Portland Fumbles Response to White Supremacist Incursion

For anyone concerned about the rise of right-wing political violence in the United States, I strongly recommend these recent pieces from Oregon Public Broadcasting, Willamette Week, and The Oregonian for an object lesson in how politicians and police can completely mishandle the challenge.  A little over a week ago, Portland was the destination for a motley gang of Proud Boys and other violent white supremacists who had long planned a rally in the city.  Before their arrival, the Portland Police Bureau, backed by Mayor Ted Wheeler, who also serves as the police commissioner, stated publicly that they would not attempt to intervene in the event of any fights between the right-wingers and counter-protestors, except in the case of a “life safety emergency.”

In doing so, the city sent a signal not only to the Proud Boys and their ilk, but also to the misguided counter-protestors who seek physical confrontation with their right-wing nemeses, that they were free to turn parts of the city into free-fire zones of roving gangs and lawlessness — which is exactly what happened Sunday, as fights and mayhem ensued in both northeastern Portland and downtown.  In the Parkrose neighborhood, fights in a K Mart parking lot moved onto the property of nearby businesses, as well as Parkrose High School, where vehicles were vandalized.  Downtown, among clashes between right-wingers and counter-protestors, a man fired a gun; thankfully, no one was injured, and the police arrested him within minutes (the police say he wasn’t associated with any of the brawling groups).

Perversely, Mayor Wheeler proclaimed the police strategy a resounding success, saying, “With strategic planning and oversight, the Portland Police Bureau and I mitigated confrontation between the two events and minimized the impact of the weekend’s events to Portlanders.  In the past, these same groups have clashed with extremely violent and destructive results. This time, violence was contained to the groups of people who chose to engage in violence toward each other.  The community at large was not harmed and the broader public was protected. Property damage was minimal.’’

But these claims of success are contradicted by the actual events of the weekend.  Residents of the Parkrose neighborhood told reporters from Willamette Week and OPB of feeling traumatized by the violence and unsafe on their own streets.  Even absent outright violence against them, police decisions that turned over parts of one of Portland’s most diverse neighborhoods to groups who avow hatred for minorities, with the result being that Portlanders feared for their safety on the streets and in their workplaces, is incomprehensible and contemptible.  It is startling that the mayor thinks that the terrorization of a Portland neighborhood counts as a success if actual casualties were confined to the brawlers.

It is also incredibly difficult to believe that Portland police wouldn’t have responded if the Proud Boys and their compatriots had invaded a wealthier, and whiter, neighborhood.  As Zakir Khan, a Portland civil rights advocate, told the Willamette Week, “We learned lessons on Sunday that showed that East Portland and West Portland are treated like entirely different places, that one huge swath of the city will be disregarded and unprotected.  When you say you are not going to put a police presence in between groups that are going to fight each other—and especially between a Proud Boys group that has shown a propensity for hurting innocent bystanders before—you are saying that you are willing to accept collateral damage as a city.”  Indeed, this is a theme that Willamette Week’s coverage captures very well — decision-making by the city that ended up allowing racist groups to rally and brawl in a diverse neighborhood.  

The shooting incident in downtown Portland, though, gives the lie to the idea that the hands-off approach by police was wise or justified.  Even if the man who fired his weapon was not connected to the day’s clashing groups, as the police state, Mayor Wheeler’s suggestion that violence can be easily confined to battling gangs still flies out the window when we consider that terrible piece of technology, the firearm, which is well know for shooting high-speed projectiles at long distances and hitting innocent bystanders.  It is completely within the realm of possibility that a non-participant might have been wounded or killed by the downtown shooting.  But it’s also unsettling to think that the mayor thinks that anyone who shows up to fight deserves what they get, even if what they get is a bullet in the head.

Police officials expressed concern that a police presence might inflame the protestors, but the protestors seemed self-inflaming even in their absence.  Police also suggested that they might become targets of the factions if they were to intervene, but this seems an inevitable part of the job of stopping violent individuals.  They also pointed to a depleted number of officers as one reason why police adopted their hands-off strategy, but it is hard to believe that an organization that still has more than 800 sworn officers could not handle the much smaller groups of brawlers involved in Sunday’s fights.

But this last police concern goes to a larger point raised by Amy Herzfeld-Copple, deputy director of programs and strategic initiatives at the Western States Center. Herzfeld-Copple told The Oregonian that, “It’s time for city and county officials and communities outside Portland to take responsibility for countering such violence.  Portland isn’t an island. It requires support from all levels of government.”  If Portland police really lack sufficient manpower to combat political violence, then other jurisdictions, including state support, should be requested.  And beyond this, political leaders in Oregon and beyond need to be asking hard questions about how to counter right-wing violence that denies Americans their basic liberties of safety, the right to work, and free movement.  The city and police are also making a grotesque error in continuing to conflate the threat from right-wing and left-wing protestors.  Only one side is dedicated to violent opposition to modern America and encompasses groups that participated in an actual armed insurrection against the U.S. government on January 6, which also included mass mob violence against law enforcement personnel.  Herzfeld-Copple notes that, “When there isn’t rule of law, when law enforcement doesn’t intervene to protect public safety, it only reinforces the lawlessness and fear that anti-democratic groups thrive on.”

City and police decisions to turn any section of Portland into a free-fire zone for brawling political factions are not compatible with public safety or a free and democratic society where we are all able to move about our neighborhoods and city, without Proud Boys or antifa types catching us in their crossfires, and causing us to fear for our physical well-being.  When the police and mayor decided to contain right-wing violence rather than disrupt it, they failed in their duty to the city.  The mayor’s statements that the Portland police achieved a great victory last weekend is the very definition of gaslighting, and ignores the lived reality of thousands of Portlanders that day.

What They Say in the Shadows

While major media’s excessive and uncritical coverage of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential run was a catastrophe that very likely enabled his election — I am thinking in particular of CNN’s decision to run his campaign rallies unfiltered, providing millions of dollars in free advertising and priceless legitimization — the media may now be repeating the mistake in the opposite direction.  Just as some of the decision-making around Trump in 2016 was likely rooted in the belief that since he was unelectable, there could be no harm in excessively covering him in order to boost ratings and readership, a sort of parallel editorial judgment seems to exist today, in which ignoring or dismissing Trump’s post-presidential machinations is tacitly seen as the proper way to handle him.

But given that Trump was the first president in our history who attempted to remain in power by means of a coup, and has not yet been fully held to account for his actions, a tendency to write the former president out of the news also obscures the ongoing need for a national reckoning with his actions.  Trump has continued to publicly insist that the 2020 election was stolen from him, using the same falsehoods that supported his coup attempt to undermine the legitimacy of Joe Biden.  Propagation of this big lie is at the center of his ongoing attempt to rally an authoritarian, if not outright fascistic, movement that cannot be reconciled with American democracy, and in fact is democracy’s enemy.  And as if all of this were not sufficient reason to subject the former president to ongoing, critical coverage, Trump is clearly still the leader of the Republican Party, with high-ranking officials such as House minority leader Kevin McCarthy continuing to almost literally kiss his ring.

My 30,000-foot take is that we need more coverage of the former president’s ongoing activities - but coverage that contextualizes the words he speaks and the ideas he propagates within the reality that he’s at the center of an anti-democratic movement: a movement that encompasses both his personal cult of personality and the efforts of GOP elected officials to undermine voting rights and the electoral process for 2022 and beyond.  Because this movement is antithetical to the basics of American democracy, there’s no question in my mind that the press has a responsibility to communicate its unvarnished reality, and its dangers, to the American people.

I’m thinking about this today in particular because of an excellent Twitter thread by Laura Jedeed, in which she both describes and comments on the former president’s rally in Alabama this weekend.  While not an exact model for how other media might cover Trump — I don’t know if the average non-political junkie American needs THIS much detail! — her method is spot on.  No Trump line is communicated without providing context for its significance to Trump’s authoritarian project.  For example, she notes that Trump was introduced not only by a speech by Alabama Representative Mo Brooks that painted Democrats as enemies of the state, but also by playing a speech from the movie Patton that includes the lines, “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.  All real Americans love the sting of battle!” (among Trump’s many offenses, we must now include making George C. Scott roll over in his grave).  Jedeed homes in on Trump’s efforts to portray the American departure from Afghanistan as a humiliating, shaming event for the country — a sensation that Trump has repeatedly invoked as part of his fascistic appeal to redeem a nation that has supposedly been crushed and betrayed by external and internal enemies.  If Trump plans to start using the Afghanistan withdrawal — which he authored — as part of his insistence on the failures of American democracy, then this strikes me as pretty newsworthy.

From what I’ve seen so far, coverage of the Trump speech by most outlets has centered on one small part of it, when told his listeners, “I believe totally in your freedoms, I do, you gotta do what you gotta do, but I recommend take the vaccines. I did it. It's good” and was booed in response.  But as Jedeed remarks, “If Trump doesn't come out against vaccines in the next couple days, he has more of a moral compass than I ever could have imagined.”  I am not holding my breath that he will ever repeat that unsuccessful line — as Jedeed neatly speculates, “That frosty silence wounded him to his core--a nightmare scenario for the man.”  Such coverage only bolsters my point — by emphasizing the one normal thing that Trump said (and that he likely will not say again), it normalizes him while underemphasizing the radical bulk of his speech.  A casual observer might conclude that the president is going around promoting vaccines, while the reality is that the president is going around promoting authoritarianism.  Is this really how a free press should defend democracy? 

Executive Indecision in Oregon

On a grand scale, the United States is acting out the cliche twist ending of horror movies, where the monster everyone thought well-killed comes back and embarks on a final round of slaughter against protagonists who prematurely stood down.  The coronavirus delta variant is pushing the United States toward record levels of infection and hospitalization, as a combination of letting down our collective guard and the reluctance of millions to do their civic duty by getting vaccinated have formed a perfect environment for the delta variant to spread.

Here in Oregon, the same overall vulnerabilities have led to a huge upsurge in covid cases, with the added ironic factor that because of Oregon’s previous relative success in stemming infections, there’s less natural immunity against the virus among those who haven’t been vaccinated.  The state hit a record daily high of 2,971 cases yesterday, and has averaged a pandemic high of 2,020 cases a day over the last week.  With 226 people in Oregon ICU beds, the state is now using 93% of its intensive care capacity.  Even more disturbingly, health officials predict that by early September, the number of people hospitalized for covid is expected to result in a 500-bed shortage in Oregon hospitals.  

But beyond the broader national factors that have made our state vulnerable, questionable policy decisions by local health authorities and Governor Kate Brown appear to have made the state’s population a sitting duck for this latest wave of death and disease.  As state health authorities warned of the dangers posed by the delta variant, county leaders across Oregon simply refused to support or implement the most basic, common-sense measures — such as requiring masking in public places —that could help slow the infection rate.  This cut the legs out from county health authorities, many of whom appeared wary of acting without political backing.  Instead, county officials averred their faith in the ability of Oregonians to make their own decisions to protect their health, even as evidence mounted that too many of those citizens were doing no such thing.  The refusal to implement countermeasures also inevitably signaled to Oregonians that there was no real threat to the public health, when in fact the threat was increasing and severe.  This lack of leadership and the decision to ignore basic science is now killing and sickening Oregonians.  

Fairly or unfairly, the mass incompetence of county level leaders placed the burden of action on Governor Kate Brown.  Until far too late, though, Brown declined to accept this burden.  As The Oregonian outlines, until this week, when she announced a statewide indoor mask mandate that goes into effect today, Brown continued to insist that local officials take the lead on coronavirus health measures — despite the fact that these same officials repeatedly indicated they would not, and never actually did.  (Yesterday, Brown also issued a mandate that teachers and health care workers in the state receive vaccinations by mid-October, following a mandate a week ago for executive branch workers to be vaccinated within the same time frame). Indeed, in a state where many local politicians tried to burnish their conservative bona fides by denouncing Brown’s health measures earlier in the pandemic, such resistance and health policy illiteracy was completely predictable.

Combined with warnings not just from Oregon state health officials, but from national officials as well, the reasons for Brown’s dilatory and insufficient action are hard to understand.  The most credible explanation is that she feared that faster, strong state-level action would result in a backlash, which is a point that Oregon Health Authority Director Patrick Allen has made:

Allen defended the lack of earlier intervention, saying a portion of the public has become unreceptive to warnings and wouldn’t have followed preventative measures a month ago, even if the governor ordered them.

“Even today, with what we know today with where our hospitalizations are, with the amount of disease in the state, the actions that the governor is taking are being characterized by some as ‘oppressive,’” Allen said. " ... A month ago, with the reality on the ground being what it was, we would have had a huge problem with trying to get some people to follow those” mandates.

If Brown in fact followed advice based on the idea that the only time you’re going to get public buy-in is when a surge is well under way, this would fly in the face of everything we’ve learned to date about how to get the coronavirus under control — by acting before it has had a chance to spread exponentially.  But equally bad is the possibility that Brown hesitated to act because of fear of non-compliance or backlash — in the face of county officials doing nothing, any action by the governor would be better than no action.  In fact, various county health officials have indicated how important it is for the state to act, in order to give them political cover at the local level to push protective measures.  

It’s also notable that the state GOP continues to push divisive, nonsensical, and anti-science responses to the pandemic.  The Oregonian reports that, “The Oregon House Republican caucus described both of the new requirements set by Brown, a Democrat, as ‘oppressive.’  Senate Republican Leader Fred Girod, of Lyons, criticized the governor Wednesday for what he characterized as a lack of clear standards.”  In a statement, Girod said that, “[T]hese mandates seem to be driven by left-wing activists who want a permanent pandemic to push forward unpopular policies.”  Girod’s remarks made me laugh out loud, but are also a reminder that anything Brown does will be met by the Republican opposition with vitriol and inflammatory lies intended to divide Oregonians.  In the face of this, Brown has a particular responsibility to stand up for science and common sense, even if it inevitably provokes a discredited opposition.

The comments of health experts regarding the state’s ability to flatten the curve in the coming weeks, even with the mask mandate, are not encouraging.  Let’s hope that Governor Brown is giving serious consideration to further measures, such as limiting the number of indoor occupants at retail businesses, and implementing vaccine requirements for leisure activities such as movie theaters and sports events.  This is not a local pandemic, but a statewide one, and requires a statewide response.  As overburdened hospitals in southern Oregon send patients to the Portland metro area, we’re reminded, as if we needed reminding, that we’re all in this together — like people keep saying, the coronavirus doesn’t care about borders, county or otherwise.  The governor is obligated to protect the state against the incompetence of local officials who have refused to do their jobs, and citizens blinded by ideology or disinformation from getting vaccinations that could stop covid in its tracks.

Delta Force

As we enter yet another wave of covid resurgence, this time fueled by the “I’m as transmissible as chicken pox” delta variant, and hear warnings that an even worse variant could emerge, the ability of health officials and political leaders to persuade Americans to get vaccinated and take mitigating action like wearing masks remains as urgent as ever.  Yet the dominant single fact of the U.S. response to this pandemic is that this public health effort has long been politicized and undermined by the Republican Party, ever since Donald Trump made denial of the severity of covid and the pandemic central to his re-election effort, as a way to excuse his incompetence in stopping its spread and to resist the economic restrictions that he saw as harmful to his re-election.  In a Republican Party that had come to view Trump less as a president and more as a figure of cult-like worship, Trump’s interests (and the interests of businesses who prioritized profit over saving citizens’ lives) became the interests of the GOP.  And so the GOP quickly became the Grand Old Party of covid denialism, the attitudes of Republican elites being reflected among the rank and file, and continuing in many ways to this day; according to a recent poll cited in a Vox article, “95 percent of Democrats are already vaccinated or want to get vaccinated, while just 50 percent of Republicans report the same.”

This has presented public health officials and Democratic politicians with a basic conundrum — how to take on anti-covid attitudes without triggering political resistance based on people’s identities as Republicans?  Among other things, this has resulted in a clear reluctance to critique Republican opposition to common-sense measures like vaccines and masking.  There has certainly been value in making good-faith efforts not to alienate Republican rank-and-file through such a strategy.

However, we’re at a point where Democrats need to seriously re-consider whether holding their fire against Republican politicians and right-wing commentators is doing more harm than good, both in terms of the immediate need to mitigate the delta surge, and from the longer-term perspective of holding the GOP accountable for propounding health policies that teeter somewhere between manslaughter and mass murder.   In Texas and Florida, governors like Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis are apparently competing to determine which of them is the most incompetent GOP governor in the union, with Abbott forbidding localities from requiring mask mandates and DeSantis fighting to make sure unvaccinated kids don’t have to wear masks at school, even as covid cases in their respective states are soaring. Paul Waldman draws the line from their sabotage straight back to our former president, writing that the two governors “are using their power to prevent local officials from implementing basic public health measures in a highly selective way that is plainly molded around the obsessions of former president Donald Trump and his movement, not anchored in any genuine public interest rationale.” It also appears that Governor Abbott is concerned about appearing weak to right-wing voters in an upcoming primary fight should he reinstate anti-covid measures, leading to the very real possibility that he’s chosen to put his political future over the present lives of his constituents.

The current reality of the pandemic puts the facts squarely on the side of taking on Republican resistance more directly.  We are now a year and a half into this catastrophe, with plentiful evidence of what works and what doesn’t.  Beyond any reasonable doubt, vaccine reluctance and opposition to mitigation measures have demonstrably made the horrific scale of the delta wave possible — blowing up a tacit Republic strategy that the pandemic could be defeated by a lackadaisical approach that downplayed and undercut the most basic tools of public health.  However difficult and fraught the path may be, the Democrats must recognize that the Republican Party is effectively undermining the U.S. pandemic response, and needs to figure out a way to make GOP party leaders back down to prevent even more preventable loss of life.

Beyond this, the Democrats need to recognize that many Republican leaders have decided to continue politicizing covid, including promotion of anti-scientific attitudes, as a key strategy for winning the 2022 and 2024 elections.  The GOP will be all too eager to blame Democrats for any backsliding in the coronavirus fight, and Democrats need to counter this effort to rewrite the GOP's sordid history of undermining the national effort. As Greg Sargent writes, “The bottom line is that these Republicans are actively trying to polarize the country around covid, for nakedly instrumental purposes. That’s because in midterm elections, the angrier the out-of-the-White House party’s voters are, the more likely it is that their torqued-up turnout will swamp the more complacent in-party’s voters.”

So if the prevailing attitude up to now has been that Democrats needed to figure out how to de-politicize public health questions, clear evidence that Republican intransigence is prolonging the country’s suffering points to the opposite solution: that the Democrats engage more fully in the political aspects of the covid response.

First and foremost, this would involve critiquing Republican elected officials for demonstrably incompetent policies that are killing those officials’ constituents.  Sargent goes on to note that the Biden administration may be starting to grasp the need for such a course change; just last week, the president criticized the polices in Texas and Florida (though, as Sargent notes, without directly naming the states’ governors). Sargent writes:

[The] thinking inside the White House is plainly that this is a tough balance to get right. Escalating political brawls around these arguments could conceivably make it harder to get more Republicans vaccinated.

And yet, it’s fair game politically to call out all this bad acting. Democrats should stand squarely on the right side of what will inevitably be a cultural battle: If Republicans are actively working to polarize the electorate, Democrats have a responsibility to level with their own voters about the public threat posed by cynically motivated GOP anti-vax and anti-mask derangement.

Sargent’s last point dovetails with the case I tried to make last week: that Democrats have a tremendous interest in rallying their voters in a way that counters the ongoing GOP radicalization of its base.  On the covid front, Democrats should not allow overblown fears of further politicizing the pandemic response from reminding their voters that, just as Democrats are what stands between them and future insurrections, Democrats are also what stands between them and the pandemic spiraling out of control should the GOP return to power.  It would also be smart politics to remind voters that we would not be in nearly as bad a place with the pandemic were it not for President Trump’s failed leadership and promulgation of anti-masking attitudes that still haunt the country’s response.  This is a case where good politics is also good public health policy: the more Democrats can be encouraged to hammer their elected officials, and raise GOP concerns about a wipeout in 2022 and beyond due to Democrats mobilized by covid fears, the greater the possibility that the GOP will respond to such pressures.

But the arguments Sargent makes can be pushed even further.  Democrats have an interest not only in communicating to their own voters about the threat of bad GOP health policy, but to communicate this to the GOP’s rank-and-file as much as possible, with the goal of inducing those voters to put pressure on their Republican officials to reverse noxious policies, and to persuade some of them to switch to supporting Democrats in future elections (the possibility of which would also help impel GOP politicians to change their attitudes in the here and now).  

Suggestively, efforts by the likes of DeSantis and Abbott to double-down on deadly policies are happening at the same time that other elements of the GOP seem to be backing off their previous efforts to undermine vaccination efforts.  Talking Points Memo and others have noted what seems almost to be a coordinated initiative by politicians like House minority whip Representative Steve Scalise and talking head Sean Hannity to turn on a dime and talk about the benefits of vaccination.  The likeliest explanation for this turn is what has always been the greatest threat to Republican disinformation and obstructionism: reality.  As Josh Marshall describes at Talking Points Memo, “we can see a sudden collision between vaccine resistance advocacy, which has more and more become an emblem of Republican partisan affiliation, and the explosion of cases hitting hardest in regions with the lowest rates of vaccination.”  Whether through a sudden outbreak of having a conscience, or — far likelier — out of fear for their political futures as their constituents fear for their lives, some Republican officials and media figures are starting to see a downside to downplaying basic steps to ending the pandemic.  If the GOP is beginning to see political weakness in their covid attitudes, then this seems like a good time for the Democrats to exploit such weakness, both in the name of public health and political self-interest.  Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress will rightly be judged by voters for their handling of the coronavirus pandemic.  If Democrats fail to devise a strategy to confront the GOP’s politically-motivated efforts to undermine the country’s response, then the party and the public health will both pay the price.

Governor Brown's Hands-off Approach to Fighting Oregon Covid Surge Is Indefensible

Given the near-total county-level refusal across Oregon to enact new measures to combat the spread of the delta variant of the coronavirus, Governor Kate Brown’s decision in June to push responsibility for coronavirus prevention measures to the counties, and not promulgate new statewide mandates, looks more and more like a grave mistake.  I don’t know what specific mix of reasons are behind her inaction, but it’s hard not to think that the governor has been intimidated by a right-wing and business community backlash against covid restrictions that were in place until fairly recently.  As articles like this one from Oregon Public Broadcasting describe, ICU hospital beds in the state are filled nearly to the previous highest point of the pandemic, while in southern Oregon, infection rates are surpassing the winter’s highs. As a nurse interviewed in the piece says, all this illness was preventable.

While it makes sense to consider whether new rules might be counterproductive should they provoke a backlash, this logically doesn’t seem possible when counties aren’t promulgating any new rules in the first place.  Things simply can’t get worse than they already are.  And at any rate, we are deep into this pandemic, and know what works from a public health perspective.  Masking works.  Social distancing works.  And above all, vaccination of as many people as possible works.  Arguments from slow-moving county officials that ordinary Oregonians know what to do at this point, and that therefore new regulations are unnecessary, is simply wrong — not when so much disinformation continues to circulate, and when the Republican Party has tacitly made mask resistance and vaccine reluctance core to the party’s identity.  In refusing to countenance common-sense measures like mask mandates in public places, these public officials  are helping to amplify the deadly lies, and are often embracing partisan identity over patriotic, humanitarian values.  They are failing to do their duty.  Amid so much propaganda and disinformation, strong public guidance and rules to combat the coronavirus are absolutely necessary.

It is clear at this point that the bulk of vaccine resistance, as well as resistance to common-sense measures like masking, is driven by a combination of disinformation and right-wing identity politics.  Neither are valid bases for making public health decisions, and in fact are problems that should be targeted for refutation by public-minded politicians. 

The governor’s responsibility in the midst of a pandemic that has already taken the lives of thousands of Oregonians, and which now threatens to kill many more, is to minimize further loss of life.  As this Oregonian article notes, Governor Brown can effectively take the heat for unpopular decisions, drawing fire from county-level executives who are afraid to enrage misinformed constituents.  The fact that she’s not running for re-election means that she has little to lose at this point (and if she’s holding back for fear of a negative impact on her future political career — perhaps a run as a senator or representative at some point — then shame on her).

If the governor refuses to act, then Multnomah County commissioners and health officials need to institute stricter measures to protect the state’s most populous county, including a requirement for proof of vaccination or a recent negative covid test for dining in at restaurants, going to movie theaters, and other leisure activities.  Mask mandates should be reinstated for businesses, and business owners should be encouraged to require employees to be vaccinated.  It is an abomination that a year and half into this pandemic, when we have miraculous vaccines that could stop this pandemic dead in its tracks, we are looking at possibly the worst surge yet.  Our elected leaders and public health officials need to step up to the severity of this moment.

Two final points.  First, it’s been all too easy to lose track of a simple but crucial point — in a very real way, those who have been misinformed about the nature of the coronavirus and the vaccines are victims of immoral propaganda efforts by unscrupulous individuals and actors.  We should be eager to see the state and local governments act to protect our fellow Oregonians who have been misinformed.  Second, those of us who believe in science and common sense need to keep foregrounding the basic fact that people should wear masks and get vaccinated not simply to protect themselves, but to make sure they don’t pass it on to others.  This is a huge blind spot in the mentality of many who refuse to take the coronavirus seriously, and I believe remains the Achilles heel of such resistance.  It is a failure of common decency and of basic social solidarity, and while it may be counterproductive to aim such a harsh critique at ordinary individuals, it can effectively be leveled at elected officials who refuse to take stronger actions to shut down the pandemic.  This is not just a question of individual freedom to defy health guidelines; it is also a question of whether such individuals should have the right to threaten the health, and yes, the basic freedom to health, of everyone else — whether it’s vaccinated people who are at risk of breakthrough infections, those more vulnerable to the coronavirus due to age or infirmity, or those unable to receive the vaccine due to underlying medical conditions, not to mention younger children for whom the vaccine has not yet been approved.  It may be counterproductive to try to shame ordinary Oregonians into more responsible behavior, but it’s absolutely fine to shame those in positions of public power who continue to enable mass death and economic destruction. These officials betray their voters, their state, and their country.

Collision Course

The current House inquiry into the January 6 insurrection will ideally be a turning point for the Democratic Party’s stance towards the GOP, an opportunity to move from an elaborate and self-defeating attitude that declares the Republican Party an equal partner in American democracy, into a no-holds-barred indictment of the contemporary GOP as an authoritarian, white supremacist party that poses a clear threat to American democracy.  It was one thing for Democrats to believe, immediately after Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election and the Democrats’ capture of the Senate, that these losses would catalyze reform and reflection amid their GOP opposition, and that the GOP would come to its senses and slough off the hate and authoritarian tendencies that culminated in the horrors of the Trump presidency.

But the calculation is entirely different now that we are nine months past the November 2020 elections, and seven months past the January 6 insurrection, when the Republican Party has clearly made its choice.  The great majority of its congressional and Senate members continue to pledge fealty to the former president, to the point that it is now a litmus test for such officials to declare the January 6 insurrection no big deal, and to assert that the 2020 election was stolen from the former president — the second falsehood legitimizing the first as a righteous and necessary act.  Indeed, the GOP is at a point where, along with its right-wing media allies, it has sought to re-write the insurrection as the fault of Nancy Pelosi, and declare the arrested insurrectionists to be maltreated political prisoners.

As I’ve written before, this continued denial of the violent intent of the January insurrectionists constitutes a tacit acceptance of their violence, a cover-story not only for those who defiled the halls of Congress with their Confederate flags and Trump banners, but for a president who ultimately turned to violence as a last-ditch effort to remain in office.  And the GOP’s broad assertion that Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election is itself an attack on our democracy no less than the January 6 attack on the Capitol — particularly as it has provided the justification for an ever deeper assault on our government, via the armada of voter suppression efforts undertaken by GOP legislatures across the country that seek to deny Democratic-leaning voters their right to vote and have their votes count.

But the assault on democratic governance goes even deeper than the self-interested promulgation of lies, concrete anti-democratic legislation, and promotion of political violence.  In pursuing this scorched earth authoritarian strategy, the GOP is, crucially, radicalizing the GOP base into further opposition to democracy and openness to employ violence to achieve political ends, and to view neighbors who happen to be Democrats not as fellow citizens, but as illegitimate pretenders to American-ness.  Through lies and incitement, the GOP is building a mass movement built on violence and anti-democratic legislation, in the service of white supremacism and the interests of their wealthy donors.

Recognizing ongoing Republican efforts to whip up millions of Americans into a frenzy against their fellow citizens and to reject the basics of American democracy (i.e., one person, one vote and majority rule) provides a stark contrast with the Democratic strategy for maintaining power in the 2022 midterms and beyond.  The Biden administration seems to have bet its political future, and that of the Democrats in the near-term, in defeating the covid-19 pandemic and ensuring both economic growth and measures to bring more fairness and equality to the American economy.  In terms of turning out and persuading voters, the theory appears to be that Americans will be incentivized to reward the party that saved them from covid and resuscitated the economy.  The contrast with the GOP’s strategy is perhaps most starkly illustrated in how the Democrats have not prioritized protection of voting rights to the same degree that the GOP has prioritized destroying voting rights. While it is true that the fate of democracy-protecting legislation like the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act are in question largely through the opposition of a handful of Democratic senators (and primarily Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema), it is also true that the Biden administration has, at least so far, chosen to prioritize economic legislation over pro-democracy laws.

I hold to a hope that once the infrastructure battles are resolved, the Biden administration will make a full court press on legislation that protects the right to vote.  In the absence of such prioritization, and instead with a current emphasis on achieving a bipartisan infrastructure bill, the Democratic leadership is doing nothing equivalent to the ongoing GOP effort to energize its base: namely, making an effort to energize the Democratic base in defense of democracy.

This basic political imbalance, more than any other, persuades me that the Democrats are pursuing a dangerous and potentially self-defeating strategy in failing to match the intensity of the GOP’s authoritarian movement with a countervailing pro-democracy movement.  Every day, the GOP is essentially asserting that the Democratic Party stole the 2020 election, instantiating this lie by anti-democratic legislation aimed at crippling Democratic electoral efforts in key battleground states.  Meanwhile, the Democrats seem to be betting that the popularity they gain by fostering economic recovery and ending the pandemic will effectively overcome GOP voter suppression.

What feels increasingly frustrating, if not outright crazy, is that the same GOP authoritarian efforts that are threatening free and fair elections, and are inciting the GOP base to turn out in 2022, are enormous vulnerabilities for the Republican Party — if the Democrats are willing to exploit them.  But part of the craziness of the situation is that the Democrats don’t just have an electoral incentive to do what they can to beat their opponents — they have a moral duty to our democracy to highlight the GOP’s anti-democratic animus. And key to taking advantage of this GOP weakness is actually talking about the authoritarian menace that the GOP poses.

Democratic unwillingness to engage more directly with the GOP’s extremist assault is deeply tied up with the party’s uncertainty about how to handle Donald Trump’s continued elephantine presence in the Republican Party.  Because the Democrats don’t want to give the former president attention that they fear would inflate his post-presidential status, they seem to have consequently limited their ability to talk about the Trump-centered authoritarian movement that the GOP has now become.  Unwilling to say the former president’s name, they’re also unable to name the authoritarian movement that he has done so much to advance.

While I would love to “move past” Donald Trump as much as the next guy, sticking unquestioningly to this wish becomes delusional when we consider that Trump remains at the center of GOP politics, and indeed seems set on running for president again in 2024.  In a way that’s oddly complementary to the GOP’s own continued Trump-worship, the Democrats appear to ascribe power to the former president far beyond what he actually possesses.  They seem to fear that talking about Trump will make him more powerful, when the reality is that this silence is allowing him and his allies to build out their authoritarian movement away from fuller public scrutiny and attacks from the Democratic Party.

But what if the opposite is actually far more the case — that Donald Trump remains what he always has been, a highly-flawed tribune for a nascent American fascism, a man who so effectively assumed leadership of this authoritarian, white supremacist movement because of his own morally flawed, narcissistic, and depraved character?  What if, it turns out, the former president graphically illustrates the dangers, immorality, and nihilism of a movement that continues to gain force within the Republican Party even now, in a way that is easily grasped by million of Americans who believe in democracy and hate white supremacism?

Thinking about the unique vulnerabilities of Donald Trump helps clarify, in turn, the massive vulnerabilities of a Republican Party that has embraced not only him, but that now openly avows a collection of retrograde beliefs that had found a home in the GOP even before his presidency.  Even as the Republican Party has taken direct aim both at American democracy and the Democratic Party, the Democrats have so far declined not to respond in kind.  But not only does this betray the Democrats’ obligation to defend American democracy, it also badly misreads the extremely vulnerable position that the GOP has placed itself in.  In the first place, the GOP has tied itself to a president who not only lost the last election, but, more importantly, is uniquely galvanizing for millions of Democratic voters.  (To my relief, I see I’m not alone wondering about the enormous slack that Democrats and the press are cutting the GOP around its Trumpophilia; John Stoehr has been digging into this issue recently, writing that, “The question of whether the Republicans are taking an enormous risk sticking with a losing president has not gotten nearly the attention it deserves,” and discussing how Trump’s insurrection blows apart GOP “law and order” claims that they hope will propel them to victory in 2022 and beyond.)

In terms of energizing their respective bases, the GOP is currently enjoying all of the benefits of Trump (jazzing the base) while suffering none of the downside (provoking a backlash among a Democratic base that despises the former president).  But I would humbly submit that at a pragmatic, common-sense level, the Democrats have every interest in reminding their base that their own political success is all that stands between ordinary Americans and the return to office of the worst president of our lifetimes.

But this strategy shouldn’t depend only on greater comfort with reminding Americans of the horrors of the Trump presidency, and of his continued sway over the GOP.  Democrats should also get much more comfortable with reminding voters that they are also the party that stands between ordinary Americans and further right-wing attacks against our government; the party that stands between ordinary Americans and future insurrections.  This has both the virtue of being true, and of energizing Democratic voters around the actual stakes of the 2022 and 2024 elections.  As much as Biden’s team might want to make those elections about our economic recovery, they are in reality as much about whether we continue to be a democratic nation — and waging those elections on such explicit terms should be seen as a net advantage to Democrats.  For Democrats to run the risk of not making the stakes of future elections clear, particularly when doing so will only help them, is the very definition of political folly.

This is why I keep coming back to the importance of foregrounding both the January 6 insurrection and Trump’s continued leadership of the GOP — not only are they essential facts for making the case against allowing the GOP to hold power at any level of government, from city dogcatcher to president, but they are easy to understand — emotionally provocative data points that serve to open broader discussions of GOP authoritarianism, including its assault on elections and its encouragement of political violence.  For instance, the Democrats would be remiss not to continue valorizing and promoting the Capitol police who defended Congress against a hateful mob of neo-Confederates, white supremacists, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other enemies of the United States.  In one fell swoop, these police officers have provided powerful testimony that GOP lies about the January 6 insurrection are the blatherings of a party that supports authoritarian violence, and as John Stoer argues, has no claim to support either law or order.  Rather than fear politicizing the events of January 6, the Democrats should fashion the truth of that day into a weapon to discredit and dismantle the GOP in the eyes of all but its most rabid supporters.  Whatever inclinations they have towards conflict avoidance and a false bipartisanship need to be put aside in the name of exploiting these points of extreme vulnerability for the GOP.

In important ways, the GOP continues to inflict potentially disastrous harm on itself on a daily basis — if Democrats are willing to take up the appropriate political and rhetorical cudgels.  Every day that the GOP continues to deny the right-wing violence of January 6, it is providing cover for that violence, and eroding whatever claims it might still make to be a legitimate American party.  Every day, in other words, its vulnerability grows, as do the stakes around whether the Democrats choose to highlight the GOP’s embrace of the January 6 insurrection.  For if the Democrats allow the GOP to re-fashion the events of January 6 into a story of how the former president’s defenders tried to stop the Democrats from stealing the election, without countering it with the truth of the president’s coup attempt (which in fact started long before January 6) that energizes a majority of Americans into a continued defense of democracy in 2022 and 2024, then they will have made themselves complicit in their own defeat.

But as important as fighting to promulgate the truth of January 6 is, the Democrats need to connect the armed assault on the Capitol with the GOP’s broader efforts to accomplish insurrection by other means — most importantly, by subverting future elections through a combination of voter suppression, gerrymandering, and administrative changes whose goal is to dilute and deny Democratic votes.  This is an aspect of the Democrats’ decision to punt on voting rights legislation that I find particular infuriating; the party would be so much better positioned to make the vital connection between January 6 and the need to stop the GOP anti-voting onslaught if the January 6 hearings were being held alongside hearings on why voting rights legislation is needed.  Democrats are doing the GOP undeserved favors by separating out these two issues.  The linkage can be illustrated in a variety of ways, but Democrats might summarize it as follows: If the GOP denies you the vote, then next time, without Democrats in power, the insurrectionists will win.  If the GOP insists on tying itself to the unforgivable actions of a treasonous former president and his armed minions, then let’s make them pay as dearly as we can, by using it to help defeat this whole sordid authoritarian movement.

It may be that Democratic leadership will shy away from making this case, or fears riling up its base in ways that might feel analogous to the tactics of the GOP.  But if elected Democrats won’t do so, rank and file Democrats must to this for themselves.  There is no equivalence between a GOP that motivates its base with lies and anti-democratic animus, while seeking to deny the country free and fair elections, and a pro-democracy movement that is activated and enraged in defense of democracy, and that seeks to ensure that everyone can vote, and have their votes counted.  One thing is the illness; the other is just what the doctor ordered.

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.