Month: March 2021

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How Conservatism Became Radical…

Posted on by mjohnson

Note: This column is based, in part, on research conducted for my new book.

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In the late 1970’s a trio of young and very conservative political activists created a new organization that aimed to takeover and then remake the Republican Party. The state of our current politics is proof that they succeeded. 

John T. “Terry” Dolan is mostly forgotten now, but he was a true architect of the modern GOP. Dolan had been a paid organizer for Richard Nixon’s 1972 presidential campaign and became the executive director of what he and his colleagues – Charles Black and Roger Stone (yes that guy) – called the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC).

President Reagan shakes hands with Richard Viguerie at a White House meeting with conservative leaders of the New Right in 1981. Terry Dolan is next to Reagan…certainly not to his left

NCPAC helped upend American politics, arguably as much as Ronald Reagan’s landslide presidential election victory did in 1980. The group used the dark political arts of direct mail fundraising, negative attack ads and third-party “independent expenditure” campaigns to take over conservative political messaging and then take over conservatism. The shrill attack ads, the politics of anger and grievance, the deep partisanship of our time didn’t just happen. There is an origin story, and the 1980 election is as good a place as any to see how the next 40 years of American politics unfolded. 

Ideology – think of it as what voters believe versus what is real – has increasingly shaped both parties, but it entirely overtook only one of them. We live largely in the world young, brash, ambitious Terry Dolan envisioned when he said he wanted to create a conservative ideological movement. 

Dolan was a fascinating character – charismatic, charming, cunning and frequently cruel. The photo above captures some aspects of his personality, I think. He could turn a pithy phrase, as when he said of NCPAC’s attacks on its Idaho target in 1980. “We’re out to destroy the popularity ratings of several liberal senators,” Dolan said, “and it’s working. Frank Church [a 24-year Senate incumbent and Idaho’s senior senator] is screaming like a stuck pig, and I don’t blame him.” 

It’s difficult to remember these days that the Republican Party once was home to moderates, even liberals, politicians like Oregon’s Mark Hatfield and Tom McCall, Washington’s Dan Evans, Charles Percy of Illinois, Jacob Javits of New York and John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky who once held the seat now occupied by Mitch McConnell. Terry Dolan detested Republican moderates and aimed to purge the party of all of them. It’s taken a while, but Dolan’s vision of 40 years ago has been realized and in the process the Republican Party has become the radical outlier of our politics.  

When a political party’s basic ideology embraces the radical it soon follows that many party supporters are radicalized, too. Both major political parties have clearly moved toward their extremes, but the evolutionary evidence of an extreme conservative transformation is easy to see, and radicalization on the right is vastly more pronounced than anything on the political left. A couple of examples of how this has worked.

Conservative legislators from Boise to Birmingham have broadly rejected the scientific evidence related to coronavirus, shunning mask wearing and rejecting vaccines. These ideological radicals have largely chosen to believe not what their eyes – or science and experts – tell them, but what their ideology espouses. 

The ideology of science denial

It would be simply ironic if it were not so obviously tragic that while the Idaho legislature was debating a measure last week that would prohibit local jurisdictions from imposing a mask mandate, the one step backed by vast scientific consensus that is effective in controlling the spread of a deadly virus, it was forced to shut down for two weeks when several members fell ill to the disease. Yet, because of the pull of ideology the legislature almost certainly will return and pick up right where it left off. 

Most conservative legislators have, of course, refused the simplest, most effective public health action in favor of minimizing the disease, embracing the fiction that it is overblown or that it will, as their clueless leader infamously proclaimed, just go away. Remember when he said the country would be back to normal by Easter – last Easter? 

This attitude is roughly the equivalent of hitting your thumb repeatedly with a hammer and proclaiming there is no correlation between the cold metal and a sore thumb. It is the triumph of belief over reality. 

There are a thousand other examples of this magical radical thinking. The crackpot lawyer who helped spread the big lie about the presidential election being stolen now admits in a court filing that “no reasonable person” could believe her assertions, but millions still do believe. 

Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, a born-again reincarnation of his state’s 1950’s senator Joe McCarthy, is another prime exhibit. Johnson is a conspiracy theorist’s conspiracy theorist, a wide-open conduit for Russian disinformation, a guy whose basically been rewriting or denying the reality of a pro-Trump mob’s attack on the U.S. Congress in January. 

Johnson initially and absurdly claimed that assault was the work of leftwing provocateurs and then more recently allowed that the deadly attack was the work of  “people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law.” Johnson is articulating an ideology belied by hours of television footage of the attack. His opinions, no matter how obviously wrong, trump objective reality. Yet, as conservative columnist Michael Gerson noted, Johnson suffers no pushback from his fellow conservative ideologues because he’s channeling the belief system of most of the Republican Party. 

“One of the United States’ venerable, powerful political parties,” Gerson wrote this week, “has been overtaken by people who make resentment against outsiders the central element of their appeal. Inciting fear is not an excess of their zeal; it is the substance of their cause.” That brings us back to the aforementioned Terry Dolan. 

Dolan and the people who helped him, North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms and direct mail impresario Richard Viguerie among them, realized more than 40 years ago that they could traffic in fear and big lies about their opponents and be successful, because, as Viguerie candidly admitted, fear, breeding resentment and grievance, is the powerful motivator of political behavior. 

Dolan’s enemies were “elites,” clueless liberals, “baby killers” and politicians he defined as dangerous to families and national security. The right’s bogeymen now include new evil forces –  “cancel culture,” socialist indoctrination of young people and nefarious plots such as early childhood education. It’s not a political agenda designed to address any real problem, but it has been the centerfold of the Republican playbook for a long generation. And it truly is the substance of the angry ideology of the modern conservative movement.

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Additional Reading:

If you are up for some additional reading, I have some recommendations…

The Covid Queen of South Dakota

I haven’t lived in South Dakota since I graduated from college – Go Jacks! – but I still follow the news from the prairie, including news about South Dakota governor Kristi Noem. You may remember her – a big Trump fan – welcoming the former president to a big event at Mt. Rushmore last summer and then encouraging tens of thousands of motorcycle aficionados to descend on Sturgis, all during a raging pandemic. 

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem

Stephen Rodrick assesses how it all turned out in Rolling Stone. 

“South Dakota has 880,000 citizens scattered over the country’s 17th largest state, providing built-in social distancing. In theory, it should have a Covid death rate in the bottom 10, near fellow sparse states like Maine and Wyoming. Instead, there are now more than 1,900 dead — one in 470 South Dakotans — and one in eight have tested positive for Covid, the second-highest rate in the country. Noem appeared on Face the Nation in February, and host Margaret Brennan asked how she could square her pro-life stance with her state having the highest Covid death rate since July. ‘Those are questions you should be asking every other governor in this country,’ said Noem. ‘I’m asking you today,’ said Brennan.”

Access the full story here:

The clown king: how Boris Johnson made it by playing the fool

An engaging portrait of the UK prime minister in The Guardian. 

UK prime minister Boris Johnson

“Observe classic Johnson closely as he arrives at an event. See how his entire being and bearing is bent towards satire, subversion, mockery. The hair is his clown’s disguise. Just as the makeup and the red nose bestow upon the circus clown a form of anonymity and thus freedom to overturn conventions, so Johnson’s candy-floss mop announces his licence. His clothes are often baggy – ill-fitting; a reminder of the clothes of the clown. He walks towards us quizzically, as if to mock the affected ‘power walking’ of other leaders. Absurdity seems to be wrestling with solemnity in every expression and limb. Notice how he sometimes feigns to lose his way as if to suggest the ridiculousness of the event, the ridiculousness of his presence there, the ridiculousness of any human being going in any direction at all.”

The link:

Off-road, off-grid: the modern nomads wandering America’s back country

If you’ve seen the Academy Award nominated film – Nomadland – you’ll want to read another piece from The Guardian. 

“’If the Great Recession was a crack in the system, Covid and climate change will be the chasm,’” says Bob Wells, 65, the nomad who plays himself in the film Nomadland, an early Oscar contender starring Frances McDormand. Bob helped April to adopt the nomad way of life and change her life in the process.

“Today, he lives exclusively on public lands in his GMC Savana fitted with 400 watts of solar power and a 12-volt refrigerator. His life mission is to promote nomadic tribalism in a car, van or RV as a way to prevent homelessness and live more sustainably.”

Read the whole thing:

The names change every decade, but iconic NBA stars are always reincarnations of Elgin Baylor

Finally, remembering one of basketball’s all-time greats: Elgin Baylor.

Surely the most underrated truly great player in NBA history

I grew up listening to Laker games on KNX from Los Angeles. And, yes, I wanted to be a radio play-by-play guy like the great Chick Hearn. I loved, among other things, Chick’s pre-game introductions of Baylor: “And…at forward, 6’5″ from Seattle, the captain of the Lakers, Number 22…Elgin BAYLOR…”

A great piece about the great Elgin from perhaps our best current sportswriter, Tom Boswell of the Washington Post.

Thanks for reading…stay safe, and if you haven’t yet get the dang shot…

Biden, U.S. Senate

Rock on the “No” Button…

Posted on by mjohnson

The easiest vote to cast in politics is a NO vote. It absolves responsibility. If something later goes wrong, and in politics things often go a little bit wrong, the no voter is off the hook, and can fall back on the oldest line in politics: “I told you so.” 

Voting no often means a politician doesn’t even need to explain the rationale for the negative. The political focus is typically on those who want to make something happen, who are willing to take a stand in favor of something. 

“If a legislator votes ‘yes,’ he or she is responsible for the entire bill and all the consequences of the legislation, good or bad, intended or unintended,” long-time congressional watcher Stuart Rothenberg wrote recently.

Every congressional Republican justified a no vote on the recent COVID and economic recovery legislation on the grounds that it was too big, too much of a driver of deficit spending or not targeted enough. That’s a convenient if disingenuous argument, as Rothenberg noted because “even the GOP — once, but no longer, the party of fiscal responsibility — didn’t much care about the deficit and the debt when President Donald Trump and his merry little band of tax-cutting ideologues cut taxes during a period of solid economic growth — almost always a bad idea. You won’t hear Republicans accepting some of the blame for the deficit and debt.”

Every Senate Republican opposed the recent COVID and economic recovery legislation

And besides who remembers a no vote? That’s why voting no is almost always the easiest thing to do. 

Senate Republicans have perfected the no vote strategy, particularly with regard to President Joe Biden’s Cabinet appointees. Voting no on a Treasury secretary or the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, even when the nominees are demonstrably capable, not only serves to register disapproval of the new president, but it’s safe. Voting no appeals to the most rabid, partisans in the party. Some Senate Republicans – Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz come to mind – have voted against virtually every Biden nominee. These guys want to be president someday – fearless prediction, they won’t be – so they are performing the ritual of negativity as political necessity. 

Idaho’s Jim Risch, a practiced no voter, has supported a few Biden nominees, but opposed more, nine as of this writing. Risch is the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee but he voted against the confirmation of Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Risch is a top Republican on the Intelligence Committee but was one of ten votes against the confirmation of Avril Haines, the first woman to ever hold the position as director of National Intelligence. 

“She is a really smart person, a person with serious horsepower and a nice person,” said Carol Rollie Flynn, a three-decade CIA veteran, said of Haines. “I don’t think you’re going to see a lot of drama out of her. Just a serious professional.” A Risch spokesman said he was thumbs down on Haines because he wasn’t confident she wouldn’t politicize intelligence. Risch, it should be noted, had no problem with the appointment of former Republican congressman John Ratcliffe, arguably the most partisan person to head the intelligence community in the history of the intelligence community. Risch better hope Blinken and Haines aren’t as vindictive as he is. 

Idaho’s Mike Crapo has supported a few more Biden appointees, and unlike Risch he supported Janet Yellen’s confirmation as Treasury secretary. Yellen is the first woman in that job and was the first women Federal Reserve Board chair, the job she previously held. Both Idaho senators opposed Yellen for that position, so Risch obviously doesn’t like her. Yet I find no record of any public statement justifying Risch’s opposition to the eminently qualified, PhD economist who continues to receive bipartisan praise for her work during the 2008 financial crisis. 

Both of Idaho’s Republican Senators – both lawyers – voted against the man who is now attorney general

Crapo and Risch opposed Judge Merrick Garland to be attorney general. Garland is the guy who was denied consideration as a Supreme Court nominee in 2016 despite his exemplary record as a federal judge and as the prosecutor who handled the investigation into the deadly 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Neither senator offered a comment on why Garland isn’t suitable to run the justice department, but both supported the guys the previous administration put in place, even when the former president demanded blind partisan loyalty from each of his attorneys general.

Risch and Crapo both voted no on nominees to be secretaries of the Interior and Housing and Urban Development and head of the Small Business Administration. It’s probably just a coincidence that all three are women of color who are broadly seen as historic pathbreakers, but also demonstrably qualified. No explanation from the senators.

Notably, both senators supported former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, Biden’s pick to head the Department of Energy (DOE). Granholm is arguably among the most partisan of Biden’s picks – she’s been a TV talking head often critical of GOP positions – and some Republicans criticized her support for abandoning the Keystone XL pipeline. She would have been a natural to oppose, but perhaps this was a rare case of political pragmatism by the Idahoans. After all, they need a working relationship with the secretary who oversees the Idaho National Laboratory, the huge DOE complex in eastern Idaho that requires pledges of unquestioned political fealty from the state’s Republicans. Maybe all politics is local after all. 

An old rule once held that barring some ethical lapse or scandal a president – any president – was entitled to pick the people for his administration. Biden will almost certainly end up getting all but one of his top people confirmed, creating the most diverse cabinet in history. The one nominee that withdrew did so because some senators found her past Twitter feed too mean. Irony had a good run.

Cornell law professor Josh Chafetz notes that the median margin of confirmation for the 18 Cabinet level appointees considered so far is 64 votes. So, Chafetz says there hasn’t been wholesale party line voting against Biden nominees who he notes are broadly liked, as well as competent. Still, Crapo and Risch have been among the most consistent Republican senators in opposing Biden’s picks – women, men, African American, Native American, Hispanic – and they offer almost no explanation as to why.

Like most everything they do in the Senate, the Idaho duo nearly always takes the predictable and most partisan path. At some point voting no when a Democrat is in the White House is just an act of reflective partisan performance. Maybe putting a rock on the no button just feels good even if you can’t be bothered to explain the reasoning. 

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Additional Reading:

A few things I came across this week that I recommend…

The John Birch Society Never Left

Rick Pearlstein and Edward H. Miller on the deep roots of rightwing conspiracy dating to the Birch Society in the 1950’s.

“Such was the complex dance that has always been at the heart of Republican politics in the conservative era. The extremist vanguard shops fantastical horror stories about liberal elites in the hopes that one might break into the mainstream, such as the “Clinton Chronicles” VHS tape distributed by Jerry Falwell in the early 1990s. The stories included the Clintons covering up the murder of Vince Foster, murdering witnesses to their drug smuggling operation, and participating in a crooked land deal at a development called ‘Whitewater.’ (The New York Times bit hard on the latter claim, setting in motion a chain of events that led to President Clinton’s impeachment over lying in a deposition about a sexual affair.)”

In The New Republic:

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How to Put Out Democracy’s Dumpster Fire

Our democratic habits have been killed off by an internet kleptocracy that profits from disinformation, polarization, and rage. Here’s how to fix that.

“With the wholesale transfer of so much entertainment, social interaction, education, commerce, and politics from the real world to the virtual world—a process recently accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic—many Americans have come to live in a nightmarish inversion of the Tocquevillian dream, a new sort of wilderness. Many modern Americans now seek camaraderie online, in a world defined not by friendship but by anomie and alienation. Instead of participating in civic organizations that give them a sense of community as well as practical experience in tolerance and consensus-building, Americans join internet mobs, in which they are submerged in the logic of the crowd, clicking Like or Share and then moving on. Instead of entering a real-life public square, they drift anonymously into digital spaces where they rarely meet opponents; when they do, it is only to vilify them.”

Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantev in The Atlantic:

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Why Kim Novak Had To Leave Hollywood to Find Herself 

Kim Novak in perhaps her most memorable role – Vertigo

Readers of, well, a certain age will remember Kim Novak. The ’50s icon is perhaps best known for Vertigo – remember the green 1957 Jaguar – reveals what healed her after years of studio-system abuse, and sets the record straight about her rumored romance with Sammy Davis Jr.

“These days, Novak feels much more comfortable on the sprawling ranch in Oregon where she has lived for decades, surrounded by the art and animals that have sustained her through tough times — from losing prior homes to a fire and mudslide to, most devastatingly, losing her husband of 45 years, equine veterinarian Robert Malloy, last year. ‘I’m surviving,’ she says, tearing up and noting that she recently painted a portrait of him.”

Read in The Hollywood Reporter: 

Thanks for reading…be safe out there.

History, McCarthy, Politics

The Paranoid Mind

Posted on by mjohnson

“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds,” Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in a famous Harper’s essay in 1964. 

Hofstadter, who won two Pulitzer Prizes for his work, entitled his essay “The Paranoid Style of American Politics,” and in that essay he traced the long arc of “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” that he contended is a reoccurring theme in the country’s history. 

The essay, easily found online, is worth reading in the context of, oh, the state legislature in Idaho coming within one vote of defunding the most popular public television system in the country because one legislator had been listening and recorded “a full page of concerning language.”

Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter

Or in light of a legislative decision to forgo a $6 million federal grant to facilitate early childhood education because the money – this grant was authorized during the Trump Administration – would facilitate “indoctrinating our children at a younger level.” One lawmaker said it was really bad news that the whole sordid mess was full of the obviously questionable concept of “social justice.” 

Many people are saying that certain notable figures – think Jesus, Gandhi, Dr. King, Pope Francis – would be shocked to learn that discussing “social justice” is now controversial. 

Or consider the bright lights of the Iowa legislature – what is it with the “I” states – who are considering placing new restrictions on public schools and universities “related to staff or student training dealing with racism, sexism and discrimination.” Similar moves have traction in Idaho and other conservative states.

Elsewhere under the golden dome of the Iowa statehouse, conservative legislators grilled a local school superintendent recently over her district’s Black Lives Matter curriculum, developed in part, the school official said, to “address incidents of bullying, lower graduation rates and higher disciplinary rates of students of color.” Imagine a local educator being concerned about her students in such a way? 

Another Iowa legislator admitted his bright idea, he wants to have the Iowa attorney general review presidential executive orders before they became effective in his state, was clearly unconstitutional, but he still felt compelled to make his point. He did, but the point made was just a little different than he intended. 

At the same time back in Idaho a gang of some of the most fevered right-wingers want to strip the Republican attorney general of much of his authority to legally represent state agencies. They don’t like the way the AG reads the law. Idaho’s chief lawyer was one of the few Republicans chief legal officers unwilling to countenance the frivolous post-election lawsuit out of Texas seeking to overturn the presidential election. You will remember that lawsuit died faster than a mayfly, but apparently embracing crazy legal theories and spending tax dollars to advance them is a new conservative value. And calling BS on such things is apparently a defunding offense.  

All of this conservative paranoia from Boise to Des Moines and points in between has one unifying theme: grievance. The angry minds on the right of American politics are perpetually pissed off. A constant state of aggravated outrage is the essence of modern conservative thought. 

Young kids are encouraged to burn face masks on the steps of a state capitol to protest an effective public health measure. Fox News and its followers fume over a decision by the Dr. Seuss Foundation – a private entity, by the way – to cease publication of a half dozen children’s books with clear racist portrayals of people of color. All a piece of the outrageous affront directed at conservatives by a liberal society. 

Idaho children burn face masks on the Statehouse steps in Boise

Richard Hofstadter wrote his essay when Joseph McCarthy’s grievance against liberals, Hollywood elites and homosexuals was still fresh in the American mind and in the wake of Barry Goldwater’s angry claim that “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice,” but he could well have been writing last week. 

The modern rightwing, Hofstadter wrote 57 years ago, always feels dispossessed. “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.”

Hofstadter’s old essay reads like last night’s Tucker Carlson script or a last year Tweet from the Prince of Mar a Lago. Conservative politics has been reduced to curated performances of assorted grievances. The agenda on the right from banning transsexual students from sports, politicizing the response to a pandemic or censuring the rare conservative who bucks the party line is not about policy or even principle, but rather anger and grievance and making someone else pay. 

Something is happening. Something is changing. Somebody not like me is causing this outrage, damn it. And I’m not happy about it. In fact, I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. 

Hofstadter didn’t know about the Tea Party or Trump or Hannity, but he would not have found any of the anger they possess surprising. “The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms,” he wrote, “he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point.”

Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1950

As you consider the paranoid nature of so many conservatives today – the outlandish conspiracy theories, the big lies about election fraud, the absurd notion that a nuanced examination of American history is a socialist plot – you see the paranoid line stretching back to McCarthy, the John Birch Society, on and on. 

As Hofstadter noted, some of us look at history and see a confusing, contradictory mishmash of good, bad and indifferent, somethings to condemn, others to celebrate. The paranoid on the right suffers that history, as well, but also deals with constant fresh fantasies, and there is always grievance. And that must be frightening, so frightening that thousands acted on their fantasies and grievance and violently attacked Congress two months ago. 

Paranoia on the far right is an enduring reality of American politics. At key moments in the past when the phenomenon went from merely crazy to seriously dangerous the conservative party rejected the worst of it. We’re waiting to see what the conservative party will do this time. 

Additional Reading:

My carefully curated – right – list of things you might want to read now or later…

6 Questions Officials Still Haven’t Answered After Weeks of Hearings on the Capitol Attack

I wonder – constantly – how many Americans are just ready to move on from the horrific events of January 6, 2021 when a violent mob stormed the U.S. Congress. And, yes, we really do need to get to the bottom of these events. While the legal and law enforcement work continues questions still go unanswered. Pro Publica has a good take on what we still don’t know.

The January 6, 2021 insurrection in Washington, D.C.

“During more than 15 hours of testimony, lawmakers listened to a cacophony of competing explanations as officials stumbled over themselves to explain how America’s national security, defense, intelligence and law enforcement agencies allowed a homegrown enemy to put an entire branch of government in danger during the attack on the U.S. Capitol.”

A good backgrounder.

Conservative Donors Have Their Own Cancel Culture

A fascinating piece in The Atlantic about the battle over the University of Texas school song. Some Longhorn football players want the song, with its Confederate nostalgia, discarded. Big donors aren’t having it.

Link here.

How The Anti-Vaxxers Got Red-Pilled

What happens when a global pandemic, a vaccine resistance movement, and the age of conspiracy collide? A black hole of misinformation that poses a grave threat to public health

A good read in Rolling Stone:

Thanks for following along. I appreciate your feedback and if you know someone who would appreciate receiving these columns and related material please encourage them to sign up or let me know and I’ll take it from there. All the best.

FDR, Interior Department, Native Americans

At Long Last…

Posted on by mjohnson

It appears after the requisite Senate hearings this week that for the first time in its 172-year history the U.S. Department of the Interior, custodian of 247 million acres of the people’s land – one-fifth of the county – will be headed at long last by a genuine American, and a woman to boot.

New Mexico Representative Deb Haaland, a citizen of the Laguna Pueblo, will become the first Native American to helm the agency, a historic moment that some Senate Republicans seemed determined to soil with fake outrage and empty bluster. Haaland took it all with grace and dignity, telling the fire breathing John Barasso of Wyoming and Steve Daines, the rightwing zealot from Montana, after swatting away or correcting their nonsense, that she would be pleased to work with them. 

New Mexico Congresswoman – and soon to be Interior Secretary – Bev Haaland

This moment has been a very long time coming. With Haaland’s tenure, as Native American writer Julian Brave NoiseCat noted, “the inclusion of everyone—including and especially the erased and forgotten First Peoples of this land” will finally have taken place. 

The Founding Generation – Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and others – perhaps more than any other generation, at least until fairly recently, confronted the dichotomy of what the government of the United States visited upon the real first Americans. 

Writing in 1818, President James Monroe, for example, acknowledged the burden of guilt associated with the wholesale white appropriation of the subsistence lands of Native Americans. “The progress of our settlements westward,” Monroe said, “supported as they are by a dense population, has constantly driven [native people] back, with almost the total sacrifice of the lands which they have been compelled to abandon.” 

Monroe said the dominate culture had to recognize native claims “on the justice of the nation,” claims sadly that have rarely been honored in the intervening 200 years. 

There have been many efforts aimed at redressing injustices to Native Americans, but they have often collapsed or simply been inadequate. In 1933, one of America’s great secretaries of the Interior, Harold Ickes, a crusty, opinionated Chicago progressive in the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt, was determined to turn the federal government’s fraught relationship with the original Americans on its head. 

FDR’s BIA Commissioner John Collier

Ickes convinced President Franklin Roosevelt to allow him to appoint a controversial Native American rights activist and sociologist, John Collier, as head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Collier was a quirky, if effective bureaucrat. He habitually smoked a corncob pipe, wore a baggy sweater in place of a suit jacket and was said to frequently carry a pet frog in his pocket. Few politicians liked him, but fewer still questioned the authenticity or depth of Collier’s commitment to more self-determination for tribes and individuals. 

Collier’s legacy, mostly good for, but tinged with some bad, has been defined by “the Indian New Deal,” the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act that sought a wholesale realignment of federal government policy toward Native American tribes. Yet, even Collier’s well-intentioned strategy was, as many critics have noted, based on a white man’s understanding of what was good for the First Peoples. Even best intentions can be paternalistic and misguided. 

The paternalism problem is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that when Collier’s appointment was announced some Indian rights advocates said if Roosevelt really sought to create a New Deal for Indians he should put a Native American in charge of the BIA. The suggestion was quickly dismissed by members of Congress who confidently and incorrectly asserted that no Native American was qualified for the job. The same attitude has hovered over the secretary’s position for generations, until now. 

Interior Secretary Harold Ickes meets with Flathead Tribal leaders after passage of the Indian Reorganization Act

In our profoundly partisan times it was gratifying to see Haaland introduced for her Senate confirmation hearing by Alaska’s very conservative Republican congressman Don Young, who unreservedly endorsed his Democratic colleague. “She has worked with me,” Young said. “She has crossed the aisle, and as a member of this administration, I know she will do a good job.” 

“Respectfully,” Young continued, “I want you to listen to her. Understand that there’s a broad picture.” Some senators, thinking all wisdom resides on their side of the Capitol, weren’t listening. 

Proving the old adage that to understand politics you need merely to “follow the money,” Barasso, the ranking Republican on the Senate committee, claimed Haaland harbored “radical views” on fossil fuel development and use. The senator has received more than $1 million in campaign cash from oil and gas interests during his time in the Senate, and clearly knows which interest primes his political pump. 

Haaland, ready to assume a job that will be consumed by a broadening climate crisis, replied to the senator from oil and gas with the only sensible answer possible: fossil fuels will be around for a long time, but developing alternatives is just plain common sense. 

Other Republicans complained about protections of culturally important native lands that, at least in the view of Utah Republican Mike Lee, ought to be exploited no matter the cost. Haaland’s steady demeanor and deep personal and cultural connection to the American West will surely lead her to find a better balance than what another great Interior secretary, Cecil Andrus, once called the policy of “rape, ruin and run.” 

The profound elevation of Native American perspective and wisdom inside the Biden Administration was further underscored by another announcement last week. Nez Perce Tribal member Jamie Pinkham, a wise, committed, collaborative and deeply respected expert on Northwest fish and wildlife issues, will have a high impact position with the Army Corps of Engineers, an agency rarely known to be sensitive about anything other than protecting its own turf.

Haaland’s appointment – and Pinkham’s as well  – rather than being condemned by some as “radical,” deserve widespread praise, not only for the quality of the individuals involved but also for what the personal experience from Indian County brings to a federal government that has long marginalized, ignored, demeaned and disrespected the first Americans.

The only thing radical here is the over-the-top reaction to the reality that a capable, unflappable indigenous woman will finally have a job that should have been the domain of a Native American generations ago.  

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Additional Reading:

Some worthy reads…

The far right’s big money strategy has poisoned our politics

Since there is no promotion like self promotion, here’s my piece that was in The Washington Post’s “Made by History” section this week. This section has been developed by the paper, but is edited by historians in order to provide opportunities to put current events in perspective.

The piece is based on some of the research I did while developing my new book Tuesday Night Massacre.

Link here:

American Cynicism Has Reached a Breaking Point

Megan Garber writes in The Atlantic about how lies, disinformation and distrust have warped culture and politics. You knew that, of course, she just tells the story really well. 

“One of the insights of Merchants of Doubt, Erik Conway and Naomi Oreskes’s scathing investigation into the American tobacco industry’s lies about its products, is that the deceptions were successful in part because they turned cynicism into a strategy. Faced with a deluge of studies that made the dangers of smoking clear, tobacco firms funded their own—junk research meant not to refute the science, but to muddle it. The bad-faith findings made Americans less able to see the truth clearly. They manufactured doubt the way Philip Morris churned out Marlboro Lights. They took reality and gave it plausible deniability.”

Read the whole thing: 

The Wasting of the Evangelical Mind

Michael Luo writes in The New Yorker about how a large segment of American Christianity has embraced conspiracy and misinformation.

Capitol rioters stop to pray in the Senate chamber on January 6

“Falsehoods about a stolen election, retailed by Donald Trump and his allies, drove the Capitol invasion, but distorted visions of Christianity suffused it. One group carried a large wooden cross; there were banners that read ‘In God We Trust,’ ‘Jesus Is My Savior / Trump Is My President,’ and ‘Make America Godly Again’; some marchers blew shofars, ritual instruments made from ram’s horns that have become popular in certain conservative Christian circles, owing to its resonance with an account in the Book of Joshua in which Israelites sounded their trumpets and the walls of Jericho came tumbling down. The intermingling of religious faith, conspiratorial thinking, and misguided nationalism on display at the Capitol offered perhaps the most unequivocal evidence yet of the American church’s role in bringing the country to this dangerous moment.” 

Worth your time in understanding the near total embrace by evangelicals of Donald Trump.

How Marty Baron and Jeff Bezos Remade The Washington Post

Marty Baron steps down as editor of the paper that he and the Amazon founder remade into a journalist behemoth.  

“It is a happy ending for The Post, for Mr. Baron and for Mr. Bezos, who earlier this month announced that he was stepping down as chief executive of Amazon to spend more time with other pursuits, including The Post.

“It is a less happy ending by implication for local newspapers elsewhere, which are increasingly owned not by benevolent billionaires but chains that answer to Wall Street and generally lack the name brand that made The Post’s quest for digital subscribers across the country plausible. As The Post’s fortunes have flourished, the fate it escaped has grown grimmer.”

Great story in The New York Times about The Washington Post.

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And Vanity Fair did an interesting exit interview with Marty Baron, including details of – surprise – when Donald Trump called to complain about a story. 

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