Whereof One Can Speak 🇺🇦

Nothing special, one post at a time since 2012

Monthly Archives: August 2022

How Democracy May Survive the Constitution

Posted on by

Among our democracy’s enemies, foreign or domestic, is a document ratified in 1789: the United States Constitution. The power the Constitution gives to the states, its provisions that favor minority rule, and the difficulty of amending it may allow the Republican Party to institute authoritarian, one-party rule, all the while claiming to respect “the supreme law of the land”. 

Two law professors, Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn, argue that it’s time to do something about our broken Constitution: 

When liberals lose in the Supreme Court — as they increasingly have over the past half-century — they usually say that the justices got the Constitution wrong. But struggling over the Constitution has proved a dead end. The real need is not to reclaim the Constitution, as many would have it, but instead to reclaim America from constitutionalism.

The idea of constitutionalism is that there needs to be some higher law that is more difficult to change than the rest of the legal order. Having a constitution is about setting more sacrosanct rules than the ones the legislature can pass day to day. Our Constitution’s guarantee of two senators to each state is an example. And ever since the American founders were forced to add a Bill of Rights to get their handiwork passed, national constitutions have been associated with some set of basic freedoms and values that transient majorities might otherwise trample.

But constitutions — especially the broken one we have now — inevitably orient us to the past and misdirect the present into a dispute over what people agreed on once upon a time, not on what the present and future demand for and from those who live now. This aids the right, which insists on sticking with what it claims to be the original meaning of the past.

Arming for war over the Constitution concedes in advance that the left must translate its politics into something consistent with the past. But liberals have been attempting to reclaim the Constitution for 50 years — with agonizingly little to show for it. It’s time for them to radically alter the basic rules of the game.

In making calls to regain ownership of our founding charter, progressives have disagreed about strategy and tactics more than about this crucial goal. Proposals to increase the number of justices, strip the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction to invalidate federal law or otherwise soften the blow of judicial review frequently come together with the assurance that the problem is not the Constitution; only the Supreme Court’s hijacking of it is. And even when progressives concede that the Constitution is at the root of our situation, typically the call is for some new constitutionalism.

Since the Supreme Court began to drift right in the 1970s, liberals have proposed better ways of reading the Constitution. [Meanwhile,] the conservative Federalist Society engaged in a successful attempt to remake constitutional law by brainstorming ideas, creating networks of potential judges and eventually helping to guide the selection of President D____ T____’s nominees…. With the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the consolidation of right-wing control of constitutional law and the overturning of Roe and other disasters this term — the damage has only worsened.

One reason for these woeful outcomes is that our current Constitution is inadequate, which is why it serves reactionaries so well. Starting with a text that is famously undemocratic, progressives are forced to navigate hard-wired features, like the Electoral College and the Senate, designed as impediments to redistributive change while drawing on much vaguer and more malleable resources like commitments to due process and equal protection — resources that a conservative Supreme Court has used over the years to invalidate things like abortion rights and child labor laws and might use in the coming term to prohibit affirmative action.

Sometimes reclaiming the Constitution is presented as a much-needed step toward empowering the people and their elected representatives. In a new book, the law professors Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath urge progressives to stop treating constitutional law as an “autonomous” domain, “separate from politics.” In contrast with earlier efforts among liberals, which, as Jedediah Purdy put it in a 2018 Times guest essay, put forward a “vivid picture of what judges should do with the power of the courts,” such exercises in progressive constitutionalism call on Congress and other nonjudicial actors to claim some amount of authority to interpret the Constitution for themselves

It is a breath of fresh air to witness progressives offering bold new proposals to reform courts and shift power to elected officials. But even such proposals raise the question: Why justify our politics by the Constitution or by calls for some renovated constitutional tradition? It has exacted a terrible price in distortion and distraction to transform our national life into a contest over reinterpreting our founding charter consistently with what majorities believe now.

No matter how openly political it may purport to be, reclaiming the Constitution remains a kind of anti-politics. It requires the substitution of claims about the best reading of some centuries-old text or about promises said to be already in our traditions for direct arguments about what fairness or justice demands.

It’s difficult to find a constitutional basis for abortion or labor unions in a document written by largely affluent men more than two centuries ago. It would be far better if liberal legislators could simply make a case for abortion and labor rights on their own merits without having to bother with the Constitution.

By leaving democracy hostage to constraints that are harder to change than the rest of the legal order, constitutionalism of any sort demands extraordinary consensus for meaningful progress. It conditions democracy in which majority rule always must matter most on surviving vetoes from powerful minorities that invoke the constitutional past to obstruct a new future.

After failing to get the Constitution interpreted in an egalitarian way for so long, the way to seek real freedom will be to use procedures consistent with popular rule. It will not be easy, but a new way of fighting within American democracy must start with a more open politics of altering our fundamental law, perhaps in the first place by making the Constitution more amendable than it is now.

In a second stage, though, Americans could learn simply to do politics through ordinary statute rather than staging constant wars over who controls the heavy weaponry of constitutional law from the past. If legislatures just passed rules and protected values majorities believe in, the distinction between “higher law” and everyday politics effectively disappears.

One way to get to this more democratic world is to pack the Union with new states. Doing so would allow Americans to then use the formal amendment process to alter the basic rules of the politics and break the false deadlock that the Constitution imposes through the Electoral College and Senate on the country, in which substantial majorities are foiled on issue after issue.

More aggressively, Congress could simply pass a Congress Act, reorganizing our legislature in ways that are more fairly representative of where people actually live and vote, and perhaps even reducing the Senate to a mere “council of revision” (a term Jamelle Bouie used to describe the Canadian Senate), without the power to obstruct laws.

In so doing, Congress would be pretty openly defying the Constitution to get to a more democratic order — and for that reason would need to insulate the law from judicial review. Fundamental values like racial equality or environmental justice would be protected not by law that stands apart from politics but — as they typically are — by ordinary expressions of popular will. And the basic structure of government, like whether to elect the president by majority vote or to limit judges to fixed terms, would be decided by the present electorate, as opposed to one from some foggy past.

A politics of the American future like this would make clear our ability to engage in the constant reinvention of our society under our own power, without the illusion that the past stands in the way.

If Only We Were Nicer

Posted on by

3 Quarks Daily is a good place to visit for online intellectual stimulation. They publish original content on Mondays; the rest of the week they link to articles on “science, arts, philosophy, politics, literature”. Even the (moderated) comments are often worth reading. Unfortunately, somebody at 3 Quarks likes to share articles that purport to explain or address political polarization.

If you’ve visited sites like 3 Quarks or read prestigious publications like The New York Times or The Atlantic, you’ve probably run into Jonathan Haidt. He’s an American social psychologist who writes lots of articles and books like The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. The 3 Quarks Daily’s search function turns up almost 60 links to things by him or that mention him (going back to 2004).

There was another one this morning: “The Polarization Spiral” by him and a co-author. The subtitle is: “How the Right’s Monomania and the Left’s Great Awokening Feed Each Other”.

The best way to read this piece — if you’re inclined — is to skip to the end and savor the conclusion:

The polarization spiral, which is fed and accelerated by social media, is making extremists on both right and left more extreme, more powerful, and more intimidating. Both sides feed off of each other. Both sides are essential for a polarization spiral. And that means that neither side can win by attacking or humiliating the other side. Such tactics only serve to energize the other side.

It’s a classic “both sides” analysis. If only those far left extremists on Twitter and Facebook would calm down, stop criticizing well-meaning people so much and in particular stop saying nasty things about right-wingers, we wouldn’t have such polarization in this country. The right wouldn’t care that America is becoming less homogeneous, less patriarchal and less Christian. They wouldn’t feel the need to make minority rule permanent or launch the occasional coup. No more gun worship or right-wing terrorism, no more teenage girls forced to give birth, no more pervasive lies, no more demonization of immigrants from “shithole” countries, no skepticism about the climate crisis. Hell, we could even have universal healthcare!

In other words, there would be much less polarization if only we were less judgmental. You can’t argue with that.

What the Hell Is Their Problem?

Posted on by

I mean, what’s going on with these people?

Theda Skocpol, a sociologist and political scientists, explains the roots of right-wing resentment in America in this interview from The Atlantic:

Starting in 2008, a widely circulated conspiracy theory was that Barack Obama was not actually born in America…. Proof of this theory was never a requirement for subscribing to it; you could simply choose to believe that a Black liberal with a Muslim-sounding middle name was not one of us….

The country has not changed much…. Now, as then, you can take the right’s scramble for evidence of fraud with a grain of salt, she told me. The election deniers who say they are perturbed by late-night ballot dumps or dead people voting are actually concerned with something else.

“‘Stop the Steal’ is a metaphor,” Skocpol said, “for the country being taken away from the people who think they should rightfully be setting the tone.” More than a decade later, evidence remains secondary when what you’re really doing is questioning whose vote counts—and who counts as an American…..

Elaine Godfrey: Tell me what connection you see between the Tea Party movement that you studied and the T____-inspired Stop the Steal effort.

Theda Skocpol: There’s a definite line. Opinion polls tell us that people who participated in or sympathized with the Tea Party … were disproportionately angry about immigration and the loss of America as they know it. They became core supporters of T____. I’m quite certain that some organizations that were Tea Party–labeled helped organize Stop the Steal stuff.

T____ has expanded the appeal of an angry, resentful ethno-nationalist politics to younger whites. But it’s the same outlook.

Godfrey: So how do you interpret the broader Stop the Steal movement?

Skocpol: I don’t think Stop the Steal is about ballots at all. I don’t believe a lot of people really think that the votes weren’t counted correctly in 2020. They believe that urban people, metropolitan people—disproportionately young and minorities, to be sure, but frankly liberal whites—are an illegitimate brew that’s changing America in unrecognizable ways and taking it away from them. Stop the Steal is a way of saying that. Stop the Steal is a metaphor. And remember, they declared voting fraud before the election.

Godfrey: A metaphor?

Skocpol: It’s a metaphor for the country being taken away from the people who think they should rightfully be setting the tone. [Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate] Doug Mastriano said it in so many words: It’s a Christian country. That doesn’t mean we’ll throw out everybody else, but they’ve got to accept that we’re the ones setting the tone. That’s what Hungary has in mind. Viktor Orbán has been going a little further. They’re a more muscular and violence-prone version of the same thing.

People [in Wisconsin] in 2016 who were otherwise quite normal would say, There’s something wrong with those votes from Milwaukee and Madison. I’d push back ever so gently and say, Those are big places; it takes a while to count the votes. I’d get a glassy-eyed stare at that point: No, something fishy is going on.

They feel disconnected from and dominated by people who have done something horrible to the country. And T____ gave voice to that. He’s a perfect resonant instrument for that—because he’s a bundle of narcissistic resentments. But he’s no longer necessary.

Godfrey: Elaborate on that for me.

Skocpol: He’s not necessary for an authoritarian movement to use the [Republicans] to lock in minority rule. The movement to manipulate election access and counting is so far along. I think it’s too late, and we’re vulnerable to it because of how we administer local elections.

What’s happened involves an interlocking set of things. It depends not just on candidates like T____ running for president and nationalizing popular fears and resentments, but also on state legislatures, which have been captured, and the Supreme Court. The Court is a keystone in all of this because it’s going to validate … manipulations that really are about locking in minority rule. In that sense, the turning point in American history may have happened in November 2016.

Godfrey: The turning point toward what?

Skocpol: Toward a locking-in of minority rule along ethno-nationalist lines. The objective is to disenfranchise metro people, period. I see a real chance of a long-term federal takeover by forces that are determined to maintain a fiction of a white, Christian, T____pist version of America.

That can’t work over the long run, because the fastest-growing parts of the country are demonized in that scheme of things. But a lot of things liberals do play into it: Democrats are the party of strong government, and they’re almost as fixated on the presidency as T____ists are…. The hour is late. This election this fall is critical.

Godfrey: Why so?

Skocpol: We’ve got about five pivotal states where election deniers—the culmination of the Tea Party–T____pist strand of the [Republican Party]—are close to gaining control of the levers of voting access and counting the results. If that happens, in even two of those places, it could well be enough. The way courts are operating now, they will not place limits on much of anything that happens in the states.

Godfrey: So what would you say is on the ballot in 2022?

Skocpol: The locking-in of minority authoritarian rule.

People talk about it in racial terms, and of course the racial side is very powerful. We had racial change from the 1960s on, and conservative people are angry about Black political power. But I wouldn’t underestimate the gender anger that’s channeled here: Relations between men and women have changed in ways that are very unsettling to them…..

This is directed at liberal whites, too. Tea Partiers talked about white people in college towns who voted Democratic the way the rulers of Iran would speak of Muslims that are liberal—as the near-devil.

Godfrey: What are the roots of that resentment?

Skocpol: The suspicion of cities and metro areas is a deep strand in America. In this period, it’s been deliberately stoked and exploited by people trying to limit the power of the federal government. They can build on the fears that conservatives have—about how their children leave for college and come back thinking differently. As soon as you get away from the places where upper-middle-class professionals are concentrated, what you see is decay. People see that. They’re resentful of it.

Anti-immigrant politics is very much at the core of this. Every time in the history of the U.S., when you reach the end of a period of immigration, you get a nativist reaction. When the newcomers come, they’re going to destroy the country. That’s an old theme in this country.

Godfrey: The 2016 election was surrounded by a lot of discussion about whether T____’s supporters were motivated by racism or economic anxiety. What’s your view on that?

Skocpol: That whole debate tends to be conducted with opinion polls. I’m in a minority, but I don’t find them very helpful for understanding American politics…. In American politics, everything is about the where.

If you drive into a place in Iowa or Nebraska where immigration is happening, it’s changed the shops downtown, it’s changed the language, it’s changed the churches, it’s changed the schools. And people’s jobs have changed—so it’s also about economics. In our 2011 interviews, Tea Party members were angry about immigrants. I’m not saying everybody in those communities is angry at newcomers, but it creates tensions that rabble-rousing politicians can take advantage of.

We know that T____ supporters, Stop the Steal supporters, are much more likely than other Republicans and conservatives to resent immigrants and fear them. In my 2017–2019 period of research, I visited eight pro-T____ counties. Tea Party types were just furious about immigrants. T____’s emphasis on immigration interjected the idea that the debate is about what the nature of America is.

T____ism is nativism. It’s also profoundly resentful of independent women, and it’s resentful of Black people whom it considers out of place politically. T____channeled that and fused it into one big, angry brew.

Godfrey: How organic have these movements been? At a certain point, we heard a lot about how the Tea Party movement became a Koch-funded operation, not a true grassroots movement.

Skocpol: The Tea Party was not created by the Koch brothers; it was taken advantage of by the Kochs. But the Kochs were not anti-immigrant. The Tea Partiers really were. The Kochs didn’t control the results. The Kochs didn’t select D____ T____. They didn’t even like him. Marco Rubio was their guy. The Chamber of Commerce crowd wanted a Bush. Both were easily dispatched by T____.

Republican leaders could have done something—and they still could. The real story is about Republican Party elites and their willingness to go along with what they’ve always known was over the top. That’s a mystery that’s a little hard to completely solve. A lot of the opportunists think they can ride that tiger without it devouring them, even though sometimes it does. But nobody seems to learn…..

Flooding the Zone with Bullshit

Posted on by

All politicians lie. So do the rest of us. What separates our two main political parties is that only one of them lies a lot. It’s part of their modus operandi. You won’t find Republicans admitting it’s their guiding strategy, but at least one did. From VOX:

We’re in an age of manufactured nihilism…..I call this “manufactured” because it’s the consequence of a deliberate strategy. It was distilled almost perfectly by Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News and chief strategist for D____ T____. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon reportedly said in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

What we’re facing is a new form of propaganda that wasn’t really possible until the digital age. And it works not by creating a consensus around any particular narrative but by muddying the waters so that consensus isn’t achievable.

My theory is that Republicans lie so much for two reasons. Big elements of their policy agenda — like low taxes on the rich and cutting Social Security and Medicare — aren’t popular, so it helps to avoid the truth. It’s also the easiest way to stop Democrats from getting anything done. Democrats tend to think government can make people’s lives better. Republicans tend to disagree. Republican icon Ronald Reagan once said the most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”. No Democrat would ever say that. The result is that some people, helped along by Fox News, Facebook, etc., believe the lies and others don’t know what to believe.

We’re witnessing an example of Republican lies and obfuscation right now. So far, the Lord of Mar-a-Lago and his supporters have suggested that Biden personally ordered the FBI search of the premises; that T____ had a perfect right to take those highly sensitive documents to Florida and not return them when the government wanted them back; that he needed them for his work; that he didn’t take them, the FBI agents planted them there during the “search”; that T____ could have declassified all those documents; yet there was an informal standing order that any document taken from the White House was automatically declassified (although nobody in the White House followed up on that informality and it would be irrelevant even if it were true, since the laws in question don’t say anything about whether documents are classified); and one of the latest: the White House staff didn’t pack them up, it was the General Services Administration, so I guess it was their fault the stuff went to Mar-a-Lago and were never returned.

Flooding the zone with bullshit.

Here are two other recent examples that got me thinking about this. The first pertains to the mysterious Mar-a-Lago documents. From The Washington Post:

When it comes to the sheer embrace of innuendo and a concerted lack of logical consistency, it’s difficult to top the latest entry….. In recent days, D____ T____ and conservative media have debuted a new whataboutism defense: What about Obama?

Several Fox News shows on Wednesday picked up on a New York Post column that noted Barack Obama at the end of his presidency had 30 million records shipped to Chicago for his presidential library. “They shipped 30 million pages of sensitive and possibly classified materials to Chicago, and, by the way, he has yet to return any of it to the National Archives. Not one page,” Fox host Sean Hannity intoned. “So is his house about to get raided?”

Former T____ campaign legal adviser Harmeet Dhillon added: “Are there SWAT teams descending on Chicago to get those documents? No. And so the double standard and triple standard here is very apparent”….

But there’s no evidence Obama has hidden anything from the Archives or that he didn’t go through the processes required to share and protect those documents once they left Washington.

And on Friday, after T____ raised the issue again, the Archives sought to put an end to the charade. It issued a statement outlining these facts and assuring that it has custody of classified documents:

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) assumed exclusive legal and physical custody of Obama Presidential records when President Barack Obama left office in 2017, in accordance with the Presidential Records Act (PRA). NARA moved approximately 30 million pages of unclassified records to a NARA facility in the Chicago area where they are maintained exclusively by NARA. Additionally, NARA maintains the classified Obama Presidential records in a NARA facility in the Washington, DC, area. As required by the PRA, former President Obama has no control over where and how NARA stores the Presidential records of his Administration.

In other words, there’s no parallel.

And from the Crooked Media newsletter, one more:

Two days ago, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted “Do you make $75,000 or less? Democrats’ new army of 87,000 IRS agents will be coming for you—with 710,000 new audits for Americans who earn less than $75k.” He was parroting talking points from basically every conservative politician and commentator that the Inflation Reduction Act’s $80 billion appropriation for the Internal Revenue Service means more taxes and more audits for middle-class Americans.

And it’s just not fucking true. The 87,000 agents figure was plucked from a Treasury report from May 2021, not even used in the Inflation Reduction Act. The facts are these: the IRS has been systematically defunded for decades, and total staff is currently equal to what it was during World War II, when the U.S. population was less than half what it is now. Much of the funding will go towards rehiring due to the fact that over half(!) the current IRS staff is eligible for retirement in the next five years.

Onto the audits: IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig, who was appointed by D____ T____, said in an August 4 letter to lawmakers that after the bill was approved, “audit scrutiny” would not be raised on small businesses or middle-income Americans. Rettig, I repeat: a T____ appointee, said, “The proposal would direct that additional resources go toward enforcement against those with the highest incomes, rather than Americans with actual income of less than $400,000.” Which is, you know, exactly what Democrats have been saying this whole time…..

Wealthy Republican lawmakers and pundits have a vested interest in killing any tax bill that targets them, and they use this same playbook of spuriously insisting that the middle class will suffer every time.

The War Between the States Continues in November

Posted on by

Today’s first post dealt with the prelude to the Civil War. This one deals with the Civil War’s unresolved division. From Mark Danner for The New York Review of Books:

Amid the blaring, pulsating hype of American culture, every election is routinely proclaimed the most important in our lifetime. Now the flood of heart-stopping news this summer—the Uvalde school massacre, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the January 6 revelations—has brought us face to face with an exceptional problem: What if this one really is? What if this time, like the boy who cried wolf, we find ourselves screaming that the emergency is real—and no one pays attention?

The 2022 election will be the first held in the shadow of an attempted coup d’état—a nearly successful and still-unpunished crime against the state. It will be the first held after a Supreme Court decision that not only uprooted a half-century-old established right but that threatens the rescinding of other rights as well. And it will be the first in which it is clear that, from Republican legislators’ relentless efforts to change who counts the votes, the very character of American governance is on the ballot.

American voters have not confronted so grave a choice since 1860. Now as then, two dramatically different futures are on offer. By undermining the right to privacy, the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision not only allows government to force women to carry pregnancies to term—as more than half the states will likely soon do—but foreshadows a country in which a state or the federal government can deny people contraception or indeed the right to love or marry whom they choose. By limiting the regulation of firearms, the Bruen decision ensures that increasing numbers of Americans, including children in classrooms, worshipers in churches, and marchers on the Fourth of July, will die in shootings. By calling into question how votes are counted—or whether they should matter at all—the January 6 coup and the persistent “Big Lie” behind it augur a country where the candidate fewer Americans voted for not only can become president (as he did in 2000 and 2016) but can be awarded the electoral votes of a state not as the choice of its people but as a diktat of its legislature.

This America of the future will be an ever more authoritarian place where government maintains the right to intervene in personal decisions, even the most intimate—except when it comes to firearms, in which case anyone, young or old, sane or unbalanced, can go about as heavily armed as a combat soldier. The coming election can either accelerate the country’s move toward this kind of authoritarianism or begin to slow it down. If any election cried out to be nationalized—to be fought not only on the kitchen-table issues of inflation and unemployment but on the defining principles of what the country is and what it should be—it is this November’s.

It is no accident that the last time an election was fought this way was also the last time the party holding the White House gained congressional seats in the midterms. Following the September 11 attacks George W. Bush’s Republicans made ruthless use of nationalism and, above all, fear. “Americans trust the Republicans,” Karl Rove told his colleagues, to keep “our families safe.” Though terrorists had killed thousands of Americans on their watch, the Republicans turned around and denounced Democrats as soft on terror. To vote for Democrats—even for heroic veterans like Senator Max Cleland of Georgia, who had lost three limbs in Vietnam—was to vote for Osama bin Laden. The argument was shameless, savage, deeply unfair. It was anything but subtle. And it worked.

Two decades later the United States is again at risk, not from foreign terrorists but from domestic extremists who are working to insert government power between Americans and their most private decisions and who would fundamentally alter the way they choose their leaders. Justice Clarence Thomas in his Dobbs concurrence was forthright enough to state the implications of that decision for the right to contraception, same-sex relations, and marriage equality. The January 6 committee in its well-orchestrated hearings has begun to bring home to Americans the danger posed by the Big Lie for the next presidential election. Still, despite these clear signs of a darker future, for many voters the danger remains unfocused and distant.

Under the threat of this darkness, Democrats have a duty to make crystal clear to voters what is at stake in November. In midterm elections especially, Americans must be given a persuasive reason to vote—a task that is much harder for a party that won the White House only two years before. This year voters are apprehensive about inflation and other lingering effects of the pandemic and demoralized that Democrats, with their narrow majorities, have failed to achieve much of what they promised.

But the January 6 committee, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the Uvalde school shooting have put stark and frightening issues prominently before the public, and if presented clearly and persistently they have a strong potential to drive voters to the polls—especially younger voters, who were so vital to the Democrats’ midterm gains in 2018, and who now, after Democrats failed to pass their climate agenda, desperately need a reason to turn out. This election must be about safeguarding the country they know and the freedoms and rights they cherish. Democrats from President Biden on down need to present these issues clearly and unapologetically:

If you don’t want a government that can force you to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term—vote!

If you don’t want a government that can deny you contraceptives—vote!!

If you don’t want a government that can tell you with whom you can make love and whom you can marry—vote!!

If you don’t want a government that will do nothing to protect your child from a troubled teenager with an assault rifle—vote!!

If you don’t want a government that can ignore the people’s voice at the polling place—vote!!

If you don’t want a government that will do nothing about rising temperatures and the danger they pose to all of us—vote!

. . . During the past months the specter of an increasingly autocratic America has raised its head. Voters who cast their ballots for Democrats must be in no doubt about what they are voting for: the freedom to love and marry whom they wish, the freedom to decide when they want to bear children and to keep those children safe from gun violence—and the certainty that they will go on having a real voice in choosing who leads them. They must be reminded that these rights and freedoms are at risk, that a very different future looms. The most important election of our lifetime is coming. The emergency is upon us. If we are truly to meet it, we must first make bold to say so.