Politics

History, Politics

Erasing History…

Posted on by mjohnson

The Republican attorney general of Montana last week issued a binding opinion about “critical race theory,” or put another way Austin Knudsen stirred the simmering pot of history erasure. 

In Tennessee, the governor, Bill Lee, a mechanical engineer by training who clearly missed taking any history electives in college, signed legislation that, as the Associated Press reported, bans “teachers from teaching certain concepts of race and racism in public schools, where teachers risk losing valuable state funding if they violate the new measure.”

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee. Let’s just say: He’s not a history major

Idaho, Oklahoma and Iowa have also passed this senseless legislation – a dozen other states entertained proposals of one kind or another – that is really aimed at keeping the culture war at a rolling boil. The controversy has literally nothing to do with American history and everything to do with the pursuit of grievance and anger that drives the overwhelmingly white, nativist wing of the Republican Party. 

Idaho’s embrace of this assault on history and free inquiry resulted in outright elimination of funding “to support social justice ideology student activities, clubs, events and organizations on campus.” The would-be governor of Idaho, Janice McGeachin, has now added her own Joe McCarthy twist to the saga with an “indoctrination task force” aimed at rooting out “teachings on social justice, critical race theory, socialism, communism, (and) Marxism.”

In the Montana case, the small thinking conservatives in charge of state government were immediately slammed by human rights activists, teachers, the American Civil Liberties Union and a host of others. Travis McAdams, with the Montana Human Rights Network, said the attorney general’s opinion “creates unnecessary confusion around racism and how it impacts people in Montana.” Montana’s top legal officer and the state school superintendent, who asked for the opinion, McAdams said “are implying that discussions about real-life examples of discrimination, bias, and privilege are somehow racist, and that is completely false.” 

The folks behind these proposals, and one suspects most of them really couldn’t define what precisely they want to ban, have actually selected an auspicious moment in which to roll out a national discussion of racism and white privilege. They are casting a spotlight on how the overwhelmingly white advocates of these moves seek to re-write history. 

How inconvenient for the Idaho lieutenant governor and the Montana attorney general that their crusade just happens to coincide with the remembrance of the worst race riot in American history, a radical bit of white supremacist mayhem and murder visited on the African American residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma on May 31 and June 1, 1921. 

The aftermath of the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921

Few atrocities in American history have been so completely covered up, denied and re-written as what happened in the prosperous, black Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa one hundred years ago. Historian Scott Ellsworth, a Tulsa native, has written one of several new books about the horrible history. 

As the New York Times said in its review: “Among white Tulsans, Ellsworth encountered a mix of shame and defiance. Photographs and official records had disappeared. Someone had even cut out relevant parts of The Tulsa Tribune before the newspaper was committed to microfilm. Black Tulsans, too, had their own reasons not to revisit what happened. What they had lived through was horrific — Ellsworth himself has likened it to an American Kristallnacht. Many of those who had survived didn’t want to burden their children with such trauma.” 

It should be noted that at least 300 Tulsa African Americans died in the riot, a number that almost certainly understates the death toll, and millions of dollars of property was destroyed. No one was ever charged, insurance claims were disallowed, no reparations have been paid, and until lately no comprehensive accounting has been attempted. This is what erasing history looks like. 

Karlos Hill, a historian at the University of Oklahoma, has published a photographic history of the Tulsa Race Massacre. “An extensive race massacre photo archive exists,” Hill has written, “because so many white participants desired to visually represent and share with other whites their role in the violent destruction of the Greenwood District. White Tulsans’ eagerness to photograph the community’s devastation was reflective of turn-of-the century lynching culture, in which photography was central.” 

Tulsa in 1921 is just one example, one horrible example, of how our nation’s history of racism and white supremacy has been systematically ignored. Perpetuating the myths that these things didn’t happen or weren’t all that important distracts from the continuing struggle to bring about greater racial and class reconciliation.

Without confronting the past we cannot confront the present. It’s really just that simple. 

Dana Thompson Dorsey, an education professor at the University of South Florida, told the Iowa Capitol Dispatch recently: “If you’re going to say that racism can’t be discussed, or critical race theory cannot be in civics or any type of history courses, you’re saying that racism did not exist in America and does not exist in America. That’s not true.” 

“You’re going to be mis-educating students, un-educating students and not allowing them to learn the real history of the United States of America.” Dorsey stresses that real teaching about racism utilizes primary sources, the documents that detail the history. 

Do we really want to put the writings of a Fredrick Douglass or a Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., or the story of courage and struggle of a Chief Joseph off limits in American classrooms? It’s clear that this wave of punitive legislation and teacher intimidation is aimed squarely at such an outcome. 

The United States is a great, diverse, complicated country. Our collective past exhibits both glory and grief, heroism and heresy. We should not shy from grappling with the full measure of that history. 

The Constitution speaks of forming “a more perfect union.” It does not say it is already perfect. 

We study history in all its messy, contradictory, troubling, ennobling and confusing complexity because history helps us understand where we are going as people, as a society, as a country. We won’t ever get better – more perfect – by denying our past. 

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

For your consideration…a couple of other things I found of interest this week…

Time to End the Filibuster

A really good overview of the current debate in Washington about changing Senate rules. Darrell Erhlick of the Daily Montanan with good insight here.

“While the name has its roots in the 18th Century (with pirates nonetheless), the concept and practice in the United States Senate is much younger, not being implemented in a modern form until 1917. Known officially as ‘Rule 22’ in an arcane set of parliamentary rules for America’s upper legislative chamber, the rule has changed and morphed into what a panel of experts has described as a ‘minority veto’ of legislation, requiring most laws to receive 60 votes – a supermajority – rather than a simple majority of 50-plus-one.”

The Kingfish, Louisiana Senator Huey P. Long, mounted a famous filibuster

Read the full piece:

Native Tribe in Maine Buys Back Land Stolen 160 Years Ago

It’s part of a growing movement.

“It’s a spiritually important place for the tribe, filled with graves from devastating smallpox, cholera and measles outbreaks caused by white settlers.

“In 1794 it was officially granted to the tribe by Massachusetts for their service during the revolutionary war. But after 1820, when Maine became its own state, colonialists changed its title, voiding the treaty. In the 1851 census there were 20 Passamaquoddy living there, in 1861 there were none.”

From The Guardian:

A New Government in Israel. What It Means for the U.S.

“The new government will be a welcome respite for a U.S. president busy with domestic politics and eager to avoid a fight with Israel. The new prime minister, the right-wing Bennett, will be preoccupied with managing an unwieldy coalition. He’s likely to lower the temperature with Washington, temporarily subvert Netanyahu’s obsession with blocking the Iran nuclear accord, and try to refrain from provocative actions toward Palestinians certain to rile his centrist and left-wing partners and collapse the fragile government.”

From Politico:

The Bipartisan Appeal of Ted Lasso

What’s not to like…

I love the series and am glad its coming back. Apparently not everyone in Europe agrees.

“In truth, people overseas might not be as charmed by Ted Lasso as us Yanks; The Guardian panned the show last August, as did an Irish Examiner sports columnist who groused about ‘lazy American stereotyping’ and wrote that ‘this show may do more for Anglo-Irish relations at this very difficult time in our history than the Clintons ever did.’ The notion that kindness could be an American export didn’t entirely compute over the past few years—certainly not when the head of state was insulting everyone in sight.”

Fun story. Read the whole thing:

Thanks for reading. Take it easy out there.

2020 Election, Politics

Our Existential Moment…

Posted on by mjohnson

A terrifying thing about democracy facing existential crisis is that it’s entirely possible – perhaps even natural – to miss the flashing red warning lights.

We have arrived at such a moment. 

There are many and varied reasons for the American decline into tribalism, nationalism, embrace of conspiracy and profound distrust of public institutions. The important thing is that it has happened. 

A non-profit called “More in Common” has released a new report that should send shivers down the spine of every American. The organization is dedicated to battling political polarization, but it’s pushing a huge rock up a very steep hill as it attempts to make progress. 

Polls show that on many big issues from health care to climate Americans are in remarkable alignment, but our partisanship drives massive division

“Every democracy,” the group said in its report, “depends on a threshold level of trust among its citizens and in its key institutions of government, business, and civil society. Currently however, the United States falls short of that ideal.” According to the group’s research “less than one in four Americans believe the federal government, American corporations, and national media to be honest. This distrust is not limited to institutions either: fewer than two in five Americans feel ‘most people can be trusted.’” 

So, we not only distrust government, business and the media, we distrust one another. The center is not holding and the evidence, if you care to see it, is all about.

As this is written it seems almost certain that the U.S. Senate will refuse to undertake a bipartisan investigation of the deadly attack on the Congress on January 6. A proposal to form a 9-11-type commission to investigate the insurrection was approved on a bipartisan basis in the House of Representatives after a senior member of the Republican Party negotiated the details with his Democratic counterpart. This is normal. What is not normal is blocking the investigation for purely partisan reasons, which is happening in the Senate. 

The legislation that passed the House with 35 Republican votes is modeled on the commission that examined the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The leaders of that commission, Republican Tom Kean and Democrat Lee Hamilton, support of the proposal that seems destined to die in the Senate.

“The January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was one of the darkest days in the history of our country. Americans deserve an objective and an accurate account of what happened,” Kean and Hamilton said. 

A supporter of U.S. President Donald Trump carries a Confederate flag through the U.S. Capitol rotunda in Washington on Jan 6. SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images

Senate GOP Mitch McConnell’s stand in opposition has the moral equivalence of saying December 7, 1941 was no big deal, or that the politically motivated break in at the Watergate complex in 1972 was merely “a third-rate burglary.” Congress, of course, conducted extensive investigations of both events, not to mention that congressional Republicans investigated the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi for months. Why wouldn’t we want to get at the instigators of those who chanted “hang Mike Pence” on that horrible day? 

The Senate vote to investigate Watergate was 77-0.

Failure to act today in light of January 6th is simply incitement to more political violence. 

Meanwhile the steady drumbeat of conspiracy mongering about a stolen election continues unabated. Conservative legislators in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and a dozen other states are restricting voting rights. As Myrna Perez, the director of the Brennan Center’s Voting Right program says, “Rather than competing for voters, they are trying to fence some voters out and make it harder for them to vote.” 

This is a breakdown of democracy. 

In a number of states, including Idaho and Montana, lawmakers are recklessly flaunting the rule of law in pushing flagrantly unconstitutional legislation and then squandering taxpayer money trying to defend their indefensible work in front of judges who are increasingly criticized for following the law. 

This is trashing the rule of law. 

A year after a white police officer murdered George Floyd, a black man, in Minneapolis many state legislators want to prohibit teaching about racism. There were twelve mass shootings last weekend in the United States, and another earlier this week. 

This is a country in crisis yet is unwilling to deal with that crisis. 

Columnist Stuart Rothenberg correctly says that those of us who thought the fever of blind partisanship, insane fakery and grievance politics would end after a decisive presidential election were flat out wrong. In fact, Rothenberg says, things have gotten worse. “Instead of laying the ground for a more thoughtful, less partisan discussion of the challenges facing this country, the past six months have raised additional questions about our country’s future and the rule of law.” 

This is a flashing red-light moment for everyone who loves the idea of America democracy, and an especially fraught moment for people not in politics but still in positions of influence. 

Businesses, for example, need to shut off the flow of campaign cash to every single politician in both parties who won’t abide by the normal and long-established rules of political behavior. If they are spinning fantasies to keep or gain power or won’t accept election results, cut them off.

Journalism, real journalism, in all its forms is under assault, many times from bad faith actors, but also from those who want to make a quick buck trafficking in anger and grievance. Not surprisingly, reporters and editors struggle to navigate a world where a former president still has most of his supporters believing the biggest lie ever told in American politics. The one thing journalists must do in this fact-free word is to go to work every day determined to protect democracy and speak truth to power, especially to those who repeat lies that only divide.

Still, even as we are plagued with profoundly inadequate political leadership from the Potomac to Portland, we need the principled leaders we have to recognize and then address a nation at war with itself. This is a moment to double down on respect for the rule of law, protect democratic institutions and embrace civility.  

“Nothing is free, not even disillusionment,” Robert Stone wrote in an essay more than 35 years ago that he entitled “Does America Still Exist?” “God doesn’t manifest himself in history; men do,” Stone said, as he argued for Americans to live up to its ideals or admit that if we fail to do so we will have betrayed “the noblest vision of civil order and probity that this imperfect world, and the cautious optimism of Western man, will ever be capable of producing.” 

It is our existential moment. Which way do we turn? 

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

A couple of other things worth your time…

Remembering Pat Moynihan

A great Joe Klein piece in The New York Times about the public intellectual turned U.S. senator.

Pat Moynihan in 1971

“Twenty-five years later, we live in a world that was Moynihan’s nightmare: Postmodern tribes — with their own fake ‘facts’ — have gone virtual; affinity groups are organized by cable news networks and social media platforms. Cynicism about government’s ability to do anything useful abounds. It remains to be seen if Joe Biden’s postindustrial version of the New Deal — which Moynihan would have voted for enthusiastically, as it reduces inequality with a minimum of social engineering — will heal the wounds. He would, I suspect, be busily foraging for statistics to prove that tax increases have little or no impact on economic growth. Both George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton proved that (and even Ronald Reagan raised taxes when few were looking).”

Great piece…read it here:

The Unreconstructed Radical

Amid all the rightwing nonsense about “critical race theory” denying the need for examination of America’s racist roots, and the continuing reality of racism, it is good to explore history many of us don’t know.

In fact, that may be the point. So, a new biography of Thaddeus Stevens, a radical if ever there was one.

“Arguing for the disfranchisement of traitors after the Civil War, Stevens counseled a policy of no mercy. Defeating the Confederacy, he knew, meant yanking out root and branch the economic system of slavery and the racial bigotry underlying it. He warned that the failure to fully address the causes of a rebellion against democracy would sooner or later lead to its recurrence. Levine’s study of the neglected, much maligned Stevens offers an opportunity to reflect on what this country might have been—and the merest glimmer of hope for what it might still be.”

Another very good read.

Thanks for reading. Be involved. Stay engaged. All the best.

GOP, Guns, Politics

Rejecting Character…

Posted on by mjohnson

There was an almost perfect alignment on the political right this week of two seemingly disconnected issues, and where things head with both will tell us a lot about the future of the Republican Party and American democracy. 

At issue in both cases is what was once called character – moral and ethical behavior as a necessary condition for public leadership. Conservatives made a choice, whether they realized it or not, when they embraced as their leader a congenital liar with the ethics of an alley cat, and I know that is damning to alley cats everywhere. 

There are a multitude of reasons why American democracy is imperiled, but one political party abandoning character is pretty high on the causation list. 

So, two examples right now: 

In a Dallas courtroom this week a federal judge ruled that the National Rifle Association (NRA) could not use a bankruptcy proceeding to shift its operations from New York to gun friendly Texas simply in order to avoid governmental oversight. The NRA has been sued in New York in an effort by the attorney general there to shut down the powerful and powerfully corrupt outfit. 

Wayne LaPierre, executive Vice President of the National Rifle Association speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Florida, U.S. February 28, 2021. REUTERS/Joe Skipper/File Photo

“The NRA’s influence has been so powerful that the organization went unchecked for decades while top executives funneled millions into their own pockets,” New York attorney general Letitia James said when she filed the lawsuit last year. 

The Texas judge essentially agreed that the NRA defense against fraud charges was itself fraudulent. Now, as the New York litigation proceeds, we will almost certainly get a detailed look at the millions and millions of dollars of blood money that have gushed for years through the NRA, enriching charlatans like Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s chief mouthpiece. This money, ginned up by gun manufacturers and gullible Americans who have bought the fiction that any restrictions on guns is tantamount to a commie plot, has allowed an allegedly non-profit organization to make the Republican Party its wholly owned subsidiary. 

LaPierre testified during the bankruptcy proceeding, as the New York Times noted, “that he didn’t know his former chief financial officer had received a $360,000-a-year consulting contract after leaving under a cloud, or that his personal travel agent, hired by the NRA, was charging a 10 percent booking fee for charter flights on top of a retainer that could reach $26,000 a month for Mr. LaPierre’s globe-trotting travel to places like the Bahamas and Lake Como in Italy. Mr. LaPierre’s close aide, Millie Hallow, a felon, was even kept on after being caught diverting $40,000 in NRA funds for her son’s wedding and other personal expenses.” 

The judge was astounded that LaPierre had cooked up the bankruptcy ruse without consulting many top NRA executives or informing most of the organization’s board of directors. In the “all politics is local” department: former Idaho Senator Larry Craig has been on the NRA board since 1983 and a former executive director of the Idaho Republican Party has run the public relations shop at the NRA for years. Both have had front row seats on the alleged corruption. Expect to hear more about their roles. 

Almost everyone even vaguely familiar with the NRA over the last 40 years should have seen its corruption was hiding in plain sight. Lavish spending on its executives and sweetheart contracts with law and marketing firms were part of the grifting, as were the political contributions flowing to Republican candidates and doubling as protection money.

Republicans nevertheless kept cashing the NRA checks because, well, why not. And stoking anger about Democrats coming for your guns has proven to be good politics even if the weekly mass shootings are kind of difficult to explain. In other words: character be damned. 

A few hours after the fraud and corruption at the NRA was made even more obvious, Republicans in the House of Representatives sacked from her leadership position the not-so-gentlewoman from Wyoming, Liz Cheney. Cheney’s crime was, of course, to take issue with the biggest lie – and the biggest liar – in the history of American politics. Fundamentally Cheney was calling out the GOP’s abandonment of character. 

Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney speaks to reporters minutes after losing her House leadership job over her criticism of the former guy

“Remaining silent and ignoring the lie emboldens the liar,” Cheney said before her cowardly colleagues, including Idaho’s two House sissies, sent her packing on a wimpy non-recorded voice vote. “I will not participate in that,” Cheney said. “I will not sit back and watch in silence, while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law and joins the former president’s crusade to undermine our democracy.”

Cheney understands that there are bigger things at stake here than retaining political power. She’s playing a long game, hoping enough conservatives come to their senses and realize the party’s future shouldn’t involve the guy who incited an insurrection over the lie that an election was stolen. 

Lord help her. She’ll need it. 

“The pattern is striking,” Jeff Greenfield wrote recently in Politico, “if you want to survive as a Republican official, you will support the former president; if you support the former president, you will support laws that reflect his conviction that the election was stolen; if you enact those rules, you are making it more possible that he will win a second term. The party is talking with one voice; the voice is Trump’s, and it’s one that plenty of Americans are still perfectly receptive to.”

Once you accept the proposition that character is fungible, that lying to your supporters is the price to be paid for re-election and that your office in the Rayburn Building is more important than resisting an open attack on democracy, what’s left? 

In a host of ways many conservatives, maybe even most have made their deal with the devil in his many forms. In the near term the bet looks pretty good. You can fool some of the people all of the time, after all, and maybe even win back the House next year. 

In the longer run, by abandoning character, honesty and facts as the foundation blocks of democracy you’re left with a political movement that believes in nothing – except power. A Republican Party that continues to embrace the NRA and reject a Liz Cheney is precisely such a political movement. 

—–0—–

Additional Reading…

The Secret Papers of Lee Atwater, Who Invented the Scurrilous Tactics That Trump Normalized

This is a very good story by a very good reporter, Jane Mayer. I would only quibble over whether Lee Atwater “invented” his approach to politics. I argue in my latest book that he adapted his style from an even earlier group of conservative activists, but Atwater certainly perfected the scurrilous tactics.

Lee Atwater (right) with Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, three guys who helped create the anger, grievance and fear tactics that now dominate the political right

“In the nineteen-eighties, [Lee] Atwater became infamous for his effective use of smears. Probably his best-known one was tying Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, Bush’s Democratic Presidential opponent in 1988, to Willie Horton, a Black convict who went on a crime spree after getting paroled in the state. A menacing ad featuring Horton was a blatant attempt to stir fear among white voters that Dukakis would be soft on crime. At the very end of his life, Atwater publicly apologized to Dukakis for it. But Atwater’s draft memoir makes clear that he had already mastered the dark political arts as a teen-ager. In fact, it seems that practically everything Atwater learned about politics he learned in high school. It’s easy to see the future of the Republican Party in the anti-intellectual dirty tricks of his school days.”

Read the whole thing:

The Republican War Against Trans Kids

“Across the country, 33 states have introduced more than 100 bills that Chase Strangio, the deputy director for transgender justice at the ACLU, argues have a clear-cut goal in totality—’to stop people from being trans.’ Notably, the bulk of these bills focuses on kids: Some would prevent trans kids from using the restroom or locker room that corresponds with their self-identification; some would ban trans kids from participating in same-gender youth sports; others would outlaw gender-affirming health care for minors; and still others would essentially ban LGBTQ issues from being taught in classrooms. In April, the Florida state house even passed a bill that would allow for genital inspections of trans student athletes.”

Read the story here and another related piece here.

Seeking Stillness and Sunlight: On the Art of Fly-Fishing

The fishing life…

“Angling is about anticipation and planning trips far in the future, but it also has a storied history. This sport has been practiced since Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler was published in 1653, in ways that are, to the naked eye, fairly unchanged today, like a Shakespeare play performed on a thrust stage. Some people justify fly fishing with claims that it’s poetic, and, yes, there are moments of pure poetry, but the pleasures of fishing are also tactile and immediate. The theoretical considerations tend to enter my mind, sometimes against my will, when I’m not catching anything..” 

If you love to fly fish you’ll enjoy this piece. David Coggins on the fishing life. 

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.

Biden, Montana, Politics

Memo to Joe: Go West…

Posted on by mjohnson

When Joe Biden says he will govern as a president who represents all Americans, even those who did not vote for him, I take him at his word. But I also know millions of fellow Americans don’t. 

Biden’s words about wanting to be a uniter, a president who seeks and finds common ground, are surely welcome after some many months of purposeful division. But without genuine action – and by that, I mean more than policies, executive orders or even legislation – Biden’s words will ring hollow for many Americans. Many don’t believe he’s sincere because, well, we live in a deeply cynical and polarized age. 

Joe Biden’s message of unity would benefit from some one-on-one engagement with people who don’t believe he really means it

So, as a Democrat in the rural west, I offer some tough love to the new president and to his staff, a group like the staff at every White House who will all too soon become victims of inside the beltway thinking that will almost certainly short circuit the new president’s efforts at unity. Three suggestions.

Get out of the bubble. A still raging pandemic makes it difficult to travel and engage with real Americans, but Biden and the White House must find a way. Despite the pandemic, political pros like senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Jon Tester of Montana have been holding virtual town hall meetings in their states. Until he can travel, Biden should be pushing hard against a presidency that is defined exclusively on inside the beltway terms. 

If I could command the White House communication shop, I’d have Biden and vice president Kamala Harris doing weekly sessions with real people, Republicans, Democrats, independents, young and old in every region of the country. The desire to control such presidential interactions causes careful staffers to fret over a real person posing an uncomfortable question that might induce a gaffe. The hell with such thinking. Biden is at his best in small group, one-on-one situations. He’s an experienced retail politician. Empathy is his long suit. Take the shackles off and let the president mix it up with real folks, particularly including those who didn’t vote for him. 

Listen and learn. The desire to avoid risk is a huge limitation on political action and political persuasion. Every politician is expected to have a crisp, detailed and often meaningless answer to every conceivable question. But real life is more than a 12-point plan and begins, as Woody Allen famously said, with showing up, and beginning to connect. 

In pre-COVID days, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden held a all-comers town hall in every county every year. Now he’s doing them virtually

Biden and his handlers can make a virtue out of merely showing up and listening. They don’t have to have a detailed position paper on every issue. Oregon’s Wyden is particularly good at this kind of listening. He starts his town halls with a sentence or two about some big issue in the news and then listens to questions and concerns from his constituents. Often, he has a good answer, but nearly as often he will turn to a staffer and say, “we need to do some more work on this and get back to this guy.” 

The key is to listen, and of course to get back. 

Imagine if the president of this apparently hopelessly divided country would show up in a small town in the rural south or central Iowa or Bonner County, Idaho and told local county commissioners, school board members, business owners, farmers and retirees: “I want to hear what’s on your mind. I want to hear your solutions to our biggest challenges.” I think jaded Washington hands would be stunned by the power of a disarming sentence like: “I really want to know what you are worried about.”

Would Biden get some seriously awkward questions? You bet. Would it make for great television? Absolutely. Forget the big, boasting, fact-free rallies that have passed for presidential leadership for the last four years. Let’s have real Americans talk directly to the new president. There is a fair chance the country would get smarter. And Biden would begin to prove that he listens and cares, even cares about and listens to those who didn’t vote for him. 

Come West. It’s become a tired cliché, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true that broad swaths of the nation are “flyover country,” precincts seldom visited by a national politician. It’s also a truism that Democrats have suffered a deep and persistent decline in most of flyover country in large part because too many on the political left don’t care – or act like they don’t care – about the West. 

You can date much of this to the widespread and not inaccurate view that Bill Clinton (and then Barack Obama) didn’t know the West and didn’t try to learn about what they didn’t know. Donald Trump appealed to many in the West despite the fact that he hadn’t a clue about why forest fires continue to rage or that public lands are where westerners hunt, fish and recreate. Showing up and listening to the very real practical concerns in flyover country would be the beginning of understanding and the foundation on which trust might be built. 

Tester, the last significant Democrat standing in Montana, also still operates a family farm on the Hi Line, and he put a fine point on all this in his recent book Grounded.

Montana Senator Jon Tester has advice for fellow Democrats

Rural westerners, Tester writes, have “given up on whatever ‘normal’ is in politics, because that normal has failed them. The status quo ain’t working, and we ought to be listening – truly listening – to what rural America has to say about it.” 

So, twice a month Biden and his staff should pick a spot in rural America and go and listen. A good place to start would be an old railroad town 30 miles from Tester’s farm. The last president to visit Havre, Montana, the county seat of Hill County, was Harry Truman in 1952. Trump won the county with 54% of the vote last year. Tester won the same county with 58% in 2018.  

Imagine a town hall in Havre. No speeches and no malarky, as Biden might say, just real folks and real issues and real listening. The power of showing up and listening just might be the first concrete step to disarmament in our uncivil war. 

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

My weekly curation of worthy reads from here and there…

Henry Aaron

The great Aaron has always been my favorite player of the great game. He was the quintessential “all tool” player. He could hit for power and average. Run the bases. He could play defense and had a great arm. His recent death hit all baseball fans hard.

Hall of Fame in every respect

And Henry Aaron was a genuinely decent man who played brilliantly and quietly through a lot of adversity and made a tremendous contribution on and off the field.

“Aaron’s consistency is unparalleled in baseball history, and perhaps in all of North American team sports. He qualified for the batting title in each of his first 19 seasons, hit at least 24 home runs 19 seasons in a row, and scored at least 100 runs 13 times in a row. He hit .300 in 14 seasons, and he posted at least 6.0 bWAR every year from 1955 to 1969, a 15-year streak that nobody had matched before or has since.”

Great piece by Michael Baumann.

Forcing out the Fringe

Republicans struggled this week with two extremely difficult issues: what to do with a conspiracy theory believing freshman House member and what to do with a GOP leader who voted to impeach Donald Trump.

Historian Matthew Dallek provides some context for the first issue by reviewing how the GOP once distanced itself from the John Birch Society, a conspiracy theory embracing group of ultra-right loons that came to prominence in the 1950’s…and now is, sort of, back.

“By stigmatizing, punishing and outvoting the forces that wanted to burn it all down in the 1950s and 1960s, Americans ostracized them; the United States put a lid on the toxic stew of bigotry, conspiratorial thinking and White Christian identity politics, and defended democratic values like truth, equality and racial justice. It was a whole-of-society strategy, more effective than anything unfolding today. Clearly, it didn’t keep those forces at bay forever. But in the right circumstances, it could work again.”

Worth your time.

The Second Shot Proves the Vaccine is Working

Katherine Wu in The Atlantic.

“Dose No. 2 is more likely to pack a punch—in large part because the effects of the second shot build iteratively on the first. My husband, who’s a neurologist at Yale New Haven Hospital, is one of many who had a worse experience with his second shot than his first.”

Get ready…and get the vaccine when you can.

All the best…and thanks for reading.

2020 Election, Biden, Politics

Obligations of Citizenship…

Posted on by mjohnson

Given the last four years, it’s difficult to remember that there have been times when there was genuine joy in American politics. And humor. And grace. Even accomplishment.

The real American story has always been one of re-invention and an attempt, as the great Preamble says, to form “a more perfect Union” where justice will be established, domestic tranquility ensured, the common defense provided for, the general welfare promoted, and the blessings of liberty granted to ourselves and those who follow us. 

The last four years have strained to the breaking point those always aspirational goals. Strained, but not yet broken. It remains for each of us – really each and every one of us – to bind up the nation’s wounds, recommit to the essential American ideals and acknowledge that we really are all in this together. 

Joe Biden takes the oath of office

As the new American president said this week, “without unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury. No progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of chaos. This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge, and unity is the path forward.” 

In the spirit of work to do and wounds to heal, let me suggest three essential objectives for myself and for others who are willing to do the work. 

Commit to civic engagement and responsibility. I live in a very rural part of the American West, a place distant enough from a city to require individual effort to both sustain yourself and your place. Following a disastrous winter storm in 2007 – winds reached 147 miles per hour – electric power and telephone service was out for days on end. Property damage was in the millions and most people were woefully unprepared for the aftermath.

Human nature might have taken over and the seen the locals revert to form and not learn from the experience, but that didn’t happen. A committed group of local volunteers were determined to make sure the area was prepared when the next disaster struck. Powered exclusively by volunteers and with minimal governmental support an emergency volunteer corps was created, plans were made, a communication network built, supplies were stockpiled. Today nearly a dozen individual neighborhoods have their own emergency preparedness organization in place. Our neighbors recently donated several thousand dollars to acquire and store supplies, and since not everyone takes this kind of preparation seriously, we’ve made provisions to be prepared for them, too. 

It’s a small example of what it means to commit to civic engagement and responsibility and what individuals can do when they do it together. No one told these volunteers to organize. The government didn’t mandate it. Good people wanted to do a good thing because, well, they’re good people. It’s the very essence of citizenship. 

Commit to character in public life. “When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide,” the historian Barbara Tuchman wrote, “the system breaks down.” 

When the history of our times is eventually written, I suspect a very big chapter will grapple with how we chose to largely dismiss character as an essential ideal in public life. One definition of character is “moral or ethical quality,” the idea that public people behave in honorable, honest, compassionate ways. 

We don’t need to tolerate serial lying from the mouths of public officials. And accepting fables when the lies comfortably reinforce our own beliefs is nothing more than lazy self-delusion. “In a time of deceit,” George Orwell observed, “telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

Resist the temptation to dismiss all words from all public officials as untrustworthy. It’s a myth. Sure, all politicians shade and shape with language, but truth – and character – are the essentials in a society that hopes to govern itself and not descend to angry mob rule. Character really does count. Don’t tolerate people in public life that you wouldn’t welcome at your dinner table. Hold on to the reality that character counts and hold those who hold power accountable for their character.

Commit to living outside your bubble. It’s been suggested that we are living in a “post-truth era” where, as the writer Paul Valadier says, too many in positions of power and responsibility display a “shameful, cavalier attitude toward the facts and a contempt for the public.” 

Many Trump supporters cling to the fiction that the presidential election was stolen. It wasn’t

A post-truth era, should it persist, sounds the death knell for democracy. It’s a citizen’s responsibility to have more than opinions. There is also a requirement to seek and use real and honest information. As Jon Meacham, the biographer of Thomas Jefferson, wrote of the architect of so much of the American experience, “the pursuit of knowledge…coexists with the pursuit of pleasure.”

The denigration of journalists and long-established and credible news organizations is a companion tactic that amplifies the fact challenged “post-truth era.” Real journalists working to report real news, hold powerful people to account and expose corruption are guardians of democracy, not enemies of the people. 

Here’s a test for all of us struggling to find good information in this time of disinformation. The next time you visit a website or read someone’s Facebook post ask yourself a simple question: prove it. Show me your source, not just your opinion. 

One test I apply is to look for transparency. Every credible newspaper or news website – and you don’t have to agree or like everything in any publication – will offer a high degree of transparency. You can find out who owns the publication. The editors will be identified, and their contact information will be obvious. The best online sites acknowledge mistakes and make clear what they stand for. If this level of transparency isn’t obvious there is a reason for that. Think about why it doesn’t exist. 

We except a lot – too much most of the time – from our leaders. Jefferson was brilliant and flawed. Franklin Roosevelt put American citizens in relocation camps, but also led the coalition that defeated fascist tyranny. Lyndon Johnson signed a civil rights act and engineered the tragedy of Vietnam. “Presidents and vice presidents are not wizards,” Tom Nichols wrote this week. “They cannot rewind history. They cannot single-handedly make us better people.” That’s our job, each and every one of us. 

“Will we rise to the occasion, is the question,” Joe Biden said this week. “Will we master this rare and difficult hour? Will we meet our obligations and pass along a new and better world to our children?” Whatever you think of our new president and his abilities or deficiencies, he alone won’t make the country what it should be. We each have a piece of the American obligation. Let’s go back to being serious about it. 

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

A few items worth a look…

Goodbye to Donald J. Trump, the man who wanted to be Conrad Hilton but turned out to be Paris Hilton

Kevin D. Williamson pens a final, brutal kiss off to the former president in what was once considered “the Bible” of American conservatism – The National Review.

Here he goes:

“Donald Trump is, in fact, the first president since Herbert Hoover to lead his party to losing the presidency, the House, and the Senate all in a single term. Along with being the first president to be impeached twice and the first game-show host elected to the office, that’s Trump’s claim to the history books. Well, that and 400,000 dead Americans and the failed coup d’état business.”

It gets better. Link here.

After The Sacred Landslide

David Roth has been known primarily for his writing on sports, but he’s also given voice to trying to define the Trump Era in cultural and social ways. His latest:

“One of the most important things to know about Trump is that he never has a plan. He barely has an itinerary. He simply moves from one flubby gilded hustle to the next, dedicating each moment to whatever feels good or whatever he thinks looks strongest. What mess he leaves behind is by definition not his problem, and he’s always already somewhere else by the time the stain sets. Trump is used to having other people do what he says, because he is richer and more powerful than them; that people have almost always done just that has made him soft and weak and strange, but also it has seldom led to him being seriously inconvenienced. He’ll call that a win.”

Read the entire piece.

From Russia With Love

We may never know the full story of the curious case of Putin and Trump, but my instincts tell me that we will eventually have most of the details of what certainly was not “the Russian hoax.”

Orange and Bad

Luke Harding in The Guardian:

“Russia would have preferred it if Trump had won the election. Despite Joe Biden’s clearcut victory, though, the Russian leader has much to celebrate. Over four polarising years Trump accomplished many of the KGB’s longstanding goals. These included estranging the US from its western allies and Nato; deepening domestic strife; and waging a Putin-style disinformation campaign against the 2020 result.”

Link to the story here.

Paula Hawkins on Patricia Highsmith

I’m a long time fan of Patricia Highsmith and particularly her book Strangers on a Train (and the motion picture of the same name.)

Novelist Paula Hawkins has a great essay on the, well, quirky author.

“Highsmith—who had an unhappy childhood, who suffered, as an adult, from depression, anorexia and alcoholism, who was deeply misanthropic—was not as a writer particularly interested in happiness. Contentment, she suspected, was often a sign of stupidity; well-balanced people must be, at best, mediocre. Nor was she interested in the simplicity of popular morality, but was fascinated by the idea that all of us carried within us the capacity for good and ill, that identity was not fixed, but shifting, that a sort of dualism existed in all of us.”

Here’s the full piece:

A Brief History of Peanut Butter

Come on you know you want to know about this…

“Though the United States lags behind China and India in peanut harvest, Americans still eat far more of the spread than the people in any other country: It’s a gooey taste of nostalgia, for childhood and for American history. ‘What’s more sacred than peanut butter?’ Iowa Senator Tom Harkin asked in 2009, after a salmonella outbreak was traced back to tainted jars. By 2020, when Skippy and Jif released their latest peanut butter innovation—squeezable tubes—nearly 90 percent of American households reported consuming peanut butter.”

Get the full spread here.

Stay safe. Thanks for reading.

2020 Election, Politics, Terrorism

The GOP’s White Supremacy/Militia Problem…

Posted on by mjohnson

You can be forgiven if you missed a story a few weeks back that in more normal times would have received a great deal more attention. The details seem particularly important in Idaho and in the Pacific Northwest, but certainly no political figure in Idaho – or the region for that matter – has been drawing attention to the testimony of FBI director Christopher Wray. 

“Racially motivated violent extremism,” mostly from white supremacists, constitutes a majority of domestic terrorism threats, Wray testified before the House Homeland Security Committee on September 17. The FBI director also said, “We certainly have seen very active — very active — efforts by the Russians to influence our election in 2020,” specifically “to both sow divisiveness and discord, and I think the intelligence community has assessed this publicly, to primarily to denigrate Vice President Biden in what the Russians see as a kind of an anti-Russian establishment.”

The Wolverine Watchmen arrest in Michigan in an alleged plot to kidnap and try for treason Governor Gretchen Whitmer

So, the Russians are doing it again, according to the Donald Trump appointed FBI director, and violence from white supremacist groups is the most serious domestic terrorism threat. 

A few days after Wray’s testimony, and after a whistle blower complaint alleged an effort to cover up another assessment of the danger of white supremacist violence, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released its own threat assessment. “I am particularly concerned about white supremacist violent extremists who have been exceptionally lethal in their abhorrent, targeted attacks in recent years,” said acting DHS director Chad Wolf. 

Because Idaho, and the Pacific Northwest more generally, has a particularly long and ugly history dealing with white supremacy let’s focus on what the FBI and DHS say is the single biggest threat when it comes to domestic terrorism – radicalized white guys with guns.

As Seattle journalist Knute Berger wrote more than two years ago in Seattle Magazine: “The Pacific Northwest has long been a sought-after enclave for people with extreme views and utopian, or dystopian, fantasies. On the far right this has included wannabe Nazis, dating back at least to the 1930s, when fascist William Dudley Pelley of the so-called Silver Shirts declared himself America’s Hitler and ran a campaign for president from Seattle in 1936. In the ’80s and ’90s, the Nazi presence emerged with various groups in Washington and what some dubbed ‘the Fourth Reich of Idaho.’”

Most in Idaho celebrated twenty years ago when the neo-Nazi Aryan Nation’s lost a multi-million-dollar jury trial and ended up in bankruptcy. The Coeur d’Alene Press celebrated the outcome as a “victory for justice” that “corrected the misconceptions about Idaho and its people,” but that assessment now seems outdated, if not flat wrong. 

Far right agitator Ammon Bundy who led an armed takeover of a federal facility in eastern Oregon now roams Idaho at will, enjoying support from elected Republican officeholders. Bundy and some of his followers went armed recently to the Idaho Statehouse to intimidate and disrupt lawmakers. They caused physical damage but received only mild rebukes.

In August the Idaho Statesman published a long piece based on “interviews, acquired emails and letters, and a review of social media profiles” documenting the ties of various Idaho GOP elected officials “to groups like the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers and the American Redoubt movement.” The newspaper noted that “Tom Luna, chairman of the Idaho Republican Party, did not respond to requests for comment, nor did many elected officials whose ties to militia groups or extremist ideologies” who were mentioned in the story. 

Washington state representative Matt Shea, a Spokane Valley Republican and a leader in the so called Patriot Movement who has his own ties to Idaho Republicans, eventually decided not to seek re-election this year after it was disclosed that he “planned, engaged in and promoted a total of three armed conflicts of political violence against the United States Government in three states outside the state of Washington over a three-year period.” 

Former Washington state Representative Matt Shea and some of his followers

Now comes news that a militant group – the Wolverine Watchmen – plotted to kidnap and try for treason the governors of Michigan and Virginia. The FBI broke up the plot and indicted six men. “The Wolverine Watchmen are not a Second Amendment militia or constitutional patriots in any sense of the word,” says John E. Finn, an emeritus professor at Wesleyan University who has studied these groups. “If they are guilty of the charges brought against them, then they are terrorists.” 

It requires minimal dot connecting to trace the arc of presidential pronouncements – “You also had some very fine people on both sides,” Donald Trump said after the white supremacy march and deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 – to the vast increase in right wing and often white supremacist violence. The president has also repeatedly vilified Muslims and people of color, including many elected officials.

You have to wonder why it’s become so difficult for Republican elected officials to connect these dots and avoid the “both sides” whataboutism argument about these threats to democracy and order. Idaho congressman Mike Simpson fell down this rabbit hole this week in an interview with Idaho Public Television’s Marcia Franklin. 

Do you condemn white supremacy, Franklin asked Simpson? “Absolutely, absolutely,” he said, before instantly pivoting to a full-on attack on the Black Lives Matter movement and “these people” who “are out burning down our cities and stuff, that’s a problem.” 

It’s possible, indeed intellectually honest, as Simpson must know to condemn the senseless property damage of protests in Portland and elsewhere and still acknowledge that there is a profound and long overdue racial reckoning taking place in the United States. You can condemn violence, including white supremacist and “militia” violence, and still believe that racism must be addressed. No once, even in passing, did Simpson make the connection. 

Franklin twice asked the 22-year House member if it was possible Donald Trump had contributed to “this type of rhetoric and behavior.” Simpson, with more than a minor pained expression on his face, said, “I don’t think he is.” 

Then he again immediately shifted to Trumpian talking points, amplified a Fox News conspiracy theory and mispronounced the name of the woman of color running for vice president. 

“I think what emboldens these people is when they get arrested and then you have the potential vice president of the United States, Kamala Harris, and her, some of her campaign staff putting, and encouraging other people to put funds into a fund to bail these people out that are out burning down out cities, and stuff, that what encourages these people. You have to stand up to these people.” 

For the record that is a gross misrepresentation of Harris’s action, but the real point is you have to stand up to these people – unfortunately these days that means a Republican like Congressman Simpson.  

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

A few stories I’ve found of interest this week…

How Dr. Birx Screwed up the CDC

Science magazine had a detailed story this week about how Dr. Deborah Birx, the head of the White House task force charged with leading the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, undercut the work of the scientists at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

President Donald Trump watches Dr. Deborah Birx address a news conference at the White House in Washington, Tuesday, March 17, 2020. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)

I know it’s a lot to ask, but it would be nice if someone in at the highest levels of the federal government really had a plan to get us through this crisis.

“When Birx, a physician with a background in HIV/AIDS research, was named coordinator of the task force in February, she was widely praised as a tough, indefatigable manager and a voice of data-driven reason. But some of her actions have undermined the effectiveness of the world’s preeminent public health agency, according to a Science investigation. Interviews with nine current CDC employees, several of them senior agency leaders, and 20 former agency leaders and public health experts—as well as a review of more than 100 official emails, memos, and other documents—suggest Birx’s hospital data takeover fits a pattern in which she opposed CDC guidance, sometimes promoting President Donald Trump’s policies or views against scientific consensus.”

Here’s a link to the piece.

Can We Do Nuclear?

Do you believe the climate is changing? That fossil fuels contribute? What do we do to power a modern industrial economy and still respond effectively to the climate crisis?

Many people are saying, even some environmentalists, that we must double down on nuclear power. But, what about the waste? What about the dangers?

“If we cannot make headway on nuclear power — and do so democratically — there would seem to be little hope for similarly complex challenges: climate change, artificial intelligence, collapsing biodiversity, sending humans to Mars. We must end the nuclear stalemate. Whether we can is a crucial test for democracy, and for humanity.”

A provocative read here.

Black Swans, Slim Chances, and the 2020 Presidential Election

An always worthwhile read from Rebecca Solnit.

“The tricky thing about hope is to not confuse it with optimism. Optimism is confidence that you know the future and it requires nothing of you. It’s a mirror image of pessimism, which likewise assumes it knows the future, only pessimism’s future is dismal and not up to us either. Hope is a sense of possibility within the uncertainty of a future that does not yet exist, but that we are making by our actions (and yeah, those we loathe and oppose are making by theirs: case study, the ramming through of Amy Coney Barrett’s supreme court nomination and all that voter suppression).”

Read the entire piece.

Thanks for following along here. Be well.

2020 Election, Lincoln, Politics

Is America Obsolete?

Posted on by mjohnson

What if the American experiment has reached its sell by date?

What are the chances the 244-year run of “the last best hope on earth,” as Lincoln said, is not just in twilight, but already too far gone to save? 

Lincoln’s hope for the world depended on, he said, “plain, peaceful, generous, just” actions by Americans who profoundly disagreed about big issues but were still bound together by a common purpose – to be part of a country bigger and better than its differences.

The “last best hope on earth” or the end of the American story?

What if the United States of the 21st Century is not the place Lincoln thought it to be, but just too big, too diverse, too divided, its population too invested in tribal loyalties and hatred, too eager to condemn, too sure of its own righteousness and too certain of its disdain to survive? What if our 244 years of failing to really confront the original American sin of permitting, indeed encouraging, human bondage has finally visited a reckoning on us? 

What if the parallel crisis of race, pandemic, economic and climate upheaval is just too much for our inadequate leadership, our fractured social compact and our wildly differing views of reality to handle? 

What if surviving world wars, economic collapse, including a decade-long depression, a deadly pandemic a hundred years ago and the catastrophe of civil war in the 1860s was just part of a trial run for ultimate failure in the 21st Century? What if “the last best hope” isn’t? 

I confess that I have never before, even in the abstract, really considered that the end might come. The United States is, after all, as we used to tell ourselves, “the indispensable nation.” The “greatest country” on the planet. We had the biggest economy, the best health care, the most freedom. We are, or we told ourselves we were, “exceptional.” 

But now we see it was all a lie. We told ourselves stories about how great things are and we believed our own press releases. We said the American system – checks and balances, fair and free elections, holding people accountable, the “rule of law” – could be shaken from time-to-time, but would endure. The idea, we told ourselves, was that our very special Constitution would protect us from crooks and charlatans and despots. Congress would exercise its independence and hold a chief executive who got too big for the Constitution accountable. After all, Republicans told Republican Richard Nixon that the jig was up, and he had to go. The system worked. Back then. 

What is really in the American DNA?

Not to worry, we convinced ourselves, American ideals, perhaps never fully realized, like the “all men are created equal” language not really applying to all persons, would still, by hook or crook, prevail.

We got this covered we assured ourselves. A momentary blip in the body politic and before you know it, we’ll be back on the path to perfecting “a more perfect union.” But we aren’t on that path. Our current path is down a long, dark alley were division and discord seem to be the only truly exceptional things about the country. 

As Thomas Geoghegan recently put it perfectly: “we are at a moment like the one the country faced in 1932 – there is not just fear and uncertainty and a sense of being unmoored but also the doubt that our form of government is capable of coping. In a way it is even worse: unlike in 1932, the plot against America is already in full swing, and we as a people are even more uncertain of who we are.” 

A thing to remember about the United States is that it’s just an idea, and an idea built on a very flimsy foundation. It’s not the laws and the Constitution that ultimately matter, but rather that people – citizens and their leaders – will decide, even when it means acting against immediate self-interest, that they will still act in good faith. The idea is that respect for the norms of a democratic society will be observed and that decency will ultimately prevail, even if observing the norms and behaving decently mean that my side is going to lose some of the time. How obsolete that seems today. 

If America is not to pass away into something Lincoln would not recognize, that Franklin Roosevelt would find repugnant, that General and President Eisenhower would reject, we need to recapture a shared sense of national purpose. 

We can begin with a fundamental question. What do we really stand for? It’s not that we stand for any one president or any one political position, but what is really in the American DNA? 

The Catholic scholar Thomas Levergood takes me back to my own belief in my church’s social message, which is to search for and find “the common good.” Levergood recently defined the idea in an essay in the Jesuit journal America: “In a specific sense a common good refers to something that can only be shared in common and cannot be divided in pieces and be possessed by individuals or smaller groups. It is a common end achieved through common actions.”

Levergood continues: “It is in plain view that many of our fellow citizens are so frustrated with our political system that they have fallen for populist rhetoric to condemn all ‘politicians’ or government itself as evil. (Others are taking out their frustrations by tearing down statues.) This situation derives not from bad ideas or faults in the American people but rather from lacking the common good of a functioning political system.” 

We fix what ails America and avoid obsolescence by rededicating ourselves as citizens to creating a functioning political system that aims squarely at the common good, not what’s good for a Republican or a Democrat, a socialist or a libertarian, a conservative or a liberal, but an American. 

Deirdre Schifeling, who heads an organization dedicated to expanding voting rights, recently told The Guardian she believes this election marks a tipping point in America, a moment in which the country, having been jolted out of its complacency, will rebound. “Faith in our democracy is at an all-time low and that is very dangerous. Now the work begins on fixing it.”

Let’s hope she’s right. And let’s find our common purpose before it’s too late. 

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

A collection of pieces I found of interest this week and I hope you will, too.

130 degrees

The climate crisis came home to us in western Oregon this week. The worst and most deadly fires in recorded memory destroyed homes and businesses and brought death – not to mention vast layers of smoke – to often wet and green Oregon.

If you any longer think that climate change is a hoax, I have some air for you to breath on the north coast. And then read this piece by Bill McKibben in the New York Review of Books. Absolutely frightening.

Drought, high temps, wind and fuel load have made fires disastrous in Oregon

“Depending on the study, the risk of ‘very large fires’ in the western US rises between 100 and 600 percent; the risk of flooding in India rises twenty-fold. Right now the risk that the biggest grain-growing regions will have simultaneous crop failures due to drought is ‘virtually zero,’ but at four degrees ‘this probability rises to 86%.’ Vast ‘marine heatwaves’ will scour the oceans: “One study projects that in a four-degree world sea temperatures will be above the thermal tolerance threshold of 100% of species in many tropical marine ecoregions.” The extinctions on land and sea will certainly be the worst since the end of the Cretaceous, 65 million years ago, when an asteroid helped bring the age of the dinosaurs to an end.

Quite a legacy to live to the kids and grandkids. Read it all here.

The Truth is Paywalled, the Lies are Free

Nathan J. Robinson, writing in Current Affairs, has a really good and provocative piece on access to information. He notes that quality sources of information – the New York Times, Washington Post, New York Review, Times of London, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, among others – have their content (for the most part) behind a “paywall,” while “Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the Washington Examiner, InfoWars” are free!

You do get what you pay for (this site not withstanding).

Robinson is really arguing for a system of uniform, free access to all kinds of content that doesn’t screw over the producers of the content. Worth your time.

Joey Biden, He Could Really Talk

The late Richard Ben Cramer wrote what political junkies (like me) consider the best presidential campaign book – ever – called What it Takes.

It might just be the best political book ever. Cramer focused on the candidates who ran for president in 1988, including a guy named Joe Biden.

Trust me, it’s worth your time.

“Joe did not stutter all the time. At home, he almost never stuttered. With his friends, seldom. But when he moved to Delaware, there were no friends. There were new kids, a new school, and new nuns to make him stand up and read in class: that’s when it always hit—always always always. When he stood up in front of everybody else, and he wanted, so much, to be right, to be smooth, to be smart, to be normal, j-j-ju-ju-ju-ju-jus’th-th-th-th-then!

“Of course, they laughed. Why wouldn’t they laugh? He was new, he was small, he was … ridiculous … even to him. There was nothing wrong. That’s what the doctors said.

“So why couldn’t he talk right?” Read the excerpt here.

She laid waste to a “dozen-odd writers and artists

I really loved this piece in the London Review of Books, a book review really of works by and about Maeve Brennan, a long-time writer for The New Yorker. It was said Brennan “could stop traffic” and was the inspiration for Truman Capote’s character Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. 

An iconic photo of the writer Maeve Brennan by Carl Bissinger

“At the New Yorker, with her ‘longshoreman’s mouth’ and ‘tongue that could clip a hedge’, she made her opinions known. Daphne du Maurier was ‘witless’, Jean Stafford her ‘bête noire’. Brennan immediately set her sights on grander things than the fashion notes and short reviews she’d been hired to write. In 1952, her first story appeared; two years later, she had a piece in ‘The Talk of the Town’, the section of the magazine over which [William] Shawn kept the tightest of reins. Brennan’s male colleagues, including [the cartoonist Charles] Addams, Joseph Mitchell and Brendan Gill (all of them her lovers at one time or another), joked that she had served her apprenticeship in hemlines. But it was the ability to spot the difference between ‘beige’ and ‘bone’ at fifty yards that made her a natural diarist. John Updike said her ‘Talk of the Town’ pieces ‘helped put New York back into the New Yorker’.”

Good stuff.

Thanks for reading. If you know someone who might be interested in these weekly posting please let me know or have them sign up at the website.

Stay safe. Be well.

2020 Election, Politics

The Death of Shame…

Posted on by mjohnson

Shame, that old political equalizer, had a good long run. But shame is dead, killed off by a political culture of anything goes, particularly if my side is doing it.

Shame died, as well, because we have embraced a culture of lying in public matters. There is no shame without truth.

The notion that certain acts, certain universally condemned behaviors, would so shame, so embarrass a public official, rocking and even ruining a career, is now such an old-fashioned concept as to be irrelevant. 

Just in the last couple of weeks, shame was knifed in a dozen different ways. One of my favorites was pointed out by the conservative writer Tim Miller who offered a succinct assessment of the “debate team” preparing Donald Trump for his one-on-one match ups with Joe Biden. 

Trump’s team consists of former governor Chris Christie; Jared Kushner, the presidential son-in-law; Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien and political advisor Jason Miller. “A motley crew,” as Miller correctly noted. “The first put the second guys dad in jail and made the 3rd guy the fall man for their joint corruption. The 4th guy was kept out of the White House over a hooker scandal.” 

Make America Shame Again. 

Or how about the president’s much ballyhooed “executive orders” that came in the wake of a breakdown in congressional efforts to extend unemployment benefits, forestall evictions and allocate more money to fighting COVID-19. The executive orders, which really were just memos to the file, Trump said, “will take care of, pretty much, this entire situation,” notwithstanding the president has no authority to do much of what he was claiming to do.  

The sheer audacity of the claim, false on its face and laughably shameful was endorsed by nearly every Republican, including Idaho congressman Mike Simpson. Simpson is a particularly troubling case in the annals of the demise of shame. 

He’s an appropriator in the House, one of the top members on the committee that actually determines how your tax dollars are spent, a guy who once jealously guarded his role in a co-equal branch of government. 

Simpson, rather than push back against what Nebraska Republican Ben Sasse immediately called “unconstitutional slop,” praised Trump on Twitter “for taking action to help those who need it most. People are struggling to make ends meet.” Simpson threw in a gratuitous swipe at Nancy Pelosi for good measure, accusing the speaker of the House of not coming “to the table seriously.” 

All politicians are given to the partisan excesses of mischaracterizing the opposition, but Simpson’s claim would warrant serious shaming if shaming of any kind were still in vogue. Simpson effectively praised Trump’s unworkable collection of memos, while slamming a Democrat who passed legislation weeks ago to address the very issues Simpson praised the president for failing to address. The Republican Senate, of course, has refused to take up the House passed legislation. 

Shame died a thousand ways. 

One-time Idaho senator Larry Craig was so shamed by his 2007 arrest in a men’s room in the Minneapolis airport for playing footsy with a guy who turned out to be a cop that Craig said he would resign his position, and then he didn’t. 

Bill Clinton shamed the presidency, but Clinton weaseled and waffled and refused to acknowledge the definition of shame. Richard Nixon disgraced the presidency, too, but had the good grace to actually resign amid his shame. Funny, Nixon is looking better and better. 

In Montana, the state Republican Party recently, blatantly and shamelessly, connived to circulate petitions to get Green Party candidates on the ballot for one crass reason: they hope Green Party candidates will siphon off votes from Democrats. A Montana judge ruled the caper illegal saying, “The actions of the Montana GOP and its agents demonstrate that its misrepresentations and failures to disclose in violation of Montana campaign finance law were intentionally designed to create an advantage for the Montana GOP at the expense of unwitting signers.”

The idea of being so completely and publicly shamed was once reason enough for such sleazy political hijinks to be avoided. But shame, sadly, is dead. Meanwhile, the Montana Republican Party is appealing. 

Trump supporting Republican operatives in Wisconsin have been helping Kanye West’s attempt to get on the ballot there as a presidential candidate. They apparently think the addled rapper will draw Black voters from Joe Biden. The cynicism of such a move is trumped only by its blatant disregard of any level of honor or decency. When winning is all you care about the shame of being disreputable is merely an inconvenience. 

An Idaho state senator made national headlines this week when he advocated a measure to prohibit the state’s public health districts from closing schools. “Listening to experts to set policy is an elitist approach and I’m very fearful of an elitist approach,” Republican Steven Thayn said. “I’m also fearful that it leads to totalitarianism, especially when you say, ‘Well. We’re doing it for the public good.’”

Once such spectacular stupidity – Idaho Statesman opinion editor Scott Mcintosh called it “one of the dumbest yet most telling statements ever made by an Idaho politician” – would have led to calls for Thayn’s resignation, or he might have been shamed by the laughter associated with any mention of his name. But without shame such mental giants just roll on. 

Shame made a brief, but undoubtedly fleeting comeback, in the case of Jerry Falwell, Jr., the once and almost certain future president of Liberty University. Falwell, a huge Trump supporter among the white evangelicals who embrace the president, bounded into the news recently with his pants unzipped, holding a drink, with his arm around a woman not his wife. Falwell first tried to explain away conduct that had he been a student could have gotten him expelled from his own school. Falwell took an extended leave of absence. 

It wasn’t Falwell’s first flirtation with unseemliness. As the conservative writer David French pointed out: “It’s easy to get inoculated against outrageous public conduct in the age of Trump, but even by the new standards, Falwell’s public conduct was simply extraordinary for a Christian leader.” 

But don’t count Falwell out just yet. Shame is dead. It had a good run. 

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

Some other stories that you may find of interest…

The Unraveling of America

Anthropologist Wade Davis – he teaches at the Univeristy of British Columbia – assesses the end of the American era. From Rolling Stone:

“The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the very idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone. All must be prepared to fight for everything: education, shelter, food, medical care. What every prosperous and successful democracy deems to be fundamental rights — universal health care, equal access to quality public education, a social safety net for the weak, elderly, and infirmed — America dismisses as socialist indulgences, as if so many signs of weakness.” 

Insightful…and depressing. Read the whole piece.

The Long Hollowing Out of the American Middle Class

Almost a companion piece here from Jim Tankersley, a tax and economics reporter for the New York Times, who has a new book on what has happened to the middle class in America. Here’s an excerpt: 

“The brutality of the financial crisis and its aftermath has obscured, in retrospect, just how lousy the preceding decade was for American workers. Even before the crisis hit, the 2000s had produced the slowest job growth, in percentage terms, of any decade since the 1930s. From January 2000 through the eve of the crisis, in late 2007, the country shed a fifth of its manufacturing jobs—more than 3.5 million of them.

“North Carolina lost nearly a third of its factory jobs in that time. The recession made it worse: by the summer of 2013, there were almost 400,000 fewer North Carolinians working in factories than there had been two decades before. The share of the state’s workers who held manufacturing jobs had been cut in half.”

Read the full piece. 

The Biggest Trump Financial Mystery? Where He Came Up With the Cash for His Scottish Resorts.

Russ Choma writes in Mother Jones about one more Trump mystery:

“His large expenditures in Scotland were notable because they came during a rocky financial stretch for Trump. The year before purchasing the Aberdeenshire estate, he was ousted as CEO of his thrice-bankrupted casino business; in 2008, he defaulted on a large Deutsche Bank loan tied to a development in Chicago.

“Like other Trump wagers, his Scottish gamble has so far not worked out. Both resorts are bleeding millions annually.”

Outstanding reporting. Spoiler alert: Some in Scotland suspect money laundering.

Read the full piece.

The Night Manager

A break from pandemics and American politics for a little illegal Middle Eastern arms sales.

Just finished watching the TV adaptation of John le Carre’s novel The Night Manager. It’s really good.

Now streaming on Amazon.

Thanks for following along. Stay well.

Iraq, Politics, Trump

Thank You For Your Service

Posted on by mjohnson

For decades the national Republican Party literally owned the political debate over national security issues. Polls repeatedly indicated that American voters trusted Republicans more to properly handle military and foreign policy.Republicans ruthlessly — and occasionally shamelessly — exploited this advantage.

In his 1976 vice presidential debate with Walter Mondale, Republican Bob Dole infamously referred to “Democrat wars” and then he denied he had said it. “I figured up the other day,” Dole really did say. “If we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, it would be about 1.6 million Americans, enough to fill the city of Detroit.”

Walter Mondale and Bob Dole debate in 1976.

The implication was clear, if altogether sleazy: Democrats caused wars and Republicans prevented them. That logic mostly held until George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 on what turned out to be false pretenses. We still have troops there, but they long ago gave up searching for weapons of mass destruction.

Polls now show that Americans are tired of what the president calls “endless wars,” which predicated his slipshod decisions of the last month to abandoned longtime Kurdish allies and create a foreign policy in the Middle East that changes hour-by-hour, based on the latest Twitter messages from the White House.

Republicans once owned the “we support the troops” trope as well, even if they occasionally slimed an opponent with a service record. You could at this point Google “swiftboating” or just remember a U.S. senator from Georgia by the name of Max Cleland.

Cleland was a wheelchair-confined Vietnam veteran who was elected to the Senate in 1996. He lost an arm and both legs at age 25 when another soldier’s hand grenade exploded near him. He was awarded a Bronze Star and a Silver Star and spent much of his Senate career working on veterans and security issues. When Cleland ran for reelection in 2002 his Republican opponent, a nonentity named Saxby Chambliss, broadcast one of the sleaziest attack ads in recent political history.

Georgia Democrat Max Cleland lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam. Republicans attacked him for being soft on national defense.

Cleland, the veteran without legs and missing one arm thanks to his service to the nation, was depicted in the ad along with photos of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. The message: The Democrat was “soft” on national security. John McCain was one of the few Republicans to condemn the slander, calling it “worse than disgraceful. It’s reprehensible.”

Cleland lost.

Still, Republicans continued to claim the mantle of support for veterans, at least until Donald Trump shredded all pretense of trying to uphold that fiction.It was a remarkable moment this week when a combat veteran of five deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, a career military officer with a master’s degree from Harvard who has also served abroad in three different U.S. embassies and on the staff of the Joint Chiefs, came to Capitol Hill.

By now everyone knows that Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman, who at age 3 emigrated from Ukraine with his parents, actually listened to the now infamous telephone call Trump held in July with the president of Ukraine.

Vindman confirmed, according to his written testimony, that Trump sought help from a foreign government to collect dirt on a U.S. citizen and political opponent. Vindman also confirmed what many suspected, the public version of the White House “transcript” of the call was incomplete.

Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman arrives on Capitol Hill to offer testimony about “the call” with the president of Ukraine.

Trump signaled in his very stable genius Twitter account that the military officer assigned to his National Security Council staff, who is the council’s Ukraine expert, was a nonentity who the president had never met, but was nonetheless branded “Never Trump.”

The Trumpian universe of apologists, enablers and sycophants took the cue and within minutes Vindman, who was wounded in Iraq, was trashed as an unworthy immigrant, a man with, as former GOP Congressman Sean Duffy said on CNN, “an affinity for the Ukraine, he speaks Ukrainian, and he came from the country, and he wants to make sure they’re safe and free.”

Or put another way, a guy who has chosen to make his career one of service to the United States, who has a twin brother who is also an Army colonel, who is an expert on that volatile piece of the globe, is somehow because he’s an immigrant a suspect patriot. And because Vindman believes the president acted improperly, he’s suitable to attack.

The reprehensible Laura Ingraham, a Fox News Trump toady of the first order, went even farther and without a scintilla of evidence. “Here we have a U.S. national security official who is advising Ukraine while working inside the Ukraine, apparently against the president’s interest. … Isn’t that kind of an interesting angle to this story?”

Ingraham’s guest, a lawyer named John Yoo, who will be remembered, if at all, for authoring the memos providing legal justification for George W. Bush’s “enhanced interrogation” methods, suggested Vindman might somehow be involved in “espionage.”

In fairness to Yoo, which is more than he offered a decorated military officer, he later tried to walk back his comments, saying they had been deliberately misconstrued. (Yoo also misspelled the colonel’s name three times in his statement, but then little mistakes are inevitable when you slander on the fly.)

For Trump, the American military is just another prop, convenient for a photo op or to soak up the deference the military affords any president. It’s the individual accomplishment and sacrifice he disparages and the list of people who have served that have received his insults is as long as his own military record is short.

No one in the Idaho congressional delegation — to a man deeply concerned about due process for the president — rose this week to defend a military man slimed in the rightwing echo chamber. And we’ll almost certainly see most Republican officeholders quietly go along with these outrages because that’s what they do in the Age of Trump.

Trump is like many Americans who enjoy the little rituals that indicate we support the troops. We gladly let them board a flight first and maybe even mutter “thank you for your service.” But most of us are as removed from Americans in uniform as Trump is from the bone spurs that kept him from Vietnam.

Trump — and most of his followers — value “the troops” in the abstract; it’s the reality of the principled, ethical Gen. Jim Mattis, or Gen. H.R. McMaster, Sen. John McCain, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Ambassador William Taylor or Lt. Col. Vindman that they hate.