Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 147
June 7, 2023
June 7, 2023
Three more candidates have entered the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination this week. Former vice president Mike Pence, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, and current North Dakota governor Doug Burgum join former South Carolina governor and Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, South Carolina senator Tim Scott, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, as well as a few others and former president Donald Trump in their hope of winning the nomination.
Taken together, the different candidates offer a window into the current Republican Party. Haley and DeSantis are embracing the cultural issues to which the Trump base is wedded. At a CNN town hall on Sunday, Haley singled out transgender girls as one of her key issues, linking (without any evidence) their presence on girls’ sports teams to an April study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that showed a rise in the number of teenaged girls contemplating self-harm between 2019 and 2021, years that covered the height of the pandemic. (In fact, LGBTQ teenagers have a higher rate of thoughts of self-harm than their straight, gender-conforming peers.)
DeSantis has reached for the Trump base by focusing on immigration. That focus has backfired as unlawful border crossings have dropped more than 70% since President Biden’s ending of the pandemic-related Title 42, and as a new Florida law designed to “scare people from coming to Florida” has resulted in immigrants, whose labor is vital to the state, leaving it.
Apparently trying to reclaim the narrative, in the last week, DeSantis has sent two charter flights taking migrants who have legally applied for asylum in the U.S. from the Texas border to Sacramento, California. While the DeSantis administration claims the migrants went “voluntarily,” they say they were tricked into thinking they would get work in California. One set of the migrants were dropped off outside the Catholic Archdiocese of Sacramento, which had not been alerted they were coming and was closed.
Pence, Hutchinson, and Christie are directly attacking Trump, Pence by saying the events of January 6, 2021, make Trump unfit to be president, Hutchinson by saying Trump should withdraw because of the criminal charges he’s facing, and Christie by attacking Trump and his family as grifters. At Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire yesterday, Christie reminded the audience: “Jared Kushner and Ivanka Kushner walk out of the White House and months later get $2 billion from the Saudis…. You think it’s because he’s some kind of investing genius? Or do you think it’s because he was sitting next to the President of the United States for four years doing favors for the Saudis?... That’s your money he stole and gave it to his family. You know what that makes us? A banana republic.”
Scott and Burgum seem to be trying to offer exhausted Republican voters a rest. Scott is trying to offer an optimistic vision of the United States amidst the apocalyptic narratives of his rivals, denying that systematic racism is a societal problem, for example, while Burgum’s chief attribute seems to be an embrace of pre-2016 Republicanism and a low-key presentation.
That scrum of Republican hopefuls—none of whom is polling well—is the backdrop to this evening’s story from Andrew Feinberg of the Independent that prosecutors from the Department of Justice are ready to ask a grand jury in Washington, D.C., to indict former president Trump on charges that he has violated the Espionage Act and obstructed justice.
Aside from anything else, the Espionage Act includes language that anyone who “willfully retains…any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation… and fails to deliver it on demand to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it” can be punished by as many as ten years in prison.
The story says the jury could vote as early as tomorrow, but it could also be delayed until next week, or beyond. It is worth remembering that this Department of Justice has not been known to leak, and that the sooner Trump is indicted—which certainly looks likely, at least in the case of the missing documents—the sooner his supporters can jump to another candidate, which might suggest a rival camp pushing the story that an indictment will come soon. That same calculation might have been part of what was behind Trump’s insistence to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman that he has “NOT been told he’s getting indicted.” And, he added on Truth Social, “I shouldn’t be because I’ve done NOTHING wrong.”
Troubles in the Republican Party are not limited to the 2024 hopefuls. House Republicans continue to fight against House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), angry over the budget deal under which he pushed through a measure to suspend the debt ceiling. McCarthy tried to head off their protests with a promise to establish a commission to cut Social Security and Medicare, but it was not enough. Yesterday, members of the House Freedom Caucus said they would not permit votes on anything until he put in writing what they believed was the deal he made to get their votes for the speakership; that revolt continued today.
Tonight, Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News reported that McCarthy appears to have agreed to let appropriators write bills that come in below the agreed-upon spending levels. Sherman’s colleague John Bresnahan noted: “The Fiscal Responsibility Act isn’t even a week old & Republicans in the House and Senate are already trying to redo it.”
In other news, CNN has parted ways with Chris Licht, its chief executive officer and chair, who had sought to move the network to what he considered the center of American politics. He had done so by highlighting “both sides” of today’s political arguments, firing leading journalists he thought too far on the left and centering Trump in a town hall that became the former president’s triumphant reentry to the political stage as he lied and bullied the interviewer. Some pundits have taken Licht’s fall as a sign that there is no longer a powerful center in American politics, but my own guess is the opposite: that most of us want news based in reality rather than media giving platforms to people who are openly lying.
Yale scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder today applied this idea to coverage of the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine, which has rained down humanitarian, ecological, and economic disaster on Ukrainians as they appear to be launching a counteroffensive to the Russian invasion of their country.
Snyder warned journalists not to “bothsides” the story by offering equal time to both sides. “What Russian spokespersons have said has almost always been untrue, whereas what Ukrainian spokespersons have said has largely been reliable. The juxtaposition suggests a false equality,” he wrote. “The story doesn't start at the moment the dam explodes. For the last fifteen months Russia has been killing Ukrainian civilians and destroying Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, whereas Ukraine has been trying to protect its people and the structures that keep them alive.” “Objectivity does not mean treating an event as a coin flip between two public statements,” he said. “It demands thinking about the objects and the settings that readers require for understanding amidst uncertainty.”
—
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/05/politics/nikki-haley-transgender-girls-teen-suicide/index.html
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/us-teen-girls-considered-attempting-suicide-2021-cdc/story?id=98901688
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/07/us/politics/pence-trump-2024-announcement.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/us/migrants-plane-sacramento-california.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/us/politics/desantis-florida-migrant-flights.html
https://www.vox.com/politics/2023/6/6/23751345/tim-scott-view-race-systemic-racism-2024
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/793
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/07/media/chris-licht-cnn/index.html
https://newrepublic.com/post/173247/florida-republicans-admit-made-big-mistake-anti-immigrant-law
https://www.newsweek.com/ron-desantis-approval-rating-2024-polls-1805073
Twitter links:
sahilkapur/status/1666257940922212352
TimothyDSnyder/status/1666480705637851136
maggieNYT/status/1666515440300859392
therecount/status/1663935439873404929
JakeSherman/status/1666570060100427778
nicholaswu12/status/1666557296648900608
June 6, 2023
June 6, 2023
Far-right Republican representatives from the House Freedom Caucus today launched a battle against House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), accusing him of violating the agreement he made with them in order to get their backing for the speakership. Angry at the passage of the deal to suspend the debt ceiling and keep the United States from defaulting, they blocked two bills today and apparently have decided to oppose all legislation that comes before the House unless McCarthy puts in writing what they understand to be the deal they made.
Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) said: “The end game is freedom, less government, less spending.”
If the far right is trying to dismantle the federal government, the White House is working to advertise the effects of its use of the federal government for the American people.
Today the administration unveiled a new website called “Investing in America.” The site tracks both the public infrastructure and the private investments sparked by the laws like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, breaking those investments down by category.
While the Republicans since 1980 have claimed that tax cuts and deregulation would spur private investment in the economy, it appears that Biden’s policy of public investment to encourage private investment has, in fact, worked. So far, during his term, private companies have announced $479 billion in investments under the new system, while the government has directed more than $220 billion towards roads, bridges, airports, public transportation, addressing climate change, and providing clean water. The website locates and identifies the more than 32,000 new projects underway.
The site also highlights the high rates of employment in the U.S. and the addition of new manufacturing jobs, as well as lower costs for prescription drugs and health insurance.
Separately, the administration noted that its plan for migration across the border is “working as intended.” The pandemic-era Title 42, put in place by Trump in early 2020 to stop the spread of COVID, went out of operation at midnight on May 12, and while Republicans insisted the reversion to the normal laws governing immigration would create a crisis, in fact unlawful crossings have dropped more than 70%. Still, the administration emphasized yet again today that Congress must address “our broken immigration and asylum system.”
While President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are returning to the traditional idea—embraced by members of both parties before 1980—that investing in the country benefits everyone, much of the Freedom Caucus has thrown in its lot with former president Donald Trump, who calls the Democrats’ ideology “communism.” So convinced were Trump’s supporters that Democrats should not be allowed to govern that they tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
One of the key figures in that attempt was Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, who as a representative from North Carolina was a founder of the House Freedom Caucus (along with Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and Ron DeSantis of Florida, among others). As Trump’s chief of staff, Meadows was close to the center of the attempt to keep former president Trump in the White House. His aide Cassidy Hutchinson provided some of the most compelling—and damning—testimony before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Meadows refused to cooperate with that committee and was found in contempt of Congress, but the Department of Justice declined to prosecute. When he seemed largely to drop out of public view, there was speculation about his role in the investigations into Trump’s role in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
This afternoon, Jonathan Swan, Michael S. Schmidt, and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that Meadows has testified before a federal grand jury in the investigations led by Special Counsel Jack Smith. It is not clear if Meadows testified in the matter of the election sabotage or in the matter of documents taken from the White House when Trump left office, or both. One of his lawyers refused to comment but told the New York Times reporters that “Mr. Meadows has maintained a commitment to tell the truth where he has a legal obligation to do so.”
I cannot help but contrast that statement with one from another American leader seventy-nine years ago.
On June 5, 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower was preparing to send Allied troops across the English Channel to France, where he hoped they would push the German troops back across Europe. More than 5,000 ships waited to transport more than 150,000 soldiers to France before daybreak the following morning. The fighting to take Normandy would not be easy. The beaches the men would assault were tangled in barbed wire, booby trapped, and defended by German soldiers in concrete bunkers.
On the afternoon of June 5, as the Allied soldiers, their faces darkened with soot and cocoa, milled around waiting to board the ships, Eisenhower went to see the men he was almost certainly sending to their deaths. He joked with the troops, as apparently upbeat as his orders to them had been when he told them Operation Overlord had launched. “The tide has turned!” his letter had read. “The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!”
But after cheering his men on, he went back to his headquarters and wrote another letter. Designed to blame himself alone if Operation Overlord failed, it read:
“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”
The letter was never delivered. Operation Overlord was a success, launching the final assault in which western democracy, defended by ordinary men and women, would destroy European fascism.
A year later, General Eisenhower was welcomed home as the hero who had won World War Two. But for all those noisy accolades, it was the letter of June 5, that he wrote in secret, alone and unsure whether the future would find him right or wrong but willing to take both the risk and the blame if he failed, that proved his heroism.
—
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/06/politics/republican-revolt-mccarthy-rule-vote/index.html
https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1666182487880392704
https://www.whitehouse.gov/invest/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/us/politics/mark-meadows-testified-trump-grand-jury.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/06/border-crossings-fall-biden-administration-00100333
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/general-eisenhowers-order-of-the-day
June 5, 2023
This morning, CBS News cameras captured on video the sight of former president Trump’s lawyers entering the Department of Justice.
Shortly after their two-hour meeting ended, a message appeared on the Trump-affiliated social media site Truth Social, in all caps: “HOW CAN DOJ POSSIBLY CHARGE ME, WHO DID NOTHING WRONG, WHEN NO OTHER PRESIDENT’S [sic] WERE CHARGED, WHEN JOE BIDEN WON’T BE CHARGED FOR ANYTHING, INCLUDING THE FACT THAT HE HAS 1,850 BOXES, MUCH OF IT CLASSIFIED, AND SOME DATING BACK TO HIS SENATE DAY WHEN EVEN DEMOCRAT SENATORS ARE SHOCKED. ALSO, PRESIDENT CLINTON HAD DOCUMENTS, AND WON IN COURT. CROOKED HILLARY DELETED 33,000 EMAILS, MANY CLASSIFIED, AND WASN’T EVEN CLOSE TO BEING CHARGED! ONLY TRUMP - THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!”
It appears there is reason to suspect Trump’s lawyers delivered to the former president bad news about Trump’s refusal to return to the government—that is, to the American people—the classified documents he stole when he left the White House.
The Twitter account of the Republican National Committee promptly tweeted footage of House Oversight Committee chair Representative James Comer (R-KY) suggesting that the “Biden family” has engaged in “a pattern of bribery, where payments would be made through shell accounts and multiple banks,” in a system of “money laundering.” There is no evidence of these accusations, and their framing of Biden as part of a “family corruption scandal” is pretty transparently designed to make the Bidens look like the Trumps, although there is no Biden family business as there is a Trump Organization.
Republican leaders have tiptoed around former president Trump even if they were hoping to move him offstage, but that caution broke today when the governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, who in February said he would vote for Trump if he is the 2024 nominee, warned in a Washington Post op-ed that the Republican Party must break free of Trump and the culture wars or face “electoral irrelevance.”
Sununu announced that he would not seek the party’s presidential nomination himself, keeping his powder dry to try to correct the Republican Party’s course. In a clear shot at the many Republicans jumping into the race, he warned that “candidates should not get into this race to further a vanity campaign, to sell books or to audition to serve as Donald Trump’s vice president.” He promised to work for whichever candidate he thought best positioned to win in 2024.
Sununu called for returning the party to “classic conservative principles of individual liberty, low taxes and local control,” saying that Republicans need to “expand beyond the culture wars that alienate independents, young voters and suburban moms” and appeal to new voters on substantive issues. He also took on the issue of abortion, which has created a groundswell of opposition to Republicans, saying that “Republicans should recognize that every time they open their mouths to talk about banning abortion, an independent voter joins the Democrats.”
Indeed, as Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo wrote today, the abortion issue is suddenly toxic for Republicans. After years of calling for the end of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, Republicans got their wish almost a year ago with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision. Republican-dominated states promptly began to pass antiabortion laws at the state level. But a majority of voters actually support abortion access, even in Republican-dominated states. They are eager to restore abortion rights, while the evangelical base of the Republican Party wants a federal abortion ban.
Republicans running for president are now trying to avoid the issue, since they need to support a federal ban on abortion to win base voters but will repel a majority of general voters if they do. Putting Republicans into power will likely mean a federal ban that will run badly against the popular will. It is not clear how Republican candidates will square this circle, but it is unlikely to go away simply because Republicans try not to talk about it.
While many eyes in the United States are focused on domestic political events, today’s news also included reports that the Ukrainian military may have begun its counteroffensive to push Russian invaders out of Ukraine (although Ukrainian officials denied it, saying that no single action would indicate that a counteroffensive had begun).
The U.K. Ministry of Defence reported that there has been a “substantial increase in fighting along numerous sectors of the front, including those which have been relatively quiet for several months.” It also said that the feud between the mercenary Wagner Group and the Russian Ministry of Defence has “reached an unprecedented level.” It is not clear they will continue to cooperate.
Natasha Bertrand, Zachary Cohen, and Kylie Atwood of CNN reported today that Ukraine has encouraged sympathizers and agents in Russia to sabotage targets there, diverting Russian attention from Ukraine and bringing the threat of war home to Russians.
Tonight, part of the Nova Kakhovka Dam was breached, sending a flood down the Dnipro River. The breach will create flooding downstream. It will also affect drinking water, and the electricity for more than 3 million people. It threatens the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, whose reactors are cooled with water from the reservoir above the dam, but tonight the Ukrainian state nuclear energy company Energoatom said the situation is under control.
—
Notes:
Twitter:
RonFilipkowski/status/1665762038281322496
atrupar/status/1621233676909514757
DefenceHQ/status/1665951346464309249
MarkHertling/status/1665922657408147457
mefimus/status/1665942450362372096
Osinttechnical/status/1665907948986458113
RNCResearch/status/1665769123111129088
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/us/politics/trump-justice-dept-classified-documents.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/06/05/belgorod-russia-ukraine-counteroffensive-militias/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/us/politics/pence-2024-president-candidate.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/05/chris-sununu-trump-gop-2024/
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/republican-haley-desantis-trump-abortion
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/05/politics/ukraine-sabotage-agents-russia-drone-attacks/index.html
June 5, 2023
June 4, 2023
Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church, a staunch supporter of Russian president Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine, last week awarded the First Degree of the Order of Glory and Honor from the Russian Orthodox Church to Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán.
Orbán has dismantled Hungary’s liberal democratic government in favor of what he calls “illiberal” or “Christian” democracy that rejects LGBTQ and women’s rights, claiming that the equality valued by liberal democracies undermines traditional virtue. Kirill called out for praise Orbán’s “great attention to the preservation of Christian values in society and the strengthening of the institution of family and marriage.”
This award makes explicit the link between the Putin regime, which has been committing war crimes against Ukraine’s people, and Orbán, who is such a hero to America’s right wing that the Conservative Political Action Conference has twice gathered in Hungary, most recently just last month. Orbán has called for Trump’s reelection.
The common thread among these groups is a rejection of democracy, with its emphasis on equality before the law, and the embrace of a hierarchical world in which some people are better than others and have the right to rule.
In Poland today, an estimated half a million people marched in the streets to protest the loss of rights for women and LGBTQ people amid an attack on democracy by the nationalist Law and Justice party (PiS), which condemned the protest as a “march of hate.” Leaders for PiS claim they are only trying to protect traditional Christian values from Western ideas.
Today is the 34th anniversary of the first democratic elections in Poland in 1989 as the Soviet Union was disintegrating. Former Polish prime minister and president of the European Council Donald Tusk, who called for the march, told the crowd: "Democracy dies in silence but you've raised your voice for democracy today, silence is over, we will shout.”
Today is also the 34th anniversary of the Chinese government’s crackdown on demonstrations for democracy in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, with troops firing on their own citizens.
For 22 weeks now, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been protesting in the streets against the plans of right-wing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to overhaul the judiciary, weakening the country’s system of checks and balances by shifting power to Netanyahu, and threatening the rights of minorities and marginalized groups.
In Sudan today, the war between two military generals who seized power from a democratic government continues. Tens of thousands of Sudan’s people have fled the country since the fighting broke out in April.
The political career of Florida governor Ron DeSantis is the epitome of Orbán’s “Christian democracy” come to the United States. DeSantis has imitated Orbán’s politics, striking at the principles of liberal democracy with attacks on LGBTQ Americans, abortion rights, academic freedom, and the ability of businesses to react to market forces rather than religious imperatives. Last week he told an audience that “the woke mind virus represents a war on the truth so we will wage a war on the woke. We will fight the woke in education, we will fight the woke in the corporations, we will fight the woke in the halls of congress. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. We will make woke ideology leave it to the dustbin of history; it’s gone.”
But DeSantis’s speech was a perversion of the real speech on which he based it.
On June 4, 1940, nine months into the Second World War, British prime minister Winston Churchill addressed the House of Commons. British, Canadian, and French destroyers along with dozens of merchant ships and a flotilla of small boats had just managed to evacuate more than 338,000 Allied soldiers from Dunkirk, in northern France, as German troops advanced.
Britain was fighting fascism, and Churchill warned his people that the war would be neither easy nor quick. But, he promised, “we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender....”
—
Notes:
https://dailynewshungary.com/pm-viktor-orban-receives-russian-order-of-glory-and-honour/
https://orthodoxtimes.com/patriarch-of-moscow-presented-russian-minister-of-defense-with-an-award/
https://www.politico.eu/article/anti-government-protest-warsaw-poland-against-pis-party/
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-tiananmen-square-demonstrations-crackdown-2023-06-04/
https://apnews.com/article/sudan-military-democracy-coup-d70cdb605bfef095eca113f77e73c68c
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/4/15/heavy-gunfire-heard-south-of-sudanese-capital-khartoum
https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1665086349483835392
https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1940-the-finest-hour/we-shall-fight-on-the-beaches/
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/23/us-election-viktor-orbn-of-hungary-wants-donald-trump-to-win-.html
June 3, 2023
June 3, 2023
Spring has sprung here, and everything is a bright young green.
Going to leave you with a photo from this year’s first trip out on the water, late one afternoon this week, while I see about catching up on some sleep.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
June 2, 2023
June 2, 2023
Three years ago today, on June 2, 2020, days after then–Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes, Martha Raddatz of ABC snapped the famous and chilling photograph of law enforcement officers in camouflage, their names and units hidden, standing in rows on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Mr. Floyd’s murder sparked protests across the country, and Trump used those protests as a pretext to crack down on his opponents. Just the day before, after a call with Russian president Vladimir Putin, Trump told state governors on a phone call: “You have to dominate. If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time.... You’ve got to arrest people, you have to track people, you have to put them in jail for 10 years and you’ll never see this stuff again.” Then he used a massive police presence wielding tear gas, rubber bullets, and flash-bang explosives to clear peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters from Lafayette Square across from the White House.
Tonight, President Joe Biden addressed the nation from the Oval Office to emphasize that democracy depends on bipartisanship.” [W]hen I ran for President,” he began, “I was told the days of bipartisanship were over and that Democrats and Republicans could no longer work together. But I refused to believe that, because America can never give in to that way of thinking…. [T]he only way American democracy can function is through compromise and consensus, and that’s what I worked to do as your President…to forge a bipartisan agreement where it’s possible and where it’s needed.”
While he noted that he has signed more than 350 bipartisan laws in his time in office, his major focus today was on the bipartisan budget agreement passed by the House and Senate after months of wrangling to get House Republicans to agree to lift the debt ceiling. Biden will sign it tomorrow, averting the nation’s first-ever default.
Biden characterized those threatening to force the U.S. into default as “extreme voices,” who were willing to cause a catastrophe. The economy, which continues to add jobs at a cracking pace—another 339,000 in May, according to the numbers released today by the U.S. Bureau of Labor—would have been thrown into recession. As many as 8 million Americans would have lost their jobs, retirement savings would have been decimated, borrowing for everything from mortgages to government funding would have become much more expensive, and “America’s standing as the most trusted, reliable financial partner in the world would have been shattered.”
“It would have taken years to climb out of that hole,” he said.
But the extremists were sidelined, and the House Republicans and the White House reached an agreement. Biden went out of his way to praise House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and his team, saying that the two negotiating teams “were able to get along and get things done. We were straightforward with one another, completely honest with one another, and respectful with one another. Both sides operated in good faith. Both sides kept their word.”
This was not entirely true—McCarthy constantly attacked Biden in the media—but Biden was hammering on the image of bipartisanship. Yesterday, Jonathan Lemire, Adam Cancryn, and Jennifer Haberkorn of Politico reported that Biden and his team plan to make the case for reelection on their ability to negotiate deals that get things done for the American people, acting as the “adults in the room” in contrast to Republican extremists. The budget deal that led to the suspension of the debt ceiling is a major illustration of that position.
Biden also praised House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), claiming that “[t]hey acted responsibly and put the good of the country ahead of politics.”
The solution to the debt ceiling crisis is a major victory for Biden’s team not only because it happened, but also because it leaves Biden’s key priorities intact, not least because they are popular and Republicans did not want to go into 2024 having demanded unpopular cuts.
Biden noted that the measure will cut spending as Republicans wanted (although not necessarily through the measures they insisted on adding), but reiterated that it is the Republican Party that has been on a spending spree. “We’re all on a much more fiscally responsible course than the one I inherited when I took office,” Biden said. “When I came to office, the deficit had increased every year the previous four years. And nearly $8 trillion was added to the national debt in the last administration,” while the deficit fell by $1.7 trillion in his first two years in office.
Biden laid out that the deal protects his reworking of the U.S. economy to support ordinary Americans. It protects Social Security and Medicare, as well as healthcare and veterans’ services. It protects the investments in the economy that have enabled the country to add more than 13 million new jobs, including 800,000 jobs in manufacturing. It protects investments in addressing climate change.
Finally, Biden vowed to make the wealthy—those who earn more than $400,000 a year—pay their fair share in taxes.
“I know bipartisanship is hard and unity is hard,” he concluded, “but we can never stop trying, because in moments like this one—the ones we just faced, where the American economy and the world economy is at risk of collapsing—there is no other way.
“No matter how tough our politics gets, we need to see each other not as adversaries, but as fellow Americans. Treat each other with dignity and respect. To join forces as Americans to stop shouting, lower the temperature, and work together to pursue progress, secure prosperity, and keep the promise of America for everybody.”
What a difference three years can make.
—
Notes:
https://twitter.com/VeraMBergen/status/1267966120662896642
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/us/politics/trump-governors.html
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/02/jobs-report-may-2023-.html
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/01/politics/wh-governors-call-protests/index.html.
https://twitter.com/edokeefe/status/1267478663949357057?s=20
June 1, 2023
June 1, 2023
Late tonight the Senate passed H.R. 3746, the Fiscal Responsibility Act, suspending the debt ceiling and cutting certain federal spending. President Joe Biden has promised to sign it tomorrow, preventing a government default. Forty-four Democrats and two Independents—Angus King (I-ME) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ)—voted yes, along with 17 Republicans. Four Democrats and Independent Bernie Sanders (I-VT) voted no, along with 31 Republicans. The final tally to pass the measure was 63 to 36.
“Democrats are feeling very good tonight,” Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said. “We’ve saved the country from the scourge of default.”
Republicans brought the nation to the brink of default with their insistence that they opposed runaway government spending, but their demands did not square with that argument. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said that the $21 billion cut in funding to the Internal Revenue Service, for example, will result in $40 billion in lost revenue, increasing the deficit by $19 billion.
In other economic news, the Biden administration today announced actions designed to address racial bias in the valuation of homes.
This sounds sort of in the weeds for administration action, I know, but it is actually an important move for addressing the nation’s wealth inequality. In 2019 a study from the Federal Reserve showed that white American families had a median net worth of $188,100, Hispanic or Latino families had a net worth of $36,200, and Black American families had a median net worth of $24,100.
Homeownership is the most important factor in creating generational wealth—that is, wealth that passes from one generation to the next—both because homeownership essentially forces savings as people pay mortgages, and because homes tend to appreciate in value.
But a 2021 study by the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, more popularly known as Freddie Mac, showed that real estate appraisers are twice as likely to undervalue minority-owned property relative to contract price for which the home sells, than they are to undervalue homes owned by white Americans.
The story of lower valuation came to popular attention after a Black couple living near San Francisco applied for a loan and received an initial valuation far too low for them to qualify for that loan. Shocked, since the same house had been appraised at almost a half a million dollars higher the year before, the couple removed all traces of their ownership of the house and asked a white friend to stand in as the owner before a new appraiser evaluated the worth of the property. That new appraisal came back a half a million dollars higher than the lowball one.
(The couple sued, and the case was settled in February 2022).
Two years ago, the Biden administration announced a sweeping effort to “root out racial and ethnic bias in home evaluations.” Today it bolstered those efforts to “ensure that every American who buys a home has the same opportunities to build generational wealth through homeownership.” They call for fixing algorithms to ensure that home values are accurately assessed, creating pathways for consumers to challenge low assessments, and increasing the numbers of trained appraisers.
There is a reason that the administration has centered its housing policies on June 1. This is the anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre, when in 1921 white gangs destroyed the prosperous Greenwood district of that city, which was home to more than 10,000 Black Americans. It wiped out 35 blocks with more than 1,200 homes and businesses and took hundreds of Black lives, robbing Black families of generational wealth and the opportunities that come with it.
In 1921, Greenwood, known as “Black Wall Street,” was estimated to be the richest Black community in the United States. The destruction of May 31 to June 1, 1921, changed all that. Residents of Greenwood filed $1.8 million in damage claims—more than $27 million in today’s dollars—against the city, but all but one of the claims were denied when the city was found not liable for damages caused by mobs. (A white pawnshop owner was compensated for the guns stolen from his store.) Insurance didn’t help, either: insurance companies claimed that damage caused by “riots” was not covered by their policies.
In a 2018 article in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Chris M. Messer, Thomas E. Shriver, and Alison E. Adams estimated that the destruction in Tulsa might well have amounted to more than $200 million in today’s dollars.
Greenwood’s Black residents nonetheless pooled their resources and rebuilt the district, despite the system of “redlining” by mortgage companies that deemed parts of Greenwood to be credit risks and made it impossible for residents to get mortgages. “Urban renewal” then destroyed the area again in the 1960s through the 1980s as white city planners rezoned the district, built highways through it, and took property through eminent domain.
Vice President Kamala Harris acknowledged the destruction of Greenwood today in a call with reporters. Noting that “[h]omeownership is one of the single most powerful engines of wealth-building available to American families,” she explained that ‘[m]illions rely on the equity in their homes to put their children through college, to fund a startup, to retire with dignity, to create intergenerational prosperity and wealth.” But “for generations, many people of color have been prevented from taking full advantage of the benefits of homeownership.”
The inequalities of the past have persisted in the home appraisal system, Harris said. “[B]ecause their homes are undervalued, Black and Latino people often pay more for their mortgage, receive less when they sell, and are less able to get access to home equity lines of credit—all of which widens the racial wealth gap and deepens longstanding financial inequities.”
“Today,” her Twitter account said, “our Administration is announcing new actions to root out racial bias in home valuations to ensure that all hardworking families can realize the true value of their investment and have a fair shot at the American dream.”
Jonathan Lemire, Adam Cancryn, and Jennifer Haberkorn of Politico reported today that White House officials urged allies to downplay their substantial victory on the debt ceiling crisis and the related budget negotiations, afraid of sparking Republican opposition and eager to be seen as the adults in the room.
But they needn’t have worried. Today, President Biden tripped over a sandbag left in his path as he was jogging away from the center stage of the U.S. Air Force Academy graduation in Colorado after giving the commencement address. He appeared fine after the fall, but it is dominating right-wing social media, the debt ceiling crisis already forgotten.
—
Notes:
https://twitter.com/ArthurDelaneyHP/status/1664395512382996483
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/06/01/senate-debt-ceiling-bill/
https://www.readynest.com/homebuyer-stories/what-role-does-homeownership-play-in-generational-wealth
https://www.freddiemac.com/research/insight/20210920-home-appraisals
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/09/1162103286/home-appraisal-racial-bias-black-homeowners-lawsuit
https://www.okhistory.org/research/forms/freport.pdf
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ajes.12225
https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-true-costs-of-the-tulsa-race-massacre-100-years-later/
https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/29/case-reparations-tulsa-oklahoma#_Toc41573965
https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf20.pdf
https://twitter.com/VP/status/1664358084125290497
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/01/politics/biden-us-air-force-academy-trip/index.html
May 31, 2023
May 31, 2023
Tonight the House passed a bill to suspend the debt ceiling for two years, enabling the Treasury to borrow money to prevent a default. More Democrats than Republicans rallied to the measure, with 165 Democrats and 149 Republicans voting in favor, for a final vote of 314 to 117. Seventy-one Republicans and 46 Democrats opposed the bill. Now the measure heads to the Senate.
The votes revealed a bitter divide in the Republican Party, as the far-right House Freedom Caucus fervently opposed the measure; Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) for example, called it a “turd sandwich.” Florida governor Ron DeSantis also came out against it, saying it leaves the country “careening toward bankruptcy.”
The far right insists the measure does not provide the cuts they demand. Last night’s nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office scoring of the bill offered them ammunition when it said that the additional work requirement imposed on able-bodied people aged 18–54 without dependents to receive food benefits is outweighed by the expansion of those benefits to veterans, unhoused people, and children aging out of foster care. The CBO estimates that the measure will add 78,000 people a month to food assistance programs, adding $2.1 billion in spending over the next ten years.
Despite their fury, though, the far right in the House appears to be backing down from challenging Representative Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) speakership. Their angry news conferences seem mostly to be performances for their base, and to answer them, McCarthy today said on the Fox News Channel that he was creating a “commission” to “look at” cutting the budget that the president “walled off” from cuts, including the mandatory spending on Medicare and Social Security.
But, as Josh Marshall pointed out in Talking Points Memo today, the Republican base no longer seems to care much about fiscal issues. Instead, they are pushing the cultural issues at the heart of illiberal democracy: anti-LGBTQ laws, antiabortion laws, anti-immigration laws.
Former president Trump is making those themes central to his reelection campaign. Yesterday he released a video promising that on “Day One” of a new presidential term, he would issue an executive order that would end birthright citizenship. Our current policy that anyone born in the United States is a citizen, he claims, is “based on a historical myth, and a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocates.” He promises to make “clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward, the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic US citizenship.”
Trump is picking up an idea from his presidential term that immigrants are flocking to the U.S. as “birth tourists” so their children will have dual citizenship, but the estimate from the immigration-restrictionist Center for Immigration Studies that birth tourism accounts for 26,000 of the approximately 3.7 million births in the U.S. each year has been shown to be wildly high. Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship is an attack on immigration itself, echoing people like Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who insists that immigration weakens a nation by diluting its native-born people with outsiders.
Trump’s attack on the idea of birthright citizenship as a “historical myth” is a perversion of our history. It matters. In the nineteenth century, the United States enshrined in its fundamental law the idea that there would not be different levels of citizenship in this country. Although not honored in practice, that idea, and its place in the law, gave those excluded from it the language and the tools to fight for equality. Over time, they have increasingly expanded those included in it.
The Republican Party organized in the 1850s to fight the idea that there should be different classes of Americans based on race—not only Black Americans, but also Irish, Chinese, Mexican, and Indigenous Americans faced discriminatory state laws. Republicans stated explicitly in their 1860 platform that they were “opposed to any change in our naturalization laws or any state legislation by which the rights of citizens hitherto accorded to immigrants from foreign lands shall be abridged or impaired; and in favor of giving a full and efficient protection to the rights of all classes of citizens, whether native or naturalized, both at home and abroad.”
In 1868, after the Civil War had ended the legal system of human enslavement, the American people added to the Constitution the Fourteenth Amendment, whose very first sentence reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Congress wrote that sentence to overturn the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that people of African descent “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.”
The Fourteenth Amendment legally made Black men citizens equal to white men.
But did it include the children of immigrants? In 1882, during a period of racist hysteria, the Chinese Exclusion Act declared that Chinese immigrants could not become citizens. But what about their children who were born in the United States?
Wong Kim Ark was born around 1873, the child of Chinese parents who were merchants in San Francisco. In 1889 he traveled with his parents when they repatriated to China, where he married. He then returned to the U.S., leaving his wife behind, and was readmitted. After another trip to China in 1894, though, customs officials denied him reentry to the U.S. in 1895, claiming he was a Chinese subject because his parents were Chinese.
Wong sued, and his lawsuit was the first to climb all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, thanks to the government’s recognition that with the U.S. in the middle of an immigration boom, the question of birthright citizenship must be addressed. In the 1898 U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark decision, the court held by a vote of 6–2 that Wong was a citizen because he was born in the United States.
That decision has stood ever since, as a majority of Americans have recognized the principle behind the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as the one central to the United States: “that all men are created equal” and that a nation based on that idea draws strength from all of its people. Over time, we have expanded our definition of who is included in that equality.
Now the right wing is trying to contract equality again, excluding many of us from its rights and duties. The Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision makes women a separate and lesser class of citizen; anti-LGBTQ legislation denigrates sexual minorities. Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship makes that attack on equality explicit, calling equality a “myth” and attempting to enshrine inequality as the only real theme of our history.
The concept of equality means we all have equal rights. It also means we all owe an equal allegiance to the country and that we all should be equal before the law, principles the former president has reason to dislike.
Today, Katelyn Polantz, Paula Reid, and Kaitlan Collins of CNN broke the story that federal prosecutors have an audio recording of the former president admitting he kept a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran. The material on the tape, which was recorded at his Bedminster, New Jersey, property and appears to indicate that the document was in his hands, shows that Trump understood he had taken a classified document and that he understood that there were limits to his ability to declassify records.
The recording also appears to suggest that at least one of the documents Trump took when he left office had enormous monetary value. As former Senior Foreign Service member Luis Moreno tweeted: “You can bet that if the TS/SCI dox involved military action against Iran, there would be a couple of countries willing to pay a king’s ransom for it.”
—
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/31/politics/work-requirements-debt-ceiling-cbo/index.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/05/31/mccarthys-critics-shy-away-threat-oust-him/
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/29/desantis-debt-limit-deal-00099155
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-diehards-fold
https://www.thedailybeast.com/russians-flock-to-trump-properties-to-give-birth-to-us-citizens
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/births.htm
https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-birth-tourism-bogeyman/
https://twitter.com/NoLieWithBTC/status/1663967414617292801
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/chinese-exclusion-act
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1860
https://twitter.com/LuisMorenolg/status/1664034994245849089
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/31/politics/trump-tape-classified-document-iran-milley/index.html
Sean Hannity Staff, “MAGA PROMISE: Trump Vows to End Birthright Citizenship on Day One [WATCH]” at hannity DOT com, May 30, 2023.
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/dred-scott-v-sandford
May 30, 2023
May 30, 2023
“[O]ne of the things that I hear some of you guys saying is, ‘Why doesn’t Biden say what a good deal it is?’” President Joe Biden said to reporters yesterday afternoon before leaving the White House on the Marine One helicopter. “Why would Biden say what a good deal it is before the vote? You think that’s going to help me get it passed? No. That’s why you guys don’t bargain very well.”
Biden’s unusually revealing comment about the budget negotiations was actually a statement about his presidency. Unlike his Republican opponents, he has refused to try to win points by playing the media and instead has worked behind the scenes to govern, sometimes staying out of negotiations, sometimes being central to them.
The result has been, as Daily Beast columnist David Rothkopf summarized today, historic. Biden has worked to replace 40 years of supply-side economics with policies to rebuild the nation’s economy and infrastructure by supporting ordinary Americans. The American Rescue Plan gave the United States a faster economic recovery from the COVID pandemic than any other major economy. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has already funded more than 32,000 projects in more than 4,500 communities in all 50 states, Washington D.C., and U.S. territories.
The Inflation Reduction Act made the biggest investment in addressing climate change in our history, and according to University of Washington transportation analyst Jack Conness, it and the CHIPS and Science Act have already attracted over $220 billion in private investment, much of it going to Republican-dominated states: Tennessee, Nevada, North Carolina, and Oklahoma have each attracted more than $4 billion; Ohio, more than $6 billion; Arizona, more than $7 billion; South Carolina, more than $9 billion; and Georgia, more than $13 billion.
Victoria Guida in Politico yesterday reported that the reordering of the economy under Biden and the Democrats has reversed the widening income gap between wage workers and upper-income professionals that has been growing for the past 40 years. The pay of those making an average of $12.50 an hour grew by almost 6% from 2020 to 2022, even after inflation.
Those gains are now at risk as pandemic measures end and the Fed raises interest rates to bring down inflation, although the wage increases are only a piece of the inflation puzzle: Talmon Joseph Smith and Joe Rennison of the New York Times today reported that companies raising their prices to “protect…profits” are “adding to inflation.” In other words, companies pushed prices beyond normal profit margins during the pandemic and the economic recovery, then maintained those higher profit margins with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and continue to maintain them now.
The fight over the debt ceiling is both an example of the different approaches to negotiation on the part of Biden and Republicans like House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), and part of the larger question about the direction of the country.
On January 13, 2023, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned McCarthy that the Treasury was about to hit the borrowing limit established by Congress and that she would have to resort to extraordinary measures in order to meet obligations until Congress raised the debt ceiling.
On March 9, as part of the usual budget process, Biden produced a detailed budget, which was a wish list of programs that would continue to build the country from the bottom up. He told McCarthy he would meet with the speaker as soon as he produced his own budget, which McCarthy could not do because the far-right House Freedom Caucus (these days being abbreviated as HFC) wanted extreme cuts to which other Republicans would never agree.
On April 26 the House Republicans passed a bill that would require $4.8 trillion in cuts but was quite vague about how it would do so apart from getting rid of much of the legislation the Democrats had just passed. HFC members said they would not raise the debt ceiling until the Senate passed their bill. That is, they would drive the United States into default, crashing the U.S. and the global economy, until the president and the Democrats agreed to their policies. Even then, they would raise it only until next spring, with the expectation that it would then become a key factor in the 2024 election.
Biden insisted all along that he would not negotiate over the debt ceiling, which pays for money already appropriated under the normal process of Congress and which Congress raised three times under former president Trump even as he added $7.8 trillion to the national debt. Biden said he would happily negotiate over the budget. McCarthy, meanwhile, was out in front of the cameras and on social media insulting Biden and insisting that it was Biden’s fault that talks took so long to get started.
Late Saturday, the two sides announced an agreement “in principle” to raise the debt ceiling for two years—clearing the presidential election. As the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell noted, it protects current spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; keeps tax rates as they are; increases spending on defense and veterans’ programs; leaves most other domestic spending the same; cuts a little from the expanded funding of the Internal Revenue Service; and tweaks both the permitting process for energy projects and the existing work requirements in the food assistance program.
As Rampell points out, “this much-ballyhooed ‘deal’ doesn’t seem terribly different from whatever budget agreement would have materialized anyway later this year, during the usual annual appropriations process, under divided government. To President Biden’s credit, the most objectionable ransoms that Republicans had been demanding are all gone.”
Now the measure has to get through both parties, with congressmembers back in Washington today after the holiday weekend. Freedom Caucus members are howling at the deal. Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) is threatening to bottle the measure up in the House Rules Committee, which decides what bills make it to the floor. The Freedom Caucus forced McCarthy to stack that committee with far-right extremists as part of his deal for the speakership (it has nine Republicans but only four Democrats on it). But Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo suggests that McCarthy’s alliance with Representatives Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) might pay off here, since the two have thrown their weight behind the measure.
Even if the measure does pass before the June 5 deadline when the Treasury runs out of money, it has had an important effect. As Rampell noted, it has weakened the United States. It has enabled both China and Russia to portray the U.S. as unstable and an unreliable partner. As if to prove that criticism, Biden had to cancel a trip to Australia and Papua New Guinea, where he was strengthening the Indo-Pacific alliances designed to weaken Chinese dominance of the region. (And Russia continues to involve itself in U.S. politics: today Tara Reade, the woman who in 2020 accused Biden of sexually assaulting her, appeared on Russian television next to alleged spy Maria Butina to say she has fled to Russia out of fear for her life in the U.S.)
Writing in Foreign Policy, Howard W. French sees a more sweeping problem with the debt ceiling fight: it “highlights America’s warped priorities.” “[W]hen a rich and powerful country finds it easier to cut back on the way that it invests in its people, in education, in science, and in making sure that the weakest among them are not completely left behind than to curtail useless and profligate weapons spending,” he said, “there are reasons to worry about the foundations of its power.”
—
Notes:
https://twitter.com/djrothkopf/status/1663546412334972932
https://www.whitehouse.gov/build/
https://www.jackconness.com/ira-chips-investments
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/29/low-income-wages-employment-00097135
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/business/economy/inflation-companies-profits-higher-prices.html
https://twitter.com/IsabellaMWeber/status/1630322499362897920
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1188
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1454
https://rollcall.com/2023/04/26/house-passes-1-5-trillion-debt-limit-increase-spending-cuts/
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4024123-spending-and-debt-ceiling-plan-whats-next/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/28/debt-limit-deal-budget-differences/
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/freak-cavalcade-but-not-more
May 29, 2023
May 29, 2023
Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed “to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.”
On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”
“You are away from home, separated from your families, no longer at a civilian job or at school and many of you are risking your very lives,” the pamphlet explained, “because of a thing called fascism.” But, the publication asked, what is fascism? “Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze,” it said, “nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.”
Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”
“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said.
Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.”
Fascists understood that “the fundamental principle of democracy—faith in the common sense of the common people—was the direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite few,” it explained, “[s]o they fought democracy…. They played political, religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seized power while these groups struggled.”
Americans should not be fooled into thinking that fascism could not come to America, the pamphlet warned; after all, “[w]e once laughed Hitler off as a harmless little clown with a funny mustache.” And indeed, the U.S. had experienced “sorry instances of mob sadism, lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. We have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of Americanism, have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which…can be properly identified as ‘fascist.’”
The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques:
First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”
Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.”
Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”
It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.”
The only way to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, the document said, “is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security.” In the midst of the insecurity of the modern world, the hatred at the root of fascism “fulfills a triple mission.” By dividing people, it weakens democracy. “By getting men to hate rather than to think,” it prevents them “from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution to the problem.” By falsely promising prosperity, it lures people to embrace its security.
“Fascism thrives on indifference and ignorance,” it warned. Freedom requires “being alert and on guard against the infringement not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob anyone of his democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is threatened.” And if “we want to make certain that fascism does not come to America, we must make certain that it does not thrive anywhere in the world.”
Seventy-eight years after the publication of “FASCISM!” with its program for recognizing that political system and stopping it from taking over the United States, President Joe Biden today at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, honored those who gave their lives fighting to preserve democracy. “On this day, we come together again to reflect, to remember, but above all, to recommit to the future our fallen heroes fought for, …a future grounded in freedom, democracy, equality, tolerance, opportunity, and…justice.”
“[T]he truest memorial to their lives,” the president said, is to act “every day to ensure that our democracy endures, our Constitution endures, and the soul of our nation and our decency endures.”
—
Notes:
https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=armytalks
War Department, “Army Talk 64: FASCISM!” March 24, 1945, at https://archive.org/details/ArmyTalkOrientationFactSheet64-Fascism/mode/2up
Heather Cox Richardson's Blog
- Heather Cox Richardson's profile
- 1300 followers
