Tag Archives: Conservatism

An Historian Admires Biden and Fears the Other Guy

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The New York Times has described Heather Cox Richardson, a history professor at Boston College, as “the breakout star” of the newsletter platform Substack, where her Letters from an American has more than a million subscribers. She has a new book out called Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. The Guardian calls it “a thoughtful study of how the world’s wealthiest democracy came to teeter on the precipice of authoritarianism, with an assist from [you know who]”. More from The Guardian:

[Richardson says] “the reason for the book originally was to pull together a number of essays answering the questions that everybody asks me all the time – What is the Southern Strategy? How did the parties switch sides? – but very quickly I came to realise that it was the story of how democracies can be undermined.”

Crucial in that is how history and language can be used to divide a population and convince some the only reason they have fallen behind economically, socially or culturally is because of an enemy. The antidote, Richardson argues, is an explicitly democratic history “based in the idea that marginalised populations have always kept the principles of the Declaration of Independence front and centre in our history”.

She is not pulling punches. Her preface observes that the crisis in American democracy crept up on many and draws a direct comparison with the rise of Adolf Hitler, achieved through political gains and consolidation.

“Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint,” she writes.

America’s current malaise, she argues, began in the same decade: the 1930s. It was then that Republicans who loathed business regulations in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal began to consider an alliance with southern Democrats, who found Roosevelt’s programmes insufficiently segregationist, and western Democrats who resented the idea of the federal government protecting land and water. In 1937, this unholy coalition came up with a “Conservative Manifesto”.

Richardson says: “When it gets leaked to the newspapers, they all run like rats from it… They all disavow it, but that manifesto gets reprinted all over the country in pro-business and racist newspapers and pamphlets and it has very long legs.

“They want to get rid of business regulation, they want to get rid of a basic social safety net and send all that back to the churches, they want to get rid of infrastructure projects that FDR is engaging in because they think it costs too much in tax dollars and it should be private investment. They don’t really talk about civil rights because because FDR is really just flirting with the idea of equality in the New Deal programmes, but they do say they want home rule and states’ rights, which is code for “We don’t want civil rights.’”

These four principles would become a blueprint for Republicans such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, language sometimes mapping directly. In the early 1970s, Richardson contends, Republicans began to pursue anti-democratic strategies such as gerrymandering and shifting the judiciary rightwards. They also spent decades waging an “information war”.

A prime example was the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton, an attempt to convince the public he was not a legitimate president.

“That era is when congressional investigations to smear the Democrats take off,” Richardson says. “Those investigations don’t turn up anything but it doesn’t matter because it keeps it in front of the American people – the idea that something is there.”

Enter [T], a blowhard who turned disinformation into an artform in the business world and become a reality TV star. He promised Christian conservatives he would appoint rightwing judges; he promised fiscal conservatives he would cut taxes; he promised the white working class he understood their resentments. He made the party his own….

“[T] is an interesting character because he’s not a politician. He’s a salesman and that is an important distinction because in 2016 he held up a mirror to a certain part of the American population [note: a white part], one that had been gutted by the legislation that has passed since 1981, and gave them what they wanted.

“If you remember in 2016, he was the most moderate Republican on that stage on economic issues. He talked about infrastructure, fair taxes, cheaper and better healthcare, bringing back manufacturing. He talked about all those economic issues but then he also had the racism and the sexism and of course that’s what he was really going for, that anger that he could tap into.

“Tapping into that anger was crucial to him forging an authoritarian movement, because at least in the United States the authoritarian rightwing movements have always come from street violence rather than the top and from ideas of what fascism should look like. He quite deliberately tapped into that emotional anger that he could spark with racism and sexism.”

Richardson is again not bashful about invoking the Nazi comparison when she cites the communications scholar Michael Socolow’s observation that [T’s] 2020 State of the Union address, in which he demonstrated that he could “raise hurting individuals up to glory”, mirrored the performances of Hitler, who sought to show an almost magical power to change lives….

Despite 91 criminal charges, Trump dominates the Republican primary….What would a second [T] term mean for America?

“An end of American democracy. I have absolutely no doubt about that, and he’s made it very clear. You look at Project 2025, which is a thousand pages on how you dismantle the federal government that has protected civil rights, provided a basic social safety net, regulated business and promoted infrastructure since 1933. The theme of his 2024 campaign is retribution.

“I don’t think people understand now that, if he wins again, what we’re going to put in power is those people who want to burn it all down. By that I mean they want to hurt their enemies for sure but, so long as they can be in control, they don’t care if it means that Nato falls apart or that Americans are starving or dying from pandemic diseases.”

Biden understands the threat. Last month in Phoenix, he issued another stark warning…. Richardson casts a historian’s eye at his record.

“Biden is a fascinating character in that in that he is one of the very few people who could have met this moment. I was not a Biden supporter, to be honest. I thought we needed somebody new and much more aggressive, and yet I completely admit I was wrong because he has, first of all, a very deep understanding of foreign affairs….

“I thought in 2020 that was not going to matter and could I have been more wrong? I think not. That really mattered and continues to matter in that one of the reasons Republicans are backing off of Ukraine right now is that they recognise, [although] it’s not hitting the United States newspapers, Ukraine is actually making important gains. A win from the Ukrainians would really boost Biden’s re-election. The Republicans recognise that and are willing to scuttle it so long as it means they can regain power….

“The other thing about Biden is his extraordinary skill at dealmaking has made this domestic administration the most effective since at least the Great Society and probably the New Deal. You think about the fact that [T] could never get infrastructure through Congress, even though everybody wanted it.

“That has been huge but 
 he needs to prove that the government can work for people after 40 years in which we had a government that we felt was working against us. That has been a harder and harder case for him to make because the media is not picking that up.

“The question going into 2024 is: will people understand that Biden has created a government that does work for the people? Whether or not you like its policies personally, he is trying to use that government to meet the needs of the people in a way that the Republicans haven’t done since 1981. He is a transformative president. Whether or not it’s going to be enough, we’re going to find out in 14 months”.

“I watch him constantly, I read him constantly, and I have met him and interviewed him. He’s fine mentally. As I get older, when I’m on task, I don’t miss a trick. I’m going to leave to go to the grocery store after this, and the chances are very good I will run into somebody I know quite well and not remember their name. That’s just the way it is.”

Richardson glides between excavations of 19th-century history and a running commentary on the hot political story of the day….

She reflects: “One of the things that people like me do is give people firm ground to stand on in a swamp. That is, 
 to have somebody say, ‘This happened, this happened, this happened and here are citations that you can go to check, and this is how things work,’ is very comforting…. “So it’s partly a search for history but it’s also partly a search to feel like you understand the world again, which is hard to do when you’re being bombarded with hearings and lies and all that kind of crap. I actually think that the meaning of it is less about history than it is about returning to a reality based community.”

We Need To Declare Independence from the Founding Fathers

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Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman is one of the most sensible people writing about politics today. (Is it a coincidence that I almost always agree with him?) This Fourth of July, he advises us to respect the Founding Fathers but not worship them (and not pretend to worship them like some of our most prominent right-wingers do):

Two hundred and forty-six years ago, Americans did something extraordinary, declaring their independence from a colonial rule enforced from a great distance with the cruel and arbitrary hand of oppression. And now it’s time for us to declare our own independence, from Founding Father fetishism.

This is not a call to repudiate the men who signed the Declaration of Independence and crafted the Constitution. We don’t have to tear down every statue of them (though frankly the statues don’t do anyone much good), or cast them only as villains in our national story.

But we need to liberate ourselves from the toxic belief that those men were perfect in all things, vessels of sacred wisdom that must bind our society today no matter how much damage it might cause.

As we’ve seen recently, the American right has found in the framers an extraordinarily effective tool with which they can roll back social progress and undermine our democracy. It may have found its most ridiculous manifestation in the tea party movement that emerged when Barack Obama was president, when people started prancing around in tricorn hats and every Republican was supposed to have a favorite Founder. But today it has gone from an affectation to a weapon, and a brutally effective one.

We saw it in the recent Supreme Court decisions that supercharged the legal philosophy of “originalism” on abortion and guns. Reproductive rights, said Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., are neither found in the explicit words of the Constitution nor “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions,” so they don’t exist as rights. As for states that want to regulate guns, said Justice Clarence Thomas, only regulations that have “a distinctly similar historical regulation” from the 18th century will be allowed. The America of 1789 becomes a prison the conservative justices can lock us all in whenever it suits them.

Originalism was a scam from the start, a foolproof methodology for conservatives to arrive at whatever judicial result matches their policy preferences: Cherry-pick a few quotes from the Federalist Papers, cite an obscure 1740 ordinance from the Virginia colony one of your clerks dug up, then claim that scripture leads us inexorably to only one outcome.

By happy coincidence, that outcome is always the one Republicans seek. Anyone who disagrees, or who shows how absurd the right’s historical analysis is even on its own terms, simply isn’t respecting the divine will of the framers.

I am no spirit medium, able to communicate with the framers through the mists of time, and neither is anyone on the Supreme Court. But I suspect they themselves would find the originalist project as practiced on the right to be utterly absurd. Imagine you could travel back and describe to them the idea that hundreds of years hence we’d all be bound to their utterances and the condition of their society. They’d probably say, “That sounds insane.”

But this is the conceit of today’s right: The Founders were essentially perfect, and only we conservatives are capable of interpreting their will.

One of the lies conservatives tell — and to which they cling all the more fiercely in the face of new understandings of history — is that the founding and the men who drove it were straightforward and easy to understand.

But like the country they shaped, they were complicated. They were brilliant and visionary, and weak and compromised. It does not diminish their accomplishments to see that they were human beings.

So what do you do about a figure such as Thomas Jefferson? He had one of the most extraordinary minds of his age, capable of crafting brilliant works of political philosophy we read to this day and designing structures that still stand. Yet he also owned other human beings.

The answer conservatives have is that we must shield our eyes from Jefferson’s shortcomings (along with those of the other enslavers among the Founders). If you’re Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, you bring public school teachers to a “civics education” seminar where they’re told to instruct children that Jefferson and George Washington were principled in their opposition to slavery; maybe the kids won’t bother asking why that opposition was never so firmly held that it extended to the men, women and children they held in bondage.

But trust me, kids can handle complexity. They want complexity. They walk every day through a rapidly changing world, and they deal with that change much better than adults do.

That’s the thing about America: It’s all about change, and always has been. At its best, it’s about imagination, and dynamism, and progress. That’s what it was in 1776, and that’s what it is now.

We are a country filled with achievements and shortcomings, virtues and vices. We have more Nobel Prize winners than any other nation, yet we’re the only highly developed country that doesn’t provide health coverage to all its citizens. We invent new sports and musical genres and see them spread throughout the world, yet alarmingly few of us speak more than one language. People everywhere thirst for American culture and dream of coming here, yet they look at our unreal levels of carnage and don’t understand how we can live in a society drowning in guns.

I’ve never been more fearful for the future of America than I am today; there are good reasons to believe that the democracy we began to fashion two and a half centuries ago may not survive the next decade. And the people most eager to strangle it are the same ones who most loudly proclaim their devotion to the Founders.

So we need to liberate ourselves from those men. We should study them, and understand them, and honor the great things they did. But they were not gods. They can’t take us to a future of freedom and justice. We have to do it for ourselves.

They’re Not Going To Help Deal With the Climate Crisis

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Our local air quality has improved to “Poor” now that some of the Canadian smoke has drifted elsewhere. The climate crisis is manifesting itself in ever more disheartening ways. Wildfires are becoming more frequent and severe. Ninety percent of Antarctic ice is gone. Mosquitoes that spread malaria are moving north.

At the same time, people who call themselves “conservative” are opposed to conserving a climate we humans have evolved to live in. The environmentalist David Roberts has an explanation for their opposition:

I have a fairly unpopular opinion that has grown stronger throughout my career, to wit: Conservative opposition to acknowledging and acting on climate change is not a contingent accident of history. The two — climate change and modern conservatism — are intrinsically at odds. 

In other words, the situation wouldn’t have been substantially changed by Al Gore not making his movie, or John McCain winning, or environmentalists talking more about national security and less about polar bears, or any of the other glib explanations that have been offered over the years. 

[There are] two basic reasons. First, at a more abstract level, solving (or just dealing with) climate requires a) concern for people distant in space and/or time, b) global cooperation across lines of race/nationality/etc., c) short-term sacrifice for future benefits, and d) planning. It requires that we think and plan as a species. It requires solidarity and cooperation. That’s just not compatible with nationalism amd other forms of in-group/out-group tribalism. It’s not compatible with extreme “there is no such thing as society” individualism. 

Slightly more concretely, clean energy is, relative to fossil fuels, more networked and infrastructure-based, more distributed, more about sharing, more reliant on long-term contracts, more reliant on solidarity and social trust. 

Basically, the structure of the climate problem and its solutions require more cooperation and solidarity and planning, less competition and nationalism and trust in markets. There’s no clever rhetorical way around that. And yes, I realize that conservatives can acknowledge climate change and still double down on reactionary shit like hoarding and wall-building — that is, in effect, what they’re currently doing — but that’s not a solution. Conservatism has no solution. 

“The two tasks – preventing Earth systems collapse and preventing the rise of the far right – are not divisible. We have no choice but to fight both forces at once.”  It’s a little crazy that George Monbiot is the only one saying this clearly.

Georoge Monbiot writes for The Guardian. Here are the first and last paragraphs of the column Roberts quoted from:

Round the cycle turns. As millions are driven from their homes by climate disasters, the extreme right exploits their misery to extend its reach. As the extreme right gains power, climate programmes are shut down, heating accelerates and more people are driven from their homes. If we don’t break this cycle soon, it will become the dominant story of our times….

It is easy to whip up fascism. It’s the default result of political ignorance and its exploitation. Containing it is much harder, and never-ending. The two tasks – preventing Earth systems collapse and preventing the rise of the far right – are not divisible. We have no choice but to fight both forces at once.

The Supreme Court Judged by a Judge

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Jed Rakoff is a Senior United States District Judge. In a book review for the New York Review of Books, he summarizes the history of the Supreme Court from the 19th century to the 21st:  

Over the course of American history, the US Supreme Court has usually been the most conservative of the three branches of government, often to a reactionary extreme. Indeed, an objective observer might well conclude that it has frequently encouraged our nation’s darkest tendencies.

In the decades immediately preceding the Civil War, the Court not only rigidly enforced slave laws but also declared that even free African Americans were not US citizens (Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857). It reduced Native Americans from sovereign nations to wards of the state (Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 1831), which was free to remove them from their treaty-prescribed lands and send them on the deadly Trail of Tears to bleak reservations hundreds of miles west. In the decades following the Civil War, it undermined Reconstruction (the Civil Rights Cases of 1883), legitimized Jim Crow (Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896), denied women the right to vote (Minor v. Happersett, 1875), and treated union activities as illegal conspiracies (Loewe v. Lawlor, 1908).

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the Court went to great lengths to hold progressive legislation unconstitutional (for example, in Lochner v. New York, 1905), especially laws that sought to protect women and children from exploitation (Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, 1923). And when, in response to pressure from (and ultimately appointments by) President Franklin Roosevelt, the Court somewhat relaxed its disapproval of federal social welfare legislation, it continued in many cases to show a callous disregard for the rights of individuals and minorities, as demonstrated by such decisions as its cavalier approval of the internment of loyal American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II (Korematsu v. United States, 1944).

There was a brief period in the 1950s and 1960s when the Court sought to recognize its past mistakes and move forward, and while the advent of the Warren Court in 1953 was something of a fluke (no one remotely expected that Earl Warren and William Brennan—both nominated by a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower—would develop into the great champions of liberty they became), in its relatively short duration it demonstrated how the Court could, if it wished, be a leader in the enhancement of civil rights and the protection of minorities. But beginning in the 1970s, the Court gradually resumed its traditional conservative stance, for example by limiting the Warren Court’s efforts to combat police misconduct (City of Los Angeles v. Lyons, 1983). And now, thanks to [the last president’s three] appointments, the current majority has reduced some of the Court’s most progressive past decisions to ashes….

Judge Rakoff then gets to the book he’s reviewing: Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment. (I’m skipping most of the long review.) Rakoff argues that Justice Frankfurter, a progressive appointed by one of our most progressive presidents, Franklin Roosevelt, was too restrained in his rulings:

Liberals were initially thrilled by Frankfurter’s elevation. But they quickly learned that his conception of a “liberal” Court was rather different from theirs. The conflict was even more noticeable within the confines of the Court, where Frankfurter’s belief that progress best lay in limiting its review of state and federal legislation so as to let the democratic political process hold sway repeatedly clashed with the view of its newest member, William O. Douglas, that the Court’s responsibility was to protect the civil rights and civil liberties of minorities and individuals…..

One of the many virtues of [Democratic Justice] is the wealth of detailed evidence he provides for each of his assertions. His own assessment of Frankfurter’s virtues and faults is that he was prescient in seeing how the supposed lack of restraint of Warren Court jurisprudence could come back to haunt American liberals once the Court returned to its more traditional conservative stance. My view, however, is that Frankfurter got so carried away with his philosophy of restraint that he failed to recognize basic principles of checks and balances inherent in our constitutional design, and in particular the natural purpose of the Court to protect individuals and minorities against excesses in which elected officials and legislators too often engage.

Moreover, it is easy to pay lip service to a particular judicial philosophy in order to achieve any desired result. For example, the Court’s recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overruling Roe v. Wade, can be interpreted by its supporters as an exercise in Frankfurter-like restraint that leaves the issue of abortion to state legislatures, while its opponents can view it as the Court’s refusal to exercise its inherent responsibility to protect individual rights.

What may not be gainsaid, however, is that the Court has now returned to its historically conservative tendencies with a vengeance that can only be called reactionary. And if you put aside arguments over judicial philosophy and look at the practical results, it is worse than that.

In the last few days of its most recent term, the Court released a series of decisions that, whatever their purported rationales, made the world a more dangerous place: more dangerous for poor people of color, who can no longer effectively seek redress for certain forms of police misconduct; more dangerous for women, who in many states must now resort to backroom abortions and face imprisonment for doing so; and more dangerous for Americans generally, who can no longer hope to meaningfully curb the increase in gun violence now plaguing our nation and whose government will find it ever more difficult to alleviate the climate change that imperils our planet. It is hard to believe that Felix Frankfurter would have been comfortable with such results.

A Brief Note on Culture War Grievances

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David Roberts, a sensible person on Twitter, explains the rationale behind right-wing culture war grievances:

Consider the “War on Christmas.” I view it as the paradigmatic right wing culture war grievance, not because it particularly matters or has any grand significance, but because it exposes the basic form that all these grievances take.

Asking everyone in a public role to say “Merry Christmas” is asking everyone to impose and reinforce a particular culture and a particular set of traditions, and thereby exclude others. Saying “happy holidays,” on the other hand, is a neutral, agnostic greeting — it makes room for everyone.

Conservatives specifically object to “happy holidays” because they do not *want* to make room for everyone. They want to exclude! The whole point is to prioritize and elevate a particular culture above others. They do not like or want multiculturalism or pluralism.

This, then, is the basic form of right wing grievance: if we stop imposing a particular dominant culture, and instead allow for more individual choice and variation, we are “attacking” the dominant culture. Attempts at pluralism are framed as an assault on the dominant culture….

The right wants a single narrow culture…. The left wants [or accepts] variation and pluralism.

Reactionary psychology is quite literally unable to process a genuine devotion to pluralism, so it can only interpret these reforms as attacks on its specific culture by some other specific culture (“Marxism” or whatever). They are dominant … or else persecuted. No other option.

Which explains why they said letting different kinds of people get married was an attack on marriage. Someone else suggested that another element of reactionary thinking is zero sum: if something is good for other people, it must be bad for them.

Finally, a personal note on variation and pluralism. If you run a website that requires a working cellphone to get past security, give your users another way to do it, e.g. email. Let a hundred flowers blossom.