Don't Put a Lid on Talking About the Northwest Heat Dome

Is it possible that each of us will have our own personal conversion moment, when we individually grasp the full reality of climate chaos and begin to fully grapple with the necessity of decisive action to protect the planet and ourselves?  For the Pacific Northwest, the quick succession of disastrous fires last summer and the deadly heat dome a few weeks ago, and now the 400,000-acre Bootleg Fire in southern Oregon, currently the largest wildfire in the nation, have been shocking and impossible to ignore for those of us who live here.

But of course the process of personal conversion is more complicated than a lightbulb going off, in part because it happens in a larger societal context of denial and repression of the basic urgency of addressing climate change.  When something truly disturbing has occurred, it’s a basic reflex to take cues from people around you when working through your reactions.  With climate change having reached the point where its effects are palpable and terrifying, we’re all haunted by this conundrum: fully recognizing that the planet’s environment is increasingly extreme and erratic is to recognize a threat that can feel overwhelming and insurmountable, that makes you as an individual feel akin to an ant scrambling to get out from under a magnifying glass leveled by an indifferent child, or out of the path of thunderbolts hurled by a Olympian god.  To acknowledge it feels like acknowledging powerlessness, helplessness, doom.

In other words, there are strong incentives even among well-intentioned people to suppress even the evidence of their senses — who wants to feel terrified and hopeless?  I have had friends and acquaintances express the hope that we have seen the last of the extreme heat this year, as if what we had suffered through wasn’t the result of concrete physical forces, and can’t simply be wished away.  It’s been as if people were doubling down on hope for normalcy, even as most of us know that the climate is no longer normal; we are still speaking banalities about the weather (something that just happens) when what we should be talking about is the climate (something that humanity has affected and that all of us, each in our own way, have some responsibility to protect).  This is why, first, we all have a civic responsibility to share our deeper feelings of fear and danger — to know that we are not alone, and to encourage others to share their feelings — and to acknowledge to each other that what we have witnessed is part of the larger climate change story.  And this is why, second, that’s it’s absolutely essential that we are collectively engaged in plans for how, exactly, we will slow, contain, and ultimately roll back climate change.

Recent extreme weather events in Oregon have also reinforced for me how challenging it’s going to be to prioritize between addressing the causes of climate change, and mitigating the effects that are already here and will continue to accelerate to matter how quickly we act in the coming years to address its roots.  With the death toll from the Northwest heat dome reaching into the hundreds, there is an obvious and pressing need to ensure that everyone who needs it has access to cooling stations and air-conditioned spaces when then next extreme heat wave inevitably arrives.  These requirements inexorably lead into a broader need to address inequality in Oregon and elsewhere; Willamette Week has a must-read story about research by Portland State University Professor Dr. Vivek Shandas that found huge disparities in temperature between leafier, well-to-do Portland neighborhoods, and poorer ones with far less tree coverage and more paved areas (the Portland death toll was disproportionately higher in the latter).  Funding efforts to cool hotter neighborhoods and offer cooling stations for those who need them on hot days strike me as non-negotiable — yet, at the state and local level, this may well divert limited resources to protecting us in the here and now rather than long-term investments that address the roots of global warming.  For instance, the Portland Clean Energy Fund, funded by a tax on retailers and passed in 2018, has so far raised $115 million.  My impression was that some of that money would go to preventing climate change, but in the Willamette Week article Dr. Shandas suggests most of the money would be well-spent for preparing buildings for extreme heat.  That may be necessary, but vividly demonstrates that we need more money from other sources (i.e., the federal government) to do the heavy lifting of actually slowing and stopping climate change itself. (Dr. Shandas has an opinion piece in The Oregonian this weekend that elaborates on his recommendations for how Portland can prepare for the next heat wave that combines both immediate and long-term mitigation approaches.)

In the wake of so many preventable deaths, I see an incentive for politicians to shirk responsibility for their roles in allowing our climate to reach this point to begin with; in this instance, to point to the unprecedented nature of wholly predictably temperature extremes to excuse why a greater effort wasn’t made to warn and accommodate vulnerable populations as the heat dome was clearly forecast.  Again, in a world of limited state resources and the obvious need for politicians to act in the here and now to protect the lives of their constituents, the incentives may strongly lean toward states protecting themselves from current climate impacts, rather than investing in things like clean energy that will lessen those impacts years down the road (this makes it clear that the federal government has a central role to play in funding solutions like clean energy and the hardening of infrastructure that state governments can’t afford). 

But the limits to simply protecting human life as the priority of climate efforts quickly become clear, even at this relatively early point in our collective awakening and mobilization.  I noted a couple weeks ago that scientists estimate that over a billion marine animals died in the heat dome up and down the northwestern U.S. and Canadian coasts; beyond this, various fruit crops were spoiled, and climate change-accelerated fires are now burning across Oregon and the western United States (does anyone in Oregon state government, or the U.S. government for that matter, have plans to keep the bulk of our forest from burning over the coming years?   The carbon emissions, and loss of so many oxygen-generating trees, would seem to be a catastrophic prospect not just for the region but the nation.).  This deeply disturbing article in The New York Times reminds us that the Pacific Northwest faces not just the prospect of future extreme heat events, but an ongoing rise in temperatures that is destabilizing and resetting the ecology of the region.  Hunkering down and taking it doesn’t seem like a viable option if that involves being burned out of house and home, having our timber industry crippled, and seeing our ability to grow crops and harvest seafood diminished.  This is to say nothing of the utter immorality of destroying vast swathes of the natural world.

General Alarm

Advance excerpts from a new book about the final year of the Trump presidency offer startling details about the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s concerns regarding the former’s president’s efforts to stay in office.  As the Washington Post summarizes, General Mark Milley “repeatedly worried about what the president might do to maintain power after losing reelection, comparing his rhetoric to Adolf Hitler’s during the rise of Nazi Germany and asking confidants whether a coup was forthcoming.”  Milley also described Trump’s efforts to undermine the election results as a “Reichstag moment,” a comparison with Adolf Hitler’s efforts to overthrow German democracy and establish a dictatorship.

The general’s observations, as documented in I Alone Can Fix It (written by a pair of Washington Post reporters), are particularly striking because he seemed to grasp Trump’s potential path to dictatorial power in highly tangible ways — namely, through deployment of violent Trump supporters in the streets and co-optation of the military, FBI, and other security agencies — and because he saw his own role as critical to stopping such potential efforts.  Milley reportedly told aides, “They may try, but they’re not going to fucking succeed.  You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with guns.”   To this end, he and other top generals planned to resign in succession if the White House gave them illicit orders.

It would be a horrible misreading of such details to conclude that Milley’s patriotic, anti-authoritarian training and instincts are in any way a cause for celebration.  Relief, yes — but at multiple levels, the fact that the head of the U.S. military saw himself and his command as what stood between American fascism and America democracy is a screaming warning for our nation, on top of the many we have already received over the last few years.  For our country to arrive at a point where the U.S. military leaders believe they are the final defenders of the democratic order is in and of itself a profound failure that must be examined and learned from, so that we never again arrive at such a point.

There’s a sickening doubleness to Milley’s resolve to protect our democracy — even as his goals of defending democracy were laudable, the possibility that the military would contemplate doing so on its own initiative, rather than on the orders of its civilian superiors, represents a breath-taking break in American democracy and the principle of civilian control over the military.  The apparent strategy of resigning rather than following orders deemed illegal or anti-democratic may have seemed like the least bad option, but what jumps out at me is that the general and his colleagues did not choose to go public with the dangers that they perceived, rather than secretly plan a resignation strategy.  Again, there may not have been any good options for military leaders as they contemplated how the president’s coup attempt would play out, and what they might do to disrupt it — but the lack of faith in sharing the danger with the public, or with elected officials, speaks in its own way to a crisis of democracy.  The basic principle should be this: the defense of democracy is the responsibility of the citizens and elected officials of that democracy.

Not that we needed still more reason to do so, but these revelations about the thinking of Milley and other military leaders shows that it is non-negotiable that Democrats investigate not only the events of January 6, but also the presidential efforts before and after that date that collectively represent a failed coup attempt by Donald Trump.  The purpose should be not only to dig up new facts and perfect the public’s understanding of the president’s malfeasance, but to politically destroy the former president and his allies in treason.  Without delay, Democrats investigating the January 6 insurrection need to get Milley’s testimony about his thoughts and plans around Trump’s attempts to overthrow American democracy, both as a matter of furthering the case against the former president and as a basic matter of re-asserting civilian control over the military.

Democrats cannot succumb to the pleasant fiction that Donald Trump’s coup attempt lies completely in the past, or that it was limited to the events of January 6.  Not only has the former president, over the last six months, continued to solidify his grip on the Republican Party, but he has increasingly placed the supposedly stolen election at the center of his claims to continued power in the party and in the country.  Perhaps most ominously — as well-documented by Talking Points Memo and others — he and his allies are increasingly asserting the legitimacy of the January 6 Capitol assault itself.  Trump recently declared that jailed insurrectionists should have their charges dismissed, and suggested that the Capitol police officer who shot Ashli Babbitt should be lynched.  Indeed, Trump and his right-wing allies are also well into constructing a storyline in which Babbitt was an innocent victim, rather than a participant in an unprecedented far-right sacking of the seat of American democracy.  Such propagandistic moves to re-write January 6 inspire and complement GOP legislative efforts around the country to restrict voting rights and place administration of elections in the hands of partisan GOP operatives.

To whatever degree Democrats can use Milley’s experiences and statements regarding Trump’s coup attempts to set the record straight and educate the public as to Trump’s danger to the republic, they must do so without hesitation — even as they need to make it clear that the military must always defer to its civilian leaders, especially in times of democratic crisis.  It is also essential that any military or civilian leaders who plotted with Trump to take control of security agencies in order to keep Trump in office are brought to justice.  This is how a democracy acts in its own defense — not by street violence, or deploying the military to show its strength, but by exposing and bringing the full force of the law and public exposure to bear on its enemies.  And looking forward, it’s more important than ever that the Pentagon expel white supremacist and right-wing extremists from its ranks; the country must never be in a position where military personnel and leaders make far worse choices than Milley and his colleagues.

Summertime Climate Chaos Performs Deadly Encore in Oregon

For the second time in less than a year, residents of Portland have experienced what it is to be helpless sinners in the hands of an angry planetary god.  Last year, our air quality spiked to toxic levels, and the sky turned acid browns and yellows, as forests to the south burned and took entire small towns with them.  Our urban safety turned out to be highly relative; Portland proper might not burn, but we were hardly safe from the dangers of fire, or from the sorrow of our fellow Oregonians burned out of house and home.  There was no escape from the harrowing air except to stay indoors, or to flee for clearer skies at the coast.

Then, two weeks ago, the city, and the greater northwest, were beset by record-breaking temperatures due to a “heat dome” that had settled over the area.  On Saturday, June 26, we got up to 106 degrees; the next day, 112; and the next, 116, which is the all-time record for the city.

The average temperature for this time of year is 73 degrees.

These triple-digit measures are desert temperatures, not temperate northwest ones, but they’re our reality now, in an area where less than half the population has air conditioners, and our infrastructure wasn’t built with such extremes in mind.  

As the Washington Post noted, this high-heat anomaly didn’t come out of nowhere; rather, "This wall of unprecedented heat bears the trademarks of human-caused climate change [. . .] Average temperatures in the Northwest have increased by nearly 1 degree Celsius since 1900 [. . .] The number of extremely hot days each year has increased, and the region is cooling off less at night. Statistical analyses show that warming from greenhouse gas emissions accounts for more than 80 percent of the increase in hot summers in the West.”

Many of us are witnessing first-hand that the dangers of climate change, too often perceived as vague warnings of higher temperatures and disrupted climates, are embodied by very definite meteorological phenomena:

Evidence suggests that heat domes like the ones wreaking havoc from Phoenix to Portland this summer are becoming more persistent and intense as the planet warms. These tall, hot air masses sit on top of a region, diverting weather systems and dissipating cloud cover, which allows more-intense summer sunlight to heat the ground further. This feedback loop can produce broiling temperatures lasting for days on end. When a heat dome happens amid the hotter, drier conditions caused by climate change, the results are record-shattering.

The butcher’s bill for this man-made heating is nearly incalculable.  So far, authorities attribute 107 deaths in Oregon to the heat wave, including 67 in Portland itself.  To our north, Washington state saw 78 heat-related deaths.  And in British Columbia, the toll appears to have been far higher, with at least 500 premature deaths attributable to the heat wave.

The consequences for our ecosystems are also shocking and gut-wrenching: scientists estimate some 1 billion marine creatures were killed by the heat wave just off Canada’s Pacific coast, and that these ocean ecosystems could take years to recover.  Such mass death points to the amoral and self-destructive recklessness of the planet’s current climate trajectory, where we approach tipping points beyond which ecosystems cannot recover and the climate warming and chaos feeds inexorably on itself. 

Reading analyses that this could well be counted as the coolest summer for the rest of our lifetimes inspires dread, helplessness and despair.  Along with the 2020 fires, it very much feels like the disastrous climate future long warned against is now upon us, with the fury and truth of revelation.  This is obviously a highly personalized perspective, the result of my own daily experience; but I am guessing this is how the full reality of climate change is dawning upon most people, through encounters with unprecedented events that verge on the uncanny.  After the fires last year, for instance, my relationship to the forested northwest feels permanently altered; all that beauty now revealed as a stressed, ticking time bomb, ready to reverse its carbon sinking, oxygen-disbursing function with the careless flick of a camper’s match or the force majeure spark of a lightning strike.

But I have to hope that I’m not alone in finding these experiences utterly radicalizing; and that this common experience will help galvanize the radical, rapid changes that we need to slow, stop, and reverse climate change.  The fact that we are all experiencing this together should activate an innate solidarity in most people, and prime us for greater awareness of disparate impacts based on wealth and race.  This is a case where the instinct for self-preservation is well-aligned with the instinct to band together in common cause (though alternate possibilities — of those who choose to hunker down and look out for their own — are very real, and must be consciously and actively repudiated).

In Portland, there’s been a lot of understandable and necessary news coverage of what more the city and county could have done to save Oregonian lives in the face of the heat wave.  Underlying whatever political failures occurred, though, is a systemic failure to grasp the reality and threat of climate chaos.  Tragically but not surprisingly, this feels deeply intertwined with the reality that the most vulnerable people are also the poorest, most politically-underrepresented citizens.  For instance, there is evidence that the highest death tolls in Portland correlated with less well-off neighborhoods in the southeast of the city (where, not coincidentally, there is far less tree canopy that could have helped cool homes).  In this respect, the deaths of so many Oregonians require that we hold accountable those politicians who, either through failure of imagination or moral failure, did not act as they could to protect the lives of Oregonians from an extreme heat wave that was predicted at least a week out, and whose extremity was presaged by more recent extreme heat events in the region.

But essential talk of resilience and preparing for the next heat wave can’t take primacy over the long-term, more fundamental effort needed: to massively reduce the carbon emissions fueling climate change, and to support and grow our ecosystems so that they can absorb more carbon out of the air and back into living systems.  As David Roberts reminds us, there are no moderate positions available for fighting climate change, only radical ones that either address the fundamentals of the challenge or allow unthinkable catastrophe to enshroud the planet. Politicians whose rhetoric and proposals fail to match this moment don’t deserve anyone’s support: they are either in denial of the facts, or unable to grasp their import, disqualifying attitudes in either case.

The Bipartisan Sand Trap

For anyone struggling to understand the dynamics and dangers of the recent infrastructure negotiations, and the fight over filibuster reform, I highly recommend these two recent articles by Brian Beutler.  Among other things, Beutler engages directly with a question that’s become central to The Hot Screen’s interests: what is the best way for the Democrats to engage a Republican Party that has clearly devolved into a racist, authoritarian party?  He’s deeply critical of the broadly-held Democratic position (one that seems to be shared by President Biden) that if Democrats can simply deliver popular legislation and economic growth, the Democrats will be best set up to win the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential election.  Referring to this attitude as “good policy is good politics,” he writes, “It doesn’t account for what happens if Democrats win popular majorities but can’t overcome partisan GOP gerrymanders; it doesn’t account for whatever margins Republicans can shave off Democratic vote totals with new suppression laws; and it doesn’t account for the demoralizing effect that marooning the Democratic base to contend with all this unfairness will have on party activists and, thus, turnout.”  He notes that while Democrats continue to pursue a bipartisan infrastructure package, with the goal of appealing to voters’ desire for bipartisan political solutions, the GOP continues to pursue culture war disputes (such as its campaign to turn critical race theory into an existential threat) that aim to keep its base upset and mobilized through the 2022 midterms and beyond.  This is a dynamic that haunts the virtual pages of The Hot Screen, and it’s validating to see Beutler homing in it as well — while the Republican Party does everything it can to persuade its supporters to “give themselves over to an end-stage struggle for the way of life that’s been stolen from them,” and to rig election laws to make it impossible for Democrats to win back the House or re-elect Joe Biden, the Democrats emphasize their ability to work with that same Republican Party as an equal and legitimate party in government.  Indeed, Beutler contends that this strategy of placing a politics of bipartisan normalcy over more full-throated confrontation already cost the Democrats in the 2020 election: 

I can’t prove this mathematically, but the decision to portray Republicans as people who could and would be reasoned with, rather than as rabid abettors of authoritarianism and criminal corruption, created a permission structure of sorts for anti-Trump Republicans to split their tickets. Something similar seems to be happening now, where Democrats want the public to recognize that Republicans place democracy under greater threat than at any time since World War II, but also that they will make winning over these saboteurs a top priority.

In the context of Democratic attempts to demonstrate bipartisan comity around infrastructure legislation, Beutler sees the Democrats setting themselves up for possible electoral disaster in 2022 and beyond:

Worse than selling the public an ersatz display of functioning democracy, though, it would lead to an election where Dems campaigned on proving the parties can work together while Republicans unleashed apocalyptic culture war. And between the power of the message and the structural advantages they enjoy in the House and Senate races, it’s a fight [the Republicans] would win [. . .] Democrats will not confront Republicans at their weakest points if their theory of politics is rooted in conciliation above all else. At some point they have to accept that the Republican Party in its current form has to be crushed, and then they have to crush it. They can’t do that by giving Republicans partial credit for a half-measure infrastructure bill. The main upshot, if they do, will be to paper over the cardinal truth that democracy is on the line because the GOP is bent on destroying it.

One point that Beutler brushes up against but that’s worth a little more consideration: the idea that the Democrats are betting their electoral fortunes, and the nation’s future as a democracy, on passing legislation that they appear willing to allow the Republicans to unduly influence, due to their emphasis on proving their bipartisanship to the American people.  In other words, the Democratic strategy of relying on game-changing legislation stands in direct contradiction with their strategy of appearing bipartisan.  You can have one, or you can have the other — but can you really have both?  (This is where the fight over the filibuster becomes incredibly salient, as it’s become both a symbolic and actual centerpiece of the meaning of bipartisanship, as well as a central obstacle to the Democrats’ ability to pass legislation that will potentially activate voters to turn out in future elections).  Simultaneously, the Republican strategy seems to be an inversion of the Democrats’, and even designed to leverage off the Democrats’ miscalculation: the GOP will continue to do everything it can, including by waging culture war battles, to insist that the Democrats are a radical organization bent on turning America into an atheistic-Muslim-homosexual hellhole where white people are treated like slaves and Christians are herded into re-education camps, while enacting racist, anti-democratic laws aimed at blocking the Democratic coalition’s ability to win elections, and while benefitting from the efforts of Democrats to portray this very same GOP as a worthy, equal partner in democratic governance.

Finally, I’m heartened to see Beutler’s emphasis not just on democracy legislation and engaging in favorable culture war politics (such as putting the GOP on defensive by pushing CDC-issued vaccination cards or passing legislation protecting the right to an abortion) as essential parts of a healthy Democratic and pro-democracy agenda, but also on pushing for investigations of Trump administration corruption.  He’s all on board with using such investigations to sully the GOP, but I’d add another possible benefit — the distinct possibility that investigations of Trump’s corruption will lead directly back to GOP representatives and senators themselves.  After all, is it really inconceivable that some Republican elected officials were active participants in the debased deeds of the Trump White House?  I do wonder, too, at the Democrats’ apparent reluctance to investigate more thoroughly reports of corruption around former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao; a Transportation Department inspector general report found that she “repeatedly used her office staff to help family members who run a shipping business with extensive ties to China,” and referred the issue to the Justice Department.  Though the Justice Department declined to pursue a criminal investigation, there’s nothing stopping congressional Democrats from digging into the matter — particularly appealing as Chao is the wife of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.  Tying McConnell, even indirectly, to the venality and corruption of the Trump administration would help the Democrats with the necessary campaign to delegitimize the broader GOP in the eyes of an American majority; making the case about a key Republican politician profiting off of public office is a powerful supplement to making the case that the GOP has become an authoritarian party no longer dedicated to the common good.

America's Rum Luck

It is generally bad form to kick someone when they’re down — and as death is unquestionably the ultimate form of being down, this guideline doubly applies in the matter of obituaries and assessments in the immediate aftermath of a person’s demise.  Not only is he or she not around to defend themselves, any criticism runs the risk of bringing additional pain to the survivors of the deceased.

But the passing of Donald Rumsfeld last week is a reminder that every guideline has its reasonable exceptions.  In this case, our collective need to speak the truth about exceptionally odious political figures is a necessary carve-out to the general rule of not speaking ill of the dead.    A democracy must be able to accurately judge the actions of its public servants, not only to hold them personally accountable, but to determine whether we want to stay the course or change policies and leaders.   Without an ability or willingness to hold our leaders and public servants responsible for their actions — both the good and bad ones —by forming judgments about their actions, we may as well be a monarchy or a dictatorship.

When we take the occasion of someone’s passing as an opportunity to highlight the ways they’ve failed or betrayed the public trust, this signals the seriousness of the person’s offenses, and the overriding importance of defending the American people and democracy against those who have offended us.  The delicacy of the moment, in other words, means that it is exactly the right time for the public to assess true public betrayals, both for the sake of the historical record, and with an eye to the future and deterring repeat offenses against our common good. I highly recommend these two pieces for an unflinching assessment of Donald Rumsfeld’s life and legacy.

Despite his decades-spanning career in public service — including time as a Navy pilot, congressman, and official in multiple Republican presidential administrations — the overwhelming facts of Rumsfeld’s career are the catastrophic wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the broader disaster of an ill-defined war on terror.  His complicity in propagating lies in order to gin up an invasion of Iraq, in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans, in the deaths of thousands of American service members, and in the use of torture against all standards of law and morality, are the truest measure of his disservice to our country.

We also need to speak the truth about Rumsfeld’s disastrous role in the George W. Bush administration because his actions, while crucial, were part of a broader, discredited vision of America as an imperialistic superpower, using military force in an impossible and quite possibly psychotic quest for domination.  Given the destructiveness of this vision to the world and to this this nation, we should not pass up an opportunity to highlight its depravity, and reinforce our collective resolve to resist such visions in the future.  Rumsfeld is not a figure out of some distant, barely discernible past.  We are still living with the consequences of the unforgivable decisions of the administration he served; Rumsfeld’s amoral and incompetent role still affects us.  The continuation of the catastrophe in the Middle East that he helped launch is the crowning reason why we should resist all efforts to whitewash his record.  This is far beyond more ordinary political conflicts, such as whether a politician might have been wrong about tax policy or the proper size of the Department of Education.  Rumsfeld’s role as Defense Secretary under George W. involved deaths counted in the hundreds of thousands.

That said, Rumsfeld’s catastrophic final act in public service makes it more important, not less, to be aware of the breadth of his life, his ordinary and extraordinary achievements, such as raising a family and being elected to Congress for multiple terms.  As important as it is to condemn those who use their power to mislead and betray the American people, it’s also crucial that we remember their basic humanity, and are open to contemplating that very few people are all bad or all evil.  I would submit that Rumsfeld’s greatest flaw was a dehumanization of the many thousands of Iraqis and Afghans dead at the hands of the conflicts the U.S. invasions unleashed, a sense that their lives didn’t count nearly as much as American ones.  This is a sickness shared by many American politicians, but one that can’t be answered by denying their humanity in turn.  It’s okay to be uncomfortable with grudging admiration for this obviously driven man, or to feel disoriented at how easily an unobjectionable public service can slide into mass death and mass deception.  We can judge Rumsfeld’s life in the harsh light it deserves while also acknowledging its complexity.

Trump's Bleak Tapestry of Malfeasance Continues to Unfurl

After Donald Trump's defeat in the 2020 election, it was hard to breathe too big a sigh of relief, given how close he had again come to an electoral college victory even while decisively losing the popular vote.  The narrowness of his loss gave weight to arguments that the fight against Trump and Trumpism could hardly be considered over with his ejection from the White House — that the battle for American democracy against GOP authoritarianism was still in the balance, and that Democrats and others needed to push to reform American democracy itself in order to ensure that the majority continues to rule.  And since the election, a wave of anti-voting measures in Republican-controlled states and legislatures has provided incontestable evidence that the onslaught continues even with Trump out of office.

One strategy for pushing back against this growing authoritarian movement was clear even while Trump was in office — ensuring that the Trump administration's offenses against the American people and government were made known to the public.  And this likelihood stood out to me: that once Trump was out of office, we were sure to learn of new offenses that could be used to continue to build the case to Americans regarding the former president’s unfitness for office, and the culpability of Republican Party officeholders in refusing to disavow both the man and his presidency. 

Over the past months, new revelations about Trump administration lawlessness have validated this assumption, and have built the case for continuing to tie the GOP to the derangements of the former president.  The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein summarizes some of the biggest stories:

Emails show how both Trump and his White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows pressured the Justice Department to support the former president’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud in 2020. A previously unheard tape captures how Rudolph Giuliani, as Trump’s attorney, explicitly pressured Ukraine to manufacture an investigation against Joe Biden—the issue that prompted the former president’s first impeachment. Even more ominous has been the disclosure that the Justice Department under Trump subpoenaed communications records of journalists, Democratic members and staffers in the House of Representatives, and even Trump’s own White House counsel, all without their knowledge. 

Brownstein notes that even with these disclosures, we can be sure that much still remains hidden.  And indeed, shortly after Brownstein wrote this piece, we learned that during White House discussions about civil rights protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, President Trump said that the military should “crack skulls” and “beat the fuck out” of protestors, and that soldiers should “just shoot them.”  Trump’s desire to slaughter unarmed civilians, had it been known at the time, alone should have prompted a new impeachment effort to remove this monster from office.

I’m sympathetic with the impulse of many Democratic politicos to avoid making a quest for accountability of Trump administration actions too large a part of the party’s identity — after all, even those who most loathe the former president also want the country to move forward and thrive now that he’s out of office.  But while there are valid concerns about politicizing the justice system by seeking punishment for the former president’s crimes and assaults on the constitutional order, an effort to investigate and publicize such matters so as to inform the public of exactly what this corrupt and evil man did is entirely proper for Democrats, and healthy for the republic — a powerful alignment of serving the public interest while also maximizing the political advantages to the Democratic Party and the political pain to the GOP.

Two obvious reasons for doing so jump out at me.  First, since Trump left office, the GOP has if anything only increased its fealty to the former president, refusing any reckoning with or repudiation of his time in office.  Instead, many in the GOP appear to see the president’s mix of white nationalism and assault on voting rights as key to the party’s future hold on power — a political game plan of racism-fueled authoritarianism.  In doing so, they legitimize the Democrats’ efforts to uncover hidden Trump administration wrongdoing in order to demonstrate to the American people the true nature of this authoritarian party.

Second, there's a strong possibility that Donald Trump will run for president again in 2024 — a possibility for which Democrats would do well to prepare by ensuring that the fullest accounting of his corruption and moral turpitude is available to voters.  In particular, Democrats should be thinking about how they might carve off a small but significant percentage of Republican voters in 2022 and 2024 — elections that will very possibly involve a field deeply tilted against Democrats due to Republican initiatives to suppress voting rights (particularly if Democrats fail to pass legislation along the lines of the For the People Act).  As a basic insurance policy against a second Trump run for the White House, Democrats should do whatever they can to maintain and increase the doubts of Republican voters unsure if another Trump term is such a hot idea.

The new report of Trump’s eagerness to kill protestors in cold blood strikes me as the sort of news that can change minds and help the Democrats construct a powerful, and accurate, continuing narrative of the Trump presidency to counter possible Republican efforts to launder the historical record in anticipation of a 2024 run.  In a similar vein, Democrats should be ready to link any future attacks by right-wing extremists to the encouragements of the former president, as well as to his administration’s efforts to downplay the threat of right-wing violence and prevent national security agencies from prioritizing the threat it poses.  I base this on a faith that most, or at least a great many, Republican voters do not want to become complicit in violence against their fellow Americans.  To this end, it’s essential to show that the former president — and by extension his current defenders in the GOP —are all too comfortable with the idea of killing, beating, and otherwise abusing their fellow Americans in order to maintain power.  It would be absurd not to wield this anti-democratic, fascistic animus as a weapon against a GOP that continues to mainline some of the worst aspects of Trump's presidency.

It's Time For a Broader Understanding of the GOP Assault on Voting Rights

Even as Republican efforts around the country to roll back and suppress voting rights have justly received a great deal of mainstream media attention, this coverage, as well as the rhetoric of Democrats working to halt these attacks, has tended to emphasize how this voter suppression aims to keep members of certain groups from being able to vote.  While completely true, and illustrative of the racist animus of the Republican initiatives, they seldom delve into the specific effects of disenfranchisement on those voters themselves, beyond the general sense that it’s bad for them.  The idea that they are denied a political voice is clearly the crux of the matter — yet the consequences of that denial are seldom elaborated or explored.  The result is to keep voter suppression too often at an unhelpful-level of abstraction, solely a matter of principle (“their voting rights are being denied”) rather than also a matter of power and who has it (“their power is being denied via a denial of their voting rights”).

This frequent omission sidelines two crucial aspects of voter suppression that would heighten everyone’s sense of the stakes, and a sense of outrage among all democracy-supporting American, Democrats and non-Democrats alike.  First, just as some define the most basic duty of a government as defending the physical safety of its subjects, the ability to vote, and have your vote count, is essential to protecting oneself against physical violence.  Lest this argument for concreteness itself sound abstract, we need look no further than the surge of violence directed at Asian-American communities around the country after our former president repeatedly used racist, scapegoating language to describe covid and its Chinese origins.  And as the New York Times reports, a sense of fear, not just of harassment but of physical threat, continues to haunt many Asian-Americans even five months into the Biden administration.  From this perspective, the right to vote and help decide whether a white supremacist, violence-propagating president remains in office isn’t just an assertion of an abstract human right; it’s the ability to help determine whether one lives in a country where one is likely to be attacked or killed by bigots.  And indeed, as The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein reports, those who have closely tracked Asian-American voters point to Donald Trump’s cultivation of an atmosphere of menace towards this diverse group as having played a strong role in a surge in Asian-American votes in 2020 — votes which broke in favor of Democrats.

The case of Asian-American voters helps highlight the second enormously important aspect of voting suppression that is currently given short shrift by both the media and Democrats.  Despite the rapid growth of this voting population (Asian-Americans went from casting 2.5% of all votes in 2000 to 5% of all votes in 2020), a group that constitutes a mere 1/20th of the overall voting population can hardly put preferred candidates into office on its own.  But this perhaps obvious fact helps us highlight a basic truth about voting that can get obscured with too much emphasis on voter suppression as a violation of individual rights (which it of course also is): in the United States, as in any democracy, one exerts one’s power not simply by casting a single vote, but by doing so in concert with hundreds, thousands, millions of fellow Americans who support the same candidates and the same party.  The right to vote means nothing if we are not able to form majority coalitions with like-minded voters.  

Our ability to form majority coalitions by voting is as important as the ability to defend one’s physical well-being by voting; indeed, it’s the precondition for any ability to have one’s vote count in any meaningful way.  And as outrageous as it is to deny the individual right to have one’s vote counted, it’s just as outrageous to prevent majorities of voters from coming together and attaining power by targeting subsets of those voters — which is exactly what the Republican Party is determined to do to the majority Democratic coalition, by suppressing the vote of individual African-American, lower-income, and other voters who tend to vote Democratic (not to mention by gerrymandering measures that dilute the votes of these and other Democratic voting blocs).

From this perspective, you can see that the idea that only particular individuals directly affected by Republican anti-voting measures are the victims is deeply misleading.  I don’t think it’s too much to say that voting suppression targeted at one’s political allies actually also constitutes voting suppression of those allies.  After all, take the case of two Democratic-leaning groups from the last election, African-Americans and Asian-Americans.  The votes of both groups were crucial not only in securing Joe Biden’s victory, but the Democrats’ control of the Senate via two hard-won victories in Georgia.  If Republican efforts to suppress the votes of African-Americans had been more successful, their allies in the Asian-American community would have been denied the senators of their choice and their ability to benefit from Democratic control of the Senate.  But the same principle applies to Democratic white voters in Georgia, and indeed, in every state in the union: if the crucial votes of Asian-Americans and African-Americans had been suppressed in Georgia, Democratic white voters everywhere would have been denied their preference as to which party should control the Senate.

And so describing voter suppression primarily as a violation of individual rights, or even the rights of particular groups, fails to do justice to the monstrosity of such actions, and how they strips millions more voters of their political power.  Talking about voter suppression as something that is being done to particular groups who must have their rights restored is not sufficient, as it misleadingly suggests that the rights of other groups not targeted so directly are somehow safe.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  This is truly a situation where an attack on one is an attack on all, and Democrats and other defenders of democracy should employ rhetoric, and political remedies, that are equal to the affront.  Likewise, the basic role of voting in keeping oneself safe from physical harm needs to be placed closer to the center of voting rights discussions.  We need to energize and even radicalize our fellow Americans to a defense of democracy — and key to this is making the case that none of us can consider our right to vote as safe or meaningful if the right of any of us is under threat.

Operation Get the Hell Out of Our Legislature

Oregon politics popped into the national scene last week, as the Oregon House voted to expel Republican Representative Mike Nearman.  Back in December, Nearman had opened a door of the locked-down Capitol back to allow in right-wing demonstrators, including some who were armed . This was an obviously pre-meditated act on his part, as evidenced by a video from a few days before the event which, in the words of The Oregonian, showed Nearman instructing viewers how they should wait outside an entrance to the Capitol and text his cell phone. Then, “somebody might exit that door while you’re standing there,” Nearman said, a plan he dubbed “Operation Hall Pass.””

Some of the protestors who Nearman helped into the building proceeded to fight with police, allegedly using bear spray on some of the officers.

I’ve seen commentary that what is most remarkable about Nearman’s actions and his expulsion — apart from the fact that a Republican elected official used his official privileges to support violent right-wing extremists in an attack on a state government — is that he was actually held to account for his actions; after all, not only every Democrat but every other Republican in the House voted for expulsion (Nearman himself was the lone dissenting vote).  It is tremendously heartening to see Democrats acting with dispatch against a colleague whose behavior crossed the line into borderline insurrectionism.  Likewise, some credit should be given to GOP leadership for speaking to the dangers posed by Nearman’s actions and the seriousness of his offense; House Republican Leader Christine Drazan told Oregon Public Broadcasting that, “There could easily have been a death on that day,” and issued a statement that Nearman’s “plan to let people into the Capitol ended with violence, property destruction and injured cops.”

But though Oregon legislators did the right thing in this instance, it’s essential that we view Nearman’s coddling of extremists as existing on a clear continuum with previous Oregon Republican outrages.  Even prior to “Operation Hall Pass,” the Oregon GOP was already shot through with extremism.  Republican legislators have staged multiple walk-outs in the past few years to deny the Democratic majority a quorum, exploiting a quirk of the Oregon constitution to bravely stop climate legislation.  And during the 2019 walkout, GOP Senator Brian Boquist had responded to Governor Kate Brown’s plans to send state troopers after the absconding politicians by saying, “Send bachelors and come heavily armed. I’m not going to be a political prisoner in the state of Oregon”; that senator was subsequently censured, but not expelled.  Subsequently, the Oregon state capital was closed due to the threats of right-wing extremist to defend the Republican politicians who had walked out; as Oregon Public Broadcasting reported, “Some lawmakers believe [Boquist’s comments] helped stir up right-wing militia members, whose avowals to defend absent Republicans led lawmakers to close the Capitol on June 22.

In 2020, Oregon Republican voters elected a QAnon supporter, Joe Rae Perkins, to run against Democratic Senator Ron Wyden (Wyden won handily.  After her defeat, Perkins’ next major political act was to take part in the January 6 insurrection at our nation’s capital — an event at which, incidentally, the vice chair of Oregon’s Young Republicans organization was arrested).  And shortly before Joe Biden’s inauguration, the Oregon state Republican Party “issued a statement condemning the 10 Republican members of Congress who voted to impeach President Donald Trump and aligning itself with conspiracy theories about the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol building.”

Given this context, I’m not sure we can rightly say Republican House members in Oregon acted honorably to punish one of their own who had gone too far, but rather that they acted expeditiously to avoid permanently cementing themselves as members of a party that demonstrated some of the same disqualifying authoritarian tendencies as other state GOP organizations.  I am not so sure that if the GOP controlled the Oregon House, so many Republicans would have voted for Nearman’s expulsion.  The decision of all 23 House members may indeed reflect some honest repugnance at Nearman’s behavior, but there’s also a strong CYA component in the party deciding to turn on one of their own.  The state GOP has already dug itself a deep hole in terms of basic credibility for the majority of state voters who back Democrats; it would be hard to see the party ever making its way to majority status were the Democrats able to portray its current crop of state legislators as defenders of political violence and insurrectionism.

One final note on Nearman’s offenses: I haven’t yet seen anyone note that he also managed to betray his constituents by depriving them of representation through the end of the current legislative session that ends this month (county commissioners from his district will appoint a new representative in the next 30 days; under state law, the new representative will be a Republican, and will serve out the remainder of Nearman’s term). Expulsion was a necessary measure, but we shouldn’t overlook that it has temporarily deprived his district of representation in state decisions in the coming weeks.

GOP Hustle to Cut Unemployment Benefits Looks Worse and Worse

Last month, I wrote about how Republican politicians had glommed on to a storyline in which overly-generous unemployment benefits are dragging down the country’s economic recovery, by keeping workers from looking for or accepting available jobs.  In doing so, the GOP consciously disregards powerful evidence that childcare concerns and continued worries about being sickened by the coronavirus have had a significant role in the reluctance of many workers to return to the job market.

Since then, I’ve come across a couple articles that take on this GOP contention, and that make important points beyond what I discussed.  First, Paul Waldman at The Plum Line makes the important observation that in a situation where workers are not flocking to fill open positions, despite a large labor supply, “the answer is for [employers] to offer more money. That’s how supply and demand works in a market economy: When the demand for labor increases, the price of labor increases as well.”  The general Republican Party unwillingness to acknowledge this possible solution to filling open positions, particularly in light of its avowed adherence to free market principles, speaks volumes about its commitment to supporting the power of business over workers at every turn.

Annie Lowrey makes some complementary points in her analysis of the recent lower-than-expected hiring numbers, noting that it is simply not healthy for the overall economy if workers with skills that merit higher pay are essentially forced to take lower-paying jobs for which they’re over-qualified.  Beyond this, she notes that even if we acknowledge some role for unemployment benefits in workers’ decisions not to seek or accept open positions, this effect is disproportionately in low-wage jobs where the unemployment benefits are closer to the wages offered.  But even if this is the case, she writes, the “job of the government is not to ensure a supply of workers at whatever wage rates businesses set.”  Moreover, there are benefits to the overall economy if even lower-paid workers are able to take some time in finding employment that matches their skills and abilities (it’s notable that in insisting that workers take the first job they can find, Republican politicians behave as if all workers, particularly lower-paid workers, are interchangeable cogs without particular skill sets).

Finally, the mendacity if not outright depravity of the GOP’s assault on unemployment benefits in the time of covid may find its supreme illustration in the fact that various Republican governors pressing this attack actually stand to benefit personally from forcing workers to take low-wage work.  As this Washington Post report documents, governors like Jim Justice of West Virginia, as well as the governors of North Dakota, New Hampshire, and Mississippi, have business interests that could benefit from the government forcing workers to take the first job that comes along.  In a healthier democracy, such news would be a career-ending scandal for some of these politicos; as things are, it’s at least a powerful lens for viewing the mix of self-interest and contempt for working Americans that animates even the supposedly “populist” GOP.  Taking a “principled” stand against allegedly indolent workers is even easier when you stand to make money (on top of your government salary!) by using the power of your office to berate and bully the very workers whom you serve, and some of whom even cast votes for you.

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.