Chris Hedges's Blog, page 26

Architects Revolt Against Trump’s Plan for Federal Buildings

Decades of federal architectural policy would be upended if the Trump administration follows through on an executive order that was leaked to the Architectural Record on Feb. 4.

Titled “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again,” it announces that the classical style of architecture – which refers to architecture inspired by the monumental buildings of ancient Greece and Rome – will be the “preferred and default style” for many federal buildings.

Since then, the American Institute of Architects, the Society of Architectural Historians, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Docomomo and the Architectural Lobby – among many others – have publicly announced their opposition to the order.

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As a historian of modern architecture, I share their suspicions. While the executive order certainly aligns with some of the administration’s conservative priorities, I fear that it will ultimately stifle innovation and reverse recent federal support for architectural experimentation.

What’s in the Executive Order?

The order encompasses all federal courthouses and agency headquarters, all federal public buildings in Washington, D.C. and the surrounding area – what’s called the National Capital Region – and all federal public buildings that cost more than US$50 million to build. The order would apply to the design of all new buildings, as well as to all renovations or additions to existing buildings.

It’s meant to overturn the existing “Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture” issued in 1962 by future Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Rather than dictating a single style, Moynihan’s principles emphasize the importance of diverse “designs that embody the finest contemporary American architectural thought.”

In fact, they specifically suggest that “development of an official style must be avoided. Design must flow from the architectural profession to the government” – which is exactly the opposite of what Trump’s mandate is trying to do.

So who’s behind the executive order?

It was drafted by the National Civic Art Society, a conservative nonprofit that promotes the classical tradition in architecture, urbanism and the arts. The group considers modernist architecture to be “a failure” and endeavors to “help architecture return to its pre-Modernist roots.” The National Civic Art Society claims all forms of modern architecture “reject traditional standards of beauty and harmony. Indeed, ‘beauty’ is a forbidden word,” and notes that some leading modernist architects were fascists, racists and evinced a “hatred of democracy.”

‘Classical’ Can Mean Many Different Things

Many U.S. government buildings – from the White House to the Supreme Court Building – were built in the classical style. According to the executive order, because the style alludes to the architecture of “democratic Athens and republican Rome,” it is able to “physically symbolize” the nation’s self-governing ideals. On the other hand, the order and the NCAS characterize buildings built since 1962 as “undistinguished… uninspiring … and even just plain ugly,” citing popular opinion polls as proof.

And yet, critics have been quick to point out that the classical style doesn’t always symbolize democratic ideals of self-governance.

Dictators, plutocrats and autocrats have long used the classical style to connect the grandeur of the Roman empire to their own power. Hitler, Stalin and Kim Jong-Il all favored classically inspired buildings.

In the United States, there’s a strong classical tradition in not just the capital but also in the South, where plantation owners were keen to build their mansions in the neoclassical style – and where this architectural tradition is still alive and well. For example, we see it in buildings like the recently completed Federal Building and Courthouse in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Yet it’s difficult to avoid the fact that many of these neoclassical estates – these purported symbols of democracy – featured separate quarters for slaves.

Architect Phineas Harper also makes a subtle but important point that today’s love of classical and traditional architecture often masks a fondness toward traditional European culture – and, by extension, an aversion to “the other.” He notes that classicism, traditional architecture and anti-modernist rhetoric frequently disguise xenophobic and violent impulses.

More Obama Backlash?

There could be a more straightforward reason for this executive order, however.

Trump’s order notes that it is simply about reviving the ideals of the Founding Fathers, and it’s clear about its goal to overturn the 1962 guidelines that allowed controversial Brutalist structures, such as the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., to be built.

But since Trump entered office, he’s sought to undermine, roll back and rewrite the legacy of his predecessor, President Barack Obama. So it’s plausible that the order is a direct reaction to a “building boom” that happened under President Obama and was funded via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. During this period, the Obama administration helped promote a diverse range of innovative and cutting-edge federal buildings, from Kieran Timberlake’s U.S. Embassy in London to the new U.S. courthouse in Austin, Texas.

These structures combined provocative design with the latest advancements in security, while incorporating green building systems that reduced energy costs. Together, I believe they project the image of a technologically advanced and enlightened U.S. federal government.

No matter your views on classical architecture, restricting designs to one particular style rejects the diverse tastes and ideals of the American people. Furthermore, this executive order would stifle innovation and progress in the architecture, engineering and construction industry.

Because aesthetics and symbolism are so central to classical architecture, the buildings – almost by definition – are more costly and less energy efficient than so-called “high-performance buildings,” which focus on cost-effectiveness, safety, sustainability and accessibility, in addition to aesthetics. Through organizations such as the National Institute of Building Sciences and their Whole Building Design Guide, the federal government has, in recent years, been working to produce advanced buildings that set standards for the industry and the world.

For these reasons, the administration’s mandate for classical architecture constrains architecture’s ability to innovate and tackle real world problems.

[Insight, in your inbox each day. You can get it with The Conversation’s email newsletter.]

Kai Gutschow, Associate Professor of Architecture, Carnegie Mellon University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Bernie Sanders’ Triumph Can’t Be Denied

One of the most frustrating things for me, as a political writer over the last twenty-five years, was the inability of most liberals to grasp what neoliberalism was. But compared to even five years ago, the situation has changed dramatically, as many more ordinary people—nurses, teachers, salespeople, accountants, drivers—understand what the ideology signifies. They are rapidly moving away from the false Republican-Democrat dichotomy, or the identity politics prism which blurs the true nature of neoliberal inequality and focusing on the true nature of power.

Bernie Sanders calls it the reign of the “billionaire class.” He constantly enumerates the dominant corporate industries that have a stranglehold on American politics. He talks about the 1% who are scared of political revolution. He’s right. Neoliberalism is what happened to both the Democrats and the Republicans when they agreed to put into practice, starting from the 1970s onwards, certain radical ideas about human social organization that had been percolating since the end of World War II.

Both Democrats and Republicans agree on the basic consensus, with only slight variations on emphasis. Thus it is futile to expect any improvements for working people with the preferred candidates of either party, because both are equally dedicated to preserving extreme corporate domination and the annihilation of freedom and dignity for those who do not have such power.

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Neoliberalism has tried to bring about a fundamental reorientation of human psychology. We might say that the “meritocrats” it likes to cheer so enthusiastically are the embodiment of this psychological transformation. Citizens have been indoctrinated to think of themselves as independent profit centers, as everyone looks out for themselves. Any shared sacrifice for the common good is demeaned as idealistic or utopian—even basic decencies such as a living wage or inexpensive college education or health care that doesn’t bankrupt you.

At the policy level, deregulation, privatization, and fiscal austerity, kicked into high gear since the Carter presidency, have meant that functions that should remain public have been turned over to private entities, the idea of universal welfare goes out the door and is replaced by earned benefits, and everyone finds themselves at the mercy of unchecked corporations that have no loyalty to class, community, or culture.

But after nearly 50 years of monopoly on political discourse, both left and right in America erupted in open rebellion in 2015. We are now witnessing the second act of this movement, in the form of the Sanders ascendancy which seeks to return the Democratic party to its participatory roots.

What encourages me so much is the resistance of ordinary voters to the kinds of hoodwinking that used to be more fatalistically accepted in earlier times.

When Pete Buttigieg suggests that people can keep their private health insurance and choose Medicare if they want it, voters understand that this is neoliberal subterfuge for a false choice: nobody wants to pay high deductibles and premiums, instead of guaranteed care, even if Mayor Pete wants you to be scared by the trillions of extra dollars he thinks it will cost. In fact, universal government programs are always cheaper and fairer than private alternatives, even if neoliberalism, particularly under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, successfully propagated the contrary myth. Buttigieg’s recent advocacy of mandatory public service and his anxiety about deficit spending align with the perennial neoliberal themes of discipline and austerity.

When Elizabeth Warren hesitates to endorse a Medicare for All program that immediately starts making the transition from the patchwork Obamacare, voters understand that this is right out of the playbook of making us settle for half a loaf by creating the impression that swallowing a full loaf will cause indigestion. In fact, what is administratively and psychologically difficult to manage is a quintessential neoliberal program like Obamacare, with legions of exceptions, qualifications, and exclusions.

Most of the early entrants in the Democratic nomination race, like Kamala Harris, Julián Castro, and Cory Booker, who at first endorsed Medicare for All but backed off when pressed for details or timelines, paid the price in voter disapproval. Amy Klobuchar is yet to undergo her trial by fire on this issue, but as she continues advancing in the polls, it will come soon enough. To base your whole candidacy on standing pat, because nothing is legislatively possible, even if this fatalism is cloaked in folksy Midwestern pragmatism, is exactly the kind of subservience to unchecked corporate power that has voters disillusioned.

Joe Biden’s career encapsulates the transition of a Democrat who came to power after the end of Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty and the idealism of the 1960s, and who smoothly transitioned to an overt neoliberal disciplinary stance, reflected in his vigorous advocacy of the war on drugs, mass incarceration, civil liberties abridgment, and tougher bankruptcy exemptions. That subtle white supremacy easily shades over into an economic repression that cuts across all races is something much better understood than just a few years ago, when the Clintons were expertly propagandized as natural allies of African Americans.

Not long ago, identity politics would have canceled the clarity that has resulted from the focus on neoliberal inequality. Voters don’t seem interested in voting for Warren or Harris as a woman per se, if they see their policies as hurting all people, including women. The same dynamic applies to Buttigieg, whose gay identity is not the overruling factor as was blackness in the case of Barack Obama; rather, whether Buttigieg’s neoliberal accommodation actually hurts all people, including people in the LGBTQ community, seems to be the overriding consideration—as it should be.

The cover of meritocracy—which simply means that the aspirant successfully met neoliberalism’s criteria for professional competition—is increasingly of little value in electoral politics. Buttigieg is almost the paradigmatic case, with his Harvard education, Rhodes scholarship, voluntary military intelligence service, McKinsey apprenticeship, and mayoral governance derived from the vacuous public language Bill Clinton and Barack Obama perfected. Yet Buttigieg will rise and fall on whether he can deviate from such neoliberal verities as adding a public option to Obamacare or relying on cap-and-trade to deal with climate change.

Bernie Sanders’s greatest service has been to insist on his “democratic socialist” moniker, even when many insisted he should opt for the safer “social democrat.” I always approved of his choice, because the disrupting label initiated a thought process that now seems to have reached a critical mass. If Sanders is a democratic socialist, then what exactly are Warren, Buttigieg, and Biden? How far removed are they from FDR and LBJ’s domestic vision? That’s the kind of vital discussion ordinary people all over the country are engaging in, even if the academic elites are lagging far behind. But they’ll come around yet, once working people show them the way in mastering the hidden language of power.

Americans Aren’t Scared of Socialism Anymore

For decades, Republicans have painted anyone left of Barry Goldwater as a “socialist.” Why? Because for a generation raised on the Cold War, “socialist” just seemed like a damaging label.

And, probably, it was.

You can tell, because many liberal-leaning figures internalized that fear. When Donald Trump vowed that “America will never be a socialist country,” for instance, no less than Senator Elizabeth Warren stood and applauded.

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But while older Americans retain some antipathy toward the word, folks raised in the age of “late capitalism” don’t. In Gallup polls, more millennial and Gen-Z respondents say they view “socialism” positively with each passing year, while their opinion of “capitalism” tumbles ever downward.

As a result, it’s not all that surprising that self-described democratic socialist Senator Bernie Sanders tops Trump in most head to head polls — and just scooped up popular vote victories in the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries.

Still, old propaganda dies hard. What else could explain the panicky musings of Chis Matthews, the liberal-ish MSNBC host, who recently wondered aloud if a Sanders victory would mean “executions in Central Park”?

Nevermind that Sanders is a longtime opponent of all executions, as any news host could surely look up. The real issue is a prejudice, particularly among Americans reared on fears of the Soviet Union and Maoist China, that “socialism” implies dictatorship, while “capitalism” presumes democracy.

Their Cold War education serves them poorly.

Yes, it’s easy to name calamitous dictatorships, living and deceased, that proclaim socialist or communist commitments. But it’s just as easy to point to Europe, where democratic socialist parties and their descendants have been mainstream players in democratic politics for a century or longer.

The health care, welfare, and tax systems built by those parties have created societies with far greater equality, higher social mobility, and better health outcomes (at lower cost) than we enjoy here. These systems aren’t perfect, but to a significant degree they’re more democratic than our own.

But we don’t have to look abroad (or to Vermont) for a rich social democratic history.

Milwaukee mayor Daniel Hoan — one of several socialists to govern the city — served for 24 years, and built the country’s first public busing and housing programs. And ruby-red North Dakota is, even now, the only state in the country with a state-owned bank, thanks to a socialist-led government in the early 20th century. Today, dozens of elected socialists hold office at the state or municipal levels.

While plenty of socialists embraced democracy, plenty of capitalists turned to dictatorship.

In the name of fighting socialism during the Cold War, the U.S. trained and supported members of right-wing death squads in El Salvador, genocidal army units in Guatemala, and a Chilean military regime that disappeared or tortured tens of thousands of people while enacting “pro-market reforms.”

Only last year, the U.S. government was cheering a military coup against an elected socialist government in Bolivia. And in 2018, the Wall Street Journal praised far-right Brazilian leader Jair Bolsonaro, an apologist for the country’s old military regime, for his deregulation of business.

Even here at home, our capitalist “freedoms” have coexisted peacefully with racial apartheid, the world’s largest prison system, and the mass internment of immigrants and their children.

Sanders has been clear his socialist tradition comes from the social democratic systems common in countries like Denmark, with their provisions for universal health care and free college.

Should Matthews next wonder aloud if candidates who oppose Medicare for All or free college also support death squads, genocide, mass incarceration, or internment camps? If that sounds unfair, then so should the lazy fear mongering we get about “socialism.”

The sobering truth is that all political systems are capable of either great violence or social uplift. That’s why we need resilient social movements, whatever system we use — and why we’re poorly served by propaganda from any corner.

The New Rules of the Game

The quadrennial political game of least worst, or how to scare the public to vote for presidential candidates who serve corporate power, comes this season with a new twist. Donald Trump, if he faces Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar or Michael Bloomberg, will continue to be an amalgamation of Adolf Hitler, Al Capone and the Antichrist. But should Bernie Sanders manage to evade the snares, traps and minefields laid for him by the Democratic Party elites, should he miraculously become the party’s nominee, the game of least worst will radically change. All the terrifying demons that inhabit Trump will be instantly exorcised. But unlike in the biblical story of Jesus driving the demons into a herd of swine, they will be driven into the senator from Vermont. Trump will become the establishment’s reluctant least worse option. Sanders will become a leper. The Democratic and Republican party elites, joining forces as they did in the 1972 presidential election, will do to Sanders what they did to George McGovern, who lost in 49 of the 50 states.

“If Dems go on to nominate Sanders, the Russians will have to reconsider who to work for to best screw up the US. Sanders is just as polarizing as Trump AND he’ll ruin our economy and doesn’t care about our military,” former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein (net worth $1.1 billion) tweeted. “If I’m Russian, I go with Sanders this time around.”

Blankfein, who calls for cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and who headed Goldman Sachs when it paid Hillary Clinton $675,000 for three speaking engagements in 2013, laid out the stance of the billionaire class that controls the Democratic Party. The New York Times reported that Mike Novogratz, “a Goldman Sachs alumnus who runs the merchant bank Galaxy Digital, said Mr. Sanders’s oppositional nature had prompted ‘too many friends’ to say they would vote against him in November. ‘And they hate Trump,’ he said.”

“Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney, and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it,” Hillary Clinton says of Sanders in a forthcoming television documentary.

The courtiers in the press, pathetically attempting to spin Sanders’ New Hampshire win into a victory for the corporate-endorsed alternatives, are part of the firing squad. “Running Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity” read the headline in a piece by Jonathan Chait in New York magazine. “No party nomination, with the possible exception of Barry Goldwater in 1964, has put forth a presidential nominee with the level of downside risk exposure as a Sanders-led ticket would bring. To nominate Sanders would be insane,” he wrote. David Frum — now a darling of the Democratic elites, like many other Republicans who morphed from George W. Bush supporters into critics of Trump — announced in The Atlantic that Bernie can’t win. “Sanders is a Marxist of the old school of dialectical materialism, from the land that time forgot,” Frum wrote. “Class relations are foundational; everything else is epiphenomenal.”

Jennifer Rubin declared in The Washington Post that a Sanders nomination would be a “disaster for the Democrats.” “Sanders’s campaign, like all primary campaigns, is a preview of the general-election race and, if elected, the administration he would lead,” Rubin wrote. “A nominee who insists on personally attacking all doubters and the media might be a model for the Republican Party, but Democrats are not going to win with their own Donald Trump, especially one who has burned bridges and stirred resentment in his own party.”

Thomas Friedman, in a column supporting Bloomberg, the newest savior in the protean Democratic firmament, wrote of Sanders: “On which planet in the Milky Way galaxy is an avowed ‘socialist’ — who wants to take away the private health care coverage of some 150 million Americans and replace it with a gigantic, untested Medicare-for-All program, which he’d also extend to illegal immigrants — going to defeat the Trump machine this year? It will cast Sanders as Che Guevara — and it won’t even be that hard.”

MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews, descending to the Red baiting employed by Blankfein, said that “if Castro and the Reds had won the Cold War there would have been executions in Central Park and I might have been one of the ones getting executed. And certain other people would be there cheering, okay?”

Despite the hyperventilating by corporate shills such as Matthews and Friedman, Sanders’ democratic socialism is essentially that of a New Deal Democrat. His political views would be part of the mainstream in France or Germany, where democratic socialism is an accepted part of the political landscape and is routinely challenged as too accommodationist by communists and radical socialists. Sanders calls for an end to our foreign wars, a reduction of the military budget, for “Medicare for All,” abolishing the death penalty, eliminating mandatory minimum sentences and private prisons, a return of Glass-Steagall, raising taxes on the wealthy, increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour, canceling student debt, eliminating the Electoral College, banning fracking and breaking up agribusinesses. This does not qualify as a revolutionary agenda.

Sanders, unlike many more radical socialists, does not propose nationalizing the banks and the fossil fuel and arms industries. He does not call for the criminal prosecution of the financial elites who trashed the global economy or the politicians and generals who lied to launch preemptive wars, defined under international law as criminal wars of aggression, which have devastated much of the Middle East, resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of refugees and displaced people, and cost the nation between $5 trillion and $7 trillion. He does not call for worker ownership of factories and businesses. He does not promise to halt the government’s wholesale surveillance of the public. He does not intend to punish corporations that have moved manufacturing overseas. Most importantly, he believes, as I do not, that the political system, including the Democratic Party, can be reformed from within. He does not support sustained mass civil disobedience to bring the system down, the only hope we have of halting the climate emergency that threatens to doom the human race. On the political spectrum, he is, at best, an enlightened moderate. The vicious attacks against him by the elites are an indication of how anemic and withered our politics have become.

The Democrats have, once again, offered us their preselected corporate candidates. We can vote for a candidate who serves oligarchic power, albeit with more decorum than Trump, or we can see Trump shoved down our throats. That is the choice. It exposes the least worst option as a con, a mechanism used repeatedly to buttress corporate power. The elites know they would be safe in the hands of a Hillary Clinton, a Barack Obama or a John Kerry, but not a Bernie Sanders — which is a credit to Sanders.

The surrender to the “least worst” mantra in presidential election after presidential election has neutered the demands of labor, along with those organizations and groups fighting poverty, mass incarceration and police violence. The civil rights, women’s rights, environment justice and consumer rights movements, forced to back Democrats whose rhetoric is palatable but whose actions are inimical to their causes, get tossed overboard. Political leverage, in election after election, is surrendered without a fight. We are all made to kneel before the altar of the least worst. We get nothing in return. The least worst option has proved to be a recipe for steady decay.

The Democrats, especially after Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential run, have erected numerous obstacles to block progressives inside and outside the party. They make ballot access difficult or impossible for people of color. They lock third-party candidates and often progressives in the Democratic Party, such as Dennis Kucinich, out of the presidential campaign debates. They turn campaigns into two-year-long spectacles that cost billions of dollars. They use superdelegates to fix the nominating process. They employ scare tactics to co-op those who should be the natural allies of third parties and progressive political movements.

The repeated cowardice of the liberal class, which backs a Democratic Party that in Europe would be considered a far-right party, saw it squander its credibility. Its rhetoric proved empty. Its moral posturing was a farce. It fought for nothing. In assault after assault on the working class it was complicit. If liberals — supposedly backers of parties and institutions that defend the interests of the working class — had abandoned the Democratic Party after President Bill Clinton pushed through the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, Trump would not be in the White House. Why didn’t liberals walk out of the Democratic Party when Clinton and the Democratic Party leadership, including Biden, passed NAFTA? Why didn’t they walk out when the Clinton administration gutted welfare? Why didn’t they walk out when Clinton pushed through the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, which abolished the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, designed to prevent the kind of banking crisis that trashed the global economy in 2008? Why didn’t they walk out when year after year the Democratic Party funded and expanded our endless wars? Why didn’t they walk out when the Democrats agreed to undercut due process and habeas corpus? Why didn’t they walk out when the Democrats helped approve the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American citizens? Why didn’t the liberals walk out when the party leadership refused to impose sanctions on Israel for its war crimes, enact serious environmental and health care reform or regulate Wall Street? At what point will liberals say “Enough”? At what point will they fight back?

By surrendering every election cycle to the least worst, liberals proved they have no breaking point. There never has been a line in the sand. They have stood for nothing.

Bernie Sanders arose in 2016 as a political force because he, like Trump, acknowledged the bleak reality imposed on working men and women by the billionaire class. This reality, a reality ignored by the ruling elites, was spoken out loud. The elites were held accountable. The Democratic elites scrambled, successfully, to deny Sanders the 2016 nomination. The Republican elites squabbled among themselves and failed to prevent Trump from becoming the party nominee.

The 2016 chessboard has reappeared, but this time in the Democratic Party primary. The Democratic hierarchy, as horrified by Sanders as the established Republican elites were by Trump, is flailing about trying to find a political savior to defeat the Red menace. Their ineptitude, Sanders’ primary asset, was displayed when they mangled the Iowa primary. They, like the Republican elites in 2016, are woefully disconnected from their constituency, attempting to persuade a public they betrayed and no longer understand.

Joe Biden, long a stooge of corporate America, for example, is frantically attempting to paint himself as a champion of poor people of color after his defeats in the largely white states of Iowa and New Hampshire. The onetime vice president, however, was one of the driving forces behind the strategy to take back the “law and order” issue from the Republicans. He and Bill Clinton orchestrated the doubling of the prison population, the militarization of the police, and mandatory minimum sentences along with juvenile boot camps, drug courts, policing in schools and the acceleration of the deportation of “criminal aliens.” During Biden’s leadership in the Senate — where he served from 1973 until 2009, when he became Obama’s vice president — the Congress approved 92 death-eligible crimes in an almost identical period. These Democratic “law and order” policies landed like hammer blows on poor communities of color, inflicting untold misery and egregious acts of injustice. And now Biden, who pounded the nails into those he crucified, is desperately trying to present himself to his victims as their savior. It is a sad metaphor for the bankruptcy of the Democratic Party.

Biden, however, is no longer the Democratic ruling elite’s flavor of the month. This mantle has been passed to Bloomberg, once the Republican mayor of New York and a Rudy Giuliani ally whose indiscriminate stop-and-frisk harassment of, mainly, African Americans and Latinos was ruled unconstitutional. Bloomberg, whose net worth is estimated at $61.8 billion, said he is ready to spend $1 billion of his own money on his campaign, what The New York Times has called “a waterfall of cash.” He has bought the loyalty of much of the ruling Democratic establishment. He spent, for example, $110 million in 2018 alone to support 24 candidates now in Congress. He is saturating the airwaves with commercials. He is lavishing high salaries and perks on his huge campaign staff. Sanders, or anyone else defying the billionaire class, cannot compete financially. The last desperate gasp of the Democratic Party establishment is to buy the election. Bloomberg is ready to oblige. After all, Bloomberg’s money worked miracles in amassing allies to overturn New York City term limits so he could serve a third term as mayor.

But will it work? Will the Democratic elites and Bloomberg be able to smother the Democratic primaries with so much money that Sanders is shut out?

“As with Republicans in 2016, the defining characteristic of the 2020 Democratic race has been the unwieldy size of the field,” Matt Taibbi writes. “The same identity crisis lurking under the Republican clown car afflicted this year’s Democratic contest: Because neither donors nor party leaders nor pundits could figure out what they should be pretending to stand for, they couldn’t coalesce around any one candidate. These constant mercurial shifts in ‘momentum’ — it’s Pete! It’s Amy! Paging Mike Bloomberg! — have eroded the kingmaking power of the Democratic leadership. They are eating the party from within, and seem poised to continue doing so.”

If Sanders gets the nomination it will be due to the Keystone Cops ineptitude of the Democratic leadership, one that as Taibbi points out replicates the ineptitude of the Republican elites in 2016. But this time there will be a crucial difference. The ruling elites, once divided between Trump and Hillary Clinton, with most of the elites preferring Clinton, will be united against Sanders. They will back Trump as the least worst. The corporate media will turn its venom, now directed at Trump, toward Sanders. The Democratic Party’s mask will come off. It will be open warfare between them and us.

California to Apologize for Internment of Japanese Americans

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Les Ouchida was born an American just outside California’s capital city, but his citizenship mattered little after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States declared war. Based solely on their Japanese ancestry, the 5-year-old and his family were taken from their home in 1942 and imprisoned far away in Arkansas.

They were among 120,000 Japanese Americans held at 10 internment camps during World War II, their only fault being “we had the wrong last names and wrong faces,” said Ouchida, now 82 and living a short drive from where he grew up and was taken as a boy due to fear that Japanese Americans would side with Japan in the war.

On Thursday, California’s Legislature is expected to approve a resolution offering an apology to Ouchida and other internment victims for the state’s role in aiding the U.S. government’s policy and condemning actions that helped fan anti-Japanese discrimination.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order No. 9066 establishing the camps was signed on Feb. 19, 1942, and 2/19 now is marked by Japanese Americans as a Day of Remembrance.

Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi was born in Japan and is one of the roughly 430,000 people of Japanese descent living in California, the largest population of any state. The Democrat who represents Manhattan Beach and other beach communities near Los Angeles introduced the resolution.

“We like to talk a lot about how we lead the nation by example,” he said. “Unfortunately, in this case, California led the racist anti-Japanese American movement.”

A congressional commission in 1983 concluded that the detentions were a result of “racial prejudice, war hysteria and failure of political leadership.” Five years later, the U.S. government formally apologized and paid $20,000 in reparations to each victim.

The money didn’t come close to replacing what was lost. Ouchida says his father owned a profitable delivery business with 20 trucks. He never fully recovered from losing his business and died early.

The California resolution doesn’t come with any compensation. It targets the actions of the California Legislature at the time for supporting the internments. Two camps were located in the state — Manzanar on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada in central California and Tule Lake near the Oregon state line, the largest of all the camps.

“I want the California Legislature to officially acknowledge and apologize while these camp survivors are still alive,” Muratsuchi said.

He said anti-Japanese sentiment began in California as early as 1913, when the state passed the California Alien Land Law, targeting Japanese farmers who some in California’s massive agricultural industry perceived as a threat. Seven years later the state barred anyone with Japanese ancestry from buying farmland.

The internment of Ouchida, his older brother and parents began in Fresno, California. Three months later they were sent to Jerome, Arkansas, where they stayed for most of the war.

Given their young ages at the time, many living victims such as Ouchida don’t remember much of life in the camps. But he does recall straw-filled mattresses and little privacy.

Communal bathrooms had rows of toilets with no barriers between users. “They put a bag over their heads when they went to the bathroom” for privacy, said Ouchida, who teaches about the internments at the California Museum in Sacramento.

Before the last camp was closed in 1946, Ouchida’s family was shipped to a facility in Arizona. When the family was freed, they took a Greyhound bus back to California. When it reached a stop sign near their community outside Sacramento, “I still remember the ladies on the bus started crying,” Ouchida said. “Because they were home.”

The resolution, co-introduced by California Assembly Republican Leader Marie Waldron of Escondido, makes a passing reference to “recent national events” and says they serve as a reminder “to learn from the mistakes of the past.”

Muratsuchi said the inspiration for that passage were migrant children held in U.S. government custody over the past year.

Ouchida said Japanese families like his always considered themselves loyal citizens before and after the internments. He holds no animosity toward the U.S. or California governments, choosing to focus on positives outgrowths like the permanent exhibit at the California Museum that provides an unvarnished view of the internments.

“Even if it took time, we have the goodness to still apologize,” he said.

Stop and Frisk Gets Renewed Attention in Bloomberg Candidacy

NEW YORK — David Ourlicht was a college student, walking down a street near campus, when he became one of millions of New Yorkers swept up in the era of stop and frisk.

A police officer accosted Ourlicht, deeming suspicious a bulge in his jacket. Police patted him down, told him to stand against a wall, emptied his pockets, finding nothing illegal, and accused him of lying about his address, according to court testimony. The 2008 encounter ended with a disorderly conduct summons, which was later dismissed.

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Ourlicht was embarrassed, angry and rattled, but not surprised. Police encounters like that had become a cornerstone of policing under then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg and a fact of life for Ourlicht, who is of black and white heritage, and his friends growing up.

He later joined a lawsuit that helped curb stop and frisk and became a lawyer himself. But his experiences with police, which he says began with getting beaten and handcuffed at 15 while trying to go up to his apartment, still cast a shadow over his life today.

“Every day I get into my car, every day I decide to step out of my house, it’s a psyching up that I have to do to myself,” Ourlicht said. “It’s always there.”

New York’s stop-and-frisk history is getting renewed attention as Bloomberg campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination. Bloomberg long defended the practice, even after a federal judge found that the stops discriminated against those who were black or Latino. He abruptly apologized in November shortly before announcing his White House bid and has largely sought to move past the issue.

That became difficult last week when a 2015 recording of Bloomberg resurfaced in which he said the way to bring down murder rates is to “put a lot of cops” in minority neighborhoods because that’s where “all the crime is.”

Bloomberg said the remarks “do not reflect my commitment to criminal justice reform and racial equity.” He has since gotten endorsements from some members of the Congressional Black Caucus. And as he campaigned in the South last week, many black voters said they weren’t offended by the comments and were more focused on finding a candidate who could beat President Donald Trump.

But the former mayor likely will face more questions about the practice as his campaign gains traction. Bloomberg is on the cusp of qualifying for Wednesday’s presidential debate, where his rivals are sure to pillory him on stop and frisk to blunt his rise and appeal to African Americans, who are a critical voting bloc in the Democratic primary.

Stop and frisk is a term for a tactic police have long used: accosting, questioning and sometimes patting down people who officers think might be doing something illegal, but the suspicions didn’t necessarily amount to probable cause for an arrest.

The New York Police Department began increasing its emphasis on stop and frisk in the mid-1990s, when Republican Rudy Giuliani was mayor. But stops soared under Bloomberg – who held office as a Republican and later an independent — rising from about 97,000 stops in 2002 to a high of about 685,000 in 2011. There were fewer than 13,500 stops last year, according to NYPD data.

Over 80% of the people stopped during the surge of stop and frisk were black or Latino.

They include Hawk Newsome, 42, who said he was stopped dozens of times while living in the Bronx when Giuliani, then Bloomberg, served as mayor.

Too often, people overlook the psychological effects of the policy, he added.

“We felt like these cops could murder us. They were pulling out weapons on us and pushing us against the wall. There was this anxiety — we could be killed at any time,” said Newsome, chairman of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York. “Just growing up in it, it made you feel hopeless, like, ‘Damn, this is all my life will ever be. This is how they treat me. Look at our schools, look at our police. My life isn’t worth much.’”

Police and Bloomberg insisted that the stops helped drive crime down to record-low levels and that the tactic was legal.

Critics said stop and frisk amounted to racial discrimination with little impact on crime. About 10% of stops led to arrests or summonses, and only about 1% to weapons seizures.

In 2013, a federal judge declared that New York City’s use of the stops had violated civil and constitutional rights.

Bloomberg’s administration appealed the ruling. His successor dropped the appeal and agreed to reforms and a court-appointed monitor.

It remains to be seen whether voters of color in and outside New York will see past the practice and give serious consideration to Bloomberg. But the national conversation in recent years about racial inequity in the criminal justice system could keep stop and frisk in focus during the rest of the campaign cycle.

“It’s complicated,” said Dayvon Love, director of public policy of the grassroots think tank Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle in Baltimore.

“I think there’s more of a recognition that that approach doesn’t work to solve the problem of violence and homicide in communities around the country,” he said, but some people living in neighborhoods plagued by violence “would see the strategy, not necessarily to the extreme of Bloomberg’s approach, as the best option available to them to meet their immediate needs.”

From Love’s perspective, black people who are politically well-connected and “more interested in their own personal success” could gravitate toward someone like Bloomberg.

Many young voters outside New York don’t know much about Bloomberg’s record as mayor.

But for Brandon Kolawole, 24, of Chicago, mention of stop and frisk triggers a response of familiarity and dread.

“I’ve seen it, and I’ve dealt with it,” said Kolawole, who is black. “If the police see you, they can just pull you over, stop you and frisk you for whatever reason.”

Kolawole, who said he won’t vote in November, knows “very little” about Bloomberg and his role in expanding the policy. Kolawole has seen the presidential candidate’s ads on television promoting his work with former President Barack Obama but doesn’t know much about the former mayor’s time in office.

Warren Evans spent about 30 years in law enforcement in the Detroit area — six of those as a county sheriff and one as the city’s police chief. On Thursday, he endorsed Bloomberg for the Democratic nomination for president.

Evans, who is black and has been Wayne County’s elected executive for the past six years, understands the initial purpose of stop and frisk. But he says it failed because of “bad police practice and the inherent bias many officers have about communities of color.”

“I don’t think it’s going to resonate negatively over the long term” for Bloomberg, Evans told The Associated Press. “I agree with his final determination that when he looked at the data and understood what was going on, it wasn’t good policy and it wasn’t implemented well. But he has done what a lot of politicians don’t do. He didn’t fake an answer.”

___

Regina Garcia Cano reported from Baltimore and Jennifer Peltz from New York. Associated Press writers Corey Williams in Detroit, Noreen Nasir in Chicago and Jennifer McDermott in Providence, Rhode Island, contributed.

Israel’s Gantz Vows to Form Government Without Netanyahu

JERUSALEM — Israeli opposition leader Benny Gantz is vowing to form a government that will include neither the indicted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor the predominantly Arab parties in Parliament.

In a series of TV interviews two weeks before national elections, Gantz looked to project confidence that the March 2 vote will provide the decisive outcome that eluded the two previous elections last year.

Gantz’s Blue and White party is currently polling ahead of Netanyahu’s Likud, although neither appears to have a clear path to a parliamentary majority required to form a coalition government.

Gantz laid out two potential paths while speaking to Channel 12 News on Saturday night. He said he’s either going to partner with a broad range of “Jewish and democratic” parties — including the ultra-nationalist party led by apparent kingmaker Avigdor Lieberman. Or he could team up with the ruling Likud Party, but only if it gets rid of longtime leader Netanyahu, who’s fending off a slew of criminal corruption charges.

“Netanyahu has ended his historic role from a political standpoint. The Likud with Bibi cannot form a government, and without Bibi there’s unity,” he said, referring to Netanyahu by his nickname.

Gantz, a former military chief, has been campaigning furiously in pursuit of a knockout punch as the election grows nearer. He appears to have grown closer to Lieberman, whose nationalist Yisrael Beitenu party has bolted from Netanyahu’s right-wing camp and sparked the unprecedented stalemate in Israeli politics that led to the multiple repeat elections.

Both deny they have reached any pre-election alliance, but Lieberman has all but ruled out sitting in government with his former mentor. Lieberman has conditioned his participation in government upon the removal of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties that he says have wielded disproportionate power for too long and have been a consistent base for Netanyahu’s bloc.

“The Netanyahu era is over,” Lieberman said Saturday, expressing a newfound openness to sitting in government with left-wing parties he once shunned.

Still, the numbers don’t seem to add up without at least the tacit support of the Arab parties who are anathema to Lieberman’s hard-line brand of politics. Netanyahu has based his campaign on linking Gantz to the Joint List, an umbrella group of mostly Arab parties who represent the country’s 20% minority, saying he has no option of forming a government without them. Gantz denied he will invite them into his government, saying there is too wide an ideological gap between them. He also claims he will be strong enough to rule without their outside parliamentary support.

Joint List leader Ayman Odeh says he will act to topple any government that includes Lieberman, who has long railed against Arab lawmakers as a fifth column and as terrorist sympathizers. And unlike the previous round, he says he will not recommend Gantz as prime minister if he continues with an approach of “racism toward Arabs.”

Even with the corruption indictment against Netanyahu and the unveiling of President Donald Trump’s Mideast plan, polls are predicting a similar outcome to the previous election in September, when neither Gantz not Netanyahu could form a coalition in the time allotted to them. Netanyahu has since fended off an internal challenge to his Likud leadership and the party has refused previous suggestions it join a unity government without him. But Gantz is banking on a surge in support this time around, after judges have already been selected to preside over Netanyahu’s upcoming trial. The public also seems weary of the prospect of yet another deadlocked result and the potential for a fourth election.

Israel’s attorney general charged Netanyahu in November on three counts of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. Under Israeli law, public officials are required to resign if charged with a crime. But that law does not apply to the prime minister, who can use his office as a bully pulpit against prosecutors.

Netanyahu has failed in efforts to secure himself parliamentary immunity, and with his trial looming Gantz has been pushing for a fresh start.

“He’s about to go to trial. Just imagine that while he is sitting down to prepare for trial with a battery of lawyers about fateful issues from his personal standpoint, the military chief of staff needs to hold a very urgent meeting at night from a security standpoint,” Gantz said.

Netanyahu has tried to portray himself as a master statesman for securing pro-Israel pledges from President Donald Trump, such as extending Israeli sovereignty over the Jordan Valley and the West Bank Jewish settlements. But Gantz said he too would implement the American president’s Mideast plan, without all of Netanyahu’s baggage.

“I don’t believe anything from Netanyahu. I think he says things only on a political level and doesn’t mean it,” he told Channel 12.

How EMILY’s List and Center for American Progress Sold Out to Bloomberg

Billionaire Republican-turned-Democrat Presidential Candidate Michael Bloomberg was hit with two damaging front-page headlines Saturday.

The Washington Post reported, “Bloomberg for years has battled women’s allegations of profane, sexist comments.”

“Now, as Bloomberg is increasingly viewed as a viable Democratic candidate for president and the #MeToo era has raised the profile of workplace harassment, he is finding that his efforts to prevent disclosure are clashing against demands that he release former employees and complainants from their nondisclosure agreements.”

“The allegations that he tolerated a hostile office culture could undercut his ability to criticize President Trump’s alleged sexual misconduct and efforts to keep such claims private.”

And in a headline titled “Bloomberg’s Billions: How the Presidential Candidate Built His Influence”the New York Times exposes the corruption of two faux-progressive DNC-affiliated organizations, EMILY’s List and the Center for American Progress who sold out their organization’s missions in return for millions of Bloomberg’s influence buying:

“In the fall of 2018, EMILY’s List had a dilemma. With congressional elections approaching and the Supreme Court confirmation battle over Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh underway, the Democratic women’s group was hosting a major fund-raising luncheon in New York. Among the scheduled headline speakers was Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor, who had donated nearly $6 million to EMILY’s List over the years.”

“Days before the event, Mr. Bloomberg made blunt comments in an interview with The New York Times, expressing skepticism about the #MeToo movement and questioning sexual misconduct allegations against Charlie Rose, the disgraced news anchor. Senior EMILY’s List officials seriously debated withdrawing Mr. Bloomberg’s invitation, according to three people familiar with the deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.”

“In the end, the group concluded it could not risk alienating Mr. Bloomberg.”

And the Times on the Center for American Progress:

“In interviews with The Times, no one described being threatened or coerced by Mr. Bloomberg or his money. But many said his wealth was an inescapable consideration — a gravitational force powerful enough to make coercion unnecessary.”

“They aren’t going to criticize him in his 2020 run because they don’t want to jeopardize receiving financial support from him in the future,” said Paul S. Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at the good-government group Common Cause.

“That chilling effect was apparent in 2015 to researchers at the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy group, when they turned in a report on anti-Muslim bias in the United States. Their draft included a chapter of more than 4,000 words about New York City police surveillance of Muslim communities; Mr. Bloomberg was mentioned by name eight times in the chapter, which was reviewed by The Times.”

“When the report was published a few weeks later, the chapter was gone. So was any mention of Mr. Bloomberg’s name.”

“Yasmine Taeb, an author of the report, said in an interview that the authors had been instructed to make drastic revisions or remove the chapter, and opted to do the latter rather than “whitewash the NYPD’s wrongdoings.” She said she found it “disconcerting” to be asked to remove the chapter “because of how it was going to be perceived by Mayor Bloomberg.””

For more on CAP's grotesque corruption – remember they only stopped accepting millions from the despots of the UAE last year under pressure – see here:https://t.co/4yGJUznhlI

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 15, 2020

We now know that the PAC Emily’s List, which confirmed it was affiliated with an attack ad against Sanders (despite his 100% pro choice record), has taken $6M from Bloomberg. We deserve better feminism. Meet Matriarch, helping progressive working-class women run for office: https://t.co/YSxVSOHSrU

— francesca fiorentini (@franifio) February 15, 2020

https://t.co/Wx7mIY0jws

James Baldwin Won the Battle, but William F. Buckley Won the War

“The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate Over Race in America”
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On Feb. 18, 1965, three days before the assassination of Malcolm X, a few weeks before the Selma-to-Montgomery marches, and six months before the Watts riots, James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. debated before the Cambridge Union Society at Cambridge University.

The proposition: that “the American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro.” Recorded by the BBC, the debate was edited down into an hour—including all of Baldwin’s speech but trimming Buckley’s—and broadcast. The show was shown later the same month in the United States by National Educational Television.

It’s hard to watch the debate, readily available on YouTube and elsewhere, and not feel the crackle in the room. Maybe I’m just imagining it; maybe it’s just historical hindsight. Or maybe not: BBC commentator Norman St. John-Stevas says it “could be one of the most exciting nights in the whole of 150 years of Union history.”

That crackle stays fresh in “The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate Over Race in America” by Nicholas Buccola. Written with drive and abundant research (including a transcript of both speeches, featuring the first-ever complete published transcript of Buckley’s), “Fire” propels us through the lives and careers that intersected in that momentous face-off.

“While some of the rhetoric and policy debates have evolved,” Buccola writes, “the core issues that divided Baldwin and Buckley remain as relevant as ever.” In Buccola’s judgment, Baldwin won the battle, in his grasp of the causes and consequences of racial conflict, in a subtle masterpiece of a speech, and in the Union vote, which he won, 544-164. But Buckley won the war, Buccola says, losing the debate but shaping the conservatism that dominates the rightward politics of our time. I largely accept Buccola’s verdict, with one big reservation.

Buccola, the Elizabeth and Morris Glicksman Chair in Political Science at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon, speaks in his acknowledgments of growing up in “a staunchly conservative Republican household,” with Cato Institute summer camps and an internship at the Heritage Foundation. Soon, though, “the study of history and political science led me to grow up from conservatism.” Note that slap at Buckley’s book “Up from Liberalism.”

The first five chapters sketch out the biographies of Baldwin and Buckley, the better to depict how the two men’s ideas took shape. Baldwin rises above his ghetto beginnings, managing, as per “Notes of a Native Son,” to avoid the “intolerable bitterness” he sees in his father. Instead he begins his celebrated turn toward the personal, toward hard-won compassion and hope.

By the time Buckley gets to Yale, his bedrock has formed. He is an oligarchist, an antidemocrat, a paternalist, a man who accepts that his caste—the white, wealthy elites that shaped the country from its beginnings—rightly holds power. Bids to challenge it must be fought at all costs. Those starting points colored all else, including his attitude toward racism (which he lamented, but to which he claimed there was no “solution”). Buccola is sensitive to the “fine line” Buckley “was attempting to walk on race.” Appalled at racial violence (and reportedly shaken to tears by the 1963 Birmingham church bombing), he was sympathetic to segregationist and states’-rights arguments. Yes, the Constitution guaranteed free speech—but political demonstrations, he felt, were often lawless riots, encouraged by the likes of Martin Luther King and Baldwin.

As of 2019, it is widely accepted that paternalism is racist. If I, white, am the parent, then you, black, are the child—less developed, less a person. You are to be guided, taught, and shaped by me, by right of my superior place and civilization. Buccola’s hair-raising summary: “Once they are civilized, then we will be willing to start talking about sharing some of our power.”

“Who or what gives you the right?” we might ask, and Buccola does. Buckley’s proud answer: my church, my fathers, and history itself.

These two men were far from exact complements. Buckley was the self-conscious, hard-charging leader of a movement. He founded The National Review and, as self-designated public gatekeeper, he built the conservative arena, peopled it with hand-picked thinkers and writers, and kicked out those he thought would harm the cause, including anti-Semites, Birchers, and violent bigots.

He was not, nor did he care to be, a great reasoner. He was not comfortable defending ideas. Buccola handily dissects the Buckley rhetoric—not a reasoned exchange but rather a weaponized performance aimed at showing the opponent in the worst possible light. He was a pugilist-provocateur.

In the age of Malcolm X and King, Baldwin was not a leader of crowds or marches. As he said to Julius Lester in a 1984 New York Times interview, “I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness.” Buckley was a policy warrior, but Baldwin was far less interested in haggling over details of social programs. As the latter said in a Jan. 15, 1979, speech in Berkeley, “I’m not really a tactician, I’m a disturber of the peace.”

Baldwin didn’t have readily identifiable politics. He trusted no theories; he wanted people to face up to what was inside of them and what was around them. It is much like Baldwin to write, “Clarity is needed, as well as charity, however difficult this may be to imagine, much less sustain, toward the other side.” Baldwin wanted to understand, and thus to avoid the sin of hatred. That sin, he felt, was the great mistake of the literature of protest.

With these two unlike men, we come at last to the jammed hall, the crackle in the room. Stevas calls Baldwin the “star of the evening” and says that Buckley, clearly less familiar to Stevas and the crowd, is “well known as a conservative in the United States.” In two climactic, exemplary chapters, Buccola guides us attentively through both speeches. Baldwin draws a standing ovation of more than a minute (“I’ve never seen this happen before in the Union,” Stevas says, “in all the years that I have known it”), Buckley half a minute of sustained, seated applause.

Buckley was right to feel he stood no chance that night. The audience was far more receptive to Baldwin and his elegant case against the oppression of black people, his insistence on their ironically indispensable place in American history, in making the American Dream even possible. And the onlookers didn’t buy Buckley or his rhetoric. His question-begging, ad hominem Molotovs, and shock tactics weren’t going to last long with them.

But if that February night 55 years ago wasn’t Buckley’s moment, Buccola suspects the present might be. “Buckley lost many battles over the years,” Buccola writes, but “racial politics helped him win the war.” Recent conservatism has enjoyed friendly breezes and bumper crops, managing to run the country despite losing the vote. And the aggressive, often sneering dismissal of liberal ideas—leaving them to the side, the better to attack—now enshrined in rightward rhetoric surely has its grandfather in Buckley. Whenever we hear conservative argument, we get a taste of him.

Whatever he thought of Trump the man, Buckley would have put up with Trump the winner. In the 1960s, noting the populist strain in Barry Goldwater’s support, Buckley made a devil’s bargain with populism, realizing it was indispensable for a conservative ascendancy. And so it was in 2016.

But if now is Buckley’s moment, it is even more Baldwin’s.

Baldwin’s work presages the #BlackLivesMatter movement and the related explosion of memoir, film, theater and poetry. He is even more important for my children’s generation than he was for mine. His legacy is unmistakable in one of the most widely read black memoirs in years, “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Baldwin’s influence extends to many other books, including Jesmyn Ward’s 2014 memoir, “Men We Reaped,” and 2017 anthology, “The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race”; DeRay Mckesson’s “On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope” of 2018; and, in 2019, Darnell L. Moore’s “No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America” and the recently released “Breathe: A Letter to My Sons” by Imani Perry and “How We Fight for Our Lives” by Saeed Jones.

These very different books all answer Baldwin’s call to witness in first-person testimonies of a life lived black, mind on fire. For an artistic coronation, there are films such as Raoul Peck’s 2017 documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” based on an unfinished script by Baldwin himself, or Barry Jenkins’ 2018 film adaptation of “If Beale Street Could Talk.”

If we grant Buckley’s presence in our politics, surely we must also grant Baldwin’s in our culture. If Baldwin is right, we’re never done; there’s no utopia, only the work of listening and witnessing. Crackling with intelligence, “The Fire Is Upon Us” ends with his words to Faulkner: “The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.”

Esper Says Taliban Deal Is Promising but Not Without Risk

MUNICH — U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Saturday that a truce agreement between the United States and the Taliban that could lead to the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan is not without risk but “looks very promising.”

Ahead of a formal announcement of the seven-day “reduction in violence” deal, Esper said it was time to give peace a chance in Afghanistan through a political negotiation. He spoke a day after a senior U.S. official said the deal had been concluded and would take effect very soon.

Expectations are that agreement will be formally announced on Sunday and that the reduction in violence will begin on Monday, according to people familiar with the plan.

“So we have on the table right now a reduction in violence proposal that was negotiated between our ambassador and the Taliban,” Esper told an audience at the Munich Security Conference. “It looks very promising.”

“It’s my view as well that we have to give peace a chance, that the best if not the only way forward in Afghanistan is through a political agreement and that means taking some risk,” he said. “That means enabling our diplomats and that means working together with our partners and allies on the ground to affect such a thing.”

Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met on Friday in Munich with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who has been skeptical of the scheme, which, if successful, would see an end to attacks for seven days and then the signing of a U.S.-Taliban peace deal. All-Afghan peace talks would then begin within 10 days as part of the plan, which envisions the phased withdrawal of U.S. forces over 18 months.

In remarks later to a group of reporters, Esper declined to say whether the U.S. had agreed to cut its troop levels in Afghanistan to zero. He said if the 7-day truce is successful and the next step toward Afghan peace talks begins, the U.S. would reduce its troop contingent “over time” to about 8,600. There currently are about 12,000 U.S. troops in the country.

Ghani also refused to comment on many specifics of the plan but said the time had come “find a political solution to stop the war.”

He said it was impossible to know whether the Taliban might take advantage of a draw down in American military power in Afghanistan to reassert its their own presence, but said the only way to find out was to “engage in the peace process.”

“The critical test is going to be: will the Taliban accept an election?” Ghani said.

The president rejected the idea that the Taliban could be granted greater influence in certain regions of Afghanistan, saying it was “antithetical to the Afghan vision because we are a unified country.”

“The scope of the peace must be national. It cannot be sub-national because otherwise it will be a recipe for another round of conflict,” he said.

The United States has not agreed to suspend or end its counter-terrorism operations in Afghanistan, which have been focused mainly on an Islamic State affiliate, known as ISIS-K, and al-Qaida, said Pentagon spokeswoman Alyssa Farah, who was traveling with Esper.

“Under any agreement, General Miller retains the authorities necessary to protect U.S. national security interests, including the authorities and capabilities to strike ISIS-K and al-Qaida,“ she said, referring to U.S. Gen Scott Miller, the commander of American and coalition forces in Afghanistan.

The agreement was finalized last week by U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad and Taliban representatives in Doha, Qatar. Esper said Ghani was supportive of the deal and had pledged to do his best to support it.

“I think he is fully on board,” Esper said of Ghani. “He wants to lead his part of the process, which if we get to that would be a a peace deal that would involve very soon afterward an inter-Afghan negotiation. He wants to be clearly a full partner in that and wants to lead on that and make sure that all Afghans come together.”

Ghani has bickered with his partner in the current Unity Government, Abdullah Abdullah, over who will represent Kabul at the negotiating table. Ghani has insisted he lead the talks, while his political opponents and other prominent Afghans have called for more inclusive representation.

Separately on Saturday, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg told the security conference that he also supported the plan but stressed that the alliance’s mission in Afghanistan would continue in the short- and medium-term.

“We are not leaving Afghanistan but we are prepared to adjust our force level if the Taliban demonstrates the will and the capability to reduce violence and make real compromises that could pave the way for negotiations among Afghans for sustainable peace,” he said.

_____

David Rising contributed to this story.