Whereof One Can Speak 🇺🇦

Nothing special, one post at a time since 2012

Yeah, There’s a Name for It

Posted on by

We’re having a primary election today. The people I planned to vote for had no opposition, but I walked over and voted anyway. Voting is a ritual of democracy! (Plus our local election workers used to provide cookies.)

It was worth the trip. They have new, electronic, paper ballot machines. You put in a piece of paper, vote on the touchscreen, and then you look through a little window to see your votes printed on the paper. If it all looks ok, you press “cast your ballot” and the paper goes into a container. So there’s a paper trail if there’s a recount. Very cool. Every voter in the US should be able to use a machine like that. While voting still matters.

From Greg Sargent of The Washington Post:

“1776 motherfuckers.”

That’s what an associate texted to Enrique Tarrio, then the leader of the Proud Boys, just after members of the group stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. In a new indictment that prosecutors filed against them, variations on that idea abound: Members refer to the insurrection as a glorious revival of 1776 again and again, with almost comic predictability.

… The way 1776 comes up in the indictment — combined with some surprising new details it reveals — should prompt a serious look at how far-right extremist groups genuinely think about the long struggle that they envision themselves waging.

In short, groups such as these generally are driven by a dangerous vision of popular sovereignty. It essentially holds that the will of the truly authentic “people,” a flexible category they get to define, is being suppressed, requiring periodic “resets” of the system, including via violent, extralegal means.

Such groups aren’t going away anytime soon. We should understand what drives them.

The new indictment that a grand jury returned on Monday against Tarrio and four other Proud Boys is for “seditious conspiracy.” This requires prosecutors to prove that at least two people conspired to use force to overthrow the U.S. government or subvert the execution of U.S. law.

To build this case, prosecutors have sought to present extensive evidence that the Proud Boys fully intended to use force to subvert governmental authority and relevant laws concerning the transfer of presidential power. This included arming themselves with paramilitary gear and discussing violent disruptions online in advance…. The indictment alleges that they attacked police officers, breached police lines with violence, and helped coordinate the storming of the Capitol in real time.

What’s more, in the indictment prosecutors disclose highly revealing text exchanges between Tarrio — who was not present that day — and another member later on Jan. 6. The exchanges appear to refer back to a document Tarrio possessed called “1776 returns,” which reportedly contains a detailed scheme to attack government buildings.

Those text exchanges compare Jan. 6 to both 1776 and the attack on “the Winter Palace,” which helped lead to the Russian Revolution. This seeming reference back to that document perhaps suggests they viewed Jan. 6 as the successful execution of a premeditated plan….

In this context, while all the 1776-oriented talk might seem like posturing, it points to something real and enduring on the far right.

It isn’t easy to pin down the Proud Boys, who tend to define themselves as defenders of Western civilization. Tarrio’s views appear pretty convoluted. In a 2021 interview, he admitted that the 2020 election had not been stolen from former president Donald Trump,… yet he openly celebrated the “fear” that members of Congress felt of “the people,” and helped mobilize Proud Boys to mass around the Capitol that day.

So how to make sense of that, as well as the broader tangle of ideologies on the far right?

A helpful framework comes from Joseph Lowndes, a scholar of the right wing at the University of Oregon. As Lowndes notes, a longtime strain in American political culture treats procedural democracy as itself deeply suspect, as subverting a more authentic subterranean popular will.

For such ideologues, what constitutes “the people” is itself redefined by spasmodic revolutionary acts, including violence. The people’s sovereignty, and with it the defining lines of the republic, are also effectively redrawn, or even rebirthed, by such outbursts of energy and militant action.

In this vision, Lowndes told me, the “people” and the “essence of the republic” are “made new again through acts of violent cleansing.” He noted that in this imagining, the “people” are something of a “fiction,” one that is essentially created out of the violent “act.”

“This regeneration through violence is going to be with us for a long time,” Lowndes said, “because it is fundamental to the right-wing political imagination.”

Lurking behind all the 1776 cosplay, then, is a tangle of very real radical and extreme ideologies…. They aren’t going away.

Unquote.

Journalist John Ganz sums up the current situation in response to a New York Times article by a “National Review fellow”, Nate Hochman:

Since he’s fond of Marxist categories, I’d like to introduce Hochman to another one: totality. This refers to the notion that we have to analyze a social and political situation in its entirety, and that failing to do so will give us a false or incomplete picture. While he is more frank than most, Hochman doesn’t want to look at the Right in its totality. While he seems comfortable with the portions of the right that, despite being demagogic and repressive, remain within the bounds of legal and civic behavior, like the anti-trans and anti-Critical Race Theory campaigns, he doesn’t really want to talk about January 6th, or the stolen election myth, great replacement, or the cultish worship of T____, or the Proud Boys, who now have a significant presence in [the] Miami-Dade Republican party….

But these things are as much, if not more, emblematic of the modern Republican party as young Mr. Hochman in his blazer over there at The National Review….

So now let’s recapitulate the totality of the political situation, with the help of Mr. Hochman’s fine essay. He wants to say this new right is essentially a secular [non-religious] party of the aggrieved, [a coalition that feels] the national substance has been undermined by a group of cosmopolitan elites, who have infiltrated all the institutions of power. That believes immigrants threaten to replace the traditional ethnic make up of the country. That borrows conceptions and tactics from the socialist tradition but retools them for counter-revolutionary ends. That is animated by myths of national decline and renewal. That instrumentalizes racial anxieties. That brings together dissatisfied and alienated members of the intelligentsia with the conservative families of the old bourgeoisie and futurist magnates of industry. That looks to a providential figure like T___ for leadership. That has street fighting and militia cadres. That has even attempted an illegal putsch to give their leader absolute power.

If only there was historical precedent and even a neat little word for all that.

Unquote.

Well, here’s a hint. The precedent is Nazi Germany and the neat little word is “FASCISM”.

Florida and Bush v. Gore Set the Stage for 2024

Posted on by

You could say the 2016 election was stolen when the Republican FBI director James Comey sent an extraordinary letter to Congress a week before Election Day to announce nothing of real importance regarding Hillary Clinton’s email. That gave our corporate media the chance to flog the email story one more time, convincing more than 78,000 wavering voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to abandon the candidate everybody thought was going to win. The 46 Electoral College votes from those three states put the Republican candidate in the White House.

You could say the Republicans stole that election, but that wouldn’t be quite accurate, because it’s doubtful the dimwitted, self-righteous FBI director was trying to steal the election when he ignored a Justice Department rule and made his last-minute, election-altering news. He was simply trying to cover his ass, fearing that his Republican friends in Congress would be upset with him if he didn’t tell them what he knew a week before the election and their guy ended up losing.

No, it was the 2000 election the Republicans actually stole.

I’d forgotten how blatant the theft was until I stumbled upon a 2001 article in the London Review of Books by law professor Bruce Ackerman. The article is called “Anatomy of a Constitutional Coup”. It explains in detail how the Republicans stole that election. Here’s the last paragraph:

Suppose I had been reporting on the recent election of Vicente Fox as President of Mexico. I would have described how a mob of Fox’s partisans stopped the vote count in Mexico City, how Fox’s campaign chairman used her authority as chief elections officer to prevent the count from continuing, how Fox’s brother exercised his position as governor to take the Presidential election out of the hands of the voters, how the Supreme Court intervened to crush, without any legal ground, the last hope for a complete count. Would we be celebrating the election of President Fox as the dawn of a new democratic day in Mexico?

Replace Mexico with the US, Mexico City with Miami, and Vicente Fox with George W. Bush and that sums up what happened to us in 2000.

If you have the intestinal fortitude to read Professor Ackerman’s fascinating article, you’ll understand why (assuming they don’t win the old-fashioned way), Republicans will almost certainly try to steal the presidential election in 2024. They got away with it in 2000. A mob of Republicans intimidated election officials in Miami; Florida’s Republican Secretary of State interfered with the vote counting; Republican Governor Jeb Bush got the Florida legislature to create an “alternate” slate of electors; and the Republican majority on the Supreme Court used their august authority to finish the job.

What Democrats Could Do

Posted on by

Lots of people are giving Congressional Democrats advice. One such person is Perry Bacon. He writes for The Washington Post. Here’s his suggestion (with commentary from me):

The Republican Party isn’t fit to lead, and most voters know it — that’s why Joe Biden won the presidency. But all those 2020 Biden voters shouldn’t be expected to turn out for two more years of Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) blocking most legislation in the Senate, sometimes joined by moderate Democrats in the House….

Democrats should level with voters. . . . There was never really a Democratic “trifecta,” because Manchin and Sinema are more independents than they are Democrats.

They should be clear about the solution: a Senate with at least 52 Democrats and a House with at least 218 Democrats [they would actually need more than 218, since that would give every Democrat in the House veto power, just like Manchin and Sinema have had in the Senate for the past two years]. If they get that, they can say, they will pass a specific agenda, something like this:
  1. Eliminate the filibuster.
  2. A national law guaranteeing a right to an abortion in the first trimester and in all cases of rape and incest.
  3. A democracy reform law mandating independent commissions to draw state and congressional districts lines free of gerrymandering; vote-by-mail and two weeks of early voting; proportional representation through multi-member congressional districts; and measures to prevent election subversion.
  4. A ban on the sale of military-style weapons such as AR-15 rifles and high-capacity magazines, along with universal background checks for gun sales.
  5. A minimum income tax of at least 20 percent on billionaires.
  6. A ban on members of Congress buying individual stocks.
  7. National marijuana legalization.
  8. A climate change plan that puts the United States on a path to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
  9. A required civics and life-skills course for high school seniors, with the same curriculum throughout the country.
  10. Voluntary term limits of 12 years in Congress for all Democrats (six terms in the House, two in the Senate) [A better idea would be a voluntary retirement age, say 70 years — airline pilots have to retire at 65, some state judges have to retire at 70]
  11. What connects these ideas? First, many of them are already popular….

Second, they directly confront America’s biggest problem: the radicalized Republican Party and how our political system gives a small bloc of GOP voters, the party’s donors and its elected officials veto power over the preferences of most Americans, including many Republicans.

Third, they acknowledge this stark reality: The United States is experiencing a non-military, uncivil war that the Democrats must win.

The Republican agenda of expanding gun rights, narrowing voting rights and functionally abolishing abortion rights doesn’t seem coherent or logical until you view it as an agenda of White male Christian hegemony. Then it fits together perfectly. The Democrats must stop trying to duck the so-called culture wars and instead fight hard to win them. There is no middle ground between White male Christian hegemony and multiracial, multicultural social democracy — and the Democrats shouldn’t be shy about using their power to impose the latter, since it’s what a clear majority of Americans want.

[These proposals would be] an acknowledgement that America’s economic and political establishments have failed and need to be changed.

Unquote.

Mr. Bacon didn’t include any strictly economic proposals or any ideas for court reform, although he mentions “the proposal of legal writer Elie Mystal to create a 29-member high court” (others have suggested a smaller number, like 13 or 15). But it’s a pretty good list and would remind some voters what would be possible with more Democrats in Congress. 

History in the Making

Posted on by

If America doesn’t succumb to right-wing authoritarianism in the relatively near future, historians will look back and say the former president’s biggest accomplishment was to undermine trust in our elections and make it popular in certain circles to try to rig the results (while all the while claiming to care deeply about majority rule).

Politico published an article today that got Democrats and democrats talking. Here’s the title and subtitle:

It’s going to be an army’: Tapes reveal [Republican] plan to contest elections

Placing operatives as poll workers and building a “hotline” to friendly attorneys are among the strategies to be deployed in Michigan and other swing states.

I didn’t want to read it, so won’t quote any more. But this summary came in tonight’s Crooked Media newsletter (which, by the way, is a good way to keep up with the day’s mostly bad news):

When Republicans don’t think anyone’s listening, they aren’t shy about their election-stealing plans. In official training meetings recorded over the course of the past year, Republicans outlined a scheme to, in effect, make the smooth administration of elections and the fair counting of votes impossible in key Democratic strongholds like Detroit, Michigan, either to create pretexts for overturning elections or even simply win on rigged initial counts. The idea is to install T____ loyalists and Big Lie conspiracy theorists—the trainees—as poll workers, and provide them a hotline to a national network of GOP lawyers and Republican district attorneys, in the hope of creating real-time chaos or even obtaining lawless orders to cease vote counting altogether. If Democrats have convened strategy sessions to discuss how to head off this kind of sabotage, I’d like someone to leak videotapes of them, too.

There was another item in the newsletter on a related topic:

Remember a few months ago when a federal judge opined that some of the materials D____ T____’s top coup lawyer, John Eastman, wanted to withhold from the January 6 committee contained evidence of felonies both men committed? Well, the main document in question is now public. It’s a memo from one of their underlings advising them against “allowing the Electoral Count Act to operate by its terms” and instead to have Vice President Mike Pence assert “the constitutional responsibility not just to open the votes, but to count them—including making judgments about what to do if there are conflicting votes.” By total coincidence, this is the same crew that immediately thereafter set about organizing a fraudulent slate of electors, to provide Pence the pretext for violating the law governing the peaceful transition of power. Seems pretty crime-y. By sheer coincidence, the [Republican National Committee] wants to distance itself from T____’s election lies during the public-hearing phase of the trial.

If future historians study all this, they’ll have plenty of primary sources to plow through.

What Our Leaders Need To Say

Posted on by

Being vague and conciliatory isn’t cutting it anymore, according to Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post:

On Saturday — the day before he departed for Uvalde, Tex. — President Biden told University of Delaware graduates: “In the face of such destructive forces, we have to stand stronger”. . .  He also warned of the “oldest and darkest forces in America” preaching hate and “preying on hopelessness and despair.”. . .

But such language feels increasingly inadequate and, frankly, counterproductive in the face of nonstop political outrage. Now is the time for precise language. “Forces” are not the problem; one political movement encased within the Republican Party is. “Ultra-MAGA” ideas are not the problem; Republicans spouting anti-American ideas that threaten functional democracy are.

It’s not the plague of “polarization” or “distrust,” some sort of floating miasma, that has darkened our society. Bluntly put, we are in deep trouble because a major party rationalizes both intense selfishness — the refusal to undertake even minor inconveniences such as mask-wearing or gun background checks for others’ protection — and deprivation of others’ rights (to vote, to make intimate decisions about reproduction, to be treated with respect).

. . . The White-grievance industry (right-wing media, politicians, pundits, think tanks) keeps its voters in a constant state of rage over the loss of a society in which far fewer women competed with men in the workplace, White power was largely unchallenged, and diversity was less pronounced. And it has persuaded millions of White Americans that they are victims of “elites” or the media or globalism or attacks on masculinity or … something.

. . . “The nostalgic appeal of ‘again,’” [Robert Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute] observes, “harkens back to a 1950s America, when white Christian churches were full and white Christians comprised a supermajority of the U.S. population; a period when we added ‘under God’ to the pledge of allegiance and ‘In God We Trust’ to our currency.”

Our future as a tolerant, decent society ultimately may depend on White Christian communities’ recovering their moral equilibrium and support for American democracy, and rejecting the movement to turn churches into platforms for QAnon and white nationalism. But we cannot wait for an evangelical reformation.

MAGA voters think everyone else is the problem. As perpetual victims, they feel entitled to ignore the demands of civilized society — e.g., self-restraint, care for actually vulnerable people, pluralism, acceptance of political defeat. Their irritation with mask-wearing gets elevated over the lives of those most susceptible to a deadly pandemic. Their demands to display an armory of weapons mean schoolchildren become targets for acts of mass gun violence. Their religious zealotry, fed by the myth that Christianity is under attack, means poor women cannot have access to safe, legal abortions.

Under such conditions, Democrats would do well to eschew avuncular bipartisanship and abandon the fantasy that they can reason with the unreasonable or shame the shameless into dropping their conspiracies and lies. “Lowering the temperature” or seeking unity with those intent on dividing Americans is counterproductive.

Like other toxic political movements, the MAGA crusade flourishes thanks to the collaboration of cynics, true believers and cult followers. In turn, our democracy’s salvation depends on a broad-based coalition that rejects the MAGA crowd’s reactionary aims and myths of White victimhood.

Democracy’s survival demands that mainstream media prioritize candor about the nature of today’s GOP over fake balance in political coverage. And it needs pro-democracy politicians to rise to the occasion with exacting, truth-based language — not to fuzz up the stark reality of a democracy imperiled by one political party.