, Laura Bassett traces the authoritarian tendencies evident in President Trump’s response to the coronavirus crisis, which I think are a huge part of this story.  There’s been a tendency to view the president’s various lies and blunders around the outbreak as primarily signs of incompetence —but as others have observed, authoritarianism and incompetence often go together.  An autocrat who relies on his personal decision-making rather than the advice of advisors or experts is bound to make mistakes, while the instinct to cover up problems from public view and accountability means that they can fester and worsen as time passes.

In the case of Trump and the coronavirus, incompetence alone provides an incomplete framework, as it downplays the president’s deliberate and even methodical attempts to manage and discuss the coronavirus in a way that prioritizes his political needs over those of the public.  He’s using the power of his office to spread self-serving propaganda about the success of the effort he’s leading to stop the spread of the virus.  We can safely assume that Donald Trump realizes he’s in over his head and truly has no sense about how to handle this epidemic; but by telling a story about his brilliant leadership and an alternate reality in which the coronavirus magically disappears, he’s laying the groundwork for the survival of his power no matter what happens.

What I think a lot of us are slow to grasp is that the impress of an increasingly devastating reality will not result in the president accommodating it in rational ways — for example, by admitting mistakes and making a course correction — but in Trump doubling down on its denial, if not in favor of a blissful vision of hale patriots easily shucking off the virus like townsfolk at a Kansas cornfest, then based on a tale wherein evil Democrats and nasty Mexicans conspired to breach our borders and infect the heartland with the Wuhan nasty.  The reason we have good reason to suspect this denialism will happen is because it is already, as the president points to the virus as further justification for a southern wall and slurs Democrats for supposedly supporting open borders.

The big question, of course, is whether this will work to distract enough people from the truth of the president’s failures.  The authoritarian aspect of his rule is important because this is what has bonded so many of his supporters to this irredeemable man — he is their leader-savior battling the forces of liberalism and non-whiteness and globalism, and it is not a huge stretch from the story he’s already been telling to now believe that a pandemic is yet another reason to stand by him against America’s enemies.

But is there a point when reality will overwhelm propaganda?

Intriguingly, there may well be.  For her article, Bassett talked with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, s scholar of authoritarianism and a history professor at New York University who’s been documenting the president’s autocratic tendencies since his election.  Ben-Ghiat points to the example of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, for whom a cult of personality could not save him from the harsh reality of Allied bombs falling on his country.  In the case of the coronavirus, as Bassett points out, we have the quite twisted situation of the president lying to his base about an illness in ways that make it likelier they will get sick and even die from it.  She writes:

The great irony here is that Trump’s own supporters may suffer the most from his narcissistic response to this public health emergency.  Many will believe him that the virus is “fake news” and take fewer precautions against it than the city-dwellers stocking up on canned goods (or oat milk) and washing their hands to “Free Bird.”  His base tends to be older, thus at higher risk of dying from the virus, and live in rural areas, where there are fewer testing resources and less adequate health care in general.

This whole awful situation reminds me of a great (pre-coronavirus) riff by Portland comic Nariko Ott about how our country is one bad bird flu away from having free college for all.  What twist of fate and reality have we undergone that a dark, truth-telling joke threatens to become our lived reality, in part at the president’s own hand?  It is the blackest of ironies that Donald Trump may be working toward his own defeat in November by actively ensuring that his supporters are winnowed by a virus indifferent to party affiliation or non-belief in its existence — but this scenario also raises urgent questions for Democrats and other opponents of Trump.  Between a president who makes it likelier that many thousands of Americans will die by his bad advice and bungled leadership, and a disease whose spread and lethality will be determined in part by many millions of individual Americans taking steps to protect themselves and others, there’s no choice but to fight for the lives of those we disagree with politically — especially when they’re being misinformed by their deranged leader.  Against the obscene betrayal of his own loyal followers, the undeniable realities of the virus in combination with a renewed compassion for our fellow Americans may help break the spell this evil man has cast.

The Coronavirus Pandemic Is Also an Unavoidable Political Crisis

It’s horror enough that in the face of a pandemic, President Trump spreads lies about the coronavirus that directly threaten the ability of millions of Americans to protect themselves from illness and death.  Clearly obsessed with his re-election and the economic effects of an outbreak, he has tried to substitute his self-serving fantasies for the hard truths Americans need to hear; in doing so, he has made himself an accomplice to the spread of the virus.  But as unforgivable as his public behavior has been, we are learning on a daily basis more and more details about the way his denialism and incompetence have, behind the scenes, sabotaged the efforts of our government to contain and mitigate it.  Just this past weekend, The Washington Post and Politico published important stories detailing how the administration’s fumbled and dilatory response to the coronavirus threat can be traced straight to the top.  

Yet, because the disaster has not yet occurred, because many hold out hope that the administration will still change course under the pressure of criticism, and because of the critical role the federal government must play in fighting this pandemic, the president has so far escaped the level of criticism his words and actions deserve.  It should not be controversial to say that a president who puts his re-election effort ahead of his constitutional obligation to defend American lives has committed an impeachable offense — and yet, you will listen in vain for any prominent Democrats to make this case.  The question of whether his incompetence has made it inevitable that many more Americans will sicken and die than if a competent presidential effort had been made is vital if we are to have accountability in our government.  Yet, perversely, Trump is somewhat protected from such an indictment by the very crisis his own actions have served to worsen.

While every American should be rooting for this administration to correct course and get the coronavirus response right, what we know thus far means that believing that this course-correction will actually happen is itself a delusion that eerily parallels the president’s own apparent faith in the power of magical thinking.  The mistakes the administration has made already make it far more likely that the coronavirus will be much deadlier and economically destructive than if a sane and reasonable person had been president.  It’s important to recognize the truth of this, and how it happened, because the facts really only lead in one direction: that the incompetence of this president and his administration will continue, founded as they are in the basic unfitness of Donald Trump.

But while the president bears direct responsibility for the actions of himself and his administration, it’s also important to recognize that the coronavirus fiasco is also a symptom of a larger political crisis involving the anti-government ideology of the Republican Party.  For decades, a core belief of the GOP has been that the government can do no good; ancillary to this, and also as a fundamental belief in its own right, the GOP has also opposed universal health care.  We now face a crisis that brings the moral bankruptcy of both positions into stark relief.  Believing neither in a larger public good served by a government elected by the people, nor in a mutual obligation to take care of such a basic need as health care, the Republican Party bears substantial responsibility for the crisis now unfolding.

This responsibility, you may not be surprised to hear, also encompasses the GOP’s support of this president through all his previous failures and lawlessness, culminating in the Senate’s acquittal of Trump in his impeachment trial.  It is no coincidence that the very thing that stood at the center of his impeachment — his placement of personal interest above the public good — is the same behavior now undermining the U.S. effort against the coronavirus, as Josh Marshall and others have pointed out.  A few months ago, the GOP had a chance to remove this man from office for offenses against the American people that are now being repeated in the coronavirus response, but declined to do so.  Having ensured that we are saddled with his inept leadership in the face of our current crisis, they share culpability for what is happening now and in the future.

So clearly to blame, Trump and his allies are bound to use this pandemic to press a narrative that the Democrats are actually at fault, both as a matter of self-preservation and because they have made clear their contempt for the two-party system and its reliance on factuality and electoral competition.  Indeed, this initiative has already begun, as President Trump blames “the Democrat policy of open borders” for the presence of the virus in the United States.  Threatened with a crisis that demands democratic accountability, Trump and the GOP will do what they can to deny Americans that accountability.

In the face of such attacks, and given the pressing need for a strong governmental response to the coronavirus, the Democrats can’t be stuck playing defense or downplaying the president’s contributions to this crisis.  As David Dayen writes at The American Prospect:

But though this crisis doesn’t fit the normal economic measures to prevent suffering, that doesn’t mean nothing can be done. Public-health and targeted economic plans must be implemented as soon as possible. If the Trump administration refuses, voters loom to show their wrath in November. Democrats must take immediate action that will not only aim to arrest the catastrophe, but signify that self-preservation aligns with progressive values and economic ideas [. . .]  Those who believe in the progressive conception of government need to drive the conversation.

There is no better argument for universal health care than a pandemic that threatens our entire populace.  Similarly, the benefits of sick leave benefits for all workers become glaringly obvious, both in moral terms and as a benefit to everyone in society, as workers who are able to stay home won’t sicken others, and are spared the unconscionable choice between making rent and working while ill.  

Likewise, Democrats should embark on a coordinated, large-scale effort to counter the lies and disinformation issued by Trump and his lackeys.  In the best-case scenario, this would push the Trump administration towards truthfulness; in the worst, it would at least provide Americans with a reliable source of information about what’s happening and how to protect themselves.  They need to make the case that we face a political crisis that is exacerbating a medical one.

Mournin' for Warren

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s withdrawal from the Democratic presidential campaign would have been a gut punch for many of us whenever it happened, but I am guessing that many or even most of her supporters were hoping against hope that her campaign would survive Super Tuesday.  The suddenness of her withdrawal against our high expectations is particularly disorienting, but so is the sense that she has been swept aside by political and even historical forces that, at least for the time being, threaten to diminish the significance of her campaign and her ideas.  I believe she would have made the best president out of all the Democratic candidates, and while we must respect the choices of our fellow citizens, I can’t avoid feeling that we’ve thrown away the opportunity to elect the right person for this moment in our history.

Instead, we’re left with two men who feel distinctly out of step with our time.  Joe Biden, who has wanted to be president since forever but failed in his attempts to do so, was lifted to redemption by Barack Obama, and passed on a chance to run in 2016, is now poised to finally achieve his dream — but at an age that sees his faculties somewhat diminished, befuddled by a political history that parallels the compromised spirit of the Democrats over the past 40 years, and with an appeal that seems rooted more in restoration than progress.  Likewise, Bernie Sanders, for all that he’s catalyzed millions of Americans to widen their expectations of our democracy and economy, feels committed to a vision imported from another age, even if in its rough outlines it fits the needs of our time.

Of all the damage Donald Trump has done to the United States, some of the worst is his reinforcing many Americans’ belief that a woman is not ready to be president, or is the wrong choice to stand against our arch-misogynist chief executive.  To me, this is a demonstration of the trauma he’s inflicted on the nation — the way he’s gotten inside our heads and psyched us out.  Too many Americans saw Hillary Clinton when they looked at Elizabeth Warren, and were afraid to repeat what they saw as the error of sending a woman to dispatch the monster.  But to me, the lesson of Trump’s election has always been the complete opposite: to heal, we needed to empower a woman as our next presidential candidate, to start to undo the unbearable stain he has inflicted on American life.  Saying that a woman cannot win against Trump, even if one blames this on the preferences of other, less enlightened voters, perversely validates the very misogyny that our current president embodies, and negates one of democracy’s greatest powers: our ability to break open new futures and possibilities by collectively agreeing to do so.

I realize that misogyny alone didn’t take down Warren’s campaign.  She didn’t connect to African-American and other minority voters as much as she needed to, and wasn’t able to broaden her appeal beyond a certain highly educated and liberal socio-economic group.  Ideologically, she was also competing against a Bernie juggernaut build up over a previous presidential campaign.  I wish the millions of Democrats who have voted so far had given Warren more of a chance, and had questioned their assumptions about who’s the best candidate to take on Trump.  More than any other candidate, Warren knows what needs to be done to fix our government and economy, and, just as importantly, how crucial it will be not to let the corruption of the Trump administration slip away without consequence.  She understands what’s needed at a level of sophistication and detail that is simply lacking in either of the two remaining Democratic contenders.  I suspect that many of us will judge the choices of the eventual Democratic nominee by a not-entirely-fair comparison with what Warren would have done.

No Longer Able to Win Elections, Oregon GOP Embraces Anti-Democratic Politics

Over at Vox, David Roberts has written an excellent piece on the latest walkout by Oregon state representatives and senators aimed at stopping a climate change bill backed by Democrats.  He correctly zeroes in on the larger story here — the minority party’s violation of democratic norms to thwart the will of the majority on behalf of a overwhelmingly white, right-wing base and fossil fuel-devoted corporate interests.  

Even though the Democrats have a supermajority in both the House and Senate (and control the governorship), the Oregon state constitution contains a strict quorum requirement that two-thirds of legislators have to be present in either chamber for it to conduct business (in most states, a mere majority is needed).  For decades, both parties respected this rule, and refrained from using it to block legislation. Yet, in the space of just the last 10 months, “Oregon Republicans have walked out more times [. . .] than all Democrats have” in all states in modern history, stopping not just climate legislation but measures on gun control and limiting religious exemptions from vaccinations.

Roberts takes apart the arguments the Oregon GOP has made regarding its opposition to the climate bill: that it was “crammed down our throats” (in the words of a logging company owners); that they are merely doing what their voters want them to do; that it’s better addressed through state initiative.  As he explains, the cap-and-trade bill under dispute has been literally years in the making, and this latest version represents extreme revisions from previous versions in order to obtain Republican buy-in.  He also reminds us that money from business interests belies claims that voter interests are first and foremost in the politicians’ eyes; state senators and representatives “get 65 percent of their donations from corporations, in particular corporations like Koch Industries with assets that stand to be affected by cap-and-trade.”  

As I noted, though, for Roberts the bigger story is the Oregon GOP’s reliance on an anti-democratic measure — abuse of the quorum — to thwart majority rule.  Critically, he makes clear that what’s happening in Oregon is a microcosm of the larger movement by the GOP nationwide to embrace anti-democratic rule to preserve the power of its declining base of white Americans.  There are particular Oregon elements, but the story is a national one:

In national US politics, as in Oregon, it’s increasingly clear that the population is urbanizing and diversifying and there simply aren’t enough rural and suburban white Christians to constitute a majority anymore. If that demographic — which has now become an intense, all-encompassing political identity — is to maintain its traditional hold on power, it can only do so through increasingly anti-democratic means.

[. . .] An overwhelmingly white, rural minority of voters is holding an entire state’s business hostage. Oregon Democrats played by the rules, got more votes, and developed legislation through appropriate channels. Now fewer than a dozen lawmakers, heavily funded by the very industries they are defending, are blocking it, at will, using an anachronistic quirk of the state constitution.

There is no conceivable justification for it, no possible democratic rationale. It only makes sense in the context of white supremacy: the notion that rural white Americans are more authentically American than other groups and deserve outsized representation in its politics and veto power over its legislation.

Roberts identifies what’s happening in Oregon as a microcosm of what’s occurring in the U.S. more generally, yet Oregon’s situation is particularly galling.  Over many years, Oregon Democrats have benefited from demographic changes in their state that have made it more liberal, but have also proactively responded to the wishes of this growing Democratic majority.  Against a flood tide of corporate money fueling the GOP, they have clawed their way into a supermajority in both houses of the Oregon legislature.  They have played by the democratic rules, and won, and won again, through years of hard organizing, occasional defeats, and unforced catastrophic errors (see: disgraced Democratic governor John Kitzhaber, who resigned in connection with his partner’s use of First Lady status for grifting purposes).  Having won by playing by the rules, the GOP has changed those rules, in a direction that leads to the end of majority rule, and thus democracy, in Oregon.

Apart from this larger story, what has Roberts (and The Hot Screen) increasingly vexed is the failure of both the great majority of the press and of the Democratic Party itself to accurately describe and call out this new American political reality.  Roberts notes the “both sides do it” reporting by various sources, such as an Associated Press story about the walkout.  Even more discouragingly, he recounts how Oregon Democratic elected officials have time and again retreated in the face of the GOP’s legislative hostage-taking.  His description of Senate President Peter Courtney repeatedly, literally begging the Republicans to return to the capitol is especially upsetting, signaling weakness in the face of a cowardly abdication of duty by the GOP.  Why will the GOP stop the walkouts if they keep working?  Answer: they won’t.

From a certain perspective, it’s laudable that Oregon Democrats still seek compromise on an environmental bill with a party that denies the existence of human-caused climate change: but it should be obvious at this point that Oregon Republicans will never pass a bill that offends their corporate overlords, not when they can keep demagoguing about how it will cripple rural economies and bankrupt Oregonians every time they fill up a tank of gas.  This is not the politics that most Democratic elected officials are familiar with, but they need to get up to speed with the new reality quickly.  The GOP is no longer a party that can be reasoned with, but only defeated and discredited. Otherwise, minority rule will become entrenched in our state as the new (undemocratic) normal.

This means that the only way forward is to make the GOP pay an electoral price for its contempt for democracy.  Fortunately, Oregon Democrats have good options for enforcing this cost on their opponents.  With the GOP’s latest display of contempt for Oregon voters, Democrats have fresh ammunition in campaigns to flip a few more seats from red to blue to end the GOP’s abuse of the quorum rule.  There are also initiatives being pursued that would reform the state constitution so that the two-thirds rule no longer applies.  If the GOP refuses to abide by democratic norms not written into law, then it is high time to write those norms into law.

But reforms that deny the GOP the ability to stymy majority rule are only part of a necessary strategy.  Democrats need to get much more aggressive in publicly identifying the transformation of the GOP into a white nationalist party that see its survival rooted in riling up its dwindling base against the diverse American majority.  Not forcing the GOP to account for its de facto white nationalism in states like Oregon is at this point foolish.  My guess that Democratic leaders both in Oregon and nationally fear that they will be accused of calling their opponents racist — but this can be overcome by a smart, calculated strategy that pairs this accurate description of reality with an acknowledgment of the cultural resentments, anxiety about demographic change, and reality-based economic fears that underlie this growing white tribalism.  To acknowledge accelerants to white nationalism does not mean excusing it, but rather is a way to begin to undo its irrational power, to expose it as grounded in weakness, not strength, and to no longer allow its unacknowledged appeal to frame the terms of our political debates.  

In Oregon, this also means redoubling efforts to aid rural counties that have been left behind by the post-recession growth that has fueled increasing wealth in urban areas like Portland.  A readiness to call out the Republican Party’s swing to white identity politics needs to be paired with outreach to GOP voters betrayed by their current representatives, who would have them believe that rural Oregonians will somehow thrive if climate change decimates the state’s vast natural resources, or that there is no future beyond industries like forestry and agriculture that have long dominated in large parts of Oregon, or that they will somehow benefit by pretending that those who live in cities and don’t look like them aren’t real Oregonians.