Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 60
December 11, 2024
December 10, 2024
December 10, 2024
Today is Human Rights Day, celebrated internationally in honor of the day seventy-six years ago, December 10, 1948, when the United Nations General Assembly announced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
In 1948 the world was still reeling from the death and destruction of World War II, including the horrors of the Holocaust. The Soviet Union was blockading Berlin, Italy and France were convulsed with communist-backed labor agitation, Greece was in the middle of a civil war, Arabs opposed the new state of Israel, communists and nationalists battled in China, and segregationists in the U.S. were forming their own political party to stop the government from protecting civil rights for Black Americans. In the midst of these dangerous trends, the member countries of the United Nations came together to adopt a landmark document: a common standard of fundamental rights for all human beings.
The United Nations itself was only three years old. Representatives of the 47 countries that made up the Allies in World War II, along with the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and newly liberated Denmark and Argentina, had formed the United Nations as a key part of an international order based on rules on which nations agreed, rather than the idea that might makes right, which had twice in just over twenty years brought wars that involved the globe.
Part of the mission of the U.N. was “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” In early 1946 the United Nations Economic and Social Council organized a nine-person commission on human rights to construct the mission of a permanent Human Rights Commission. Unlike other U.N. commissions, though, the selection of its members would be based not on their national affiliations but on their personal merit.
President Harry S. Truman had appointed Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and much beloved defender of human rights in the United States, as a delegate to the United Nations. In turn, U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie from Norway put her on the commission to develop a plan for the formal human rights commission. That first commission asked Roosevelt to take the chair.
“[T]he free peoples” and “all of the people liberated from slavery, put in you their confidence and their hope, so that everywhere the authority of these rights, respect of which is the essential condition of the dignity of the person, be respected,” a U.N. official told the commission at its first meeting on April 29, 1946.
The U.N. official noted that the commission must figure out how to define the violation of human rights not only internationally but also within a nation, and must suggest how to protect “the rights of man all over the world.” If a procedure for identifying and addressing violations “had existed a few years ago,” he said, “the human community would have been able to stop those who started the war at the moment when they were still weak and the world catastrophe would have been avoided.”
Drafted over the next two years, the final document began with a preamble explaining that a UDHR was necessary because “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” and because “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.” Because “the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,” the preamble said, “human rights should be protected by the rule of law.”
The thirty articles that followed established that “[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status” and regardless “of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs.”
Those rights included freedom from slavery, torture, degrading punishment, arbitrary arrest, exile, and “arbitrary interference with…privacy, family, home or correspondence, [and] attacks upon…honour and reputation.”
They included the right to equality before the law and to a fair trial, the right to travel both within a country and outside of it, the right to marry and to establish a family, and the right to own property.
They included the “right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion,” “freedom of opinion and expression,” peaceful assembly, the right to participate in government either “directly or through freely chosen representatives,” the right of equal access to public service. After all, the UDHR noted, the authority of government rests on the will of the people, “expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage.”
They included the right to choose how and where to work, the right to equal pay for equal work, the right to unionize, and the right to fair pay that ensures “an existence worthy of human dignity.”
They included “the right to a standard of living adequate for…health and well-being…, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond [one’s] control.”
They included the right to free education that develops students fully and strengthens “respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Education “shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.”
They included the right to participate in art and science.
They included the right to live in the sort of society in which the rights and freedoms outlined in the UDHR could be realized. And, the document concluded, “Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.”
Although eight countries abstained from the UDHR—South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and six countries from the Soviet bloc—no country voted against it, making the vote unanimous. The declaration was not a treaty and was not legally binding; it was a declaration of principles.
Since then, though, the UDHR has become the foundation of international human rights law. More than eighty international treaties and declarations, along with regional human rights conventions, domestic human rights bills, and constitutional provisions, make up a legally binding system to protect human rights. All of the members of the United Nations have ratified at least one of the major international human rights treaties, and four out of five have ratified four or more.
Indeed, today is the fortieth anniversary of the U.N.’s adoption of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, more commonly known as the United Nations Convention Against Torture (UNCAT), which follows the structure of the UDHR.
The UDHR remains aspirational, but it is a vital part of the rules-based order that restrains leaders from human rights abuses, giving victims a language and a set of principles to condemn mistreatment. Before 1948 that language and those principles were unimaginable.
In a proclamation today, the White House recommitted to “upholding the equal and inalienable rights of all people.” It noted that in the U.S., the Biden administration established “the White House Gender Policy Council to advance the rights and opportunities of women and girls across domestic and foreign policy [and] rejoined the United Nations Human Rights Council to highlight and address pressing human rights concerns.” It has “worked to protect the rights of LGBTQI+ people” and to expand “accessibility for people with disabilities.” Crucially, the administration has also worked to stop the misuse of commercial spyware, which has enabled human rights abuses around the world as authoritarian governments surveil their populations, and to fight back against transnational repression targeting human rights defenders.
At the State Department, Under Secretary of State Uzra Zeya, Assistant Secretary of State Dafna Rand, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken honored eight individuals with the Human Rights Defender Award. The recipients came from Kuwait, Bolivia, the Kyrgyz Republic, Burma, Eswatini, Ghana, Colombia, and Azerbaijan and defend migrant workers, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, democracy.
Their stories underlined both that the fight for human rights is universal and that it requires courage. One recipient’s award was delivered in absentia because he is imprisoned. Another award was posthumous—the recipient was murdered last year.
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Notes:
https://www.nps.gov/elro/learn/historyculture/udhr.htm
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text
https://www.un.org/ruleoflaw/thematic-areas/international-law-courts-tribunals/human-rights-law/
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/udhr/foundation-of-international-human-rights-law
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights
https://www.state.gov/2024-human-rights-defender-award-recipients-announced/
https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-at-the-human-rights-defender-award-ceremony/
December 9, 2024
The sudden collapse of the Assad regime in Syria yesterday took oxygen away from the airing of President-elect Trump’s interview with Kristen Welker of NBC’S Meet the Press. The interview told us little that we didn’t already know, but it did reinforce what we can expect in the new administration.
As Tom Nichols pointed out after the interview, when Donald Trump ran for the presidency this year, he “wasn’t running to do anything. He was running to stay out of jail. The rest he doesn’t care about.”
Nichols was reacting to the exchange that began when Welker asked the president-elect: “Do you have an actual plan at this point for health care?” Trump answered: “Yes. We have concepts of a plan that would be better.” “Still just concepts? Do you have a fully developed plan?” Welker asked.
The answer, nine years after Trump first said he would repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something cheaper and better, is still no. He went on to add, “I am the one that saved Obamacare,” although he spent his first term trying to weaken it.
Trump also reiterated his plans for revenge against those he perceives to be his enemies. He told Welker that when he is president, the Department of Justice should pursue and jail the members of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, more commonly known as the January 6th Committee. He singled out committee leaders Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY).
But it was in his insistence on one specific lie that Trump was most revealing. He told Welker that there were “13,099 murderers released into our country over the last three years. They’re walking down the streets. They’re walking next to you and your family, and they’re very dangerous.”
This statement sets Trump up to be a strongman who will save America from great danger, but it is a lie that has been repeatedly debunked. It originated in a September 2024 letter from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to Representative Tony Gonzales (R-TX) listing 13,099 people convicted of homicide as being “non-detained.”
As Alex Nowrasteh of the libertarian Cato blog explains, “non-detained” does not mean free to roam the streets; it simply means that those in prison for homicide are not currently detained by ICE. Once they have served their sentences, they go back onto ICE’s docket to be deported unless their countries of origin don’t have repatriation agreements with the U.S., a condition that affects a very small number of people. Releases of criminal migrants into the U.S. dropped during the Biden administration from the numbers released during Trump’s term. In addition, as Nowrasteh points out, the 13,099 figure covers at least 40 years.
Welker tried to correct Trump: “The thirteen thousand figure I think goes back around 40 years,” she said. “No, it doesn’t,” Trump insisted. “It’s within the three-year period. It’s during the Biden term.”
Trump was intent on making Welker and the television audience accept an egregious lie, despite the fact it has been thoroughly debunked. His insistence echoed his determination in January 2017 to make the American people accept his lie that his inauguration crowd was bigger than that of his predecessor, Barack Obama, although we could see with our own eyes that he was lying. He was demanding we reject our own experience and instead let him define how we see the country.
Trump built on a history of narrative shaping that ran through the Republican Party. In 2004 a senior advisor to President George W. Bush famously told journalist Ron Suskind that people like Suskind lived in “the reality-based community,” believing that people could find solutions to problems based on their real-world observations. But such a worldview was obsolete, the aide said. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore.… We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality…. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
America’s right wing has been able to shape reality in large part because of the 1996 advent of the Fox News Channel (FNC), the brainchild of Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Shows on the FNC used clear, simple messaging with colorful graphics that told a story of an America overwhelmingly made up of white, rural folks who hated taxes and an intrusive government, and would do fine if they could just get the socialist Democrats to leave them alone. To spread the new channel, Murdoch initially offered ten dollars per subscriber to each cable company that carried it.
That right-wing echo chamber has expanded until it is now so strong that nearly 70% of Republicans falsely believe Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election, despite the fact that the FNC had to pay more than $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems for defamation after it lied to viewers about that election.
Trump has built on that Republican narrative to create a fantasy world that is badly out of step with reality. It is not easy to see how he will reconcile his vision with real-world events.
He and his supporters might try simply to tell voters that they have done what they promised, and hope that story sells.
When Trump threatened to put a 25% tariff on goods from Mexico until Mexico stopped undocumented migrants from crossing the border, Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum told Trump that "encounters at the Mexico–United States border have decreased by 75 percent between December 2023 and November 2024.” Trump then simply told reporters that Sheinbaum had “agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border,” and his supporters trumpeted on social media that Trump had closed the border with one phone call.
But convincing people of an alternative reality might be harder with issues closer to home.
Trump has vowed to place a tariff wall around the U.S., for example, at the same time he has promised to bring down the price of consumer goods. “Economists of all stripes say that ultimately, consumers pay the price of tariffs,” Welker told him on Sunday. “I don’t believe that,” Trump answered. He might not believe it, but producers do: car manufacturers as well as major shopping chains have warned that tariffs will force them to raise prices.
On other issues, Trump will have a vocal and established opposition. After his threat to go after the members of the January 6th committee, former representative Liz Cheney said in a statement: “There is no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis for what Donald Trump is suggesting.“
“Here is the truth: Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power. He mobilized an angry mob and sent them to the United States Capitol, where they attacked police officers, invaded the building, and halted the official counting of electoral votes. Trump watched on television as police officers were brutally beaten and the Capitol was assaulted, refusing for hours to tell the mob to leave. This was the worst breach of our Constitution by any president in our nation’s history.”
Cheney called for the release of the evidence and grand jury material special counsel Jack Smith assembled “so all Americans can see Donald Trump for who he genuinely is and fully understand his role in this terrible period in our nation’s history.”
Nobel laureates generally try to stay out of politics, but today more than 75 of them in medicine, chemistry, economics, and physics wrote a letter to senators urging them not to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for secretary of Health and Human Services. They object to Kennedy’s stand against the scientists and agencies he would oversee. They noted that he has no credentials or relevant experience and that he has opposed life-saving vaccines, promoted conspiracy theories, and attacked the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health.
Putting him in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, they write, “would put the public’s health in jeopardy and undermine America’s global leadership in the health sciences, in both the public and commercial sectors.”
There is also the chance that the Fox media empire will not effectively push a right-wing narrative much longer. The Murdoch family is in a struggle over control of that empire after the death of the 93-year-old Rupert. He and his eldest son, Lachlan, want to lock the company into its current political slant, but at least two of the three of Murdoch’s other children who are set to inherit the company do not share their father and brother’s politics.
Rupert has been trying to change the terms of the family trust to cement Lachlan’s control of the empire, but today a commissioner in Nevada ruled against him. Edward Helmore of The Guardian noted that the decision likely means that even if the children do not take the media empire in a different direction, divided leadership will weaken the right-wing message.
Almost 30 years after the Fox News Channel began to shape American politics with a fictional narrative, a different Fox media empire would almost certainly disrupt the right-wing bubble. A lawyer for Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch said they will appeal the decision.
Finally, Pennsylvania law enforcement officials today arrested a “strong person of interest” in the shooting of United Healthcare chief executive officer Brian Thompson. Tonight a court document shows 26-year-old Luigi Mangione has been charged with murder.
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Notes:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/know-person-interest-uhc-shooting-rcna183496
https://coloradonewsline.com/2024/12/09/dc/trump-liz-cheney-go-to-jail/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/08/us/politics/trump-nbc-interview-fact-check.html
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/29/politics/fact-check-trump-harris-immigrants-homicide/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/12/politics/obamacare-trump-administration/index.html
Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004.
Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan, “The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 122 (August 2007): 1187–1234.
https://www.newsweek.com/claudia-sheinbaum-pens-fiery-letter-trump-over-mexico-tariffs-1992306
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c89v4w51dzyo
https://www.newsweek.com/cars-are-about-get-even-more-expensive-thanks-trumps-tariffs-1992278
https://mailchi.mp/greattask/cheney-response-to-trump-lies-about-the-jan-6-committee?e=c115cd0614
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/12/09/health/rfkltr.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/09/health/kennedy-hhs-nobel-laureates.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/09/business/media/rupert-lachlan-murdoch-family-trust.html
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/dec/09/murdoch-succession-case-rightwing-legacy
X:
https://x.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1865854629738647668
Bluesky:
acyn.bsky.social/post/3lcsn2o3uc22t
acyn.bsky.social/post/3lcsjmrqtgg2c
acyn.bsky.social/post/3lcsnjhg3pt2c
December 9, 2024
December 8, 2024
December 8, 2024
Late last night, the White House said in a statement that “President Biden and his team are closely monitoring the extraordinary events in Syria and staying in constant touch with regional partners.”
Early this morning, the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad fell to armed opposition.
According to Jill Lawless of the Associated Press, the forces that toppled Assad are led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, a coalition of Islamic groups formerly associated with al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria and currently designated a terrorist group by the U.S. and the United Nations, although its leaders have tried to distance themselves from al-Qaeda.
President Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father to the Syrian presidency in July 2000, establishing a totalitarian dictatorship. In 2011, Assad cracked down on protesters who were part of the Arab Spring, sparking a civil war of a number of factions fighting Assad’s troops, which by 2015 relied on support from Russia and Iran.
That war has turned half of Syria’s prewar population of 23 million (a little more than the population of Florida) into refugees and killed more than half a million people. With Russian and Iranian support, Assad managed to regain control of most of the country, with rebels pushed back to the north and northwest.
A stalemate that had lasted for years ended abruptly on November 27.
Iran and Hezbollah have been badly weakened by the ongoing fight of Israel against Iran-backed Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. On November 27, Israel and Lebanon signed a ceasefire agreement that made it clear that Hezbollah had been tied down in Lebanon and that its ability to fight had been severely compromised. At the same time, Russia has been badly weakened by almost three years of war against Ukraine, and the Russian ruble fell sharply again in late November after additional U.S. sanctions targeted Russia’s third-largest bank, creating more economic hardship in Russia and undercutting Putin’s insistence that he is winning against the West.
When opposition forces began an offensive on November 27, they took more than 15 villages in Aleppo province that day. Journalist Lawless recounted a quick history of the next 11 days, recording how the insurgents swept through the country with little resistance, taking Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, on the 29th. The Syrian military launched a counterattack on December 1, but the insurgents continued to gain ground, and by December 7 they had captured Syria’s third-largest city, Homs. They announced they were in the “final stage” of their offensive.
Today, December 8, Assad fled with his family to Moscow, where Russian president Vladimir Putin has offered him asylum. As Nick Paton Walsh of CNN put it, “Without the physical crutches of Russia’s air force and Iran’s proxy muscle Hezbollah, [Assad] toppled when finally pushed.”
In Damascus, crowds are praying and celebrating, and opposition forces have liberated the prisoners held in the notorious Saydnaya military prison. More than 100,000 detainees are unaccounted for, and their families are hoping to find them, or at least to find answers.
Meanwhile, after Assad’s regime fell, the U.S. Air Force struck more than 75 ISIS-related targets in Syria. “ISIS has been trying to reconstitute in this broad area known as the Badiya desert,” a White House senior official told reporters. “We have worked to make sure they cannot do that. So when they try to camp there, when they try to train… we take them out.”
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan explained at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, that the U.S. will work to prevent the resurgence of ISIS. It will also make sure “that our friends in the region, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, others who border Syria, or who would potentially face spillover effects from Syria, are strong and secure.” Finally, he said, the U.S. wants to make sure “that this does not lead to a humanitarian catastrophe.”
Speaking to the nation this afternoon, President Joe Biden announced: "At long last, the Assad regime has fallen. This regime brutalized and tortured and killed literally hundreds of thousands of innocent Syrians." He called the fall of Assad’s regime a “fundamental act of justice” and “a moment of historic opportunity for the long-suffering people of Syria to build a better future for their proud country.”
But it is also “a moment of risk and uncertainty,” the president said. He noted that the U.S. is “mindful” of the security of Americans in Syria, including freelance journalist Austin Tice, who was kidnapped in 2012 and imprisoned by Assad’s regime. “[W]e believe he is alive,” Biden told reporters. “We think we can get him back, but we have no direct evidence of that yet.”
Biden noted that Syria’s main backers, Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia, could not defend “this abhorrent regime in Syria” because they “are far weaker today than when I took office.” He continued: “This is a direct result of the blows that Ukraine [and] Israel” have landed on them “with the unflagging support of the United States.”
In contrast to Biden’s comments, President-elect Donald Trump’s social media accounts took Russia’s side in the Syrian events. Noting that the insurgents looked as if they would throw Assad out, Trump’s account said that “Russia, because they are so tied up in Ukraine, and with the loss there of over 600,000 soldiers, seems incapable of stopping this literal march through Syria, a country they have protected for years.” The account blamed former president Barack Obama for the crisis of 2011 and said that Russia had stepped in then to stop the chaos. The Trump account suggested that Assad’s defeat might be “the best thing that can happen to” Russia, because “[t]here was never much of a benefit in Syria for Russia, other than to make Obama look really stupid.”
“In any event,” the account continued, “Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, & THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!”
In contrast to Trump’s focus on Russia, journalist Anne Applebaum, a scholar of autocracy, took a much broader view of the meaning of Assad’s fall. In dictatorships, she wrote in The Atlantic, “cold, deliberate, well-planned cruelty” like Assad’s “is meant to inspire hopelessness. Ludicrous lies and cynical propaganda campaigns are meant to create apathy and nihilism.” Random arrests create destabilizing waves of refugees that leave those who remain in despair.
Authoritarian regimes seek “to rob people of any ability to plan for a different future, to convince people that their dictatorships are eternal. ‘Our leader forever’” she points out, was the slogan of the Assad dynasty. But soldiers and police officers have relatives who suffer under the regime, and their loyalty is not assured, as Assad has now learned.
The future of Syria is entirely unclear, Applebaum writes, but there is no doubt that “the end of the Assad regime creates something new, and not only in Syria. There is nothing worse than hopelessness, nothing more soul-destroying than pessimism, grief, and despair. The fall of a Russian- and Iranian-backed regime offers, suddenly, the possibility of change. The future might be different. And that possibility will inspire hope all around the world.”
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Notes:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/02/who-are-syrian-rebels-hayat-tahrir-al-sham-hts-aleppo
https://www.newsweek.com/what-does-rubles-sharp-fall-mean-russias-economy-1992933
https://apnews.com/article/syria-assad-sweida-daraa-homs-hts-qatar-7f65823bbf0a7bd331109e8dff419430
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/07/middleeast/analysis-damascus-syria-intl-latam
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/12/08/syria-prisons-sednaya-detainees-assad/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-39926914
https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2024/12/us-strikes-isis-syria-assad-regime-falls/401522/
https://apnews.com/article/syria-biden-austin-tice-bee5a5547a63e95eea5b75366d208f16
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2024/12/sudden-collapse-bashar-assad/680917/
https://www.csis.org/analysis/evolution-russian-and-iranian-cooperation-syria
https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/iran/the-history-of-iran-in-syria/
https://www.dni.gov/nctc/ftos/hts_fto.html
YouTube:
Bluesky:
December 7, 2024
December 7, 2024
On Thursday, December 5, in Chicago, Illinois, former president Barack Obama gave the third in an annual series of lectures he has delivered since 2022 at his foundation’s Democracy Forum, which gathers experts, leaders, and young people to explore ways to safeguard democracy through community action.
Taken together, these lectures are a historical and philosophical exploration of the weaknesses of twenty-first century democracy as well as a road map of directions, some new and some old, for democracy’s defense. In 2022, Obama explored ways to counteract the flood of disinformation swamping a shared reality for decision making; in 2023 he discussed ways to address the extraordinary concentration of wealth that has undermined support for democracy globally.
On Thursday, Obama explored the concept of “pluralism,” a word he defined as meaning simply that “in a democracy, we all have to find a way to live alongside individuals and groups who are different than us.”
But rather than advocating what he called “holding hands and singing ‘Kumbaya’” as we all tolerate each other, Obama described modern pluralism as active work to form coalitions over shared issues. His argument echoed the concepts James Madison, a key framer of the Constitution, explained in Federalist #10 when he was trying to convince inhabitants of a big, diverse country that they should endorse the newly written document.
In 1787, many inhabitants of the fledgling nation objected to the idea of the strong national government proposed under the new constitution. They worried that such a government could fall under the control of a majority that would exercise its power to crush the rights of the minority. Madison agreed that such a calamity was likely in a small country, but argued that the very size and diversity of the people in the proposed United States would guard against such tyranny as people formed coalitions over one issue or another, then dissolved them and formed others. Such constantly shifting coalitions would serve the good of all Americans without forging a permanent powerful majority.
Obama called the Constitution “a rulebook for practicing pluralism.” The Bill of Rights gives us a series of rights that allow us to try to convince others to form coalitions to elect representatives who will “negotiate and compromise and hopefully advance our interests.”
Majority rule determines who wins, but the separation of powers and an independent judiciary are supposed to guarantee that the winners “don’t overreach to try to permanently entrench themselves or violate minority rights,” he said. The losers accept the outcome so long as they know they’ll have a chance to win the next time.
Obama noted that this system worked smoothly after World War II, largely because a booming economy meant rising standards of living that eased friction between different groups: management and labor, industry and agriculture. At the same time, the Cold War helped Americans come together against an external threat, and a limited range of popular culture reinforced a shared perspective on the world—everyone watched the sitcom Gilligan’s Island.
Most of all, though, Obama noted, American pluralism worked well because it largely excluded women and racial, gender, and religious minorities. He pointed out that as late as 2005, when he went to the Senate, he was the only African American there and only the third since Reconstruction. There were two Latinos and fourteen women.
In the 1960s, he noted drily, “things got more complicated.” “[H]istorically marginalized groups—Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans; women and gays and lesbians; and disabled Americans—demanded a seat at the table. Not only did they insist on a fair share of government-directed resources, but they brought with them new issues, born of their unique experiences that could not just be resolved by just giving them a bigger slice of the pie. So racial minorities insisted that the government intervene more deeply in the private sector and civil society to root out long-standing, systemic discrimination.”
Women wanted control over their own bodies, and gays and lesbians demanded equality before the law, challenging religious and social norms. “[P]olitics,” Obama said, “wasn’t just a fight about tax rates or roads anymore. It was about more fundamental issues that went to the core of our being and how we expected society to structure itself. Issues of identity and status and gender. Issues of family, values, and faith…. [A] lot of people…began to feel that their way of life, the American way of life, was under attack” just as increasing economic inequality made them think that other people were benefiting at their expense.
Increasingly, that economic inequality cloistered people in their own bubbles as unions, churches, and civic institutions decayed. “[W]ith the Cold War over, with generations scarred by Vietnam and Iraq and a media landscape that would shatter into a million disparate voices,” he said, Americans lost the sense of “a common national story or a common national purpose.” Media companies have played to extremes, and “[e]very election becomes an act of mortal combat.”
With that sense, there is “an increasing willingness on the part of politicians and their followers to violate democratic norms, to do anything they can to get their way, to use the power of the state to target critics and journalists and political rivals, and to even resort to violence in order to gain and hold on to power.”
For all that he was speaking in 2024, Obama could have been describing the realization of the fears of those opposed to the Constitution in 1787.
But he did not agree that those anti-Federalists had won the debate. Instead, he adapted Madison’s theory of pluralism to the modern era. Obama stood firm on the idea that the way to reclaim democracy is to build coalitions around taking action on issues that matter to the American people without regard to personal identities or political affiliations. Pluralism, Obama said, “is about recognizing that in a democracy, power comes from forging alliances, and building coalitions, and making room in those coalitions not only for the woke but also for the waking.”
And that, in many ways, identified the elephant—or rather the donkey—in the room. In the 2024 election, the Democratic Party under Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota governor Tim Walz very deliberately moved away from so-called identity politics: the idea that a person builds their political orientation around their pre-existing social identity. During the campaign, Harris rarely referred to the fact that if elected, she would be the first woman, as well as the first woman of color, to hold the presidency: when attendees at the Democratic National Convention wore white in honor of the suffragists, Harris wore black.
Instead, Harris and Walz embraced investing in the middle class and supporting small businesses. But that shift to the center did not translate into a presidential victory in 2024, and those on the political left, as well as progressive Democrats, are not convinced it was a good move.
Since the rise of Donald Trump, the MAGA party has been the one championing identity politics, rejecting American pluralism in favor of centering whiteness, a certain kind of individualist masculinity, Christianity, and misogyny. Making common cause with Republicans, even non-MAGA Republicans, in the face of such politics seems to the left and progressive Democrats self-defeating.
Obama disagrees. “[I]t’s understandable that people who have been oppressed or marginalized want to tell their stories and give voice fully to their experiences—to not have to hold back and censor themselves, especially because so many of them have been silenced in the past,” he said, “But too often, focusing on our differences leads to this notion of fixed victims and fixed villains.”
He stood firm against compromising core principles but said: “In order to build lasting majorities that support justice—not just for feeling good, not just for getting along, to deliver the goods—we have to be open to framing our issues, our causes, what we believe in in terms of ‘we’ and not just ‘us’ and ‘them.’”
And he emphasized that such cooperation works best when it’s about action, rather than just words, because action requires that people invest themselves in a common project. “It won't eradicate people's prejudices, but it will remind people that they don't have to agree on everything to at least agree on some things. And that there are some things we cannot do alone.” “It’s about agency and relationships.”
Then Obama addressed the political crisis of this moment, the one the anti-Federalists feared: “What happens when the other side has repeatedly and abundantly made clear they’re not interested in playing by the rules?” When that happens, he said, “pluralism does not call for us” to accept it. “[W]e have to stand firm and speak out and organize and mobilize as forcefully as we can.” Even then, though, “it’s important to look for allies in unlikely places,” he said, noting that “people on the other side…may share our beliefs in sticking to the rules, observing norms,” and that supporting them might help them “to exert influence on people they’ve got relationships with within the other party.”
The power of pluralism, he said, is that it can make people recognize their common experiences and common values. That, he said, is how we break the cycle of cynicism in our politics.
Obama’s argument has already drawn criticism. At MSNBC, Ben Burgis condemned Obama’s “centrist liberalism” as inadequate to address the real problems of inequality and warned that his political approach is outdated.
But it is striking how much Obama’s embrace of pluralism echoes that of James Madison, who had in his lifetime witnessed a group of wildly diverse colonists talk, write letters, argue, and organize to forge themselves into a movement that could throw off the age-old system of monarchy in favor of creating something altogether new.
—
Notes:
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp
https://www.obama.org/democracy-forum-2024/president-obama-remarks/
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/barack-obama-democracy-forum-speech-trump-era-rcna183127
https://barackobama.medium.com/my-remarks-at-the-2023-democracy-forum-32609c7ec237
https://barackobama.medium.com/my-remarks-on-disinformation-at-stanford-7d7af7ba28af
December 6, 2024
December 6, 2024
On the sunny Sunday morning of December 7, 1941, Messman Doris Miller had served breakfast aboard the USS West Virginia, stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and was collecting laundry when the first of nine Japanese torpedoes hit the ship.
In the deadly confusion, Miller reported to an officer, who told him to help move the ship’s mortally wounded captain off the bridge. Unable to move him far, Miller pulled the captain to shelter. Then another officer ordered Miller to pass ammunition to him as he started up one of the two abandoned anti-aircraft guns in front of the conning tower.
Miller had not been trained to use the weapons because, as a Black man in the U.S. Navy, he was assigned to serve the white officers. But while the officer was distracted, Miller began to fire one of the guns. He fired it until he ran out of ammunition. Then he helped to move injured sailors to safety before he and the other survivors abandoned the West Virginia, which sank to the bottom of Pearl Harbor.
That night, the United States declared war on Japan. Japan declared war on America the next day, and four days later, on December 11, 1941, both Italy and Germany declared war on America. “The powers of the steel pact, Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany, ever closely linked, participate from today on the side of heroic Japan against the United States of America,” Italian leader Benito Mussolini said. “We shall win.” Of course they would. Mussolini and Germany’s leader, Adolf Hitler, believed the Americans had been corrupted by Jews and Black Americans and could never conquer their own organized military machine.
The steel pact, as Mussolini called it, was the vanguard of his new political ideology. That ideology was called fascism, and he and Hitler thought it would destroy democracy once and for all.
Mussolini had been a socialist as a young man and had grown terribly frustrated at how hard it was to organize people. No matter how hard socialists tried, they seemed unable to convince ordinary people that they must rise up and take over the country’s means of production.
The efficiency of World War I inspired Mussolini. He gave up on socialism and developed a new political theory that rejected the equality that defined democracy. He came to believe that a few leaders must take a nation toward progress by directing the actions of the rest. These men must organize the people as they had been organized during wartime, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that businessmen and politicians worked together. And, logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate.
Italy adopted fascism, and Mussolini inspired others, notably Germany's Hitler. Those leaders came to believe that their system was the ideology of the future, and they set out to destroy the messy, inefficient democracy that stood in their way.
America fought World War II to defend democracy from fascism. And while fascism preserved hierarchies in society, democracy called on all men as equals. Of the more than 16 million Americans who served in the war, more than 1.2 million were African American men and women, 500,000 were Latinos, and more than 550,000 Jews were part of the military. Among the many ethnic groups who fought, Native Americans served at a higher percentage than any other ethnic group—more than a third of able-bodied men between the ages of 18 and 50 joined the service—and among those 25,000 soldiers were the men who developed the famous “Code Talk,” based in tribal languages, that codebreakers never cracked.
The American president at the time, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, hammered home that the war was about the survival of democracy. Fascists insisted that they were moving their country forward fast and efficiently—claiming the trains ran on time, for example, although in reality they didn’t—but FDR constantly noted that the people in Italy and Germany were begging for food and shelter from the soldiers of democratic countries.
Ultimately, the struggle between fascism and democracy was the question of equality. Were all men really created equal as the Declaration of Independence said, or were some born to lead the rest, whom they held subservient to their will?
Democracy, FDR reminded Americans again and again, was the best possible government. Thanks to armies made up of men and women from all races and ethnicities, the Allies won the war against fascism, and it seemed that democracy would dominate the world forever.
But as the impulse of WWII pushed Americans toward a more just and inclusive society after it, those determined not to share power warned their supporters that including people of color and women as equals in society would threaten their own liberty. Those reactionary leaders rode that fear into control of our government, and gradually they chipped away the laws that protected equality. Now, once again, democracy is under attack by those who believe some people are better than others.
Donald Trump and his cronies have vowed to replace the nonpartisan civil service with loyalists and to weaponize the Department of Justice and the military against those they perceive as enemies. They have promised to incarcerate and deport millions of immigrants, send federal troops into Democratic cities, silence LGBTQ+ Americans, prosecute journalists and their political opponents, and end abortion across the country. They want to put in place an autocracy in which a powerful leader and his chosen loyalists make the rules under which the rest of us must live.
Will we permit the destruction of American democracy on our watch?
When America came under attack before, people like Doris Miller refused to let that happen. For all that American democracy still discriminated against him, it gave him room to stand up for the concept of human equality—and he laid down his life for it. Promoted to cook after the Navy sent him on a publicity tour, Miller was assigned to a new ship, the USS Liscome Bay, which was struck by a Japanese torpedo on November 24, 1943. It sank within minutes, taking two thirds of the crew, including Miller, with it.
I hear a lot these days about how American democracy is doomed and the reactionaries will win. Maybe. But the beauty of our system is that it gives us people like Doris Miller.
Even better, it makes us people like Doris Miller.
—
Notes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_declaration_of_war_on_the_United_States
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-weaponization-justice-department-political-opponents/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/11/us/politics/trump-2025-immigration-agenda.html
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2023-09-24/mcmanus-column-trump-second-term-agenda
https://www.axios.com/2023/11/13/trump-loyalists-2024-presidential-election
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/us/politics/trump-kash-patel-journalists.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/04/opinion/trump-patel-vought-project-2025.html
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