Month: July 2021

GOP, Insurrection

Some Legacy…

Posted on by mjohnson

No politician ever admits to caring about a “legacy.” It’s a lie. They all want to be remembered, to be memorialized in some way for their good works or brave deeds.

They all wonder what the third paragraph of their obituary will say about them. “Senator Snort led the defense of Social Security when the program was under attack.” Or “Congressman Cleverton engineered the federal funding for Cleverton Dam, the massive concrete structure that bears his name.”

Or will the legacy be, as was the case with Congressman Charles E. Wiggins when he died in March 2000, a fact the gentleman from California would rather we forget?

California Congressman Charles E. Wiggins in 1974. He’s seen with the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Peter Rodino, of New Jersey during the impeachment hearings for Richard Nixon

“As a congressman, Mr. Wiggins was considered one of [Richard] Nixon’s staunchest defenders. Along with two other members of the House Judiciary Committee, he led the president’s defense when the Watergate hearings began in the summer of 1974. The strategy was to construe the evidence as narrowly as possible, require ironclad proof and propose benign explanations of information damaging to the president.”

In fairness to the memory of Mr. Wiggins – he later became a federal judge – he eventually decided Nixon was a crook and came around to support his impeachment. As the New York Times reported, in order to change his mind, Wiggins had to hold in his hands the transcript of the taped conversation where Nixon committed to obstructing justice. Wiggins had to read the actual words of presidential betrayal to believe what he had been defending was a lie.

I thought about the long-forgotten Charles Wiggins when earlier this week, a burly, bearded Capitol Police officer, Harry Dunn, recounted for a congressional committee his experiences during the January 6 insurrection. Dunn was graphic, detailed and totally believable. He laid bare the lie that the riot of Donald Trump supporters was no big deal, as well as the fiction that Trump had not helped instigate the attack on American democracy.

“This n—– voted for Joe Biden!” Officer Dunn said a rioter screamed at him, prompting the crowd to turn on him with shouts of “Boo! F—— n—–!”

Later, Dunn implored elected members of Congress to uncover the full extent of Trump’s role.

Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn

“There was an attack on January 6, and a hit man sent them,” the police officer said. “I want you to get to the bottom of that.”

Imagine being, as old Charles Wiggins was in 1974, among the last to call into question the actions of a president in the face of such obvious and total depredation of democracy?

Imagine, for example, being Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, who first attempted to turn a bipartisan investigation into a clown show and then refused to participate at all. McCarthy couldn’t be bothered to watch Officer Dunn’s testimony this week. Too busy, perhaps, working on denial of his own role on January 6. We know McCarthy spoke to Trump that day. What do you suppose they talked about?

Or imagine being Montana Congressman Matt Rosendale, an election denier, who expressed his disappointment with the words of fellow Republican Liz Cheney, one of the few Republicans who has called for a reckoning with Trump and his incitement of insurrection. Cheney, who is in perpetual GOP purgatory for her embrace of the truth, urged lawmakers to find out “what happened every minute of that day in the White House” on January 6. “Every phone call, every conversation, every meeting leading up to, during and after the attack.”

“We did not have an armed invasion of the Capitol,” Rosendale said in response. “We had a breach in security.” Try telling that to the Capitol Police officer who testified under oath that one Trump supporter tried to gouge his eye out. Or the story of another officer caught in a scrum where one attacker shouted to get his gun and kill him with it.

Or imagine being Idaho Senator Jim Risch or Wyoming’s John Barasso or Montana’s Steve Daines, all of whom opposed an independent, bipartisan investigation of January 6, and near as I can tell had no reaction to the officer’s testimony this week. What the three senators were outraged about was a letter written more than 30 years ago by a college environmental activist who warned that trees in a proposed Forest Service timber sale had been spiked. Tracy Stone-Manning will be the next director of the Bureau of Land Management, but Risch, a little man in high performance dudgeon, called her a “terrorist” and a “criminal.”

Risch and Barasso and Daines have been on this attack line for several weeks but have nothing significant to say about an attack on the Capitol that put their own lives are risk. They have gladly enlarged the January 6 memory hole of denial and deflection; the modern characteristics of what it takes to be a leader of the Republican Party. And let us not let Senator Mike Crapo continue to skate away in silence. Crapo voted against an independent investigation and now sits on his hands awaiting a re-election he demonstrably does not deserve.

What perverse level of political sycophancy, what degree of moral depravity has overtaken these people and dunked them in the turgid water of Trumpland?

The conservative writer Mona Charen has it right. It’s easy to blame it all on the far-right “base” of the Republican Party, the deplorables who have hijacked conservatism in fealty to conspiracy, science denial, and the anti-democratic Trump cult. But Charen argues the base excuse is a cop out, pardon the pun.

“We have seen the end of 160 years of the peaceful transfer of power,” Charen wrote in The Bulwark. “We’ve seen the majestic United States Capitol turned into a scene from a dystopian fantasy; an armed mob attempting to subvert an election. They smashed and tortured and caused deaths. They erected a gallows and hunted for the speaker of the House and for the vice president. And Republicans, almost to a man and woman, are excusing, downplaying, or whitewashing what happened. An entire political party has abandoned commitment to the rule of law.”

Recall that these Republicans – Risch, Crapo and all the rest – who quake in fear of the authoritarian reality of their party and its leader could have done something. They did nothing. They knew he was a con and a crook, and they were against him before they weren’t any more.

“The great tragedy of this moment is not that Trump attempted what he did,” Mona Charen said, “but that so few Republicans tried to stop him when it would have made a difference.”

That is their legacy. And the country’s legacy, too.

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

Some good reads culled this week from many sources…

The Beltway Can’t Stop Talking About Him. The Voters He Needs Barely Know Him

When J.D. Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy came out I read it with considerable interest. Many of us were trying to understand the heartland appeal of the former guy. Vance seemed like an interesting guy: up from poverty, stellar education, business success and perhaps a new kind of conservative, a populist with ideas. It also seemed like he totally saw through the Donald Trump appeal and saw the faux business tycoon as a conman.

JD Vance, the venture capitalist and author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” speaks with supporters after a rally Thursday, July 1, 2021, in Middletown, Ohio, where he announced he is joining the crowded Republican race for the Ohio U.S. Senate seat being left by Rob Portman. (AP Photo/Jeff Dean)

More and more the hype around the book and the follow on movie seems like it was manufactured to promote a political career, which Vance is now trying to launch. He’s a candidate for the U.S. Senate. He’s taken great pains to cleanse his anti-Trump views.

He may just be another opportunistic rich guy trying to get into elective office. And as this story makes clear, he has some work to do. From Politico.

“Vance has countered with an apology tour of sorts, scrubbing his old tweets and making the case, often and to anyone who will listen, that though he was at first skeptical of Trump himself, he bought into Trump’s ideology all along, and has since come around on the man too. Meanwhile, a super PAC supporting Vance, financed by $10 million from the tech investor Peter Thiel, has spent six figures on digital ads that emphasize Vance’s criticisms of Democrats and Big Tech, and his Hillbilly Elegy story.”

A story from Ohio that may leave you wondering – again – just how it is that the American conservative movement has fallen so far.

4 Reasons I’m Wearing a Mask Again

Some confusing, or maybe just unwelcome guidance out of the CDC this week about masks and the effort to control a still raging pandemic.

I think The Atlantic has done remarkable work covering this huge story. Here’s reporter Katherine J. Wu on why she’s gone back to wearing a mask.

“If I get infected, that affects more than just me. I worry about the strangers I encounter—many of them maskless—whose immune status I don’t know. I worry about the youngest kids in my social network, who aren’t yet eligible for shots, and the elderly and immunocompromised, whose defenses may be weaker than mine. I worry about the people in my community who have been structurally barred from accessing the vaccines, or who are reluctant to take the shots. My risk of getting COVID-19 is low. Theirs is very much not.”

Get the shot. Wear a mask indoors. Be smart. Be safe. Read the full story here:

ARE YOU ALLOWED TO CRITICIZE SIMONE BILES?: A DECISION TREE

The satirical site McSweeney’s has created a decision tree in response to the criticism of Simone Biles, the sensational gymnast who decided to end her participation in the Olympics. An, yes, I know there are big issues here about the rights of athletes, mental health, social media, etc.

This cuts through all that…funny.

Thanks for reading. Stay in touch.

History, Politics

Flood the Zone…

Posted on by mjohnson

In his book about the modern history of tyranny the Yale historian Timothy Snyder writes that the founders of the American experiment were “concerned that the democratic republic they envisioned would collapse.” Those founders drew on history – Greek and Roman – to contemplate “the descent of ancient democracies and republics into oligarchy and empire.”

“History does not repeat,” Snyder writes, “but it does instruct.”

A highly recommended little book that is essential reading in our times

The worrying, dangerous signs are all about. Pick through the headlines and you’ll find, if you care to find, lots of evidence – issues and concerns both small and large – of democratic descent that presages collapse.

Yes, it can happen here. Consider:

A rich friend of the former, and he hopes future, president was indicted this week for using his access to the highest officials of our government to advance the interest of a foreign government. Federal prosecutors characterized what Donald Trump’s pal Tom Barrack did as “extremely serious offenses based on conduct that strikes at the very heart of our democracy.” Barrack is just one of many striking at the heart of democracy.

In Albany, Oregon, a community in the Willamette Valley south of Portland, the brand-new majority on a local school board took, as Oregon Public Broadcasting reported, “a dramatic step … summarily firing a superintendent who had received positive performance reviews and whose contract had just been renewed. Perhaps more strikingly, most of them won’t say why.”

The action was apparently stimulated by “political rifts over COVID-19 and racial equity that have played out nationally.” The campaigns of the majority members of the board who engineered the firing were funded largely by money outside the community. In short: another local school board has become a hot battleground in the raging culture wars that serve to divide Americans and breed a level of intolerance that can lead to something much worse than a debate over how to teach kinds about history.

A variety of indicators tell similar stories. Significant numbers of Americans actually favor breaking the country up. Sixty-six percent of southern Republicans, according to a new poll, support “leaving the U.S. and forming a new country. Those sentiments were shared by 50% of independents and 20% of Democrats.”

Some eastern and southern Oregonians are advancing the fantasy of a “greater Idaho” that would divide the mostly rural areas of Oregon from the allegedly out of touch radicals west of the Cascades.

A climate crisis is upon us that threatens vast disruption of world food supplies and a deepening of global inequality. A pandemic rages for which a proven vaccine exists, but millions of Americans refuse to accept the science and logic that can save them from severe illness and even death.

A huge fire burning for two weeks in southern Oregon is creating its own weather

But…but…in the midst of the division, chaos, controversy and cynicism of daily life it pays – believe me it pays – to live with someone who refuses to play the pessimism card, while still recognizing the perils we face. I’m lucky. So, taking a page from Professor Snyder’s rules for resisting tyranny – and with encouragement from the breakfast table – I offer my own six-part mini-survival guide for our troubled times.

  • Refuse to be a victim. Many of the defendants facing charges for the assault on the U.S. Capitol in January are invoking the defense that the mob made them do it. Nonsense. No one is forcing you to be a political victim. It’s a choice you make. Knock it off. Democracy doesn’t settle disputes by smashing things, but by elections and compromise. You got a grievance, don’t nurse it, use the political system to work for change. Anything less is a call for anarchy, the kind that has crippled effective response to real problems in cities like Portland. Being a victim is easy. Real, responsible political change is damn hard work.
  • Act on your frustrations. But do it responsibly. Give your time, treasure and talent to causes and people you agree with, but at all cost resist the comfortable impulse to support the dividers and the haters. Every town in America has a non-profit or ten that exists to feed the hungry, house the homeless, heal the sick or stimulate our souls. Get off the sidelines and get in the real game.
  • Check your priors, or better yet update them. We all come to adulthood with “priors,” beliefs, notions, ways of seeing things that may or may not be valuable or even correct. Self-awareness is a powerful thing. Most of us are never more certain of what we really don’t know much about.
  • Seek truth, not a validation of an opinion. This is a corollary to the previous thought. You really can find factual information if you want to. Sifting through the garbage is tiresome and demanding but remember as you search, history’s tyrants always seek to confuse and devalue objective reality. The loathsome Steve Bannon, a world-class purveyor of misinformation, said the quiet part out loud in 2018. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon said. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Don’t believe all the crap out there.
  • Remember that ethics and character count – always. In our tribal society we tend to believe my side can do no wrong and your side is evil. What is commonly missing from this formulation is the fundamental democratic requirement that demands that leaders always operate within widely accepted ethical boundaries, and that they have the character to not lie to your face, enrich themselves in office or abuse their power. Without ethics and character democracy dies.
  • Think about the future. We are all short timers here. What is our responsibility to the next generation and the next beyond that? Most of us won’t be remembered beyond family and friends, but let us live so as to not be remembered for making things worse, but for trying to make things better for a next generation of Americans.

A great challenge of our times is to prevent political and cultural cynicism from becoming self-fulfilling. “If you once believed that everything always turns out well in the end,” Timothy Snyder writes, “you can be persuaded that nothing turns out well in the end. If you once did nothing because you thought progress is inevitable, then you can continue to do nothing because you think times moves in repeating cycles.”

History is not destiny. It is a guide. Get off the sofa. Get in the game to preserve American democracy.

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

Some things I stumbled across this week that you may find of interest…

Mr. Justice Marshall

Marshall argued and won the Brown v. Board of Education case and became the first Black justice of the Supreme Court in 1967

Stephen L. Carter, law professor, author of fiction and non-fiction, and law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall, had a great piece in The New York Times Magazine about the late, great Supreme Court justice and civil rights legend.

“Marshall was among the great storytellers, heir to an American tradition stretching back to Lincoln and beyond. He told stories to teach lessons — and also like Lincoln, he never told the same story quite the same way twice. The message was what mattered.”

Great story. Read it here:

3 Tropes of White Victimhood

I thought this piece by historian Lawrence Glickman was really terrific. He writes about rightwing personalities who knowingly or not are using the same rhetoric around race that was employed by post-Civil War politicians.

“Kilmeade, Carlson, and Robertson all blamed critical race theory, a school of legal thought developed in the 1980s that has become the latest fixation of the conservative outrage machine. But the panic they expressed has a much longer history, with roots going back to white-supremacist rhetoric from before the Civil War—and particularly apparent during the attack on Reconstruction, America’s experiment in interracial democracy that lasted from 1865 until 1877.”

Really significant history here:

I Just Learned I Only Have Months to Live. This is What I Want to Say

And, man I couldn’t get through this without a few tears. From long-time Boston Globe journalist Jack Thomas.

“After a week of injections, blood tests, X-rays, and a CAT scan, I have been diagnosed with cancer. It’s inoperable. Doctors say it will kill me within a time they measure not in years, but months.

“As the saying goes, fate has dealt me one from the bottom of the deck, and I am now condemned to confront the question that has plagued me for years: How does a person spend what he knows are his final months of life?”

It is sad and uplifting at the same time. Here is the link:

Thanks…be well. Get the vaccine.

Income Inequality

The Rich are Different…

Posted on by mjohnson

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his 1926 short story “The Rich Boy.” 

Let us count the ways. 

British billionaire Richard Branson flew in his own space plane recently to the “invisible boundary between the planet’s atmosphere and outer space” where the space tourist spent a few moments “basking in the sensation of weightlessness.” 

The flight was hyped to the hilt, as only cable television can do, and while the stunt was celebrated as a space travel break through with hints of science it was really about money and the strange American obsession with too much of it. Branson’s trip, journalist Marina Koren wrote, “brings us closer to an era in which rich thrill seekers with bucket lists, not government-backed astronauts, make up the largest group of people who’ve been to space.” 

If you want to ride with Sir Richard plan on winning the lottery. A ticket on Virgin Galactic will set you back a quarter of a million dollars. No word on the quality of the in-flight snacks. 

Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, is next into near space in his own craft. A joy ride with the Amazon emperor is reported to cost even more than a near space hop with Branson. 

Meanwhile, “summer camp for billionaires,” the annual Allen and Co. shindig in Sun Valley, Idaho, recently attracted a guest list with an estimated net worth of a trillion dollars. This is the place where big media and tech mergers are hatched and where guys like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates fly in on the dozens of corporate jets that make the little airport in nearby Hailey look like a used plane lot for Falcon 50’s. One of those nine passenger wonders will, by the way, set you back $15 million. 

Some of the 70 corporate jets that were expected in Sun Valley, Idaho for this year’s Allen and Co. summer camp for billionaires

You can contemplate the excess of this billionaire carbon footprint while pondering why the Pacific Northwest climate is producing record heat and some of the earliest, most catastrophic fires on record. There are no coincidences. 

The Allen event, as Hamilton Nolan wrote in The Guardian, “is the wondrous model of American capitalism in action – a tiny handful of wealthy people eat cake, and an entire nation gathers downstream, hoping to snatch up a few falling crumbs.” 

A bit harsh, perhaps. Yet, it is also true that while a lot of us are happy to just be doing reasonably well after 18 months of a pandemic, the Sun Valley crowd never missed a beat even as many, many Americans took a beating. According to one analysis, the world’s 2,365 billionaires saw their net worth increased by 54% during the first twelve months of the pandemic. 

The rich are different. Very different. Among other things, and unlike most of the rest of us, they don’t pay taxes. The income tax structure, written by politicians beholding to people with great fortunes and who also aspire to have their own great fortunes, rig the system to benefit the wealthiest people in our society. 

Since there are no coincidences, the timing of the recent Biden Administration executive order – all executive orders these days are “sweeping” – aimed at enhancing business competition and giving consumers more say was issued while America’s billionaires huddled in Idaho’s Wood River Valley. 

Historian Nelson Lichtenstein said Biden’s executive action “returns the United States to the great antimonopoly tradition that has animated social and economic reform almost since the nation’s founding. This tradition worries less about technocratic questions such as whether concentrations of corporate power will lead to lower consumer prices and more about broader social and political concerns about the destructive effects that big business can have on our nation.” 

It’s about time. Here is one issue the right and the left should be able to unite around: bigness is very often bad for little people. 

It’s mostly been forgotten in the sweep of the last hundred years of history, but American politicians from both parties once opposed monopoly, concentrated economic and political power and the accumulation of vast wealth. In 1927, legislatures in Maryland, Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania passed laws taxing chain stores. 

The theory behind the tax was simple. Local, independently owned retail establishments were good. They were connected to their communities. They created value for their owners, employees and customers. The money stayed close to where it was generated. You wonder what those politicians would have thought of Bezos’s creation.

Texas Congressman Wright Patman was “hell on the big banks.” He chaired the House Banking Committee for years.

Politicians like Congressman Wright Patman of Texas once tried to break up big banking concentrations. Congress passed landmark legislation in 1935 tearing down the corrupt holding company structure of the always monopolistic electric utility industry. Great wealth – the Mellons, the Rockefellers and such – were taxed, and I mean really taxed. 

But the rich are different, after all. The five biggest U.S. banks now control nearly half of the industry’s total assets. Warren Buffett’s holding company has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the destruction during the second Bush Administration of the last remaining elements of the utility holding company legislation. Biden’s plan to modestly increase taxes on Americans making more than $400,000 a year has been hooted down amid cries that such audacity will usher in, wait for it, socialism.

Socialism must have thrived during the Eisenhower Administration in the 1950’s since Ike presided over a 90 percent tax rate for the super-rich.

There are many and varied reasons why many younger Americans have trouble paying for college, can’t afford to own a home and struggle to more than barely get by, but the vast concentration of wealth in the hands of a handful of Americans is surely a contributing factor. Even a modest redistribution of the concentrated wealth of the richest Americans could power transformation on climate, infrastructure and education, just for starters. 

We live in a new Gilded Age, populated by billionaire space cowboys and the hedge fund super wealthy. Biden has the right idea: save capitalism by insisting on more competition, tax the greatest wealth, create real economic opportunity by making the tax code work for people not named Bezos or Zuckerberg. 

As the historian T.J. Stiles said of one of the first great American tycoons, Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad and shipping magnate, amassed economic power in the 19th Century “to rival that of the state.” The state – and the people – pushed back. It’s past time to do it again.

What better metaphor for private wealth rivaling the power of the state than two multi-billionaires launching a vanity project to send themselves into space? If you have that much money, you really are different, and you have too much. 

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

If you are interested in some additional reading material here are a few items that I found interesting…

Billionaire Playbook: How Sports Owners Use Their Teams to Avoid Millions in Taxes

A companion piece to my column this week. It really is a scandal.

“IRS records obtained by ProPublica show the Clippers have reported $700 million in losses for tax purposes in recent years. Not only does [owner Steve] Ballmer not have to pay tax on any real-world Clippers profits, he can use the tax write-off to offset his other income.”

Steve Ballmer, the billionaire owner of the L.A. Clippers, is able to avoid a lot of taxes by claiming losses on his team

Nice work if you can get it. Read the full piece:

The death of American democracy (explained)

A really solid piece here from The Daily Montanan.

“If you want to know at what point America’s democracy started to die, experts say 2016 seems like a logical point: With nearly a year to go until his term expired, President Barack Obama’s attempt at appointing a Supreme Court justice failed when the Republican-controlled Senate vowed to block any nominee.

“Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, both professors at Harvard University, said that even after the tumultuous Donald Trump presidency, democracy is in a recession that started before and will last until after the forty-fifth president.”

Read the entire thing:

How Tucker Carlson became the voice of White grievance

A must read piece on the Fox News host. The guy comes from a tony, privileged background, but has become the leading voice of white grievance on the political right. Frankly, some of the detail in this Washington Post story will make your eyes water.

“Carlson, in his writings and commentaries, has described resentment toward liberals as far back as the first grade. He has frequently ridiculed the notion that America should celebrate diversity and has lashed out repeatedly at the idea that he, as a White person, bears any responsibility for racism against Black people.

“Several people who have interacted with him over the years say they don’t know what he really believes, but they say they are increasingly troubled by his influence as what one of his former mentors described as a ‘very talented demagogue.'”

Read the full amazing story.

When a Black boxing champion beat the ‘Great White Hope,’ all hell broke loose

The story of the first Black heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Johnson, is one of the important stories of 20th Century sports – and culture.

Black Champion Jack Johnson fights Tommy Burns in 1908

“No white boxer could defeat Johnson in the ring, so white America worked to defeat him outside the ring. Johnson was arrested in 1912 and charged with violating the Mann Act, which made it illegal to transport women across state lines ‘for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.’ He served 10 months in federal prison.

“Whites responded to Johnson’s triumph by using violence to keep Blacks in their place by any and all means. When Black construction workers celebrated Johnson’s victory near the town of Uvalda, Georgia, whites began shooting. As the Blacks tried to escape into the woods, the whites hunted them down, killing three and injuring five.”

To understand our country you must work to understand the history of race in America. This story is important.

Thanks for reading. Stay safe out there.

Insurrection, Politics, Trump

The West’s Homegrown Threat…

Posted on by mjohnson

America has some history with populist demagogues. 

A Catholic priest from Detroit became a major figure in the 1930’s by playing to fears about economic collapse. Charles Coughlin, a kind of Rush Limbaugh-like character, had a national radio following. Coughlin advocating monetizing silver as a panacea for the depression decimated economy. It was later revealed the priest was trading in the metal, using his secretary to conceal his purchases, but knowledge of that scam still didn’t derail him. He moved on to stoking anti-Semitism. 

Father Charles Coughlin: American Demagogue

In the same period, a fantastic character skyrocketed onto the national scene touting a plan to make “every man a king.” Huey Long appealed to the have nots by building highways, hospitals and schools in Louisiana, but he also presided over a virtual police state where, among other things, he required state employees to hand over a portion of every paycheck to his political operation. Huey would almost certainly have made a play for the White House had not an assassin shot and killed him in a hallway of the state capitol building in Baton Rouge. 

A more recent variety of domestic demagogue – Joe McCarthy, Pat Buchanan, a guy named Trump to name a few – came into being playing on old American tropes: fear of “others,” hatred of our government or the evil threats of vicious foreign elements bent on our destruction. Much of the American story has been built on need to defend the country against someone or something determined to undermine or demolish all that is good. 

Usually, the demagogue defines the threat as “endangering the American way of life,” a statement so broad and ill-defined as to satisfy the grievance of that segment of our society that is always upset about something. 

Until Donald Trump inspired an insurrectionist attack on the U.S Capitol six months ago, the American demagogues have sought, often in odious and fundamentally destructive ways, to achieve political power by winning elections. Or at least they attempted to crush their opponents in the marketplace of ideas. But Trump has brought a new reality to American life: the demagogue as commander of what can only be called an armed militia. 

This happened just six months ago…

A significant number of the Americans who assaulted their own seat of government on January 6 identify with certain militia movements – the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers. The Guardian reported in March on leaked documents from some of these groups indicating that have attracted hundreds if not thousands of members who are current or former military or law enforcement personal, but the groups also “include men and women, of ages ranging from their 20s to their 70s, doing jobs from medical physics to dental hygiene and living in all parts of the country.” 

One Three Percenter patch says: “We’re everywhere.” Another proclaims: “Be polite. Be professional. But have a plan to kill everyone you meet.” As evidence of the January insurrection has made clear, these militia groups are heavily armed and certainly dangerous. Chants of “Hang Mike Pence” were not a statement of abstract political theory. 

Which bring us to the West latest home-grown demagogue: Idaho Republican gubernatorial candidate and anti-government militia crusader Ammon Bundy. 

It’s easy to dismiss Bundy with his big hat and attention attracting antics as a joke, a marginal figure much like the usual marginal figures who pay the filing fee and show up on a ballot somewhere in the West. I’ve been guilty of dismissing Bundy as someone few people should take seriously. I was wrong. He’s different. 

The Catholic priest in the 30’s or a Pat Buchanan, who proclaimed himself the head of the “pitchfork brigade” in the 1990’s, certainly had followers who could be and were stirred up at the drop of a microphone, but until recently American demagogues didn’t command armed militias. Now they do. 

In a Los Angeles Times profile of Bundy this week one sentence stands out: “Standing in his kitchen, Bundy recently used his smartphone to pull up the latest stats for People’s Rights — nearly 60,000 members organized in 29 states and Canada, all promising to protect their fellow members if called, he claimed. Bundy is quick to describe it as a linked network of ‘neighbors’ who make independent choices and are not under his direction.” 

The lie to that last claim is put to rest by a visit to Bundy’s YouTube channel where he certainly is directing those 60,000 folks. In other statements he has called his followers “neighborhood watch of steroids.” 

News accounts often describe Bundy as “a far right activist,” but that description falls short. He’s the most visible leader of a huge network of heavily armed, anti-government militia members

An American demagogue like Huey Long certainly called his followers to action, but the action was aimed at winning elections. We know what kind of action Bundy is capable of. He masterminded the armed takeover of a wildlife refuge in eastern Oregon, he defied federal agents in a grazing standoff in Nevada and he led a violent demonstration inside the Idaho capitol building. The $750 he was fined recently for failing to leave a legislative meeting room in Boise is less than a slap on the wrist and will almost certainly embolden Bundy and his followers for the next action. 

“We have the potential for multiple Malheurs in multiple states, in that at any moment they could bring hardened far-right activists, often heavily armed, into any one event,” Devin Burghart, executive director of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, told the Los Angeles Times in February. 

Bundy’s play for political office in Idaho is a joke, at least in this sense. He doesn’t believe in his own government or the idea that a democratic society runs on rules and law. He flouts such conventions as easily as he summons a mob to intimidate a local elected official. His political campaign is a means to an end and the end is to menace real elected officials into silence and acceptance. 

Who knows what Ammon Bundy, a true believer secure in the sacredness of his own opinions, is ultimately capable of? He has certainly given us a preview of coming attractions. No elected official in the West – and particularly in Idaho – should be surprised when he ratchets up his pressure campaign, as he surely will.

And while some elected Republicans, the fringe of the fringe, have embraced and encouraged Bundy’s anti-government nonsense most others have sat quietly, apparently hoping he will just go away. But he’s not going away. He’s now injected himself into the very heart of their party. 

There is a stark choice here for most elected Republicans: risk alienating Bundy’s militia followers by pushing back on all that he stands for, or choose to support the rule of law and democracy. The recent Republican track record on that choice isn’t very encouraging. 

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

Items I found interesting, important or fun….

White House fire meeting was a bunch of hot air

President Joe Biden summoned a group of western governors to the White House recently to talk about the latest terrible fire season in the region. He left the governors of Montana and Idaho out of the meeting. It was a dump call, whether intentional or caused by West Wing bungling. Here’s Darrell Erhlick in The Daily Montanan.

“It seems like someone in the White House would have gazed over the terra incognita on the map of the United States — that vast expanse between the two better-known coasts — and thought, ‘Hmm, there seem to be a lot things that could burn up there in northwestern land located between, say, North Dakota and Washington.’

“But if such a musing or consideration happened, we didn’t hear about it.”

Read the full piece here:

Reasserting Checks and Balances: The National Emergencies Act of 1976

A great – and mostly forgotten – piece of American political history.

Senators Mathias and Church in 1974

“The story of this obscure Senate committee begins with the Vietnam War. In 1968 Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon pledged to end the war if elected. In the spring of 1970, however, President Nixon secretly expanded the war into Cambodia—without congressional approval. Weeks later, Nixon announced the expansion of the war into Cambodia on national television. The administration’s actions infuriated many senators, especially Frank Church, a long-time Vietnam War critic.”

From the Office of the Senate Historian:

The 3 Simple Rules That Underscore the Danger of Delta

I confess to not understanding the reluctance by millions of people to get vaccinated against COVID-19. I keep wondering if they realize why hardly anyone of my generation contracted polio – because we got the vaccine!

In any event, I hope they will reconsider and in the meantime this from Pulitzer Prize winner Ed Yong in The Atlantic.

“Fifteen months after the novel coronavirus shut down much of the world, the pandemic is still raging. Few experts guessed that by this point, the world would have not one vaccine but many, with 3 billion doses already delivered. At the same time, the coronavirus has evolved into super-transmissible variants that spread more easily. The clash between these variables will define the coming months and seasons. Here, then, are three simple principles to understand how they interact. Each has caveats and nuances, but together, they can serve as a guide to our near-term future.”

The bottom line: vaccines work. Read the full piece:

When George Harrison vacationed in southern Illinois

A great story about a member of The Beatles before he was famous. Turns out George Harrison spent part of 1963 in the rural Midwest. Who knew?

Yes, that George Harrison

“Louise said George was in a band back in England, where he lived. So, later that day, Chris and Monty went to Skaggs Electric Supply Company, which sold records alongside light bulbs and extension cords, and asked the proprietor if he had anything by a band called the Beatles. The man shook his head. ‘Never heard of ’em,’ he said.”

Good story…read it here.

Many thanks for following along. Be well.

GOP, Idaho

A Long Time Coming…

Posted on by mjohnson

I’ve been reading “letters to the editor.” It’s fun, occasionally even enlightening. A sample: 

“Once we get together and rout the extremists from the midst of the Grand Old Party we will be able to go back to sane and sensible party politics in which we debate alternative programs toward progress in terms of facts and feasibility.” 

A letter to the editor…

“To all who believe in the right of individualism and all freedoms the Constitution once, yes once, gave you, become alert to the poisoned gifts of socialist order or you shall surely march down the corridors of slavery to the end that Lenin and his disciples have promised you.” 

A letter to the editor…

“I am so ashamed of the man who calls himself governor of Idaho … I have known for quite some time he leaned left, or as they like to call themselves, moderates or liberals.” The same writer observed about the losing presidential candidate in the last election: “The abuse, lies, and all the venom that spewed forth, it seemed to me the evil forces of Satan were against him.” 

And a particular favorite letter: “I am getting fed up about these so-called Americans who believe in the John Birchers, Ku Klux Klan and many others who are trying to undermine our society. I have read the trash they publish and air. It only appeals to the mind of a seven-year-old.” 

A letter to the editor…

Each quotation is from a genuine “letter to the editor” – and there are dozens more like them – that appeared in an Idaho newspaper – in 1964. 

The radicalization of the conservative right in America has been a long time coming, but it is possible to pinpoint 1964 – the year the GOP nominated Barry Goldwater, a card-carrying right winger, for president – as a critical milestone in the radicalization. To be fair, the origins of the radicalization that grips the GOP today actually go back even farther to post-war McCarthyism and a manufactured crisis over communist infiltration of American society and government. 

Barry Goldwater in 1964

Even accounting for a few momentary detours to something less radical than today’s Republican Party – think Gerald Ford, John McCain or Mitt Romney – conservatism in America over at least the last 70 years has been the happy home of conspiracy, contempt for facts and commitment to grievance. 

And Idaho has not infrequently been a central melting pot for the conspiracy and anti-government sentiment. Frank Church, arguably the state’s most important national legislator from the 1950’s through the 1970’s, regularly felt the sharp end of this kind of politics. At various points in his 24-year career in the Senate, Church was labeled a socialist sympathizer and a “baby killer.” His stand against the Vietnam War was reason for the right to label him un-American and his investigation of the nation’s intelligence agencies led to the ludicrous accusation, made by allegedly responsible voices on the right, that he had singlehandedly destroyed the CIA. 

An essay Church wrote in January 1965 for Look magazine – the piece was entitled “Conspiracy USA” – gave me the idea of going back and looking at all those old letters. 

Church dubbed what he saw in 1965 “the slowly boiling outrages of extremism” and he warned, “we have already become accustomed to a level of political absurdity that would have seemed, a few years ago, quite impossible.”

You might think the fabricated outrage about the teaching of American history among a new generation of the right’s conspiracy spreading McCarthyites is a recent phenomenon. It’s not. 

In his essay, Church quoted a letter printed in the Idaho Statesman in 1964: “The ‘Social Studies’ program [in the high schools] was initiated 30 years ago by American education intelligentsia after the Soviet plan, for the acknowledged purpose of promoting the ‘collectivist society’ in America.” 

That nonsense of decades ago is not all that different from the public education bashing “task force” formed recently by Idaho’s lieutenant governor and aimed at rooting out “teachings on social justice, critical race theory, socialism, communism (and) Marxism” from public schools. 

The co-chair of this witch hunt, Representative Priscilla Giddings, is always in high McCarthy dudgeon. As reported by the Idaho Capitol Sun, Giddings said “she found examples of indoctrination or critical race theory in libraries, the Idaho Public Television budget, early childhood development programs and ‘a little bit’ in K-12 public schools. She said she was particularly concerned where the words ‘equity’ and ‘privilege’ are used.” 

Idaho Senator Frank Church at about the time he warned about the Radical Right in 1965

The late Senator Church provided some context for all this in his 1965 essay. 

“Scholars differ on why so many conscientious Americans are being caught up in the Radical Right,” Church wrote. “It is clearly a revolt against the established order by the discontented, motivated by a mixture of reasons: a quest for some higher purpose than is satisfied by the commercial standards of our times; a fear of the new relationships being generated by the burgeoning growth, urbanization and automation of the country; a resistance to the complexities of modern life, to the bigness of government, to the racial revolution, to a ‘cold war’ that never ends, to the absence of quick and easy solutions; a frustration over the inability of the United States, in the nuclear age, to swiftly work its will upon the world. These are the conditions of life with which we must cope, but they stir
a rebel to go forth in search of a cause.”  

Church wrote – and again it’s important to remember he spent his career under attack from these merchants of conspiracy and fear – that it was essential to expose the “delusions of the fanatical right” including its “propaganda, its frequent resort to outright intimidation and coercion” and what he called nothing less than its “totalitarian methods.” 

Church was a prophet before our time. The Morning Consult polling firm reported this week that 26% of the U.S. population now qualifies as being “highly right-wing authoritarian,” twice the share of people who hold similar views in Canada or Australia. 

There is nothing new, absolutely nothing new, in the playbook of the radical right. Tossing off “socialism” at every opportunity, condemning public education, ridiculous allusions to Satan, the life and death struggle for “freedom” are all pages in its well-thumbed playbook. 

Optimists might take comfort in the fact that Goldwater lost in 1964, but his followers – and now a new and even more radical generation – have kept right on. These radicals delude themselves into thinking they are saving their country. What they are actually doing is taking aim at the very ideas of America: free expression, tolerance, community, inclusion and reason. 

But, then again, what they are trying to sell is an old story. You can look it up. 

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

A few other items worthy of your time…

The War on History Is a War on Democracy

Historian Timothy Snyder has been a touchstone for me during the last several years. Snyder is an expert totalitarianism and the methods of authoritarians like Stalin and Hitler. He has written about the Holocaust and how democracies fail. His current essay in The New York Times is a must read, putting efforts by Republican legislators to control the teaching of history in historical context.

“This spring, memory laws arrived in America. Republican state legislators proposed dozens of bills designed to guide and control American understanding of the past. As of this writing, five states (Idaho, Iowa, Tennessee, Texas and Oklahoma) have passed laws that direct and restrict discussions of history in classrooms. The Department of Education of a sixth (Florida) has passed guidelines with the same effect. Another 12 state legislatures are still considering memory laws.”

Read the full piece here:

How Rumsfeld Deserves to Be Remembered

WASHINGTON – JUNE 23: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gestures as he testifies during a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee June 23, 2005 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The hearing was focused on U.S. military strategy and operations in Iraq. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

The death this week of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld brought forth a great deal of commentary. George Packer in The Atlantic was one who weighed in, not softly.

“Rumsfeld was the worst secretary of defense in American history. Being newly dead shouldn’t spare him this distinction. He was worse than the closest contender, Robert McNamara, and that is not a competition to judge lightly.”

Read the entire story:

Presidential Historians Survey

And speaking of the worst…or best…ever. C-SPAN is out with its regular assessment of where American presidents stand in the view of a host of historians.

Number One on the greatness scale is Lincoln. And it turns out the “former guy” is rated as the worst. Close, but not the absolute bottom. Check out the rest of the survey here.

The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America’s Judicial Hero

And I’m anxious to read this new biography of a late 19th and early 20th Century Supreme Court justice.

John Marshall Harlan: a great dissenter on segregation among other things

“John Marshal Harlan’s life and opinions are well worth studying. But he may be easier to admire than to understand. His intellectual roots stretch back to antebellum America and even to the era of the country’s founding. In that sense, his jurisprudence is not so much a prophecy of the future as the dying gasp of Radical Republicanism—a political vision the nation had abandoned by 1896 in favor of the macabre splendor of the Gilded Age.”

A review of The Great Dissenter.

As alway, I appreciate you reading and providing your reactions. All the best and have a safe and sane Fourth of July.