Will It Happen Here?

Posted on by

“It always happens” doesn’t imply “it will always happen”. With that correction in mind, Adam Gopnik makes an interesting point about democracy and autocracy in The New Yorker:

We are told again and again that American democracy is in peril and may even be on its deathbed. Today, after all, a defeated yet deranged President bunkers in the White House contemplating crazy conspiracy theories and perhaps even martial law, with the uneasy consent of his party and the rabid support of his base. We are then told, with equal urgency, that what is wrong, ultimately, is deep, systemic, and Everybody’s Fault. Perhaps there is a crisis of meaning, or of spirit; perhaps it is a crisis caused by the condescension of self-important élites. (In truth, those élites tend to be at least as self-lacerating as they are condescending, as the latest rounds of self-laceration show.)

Lurking behind all of this is a faulty premise—that the descent into authoritarianism is what needs to be explained, when the reality is that . . . it always happens. The default condition of humankind is not to thrive in broadly egalitarian and stable democratic arrangements that get unsettled only when something happens to unsettle them. The default condition of humankind, traced across thousands of years of history, is some sort of autocracy.

America itself has never had a particularly settled commitment to democratic, rational government. At a high point of national prosperity, long before manufacturing fell away or economic anxiety gripped the Middle West—in an era when “silos” referred only to grain or missiles and information came from three sober networks . . .—a similar set of paranoid beliefs filled American minds and came perilously close to taking power. . . . [A] sizable group of people believed things as fully fantastical as the Txxxx-ite belief in voting machines rerouted by dead Venezuelan socialists. The intellectual forces behind Goldwater’s sudden rise thought that Eisenhower and J.F.K. were agents, wittingly or otherwise, of the Communist conspiracy, and that American democracy was in a death match with enemies within as much as without. (Goldwater was, political genealogists will note, a ferocious admirer and defender of Joe McCarthy, whose counsel in all things conspiratorial was Roy Cohn, Dxxxx Txxxx’s mentor.)

Goldwater was a less personally malevolent figure than Txxxx, and, yes, he lost his 1964 Presidential bid. But, in sweeping the Deep South, he set a victorious neo-Confederate pattern for the next four decades of American politics, including the so-called Reagan revolution. Nor were his forces naïvely libertarian. At the time, Goldwater’s ghostwriter Brent Bozell spoke approvingly of Franco’s post-Fascist Spain as spiritually far superior to decadent America, much as the highbrow Txxxx-ites talk of the Christian regimes of Putin and Orbán.

The interesting question is not what causes autocracy (not to mention the conspiratorial thinking that feeds it) but what has ever suspended it. We constantly create post-hoc explanations for the ascent of the irrational. The Weimar inflation caused the rise of Hitler, we say; the impoverishment of Tsarism caused the Bolshevik Revolution. In fact, the inflation was over in Germany long before Hitler rose, and Lenin came to power not in anything that resembled a revolution—which had happened already under the leadership of far more pluralistic politicians—but in a coup d’état by a militant minority. Force of personality, opportunity, sheer accident: these were much more decisive than some neat formula of suffering in, autocracy out.

Dxxxx Txxxx came to power not because of an overwhelming wave of popular sentiment—he lost his two elections by a cumulative ten million votes—but because of an orphaned electoral system left on our doorstep by an exhausted Constitutional Convention. . . .

The way to shore up American democracy is to shore up American democracy—that is, to strengthen liberal institutions, in ways that are unglamorously specific and discouragingly minute. The task here is not so much to peer into our souls as to reduce the enormous democratic deficits under which the country labors, most notably an electoral landscape in which farmland tilts to power while city blocks are flattened. This means remedying manipulative redistricting while reforming the Electoral College and the Senate [or by making the Electoral College irrelevant]. Some of these things won’t be achievable, but all are worth pursuing—with the knowledge that, even if every box on our . . . wish list were checked, no set-it-and-forget-it solution to democratic fragility would stand revealed. The only way to stave off another Txxxx is to recognize that it always happens. The temptation of anti-democratic cult politics is forever with us, and so is the work of fending it off. . . .

Unquote.

It’s hard for most Americans to believe it might happen to us. We haven’t had a king or dictator since the United States was created 240 years ago. That’s why Sinclair Lewis called his novel about fascism coming to America It Can’t Happen Here. Our country isn’t destined to become an autocracy, but the past four years show that we have work to do — to make sure it doesn’t happen here.

Many Deaths, No Cameras

Posted on by

From The Washington Post:

Death is now everywhere and yet nowhere in America. We track its progress in daily bar graphs. We note its latest victims among celebrities and acquaintances. Yet, in many parts of America, we carry on — debating holiday plans, the necessity of mask mandates, how seriously to take the virus, whether it’s all a hoax.

In the face of one of the biggest mass casualty events in American history, we are growing increasingly numb to death, experts say — numb to the crisis and tragedy it represents and to the action it requires in response.

Something happens in the brain when fatalities reach such high numbers, say psychologists who have studied genocides and mass disasters. The casualties become like a mountain of corpses that has grown so large it becomes difficult to focus on the individual bodies.

With the coronavirus in particular, experts say, the deaths have been hidden from sight even from friends and family — the human cost sequestered in hospitals and nursing homes.

“Sometimes I think, if only others could see what we see every day,” said Joan Schaum, a hospice nurse who has spent the past year caring for the dying in Lancaster, Pa.

“Other times,” she said, “I think, no one should have to see the amount of death and suffering going on right now. It changes you. It stays with you.”

In 1994, hundreds of thousands in Rwanda were murdered in the space of weeks by soldiers and militias from a rival ethnic group. In response, the United States and much of the world largely shrugged. President Bill Clinton later called his administration’s failure to act one of his great regrets.

Puzzled by that apathy, a psychologist named Paul Slovic began conducting experiments to better understand people’s reaction to mass suffering and death. What he found was troubling.

In one study, his researchers showed people a picture of a . . . girl dying of starvation and asked for donations to help her. He showed another group two starving children, then even larger sets of children. Slovic found people’s distress didn’t grow with the number of children in danger, but often shrank.

“In fact, the more who die, sometimes the less we care,” Slovic said in an interview. In greater numbers, death becomes impersonal, and people feel increasingly hopeless that their actions can have any effect.

“Statistics are human beings with tears dried off,” Slovic said. “And that’s dangerous because we need tears to motivate us.”

With the coronavirus — the death toll substantially exceeding 300,000 in the United States [100 times as many as died on 9/11] — many of our strongest impulses are working against us, experts say.

“Think about the disasters that have captured our national attention. … A hurricane like Katrina hits. News crews show the devastation, and people open their wallets,” said Lori Peek, who directs the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “But this pandemic isn’t a camera-ready event like that.”

Instead of a single discrete event — like the twin towers collapsing on Sept. 11, 2001 — the pandemic has unfolded as an invisible, slow-creeping, chronic hazard. Over time, our brains gradually tune out the danger.

Peek likened the effect to heat waves, which kill more people in America than all other natural disasters combined. “But you never hear that much about heat waves because it’s gradual. You don’t see people trapped on rooftops like Katrina. You don’t have homes going up in flames like in wildfires.”

Without visual, physical manifestations of deaths, the alarm bells in our heads fail to ring, experts said. Because we don’t see the deaths, we fail to see their connection to us — including our role in preventing their growing numbers.

This is what death in the pandemic looks like up close: Patients often grow ashen as their body struggles for nutrients. Their skin becomes mottled with splotches of reddish purple as their heart pumps less and less blood to parts of the body that need it.

Often, the room is eerily empty, with nurses and doctors trying to minimize risk of infection. The only constant is the low, steady hum of an oxygen compressor piping air to the patient’s nostrils.

Amid the silent void, the patients’ dying breaths become magnified.

“The hardest thing about it is how alone they are in the end,” said Schaum, a nurse with Hospice & Community Care in Lancaster, Pa. . . .

“You do everything you can to make sure they don’t feel alone,” she said. “But it’s hard to convey just how isolated it is”. . . .

When families are unable to be there, Laura Carey, a social worker for Hospice & Community Care, sometimes sits with covid-19 patients during their last moments. . . .

She sits quietly beside them as their breath slows and becomes increasingly shallow and irregular, until it stops.

“There’s something so incredibly sacred and powerful about that moment,” Carey said. “If only others could experience it, maybe things would be different.”

Update from the Nut House

Posted on by

From The Washington Post:

President Txxxx has intensified efforts to overturn the election, raising a series of radical measures in recent days, including military intervention, seizing voting machines and a 13th-hour appeal to the Supreme Court.

On Sunday, Txxxx said in a radio interview that he had spoken with Sen.-elect Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) about challenging the electoral vote count when the House and Senate convene on Jan. 6 to formally affirm President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

“He’s so excited,” Txxxx said of Tuberville. “He said, ‘You made me the most popular politician in the United States.’ He said, ‘I can’t believe it.’ He’s great. Great senator”. [Note: Tuberville is not yet a senator.]

Tuberville’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment on Txxxx’s statement, which the president made in an interview with Rudolph W. Giuliani, his personal lawyer, on New York’s WABC radio station.

The next day, Flynn was in the Oval Office to discuss the idea. Flynn’s attorney, Sidney Powell, who has promoted outlandishly false claims about this year’s election, including a disproved allegation that Venezuelan communists programmed U.S. voting machines to flip votes for Biden, was also at the meeting.

Officials inside the White House said Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House counsel Pat Cipollone pushed back “strenuously” on the idea of martial law. Two officials, who like others for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private matters and conversations, said that there have been no efforts inside the White House to actually deploy the military and that the idea was quickly dismissed at the meeting.

Experts also agree the president does not have the authority to order such an action.

Meadows and Cipollone did not respond to requests for comment.

Txxxx also suggested naming Powell as special counsel on voter fraud, an appointment that appeared to be a non-starter.

“The fact that she’s in there, it’s totally nuts,” a senior campaign official said, referring to Powell. A second official noted that Matt Morgan, a lawyer for the Txxxx campaign, told employees Saturday that they should preserve records related to Powell. Dominion Voting Systems has threatened to sue Powell and the Txxxx campaign for what it described as “wild, knowingly baseless and false accusations.”

At the meeting, Txxxx again suggested that homeland security officials should seize state voting machines and investigate alleged fraud.

Acting homeland security secretary Chad Wolf and other homeland security officials have previously told the White House they have no authority to do so unless states ask for inspections or investigations, and they have not.

DHS officials were not present for Friday’s meeting and have not had subsequent conversations with the White House. Ken Cuccinelli, acting deputy secretary of homeland security, also told Giuliani in a call last week that they could not take the machines, said officials.

In recent days, Txxxx has expressed frustration that his Cabinet is not doing more to assist. At a Cabinet meeting last week at the White House, Txxxx vented about the election and made unsubstantiated allegations of fraud, officials said, but did not give Cabinet members specific orders. The president has said Wolf should have moved more quickly to fire Christopher Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, after Krebs countered Txxxx’s claims of widespread election fraud.

Additionally, some of Txxxx’s advisers have convinced him that Attorney General William P. Barr has not done enough to investigate the claims of voter fraud, and the president has increasingly complained about him, they said.

On Sunday, the Txxxx campaign said it was filing another suit with the Supreme Court over Pennsylvania’s mail-in voting rules. The U.S. Supreme Court has twice declined to take up challenges to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decisions regarding the state’s voting procedures. Generally, the court does not get involved in state court decisions on state law. 

Efforts to persuade Txxxx to do a valedictory tour for some of his accomplishments [Note: Accomplishments?], or focus on the coronavirus vaccine [but not the virus], have been futile, said two advisers. Advisers say they hope Txxxx going to Mar-a-Lago this week will calm his anger about the election, but Txxxx has shown no signs of pulling back.

Public officials and military leaders have refused to be drawn into Txxxx’s post-election maneuvering. On Friday, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy and Gen. James C. McConville, the Army’s top officer, released a joint statement that said: “There is no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of an American election.”

Acting defense secretary Christopher Miller, who was installed after the post-election firing of Mark T. Esper, was not present at the meeting Friday night at the White House, a senior U.S. official said. Neither was Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was traveling in the Middle East last week.

In recent days, Milley has stressed that the U.S. military will follow U.S. law, without directly criticizing the president or his most partisan supporters.

“We are unique among militaries,” Milley said in a Nov. 12 speech at the new National Museum of the United States Army. “We do not take an oath to a king or a queen, a tyrant or a dictator. We do not take an oath to an individual. No, we do not take an oath to a country, a tribe or a religion. We take an oath to the Constitution.”

Peter D. Feaver, a former member of George W. Bush’s presidential administration who now studies civil-military relations at Duke University, said it was “extraordinarily distressing” that Flynn, a former national security adviser, would recommend to Txxxx that he do something “manifestly illegal and manifestly unconstitutional.”

“To invoke the Insurrection Act now to prevent that from coming to full fruition, there is just not basis for it,” he said. “The professional military ethics of it are pretty clear: The military is trained to not carry out illegal orders.”

The Justice Department also has not acquiesced to Txxxx’s pressure campaign to appoint special counsel to explore his unfounded claims of fraud, though officials say privately they are worried about what might transpire in coming weeks, as the president becomes increasingly desperate. . . .

Last week, [Attorney General William] Barr submitted a resignation letter to Txxxx, revealing he would be leaving the department on Dec. 23. . . .Barr had wanted to stay on in a second term if Txxxx had won.

Starting on Wednesday, leadership of the department will fall to Jeffrey Rosen, who had been Barr’s top deputy. Rosen had been serving as a deputy transportation secretary before he was tapped to be the No. 2 Justice Department official under Barr. He had not worked at the Justice Department before, and some lawmakers questioned whether he had adequate experience for the job.

Rosen declined to answer questions in a recent interview with Reuters about whether he would name special counsels to investigate voter fraud or Hunter Biden.

Txxxx’s efforts to persuade congressional Republicans to question the legitimacy of the vote seem to be gaining traction.

Some current and incoming Republican members of the House, including Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Reps.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) and Barry Moore (Ala.), have suggested they will join Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) in using an 1880s law that allows members of Congress to dispute a state’s results and make the House and Senate vote on the challenge to the electoral vote tally on Jan. 6.

The effort is certain to fail in the Democratic-led House and will meet resistance in the Senate, where several Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), have dismissed the idea. Both chambers would have to vote in favor of any challenge for it to succeed.

Last week, while campaigning for Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue (R-Ga.) in Georgia, Tuberville suggested he would support an electoral vote challenge.

“You see what’s coming. You’ve been reading about it in the House. We’re going to have to do it in the Senate,” Tuberville said, according to a video posted online by liberal activist Lauren Windsor.

Tuberville did not say whether he would bring such a challenge himself. But in a speech to conservative activists Sunday, Gaetz said he had spoken with Tuberville and confirmed that the Alabama Republican plans to challenge the results.

“He says, ‘We are done running plays from the establishment’s losing playbook. It is time to stand and fight,’ ” Gaetz said at an event in West Palm Beach, Fla., sponsored by Turning Point USA, a conservative youth organization. “The odds may be tough, it may be 4th and long, but we’re going for it on January 6.”

Unquote.

Before being elected to the Senate by Alabama voters last month, Mr. Tuberville was a football coach for 40 years. This qualifies him to say things like “it may be 4th and long, but we’re going for it”. More on the senator-elect:

In 2014, Tuberville founded the Tommy Tuberville Foundation, which aimed to help American veterans. In 2020, the Associated Press reported that tax records showed the foundation spent only about one-third of the money it raised on charitable giving. . . .

On November 13, 2020, Tuberville wrongly stated in an interview with the Alabama Daily News that the European theater of World War II  was fought to stop socialism and that the three branches of the US federal government are the House, the Senate, and executive, garnering him considerable negative attention and criticism. He has also said that he was looking forward to raising money from his Senate office, a violation of federal law [Wikipedia].

You Could Call It the Spirit of Christmas

Posted on by

This is part of an interview Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times did with theologian and activist Jim Wallis:

WALLIS: How I “take Christmas” is defined in the famous prayer by the mother of Jesus — Mary’s Magnificat: “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” Meaning: The coming of Jesus is intended to turn things upside down. The power of the Bethlehem narrative includes the inn having no room for Mary and Joseph, and the lowly shepherds being the first witnesses of the new baby as hope for the world born in a manger with his homeless parents. This is not the conquering messiah many were hoping for, but one from the bottom of society in a time of political unrest and massive inequality — sort of like now.

KRISTOF: What is it with the modern evangelical movement? Historically, evangelicals were people like William Wilberforce, fighting to abolish slavery. More recently, they included Jimmy Carter. But these days the big cause of many evangelicals has been a philandering politician who rips children from parents at the border.

WALLIS: The word “evangel” comes from Jesus’ opening pledge to bring “good news” to the poor and let the oppressed go free. Txxxx evangelicals have turned Jesus’ message upside down. That’s called heresy. And, in the United States, this has created a toxic melding between white evangelicals and the Republican Party. We’ve seen the conversion of too many white evangelicals to the narcissistic and nationalistic cult of Txxxx, where the operative word in the phrase “white evangelical” is not “evangelical” but “white.”

KRISTOF: I struggle with this. I’ve seen conservative evangelicals do heroic work, including Chuck Colson’s work in prisons, and George W. Bush’s leadership in fighting AIDS in Africa that saved 20 million lives. But some of the grossest immorality of my life came when evangelicals like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson smirked at AIDS and resisted tackling the disease because it was killing gay people. How do we understand a faith that can produce so much good and so much evil?

WALLIS: The religious right leaders you name hijacked the word “evangelical.” Result: White evangelicalism has destroyed the “evangel.” When “evangelical” strays from the radical love of Jesus into hateful partisan faith, we see the worst.

KRISTOF: Do you think about abandoning the term “evangelical” because it has too much baggage?

WALLIS: I understand why so many have moved to “post-evangelical” or “adjacent evangelical” as the old term has become so tainted by right-wing politics and hypocrisy. Many of us call ourselves “followers of Jesus” who want to return to the original definition of a gospel that is good news to the poor. And we believe that any gospel that isn’t good news for the poor is simply not the gospel of Jesus Christ. Period. . . .

KRISTOF: But if faith drives your work on behalf of the poor, why does the same Scripture seem to lead others to cut funds for the homeless?

WALLIS: Because they aren’t reading those Scriptures with over 2000 verses in the Bible about the poor and oppressed! Those white evangelicals have cut all those texts out and their Bible is full of holes.

KRISTOF: For many evangelicals, the paramount political issue is abortion, which Jesus never directly mentions. What’s your take?

WALLIS: Abortion is used by the political right as a distraction from all the other issues that would entail a consistent ethic wherever human life and dignity are affected. Everyone in the “pro-life” and “pro-choice” polarizations should want to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies and abortions — and there are clear policies to do that, especially in support of low-income women

Would It Be Inappropriate to Call It the Nut House?

Posted on by

Predictions that, given his warped psychology, the president will become even more erratic as he gets closer to the end of his presidency are coming true. He held a meeting at the White House yesterday. From Axios:

Senior Txxxx administration officials are increasingly alarmed that President Txxxx might unleash — and abuse — the power of government in an effort to overturn the clear result of the election.

Why it matters: These officials tell me that Txxxx is spending too much time with people they consider crackpots or conspiracy theorists and flirting with blatant abuses of power.

  • There are 32 days until President-elect Biden’s inauguration.

The big picture: Their fears include Txxxx’s interest in former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s wild talk of martial law; an idea floated of an executive order to commandeer voting machines; and the specter of Sidney Powell, the conspiracy-spewing election lawyer, obtaining governmental power and a top-level security clearance.

A senior administration official said that when Txxxx is “retweeting threats of putting politicians in jail, and spends his time talking to conspiracy nuts who openly say declaring martial law is no big deal, it’s impossible not to start getting anxious about how this ends.”

  • “People who are concerned and nervous aren’t the weak-kneed bureaucrats that we loathe,” the official added. “These are people who have endured arguably more insanity and mayhem than any administration officials in history.”

At Friday’s meeting, first reported by The New York Times, Txxxx discussed making Powell a special counsel for election fraud.

  • The ideas included commandeering voting machines, with Powell as a special counsel to inspect the machines, according to a source familiar with the meeting.
  • White House counsel Pat Cipollone and chief of staff Mark Meadows “pushed back strenuously and repeatedly against the ideas put forth by Sidney Powell,” the source said.
  • The meeting included Flynn, who was pardoned by Txxxx in November and is a celebrity with election-denying Txxxx supporters.

Unquote.

Nobody knows how unhinged the president will become in the next four weeks, but it shouldn’t surprise us if he issues orders to insert Flynn, Giuliani, Jared or Ivanka in the military chain of command.