Party of Insurrection

Just as the Republican Party is united around an anti-democratic myth that the 2020 election was stolen from them, too many Democratic politicos are possessed by a related fable: that the Trumpist attempt to undermine and overthrow American democracy ended with the January 6 attack on the Capitol.  What these Democrats fail to grasp, both at their own peril and to the grave danger of the United States, is that the insurrection has continued through the present day, changing form and expanding its goals from throwing out the 2020 results to undermining the possibility of free and fair elections in 2022 and beyond.  The goal remains the same: the overthrow of America’s democratic form of government by ensuring that the Republican Party maintains power.

The mass Republican refusal to acknowledge that Joe Biden was fairly elected president is the public justification for the ongoing insurrection, which is being conducted by means of state-level efforts across the land to restrict the voting rights of Democratic-leaning voters, empower state officials to overrule local election authorities, and authorize state legislatures to reject the will of the majority.  By passing laws to maximize Republicans’ ability to game future election results in the party’s favor, the GOP continues the insurrectionary attack on American democracy by pseudo-democratic means.  What armed Trumpists were not able to gain by force at the Capitol on January 6, GOP politicians now aim to accomplish by dismantling democracy, state by state, before the 2022 midterms.

Thinking in terms of an ongoing insurrection helps counter more fragmentary and misleading coverage that holds that the salient fact of the Republican Party is how thoroughly it has become a cult of Trump.  When the GOP attempts to rig future elections based on its embrace of Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen, the adherence to Trump is hardly the whole story.  The assault on democracy, not the impulse to parrot Trump’s lies or the desire to keep him as the leader of the GOP, is of overriding importance.  And as central as Donald Trump has been to providing the Republican Party with an inspirational leader who mobilizes the base, GOP lies about election integrity and a party-wide dedication to suppressing Democratic votes long pre-date his presidency.  As this Vox article recounts:

After Republicans won a series of statehouse elections in 2010, they spent the next few years falsely claiming that voter fraud was a serious threat in order to pass voter ID laws that were nakedly designed to suppress the vote among Democratic-leaning minority groups. Research has found that, even prior to Trump, this convinced Republicans that voter fraud was a real problem when it’s exceptionally rare.

These earlier campaigns laid the intellectual groundwork for 2020. Republicans were already primed to believe elected Democrats were somehow illegitimate and to believe in widespread fraud in the American electoral system. Trump’s innovation — claiming that an entire presidential election result was fraudulent — was pushing on an open door.

This long-term GOP project to undermine democracy for partisan ends helps contextualize why Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election were so smoothly transformed into the ongoing Republican insurrection.  While Trump may be a singularly malevolent political actor, his anti-democratic behavior was on a continuum with decades of anti-democratic animus in his party at large.  The Republican Party’s collective decision to line up behind an authoritarian strongman should be seen as the logical end point of its previous efforts to undermine free and fair elections, just as the party’s war on democracy has flowed inexorably from the party’s increasing identity as America’s party of white supremacism, as white Americans compose a shrinking share of the electorate and fear a loss of power and status.  As the party has concluded that it can no longer muster nationwide majority support, its commitment to democracy has fallen away, unveiling a GOP and a broader anti-democratic movement that poses the greatest threat to American democracy since the Civil War.

But if the Grand Old Party’s transformation into the Party of Insurrection is the prime political fact of our time, the Democrats’ lackadaisical response is a close second.  A dizzying imbalance now exists between the two parties.  Even as Republicans move to cement permanent legislative control in states like Michigan, to gain permanent control of the House via gerrymandering and voter suppression, and to lay the groundwork for refusing to accept a Democratic presidential victory in 2024, Democrats have so far been unable or unwilling to pass national legislation that would not just blunt but roll back the GOP’s attack on democracy.  Instead, they are hamstrung by a few senators still obsessed with preserving the filibuster, who in doing so ensure that that the Senate is unable to carry out the will of the majority, not to mention the most basic defense of American democracy itself.

But the partisan imbalance goes deeper than Democrats’ apparent lack of urgency in pushing through laws that would preserve free and fair elections, and that would prevent the Democrats from passing into electoral oblivion, even as their political opponents are intent on transforming the U.S. into a one-party state.  Even after the armed insurrection of January 6, and the GOP’s assertion that Joe Biden and the Democrats effectively staged a coup to gain power in 2020, the Democrats apparently remain fully committed to treating the Republicans as worthy partners, legitimate and good-faith participants in our democratic political system.  In doing so, the Democrats provide valuable cover and legitimacy for Republicans to move forward their insurrectionary movement that, if it is successful in imposing voter restrictions and deepened gerrymandering in enough states, could make it impossible for Democrats to ever again win the presidency, win the House or Senate, or win power in multiple states across the union.

The imbalance can also be seen in the two parties’ attitudes towards their base voters and the American public more generally.  The GOP has made explicit that its highest priority is not to help the economy recover, or defeat the coronavirus pandemic, but to impose voting restrictions targeting Democratic-leaning votes in as many states as possible.  In making this a priority, they have placed promotion of the Big Lie about the 2020 election at the center of their voters’ consciousness.  By insisting that Joe Biden gained power by effectively staging a coup against the nation, the GOP is working not just to motivate but to radicalize its base against democracy itself, and to persuade its voters to treat the Biden administration and elected Democrats not as political opponents but as an occupying army.  Claims of a stolen election thus transform politics from a struggle between political adversaries into a life-and-death struggle against political enemies.

In contrast, the Democrats are making no analogous efforts to energize their base or to persuade Americans about the importance of defending democracy against those would take it apart. As Brian Beutler argues, the Biden administration and Democratic legislators appear to have made a decision that the way to beat the GOP is to ensure the economy has recovered in time for the 2022 midterms and for the 2024 election, rather than pursuing no-holds-barred investigations of Trump administration corruption that could also taint the broader GOP.  But Beutler’s point applies equally well to the Democrats’ refusal to prioritize defense of democracy relative to economic recovery.  Not only does this strategy gamble everything on the health of the economy, it ignores the basic fact that the GOP is trying to rig the 2022 elections so that it doesn’t matter how many people vote for Democrats!  This is actually a case where the Democrats could learn from the GOP: the public is more likely to think an issue is important is you actually ACT like it’s important.  Even as the GOP is fomenting its base into opposition to democracy, the Democrats are failing to rally the American public in democracy’s defense.

Apart from the slow-roll treatment being given to essential pro-democracy legislation like the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, the Democratic Party’s reluctance to recognize the political stakes has been telegraphed by the party’s increasingly bizarre insistence on a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection.  As observers like Josh Marshall have noted, it simply doesn’t make any sense for the party involved in the insurrection to be allowed to investigate itself.  This is a glaring instance of the Democrats concerning themselves with appearances of bipartisanship when the quest for such appearances threatens to give cover for actual insurrectionary acts against the United States.

Democratic leaders also collectively seem not to understand that whether or not violence is considered an acceptable element of American politics is the dividing line between whether we live in a democracy or in an authoritarian state.  If one party is able to use violence, or the threat of violence, to get its way politically, and that party pays no price, then its opposition will eventually be swept aside through injury, death, and intimidation.  This fact stands apart from the GOP’s campaign to rig elections via voter suppression and gerrymandering — yet the fact that GOP is so insistent on shielding Trump and his co-conspirators from the consequences of January 6 attests to the party’s comfort with violence as a tool for maintaining power against the will of the majority.  And so alongside the passage of anti-democratic voting laws, the ongoing GOP insurrection, with its basic assertion that elections that put Democrats in office are no longer to be considered valid, also inevitably takes up the cudgels used in the January 6 attack, employing the threat of violence to intimidate Democrats. This strategy runs from tolerating threatening behavior by Republican members of Congress against their colleagues, to making common cause with actual armed vigilantes, as has happened in states like Michigan and Oregon, to mobilizing and activating far-right terrorists by false claims of a Democratic coup. The Republican Party believes that the fight against democracy necessarily involves the ability to inflict bodily harm on democracy’s defenders.

As I noted above, the events of January 6 were the climax of months of non-violent efforts by Trump and other Republicans to subvert and steal the 2020 election.  Yet the former president’s resort to violence to achieve what he could not accomplish by cheating was a turn against democracy, and a violation of his oath of office, so profound as to leave no room for ambiguity.  Now that the GOP has taken up the myth of a stolen election — the same myth that motivated an armed insurrection among Trump loyalists — as central to its identity, it’s more important than ever to highlight the violence that such lies spurred, and how it was the logical recourse of a president committed to maintaining power against the will of the electorate.  Even if the GOP had not been complicit in the events of January 6 when they happened, its ongoing propagation of Trump’s lies makes it complicit now — as does the party’s refusal to hold the former president accountable for his actions by means of a congressional investigation.  Democrats need to view a January 6 inquiry as a completely legitimate and necessary tool to paint the GOP as the insurrectionist party it has become.  Most Americans understand violence is outside the bounds of American democracy, and the Democrats need to press this point with every resource at their disposal, even as they also fight back against the legislative insurrection being waged in dozens of statehouses.  

This gets us to a point that I find singularly frustrating: the very willingness to make war on democracy, and defend violence, that makes the GOP such a threat today, are also sources of profound vulnerability for the party — if, that is, the Democrats are willing to highlight these basic points.  The GOP’s incoherent arguments against participating in a January 6 commission — which boil down to fear of what the commission might find about GOP complicity — provides yet more fuel for pressing on with such a commission and proving right the GOP’s sense of its own vulnerability.  And in passing laws that obviously target minority Americans and that defend the right of terrorists to mow down BLM protestors by crashing cars into them, and by coming up with an infinite number of excuses for not holding to account the president who instigated our nation’s first coup attempt, the GOP evinces a white supremacist, authoritarian theory of governance that is repugnant to a clear majority of Americans.  In particular, the GOP’s willingness to embrace an American apartheid that restricts the political rights and power of minority Americans even as those Americans constitute a larger and larger share of the population with each passing year, means that the party has set itself on a course where it must either succeed in its destruction of democracy, or be destroyed by an electorate repelled by its racism and authoritarianism.

Taking the Bullies By the Horns

When GOP Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene aggressively harassed Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the Capitol building last week, Greene was clearly trying to manufacture edgy media “content” to boost her already-well burnished bona fides as a far-right provocateur.  But more than this, Greene’s actions express the Republican Party’s drift toward intimidation and violence to achieve its political goals, the rough outer edges of its offensive against American democracy.  As has been pointed out elsewhere, the GOP House leadership’s tolerance for Greene’s behavior the same week that it defenestrated hard-right Representative Elizabeth Cheney “because she spoke out against Trump and because she pushed back against his lies about the 2020 election,” as expert on authoritarianism Brian Klaas puts it, speaks volumes about what the party considers inside political bounds.  This tacit endorsement of Green’s tactics, in which physical confrontation of fellow elected officials is considered yet another tool in the toolbox, needs to be taken seriously as a threat not only by the Democratic Party, but by the news media and the citizenry.

Joanne Freeman, a history professor, meticulously documented the history of 19th century congressional violence in the lead-up to the Civil War in her amazing book Field of Blood.  She describes how Southern senators and representatives relied on physical intimidation to set the limits of debate on issues like the expansion of slavery in order to retain the South’s outsized power in American governance.  The deployment of bullying and outright violence were aimed at intimidating their opponents.

But as Freeman reminded us in a tweet last week, such Southern behavior was hardly an expression of unquestionable power - quite the opposite: 

History shows that members of Congress who feel the need to consistently and aggressively harass and threaten their colleagues often are people who know that they are in a minority and might very well lose power in a fair system.

Bullies exist because they fear fair outcomes.

For me, this helps clarify the dual challenge posed by the aggressive rhetoric and behavior of Greene and the larger GOP.  On the one hand, their threats of violence need to be viewed and treated with deadly seriousness, as an assault on the working of democracy itself.  (As Freeman wrote shortly after the January 6 insurrection, “This is the logic of bullying. It’s democracy by force — which, of course, isn’t democracy at all. It’s a demand for one-party rule.“) Ocasio-Cortez did the correct thing by calling on House leadership and security officials to “take real steps to make Congress a safe, civil place for all Members and staff.”  But fascists like Greene try to turn efforts to call out their behavior into evidence of Democrats’ weakness, an attempt to validate the bullying behavior and lay the groundwork for its escalation.  And so Greene’s response was to write a tweet making fun of Ocasio-Cortez’s concerns for her personal safety; this was Greene’s way of asserting that her intimidation had worked, while pretending that it was only AOC’s cowardliness that led her to think Greene was actually trying to intimidate her.

AOC’s own tweeted response to the incident feels right to me: she described Greene as the sort of person she used to have thrown out of the bar back in her bartending days.  In one fell swoop, she related Greene’s behavior to a belligerence everyone is familiar with, as well as intimating that she’s dealt handily with the likes of Greene before.  Crucially, she acknowledged Greene’s abusive behavior by asserting that she won’t be cowed by it —an essential step in standing up to bullies of the schoolyard or congressional variety.  AOC’s response also engages with the second major challenge of dealing with aggressive behavior: not allowing yourself to get sucked down to their level of intimidation and violence.  Greene’s preferred outcome, I would guess, would be for AOC to lose her cool and resort to the same sociopathic behavior as herself, hustling after Greene in full view of the television cameras and demanding that Greene debate her — at which point, I would guess, Greene would be cunning enough to switch roles and attempt to paint AOC’s identical behavior as evidence of an unhinged person who prefers intimidation to a calm debate of political issues. For Greene, the goal is not meaningful engagement on the issues of the day; it is to discredit and destroy the opposition by short-circuiting the norms and ideals of democracy itself.

Crafting a response to one-on-one intimidation like Greene’s, and the more serious cultivation of violence that the Trumpified GOP has engaged in, will be a necessary element of rolling back and defeating the Republican Party’s authoritarian threat to American democracy.  The Democrats need to be ready for more GOP representatives to engage in Greene’s bullying tactics, and have strategies prepared to turn such intimidation to their advantage; whatever mental or emotional problems Greene might have, the tactics she’s engaged in are both rational and predictable.  Democrats have to take these tactics seriously while also drawing attention to the fundamental weakness that drives them.  The GOP engages in such behavior because it needs to appear strong when it is in fact weak and in decline by the basic standards of a democracy.  Having embraced an identity as America’s white supremacist party, it has now hitched its future and very survival on a diminishing demographic, on regions of the country that by and large represent the economic past, and on the unraveling of our democracy.  Again, as Freeman put it, “Bullies exist because they fear fair outcomes.”  Democrats would do well not only to bear this in mind, but to make sure they’re educating the American people about the rotten roots of the GOP’s turn to violence and intimidation.  And they should take faith and comfort in the fact that most people really dislike bullies.

GOP Rush to Cut Unemployment Benefits Highlights Hostility to American Workers

Friday’s unexpectedly low jobs report for April — showing that only 266,000 jobs were created, far less than estimates that ranged up to a million — has added fuel to an ongoing Republican attack on the Biden administration’s large-scale stimulus spending.  Even before these latest figures were released, GOP politicians at both the state and federal levels had been arguing that rather than helping pull the economy out of its coronavirus-related slump, stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment benefits have actually driven the economy into an overheated inflationary tizzy, while persuading millions of Americans to stay home rather than look for jobs; the latter, say Republicans, has led to a “worker shortage” in which Americans just plain refuse to work because they make more money getting government checks.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration and other Democrats argue that there’s simply no evidence for either an overheating economy or the phenomenon of millions of people deciding to retire early because they’re receiving an extra $300 week in unemployment benefits.  Democrats show no signs of suddenly reversing the spending they’ve authorized, but in several GOP-controlled states, governors and legislators are moving to cut off state disbursements of the federally-funded unemployment benefits; Arkansas, Montana, South Carolina, and Indiana are implementing or considering such a move, based on the premise that unemployment benefits are simply too generous and keeping Americans from taking available jobs.

I may surprise you by saying that the Republican position that generous unemployment benefits could conceivably undermine employment growth contains an element of plausibility. If every American were receiving $10,000 a month, many people would likely make the rational calculation that it makes more sense to stay home than work.  But that’s hardly where we are.  The idea that an additional $300 a week — payments that, importantly, people know will be going away in the foreseeable future — is keeping most unemployed from looking for jobs or thinking about their economic futures sounds absurd on its face, and indeed, appears to be refuted by the evidence.  Crucially, GOP politicos appear to be relying on anecdotes, particularly from the business community, to bolster their case, rather than actual facts.  Typical is Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who said last week that, “We have flooded the zone with checks that I’m sure everybody loves to get, and also enhanced unemployment.  And what I hear from business people, hospitals, educators, everybody across the state all week is, regretfully, it’s actually more lucrative for many Kentuckians and Americans to not work than work.”  

Rather than being an abstruse economic argument, this conflict about how best to construct an economic recovery highlights crucial differences of political philosophy between the two parties.  Republican opposition to both the latest round of government stimulus checks and decent unemployment benefits traces back to a pair of fundamental beliefs: that ordinary Americans are untrustworthy layabouts who can’t be trusted to do an honest day’s labor if given half a chance, and that the business community both requires and deserves a pool of powerless workers who have no choice but to accept the lowest wages businesses wish to pay.

This contempt for the work ethic of the average American has a long history, and in recent times made memorable appearances in former Speaker Paul Ryan’s talk of the country being divided between “makers” and “takers,” as well as in Mitt Romney’s assertion as the 2012 GOP presidential candidate that nearly 50% of Americans expected the government to pay their way.  This slur is in fact the prerequisite to the second fundamental pillar of Republicanism I noted — that business find at its disposal a populace willing to take whatever jobs at whatever low wages business choose to offer.  Painting a picture of Americans as fundamentally lazy and dishonest helps justify paying them subpar wages, and promulgating a lie that Americans won’t go back to work if government helps them when they’re out of a job helps maintain a steady supply of desperate Americans forced to accept whatever low-pay work is available.

Not only is there plentiful evidence that the recent unemployment benefits in particular have effectively helped unemployed Americans stay above water in their hour of need, there is also evidence that concerns like a lack of child care — not worker laziness — may be holding back job growth.  In support of the latter point, this Washington Post analysis notes that all the job gains in April were among men, not women, suggesting the strong role of child-care issues.  But this same Post article makes a larger point: that what we may be witnessing in the unexpectedly low April jobs numbers is a side effect of an enormous re-evaluation of work going on among millions of Americans.  This re-evaluation encompasses not just those who’ve determined they need to secure child care before they return to the workplace, but also those who no longer want to work grocery and other retail jobs that, among other things, exposed them to the coronavirus and abusive customers alike.  In other words, many Americans may be taking some time to figure out how best to prosper economically than grab the first low-wage job that comes along.  And as Paul Waldman notes, “If I’m an unemployed engineer, it’s better for me and the whole economy if I wait and get an engineering job rather than work at Arby’s.”

From this perspective, those additional unemployment benefits are giving some unemployed citizens a little breathing room to figure out what employment will make them not only wealthier, but healthier and happier.  This, I would argue, is at the heart of what’s really enraging all those Republicans who are so eager to cut off unemployment benefits.  The pro-worker policies enacted by the Biden administration and a Democratic Congress are a direct attack on core Republican principles that see American workers as a population that must be kept desperate and hungry for whatever low-wage work American businesses deign to throw their way.  In practical, concrete terms, Republicans must deny the dual possibilities that perhaps unemployed Americans aren’t rushing to take low-paid, exploitative jobs because those jobs are in fact low-paid and exploitative, and that businesses must play their part by raising wages to attractive levels.

In contrast with the deep GOP philosophy that American workers cannot be trusted and that business is entitled to a fearful, eager-to-please labor force, the Democrats are exhibiting a deeper faith in ordinary Americans’ ability to make informed choices for themselves and to respond in good faith to the receipt of unemployment benefits.  The GOP views unemployed workers solely as workers; the Democrats view those unemployed workers as citizens of the United States, rather than simply as economic units to be manipulated for maximum gain.

The reflexive way in which Republicans are trying to turn the reality of an economy hobbled by the coronavirus into a story about feckless American workers is an important reminder that for all the talk of how the party has manacled itself to Trump and his “populism,” the GOP’s fundamental identity as a party that favors the power of corporations over working people remains unchanged.  But as a means of exposing the hollowness of the Republican Party’s supposed pro-worker stance, it is hard to think of a better example than when the GOP responds to a disappointing jobs report, and an uptick in the unemployment rate, by declaring that now is the time to cut unemployment benefits to all those free-loading, jobless Americans out there.  This is no different than the GOP outright blaming unemployed workers for their own lack of jobs.

Last Laugh

I wouldn’t describe it as a happy ending — but a settlement in which the U.S. government will pay comedian Mohaned Elshieky $35,000 after he was harassed by the Customs and Border Patrol is a small measure of justice served.  In 2018, returning home to Portland from a gig in Spokane, Washington, Elshieky and three other passengers aboard a Greyhound bus were questioned by CBP agents.  The agents gave Elshieky, who was granted asylum in the U.S. after fleeing his native Libya, a particularly hostile and nonsensical going-over, refusing to believe he was in the country legally and rejecting the documentation he provided.  Following the incident, Elshieky publicized his experience through media such as Twitter.

It is not as if we were wanting for instances of CBP and ICE abuses — but Elshieky’s experience, and his insistence that the government be held to account for its actions, is a reminder of the many, many cases of immigration enforcement gone awry that we never hear about.  Elshieky had the presence of mind to push back against the harassment while it was happening, and the confidence to pursue a lawsuit in its aftermath; but for every person like him, you have to imagine there are hundreds or thousands of immigrants who are bullied without seeking recourse.

One glaring perspective illuminated by Elshieky’s experience is the way that overly aggressive immigration enforcement seeks to assert that immigrants are interlopers in American society, rather than integrated and integral parts of the social fabric. The CBP agents who mistreated Elshieky probably never imagined he was a well-known comedian in Portland, part of the city’s life and culture (since the incident, Elshieky has moved on to New York City, where he now works on Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal TV show).  In enacting what appears to have been an illegal search lacking probable cause, and then threatening and intimidating Elshieky, they weren’t just harassing an immigrant; they were hacking away at the fabric of our society, which requires at its core the ability to exist without fear of government coercion or intimidation.  Elshieky took the full brunt of this intimidation, but make no mistake: it was an attack on us all.

Afghanistand Down

A little more than two years ago, The Washington Post published a deeply-reported series on the mass fraud perpetrated against the American people by the government and military in the prosecution of the Afghanistan War.  As the introduction puts it, “senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”  This failure continued through both Republican and Democratic administrations, and was abetted by a Congress that collectively refused to act on its responsibilities to end a failed war.  As one U.S. three-star Army general said, “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing.”  

The Post’s report, based on an in-depth government inquiry into the conduct of the war, and utterly damning as to the winnability or purpose of the presence of American forces in Afghanistan, appeared to have zero impact on either the public or the political world.

Yet with President Biden’s announcement earlier this month that he will withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan before September 11 of this year, the U.S. government has at last tacitly acknowledged the folly of this two-decades-long war and its own internal findings.  It is also an acknowledgment that the American public does not support the war.

But I can’t say I feel much relief that it’s over so much as sorrow that it went on so long.  Twenty years of war have also been 20 years of propaganda’s victory over truth, 20 years of failed democracy and accountability, 20 years of a nation valorizing the sacrifice of troops while failing to question the pointlessness of the war they were sent to fight.  From the start, the 9/11 terrorist attacks were themselves weaponized into political terror weapons by the Bush White House and Republicans, who used them not only to start our self-defeating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but to structure debate so that any refusal to support such self-defeating wars meant setting the United States up for further attacks and even siding with the terrorists.  And so it was claimed necessary to invade an entire country, and collaterally inflict thousands upon thousands of civilian deaths, in response to a small terrorist group that itself had targeted civilians. The willingness to accept mass Afghani death in order to theoretically save American lives stateside was an immoral and racist tradeoff, one for which history will surely condemn us.

Pentagon and governmental disinformation, combined with the false narrative that a retreat from Afghanistan would mean Islamist terrorism in America, worked to keep many Americans complacent over the war, the 2,300 American dead and  20,000+ wounded the sacrifice we were willing to outsource to American military families to maintain the myth that we were defending ourselves from further attacks by occupying a distant nation.  The nation generally, and progressives in particular, were ground down by the apparent implacability of the American war machine, so that stopping it seemed futile; goosed by the refusal of the government and military to tell the citizenry the truth about the war’s progress, the American military presence in Afghanistan became a self-contained perpetual motion machine.

Yes, it is a restoration of some measure of sanity to hear Joe Biden say that 20 years of war is enough; but 10 years was enough, five years was enough, one year was enough of a war that any rational nation never would have waged to begin with.

Immunity to Caring About Others

As the supply of covid vaccines continues to increase, and record numbers of people receive their dose every week, the next challenge in rolling back this pandemic comes more clearly into view: persuading those reluctant about getting a vaccine to get one.  One group in particular looms large in whether or not we will be able to reach heard immunity through vaccination.  Some 43% of Republican voters say they don't plan to be immunized, presenting a conundrum that blends politics and public health in toxic ways with which we became familiar during the Trump administration’s year of coronavirus failure.

Reading this Washington Post account of a recent focus group on GOP voter attitudes towards vaccination, at least one thing is clear: the effort of persuading such reluctant citizens is going to take near-God levels of patience and careful strategizing.  Particularly worrisome to me is an apparent hardening of attitudes against vaccination: the more time goes on, the more people are reluctant to change their positions.  This development goes against my own intuition, which had been that as more and more Americans get vaccinated without harm and with all the benefits of immunity, hold-outs would want to jump on the bandwagon.  

The focus group that the article discusses found various sources of reluctance.  There is a basic distrust of medical experts who tell them the vaccines are safe; skepticism about needing follow-on booster shots to maintain immunity; powerful reactions to perceived negative media messages about vaccination resistance (“A lot of the hesitancy that’s coming from the right is just from being bullied, being humiliated, basically, by the media,” said one participant); and long-term damage from President Trump’s efforts to downplay the virus and attack public health officials, as evidenced in participants’ particular distrust of Dr. Anthony Fauci.

But one finding in particular points to a unifying theme of the resistance.  According to the Post, “Most participants said they would want a fake vaccination card that would allow them to claim they had received shots.”  The willingness not only to cheat and break the law, but in a way that would propagate the coronavirus by making themselves and others sick by false claims of immunity, speaks in the first place to a basic inability or unwillingness to grasp the reality of the coronavirus.  Even if you yourself don’t get sick, or don’t care about getting sick, you can still serve as a carrier to pass it on to someone who does.  You get a vaccine not just to protect yourself, but to protect others, including people you will never meet. And so this attitude — that the most important thing is what each person can get away with, no matter the consequences — feels not just like individualism gone awry, but a pathological indifference to others: a fundamental rejection of the social contract, of the idea that we owe anything to each other.  Again, these are people who belong to a party that purports to stand for law and order saying that they would be willing to break the law rather than act as responsible citizens and get their vaccinations.

Of course, this sounds exactly like the sort of criticism that pushes people with such a mindset even further away from ever getting vaccinated — which is part of the point I’m trying to make here.  It’s hard to disagree with the conclusion reached by one expert in the article that the vaccination should not be treated as a “political debate”; it’s clearly going to take the wisdom and experience of health professionals who have dealt with such reluctance in other public health challenges to figure out how to get people to change their minds (one approach noted in the article is to rely more on people’s personal, more trusted doctors to get the message out).  But for the good of our society’s long-term survival, we will at some point need to more openly confront the indifference to the common good and rebellion against scientific fact that are making the possibility of reaching herd immunity through vaccination such a close-run thing.

Business as Unusual

No doubt self-interest is playing a part in the willingness of numerous major corporations to speak out against the anti-democracy voting restrictions being moved forward by Republican state legislators around the country.  As observers like Josh Marshall have noted, many of these companies understand that the very minority groups targeted by these GOP bills are indistinguishable from growing customer bases that help these companies prosper now, and more importantly, increasingly into the future; as Marshall puts it, “Consumer-facing corporations are most sensitive and responsive to economic dynamism, disposable income and growth.”  Alongside this, these companies realize that the relative political power of these groups will continue to increase.

Acknowledging these fact helps us healthily limit our expectations that these companies will somehow save the day and rescue American democracy from its enemies; the same sensitivities to long-term profit and power could very conceivably turn such corporations to a new path of caution and complicity — if, for example, the GOP embarked on a determined effort to punish them for their activism.  In fact, we have already seen scattershot attempts at such an effort, including the Georgia legislature’s repeal of a tax law that benefitted Delta Airlines after that company spoke out against voting restrictions in that state, and Mitch McConnell’s absurd declaration that corporations should butt out of politics save for the act of giving money to Republican candidates.

But tempering our expectations does not mean dismissing such corporate stands outright.  It is a big deal for major companies to effectively declare voting rights to be beyond the realm of partisan politics; this helps send a message to the citizenry that voting restrictions constitute abnormal, illegitimate actions outside the proper bounds of American politics.  The reality is that voting rights are foundational to American democracy.

It’s also notable that the initial impetus and organization of a corporate response to the anti-voting initiatives came from African-American CEOs and business leaders.  This feels to me like a glaring demonstration of how important it is for minorities to be fully represented in corporate boardrooms and so be in a position to expand our ideas of the democratic responsibilities of American companies.  I don’t want to be too pollyannish about this — but the fact that this corporate movement has been spearheaded by African-Americans makes it hard to dismiss it as simply the cold calculations of hard-headed business leaders.

Crucially, companies vocalizing their opposition to voting restrictions also opens up a window on its opposite: companies that continue to support Republican legislators pushing voting restrictions whose goal is to cement GOP political power at the expense of American democracy , at the same time as these companies rely on the GOP to push for corporate tax cuts and a favorable regulatory environment.  The mutual embrace of corporate American and the GOP is long-standing; but when it involves companies donating to politicians who disassemble American democracy to achieve permanent power, so that those companies might continue to increase corporate profits through the legislative favors those politicians bestow, we are beyond misleading talk of companies exercising their right to “free speech” through campaign donations, and into a realm where companies and politicians participate in a fascistic enterprise that should rightly be seen as the antithesis of American democracy.  

From this perspective, the willingness of some companies to speak out on voting rights should be taken as an opening to discuss the extreme dangers and basic immorality of companies that continue to donate to anti-voting rights GOP politicians.  Such companies make themselves complicit in an attack on democracy, and we need to talk about it in such terms.  Conversely, it’s extremely worrisome that the GOP is comfortable targeting companies for retribution for the crime of supporting basic democracy, as happened with Delta in Georgia.  This seems to be not just an abuse of power, but an abuse of power in the name of replacing American democracy with an authoritarian governance that sees only GOP rule as legitimate.  

An Incisive Take on Cuomo's Corruptions

Rebecca Traister has written not only a useful guide to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s rapidly-deteriorating political fortunes, but a deeply incisive look into the links among his authoritarian style, sexism, and incompetence.  She also pulls back the lens to make a broader point about the nature of how many male politicians of both major political parties choose to wield power.

This paragraph captures her basic thesis:

Though the multiple scandals erupting in Albany seem to toggle between sexualized harassment stories and evidence of mismanagement, what is emerging is in fact a single story: That through years of ruthless tactics, deployed both within his office and against anyone he perceived as an adversary, critic, or competitor for authority, Cuomo has fostered a culture that supported harassment, cruelty, and deception [. . .] his tough-guy routine has in fact worked to obscure governing failures; it is precisely what has permitted Cuomo and his administration to spend a decade being [. . .] both mean and bad at their jobs.

As someone who pays pretty much no attention to New York politics but whose general impression over the last several years has been of a corrupt and not particularly progressive New York governor, Traister’s reporting and analysis more than validates my own personal third-hand impressions of unimpressive goings-in in Albany.  But as good as her concentration on Cuomo is, the broader critique she makes regarding a more widespread American governing style is just as striking.  The New York voting public’s confusion of a performance of strength that’s rooted in a fundamental sexism with an authentic, effective leadership style points not only to a con job perpetuated by Cuomo, but basic cultural assumptions about leadership found across the U.S., and which should trouble citizens of a democracy.  

Traister makes the essential comparison between the styles and results of Cuomo and Donald Trump — a likeness that was transmuted into false difference by uncritical media coverage during the coronavirus pandemic.  One major observation I come away with is that, no matter our political orientation or professed ideology, many of us are too easily swayed and seduced by those who simply appear powerful and confident, particularly in troubled times — a phenomenon that Cuomo demonstrates is hardly confined to the right and the Republican Party.  Whatever the social or biological undercurrents to this impulse, we need far greater discussion and awareness of its tension with a democratic spirit; it’s an authoritarian lure that corrodes fundamental values like basic accountability of our elected officials.

For those eager for an increasingly progressive and effective Democratic Party, Cuomo, and other politicians of his substance and style, are a roadblock to the party’s ability to expand its electoral appeal and make meaningful economic and social progress across this country.  Among other things, Cuomo’s retrograde example helps advance pragmatic arguments for why Democrats should continue to promote a strong bench of female politicians, with the non-negotiable goal of representation equal to the female share of the population.  To read of the twisted, sexist, self-serving ways of Cuomo and his administration, and to realize that they’ve been following a long-existing template in American politics, should lead seamlessly to a collective drive to shatter that template into a thousand irretrievably broken pieces.

When It Comes to a Global Covid Vaccination Campaign, It's OK For the U.S. to Embrace Its Savior Complex

As the U.S. covid vaccination campaign continues to accelerate, there are reports that the U.S. government is looking more comprehensively at sharing vaccines and vaccine technology with countries around the globe.  This is good news from a public health perspective, and also good news for the United States’ moral and diplomatic standing in the world.  Last week, we talked about resistance by the pharmaceutical industry and some government officials to making proprietary vaccine formulas available to poorer countries — such resistance itself being a formula for mass unnecessary suffering if there ever was one.

It appears, though, that progressive Democratic lawmakers (including, happily, The Hot Screen’s local representative Earl Blumenauer) have been trying to light a fire under the Biden administration to share patent technology on a temporary basis, and that the Biden team is considering such action.  This would be tremendous news for global health, and a further sign that sanity has returned to the White House.  As I argued last week, I don’t see a persuasive argument that corporate incentives to develop new vaccines will be harmed long-term by taking this special measure during an unprecedented global pandemic, particularly when big Pharma has profited, and will continue to profit, enormously from its research and production (this research and production, crucially, has been backstopped by the American taxpayer to the tune of billions of dollars).

As I also mentioned last week, people like historian Timothy Snyder have been making the case that a global vaccine initiative by the U.S. could reap enormous diplomatic benefits.  Comments by a spokesman for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative suggest that this perspective is on the radar of American policymakers, as he remarked that, “As part of rebuilding our alliances, we are exploring every avenue to coordinate with our global partners and are evaluating the efficacy of this specific proposal by its true potential to save lives.”  And Secretary of State Antony Blinken has also recently addressed criticism of the lackluster U.S. role in global vaccinations, saying that, “As we get more confident in our vaccine supply here at home, we are exploring options to share more with other countries going forward. We believe that we will be in a position to do much more on this front.”  Notably, Blinken also remarked that the United States would not “trade shots in arm for political favors.”  This seems to be both an acknowledgment that vaccine sharing needs to be fair, and a shot across the bow of countries like China and Russia that have thus far been more assertive in exporting doses of covid vaccines.  But of course, the perceived fairness of U.S. vaccine distribution efforts has an inevitable diplomatic aspect.  There is nothing inherently wrong with putting U.S. resources into a necessary global campaign while also embracing the windfall of goodwill and reinforced alliances that it would cultivate.

And reporting on France’s continuing difficulties in combatting the coronavirus offers more evidence that U.S. efforts shouldn’t be limited only to poorer nations.  This New York Times article details a general malaise among the country’s populace at their country’s collective failure to get the pandemic under better control.  Significantly, France is the only permanent member of the UN Security Council that has not yet developed and deployed its own vaccine, contributing to the country’s sense of failure.  A U.S. relief effort that includes European allies like France would be the right thing to do on health grounds, but would also provide an inoculation against far-right political parties like France’s National Front that are sure to use this foundering government response as a cudgel against democracy and liberal society.  The U.S. has every interest in vaccinating the world against incipient authoritarian movements as well as against the coronavirus.

Waiting in Vain for a Redeemed Mick Mulvaney

In an appearance desired by no one and further cementing his reputation as an unparalleled hypocrite and right-wing boob, former congressman and Trump administration official Mick Mulvaney appeared to criticize former President Donald Trump in a CNN appearance last week — then quickly made clear that he would still support Trump if he were to be the 2024 GOP presidential candidate.  Responding to comments by the former president that the January 6 insurrectionists had posed “zero threat,” Mulvaney remarked that, “I was surprised to hear the President say that. Clearly there were people who were behaving themselves, and then there were people who absolutely were not, but to come out and say that everyone was fine and there was no risk, that's just manifestly false -- people died, other people were severely injured.”

But by then making clear that he nonetheless views Trump as a viable presidential candidate for the Republican Party despite his role in an armed insurrection against the United States, Mulvaney showed that his aim was never to critique the act of insurrection or Trump’s role in it, but to offer guidance to the former president in how to talk about the Capitol attack so that he doesn’t alienate possible future voters who don’t happen to be hard-right Republicans.  Mulvaney understands the indefensibility of pretending that the violence did not happen, and is simply acting in line with other pro-Trump politicians to steer a “middle course” that acknowledges the undeniable violence while pretending that the former president bears no responsibility for it. 

To Mulvaney and others of his ilk, Trump does himself no favors by promoting an entirely alternate reality in which rioters were actually “hugging and kissing” police officers, as Trump said last week; such an obvious lie might fly with Trump die-hards, but not with other Republican voters less willing to deny the plentiful footage of right-wing extremists beating cops and sacking the Capitol building.  Like other GOP politicians, Mulvaney is hedging his bets, pretending to critique the president while in actuality offering him advice so that he doesn’t totally destroy the party’s 2024 chances should he stage a comeback.  As Mulvaney told CNN, Trump “is still a major player in the Republican Party — there's a lot of folks who were turned off by the last six weeks, and especially the riots, that he's going to have to do some work to sort of build bridges back with, if he wants to run again.”  But any criticism of Donald Trump that doesn’t include the obvious addendum that he should never hold public office again is no criticism at all — it’s propaganda in service of a would-be authoritarian who ended his dark reign in office by making war on the United States.  Attempts to deny or dilute this basic fact constitute complicity with the original act of insurrection.

When Will There Be A Vaccine Against the Power of Big Pharma?

The United States appears to be at a real turning point in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.  Even as cases remain inexcusably high, and many states have prematurely relaxed commonsense mask and social distancing restrictions, the pace of vaccinations is accelerating, with President Biden calling on states to make inoculations available to all adults by May 1.

But with a pandemic that has spread around the entire world, an excessive focus on our country’s fortunes threatens to be deeply counterproductive.  After all, most people are now aware that the longer the virus rages around the world, the better the chances that it will mutate into variants against which current vaccines are less effective.  Stopping the virus at home means stopping it overseas.

Depressingly, though, much of the world remains unvaccinated, with the dominant theme being a grotesque inequality between wealthier countries and others; according to The New York Times, “Residents of wealthy and middle-income countries have received about 90 percent of the nearly 400 million vaccines delivered so far. Under current projections, many of the rest will have to wait years.”

As that startling Times piece goes on to describe, there’s a key reason for this disparity, and for the horrifying prospect that it might be years before poorer nations and populations receive vaccines: it turns out that much of the developed world chose not to include language in vaccine contracts that would have forced pharmaceutical companies to share vaccine know-how with companies and governments seeking to vaccinate poorer countries.  One might have expected the Trump administration to display such indifference; but even less morally-compromised European countries followed the same contractual path.  Something went terribly wrong across many nations, for reasons that beg a deeper look.

Fortunately for the sake of continued government leverage in the United States, many of the current coronavirus vaccines employ biotechnology that depends on a patent the U.S. government is about to receive; this patent will allow our government not only to make money licensing the technology to the companies already using it, but will also present an opportunity to pressure them into sharing their vaccine formulations with poorer nations.  Incredibly, though, it appears that there’s hesitancy within the Biden administration about how much pressure to exert.  The conflict seems to come down to balancing the monetary incentives for pharmaceutical companies to continue taking risks in developing vaccines against the basic need to vaccinate people.

But there can’t be any question that the U.S. government must strike this balance in a way that results in cheap, readily-available vaccines for the rest of the world as soon as humanly possible.  To do otherwise subverts a central purpose of patents; they’re not only intended to spur innovation by offering financial protections to inventors, but particularly in the case of vaccines, their obvious goal is to benefit society.  In the case of a deadly pandemic that has already crippled societies and economies, tilting the balance in favor of protecting health seems overwhelmingly correct on both moral and pragmatic grounds.  Losing hundreds of thousands or even millions more lives so that rich and powerful biotech companies supposedly remain incentivized to innovate is a moral tradeoff no civilized society or world should even be contemplating.  If our system of vaccine development requires thousands to die in order for it to function, then the system is contemptible and broken.

The worries about undermining innovation and incentives to develop vaccines become even more tenuous when you step back and contemplate that it was the U.S. government’s willingness to backstop vaccine research, and provide research it had itself developed, that made the rapid development of coronavirus vaccines by corporations possible in the first place.  In other words, we’ve already recognized that this pandemic is a situation where it’s insufficient to rely on market mechanisms to incentivize vaccine development.  Having applied an approach of strong government intervention — an intervention grounded in the expenditure of taxpayer dollars — you can’t then turn around and try to argue that we’re now in a situation where the government will somehow destroy all future incentives for innovation by pressuring pharmaceutical companies to share their technologies.  That is an unacceptable, immoral argument, and I hope to god it’s not one that the Biden administration intends to make.  I also wonder if the hesitation is not simply coming from the government, but from companies eager to protect their profits at any cost, even as those profits are based on funds and research provided courtesy of the American people.  (As a side note, I have yet to hear about a single pharmaceutical company rejecting government assistance on the principle that it improperly undermined their incentive to develop vaccines).

And as historian Timothy Snyder argues, the case for the United States making vaccines available to poorer nations is overwhelming simply in terms of basic self-interest; the gains he describes greatly overshadow exaggerated concerns that pressuring pharmaceutical companies might somehow hurt future vaccine development.  As Snyder describes matters, the pandemic and its fallout is the most pressing issue of our time, and the United States can reap immense diplomatic and other soft power benefits by acting as a vaccine distributor to the world.  Such benefits would be on top of the essential need to stop further mutations that undermine an effective vaccine regimen within U.S. borders, and to ensure the world economy does not continue to be suppressed by the pandemic.

Snyder notes the small cost of contributing to vaccination efforts in comparison to U.S. military spending, which hints at another argument that he doesn’t fully explore: placing public health concerns at the center of U.S. diplomatic efforts could be a way to roll back and rectify decades of a counterproductively militarized American foreign policy.  And protecting global health has more than a passing commonality with the overwhelming existential challenge of our time: stopping climate change as quickly as we can.  Demonstrating leadership through a massive global public health initiative could also help supercharge the cause of U.S. leadership on global climate change efforts. 

Intriguingly, Snyder ties a U.S. vaccine initiative to our ability to protect democracies as they remain under assault from authoritarian leaders and parties around the world.  By providing assistance not only to poorer nations, but also to our European allies as they fumble through vaccine issues, the U.S. has a chance of gaining major good will with millions of ordinary Europeans, and providing persuasive evidence of the effectiveness of democratic governance in those countries that cooperate with American assistance.  As Snyder summarizes, “The United States has a once-in-a-century chance to do well by doing right.”

The Dark Political Heart of Anti-Asian Hate Crimes

Even if, all appearances to the contrary, it turns out that somehow racial hatred had nothing to do with the killing of six Asian-Americans and two others in Georgia last week, then at least the nation can no longer look away from the wave of violence against Asian-Americans in this country; one report has found that anti-Asian hate crimes rose 150% from 2019 to 2020.  Many observers associate this violence with the scapegoating of the Asian community for the coronavirus pandemic — a retrograde tendency of irrational blame that many are right to point out has a long and sordid history in this country, perhaps most ignominiously in the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

But even as racism still clearly finds a place in the hearts of many Americans, and must be treated as a societal problem to be attacked and scourged away on many fronts, there can be no credible discussion of ending violence against Asian-Americans, or African-Americans, or any other minority group in America, that does not include the elephant in the room: the elephant of a GOP that has become a de facto white supremacist political party.  

This recent rise in anti-Asian animus has a clear relationship to the bigotry and slander of our former president, who repeatedly insisted on calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus” or “kung flu,” even as other politicians, leaders, and activists warned of the violence this could incite.  The former president did not care.  Indeed, it’s fair to say that he welcomed the division that such language brought, that he saw it as yet another way to supercharge the white identity politics that he had mastered and thrived on.  Donald Trump, more than any other single person, created a permission structure for the bigoted and the ignorant, amplifying whatever baseline attacks the Asian-American community would have endured in the absence of his hateful rhetoric, even as the hate crimes mounted and those of Asian descent paid the price for what the president cold-bloodedly saw as a re-election tactic.

The GOP politicians who stood by while the former president fomented hate and prejudice are complicit in this violence.  And even now that he’s out office, the core of white supremacism that binds the party together was on full display in last week’s congressional hearings on anti-Asian violence.  Texas Representative Chip Roy was less concerned about such violence, and far more about the GOP’s supposed right to continue the racist incitement, making the preposterous argument that Democrats were trying to limit Republicans’ ability to criticize China (he also appeared to speak approvingly of lynching as a form of punishment).  Another GOP representative, Tom McClintock of California, tried to turn the hearings into an indictment of Democrats for impugning the United States as a promised land for minorities, remarking that, “If America was such hate filled, discriminatory, racist society filled with animus against Asian Americans, how do you explain the remarkable success of Asian Americans in our country?”  The idea that some Asian-Americans might have succeeded despite such obstacles seems not have occurred to the man, nor that suggesting Asian-Americans are a uniformly affluent and contented model minority group is in itself pretty racist.  This is to say nothing of his apparent lack of awareness of laws like the late 19th century Chinese Exclusion Act, or past acts of violence and oppression that scarred the lives of generations of Asian immigrants.  Is it really possible he isn’t aware of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II?   

The unwillingness to simply engage and accept the reality of violence against people of Asian descent in America puts such Republicans on the wrong side of justice and history, as does the willingness of many to continue using the same inflammatory language so beloved of their former president and current warlord-in-exile.  But beyond this reflexive defense of the United States as a nation devoid of substantial racism — a defense that serves to excuse and defend white supremacism in all its modern manifestations — the GOP also lends legitimacy to racist violence through its own increasing willingness to countenance violence for political ends.  From the wholesale unwillingness to hold Donald Trump accountable for inciting violent insurrection against the country, to looking the other way as GOP lies about a stolen election fuel a growing far-right nationalist terror movement against Americans and our government, to its unswerving support for any murderous-minded insurrectionist's or bigot’s right to buy a gun, the Republican Party increasingly sees violence as an essential tool to help it maintain a grip on power.  As its deathly embrace of an inexorably dwindling white base means that the party has come into increasingly direct conflict with basic principles of democracy and majority rule, the GOP is helping to legitimate a “by any means necessary” resistance among ordinary Americans.  Indeed, at this point, it seems misleading to insist on separating out strands of terroristic right-wing violence from GOP complicity.  As John Stoehr observed last week in the wake of the Atlanta shootings:

I would argue that most shooting massacres that we have witnessed since the assault weapons ban expired in 2004—Sandy Hook, Charleston, El Paso, Parkland, and now Atlanta—are in ways large and small a reflection of this violent impulse to stop whatever it is that democracy is producing, and that cannot be stopped through normal, legitimate and non-violent means. I would also argue that the Republicans knew instinctively what they were doing when they scorched the earth to prevent democracy from putting a stop to the violence. They have created conditions in which domestic terrorism is now a normal part of life.

Yet, as essential as this observation is, I would not stop simply with the Republican Party’s courting of violent methods and incitement of murderous anti-democratic and racist extremist elements.  It’s just as important to recognize the superficially non-violent means embraced by the Republican Party that end up legitimizing the violence and empowering racist Americans at the expense of minorities.  Escalating GOP attacks on the right to vote might appear to be the “legal” way that the party looks to privilege its overwhelmingly white voters over their fellow Americans, but at its base is the same belief in the fundamental inferiority of non-White Americans — a white supremacist attitude that inexorably requires violence to keep them in their place.

The GOP’s massive ongoing campaign across multiple states to make it ever harder for minority voters to cast a ballot, or have their votes count, also means that these voters are denied the political power necessary to protect themselves against racist violence: it makes it less likely that hate crime laws will be passed or diligently enforced, less likely that the politicians who are supposed to represent them don’t engage in racially inflammatory rhetoric that gets people killed.  In a stark sense, as Asian-Americans, African-Americans, and others are bullied, injured, and killed by racist violence, the GOP is seeking to make it more difficult for those Americans to use their government to protect themselves from such violence.  This is to say nothing of the way that voters suppression prevents these voters from having enough influence on American government to change it, and our society, enough to finally dismantle white supremacism and the countless social, economic, and psychological harms it inflicts.

I recognize that ideals of bipartisanship have great momentum and staying power in American politics, but we are increasingly at a point where Democrats’ refusal to clearly and openly call out the Republican Party’s transformation into a white nationalist, authoritarian party does more harm than good. Such refusal helps normalize obscene levels of bigotry and violence, and denies the American people the benefits of seeing the full stakes of our very real political divisions.

Sea Change or Calm Before the Storm?

I will be honest: the last four years often felt to me like the country was at war, beset by a president and a Republican Party whose assault involved interrelated cultural, economic, and political campaigns of degradation and destruction.  There was not a day that felt like politics as usual.  Instead, the president worked to enrage his white base against their fellow Americans, demonizing immigrants and minorities while performing the alchemy of fusing his personal sense of victimization with that of white Americans, while working to weaponize the federal government in service of his own power.  At the same time, most major accomplishments, such as they were, were recognizably traditionally Republican — like massive tax cuts for the ultra-rich paired with absolute indifference to the federal government having any actual responsibility or even relationship to the majority of the people it serves. 

This war on America turned absolutely catastrophic when the coronavirus pandemic struck.  The Trump administration had already dismantled important parts of our public health apparatus that could have helped stem the crucial early spread of the virus, while the president’s sociopathic insistence that the virus was not threat to American health (born out of fear of harming his re-election prospects) ensured that the federal response would be hobbled as long as he remained in office.  And so the war on America began to count its casualties in the tens of thousands, then the hundreds of thousands, as the body count began to resemble an actual war, only with civilians filling the graves in place of soldiers.  

But metaphoric war became literal on January 6, 2020, when an insurrectionist mob incited by the president stormed the Capitol.  The danger had emerged fully-formed and undeniable; we were at the point that the president, abetted by a GOP that echoed his lies of a stolen election, was willing to goad right-wing extremists into a physical assault against the United States government, in an act of treason by an elected official matched only by the politicians who joined the Confederacy a century and a half ago.

I review this sordid recent history, first, as context for why, over the past couple months, it has felt difficult to grasp that that the country’s political direction may have turned much faster than I thought possible.  Yet not only has Joe Biden become president, but the Democrats have moved quickly and aggressively to pass a massive $1.9 trillion bill to fight the coronavirus and provide economic support to millions of Americans; polling shows that the legislation is popular across broad reaches of the public, including Republicans.  Meanwhile, vaccine production and crucially, distribution, have steadily escalated, so that Joe Biden can credibly tell us that by May 1, vaccinations should be open to every adult.  On top of this, the Biden administration is already looking ahead to a huge infrastructure bill that will further goose the economy while repairing and modernizing decades’ worth of deferred spending and construction.  In other words, by many objective measures, things aren’t just looking up, they’re heading in the right direction.

Obviously, Biden as president, combined with Democratic control of Congress, is the central reason for our turnaround.  But the question I’ve been asking myself, coming out of the trauma and fears of the Trump years, is why the Democrats have been able to roll over the GOP so far.  Beyond the basic fact that the Democrats control Congress (though narrowly) and the presidency, it seems like the initiative is simply on their side right now, with much of this momentum tied to the idea that the federal government has a central role to play in the economy on behalf of ordinary Americans.

This is all still in flux, of course, and we won’t have more definitive answers for years, but a few recent articles have offered some intriguing perspectives on what might be going on.  At The Editorial Board blog, John Stoehr posits that the scale of the coronavirus crisis essentially broke conservative Republican opposition to big government spending; after Americans received multiple rounds of relief checks, even conservative voters became acclimated to the idea that the government has a larger role to play in the economy.  Whereas before the GOP relied on inculcating fear among voters against government spending, these tactics can’t work the same way when it’s the GOP that started not just the higher federal spending, but also (at least tacitly) embraced the idea that the government has both a role and a responsibility to protect Americans’ economic well-being.  Given that that the Democrats already believed this, the Republicans inadvertently helped establish a new consensus in American politics.

The Plum Line’s Paul Waldman provides another clue to a possible sea change in our politics.  He argues that because a) Joe Biden is white and b) has a long-established centrist identity, the culture war tactics that the GOP honed to perfection during Barack Obama’s presidency, and that continued while President Trump continued to use Obama as his political foil, simply don’t work against Joe Biden.  He points to white people’s “cultural anxiety” as key to Trump’s sway with the GOP base: 

It was not “economic anxiety” that pulled so many White voters toward him, it was cultural anxiety: the feeling that your way of life is receding, that popular culture rejects your values, that you’re being forced to consider the sensibilities of people you thought were beneath you on the ladder of status, and that it will only get worse.

In other words, even when Obama was no longer president, Trump used the fears and resentments his predecessor had aroused (and had been used to arouse) to keep his white base engaged and enraged.  But even though he served as Obama’s VP, it’s simply impossible to paint Biden as anything akin to a Kenyan socialist aiming to enslave white people and impose Sharia law on god-fearing Christians (I have seen Republicans say many nasty things about Joe Biden, but I haven’t yet heard any dare to claim that he wasn’t born in America).

And Waldman adds a point that others have made recently as well — that Joe Biden, whether based on personal inclination or conscious political strategy (or both), doesn’t seem interested in engaging in any sort of culture war exchange with the GOP.

What intrigues me is the way that Stoehr’s and Waldman’s theories complement each other.  It’s not just that, as Stoehr describes, the GOP opened the spigots of government spending for the public good, thus helping to normalize the idea of a large government role in the economy and on behalf of working people.  When white people received their stimulus checks and unemployment assistance, it also helped undermine the Republican myth that government spending is always for the benefit of undeserving minorities — a myth that the GOP has relied on to ensure that cultural anxieties about reduced social status and power can be used as a cudgel against government spending that would in reality benefit BOTH whites and non-whites alike.  So if, as Waldman argues, the GOP is having trouble saddling the Biden presidency with culture war attacks because of who Biden is, Biden has also benefitted from Trump and the GOP’s economic relief efforts that saw white Americans receive massive amounts of government largesse.

And if Joe Biden continues and indeed expands those same policies — policies that undeniably benefit people of all races and indeed classes (save for the ultra-rich) — then the GOP’s culture war tactics may become less effective, and its resistance to an activist federal government politically dangerous (Waldman argues as much, seeing a GOP potentially in danger of being on the wrong side of a massive change in public consensus about the role of government in American life).  

It’s way too soon to tell if we are witnessing a sea change or a temporary shift in attitudes connected to the pandemic and its aftermath, but after the brutal struggles during the Trump administration to simply keep our democracy alive, these possibilities are worth keeping an eye on. On the flip side, it’s also nearly inevitable that the same policies and leadership that may be making a dent in the attitudes of some Republican voters are also supercharging the resentments of others, so that even as we may be seeing the development of a new consensus in American politics, the backlash may grow still more severe, even if it’s embraced by a smaller chunk of the population than before.

Future Non-Shock

Undoubtedly the biggest political news of the week is the Democrats’ passage of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.  Apart from the general benefit of addressing health needs related to the coronavirus, it also delivers massive amounts of cash to Americans and government spending that together will keep our damaged economy on the path to recovery.  But as Jamelle Bouie elucidates, it’s also a massively progressive piece of legislation that “is expected to reduce overall poverty by more than a third and child poverty by more than half. It is, with no exaggeration, the single most important piece of anti-poverty legislation since Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.”

After the derangements and gutting of the public weal during the Trump years, the size of the ambition here is pretty dizzying; the door seems suddenly open to a renewed federal role in the economy and moving the United States toward greater equality after years of growing income and wealth gaps. 

But this ambition didn’t come from nowhere; economists, political thinkers, and others have been talking for years about reviving an activist ideal for American government (which I think is ultimately intertwined with reviving American democracy itself — the American people have every right to employ their common government for shared economic ends).

For a great overview of some of this progressive thinking, I highly recommend Noah Smith’s interview of Saikat Chakrabarti, who among other things wrote the Green New Deal while he was Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff.  Not only does Chakrabarti’s deep involvement in progressive thinking make him a compelling narrator of recent trends in the movement, the interview captures a sense of deep intellectual and moral ferment, in which erstwhile “radical” ideas have been moved closer and closer to the realm of common sense.  The interview hits on topics that you may have heard about before; but for me, it brought a lot of ideas into more of a coherent whole, while highlighting some essential insights of contemporary progressivism.

Probably the most striking point that I’ve encountered elsewhere, but which hit me with a fresh perspective, is the insight that shifting the economy to fight climate change doesn’t necessarily mean limiting economic growth, but could actually be the key to developing a new, sustainable prosperity for the country; that the United States has lulled itself into thinking that we are already a fully-developed economy.  Along these lines, Chakrabarti’s explanation of the political strategizing behind development of the Green New Deal is gripping stuff, all the more so as we’ve reached a point where attempts to open the public discussion have paid off.  The conversation about the need for an American industrial policy is also pretty hot; in it, you can see the outlines of a policy that, among other things, can neutralize Trump-Republican fake populism that pretends to put America first but always ends up putting Americans last.  Just a great stimulating and challenging read.

Neanderthal v. Homo Sapiens

Last week, after the governors of Mississippi and Texas announced an end their states’ mask-wearing mandates and that businesses could open at full capacity, President Joe Biden told reporters that such rollbacks are a “big mistake" and that "The last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking.”  His “Neanderthal” comment in particular was seized on by a slew of GOP politicians who sought to turn the president’s phrasing from a criticism of bad public health decisions by elected leaders into a wholesale attack on all Republican voters.  Mississippi’s governor, Tate Reeves, gave a master class in misdirection through high dudgeon, tweeting that “Mississippians don't need handlers. As numbers drop, they can assess their choices and listen to experts. I guess I just think we should trust Americans, not insult them.”

Among other reasons, the kerfluffle was notable because it was a rare instance of Joe Biden seeming to throw culture war shade in the way his predecessor did on a near-hourly basis.  But where Donald Trump always clearly intended to divide Americans, it’s a huge stretch to claim that Biden was effectively blowing up his claims to unify America, as many Republicans indeed argued.  The truth of Biden’s approach is far closer to what Ezra Klein described last week about Biden’s effort to turn down the temperature of American politics.  

So why the “Neanderthal” remarks from Biden?  An honest reading makes clear that the president was taking aim at the Republican leaders making premature and ill-advised decisions to relax coronavirus precautions, rather than attacking ordinary citizens.  The president is on sound public health ground here, as health officials continue to advocate for the wearing of masks; for example, Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN last week that, “I understand the need to want to get back to normality, but you're only going to set yourself back if you just completely push aside the public health guidelines.”

I think it’s also safe to say that Biden’s language expressed a real personal outrage against the governors’ policies.  Crucially, it’s an outrage that is incredibly well-founded, based not on a disagreement on something like tax policy or amount of stimulus needed to help the economy (as important as those are), but on basic matters of life and death.  Governors who are prematurely declaring victory over the virus and signaling that basic health measures are no longer necessary are endangering the lives of their citizens, full stop.   

It’s a complete red herring for GOP politicians to fall back on arguments that “personal responsibility,” not state laws, will save the day, and that states should trust people to make the right decisions.  It is incredible at this late date that Republican leaders continue to pretend that mask mandates are simply about the choice about whether to protect’s oneself from the virus.  The far more important role of masks is in fact to prevent spreading the virus to others.  And so the discussion of personal freedom is completely perverted into a question as to whether a person is “free” to catch the virus, when the real question is whether the rest of us should be free from catching it.  Without mask mandates, people can now enter businesses without masks in Texas and Mississippi, endangering not simply themselves but everyone they come into contact with.  But it gets worse. People who choose not to wear masks are also increasing the odds of dangerous mutations in the virus that can make it more contagious and more deadly. This is bad enough for their own states, but of course the virus doesn’t recognize state, or national, borders. And yet these governors wold have us believe that they are only engaged in a discussion of freedom in their states.

It is harder to think of a more tendentious mis-definition of “freedom” than what we are hearing from governors like Mississippi’s Reeves or Texas’ Gregg Abbott.

It may seem counter-intuitive, given the bad-faith willingness of the GOP to twist the president’s words, but I would argue that Joe Biden’s language was not nearly harsh enough.  Mask-wearing is such a tremendously easy way to slow the spread of the virus, imposing zero cost on citizens and bringing vast benefits.  It’s not just bad policy to eliminate such state mandates — it’s outright murderous.  More people will die than otherwise, for absolutely no good reason. Such relaxation is all the more contemptible as public health experts issue warnings that new strains of the virus may push the U.S. into a spike of Covid-19 cases.

It may prove over the long term that Biden’s general refusal to engage in culture war flash points is a winning strategy, but it’s deeply galling that on a matter of life and death, Biden and other Democrats are constrained from using the appropriate language to describe the actions of their political opponents.